Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde May 2026

The lock on the journal was never picked. A 1932 attempt by a San Francisco locksmith failed; he reported “a mechanism unlike any I’ve seen, possibly European or custom-made.” In 1951, the journal was donated to the Huntington Library with a condition: it could not be opened without permission of the “Van Wylde literary estate” — which no one has successfully claimed since Julian died childless in 1944.

By 1922, she had done both. Her one published story, The Parrot Who Knew Too Much , sold barely 300 copies but became a cult oddity for its unsettling blend of dark comedy and locked-room mystery. She was photographed at the Algonquin Round Table — not as a member, but as a “wild card guest who made Dorothy Parker laugh once and never returned.” cubbi thompson van wylde

But it’s what happened after the divorce that turns Cubbi from a footnote into a mystery. The lock on the journal was never picked

In 1924, she married , an eccentric amateur archaeologist fifteen years her senior, who claimed to have found evidence of a lost Viking settlement in the Mojave Desert. The wedding lasted six months. The divorce lasted three years. Her one published story, The Parrot Who Knew

In April 1928, Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde drove a rented Pierce-Arrow from Los Angeles to the Mojave, telling her housekeeper she was “going to see what Julian was so scared of.” She brought a .22 caliber revolver, three changes of clothes, and a leather-bound journal with a brass lock.