Even as she spoke Lady Irene, with a cry of agony, fell senseless in my dear lady’s arms.
The doctor, I may tell you, came too late. The unfortunate woman evidently had a good knowledge of poisons. She had been determined not to fail; in case of discovery, she was ready and able to mete out justice to herself.
I don’t think the public ever knew the real truth about the woman in the big hat. Interest in her went the way of all things. Yet my dear lady had been right from beginning to end. With unerring precision she had placed her dainty finger on the real motive and the real perpetrator of the crime – the ambitious woman who had married solely for money, and meant to have that money even at the cost of one of the most dastardly murders that have ever darkened the criminal annals of this country.
I asked Lady Molly what it was that first made her think of Lady Irene as the possible murderess. No one else for a moment had thought her guilty.
‘The big hat,’ replied my dear lady with a smile. ‘Had the mysterious woman at Mathis’ been tall, the waitresses would not, one and all, have been struck by the abnormal size of the hat. The wearer must have been petite, hence the reason that under a wide brim only the chin would be visible. I at once sought for a small woman. Our fellows did not think of that, because they are men.’
You see how simple it all was!
MADELYN MACK
Created by Hugh Cosgro Weir (1884-1934)
Madelyn Mack is probably the most flamboyant and eccentric of all the female detectives of the period, and the one with the most resemblance to Sherlock Holmes. Like Holmes, she works as a private consulting detective, although her city is New York rather than London. Her creator goes to great lengths to emphasise her genius as a criminologist and she attracts much admiring attention for her startling deductive abilities. Also like Holmes, she has her Watson in the journalist Nora Noraker who narrates the stories. She has her addictions – she carries a locket around her neck which holds cola berries to keep her awake for days at a stretch when she is on a particularly demanding case. And she has her musical tastes – she is a collector of gramophone records, some of which she privately commissions from famous performers. She was the brainchild of an Illinois-born writer, advertising guru and magazine publisher named Hugh Cosgro Weir and first appeared in a volume of short stories entitled Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective, published in 1914. The book was originally dedicated to a woman named Mary Holland, a pioneering fingerprint expert from Chicago whom Weir knew. Holland worked as a detective and Madelyn Mack was probably based, very loosely, on her. At one time Weir wrote screenplays for the burgeoning American movie business and several of the Madelyn Mack stories were made into short films starring Alice Joyce, a popular actress of the silent era. Weir’s interest in the cinema continued and, at the time of his death, aged only 50, he was the editor of The New Movie Magazine.
THE MAN WITH NINE LIVES
1
Now that I seek a point of beginning in the curious comradeship between Madelyn Mack and myself, the weird problems of men’s knavery that we have confronted together come back to me with almost a shock.
Perhaps the events which crowd into my memory followed each other too swiftly for thoughtful digest at the time of their occurrence. Perhaps only a sober retrospect can supply a properly appreciative angle of view.
Madelyn Mack! What newspaper reader does not know the name? Who, even among the most casual followers of public events, does not recall the young woman who found the missing heiress, Virginia Denton, after a three months’ disappearance; who convicted ‘Archie’ Irwin, chief of the ‘fire bug trust’; who located the absconder, Wolcott, after a pursuit from Chicago to Khartoum; who solved the riddle of the double Peterson murder; who – but why continue the enumeration of Miss Mack’s achievements? They are of almost household knowledge, at least that portion which, from one cause or another, has found their way into the newspaper columns. Doubtless those admirers of Miss Mack, whose opinions have been formed through the press chronicles of her exploits, would be startled to know that not one in ten of her cases has ever been recorded outside of her own file cases. And many of them – the most sensational from a newspaper viewpoint – will never be!
It is the woman, herself, however, who has seemed to me always a greater mystery than any of the problems to whose unravelling she has brought her wonderful genius. In spite of the deluge of printer’s ink that she has inspired, I question if it has been given to more than a dozen persons to know the true Madelyn Mack.
I do not refer, of course, to her professional career. The salient points of that portion of her life, I presume, are more or less generally known – the college girl confronted suddenly with the necessity of earning her own living; the epidemic of mysterious ‘shop-lifting’ cases chronicled in the newspaper she was studying for employment advertisements; her application to the New York department stores, that had been victimised, for a place on their detective staffs, and their curt refusal; her sudden determination to undertake the case as a freelance, and her remarkable success, which resulted in the conviction of the notorious Madame Bousard, and which secured for Miss Mack her first position as assistant house-detective with the famous Niegel dry-goods firm. I sometimes think that this first case, and the realisation which it brought her of her peculiar talent, is Madelyn’s favourite – that its place in her memory is not even shared by the recovery of Mrs Niegel’s fifty-thousand-dollar pearl necklace, stolen a few months after the employment of
