Double-Crossover: Carol (CJ) Verburg on the Multifaceted Edward Gorey/Edgar Rowdey/Ogdred Weary/Regera Dowdy

Tuesday, September 30 @ 2:00 p.m.
In-person in Community Rooms AB

Happy 100th birthday, Edward Gorey! For his worldwide fans, 2025 marks the centennial of this brilliant artist and author. For his friends, it also marks 25 years since his death. For Gorey’s longtime comrade-in-arts Carol Verburg, 2025 is when friends and fans can finally discover a startling new side of him, in her book: The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey: Rare Drawings, Scripts, and Stories.

Alongside this lavish art biography, Verburg pursued a personal project. The summer before his passing, she and Gorey joked over lunch at Jack’s Outback that their funky local cafe would make a perfect setting for an Agatha Christie. When he abdicated as her coauthor, she gave him the starring role of sleuth in Croaked: An Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery. That couldn’t fill the hole in her heart; but it cheered her enough to write two sequels (Zapped and Shafted, or The Toastrack Enigma) and some stories.

Please join Carol (CJ) Verburg to explore her and Edward Gorey’s double-crossover between books and theater and between fiction and nonfiction.

A book sale and signing will follow the presentation. A selection Carol’s books will be available for purchase, courtesy of Titcomb’s Bookshop.

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About the Author:

Carol Verburg fell in love with Cape Cod when she moved to Centerville in the mid-1980s. Through the ’90s she worked by day as a freelance nonfiction writer, and by night behind the scenes at local theaters. She met the artist and author Edward Gorey at the Barnstable Comedy Club. He came to see her workshop adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s unstageable novel Cat’s Cradle; afterward they crossed 6A to the Barnstable Tavern and talked until closing. They became neighbors and friends in Yarmouth Port, and collaborated on more than a dozen shows from Provincetown to Bourne. That partnership inspired Carol’s 2024 art biography The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey: Rare Drawings, Scripts, and Stories (Chronicle Books), as well as her award-winning play Spin, or Twilight of the Bohemians. It also triggered her noir-cozy Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod mystery novels, Croaked, Zapped, and Shafted, and her stories “Disarmed” and “A Terrible Tragedy” (published as CJ Verburg).

Carol moved to San Francisco after Edward Gorey died and continues to write crime fiction in the Golden Age tradition. Her Cory Goodwin mystery series stars a Boston-based journalist-sleuth; her “Scandal at the Savoy” stories take place in a theatrical re-creation of Holmes and Watson’s London. She’s a member of the Authors’ Guild, Sisters in Crime, the Mechanics’ Institute Library, and the Book Club of California.

Learn more about Carol on her website: carolverburg.com