IN THE SHADOW OF
AGATHA
CHRISTIE
CLASSIC CRIME FICTION BY
FORGOTTEN FEMALE WRITERS:
1850–1917
EDITED BY LESLIE S. KLINGER
“What a woman—oh, what a woman!”
—The King of Bohemia, in “A Scandal in Bohemia”
by Arthur Conan Doyle
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
LESLIE S. KLINGER
THE ADVOCATE’S WEDDING DAY
CATHERINE CROWE
THE SQUIRE’S STORY
ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL
TRACES OF CRIME
MARY FORTUNE
MR. FURBUSH
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
MRS. TODHETLEY’S EARRINGS
ELLEN WOOD
CATCHING A BURGLAR
ELIZABETH CORBETT
THE GHOST OF FOUNTAIN LANE
C. L. PIRKIS
THE STATEMENT OF JARED JOHNSON
GERALDINE BONNER
POINT IN MORALS
ELLEN GLASGOW
THE BLOOD-RED CROSS
L. T. MEADE AND ROBERT EUSTACE
THE REGENT’S PARK MURDER
BARONESS ORCZY
THE CASE OF THE REGISTERED LETTER
AUGUSTA GRONER
THE WINNING SEQUENCE
M. E. BRADDON
MISSING: PAGE THIRTEEN
ANNA KATHARINE GREEN
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CLOTHES-LINE
CAROLYN WELLS
JURY OF HER PEERS
SUSAN GLASPELL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
INTRODUCTION
Agatha Christie is undoubtedly the world’s best-selling mystery author, hailed as the “Queen of Crime,” with sales in the billions and more translations than any other author. Her books, according to her estate, have outsold any other than the Bible and Shakespeare. Christie burst onto the literary scene in 1920, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introducing the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot; her last novel was published in 1976, a career longer than even Conan Doyle’s forty-year span. The indefatigable Miss Marple, who starred in Christie’s last book, first appeared in 1927. Yet as late as 1929, Dorothy Sayers, in her classic introduction to the 1929 Omnibus of Crime, could write, “But the really brilliant woman detective has yet to be created.” And prior to Christie, only Anna Katharine Green, discussed below, had achieved any real recognition as a crime writer.
In the nineteenth century, Arthur Conan Doyle dominated the genre, along with William Godwin, Eugène Vidoc, Edgar Allan Poe, Émile Gaboriau, Fergus Hume, and Wilkie Collins—all notably male. It is also the common view that in the nineteenth century, crime writing was a spasmodic enterprise, with occasional bursts of popularity of the mystery stories of Poe or Gaboriau, but not really established until the overwhelming success of Sherlock Holmes in the 1890s.* But there were earlier notable contributions to the genre, by women writers in England, the United States, Australia, and Europe, throughout the period from 1850 to 1890, and even after Holmes came to predominate the model of the detective, women writers were traveling different roads.
Crime writing was not an invention of the nineteenth century. Bruce Cassiday, in Roots of Detection: The Art of Deduction before Sherlock Holmes (1983), includes examples of deductive reasoning applied to crime from Herodotus, the apocryphal Scriptures, The Arabian Nights, Voltaire’s Zadig, E. T. Hoffmann, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In America, sermons often told horrifying tales of crimes and repentant criminals. Gothic novels were populated with mysterious deaths and terrifying villains, and the widely sold Newgate Calendars focused on crimes, criminals, and their capture. However, stories of detection did not flourish until mid-century, with the rise of the professional police force.
The first great writer of tales of criminal detection was the Frenchman Eugène Vidocq (1775–1857), whose memoirs and novels found a ready audience. Vidocq, a reformed criminal, was appointed in 1813 to be the first head of the Sûreté Nationale, the outgrowth of an informal detective force created by Vidocq and adopted by Napoleon as a supplement to the police. His 1828 memoirs recounted his adventures in the detection and capture of criminals, often involving disguises and wild flights. Later books told of his criminal career, and sensational novels published under his name (probably written by others) capitalized on his reputation as a bold detective.
While Vidocq’s stories captivated the public, they were hardly original tales of detective fiction. The first great purveyor of fictional stories about a detective was Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), whose Chevalier Auguste Dupin set the standard for a generation to come. The cerebral Dupin first appeared in Poe’s short story “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). At the same time, Poe introduced another staple of detective fiction, the partner and chronicler (nameless in Poe’s tales) who is less intelligent than the detective but serves as a sounding board for the detective’s brilliant deductions. In each of the three Dupin stories (the other two are “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” [1842] and “The Purloined Letter” [1844], the detective outwits the police and shows them to be ineffective crime fighters and problem solvers. Yet Poe apparently lost interest in the notion, and his detective “series” ended in 1844.
Another Frenchman, Emile Gaboriau, created the detective known as Monsieur Lecoq, drawing heavily on Vidocq as his model. First appearing in L’ffaire Lerouge (1866), Lecoq was a minor police detective who rose to fame in six cases, appearing between 1866 and 1880. Although Sherlock Holmes describes Lecoq as a “miserable bungler,” Gaboriau’s works were immensely popular, and Fergus Hume, English author of the best-selling detective novel of the nineteenth century The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), which sold over 500,000 copies worldwide, explained that Gaboriau’s financial success inspired his own work.
Memoirs of police officers and detectives were another important stream of stories. Richmond; or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Officer: Drawn Up from His Private Memoranda, published anonymously in 1827, purported to be true tales of criminal detection (though now thought to be largely fictional). Also in England, “Waters’s” Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer appeared in 1856, and Revelations of a Lady Detective in 1864.† James M’Govan’s Brought to Bay, or Experiences of a City Detective, which was issued by the Edinburgh Publishing Company in 1878, was a great success, leading to two more volumes of these (fictional) stories of an Edinburgh detective.
In America, Detective Sketches [by a New York Detective] appeared in 1881 in the format of a “dime novel.” These were cheap, pulp editions, usually published anonymously or by fictitious authors, first popularized in England as “shilling shockers” or “penny dreadfuls,” featuring highwaymen, pirates, and other criminals, ghosts, vampires (Varney the Vampyre first seeing the light of day, so to speak, in this format), and other shocking subjects. Ellery Queen estimates that between 1860 and 1928, more than six thousand different detective dime novels were published in the United States, including female detectives such as Lady Bess, Lizzie Lasher (the Red Weasel), and Lucilla Lynx.
In England, criminals and detectives peopled Charles Dickens’s tales as well. While not widely regarded as an author of detective fiction, Dickens created Inspector Bucket, the first significant detective in English literature. When Bucket appeared in Bleak House (1852–1853), he became the prototype of the official representative of the police department: honest, diligent, stolid, and confident, albeit not very colorful, dramatic, or exciting. Wilkie Collins, author of two of the greatest novels of suspense of the nineteenth century, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868)
, contributed a similar character, Sergeant Cuff, who appears in The Moonstone. Cuff is known as the finest police detective in England, who solves his cases with perseverance and energy, rather than genius. Sadly, after The Moonstone, he is not heard from again.
The first female detective probably was Mrs. G. in The Female Detective (1864) by Andrew J. Forrester Jr.‡ However, the first female crime writer is probably the British writer Caroline Clive, whose novel Paul Ferroll (1855), published under the pseudonym “V.,” is clearly a murder mystery, albeit one without a detective figure. Spoiler alert: Twenty years after the murder, the title character, whose wife was the victim, admits to the killing. Clive (1801–1873) also wrote a handful of short stories, a half-dozen volumes of poetry, and some other novels, including a “prequel” to Paul Ferroll in which she explored the husband’s motives, but none achieved the success of her first venture into crime writing.
In America, the New England–based Harriet Prescott Spofford began to write stories about women in contemporary American society. The author of hundreds of stories, essays, poems, and children’s tales, she also began to focus on crime writing. Her first crime story was “In a Cellar,” published in 1859, which she submitted under an assumed name, causing the editors to think that it was a translation of Dumas or Balzac. In “Mr. Furbush” (1865), included in this volume, she created the first “series” detective character. Furbush appears again in “In the Maguerriwock” (1868). However, after this story, Spofford apparently bowed to the public’s demand for more realistic narratives and returned to writing New England sketches.
Oline Keese was the penname of Caroline Woolmer Leakey (1827–1881), an Australian gentlewoman whose novel The Broad Arrow (1859) is the first depiction of convict oppression and brutality in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), focusing on the plight of a woman, Maida Gwynnham, who has been wrongly convicted. It precedes by fifteen years the better-known For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke, also set in Tasmania and also telling the story of an innocent character. While Leakey’s novel is full of Christian righteousness, it is also indignant about the corrupt and corrupting convict system. Leakey also wrote moral tales but with no crime element.
Although Ellen Davitt (ca. 1812–1879) only wrote for three years, 1865 to 1868, she was a significant contributor to Australian crime writing. Educated in England, she relocated to Victoria in the 1850s. Davitt was the elder sister of Anthony Trollope’s wife, though she never spoke of the connection. Her novel Force and Fraud was serialized in the Australian Journal in 1865, and that journal also published her novel-length serials “Black Sheep: A Tale of Australian Life” and “Uncle Vincent; or Love and Hatred,” subtitled “A Romance of Modern Times.” Her last serial was “The Wreck of Atalanta, which appeared in the Journal in 1867. Force and Fraud is the first murder mystery published in Australia and the first “whodunnit,” drawing on the developing genre of British mystery fiction. However, there is no detective figure, and the police fare badly in Davitt’s view. Perhaps as a result and certainly in part by reason of its Australian setting, it was largely ignored outside Australia.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) was a close friend of Charlotte Brontë and therefore quite naturally became her biographer. Gaskell produced seven novels, four novella, and over forty short stories, and the longer works generally focused on historical, domestic, and social themes. In her short fiction, however, she anonymously wrote sensationalized, Gothic stories. Gaskell was certainly interested in cirme writing: She was enthusiastic about and recommended Caroline Clive’s Paul, Ferroll and her novella “Dark Night’s Work” (1863) and her novel Mary Barton (1848) both incoprorate crime. Her story “The Grey Woman” (1861) also includes crime, though it can hardly be called crime writing, but “Disappearances” (1851) is listed in Barzun and Taylor’s Catalogue of Crime as is “The Squire’s Tale,” included in this volume.
Although well-known later in her career as a prolific author of “sensation” fiction, Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) also wrote an important crime novel, The Trail of the Serpent (1860). Originally titled Three Times Dead; or, The Secret of the Heath, it focuses on Jabez North (Emphraim East in the original verison), a criminal who changes his identity three times, and Mr. Peters, a unrelenting but highly unusual police detective. She also incorporated crime into some of her better-known work: Richard Audley functions as a detective in her well-remembered Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Eleanor’s Victory (1863) also includes a proto-detective. Although Braddon would never identify herself as a “crime writer,” her fiction did much to advance the genre.
Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood (1814–1887) began publishing her novel East Lynne in the same year as Braddon’s Trail of the Serpent. Wood’s story included crime elements, though no detective, but in 1862, her novel Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles featured police detective Sergeant Delves. In addition to dozens of novels, Wood penned six volumes of stories about Johnny Ludlow, a young man who lives in a rural community. All of the stories appeared in the Argosy magazine, which Wood owned and edited. Many of the stories feature crimes of all types, and Johnny is an unusually observant lad, though certainly not a detective. The first Ludlow story was published in 1868, and over the next 23 years, 89 more tales appeared. The first series was collected in 1874, and the stories were not identified as written by Wood, perhaps because she wanted to conceal that virtually the entire contents of some Argosy issues were from her pen. The secret was concealed until the second series appeared in collected form in 1880. Very popular at their inception, as the mystery genre developed in England, by 1885, when the third collection of Ludlow tales was published, their style was being left behind. “[T]hese chronicles of petty crime and misadventure at the best but painted photographs which do not deserve the name of works of art,” wrote the Saturday Review. Nonetheless, the stories were an important transition to the stylized detection of the era of Sherlock Holmes.
An American writer not normally associated with crime writing is Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888). However, between 1863 and 1869, primarily under the name A. M. Barnard, she wrote a number of lesser-known shorter works—she referred to them as her “blood-and-thunder” stories—with themes including drug use, ghosts, violence, revenge, murder, insanity, and mental abberations. Though little remembered, her best-known are “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” (1863), “The Abbot’s Ghost” (1866), “Behind a Mask” (1866), “Long Fatal Love Chase” (1866), and “The Mysterious Key” (1867). With the success of Little Women in 1868, however, she abandoned the genre.
In 1866–1867, the first crime novel written by a woman in America was published, The Dead Letter: An American Romance.§ Its author was the remarkable Metta Victoria Fuller Victor (1831–1885), writing under the name of “Seely Regester.” Victor had written and would continue to write dozens of other works, including novels, short stories, dime novels, poetry, and housewives’ manuals that included boys’ adventures, westerns, juvenile fiction, and humor. For purposes of this survey, most noteworthy were her two other tales written under “Seely Regester,” a novel titled The Figure Eight; or, The Mystery of Meredith Place (serialized in The Illuminated Western World, 1869) and “The Skeleton at the Banquet.”¶ All of these featured detectives: In The Dead Letter, there is both a police detective, Mr. Burton, and an amateur, Richard Redfield (who is training to be a lawyer). In The Figure Eight and “The Skeleton at the Banquet,” the detectives are amateurs. The Dead Letter was published both as a serial dime novel and in book form, and it was successful enough to be pirated by Cassell’s Magazine and reprinted in England in 1866–1867. Kate Watson concludes that Victor’s work “both contributed to and made possible that of her more famous sister-in-crime, Anna Katharine Green.”#
Mary Fortune, who touchingly styled herself “Waif Wander” on some of her fiction, was the most prolific female crime writer of the nineteenth century. Born in Ireland, she moved to Canada with her father and married Joseph Fortune in 1851. Nothing is known of
his fate, but Mary Fortune migrated with her father to Australia in 1855, where three years later she married a mounted trooper, Percy Rollo Brett. She began to write, and her first stories appeared in 1865 as part of the “Memoirs of an Australian Police Officer” series, thus predating the work of Metta Victor. Michael Sims, in The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur’s Guide to Victorian Detective Stories,** terms Fortune the author of “the first known detective story written by a woman.” In 1868, Fortune initiated the “Detective’s Album” casebook series, eventually including over 500 stories, written between 1868 and 1908. All of her stories were published anonymously or pseudonymously during her lifetime, and it was not until 1987 that a scholar, Lucy Sussex, with the aid of a collector, John Kinmont Moir, identified the body of her work. Fortune, assesses Kate Watson, “was an innovative writer who challenged literary, generic and gender boundaries and conventions. . . . [S]he was genuinely ground-breaking, producing narratives which can with confidence be called crime and detective fiction.”††
With the exception of Edgar Allan Poe, Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935) is the best-known American writer of mystery fiction before Mary Roberts Rinehart, whose 1908 novel The Circular Staircase became the fountainhead of an enormous body of modern American crime writers. Rinehart herself acknowledged Green as her direct ancestor: When it came to selecting a publisher to which to submit The Circular Staircase, Rinehart stated that she merely looked at who had published Green’s latest work. Michael Sims, in The Dead Witness, credits Green as the first woman to write a “full-fledged” detective novel, discounting Metta Fuller Victor’s The Dead Letter as dependent on the psychic visions of the detective’s young daughter—“thus rejecting the underlying rational basis of detection.”‡‡ Green, the daughter of a lawyer, wrote The Leavenworth Case (featuring New York police detective Ebenezer Gryce) after college, though it was not published until 1878. It was an instant bestseller and led to another twenty-eight mystery novels, countless short stories, and books in other genres. Though Gryce was the lead detective in three novels, it was the character of Amelia Butterworth, a nosy society spinster, that was her great innovation—Butterworth was undoubtedly the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Green also can be credited as inspiring the Nancy Drew series of girls’ mysteries: Her young society debutante, Violet Strange, appeared in a series of nine stories (one is included in this volume), solving crimes in order to earn enough money to support a disinherited sister.
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