[Madam Broshkina]

Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett was born on October 26, 1886 above his grandfather's bookshop in Toronto. His father moved the family to Chicago in the late 1890s where Starrett attended John Marshall High School. Starrett landed a job as a cub reporter with the Chicago Inter-Ocean in 1905. When that paper folded, two years later, he began working for the Chicago Daily News as a crime reporter, a feature writer and finally a war correspondent in Mexico from 1914 to 1915. Starrett turned to writing mystery and supernatural fiction for the pulp magazines during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1920, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche entitled The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet . This story involved the detective with a missing 1604 edition of Shakespeare's play. Starett was one of the founders of the Chicago chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars.