Serendipity brought the superb Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime [ss] (2009) edited by Michael Sims to my awareness, and highlighted Sims’ erudition and excellent coverage of Victorian crime fiction, an era of the genre which is holding an increasing fascination for me. And so the opportunity to read another Sims-edited collection was to be seized with alacrity.

Of course, the disorganised nature of my reading means it’s taken me a little while to get to The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (2011), but we’re here at last, with 11 stories published between 1864 and 1915 in which the female of the species turns her hand to detection…often, it appears, before said hand is taken in marriage in their final adventure and they retire to more era-approved feminine pursuits.

In his introduction, Sims charts the rise of the female detective in both fact and — far earlier — fiction, suggesting that:

[T]he creation of a female detective instantly provided a number of narrative possibilities that were unavailable to male heroes… Sometimes, to be observant, all a lady detective had to do to was remain silent and be carried along by the authoritarian assumptions of the men in the case, including their belief that she was unlikely to be either intelligent or brave. A female detective would notice different clues and be welcomed behind doors closed to her male counterparts. She could disguise herself and become even less noticeable than the postman in G. K. Chesterton’s famous Father Brown story “The Invisible Man.”

…and the possibility to see detection from another angle, as well as plot some further points on the graph of my own interest in the nascent stages of detective fiction, was one not to be passed up. And so, in we go…

While my interest in the stories which gave birth to the Golden Age stories I adore so much remains keen, experiences like ‘The Mysterious Countess’ (1864) by W.S. Hayward convince me that there’s a definite expiration date on my curiosity. The early provenance of this rendered it to my mind somewhat stilted, slow, and uninteresting — no doubt there are the genes of later detective fiction in her, but it’s communicated in an idiom that I found astonishingly hard to get on board with.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a dud, I just think there’s an older style of writing and plotting for which my simple brain cannot generate too much enthusiasm. I’ve similarly struggled with The Dead Letter (1866) by Seeley Regester, so I’m going to suggest that perhaps 1880 is the earliest I should broadly be looking for these pre-GAD crime stories. I’d be happy to be proved wrong in due course, but that seems a good assumption with which to be going forward.

It will, then, come as no surprise that ‘The Unknown Weapon’ (1864) by Andrew Forrester defeated me. Sims’ introduction promised much which I find interesting in the genre, and his betokening it a “forward-looking story” boded well for the thing I’m after in my Victorian crime fiction, but, honestly, I merely found it slow, dense, and circumlocutory. Perhaps I’ll give it another go when I’ve not just fought my way through one slow-moving and slightly tedious story, but for now I’ll take Sims’ word for its finer points and chalk up another mark in favour of my 1880 speculation.

As if reinforcing my belief about dates, the first story in this collection to be published after that imaginary line in the sand, ‘Drawn Daggers’ (1893) by C.L. Pirkis, not only has a pun for a title but proves rather more rapid and entertaining. The upright Mr. Hawke has received by post missives bearing a drawing of first one and then two daggers, and fears that some secret society has designs on his life. Enter, then, the capable and perceptive Miss Loveday Brooke, having first found her way into detection by necessity of penury.

One hour in Mr. Hawke’s house is enough for Miss Brooke to connect the various happenings, including the arrival of the daughter of a family friend some weeks before, into a clear pattern that accounts for small events that would likely only occur to the feminine mind. And, while there’s an element of convenient speculation about some of her conclusions, there’s also little doubt that the author has played as fair asd the genre conventions of the time would allow. This isn’t a particularly notable story, but it shows proper detection done well (alas, mostly off the page) and contains a hint of the attitudes of the time (“I do not mean to imply that I am not master in my own house.”) that fits well with the spirit of emancipation evident in both this story and the collection as a whole.

I had some loose awareness of ‘The Long Arm’ (1895) by Mary E. Wilkins, but certainly had not read it before. When Sarah Fairbanks’ tartar of a father is found stabbed to death in borderline-impossible circumstance — all doors to the house bolted, windows not opening wide enough to admit or eject any malefactor, which is good enough for it to feature in Skupin — suspicion inevitably falls on her as the only other person in the house…though, as befits the democratic nature of Golden Age finger-pointing, a few other people also feel the lantern of surmise shine upon them.

Wilkins has a good eye for the difference between suspicion and proof, however, (“[I]f people were condemned for their motives, would there be enough hangmen in the world?”), and Fairbanks’ borderline forensic examination of the house following the murder feels like the starts of something new. Unfortunately, we see that puzzle plotting has yet to find a foothold, with a variety of odd or striking effects explained away by the sort of behaviour that no real person would ever display, and it dampens the overall impact. A promising start, a less-than-rewarding end. The title is faintly comical, too, once you understand it, and I don’t think that’s deliberate.

The first chapter of That Affair Next Door (1897) by Anna Katharine Green follows, and is perhaps notable for the awareness its female narrator has of her position as a second class citizen on account of her gender. One gets the impression that Amelia Butterworth might be rather fine company, not least because of how she is so casually dismissive of the policeman with whom she discovers a dead body in her next door neighbours’ house (“[I]t would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own.”), but this excerpt is too short to make much impact on its own terms.

What to make of ‘The Man with the Wild Eyes’ (1897) by George R. Sims? It feels classically familiar with its dim Colonel Hargreaves who thinks his daughter got a bruised neck and wrists from fainting at the edge of lake, its semi-Sherlockian notion of ‘the dog that barked a bit in the night-time’, and our sleuth Dorcas Dene’s canny examination of footprints and other convenient evidence. I also enjoyed the Watson analog, Mr. Saxon, playing rather more a part in the gathering of evidence — and even challenging some of Mrs. Dene’s reasoning as “only surmise”.

A man cannot be a murderer if he hasn’t murdered anyone, though, but this flaw can be countered by the interesting notion that the story appears to be set 13 years ahead of the time it was written, since it refers to a marriage that took place four years ago in 1906…misprint, or fourth dimension-busting authorial fillip? The narrative reliance on madness marks this out as something struggling to shake off the cobwebs of Victorian preoccupations, but it’s notable for trying to extend the form even if the shadow of Baker Street looms large.

Histrocially interesting note: The possibility of Dene being “a female member of the Criminal Investigation Department” would imply that such people existed at this time. That feels early, no?

The second story by Grant Allen that Sims has brought to my attention, ‘The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady’ (1898) is another lively and well-written adventure. Finding herself — surprise! — destitute, 21 year-old Lois Cayley is reluctant to fall into the profession that others feel is suitable for her (“teaching, like mauve, is the refuge of the incompetent.”) and so seeks adventure on her own terms, here besting a conman whose patina of charm does little to convince our perceptive heroine.

Hired by the eponymous Lady Georgina Fawley as a temporary lady’s maid for the first leg of foreign travel, Miss Cayley is drawn into an adventure which — as Sims acknowledges — while hardly challenging the mental faculties is at least entertainingly told (Lady Fawley is a caustic and lively critic of both those in her presence and those in her social circle) and sparkles with plenty of wry, compact language. Allen once again compels himself as an author to explore; it’s to be hoped someone somewhere has done his abilities due credit with something more than a copyright-free ebook full of typos.

‘How He Cut His Stick’ (1900) by M. McDonnell Bodkin is fascinating for how much it seems to exist on the boundaries of formal detective fiction. It’s almost an impossible crime (how someone can disappear from a locked railway carriage travelling at full speed — also in Skupin), almost a puzzle plot (the disparate elements are tied in to a cohesive whole via clever reasoning), and could be put together by logical reasoning of a sort if it didn’t rely on a detective who sees the (clever) answer right away.

It would be presumptuous of me, having read so very little pre-GAD material, to say that this is the moment that the Victorian sensation story first slid its toe over the line into formal detection, but there’s an undeniable sense of evolution about this. Dora Myrl’s forthright, convention-shattering behaviour continues the trend of precocious young women putting their male counterparts to shame…yet the ingenuity of her insight elevates her in my mind, so she feels more than just a proto-Holmes-in-skirts.

It feels fitting that Sims tell us Richard March would “dictate his works to a secretary” a la Erle Stanley Gardner, because ‘The Man Who Cut Off My Hair’ (1912) feels like a prototype for a 1920s pulp called ‘Judith Lee, Lip-Reading Detective’. It’s novel that the protagonist is only about 12 years old, but when the detection is solely based on criminals saying everything with perfect diction — discernible even when young Judith is running towards them from some distance away — it’s difficult to get too excited about the analytical prowess on display.

While a trifle over-written and — Sims is right — containing far too many exclamation marks, ‘The Man with Nine Lives’ (1914) by Hugh C. Weir presents much of interest to the student of detection, not least an engaging female sleuth in Madelyn Mack who is, alas, perhaps just a little too much in the shadow of Holmes to distinguish herself. And the borderline-impossible murder of a wealthy man in his locked library (listed in Adey) presents some intriguing points — many of which are now tropes, but which would at the time probably sparkled rather more like innovations.

It’s a shame that more of these stories about enterprising women weren’t written by women, really, because at times the very masculine attitude that can’t help but dismiss their female counterparts as overly-emotional peeks out and sort of taints the progressive narratives. Case in point, when Nora Noraker, our Watson, tells her detective friend, who has come up against a blank wall in her reasoning, “You are a woman even if you are making your living in a man’s profession! What you need is a good cry!”. Still, this is a good example of the sort of boundary fiction that piqued my interest in the first place; and, if you take a drink every time the red handkerchief is mentioned, you’ll finish it even more positively inclined…assuming you can still see straight.

Finally, ‘The Second Bullet’ (1915) by Anna Katharine Green, in which youthful socialite Violet Strange is asked to investigate the shooting of a man that has been ruled suicide — two bullets would appear to have been fired at the scene, since one shattered a mirror and the second is found in the victim, but even the most careful search can’t turn up the first. The setup feels progressive, moving on from the detective’s need for an amazed onlooker (“I could not do the work I do if I felt it necessary to have a confidant.”), and so stepping more fully beyond the reach of the lingering Victorian tendrils seen elsewhere.

There are inconsistencies here — the inconclusive crime scene surely wouldn’t simply result in a lazy verdict of suicide, and surely (rot13 for minor spoilers) gur qrnq zna jnf snpvat gur jebat qverpgvba — but the solution is ingenious and undeniably tragic. It takes a special mind to come up with something that clever, unlikely as all hell as it may be, and Green is to be commended for the sharpness of her acumen. This is decidedly more a story of character than it is of detection, but it’s a good one, and bodes very well indeed for the genre going forward.

I’ll typically indicate a ‘top five’ for longer collections of short stories, and here that would probably be:

1. ‘How He Cut His Stick’ (1900) by M. McDonnell Bodkin
2. ‘The Second Bullet’ (1915) by Anna Katharine Green
3. ‘The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady’ (1898) by Grant Allen
4. ‘The Man with Nine Lives’ (1914) by Hugh C. Weir
5. ‘The Man with the Wild Eyes’ (1897) by George R. Sims

Sims has done well here to collect stories which both fulfil the brief of the project and give a sense of the progression from mere crime to actual detection — that relying both on likely physical clues and strong psychological insight. The creators here use their female protagonists well, making a point of the femininity and perspective rather than simply imagining that they should superintent for a male detective in all but chromosomes. Nevertheless, the spirit of Sherlock Holmes looms large, with only a few of these tales moving away from the secretive dynamo who astounds all around her, so perhaps we should be mindful of declaring the female-led crime story to be too great an evolutionary leap.

It must be said that overall I enjoyed Sims’ earlier collection more, but the education he continues to provide is greatly appreciated and I remain delighted to have made his (textual) acquaintance. His next anthology of criminous Victorian endeavours, The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries [ss] (2023), already occupies a space on my shelves, and shall follow in due course.