Between 1891 and the outbreak of the First World War, dozens and dozens of crime-fighting characters made their bow in the periodical press. Each writer strove to make his detective stand out from the crowd. Provide your creation with some kind of USP and you might, at least in your dreams, attain the kind of success Conan Doyle had done. So a blind detective (Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados), a detective who was a Canadian woodsman (Hesketh Prichard’s November Joe), a Hindu from a remote Indian village (Headon Hill’s Kala Persad), and many more with a bewildering variety of talents, characteristics and geographical origins were sent out into the world to attract potential readers.
Among all the competing sleuths, a significant number were women. These female detectives were almost as diverse as their male counterparts. Some had special talents which helped them in their work. Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee, who appeared in a series of stories published in The Strand Magazine in 1911, was a lip-reader who was forever spotting crooks discussing their nefarious plans. Diana Marburg, the so-called ‘Oracle of Maddox Street’, who was created by the writing partnership of LT Meade and Robert Eustace, was a palm-reader, although she solved her cases more through the application of observation and common sense than through her skill at interpreting lines on the hand. Several of the women detectives, most notably George R Sims’s Dorcas Dene, had been actresses and their stage experience came in handy when they were donning disguises to pursue villains.
Many of the female detectives from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods were women obliged, for a variety of reasons, to make their own way in the world without the support of husband or family. They were resourceful and swift to adapt themselves to new circumstances. Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke had been ‘thrown upon the world penniless and almost friendless’ by ‘a jerk of Fortune’s wheel’ but she becomes the leading light in Ebenezer Dyer’s detective agency. ‘She has so much common sense that it amounts to genius,’ her boss remarks. Mollie Delamere, the heroine of Beatrice Heron-Maxwell’s 1899 book, The Adventures of a Lady Pearl-Broker, is a young widow who has no assured income. ‘People seem to think it a disgrace that one’s husband should not leave one enough to live on,’ she wryly comments. She takes a job as an agent for pearl merchant Mr Leighton. This exposes her to many dangers and adventures, all of which she takes in her stride.
The 1890s and 1900s were an era in which feminism was on the rise. Educational opportunities were increasing. More and more women were demanding access to professions like medicine and journalism. They wanted to challenge men in what had previously been exclusively masculine domains. It is no surprise that the crime fiction of the time provided plenty of examples of what was called ‘The New Woman’ in action. Grant Allen’s Lois Cayley is a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge. In the course of her globe-trotting adventures, she wins a bicycle race, exposes the charlatanry of a quack doctor, rescues a kidnapped woman and kills a tiger. By doing so she amply proves herself to be a match in spirit and intelligence for any man. The eponymous protagonist of M McDonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl: The Lady Detective is a brilliant mathematician with a medical degree. Unable to get a practice, she has tried various jobs (including journalism) before she falls into detective work. There her gifts and personality finally come into their own. Bodkin was a prolific writer whose earlier creations had included a male detective named Paul Beck. In a later book, Beck and Dora work together and eventually marry.
Like Dora Myrl, many of the female detectives from the decades before the First World War were created by men. This was largely a simple reflection of the fact that the majority of the stories of all kinds in the periodical press were written by men. However, there were plenty of women writers publishing stories in magazines like The Strand, Pearson’s Magazine, The Idler and the dozens of competing titles which could be found in newsagents and on railway bookstalls. Possibly the best example of such a woman is LT Meade who, with her regular collaborator Robert Eustace, makes two appearances in this anthology. Miss Florence Cusack and Diana Marburg, the ‘Oracle of Maddox Street’, are among many series characters that the immensely productive Meade created, both with and without the assistance of other writers.
In America, women writers such as Anna Katharine Green produced early examples of detective fiction but women detectives were few and far between before 1900. Those that did appear were mostly published in so-called ‘dime novels’, the transatlantic equivalents of the ‘yellowbacks’ and cheap railway formats which, in Britain, had provided a home for Miss Gladden and Mrs Paschal. Characters such as the heroine of Madeline Payne, the Detective’s Daughter, published in 1884, Mignon Lawrence, a feisty New Yorker sent west in pursuit of a bad guy, and Caroline ‘Cad’ Metti, a beautiful Italian-American who took centre stage in several stories in the 1890s, were the chief protagonists of entertaining potboilers with little pretension to literary merit.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century the woman detective migrated from the pages of the dime novel to more respectable literature. Anna Katharine Green was the author of The Leavenworth Case, an 1878 novel which introduced the detective Ebenezer Gryce to American readers. Twenty years later, Green created Amelia Butterworth, a high-society spinster with a taste for poking her nose into other people’s misfortunes, who joined forces with Gryce to solve crimes in three novels, beginning with That Affair Next Door (1897). In 1915, nearly forty years after her first detective novel, Green published a series
