Rennison Sherlock's Sisters

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-0-85730-399-8
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Sherlock Holmes was the most famous detective to stride through the pages of late Victorian and Edwardian fiction, but he was not the only one. He had plenty of rivals. Some of the most memorable of these were women: they were 'Sherlock's Sisters'. This exciting, unusual anthology gathers together 15 stories written by women or featuring female detectives. They include Dorcas Dene, Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, Hagar the Gypsy, Judith Lee and Madelyn Mack. Editor Nick Rennison has already compiled several highly entertaining collections of stories from what he considers a golden age of crime fiction, including The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, More Rivals ofSherlock Holmes and Supernatural Sherlocks. His latest anthology turns the spotlight on the women detectives who could more than match their male counterparts.

NICK RENNISON is a writer, editor and bookseller with a particular interest in the Victorian era and in crime fiction. He is the editor of six anthologies of short stories for No Exit Press: The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Rivals of Dracula, Supernatural Sherlocks, More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock's Sisters and American Sherlocks, plus A Short History of Polar Exploration, Peter Mark Roget: A Biography, Freud and Psychoanalysis, Robin Hood: Myth, History & Culture and Bohemian London, published by Oldcastle Books. He is also the author of The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction, 100 Must-Read Crime Novels and Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography. His crime novels, Carver's Quest and Carver's Truth, both set in nineteenth-century London, are published by Corvus. He is a regular reviewer for both The Sunday Times and BBC History Magazine.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rennison, Nick

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Female detectives make their first appearances surprisingly early in the history of crime fiction. The 1860s was not a decade in which women in real life had much scope to forge independent careers for themselves, particularly in the field of law enforcement, but, in the pages of novels and short stories, they were already busy solving crimes and bringing villains to justice. Andrew Forrester’s 1864 book The Female Detective (recently republished by the British Library) introduced readers to the mysterious ‘G’, a woman enquiry agent employed by the police who sometimes goes by the name of ‘Miss Gladden’. There had been women who turned detective in fiction before. Wilkie Collins’s short story entitled ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’, for example, was published in 1856 in Dickens’s magazine Household Words, and has a heroine who investigates the suspicious circumstances of a friend’s death. However, Forrester’s character seems to have been the first professional female detective in British fiction. Like ‘Miss Gladden’, ‘Andrew Forrester’ was a pseudonym. The author’s real name was James Redding Ware (1832-1909), a novelist, dramatist and writer for hire in Victorian London who produced books on a wide variety of subjects from card games and English slang to dreams of famous people and the lives of centenarians. The Female Detective consists of a number of ‘G’’s cases, narrated by herself, in which she deploys her deductive and logical skills to reveal the truth.

The Female Detective, and other titles such as WS Hayward’s Revelations of a Lady Detective which appeared at about the same time, were published as ‘yellowbacks’. These were cheaply produced books, so called because of their covers which often had bright yellow borders. They were sold mostly at the bookstalls which had recently sprung up at railway stations across the country, and were intended as easy, disposable reads for train journeys.

For nearly twenty-five years, Miss Gladden and Mrs Paschal, the heroine of Hayward’s book, had no real successors in English fiction. The third woman detective did not put in an appearance until 1888 when Leonard Merrick (1864-1939) made Miriam Lea, a former governess turned private investigator, into the central character of his short novel Mr Bazalgette’s Agent. Employed by Mr Bazalgette’s detective agency, Miriam pursues an embezzler halfway across Europe in what is a charming, skilfully written narrative. Unfortunately her creator, Leonard Merrick, who was in his early twenties when he wrote Mr Bazalgette’s Agent, came to hate it. He went on to become a well-respected novelist whose admirers included HG Wells, JM Barrie and GK Chesterton. George Orwell enjoyed his novels and wrote a foreword to a new edition of one of them. In later life Merrick clearly saw his detective story as an embarrassment – ‘the worst thing I wrote’, he called it – and made every effort to cover up its existence. He took to buying up copies of the book and destroying them which explains why only a handful now remains in existence. Luckily, the British Library republished it in their ‘Crime Classics’ series in 2013 so readers today can see that Merrick was unjustly severe on his own work.

By 1890 there had only been a very small number of pioneering women detectives in crime fiction but that was about to change. Two phenomena dictated that change. One was the astonishing increase in the number of magazines and periodicals in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Between 1875 and 1903, that number nearly quadrupled from just short of 700 to more than 2,500. Not all of them, of course, carried crime stories but a significant proportion did. The market for all kinds of what would later be called ‘genre’ fiction, but especially crime stories, grew exponentially.

The other factor was the advent of Sherlock Holmes. The great detective’s debut in A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887, did not immediately start the Holmes craze. It was only when The Strand Magazine began to publish the short stories featuring Holmes and Dr Watson four years later that the public took the characters to its collective heart and worldwide fame beckoned. The success of the Holmes stories was so startling that soon every fiction magazine was looking to duplicate it and writers of all kinds were hoping to come up with a detective as appealing.

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...