Last week’s item about the death of novelist Theodora Keogh generated some interesting emails. “I’d never heard of her either,” wrote Glen David Gold, but “I followed a couple of Google searches until I got to [a blog post by] Brooks Peters, who seemed to indicate that something called The Double Door was her best novel. Then I went on abe.com and bought a copy… Just read the first chapter—she is sorta the bastard child of Patricia Highsmith and Dawn Powell, as far as I can tell, but her stuff is definitely a little purple and a little pulpy. But highly, highly enjoyable.”
(That Brooks Peters tribute, which is where the photo above comes from, also, so I hear, drew another longtime Keogh fan out of the shadows: former Village People cowboy Randy Jones.)
I also got a nice note from bestselling style writer Pamela Keogh, who saw the obit and realized that she was related to Theodora’s first husband, Tom Keogh. By coincidence, one of the sources she’d just interviewed for the forthcoming What Would Audrey Do? was photographer Bob Willoughby, who was friendly with the Keoghs during their Paris years. And at least one publisher I know of is actively considering trying to bring one of Keogh’s books back into print…