You might say our adventure begins with A.C. Gunter visiting San Francisco in the summer of 1888. You have probably never heard of Gunter, which would surprise the people of his time for he was one of America's most successful novelists. Today he has only one, very tangential, claim to literary fame.
On June 8 he picked up a copy of the San Francisco Examiner and read a poem. He enjoyed it so much that he tore it out and took it with him when he returned to New York. There, he handed it to his friend John A. McCaull, a theatrical producer. McCaull was impressed enough that he gave the poem to his chief comedian, DeWolf Hopper, and told him to memorize it and recite it that night in the middle of a play which, interestingly enough, had nothing to do with the subject of the poem. Theatre was more casual in those days.
Hopper did so and thus began a new career. For the next forty years he recited that poem countless times on stage, on records, and even in new-fangled talkie cinema. In old age he commented dryly that when summoned out of his grave at the resurrection he would probably, automatically, announce "The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day."
As you have probably figured out the poem Gunter rescued from obscurity was "Casey at the Bat." It was published anonymously but the author was Ernest L. Thayer, a recent Harvard graduate, who had taken a job at the Examiner. (Inevitably, other people claimed to have written it, but there is no reasonable doubt.) Thayer, like Gunter, left no other memorable work behind. But his little masterpiece shows no sign of fading away.
I learned all this in an entertaining little book by John Evangelist Walsh called The Night Casey Was Born. Because of the way my brain works, reading the book made me wonder: Can I get a crime story out of this?
And I did. The October issue of Mystery Magazine features "Murder in Mudville," in which that town's unfortunate chief of police is trying to solve the murder (by baseball bat) of the very pitcher who struck out the hometown hero.
It was great fun to write.
But here's the thing that haunts me: Think about Gunter stumbling on that poem. How many little masterpieces are rotting away, undiscovered, in old papers and magazines?
