Josephine
Bell, the pen name of Doris Collier Ball, was born in Manchester in
1897, educated at Cambridge, and became a University College Hospital of
London physician. She married a fellow physician who died at a young
age in 1936, which is when Bell turned her hand to writing, even as she
maintained her medical practice.
She was a co-founder of the
Crime Writers' Association, serving as its chair in 1959, and also
became a member of the Detection Club. She eventually closed her medical
practice at age 57 but continued to write full time until she was 85,
creating numerous sleuths in her more than 40 crime novels (at the rate
of two a year), such as AmyTupper, Dr. David Wintingham, Dr. Henry
Frost, and Scotland Yard Inspector Steven Mitchell.
Not
surprisingly, her novels often feature a strong medical component, not
the least of which were two of her doctor-protagonists. She also
featured poison and other unusual methods of murder prominently in her
plots. Bell and her family were experienced sailors, and the author drew
upon this knowledge, too, using many vivid passages in her books that
relate to the water and to various nautical details.
Water is certainly at the heart of the setting in Bell's novel The Port of London Murders
from 1938, specifically as the title suggests, the port area of
London's River Thames. It's a tough neighborhood, but the death of one
Mary Holland is still a bit of a shock, even though it appears at first
to be a suicide by Lysol poisoning. Tell-tale needle marks on the
victim's arm lead Detective Sergeant Chandler to suspect murder tied
into a drug ring—which
seems even more chillingly apparent when Chandler disappears shortly
after he starts to investigate, right before he's due to testify at the
inquest. It's up to Inspector Mitchell of Scotland Yard to unravel the
layers of deception and addiction that are exploiting rich and poor
alike in a way that hasn't changed much in the seventy years since the
book was written.
Bell is particularly good with settings, even
the squalid ones that pop up in the novel, no doubt witnessed first-hand
in her role as a physician who saw people from every walk of life. Her
take on the state of medicine in her day was often somewhat bleak, as in
this passage from the book—again, as true today as it was in 1938:
For the great majority of these cases, too poor to have a doctor of their own, there was little he could do...Dr. Freeman could encourage them with a bottle of medicine and help them with a pint of milk a day, but it was not in his power nor that of anyone else to effect a lasting cure of their complaints. There were others, too, not old, but equally hopeless, who attended the dispensary as regular visitors; those struck down in youth or middle age by tuberculosis, rheumatism, heart trouble, and a number of more rare diseases. They had come to the end of their resources, their insurances, and their capacity for earning. The hospitals could do nothing more for them, but they still lived, in the worse possible surroundings, and the Public Assistance saw to it that they did not die too soon.
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