Friday's "Forgotten" Books: The Albert Gate Mystery

Louis Tracy (1863-1928) was born in Liverpool to an upper middle class family and educated at the French Seminary at Douai. Although he led a relative life of leisure, he also joined the 1st Volunteer Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment and earned a full certificate for a captaincy by the age of 18, an unusual feat for the time. He turned his hand to journalism in 1884, writing for several newspapers and even worked his way up to part-ownership of the The Evening News before selling his share. He is said to have used some of the proceeds to run 23 soup kitchens during the depression-style winter of 1894, using some of those glimpses of poverty first-hand in his later novels.

His first published work of fiction was a patriotic, somewhat propagandistic war-themed title, The Final War, which appeared as a serial from 1895 to August 1896 in Pearson's Weekly. After a visit to America for research, Tracy was due to write another serial for Pearson's, but fell ill. The publication drafted M. P. Shiel to help finish the work, which began a decades-long occasional, and sometimes prickly, collaboration between the two men. Tracy went on to publish prolifically, with some 80 or more books and numerous short stories, essays and articles, under his own name and the pseudonyms Gordon Holmes and Robert Fraser.

Tracy's fiction often featured American characters, a ploy to make it easier to sell his books on both sides of the Atlantic. This led to some head-scratching plotting such as setting The House of Peril in New York, even though it included a number of Tracy's familiar English detectives. In the revised English edition of 1924, (retitled The Park Lane Mystery), he reset the story in London. Tracy's strange love-hate relationship with his own country also led to pronouncements such as his comment to the Sunday Times that "American readers are better educated than the English," leading the reporter to sniff, "at least he writes novels about this country without the usual blunders of foreign writers."

The Albert Gate Mystery from 1904, is actually set in London and features one of Tracy's regular protagonists, amateur detective Barrister Reginald Brett. The plot hinges around priceless imperial diamonds sent by the Sultan of Turkey to London, to be cut in the heavily-guarded Albert Gate mansion by experts under the protection of the British government. However, four Turkish officials are found dead in the house, and the diamonds disappear. The leading culprit is Jack Talbot, a young secretary at the Foreign Office who was overseeing the endeavor and also disappeared without a trace the evening of the murders.

Brett reads about the events in the morning newspaper, detailing the high-ranking Turkish gentry, servants, guards, and fourteen expert Dutch diamond-cutters who have been detained at Scotland Yard, and how "the greatest living authority on toxicology" was among several medical personnel consulted. Brett's interest is piqued, but he doesn't get pulled into the mystery until the arrival of Lord Fairholme. It seems Fairholme's fiancee, Edith Talbot, refuses to marry him until her brother—who also happens to be the suspect Jack Talbot—is found and proved innocent.

Brett's investigation has him chasing diamond thieves through England, France and Sicily with the somewhat-antagonistic help of Scotland Yard detective Winter, as well as royal messenger Captain Gaultier, Lord Fairholme and Edith. Along the way, the sleuth (who is described as brash, fearless, handsome, brilliant, a human dynamo and both "the smartest criminal lawyer in London" and "the cleverest analytical detective of the age") dons disguises and wades through political intrigue, treason among thieves, and a spirited horse-carriage chase scene, before the denouement.

The character of Brett was compared to Sherlock Holmes during Tracy's day, although one reviewer said that "Mr. Reginal Brett is perhaps a trifle too Sherlockian in his rapid conclusions, although unlike the incomparable Holmes, he does not always permit his admiring audience to follow step by step in his course of reasoning." Brett has also been called a precursor of Lord Peter Wimsey, but as entertaining as he is at times, the writing and character aren't quite in the same league as Holmes and Wimsey.

There are some laugh-out-loud dated bits, too, such as "Brett expected to see a young, pretty and clever girl, vain enough to believe she had brains" (although the woman in question, Edith, turns out to be a fierce heroine in her own right). There are also some homages to other detective icons in the book, such as the small bust of Edgar Allan Poe in Brett's home and how he has adopted the French method of "reconstituting" the incidents, no doubt a nod to Vidocq, the founder and first director of the crime-detection Sûreté Nationale as well as the head of the first known private detective agency.