The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime
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The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime
Sims, Michael
Penguin (2011)
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SUMMARY:
A wonderfully wicked new anthology from the editor of The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime It is the Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides those new- fangled bicycles and doesn't like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, such female detectives as Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene, and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve a murder. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Michael Sims has brought together all of the era's great crime-fighting females- plus a few choice crooks, including Four Square Jane and the Sorceress of the Strand.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
THE MYSTERIOUS COUNTESS
THE UNKNOWN WEAPON
DRAWN DAGGERS
THE LONG ARM
THAT AFFAIR NEXT DOOR
THE MAN WITH THE WILD EYES
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CANTANKEROUS OLD LADY
HOW HE CUT HIS STICK
THE MAN WHO CUT OFF MY HAIR
THE MAN WITH NINE LIVES
THE SECOND BULLET
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF VICTORIAN WOMEN IN CRIME
MICHAEL SIMS is the author of several nonfiction books, including Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination, Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form, and most recently In the Womb: Animals, a companion book to a National Geographic Channel TV series. For Penguin Classics he has edited The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel; Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief; and The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime; and he introduced The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Green. He is also the editor of Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Orion, the Times of London, New Statesman, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Learn more at www.michaelsimsbooks.com.
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First published in Penguin Books 2011
Selection, introduction and notes copyright © Michael Sims, 2011
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
The Penguin book of Victorian women in crime : forgotten cops and private eyes from the time of Sherlock
Holmes / edited with an introduction by Michael Sims.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
eISBN : 978-1-101-48617-7
1. Women detectives—England—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—England—Fiction.
3. Detective and mystery stories, English. 4. English fiction—19th century. I. Sims, Michael.
PR1309.D4P45 2011
823’.0872083522—dc22 2010040866
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Acknowledgments
Once again I thank the admirable team at Penguin Classics, who have been a dream to work with, and who even sent care packages of books and cookies while I recovered from a car wreck. My thanks to editorial director Elda Rotor, who is helpful and patient and who wears great colors; her intrepid and eagle-eyed assistant, Lorie Napolitano; publicity director Maureen Donnelly; publicists Meghan Fallon and Courtney Allison; Bennett Petrone, associate director of publicity; cover designer Jaya Miceli; and production editor Jennifer Tait.
I welcome this opportunity to thank Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, assistant professor of English at the University of California at Davis, for her generosity in providing copies of her insightful articles and for her critique of my introduction to this volume as well as my introduction to Penguin’s edition of Anna Katharine Green’s novel The Leavenworth Case (and thanks for tea at MLA). Thank you also to Arlene Young, assistant professor of English at the University of Manitoba, for her critiques and advice and her generosity in sending her own article. Several people generously provided sources, suggested authors or books, discussed issues, or otherwise assisted: Jon Erickson, Michele Flynn, Collier Goodlett, Michele B. Slung, John Spurlock, Art Taylor, and Mark Wait. Once again Karissa Kilgore proved invaluable. Perpetual gratitude goes to the staff of the Greensburg Hempfield Area Library, especially Cindy Dull and Linda Matey, those book detectives extraordinaire, and library director (and good friend) Cesare Muccari. And always, my thanks to Laura Sloan Patterson, my wife and in-house literary scholar and the most entertaining traveling companion I could imagine. She would have made a great detective but I’m glad she chose teaching instead.
Introduction
Intimate Watching
The reader will comprehend that the woman detective has far greater opportunities than a man of intimate watching, and of keeping her eye upon matters near where a man could not conveniently play the eavesdropper.
—MRS. G., IN The Female Detective (1864)
One aspect of the Victorian era that captivated and energized many of its fiction writers was the chaotic bustle of the London streets. Crowds featured not only ladies crowned in velveteen and feathers, strolling arm in arm with waistcoated men in sugarloaf top hats, but also their social inferiors. The jostling hoards included bootblacks and chimney sweeps, urchins selling crude little boxes of lucifer matches, knife grinders at their humming whet-stone wheels and strops. Street entrepreneurs hawked everything from ballads to puppies to those quintessential items of English-ness even today: umbrellas. Buskers sang or played the fiddle before their upended cap; vendors sold lemonade, pastries, and milk so fresh it might still be warm. Carriages and bicycles threaded among pedestrians as nearby trains belched smoke.
Not surprisingly, such crowds drew all species of cutpurse and brigand. Every kind of crime, from a team of pickpockets’ choreographed three-way lift to a brutish smash-and-grab, could be found on the streets. Private homes, from mansion to tenement, were less secure then than now, and nighttime alleys were not for the faint of heart. Burglary, armed robbery, assault, murder, in
fanticide, spousal abuse, racially motivated hate crimes—the whole menu of depravity could be found. It was a time much like our own.
From the earliest stories in the genre, urban bustle has been the backdrop of most detective fiction, as many stories in this anthology demonstrate. Although some of the stories occur in the United States, most take place in England, which is why I use the term Victorian in the anthology’s title. The chronological progression of stories extends into World War I. This range gives us an opportunity to see how times were changing in the generation following Queen Victoria’s death. During her reign, which comprised two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the detective story was born and bolted through its rowdy youth into maturity—or at least into young adulthood. Nowadays we think of its celebrity sleuths as strolling down crowded streets in London or New York or Paris, and it’s true that from its inception the detective story was largely an urban art. Although each detective ventures out to the country as well, Loveday Brooke and Dorcas Dene and their colleagues, like Sherlock Holmes and Martin Hewitt—and like Philip Marlowe and Cordelia Grey after them—are headquartered in, and operate largely within, cities.
Now we can revise our opening crowd scene, with its thieves plucking the innocent, and restore a comforting sense of order by placing detectives on the trail of the miscreants. But wait—the setting is real but the sleuths are fictional. I raise this seemingly obvious point for a reason. Most of us, even fans of Victorian detective fiction, know little about the actual investigative work of the era. Before we bring out the brave and resourceful women who are waiting backstage, let’s glance briefly at their real-life contemporaries to see how much (or how little) the fiction in these pages resembled reality. Many of the female detectives in this anthology have a curious trait in common: they are employed by, or at least consulted by, the official police. Only with a look at their historical context can I demonstrate the revolutionary nature of the early debut of fictional female detectives. I first yearned to edit this anthology after I discovered how early in the genre female detectives emerged.
When we go back to the genesis of modern police work, we find ourselves—appropriately for a genre that has always intertwined fact and fiction—in the presence of an author. In 1749, the year he published his picaresque novel Tom Jones, the English novelist Henry Fielding launched an organization that came to be called the Bow Street Runners. Working out of Fielding’s Bow Street office in London, where he served as chief magistrate, the Runners traveled far and wide to arrest offenders and serve subpoenas and other writs. Originally there were only eight Runners. Although in some respects they were more like private detectives than our contemporary notion of cops, many historians consider them the first modern police force. They were paid out of allocated government funds, a kind of payment that separates them from their juridical ancestors. Before the Runners, many crime victims had recourse only to thief-takers. These shady characters weren’t precisely bounty hunters, most of whom were paid by bail bonds-men; thief-takers were usually in the employ of those few victims who could afford them. Naturally such an arrangement lent itself to chicanery. Some thief-takers acted as go-betweens, returning goods that their partners had stolen.
What was needed was an official police department, despite such an institution’s own fertile ground for corruption. In 1829, eight years before the reign of Victoria began, Parliament passed the Metropolitan Police Act, which replaced the antique plexus of watchmen and parish constables with a reasonably organized force. Soon London saw a bold new figure striding down the street. These constables were a tough-looking lot—tall, sturdy, dressed in blue top hat and tailcoat to make them look as different as possible from the red-coated and metal-helmeted soldiers who had often served as military police on the streets. They were armed with only a wooden truncheon and a pair of handcuffs. At first they carried a wooden rattle to summon other officers, but it turned out to be too cumbersome and not loud enough; a whistle replaced it. Because the police force was launched by popular home secretary Robert Peel, they were nicknamed peelers in Ireland and bobbies in England. Peel had earned his reputation while launching the Royal Irish Constabulary during his tenure as chief secretary for Ireland, in which his job was to maintain “order”—as defined, we must remember, by the English occupying force.
Within a decade of the bobbies’ founding, the Bow Street Runners were gone. But bobbies were there to prevent crimes or to respond to them immediately, not to solve them. They were not detectives. Not until 1842 was there a detective bureau—the ancestor of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) that still exists in England—to decipher clues and investigate the crimes discovered or interrupted by uniformed officers.
Missing from the new detective bureau, of course, were women. It would take four more decades, until 1883, before women were employed in even the most menial of police jobs—the searching of female prisoners upon their arrest. In 1905 a woman was hired in a position that seems to have merged truant officer, prison warder, and counselor. Not until 1918 did the London police hire the first women as officers. As late as 1924, the Joint Central Committee of the Police Federation of England and Wales issued a public statement in opposition to this idea: “[T]he very nature of the duties of a police constable is contrary to that which is finest and best in women ... it is purely a man’s job alone.” Women’s law enforcement work, in the eyes of the police administration, included such domestic tragedies as spousal abuse and child prostitution, but larceny and homicide remained for many more years the purview of men only.
The kinds of glamorous jewel theft and high-society murder that appear in these pages have always existed mostly in fiction, and in made-up worlds other strange things could happen. “The representation of a woman engaging in detection during the nineteenth century,” writes Joseph A. Kestner, “constituted a profound fantasy of female empowerment.” It was a fantasy because fiction was decades ahead of reality. The first stories about female detectives appeared in the early 1860s. I’m imprecise about the year because critics aren’t sure. They argue over whether W. S. Hayward anonymously published Revelations of a Lady Detective in 1864 or if the 1864 edition was a reprint of an 1861 edition barely mentioned but otherwise unknown. From this collection, whatever its birth date, comes a fine story, “The Mysterious Countess,” which you will find herein. And it was definitely 1864 when Andrew Forrester published The Female Detective, from which I have chosen the longest story in the anthology: an extraordinary novella entitled “The Unknown Weapon.” These two stories present the first female professional investigators diligently pursuing their careers. There are moments in literature so far ahead of their time they seem almost science-fictional. Not even Captain Nemo’s electrical submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was more futuristic than the representation of “lady” detectives that you will encounter in the pages ahead.
Why did female characters show up in crime fiction several decades ahead of their appearance in the real world? Probably every author had a different reason for deciding to write about a female protagonist. “That so many male writers ... created women sleuths may say something about their feminist sympathies,” writes Laura Marcus, “but it also suggests that female characters allowed for quite specific kinds of detective work and detective narrative.” Whatever the progressive sensibilities of the author, the creation of a female detective instantly provided a number of narrative possibilities that were unavailable to male heroes—as my title for this introduction implies. 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.” Many of the heroines in this anthology employ disg
uises, but Loveday Brooke is particularly good at turning herself into an unseen housemaid or overlooked governess, placing herself in a position that permits intimate watching.
As you will observe in these stories, one of the most important questions to be settled by each author is how the character came to find herself working in such an unladylike profession. Dorcas Dene begins as an actress and moves into investigation only after her artist husband loses his sight and thus his ability to support her; young socialite Violet Strange needs money to secretly assist a disowned sister; Mrs. Paschal’s husband dies and leaves her penniless. Therefore outraged readers could see these women’s transgressions beyond Victorian norms as nobly heroic efforts to preserve the sacred family.
The phrase “Victorian detective story” sparks a particular image in my mind. It’s the old Sherlock Holmes vignette—nighttime in London, fog rolling in off the Thames, the wheels of a hansom cab clattering across the cobblestones. I don’t find it any less evocative for its being a cliché. I enjoy the era’s texture and, in the better works, its precise and vivid language. Surely we return to a favorite genre in quest of a predictable experience. That’s why most genres are described by the primary emotion sought by the reader who picks them up for diversion: horror, thrills, humor, adventure, love, mystery.
But when we say “detective story” instead of “mystery,” we reveal a distinct aspect of this genre—its emphasis not on a particular emotion, because detective stories may be suspenseful or humorous or adventurous, but on a particular kind of character. Like many other readers, I revel in the investigative routine that reveals glimpses of many lives, in the puzzle that motivates the action, in the deciphering of clues and pursuit of the malefactor. (Based upon an extremely unscientific poll of friends of mine, I suggest that a Venn diagram of Mystery Readers would reveal blank areas in which the readership of detective stories doesn’t overlap with the readership of thrillers that focus on the abominable behavior of the miscreants instead of on the detective’s efforts to find or stop them.) Most detective stories are part of a series, as well, so we have the pleasure of returning to the company of an already familiar character, usually someone intelligent and courageous, even heroic. No wonder psychologists describe detective stories, especially the early ones, as cathartic and often conservative—portraying an initial threat to the social order combated and vanquished by the investigator.