The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime

by Michael Sims

  Here we come to the unique pleasures of the book you hold in your hands: the characters, the detectives themselves. You will meet the dashing young Dora Myrl and the sardonic old Amelia Butterworth. You will encounter a thoughtful tragedy that young socialite Violet Strange uncovers, the professional routine of policewomen such as Mrs. Paschal, and the adventures of that indefatigable private detective Loveday Brooke. Among the protagonists in this book, only Sarah Fairbanks, the observant narrator of Mary E. Wilkins’s story “The Long Arm,” is not a series character. Only one character, Anna Katharine Green’s Amelia Butterworth, is truly an amateur detective, allied with neither police nor a private inquiry agency—although in her later outings she becomes ever more respected by Ebenezer Gryce, Green’s already famous detective whom she had introduced in 1878 in The Leavenworth Case.

  In most cases I have read every story in each series in order to choose the best. In a couple of instances I found two or three nominees equally strong, and chose the one that had previously been anthologized least often. You will also find the first chapter of Anna Katharine Green’s important and highly amusing 1897 novel That Affair Next Door, the debut of her spinster snoop Amelia Butterworth, clearly the direct ancestor of Agatha Chris-tie’s Miss Marple although a more three-dimensional and believable character. In this selection you won’t be able to follow the mystery to its denouement, but you will see why the quick and vivid Green was one of the most influential writers in the genre. In each story’s individual introduction, I describe in detail its author and characters and historical context, so I won’t clutter this overview with biographical or bibliographical details.

  How did this anthology come about? My first foray into editing a collection of crime stories was Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief, a selection of the best of Maurice Leblanc’s tales about the suave and vainglorious French master criminal, which Penguin published in 2007. My survey of Lupin’s ancestors, descendants, and context directly inspired The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes, which Penguin published in 2009. My wide reading for this book, in turn, reminded me how few of the great women detectives and criminals of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are remembered today. Although they show up here and there, I could find no collection devoted strictly to these pioneer characters. I thought this absence a shame, and the opportunity to fill the gap exciting; and Elda Rotor, the editorial director of Penguin Classics, agreed on both points. So here we are.

  In this as in my previous collections, I have faced the anthologist’s sweet dilemma: How many of the usual suspects ought to be included and how many omitted to make room for lesser-known characters? This problem results from an embarrassment of riches, so it isn’t exactly a burden, but space limitations demand triage. In order to make room for unfamiliar authors such as W. S. Hayward and Andrew Forrester, I left out several stories that are already widely available. “The Diary of Anne Rodway,” for example, which Wilkie Collins published in 1856, is often described as starring the first female detective. It’s an interesting story and the narrator is sharp and courageous; but she is not a professional, the primary clue simply falls into her lap, and the adventure as a whole is not quite a detective story. One anthology favorite, Clarence Rook’s brief 1898 story “The Stir Outside the Cafe Royal,” although it involves the police and a criminal, isn’t really a detective story.

  For various reasons, I have refused admittance to several female series detectives. Space is an issue, of course. So is boredom, an emotion that every anthologist must employ as doorkeeper. I exclude, for example, Fergus Hume’s stories about Hagar Stanley, as well as a series about criminal-turned-detective Constance Dunlap, written by Arthur B. Reeve, creator of the popular scientific detective Craig Kennedy. I never found copies of books that supposedly would have introduced me to Marie Connor Leighton’s Lucille Dare and Beatrice Heron-Maxwell’s Mollie Delamere, but these both live in longer works unlikely to lend themselves to coherent excerpts. We wanted to include a Lady Molly story by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, but reprint rights proved outrageously expensive.

  Many of the stories I include first appeared as part of a progressive series, one in which each story stands alone but also moves toward a denouement, like TV series such as Veronica Mars or Lost. In these cases I carefully chose a story that stood on its own legs. Any necessary background information from earlier stories or chapters I provide in my introduction to the selection. Because not every first story is the best in its series, I often choose a later one for inclusion and simply preface it with the relevant passage from the origin story. Whenever I do so, I specify the nature of this merger in the story’s introduction; I hate to be misled by invisible editorial tinkering and I assume that you do too.

  One author appears more than once. Anna Katharine Green shows up with one story from her series about the young socialite detective Violet Strange and also with the first chapter of the novel that introduced Amelia Butterworth. Our eleven authors have produced stories about murder, theft, swindling, impersonation, kidnapping, and other antisocial entertainments. Within such a seemingly narrow focus as Victorian female detectives, the variety is highly enjoyable.

  This collection concentrates on female characters. Many of the authors are female as well, but not all. To honor this premise, I omit the first known detective story by a woman, because her protagonist was a man. In early 1866 the Australian Journal published a story entitled “The Dead Witness,” a suspenseful tale of an outback manhunt by Irish-born Mary Fortune, who wrote under the nom de plume W.W., which represented her poignant nickname for herself—Waif Wander. Obviously many of the pioneer writers in the field were women, but at first few of them wrote about female protagonists. But it’s fun to see that they were on board so early. When W.W. published her first detective story, it had been only a quarter century since the genre’s birth.

  In 1841, a year before the founding of the first detective bureau in England, an oddball American poet, fiction writer, and critic scribbled a story entitled “The Murders in the Rue Trianon” and signed it Edgar A. Poe. Before he published it in the Philadelphia-based Graham’s Magazine, of which he had just become editor, Poe changed the street to Rue Morgue—a great editorial decision, adding that chilling whiff of death in the title. Unquestionably Poe was the father of the detective story. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was the first of three stories about an amateur French detective named C. Auguste Dupin, a highborn melancholic whose spirit has been broken by his clan’s pecuniary fall from grace. Arthur Conan Doyle purloined many of the stories’ idiosyncrasies for Sherlock Holmes: an admiring narrator, an egocentric genius, and official police almost addle-brained enough to audition for the Keystone Kops. “The time of the professional police detective had barely begun,” as Kate Summerscale wrote in her recent nonfiction book The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, but “the era of the amateur was already in full flower.”

  None of Poe’s grotesques and arabesques was more influential than this clever and revolutionary tale that, however outrageous its premise, nonetheless eschews the supernatural in deciphering the mystery at its core. It was the first detective story—that is, the first fiction in which the focus of the plot is the unraveling of a crime by investigative methods. Poe also wrote the first impossible-crime murder story (“Rue Morgue” again), the first in which a detective springs a surprise on a murderer to elicit a confession (“Thou Art the Man”), and the first in which a suspect is unknowingly shadowed by a detective (“The Man of the Crowd”).

  Some critics argue that Poe was in turn inspired by such works as “Mademoiselle de Scuderi,” by the brilliant German fabulist E. T. A. Hoffmann, and that those tales ought to be regarded as protodetective stories. As much as I would like to bring one of my favorite writers into this genesis myth, I have to disagree with critics who consider Mlle Scuderi a detective. She is not an investigator by trade, neither amateur nor professional; nor does she launch anything
approaching an investigation. The violent outrages of the Inquisition show up at her door in eighteenth-century Paris, and she proves smart and brave. But ratiocination is not her forte and most of the solution falls into her lap. Calling the tale a detective story is similar to borrowing noble ancestors for the luster they add to the family tree. Surely Poe is exotic enough.

  Poe did have predecessors in the crime story, of course, including a long-winded, not-quite-detective-novel from 1794—Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, by the English radical William Godwin. Dupin had ancestors of sorts in other genres, including Voltaire’s novel Zadig, which briefly features ratiocinative work performed in a different context entirely. Also, alongside the first police department had come the first subgenre of detective fiction—the “casebook” phenomenon. These books and stories recounted adventures that were sometimes true, sometimes a hybrid of truth and fantasy, and sometimes avowedly fictional. Casebook works included Richmond: or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Officer, published in 1827; and, two years later, about the time the first bobbies hit the street, Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French Police, by Eugène François Vidocq, a criminal who became a detective and founded the Paris Sûreté. There were also American dime novels that included policemen and fugitives from justice, but they were seldom carefully plotted or featured anything approaching actual detective work. In 1853, twelve years after Dupin’s debut, Charles Dickens was the first writer to prominently feature a detective in a serious novel, Bleak House, but the book is not a detective story. Sly Inspector Bucket is a prominent and memorable figure, but he is not the book’s protagonist and his investigation of Lady Dedlock is not its primary feature.

  In 1866, the same year that Mary Fortune published “The Dead Witness,” Emile Gaboriau published in France L’Affaire Lerouge, which introduced both an amateur detective and a policeman named Monsieur Lecoq, who became a series character. Gaboriau merged fact and fiction by basing Lecoq upon the half-real, half-legendary exploits of Vidoq. Many critics call this the first detective novel. The very next year an American dime novelist named Metta Victoria Fuller Victor published, under the pseudonym Seeley Regester, a novel that some critics cite as the first detective novel by a woman, The Dead Letter. But in fact the story depends heavily upon psychic visions and coincidence. Earning ancestor status at best, it can’t qualify as a legitimate detective story.

  Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins featured the next famously memorable detective, the sedate and rose-loving Sergeant Cuff, in The Moonstone, published in 1868. Despite its outrageous plot, T. S. Eliot called this irresistible story “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” An interesting side-light in literary history is that the characters of both Bucket and Cuff seem to have been inspired by the real-life adventures of the same London detective, Inspector Charles Field, whom Dickens accompanied on his police rounds and wrote about in his journalism, and who later became a friend of both Dickens and Collins.

  The first legitimate detective novel by a woman turned out to be one of the great bestsellers of the nineteenth century and one of the earliest important books in the genre—The Leavenworth Case, which Anna Katharine Green published in 1878. (Penguin Classics published a new edition in 2010.) Soon it was required reading at Yale’s school of law. It introduced the sardonic and oblique Ebenezer Gryce of the New York City police, who would reappear in all three novels about her later detective Amelia Butterworth. Leavenworth was a locked-room murder and its construction founded the English country-house style of murder—revolving around a discrete set of suspects enclosed within a fixed area—even though it was set in a big city in the United States. It also founded the now iconic climax of the detective’s unraveling of the mystery in the presence of a roomful of suspects. It is impossible to overstate the importance of Anna Katharine Green in the early history of the detective story. No wonder she shows up in this anthology twice.

  The rapid rate of change during the Victorian era, like that of our own new millennium, can be graphed in part by the evolution of its vehicles—in particular those featured in the following stories about women: hansom cab, bicycle, and train. Often such background textures become plot elements. A glance at them will also address a complaint from some readers of Victorian fiction that they get lost amid the background detail.

  Plowing through the crowds of jostling pedestrians, many species of carriage jammed the cobblestone streets and country thoroughfares of the nineteenth century—elegant enclosed broughams and landaus, sporty little phaetons on four high wheels, six-horse mail coaches with room for passengers on top. A pedestrian would have to dodge eye-catching rented post chaises called “yellow bounders,” driven by a postilion astride one of the horses, or even the smart but unstable two-horse curricle memorably driven by dashing young Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey.

  Probably the iconic vehicle for fans of detective fiction is the two-wheeled hansom cab that seated a pair of passengers behind a low double door that guarded their shoes and clothes from mud and excrement flung up by the horse’s rear hooves; the top-hatted driver stood outside at the back, holding the reins through a loop on the roof. These vehicles were so popular that Fergus Hume worked them into the title of the hottest nineteenth-century bestseller in the crime genre, The Mystery of the Hansom Cab, set in Gold Rush-era Australia. During the heyday of Sherlock Holmes, more than eight thousand hansom cabs served London and its environs—and the last was gone by 1933. Among the early stories in this volume, it is the hansom that most often bears Loveday Brooke and Dorcas Dene on their investigations.

  Such variety in transportation testifies to changes in the rising middle class and the bustling urban workforce, innovations that in their own way helped prepare society for women who worked and voted. Like the twentieth century, the nineteenth was a period of almost constant change in the material world, thanks primarily to the Industrial Revolution’s innovations in travel and communication. The queen herself changed greatly over those decades, but not as much as the world around her. Victoria reigned for a record-breaking sixty-four years, from 1837 to 1901—from the year that Dickens began serializing Oliver Twist to the year that Gary Cooper was born. When she acceded to the throne at the age of eighteen, Samuel Morse was patenting the telegraph; she died a few months after Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic radio signal—in, appropriately, the first year of a new century. This was the lively era in which our stories take place.

  The queen’s own century rode in behind horses and rode out behind a smoke-coughing, coal-driven engine. In the first decade of Victoria’s reign, Charles Dickens in Dombey and Son was already comparing the vast excavations and construction on the Camden Town rail tracks to “the first shock of a great earthquake.” With a little jaunt from Slough to Paddington in 1842, Victoria became the first British monarch to travel by rail; one of the earliest regularly operating trains was a royal coach for her aunt, Queen Adelaide. By the late 1860s, trains were omnipresent. While Victoria floated along in a luxurious coach with yellow satinwood trim and a quilted ceiling of moiré silk, the homespun poor crowded into hard wooden seats or stood gripping a railing.

  During Victoria’s reign, horse-drawn carriages went through considerable evolution before surrendering to trains and, eventually, automobiles. Along the way, as you will see in some of these stories, England fell in love with bicycling. “Get a bicycle,” advised Mark Twain in 1884. “You will not regret it, if you live.” Safety was a key issue and intimately related to female freedom. As early as 1880, the penny weekly Girl’s Own Paper was running—alongside articles on “Lissome Hands and Pretty Feet” and “Female Clerks and Book-Keepers (Earning One’s Living)”—reminders that when dressing for tricycling a girl must omit trailing garments that might catch in the wheels. At first it was common to see a frilled and furbelowed woman perched on the carriage seat of a high-wheeled tricycle, with her suited husband astride a unicycle nearby. But tradition
al dress hampered exercise. This point was publicly demonstrated by the many accident reports that soon filled newspapers—to be gleefully cited by conservatives as proving the dangers of innovation. Feminist reformer Ada Ballin, author of the popular child-care manual From Cradle to School, wrote rather grandly in The Science of Dress that “tight lacing must be banished from the mind and body of the woman who would ride the steel horse.”

  This remark encapsulates one of the era’s deepest fears: that as women’s clothes became less straitlaced, so might their morals. What was England coming to, with all these uppity women propelling themselves around on newfangled contraptions, in charge of their own unpredictable mobility? Bicycles—which soon replaced their three-wheeled ancestor—quickly became emblematic of the New Woman. They show up often within the pages of this anthology, as the cover suggests, and play a key role in a couple of stories. By 1897, the cover of the Girl’s Own Paper was portraying a female cyclist wearing the baggy, trouserlike fashion named for the American suffragist Amelia Jenks Bloomer, who argued that women ought to replace their layered petticoats with something resembling Turkish pants. It was Bloomer who wrote the revolutionary sentence, “The costume of women should be suited to her wants and necessities.” Many disagreed. No less a personage than Lady Harberton was famously refused admittance to the Hautboy Hotel because she showed up at the door in the kind of divided skirt and long coat she recommended for cyclists. An 1894 Punch cartoon satirized the New Woman as “Donna Quixote.”