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Hulbert Footner (April 2, 1879 – November 17, 1944) was a Canadian born, American writer who was predominantly self-educated and wrote both adventure stories and detective fiction. He loved to live outdoors and canoe, and a trip gone bad made him a Maryland fan. On a trip to paddle the Chesapeake Bay in 1910, he encountered bad weather at Baltimore and ended up taking a steamboat to Solomons, Maryland and was hooked. He married a local lady, Ms. Gladius March, and in 1915 bought Preston on the Patuxent, in Lusby, MD, which he renamed Charles Gift and where he lived until he died in 1944.
He wrote his first novel, Two on the Trail, at Solomons in 1911. It’s a fictional adventure based upon the 3,000-mile canoe trip he made alone through Northern Alberta in 1906. Immediately afterwards, he made another canoe trip through the Northwest Territory going from Portrait by Mabel Welch British Columbia Through Alberta and into the Territory of MacKenzie from which he wrote, Jack Chanty.
A friend, Christopher Morley, suggested Footner shift to crime fiction. As Footner recalled, “Morley steered me past an overdose of northwestern stories into crime stories, adventure and romance.” Footner’s Madame Rozika Storey and her plain assistant, set in the flapper era of the 1920’s, became his most successful detective character. His first romantic novel, Country Love, is set on board Adams Floating Theater, which sailed the Chesapeake Bay bringing plays and vaudeville acts to the isolated villages including Solomons, Maryland during the years after World War I. In 1930, Footner introduced a new detective, Amos Lee Mappin, whose crimes tend to occur in New York's cafe society.
He wrote, Maryland Main and the Eastern Shore, (illustrated by Louis Ruyl), a chapter by chapter study of Maryland through his eyes and impressions as an outsider, as he was dying. Critics consider it an accurate capture of the essence of Maryland. Footner is buried at Middleham Chapel, Lusby, MD.
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