Review: The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

by Mary

This collection of stories appeared in the early 1890s and features Miss Loveday Brooke, who works for Ebenezer Dyer, head of a detective agency in Lynch Court, off London's Fleet Street.

Miss Brooke is in her thirties and began detecting as the result of an event (not described) by which she was "thrown upon the world penniless and all but friendless". With no way to earn a living, she chose this particular line of work, which had the effect of cutting her off from her friends and original position in society. By this we can safely deduce she is well bred, the more so as she has rooms in Gower Street and employs a maid. Miss Brooke is nondescript in appearance, making her occasional impersonation of, for example, a nursery governess seeking work or a lady house decorator easily carried off.

A few words about her various adventures:

The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step
Craigen Court is burgled, Lady Cathrow's jewels stolen, and her French maid suspected of having a hand in the job. Is there a connection between the theft and a bag whose contents include clerical trappings and a suicide note found on a doorstep not far away?

The Murder at Troyte's Hill
Highly unpopular Alexander Henderson, lodge keeper at Troyte's Hill, is found murdered in his bedroom, which has been turned not so much topsy turvy as completely rearranged in a bizarre fashion, with bed-clothes up the chimney, mantelpiece ornaments arranged in a line on the floor, the clock on its head, and so on. Yet nothing has been stolen.

The Redhill Sisterhood
Sister Monica has rented a house in fever-haunted Paved Court in Redhill, probably not the best location for the Sisterhood's home for crippled orphans. The Sisters take children begging around local villages each day and strange to relate, burglaries seem to follow in their tracks.

A Princess's Vengeance
Major Druce is engaged to the Turkish Princess Dullah-Veih, but his gaze has been wandering to his mother's amanuensis Mlle Cunier. Now the latter has disappeared, taking only her coat and hat...

Drawn Daggers
Miss Monroe, staying with the Revd and Mrs Hawkes, has lost a valuable diamond necklace but she and Mrs Hawkes wish the matter to be hushed up. Now Mr Hawke is receiving anonymous drawings of daggers, and with his wife conveniently away, he engages Loveday to look into the matter.

The Ghost of Fountain Lane
On holiday in Brighton, Miss Brooke investigates the matter of a blank cheque stolen from Revd Charles Turner, cashed for £600, and returned with the mysterious annotation 144,000 on its reverse. Then there's the ghost....

Missing!
Miss Irene Golding of Langford Hall, Leicestershire, has disappeared and £500 is offered for aid in finding her. Her Italian maid may know more than she is willing to reveal. The final plot twist will be too weak for many to accept.

My verdict: The collection is not terribly sparkling and occasionally does not play fair with the reader, although its explanations of Miss Brooke's chain of deductions are reasonable and demonstrate one of her main traits: common sense. The stories will however certainly be an interesting read when viewed as an early example of the female detective, although sometimes too slowly paced for most modern readers.

Illustrated etext: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/pirkis/brooke/brooke.html

Review: The Red Seal by Natalie Sumner Lincoln

by Mary

Twins Helen and Barbara McIntyre arrive at court to give evidence against one John Smith, caught burgling the McIntyre mansion. Strange to relate, the sisters ask lawyer Philip Rochester, who happens to be present, to defend Smith, which task he undertakes.

Smith is taken ill as he leaves the witness box and dies, whereupon he is discovered to be in disguise. He is James Turnbull, cashier of the Metropolis Trust Company, Helen's fiance, and Rochester's room mate. Incredibly, all three claim not to have recognised him. Turnbull's angina pectoris is thought to have caused his death, but Helen insists on an autopsy.

It transpires Turnbull was burgling the house because of a silly wager made with Barbara that he could not pull it off. Barbara asks her sweetheart Harry Kent, Rochester's partner in a legal practice, to find out who murdered Turnbull, for she and her sister are convinced his death was the result of foul play.

Soon the deceased Turnbull is suspected of forgery, Rochester goes missing, an eavesdropper lurks at a window, and a handkerchief is suspected as being the murder weapon. To further the busy plot, various characters play pass the red-sealed envelope, whose contents turn out to be the last thing most readers will expect.

My verdict: While the initial pace is slow, it picks up after a few chapters. The solution is complicated, not to say outrageous, so don't try reading The Red Seal if there is anything to distract you from noting every nuance. Cleverly worked red herrings mislead, and the explanation of the characters' roles in the tragedy and subsequent events features what must be the largest number of culprits-named-and-then-it's-someone-else's-turn-to-be-accused many readers will have read -- and all in a single chapter! Or to put it another way, the plot features twists galore. I suspect not many readers will guess whodunnit.

Etext: The Red Seal

Review: A Silent Witness by R. Austin Freeman

by Mary

Dr Humphrey Jardine's narration treats of a strange chain of events that befell him when he was newly qualified, at a time when there were still horse-drawn cabs and the descent of dusk saw lamplighters at work.

His adventures began late one evening when he went for a stroll along Millfield Lane on the edge of London's Hampstead Heath. He sees a corpse, a clerical gent going by his garments, lying further up the narrow thoroughfare but when he returns with police reinforcements a few minutes later the body has gone. Naturally enough, the chaps in blue are politely sceptical about what Jardine saw or, as they see it, did not see.

Jardine returns next day to examine the lane and finds a suspicious stain on the fence near where the body had lain. He also picks up a tiny reliquary made of gold, its frayed silk cord suggesting it had been worn as a necklace or in some other way about its owner's person. Climbing up and looking over the fence, he sees obvious tracks leading away from the fence -- taken all together, suggestive circumstances to say the least.

Dr Thorndyke suggests Jardine act as locum tenens for one Dr Batson, thus pitching the young medic into a positive whirlwind of odd goings-on. After a particularly inventive effort at murdering Jardine, Thorndyke's colleague Dr Jervis takes over Jardine's locum tenems position pro tem and investigations get under way to find out who is assiduously trying to dispose of Jardine, a man with, so far as he knows, no enemies and with no relatives liable to benefit by his death.

My verdict: The plot unspools into a web of disturbing incidents, unexpected meetings and re-meetings, attempted murders, and a deserted house which nonetheless tells a great deal as the novel rattles up hill and down dale, or rather lane, in a landscape through which move a pretty young artist with a ferocious aunt, a mysterious stranger afflicted with a rare eye disorder, a Jesuit priest seeking news of a missing friend, and a "downy bird" or two of both genders -- not to mention a hidden portrait. There is much following about of various people and sending of telegrams, and, of course, despite lack of clews, Thorndyke cracks the case, although not in time to...but no, I shall say no more.

http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301591.txt

Golden Age Mystery Review: The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley by Louis Tracy

by Mary

Artist John Trenholme is staying in the Hertfordshire village of Roxton, having gone there at the request of a magazine to do paintings of the local area before the railway arrives and ruins everything. His request to thus immortalise a nearby Elizabethan mansion is rebuffed by its owner, Mortimer Fenley, private banker and father of two half-brothers.

Trenholme finds out there's a public right of way across Fenley's parkland and on a lovely June morning he avails himself of it to paint the view -- which includes a young woman in a bathing suit taking a morning dip in the lake. He is thus on the spot to hear the shot that kills Fenley on his own doorstep. At this point one of my favourite sleuthing teams, Superintendent James Leander Winter and Detective Inspector Charles Francois Furneaux, arrive on stage when Scotland Yard is called in by oldest son Hilton Fenley. To add to the family's troubles, both siblings wish to marry their father's beautiful ward Sylvia Manning -- she of the bathing suit -- which worsens the already bad blood between them.

The younger son Robert is a ne'er-do-well who was in London when his father died, or was he? Could the murder be connected to a bond robbery at the Fenley Bank? How was the seemingly impossible crime committed when a prime suspect was known to be in the house when the murderous shot was fired from a wood some 400 yards away?

My verdict: Much as I have enjoyed the Winter & Furneaux stories, I must mark this one as a B. The Fenleys are curiously thin as characters and I felt the lesser players in the drama were more rounded out, probably because Tracy provides a different angle for the traditional supporting cast. Thus for example we have the oft bibulous butler depicted instead as a wine connoisseur and the village bobby as intelligent and quick thinking. On the other hand, the touch of melodrama towards the end of the novel seems somewhat out of place and prospective readers should be aware there are a few comments of an un-PC nature.

Etext: The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley by Louis Tracy

Review: The Albert Gate Mystery by Louis Tracy

by Mary

The Albert Gate Mystery: Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective, by Louis Tracy, begins with a locked, heavily guarded London mansion where more than one crime is committed in a single night, and then moves back and forth over the English Channel and around the Mediterranean.

Barrister Reginald Brett takes note of two items in the morning paper. The first reports an "affair of some magnitude" at a mansion in Albert Gate, London. Details are scanty so speculation is rife but what is known is that a party of high-ranking Turkish gentlemen, servants, and guards are living in the house under strict security. What's more, fourteen expert diamond-cutters have shown up from Amsterdam and are working there daily.

The previous night the Dutch visitors and the various Turkish attendants were detained at Scotland Yard, and Dr. Tennyson Coke, "the greatest living authority on toxicology", is among medical wallahs being consulted by the authorities.

What does it all mean?

Brett thinks it may well be connected to a brief note in the same paper reporting a close relative of the Turkish Sultan has it off to France in suspicious circumstances.

Brett has hardly started to connect the dots when the Earl of Stanhope shows up in an awful bate. It seems his fiancee, Edith Talbot, refuses to marry him until her brother Jack is located and cleared of wrongdoing.The Foreign Office put Jack in charge of arrangements for the Turkish visitors and their priceless gems and not only has Jack disappeared, so have the diamonds -- and five men have been murdered at the mansion, including the Turkish envoy, His Excellency Mehemet Ali Pasha.

And all this takes place before the end of the first chapter!

Brett agrees to take the case and goes to visit Edith Talbot, who tells him that due to the various precautions taken and certain structural alterations made before the Turkish gents arrived it was absolutely impossible for anyone to get into the house except through the front door and an entrance hall where a dozen policemen and an inspector stood guard.

Thus begins a merry chase that ultimately leads Brett and his companions across France and beyond.

My verdict: Fans of the impossible crime will find the explanation is disappointing but Brett is an interesting character. He is an analytical detective of the Holmesian type but deduces information and future actions based upon observation and rumination rather than extensive knowledge of bicycle tracks or cigar ash. Because these feats occur only occasionally in the narrative readers will find them convincing. The Scotland Yard detective turns out not to be so dim-witted as usually thought, and GAD fans will not be surprised at the thorough thrashing administered to a man instrumental in casting mud on the reputation of Edith's brother. One piece of justice meted out towards the close is so fitting that despite possible moral outrage on the part of some readers, bearing in mind the character's attitude (valiantly trying to avoid spoilers) I suspect most of them will laugh out loud....

Etext: The Albert Gate Mystery

Inventing a Religion...or Not

Today at Poe's Deadly Daughters Mary and I write about the time we invented a religion for one of our Byzantine mysteries...or was it really imaginary?

Inventing a Religion...or Not.

The Lord Chamberlain Lives!

by Eric

Our writing has more energy than I do right now. It's still getting out and about. For example, the second ever John the Lord Chamberlain story is now available as an ebook from Head of Zeus. Under the title A Mithraic Mystery it appeared in 1995 in The Mammoth Collection of Historical Whodunnits and Historical Detectives. Our first Byzantine mystery (A Byzantine Mystery!) was a very short puzzle oriented story in which the the Lord Chamberlain was little more than a cypher, and honestly, not much like our subsequent sleuth. (We think it was malicious gossip passed on by Procopios) When editor Mike Ashley asked us for a second tale about John we decided to start fleshing the character out. For the Head of Zeus reissue we did extensive rewriting and we hope it can serve as a short intro to the series under the new title:

The Body in the Mithraeum

Byzantium AD 533: In a secret underground temple, the victim was blindfolded, bound with entrails and cut open with knife. In blood, a scrawled message: 'thus perish all who hate the Lord of Light'. Who could have performed such an abomination? Why has the Empress Theodora taken such a personal interest? John's investigation will lead him into world of hidden cults and lethal palace secrets.

The Body in the Mithraeum at Head of Zeus.

For a much longer intro you can now purchase the first four novels of the series in an e-book "boxed set":

NOTE: We have suggested they might correct the spelling on the cover image!! Consider this .jpg a collector's item.

DEATH IN BYZANTIUM: At the heart of what is left of the Roman Empire, lies a city simmering with intrigue & treachery. Amid this maelstrom stands John, ex-slave, now the right hand of Emperor Justinian. It is John's skills as an investigator that Justinian prizes the most. But the emperor is not a sentimental man. Nor is he a patient one. John knows his position is precarious. One misstep and his enemies may have him. And if they don't, the emperor himself almost certainly will.

ONE FOR SORROW: When the body of a high-ranking treasury official is found in a filthy alley, John's investigation stirs the ghosts of his past and threatens his life.

TWO FOR JOY: John must discover why three of Constantinople's holy stylites have burned to death atop their pillars.

THREE FOR A LETTER: The murder of a child threatens Justinian's dreams of resurrecting the glory of Roman Empire. John will need all his wits to keep his job... and his head.

FOUR FOR A BOY: In this series prequel, John the slave takes his first steps along the dangerous path that will lead him to become Justinian's Lord Chamberlain.

Death in Byzantium

Lastly, Poisoned Pen Press will be publishing Ten for Dying in March, but more about that later.