FFB: Twelve Women Detective Stories

Oxford University Press put out a series of "twelve" anthologies in the 1990s, including Twelve American Detective Stories (1997), Twelve English Detective Stories (1998), and Twelve American Crime Stories (1998). The only one devoted to female protagonists is Twelve Women Detective Stories, also published in 1988, and edited by Laura Marcus (of Birkbeck College, London), with assistance from Chris Willis. Interestingly, over half of the writers were male and date from the late 19th to early 20th centuries when women detectives came into fashion. The heroines in these stories range from a housekeeper to a secretary, and a pawn-broker in a seedy area of Victorian London to Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk of Scotland Yard.

Arranged in roughly chronological order, the stories included are

• W. S. Hayward's "The Mysterious Countess" (1864)
• Catherine Louisa Pirkis's "Drawn Daggers" (1893)
• Fergus Hume's "The First Customer and The Florentine Dante" (1897)
• Grant Allen's "The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady" (1898)
• L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace's "Mr. Bovey's Unexpected Will" (1899)
• Baroness Orczy's "The Man in the Inverness Cape" (1910)
• Hugh C. Weir's "The Man with Nine Lives" (1914)
• Anna Katherine Greene's "An Intangible Clue" (1915)
• Arthur B. Reeve's "The Clairvoyants" (1916)
• F. Tennyson Jesse's "Lot's Wife" (1931)
• Gladys Mitchell's "A Light on Murder" (1950)
• Henry Cecil's "On Principle" (1948)

Many of these authors are unfamiliar to the average reader (and a few even to me), so this volume serves also as an introduction to their writing. As with all anthologies, the quality of the stories varies quite a bit, with the better stories toward the latter part of the book, including Baroness Orczy's "The Man in the Inverness Cape" (with Lady Molly of the Yard); F. Tennyson Jesse's "Lot's Wife," where her Frenchwoman detective Solange (who has psychic powers that enables her to sense evil) becomes entranced with another woman's beauty; Hugh C. Weir's "The Man with Nine Lives" about a poor devil who has survived eight attempts on his life until famous detective Madelyn Mack discovers there's more to his story than meets the eye; and Henry Cecil’s amusingly cynical "On Principle."

Other female-themed anthologies have superceded this one in quality and scope. But this is still an entertaining read and a good, if limited, overview to the types and styles of female protagonists penned before and during the two world wars.

Comments

[Jerry House]

Coincidently, my FFB this week is Haywood's REVELATIONS OF A LADY DETECTIVE. Although published anonymously, the general agreement today is that Haywood wrote the book and, of course, Marcus gave him credit when she reprinted the first story "The Mysterious Countess."

[BV Lawson]

Jerry, we must be "in synch" (not the pop group kind). I'll have to seek out "Revelations," as it sounds fascinating. Viva la femme!