Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett was born above his grandfather's bookshop in Toronto. His father moved the family to Chicago in the late 1890s where Starrett attended John Marshall High School. Starrett landed a job as a cub reporter with the Chicago Inter-Ocean in 1905. When that paper folded, two years later, he began working for the Chicago Daily News as a crime reporter, a feature writer and finally a war correspondent in Mexico from 1914 to 1915. Starrett turned to writing mystery and supernatural fiction for the pulp magazines during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1920, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche entitled The Adventure of the Unique 'Hamlet , limited to 200 copies (the plan was to have 100 copies with the imprint of bookseller Walter M. Hill, and 100 with Starrett's imprint; the printer misunderstood the instructions and 190 have Hill on as publisher, and only 10 have Starrett). This story involved the detective with a missing 1604 edition of Shakespeare's play, which included an inscription by the playwright. Starrett's most famous work, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, was published in 1933. He retired from The Chicago Tribune in 1967 where he had written a book column, "Books Alive," for 25 years. Starrett was one of the founders of The Hounds of the Baskerville (sic), the Chicago chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars.

Starrett also wrote horror/fantasy stories, primarily for the pulp magazine Weird Tales (collected in The Quick and the Dead, Arkham House, 1965), poetry (collected in Autolycus in Limbo, Dutton, 1943), detective novels (Murder on 'B' Deck, Doubleday, 1929, and others), and detective short stories primarily about Chicago sleuth Jimmie Lavender (The Case Book of Jimmie Lavender, Gold Label, 1944).

A complete edition of Starrett's works is being published by George Vanderburgh's Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, a print-on-demand publisher, with 22 of a projected 25 volumes already in print. The most recent publication in the Vincent Starrett Memorial Library is Sherlock Alive, compiled and edited by Karen Murdock. The first printing of this book was in August 2010. Sherlock Alive is a collection of the Sherlockian references from Starrett's "Books Alive" column.