SHERLOCK’S SISTERS : STORIES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE FEMALE DETECTIVE
Edited and introduced by Nick Rennison
No Exit Press. 319
pages. £9.99. ISBN 978-0-85730-398-1
Reviewed by Jim Burns
Reviewing an earlier anthology edited by Nick Rennison (More
Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, NRB, June 2019), I pointed to the
context in which the stories had originally appeared in print.
The late-Victorian and Edwardian periods saw a wide range of
magazines and newspapers on sale. They were largely aimed at an
audience which didn’t want highbrow literature and erudite essays.
Entertainment, whether in the form of lively factual articles or
popular fiction, was what the editors looked for on the whole. The
number of magazines competing for attention on a regular basis meant
that they weren’t all likely to be successful.
Publications came and went. But there was a demand for
material and writers could earn a reasonable income if they came up
with enough stories to meet deadlines. This did mean that an air of
“we don’t want it good, we want it Tuesday” was sometimes evident.
Not every story – and there must have been thousands of them – was
ever likely to warrant being considered a work-of-art, or destined
to last beyond the week.
A case in point might be Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s “Madame
Duchesne’s Garden Party”, which features a female sleuth named Dora
Bell. I think Rennison’s own summing up of this story might be
useful in explaining why he considered it worthy of inclusion: “The
Dora Bell stories are short and uncomplicated, ideally suited to the
newspaper readership at which they were aimed. They win no prizes
for great originality, but they remain entertaining and
easy-to-read”. Some of the attraction for readers probably arose
from the stories often being built around a particular detective.
There were, It seems, several Dora Bell tales, though they don’t
seem to have ever been published in book form after they’d graced
the pages of the Leeds
Mercury and The Adelaide
Observer.
I’ve remarked elsewhere that the lives of the authors often seem as
interesting as the stories they wrote, and Corbett (1846-1930)
produced novels, one of which uses the basic theme of someone
falling asleep and waking up in a different century. Corbett
imagined a world where women are in control and lifespan has been
extended to around five hundred years. Society is “fairer and less
corrupt”, but a form of eugenics is practised. It was a subject in
the air in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods and aroused the
curiosity of some prominent writers, and not just those who
published what might be called fiction for the masses. I have to
admit that the title of one of Corbett’s crime novels, “When the Sea
Gives Up its Dead” is almost enough to make me start searching for a
copy. But would I be disappointed if I read it?
I’d read Clarence Rook’s “The Stir Outside the Café Royal” before
picking up Sherlock’s Sisters
(it’s in Crime on Her
Mind, edited by Michele B. Slung, Penguin, 1977), and it’s
another story that is best described as routine. The interest might
lie in its brief portrait of the scene around the entrance to the
Café Royal. Rook (1862-1915) is remembered, if he is, for his book,
The Hooligan Nights,
which purported to be the authentic story of a young tearaway from
Lambeth. Rennison suggests that Rook may not have strayed too far
from his study when researching for his book, and that it might have
been more than influenced by Arthur Morrison’s
Tales of Mean Streets.
Mentioning Rook indicates that, although the stories have female
detectives at their centre, not all of them were written by women.
George R. Sims (1847-1922) created Dorcas Dene who solves the riddle
of “The Haverstock Hill Murder”. Sims – “a journalist, novelist,
dramatist and bohemian man-about-town” –
was a prolific author, one
of his creations being the poem, “Christmas Day in the Workhouse”.
It’s often parodied (the wonderful Billy Bennett did a
military-based version, “Christmas Day in the Cookhouse”, available
on YouTube), but as Rennison makes clear, it was originally designed
as “a biting critique of the Victorian poor laws”. There were twenty
Dorcas Dene stories, according to Rennison, and they were pulled
together in two volumes. They are now collectors’ items and when I
checked the available copies were priced at just over £5,000 for the
two.
I first encountered “The Redhill Sisterhood” by Catherine Louisa
Pirkis (1839-1910) when Hugh Greene included it in
Further Rivals of Sherlock
Holmes (Penguin, 1976), but it was worth reading again. It
features Loveday Brooke, one of the “most interesting and appealing
of late Victorian female detectives”, who manages to operate
successfully in a world largely dominated by men. She doesn’t resent
them and has an eye for a good-looking chap. The story is intriguing
for its period details and starts in London on a “dreary November
morning, every gas jet in the Lynch Court office was alight, and a
yellow curtain of outside fog draped its narrow windows”.
When Brooke is despatched to investigate some shady dealings they
are in an area “known to the sanitary authorities for the past ten
years as a regular fever nest”. Later, there are references to the
introduction of electric lighting in more-prosperous locations, and
its supposed effectiveness in deterring burglars “If electric
lighting were generally in vogue it would save the police a lot of
trouble on these dark winter nights”. At one point a policeman says
of someone, “he has weathered me, after all”, presumably meaning
that the man has spotted and/or recognised him. I can’t recall ever
seeing “weathered” used in this way before.
It’s also possible to get a picture of Victorian life from a passage
in Fergus Hume’s “The Fifth Customer and the Copper Key” when the
detective, Hagar the Gypsy, enters a room “furnished in the ugly
fashion of the early Victorian era……..Chairs and sofa were of
mahogany and horsehair; a round table, with gilt-edged books lying
thereon at regular intervals, occupied the centre of the apartment,
and the gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace was swathed in green
gauze. Copperplate prints of the Queen and the Prince Consort
decorated the crudely-papered walls, and the well-worn carpet was of
a dark green hue sprinkled with bouquets of red flowers”.
Hume (1859-19320) was the author of
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab,
said by Rennison to be “the most popular novel of the Victorian
era”. He published it himself in Australia, when he lived there, and
then sold the English rights for £50. When it became a best-seller
he didn’t profit from it. But he went on to publish over 150 novels
and collections of short stories.
I was intrigued by the occurrence of narcotics in a couple of the
stories, and Madelyn Mack, the “most flamboyant and eccentric female
detective”, was created by Hugh Cosgrove Weir (1884-1934) for “The
Man with Nine Lives”. She chews cola berries as a stimulant when
needing to consider the facts of a case. And the victim of a murder
she’s looking into turns out to have been addicted to “Indian hemp
or ‘hasheesh’ for some time”. The murderer finds a particularly
clever way of ensuring that the man imbibes a lethal dose of the
drug. Amusingly, this story really is one where “the butler did it”.
“The Dope Fiends” by Arthur B. Reeve (1880-1936) has Constance
Dunlap tracking down a cooked doctor, a shady pharmacist, and a bent
policeman engaged in supplying cocaine to, among others, members of
the theatrical profession.. My thoughts were drawn back to Billy
Bennett again. He had an amusing monologue about his mother being so
worried that’s he may become a performer on stage that she gladly
accepts his assurance that the powder on the shoulders of his suit
is only cocaine and not make-up. But
Reeves’s heroine has a more-serious purpose in mind and it is to
save a young dancer from the grip of the drug. Reeve worked as
journalist, a consultant in crime-prevention, and wrote serials for
the early American cinema. I was curious about the date of his story
and whether or not it fell strictly within the Victorian/Edwardian
category. It seems to have been in a collection of his stories
dating from 1916, but may have been published earlier in a magazine.
But perhaps I’m niggling?
Another American writer, Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935)
highlighted Violet Strange as the focus of some of her short
stories. Strange was a rich man’s daughter and didn’t need to work,
but liked to carry out investigations on behalf of a New York
private detective agency. She doesn’t care to take on murder cases,
but gets involved in one involving an elderly lady in a house,
described as “of the olden times……it has a fanlight over the front
door………and two old-fashioned strips of parti-coloured glass on
either side…….and a knocker between its panels which may bring money
some day”. The story has a somewhat contrived ending, but Rennison
aptly sums it up as “well-written and entertaining”.
Green’s work included The
Leavenworth Case, an 1878 novel said to be one of the earliest
of all American detective novels. She wrote other novels which
featured an investigator called Ebenezer Gryce, “one of the first
series characters in detective fiction”.
One of the most intriguing and well-written stories in
Sherlock’s Sisters is
“The Long Arm” by Mary E.Wilkins (1852-1930). Rennison points out
that Wilkins was not a crime writer and the woman at the centre of
her story is not a detective in the accepted sense of the word. She
is, instead, Sarah Fairbanks, a country schoolteacher twenty-nine
years of age, who has been engaged for five years to a young man.
But her father opposes the match. When he is murdered suspicion
naturally falls on both her and her fiancé. He has an alibi to prove
that he was elsewhere at the time of the murder, but she is arrested
and charged. She is acquitted, but suspicion lingers, and she
determines to discover the real killer. The story-telling does have
some originality and flair, and if the ending is a little
melodramatic the overall impression is effective.
Wilkins wrote stories based in New England and involving
“marginalised characters struggling with the frustrations and
constraints of their lives”.
But Rennison says that although they “won her much praise” at
the time of their publication, “today she is probably better known
for her stories of ghosts and the supernatural”. I have to say I
looked in vain for a reference to her in Malcolm Cowley’s
New England Writers and
Writing (University Press of New England, 1996), though I was
perhaps expecting too much in thinking she might be there. Larzer
Ziff does devote a few pages to her New England stories in
The American 1890s: The Life
and Times of a Lost Generation (Chatto & Windus, 1966).
There are other stories that are worthy of mention. “The Episode of
the Needle that did not Match” by Grant Allen (1848-1899), has Hilda
Wade exposing how ambition can overcome scruples, and professions
are sometimes too willing to overlook the faults of the famous.
Allen is yet another popular writer who is now almost forgotten.
Likewise with Richard Marsh (1857-1915) whose “Eavesdropping at
Interlaken” gives us Judith Lee, a young lady with an uncanny gift
for lip-reading, even at a distance. It serves her in good stead
when she is accused of stealing jewellery in a hotel where she is
staying, and she is able to unmask the real thieves. I suppose there
has to be a degree of suspending disbelief when reading a story like
this – can she really be that gifted? – but it rolls along easily
and it’s not hard to enjoy its light entertainment .
Sherlock’s Sisters
is another excellent anthology from Nick Rennison. If one or two of
the stories creak a little it’s still possible to consider them of
some value, even if only for their period charm. And sometimes they
offer insights into how
words change their meaning or application as the years pass. A young
man says he “whipped down the stairs” (meaning dashed down), in the
Loveday Brooke story, and it’s not something I’ve heard recently,
though I would have said it myself seventy and more years ago. But
I’m sure someone will soon tell me that it’s still in use. And some
readers might want to identify with an old lady in the Baroness
Orczy (1865-1947) Lady Molly of Scotland Yard story, “the Woman in
the Big Hat”, who says, “I hate all this modern smartness and
fastness, which are only other words for what I call profligacy”.
Somehow its relevance doesn’t really sound all that old.
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