Stain (see below). The literary scholar William S. Baring-Gould wrote that Bishop was "one of the great masters of the contemporary limerick". Louis Untermeyer wrote that Bishop "has achieved the almost impossible: he has composed dozens of limericks that are decent but, nevertheless, funny". Similarly, the cultural critic Gershon Legman called him "the unquestionable modern master in the clean limerick line" (and also praised him for "one of the most penetrating articles written 'On the Limerick'"). The Widening Stain Bishop had a mystery novel, The Widening Stain, published in 1942 under the pseudonym W. Bolingbroke Johnson, rather jokily described on the jacket as a former librarian for the American Dairy Goat Association and Okmulgee Agricultural and Mechanical Institute. The novel has been described as "[deriving] both its suspense and its humor . . . from its grotesque mixture of the oil of sex with the water of academic life". Bishop put it together quickly, and when halfway done wrote that "The mystery itself would not deceive an intelligent chimpanzee, but I think I can make it more obscure on second writing." Much of it is set in a university library that, according to his daughter Alison Jolly, borrowed from those of Yale and Cornell. Its sleuth is Gilda Gorham, Chief Cataloger of the library; who according to Bishop's granddaughter Margaretta Jolly appears to be based on his wife. The review in The New York Times concluded, "We do not know who W. Bolingbroke Johnson is, but he writes a good story with an academic atmosphere that is not so highly rarefied as we have been led to believe it should be in university circles." A review in The Spectator described the book (and Percival Wilde's novel Tinsley's Bones) as "good American detective stories, and as bright and cheerful as it is possible to be about murder"; however, "there is just something missing [from The Widening Stain] that places the story below the first class". Ralph Partridge congratulated the newcomer Bolingbroke Johnson for devising a new murder motive, but found the novel uneven and amateurish. The novel was very quickly attributed to Bishop, who expressed some regret about it, inscribing a copy within Cornell's library: A cabin in northern Wisconsin Is what I would be for the nonce in, To be rid of the pain Of The Widening Stain And W. Bolingbroke Johnson. Bishop also started a second mystery, but did