I love a good mystery - especially when the mystery is:
who is the author of the mystery book! Whew! This has been a long way around the mountain - virtually NO info on Thomas Sterling.
who is the author of the mystery book! Whew! This has been a long way around the mountain - virtually NO info on Thomas Sterling.
This is what I do know:
I have a 1950 BCE (Book Club Edition) titled
The House Without A Door, by Thomas Sterling.
Jacket Design: H. Lawrence Hoffman
Published by Simon and Schuster, Inc
Rockefeller Center, 1230 Sixth Avenue,
New York 20, N.Y.
Inside, it states: Inner Sanctum Mystery
Story is about: Hanna Carpenter, heiress and for 34 years a voluntary, imprisoned recluse in a New York City hotel, dares a look at the world outside,- ends up as a guest of a vicious blackmailer, almost sees him murdered. Back in seclusion, hunted for by the police and the killer, Hanna almost goes mad, is revealed to the public through a fire in the hotel, faces the assorted suspects, tags the killer and is saved from death by hardworking, quick-thinking Lt. Corelli.
And this was on the back cover - a (THE?) elusive photo of Mr. Sterling.
All of my online searches kept bringing up other similar titles or authors (one has the same name, but whose real name is Sterling North).
I finally found this at:
http://killercoversoftheweek.blogspot.com/2012/01/murder-in-venice-by-thomas-sterling.html
" ... Thomas Sterling (sometimes credited as Thomas L. Sterling) appears to have made his initial impression on the crime-fiction world in 1951, when his book The House Without a Door (1950) received an Edgar Award nomination in the category of Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author. He didn’t wind up winning; the honor that year went instead to Thomas Walsh for Nightmare in Manhattan ... " (and I have that book, too!)
Mr. Sterling wrote another book four years later, titled The Evil of the Day:
which later became the source material for The Honey Pot, starring Rex Harrison, Cliff Robertson, Susan Hayward, and Maggie Smith (plays the mother nun on Sister Act)
Wikipedia states: The screenplay was based on the plays Volpone by Ben Jonson and Mr. Fox of Venice by Frederick Knott and the novel The Evil of the Day by Thomas Sterling
Apparently, that is all Mr. Sterling wrote - in fact, it appears he disappeared off the face of the earth.
Anyhoo - now that I've spent the past 3 hours researching this - I'll go back to my books - and maybe in my shelves, find another mystery about a mystery.
