Donald K. Adams, 62; Editor of Mystery Anthologies

Donald K. Adams, an English scholar and Occidental College professor whose fascination with mystery and detective fiction produced anthologies ranging from essays by Edgar Allan Poe to studies of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, died Monday of what was believed to have been a stroke.

He was 62 and died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after being stricken at his Beverly Hills home.

Adams, whose specialty was 19th-Century British literature--particularly Romantic poetry and Victorian fiction--was known to local bibliophiles as the owner of an extensive collection of 17th- and 18th-Century fiction in pirated first editions printed in France.

He perhaps was better known to mystery lovers as the editor of “The Mystery & Detection Annuals,” collections of essays, reviews and notes on the great spy and suspense stories of our time.

To them he was credited with bringing the scholarly research associated with his long tenure in academia (32 years at Occidental alone) coupled with the personal enthusiasm of an avid mystery reader.

Born in Cranbrook, British Columbia, he worked as a statistician in Vancouver before taking master’s and doctorate degrees at Northwestern University. He taught there and at USC before joining the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental in 1955.

Over the years he received many grants and fellowships and most recently had been visiting Fulbright professor at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia. He received a similar grant to lecture at Dacca University in Bangladesh during 1961-62.

At Occidental he had been working on a bibliography of the Guymon Mystery and Detective Fiction Collection, donated to the college years ago by E. T. Guymon Jr., an alumnus and former trustee.

The 16,000-volume collection contains Gothic, Victorian and more modern detective fiction by such writers as Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley and Agatha Christie. It contains dozens of pages of unpublished manuscripts by Dashiell Hammett, the original turn-of-the century illustration of Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” and a complete set of “Sherlockiana,” more than 400 books of Sherlock Holmes literature from the detective’s debut in The Strand magazine at the turn of the century through current critiques of Doyle’s protagonist.