My short story collection featuring Sherlock Holmes and a brand new Victorian female detective, The Meinir Davies Casebook, is coming out this month — 19 October, although preorders and Kickstarter backers may have already gotten their mitts on it! 😆
So, in the run up, I thought I’d share a selection of Victorian (or neo-Victorian) detective stories, one for each day until publication day.
1 – Miss Cayley’s Adventures
Today’s fave is Lois Cayley of Miss Cayley’s Adventures (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30970/30970-h/30970-h.htm). She’s not quite a detective, but does just about enough of it to count over the course of the collection when her employer is beset by criminals, and her lover (the employer’s son) framed for a crime he didn’t commit. The latter is a common trope for female amateur detectives of the period, but Lois has proven her mettle long before the trope kicks in. I love her spirit and verve, as a young girl fresh from the first women’s college at Cambridge, and I enjoy more or less everything Grant Allen writes. (He’ll make further appearances in this list before we’re done.) There is a little hint of her and college women in the Meinir story The Case of the Anonymous Writer.
2. Murder by the Book
I’ve reviewed this book by Claire Harman previously. This is not strictly a favourite detective, but a recognition that the field of neo-Victorian fiction is intimately intertwined with nineteenth-century history and true crime non-fiction writing. Part of what makes historical fiction magical is often the mundane; the historical details that form part of the background, or the air the characters breathe, make the whole harmonious (and also act as pleasing Easter eggs for many readers). Part of the joy of writing The Meinir Davies Casebook was tracking down historical figures and building them into both the narratives and the background. Although the Lord William Russell murder doesn’t feature, I really enjoyed digging into the history of Arthur Winnington-Ingram (Bishop of Stepney, and later Bishop of London), for example, and he pops up in more than one story in the book.
3. Dorcas Dene: Detective (and her author)
Today’s fave is Dorcas Dene, heroine of two collections and various other short stories by George R. Sims (featured left in a rather snazzy hat). Dorcas herself appears in one or two of Meinir’s cases, and she is a wonderful character; her facility with disguise and performances enables her to be bold and sly at once, and she is an acute observer, as with most fictional detectives.
Sims is also something of an inspiration for her Watson/scribe, the narrator of the book. Sims was a journalist and social commentator, as well as a fiction and drama writer, and is perhaps best known for his How the Poor Live, about the living conditions of ordinary people in London. A campaigner, in common with other late-nineteenth century writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Emile Zola, he involved himself in righting miscarriages of justice in real life, in Sims’ case the Adolf Beck case. Some of those concerns and interests make their way into both Meinir’s and her scribe’s actions in the book.
4. Mr Bazalgette’s Agent (aka Miriam Lea)
This is not strictly a good novel—Merrick himself thought it was the worst he’d ever written and claims to have gathered up and destroyed many copies!—it is a fascinating one. Miriam Lea is only the third ever professional female detective in Victorian literature, after a gap of approximately 20 years. A standalone story, it features a detective/spy on her first ever mission (accompanied by a more experienced female sidekick) for Mr Bazalgette, the owner of a private detective agency. Such agencies form a staple of Victorian fiction and, indeed, were modelled on real businesses in operation. There are some wonderful adverts from C19 newspapers of agencies actively advertising their female agents—well-suited for work in domestic situations or female-only spaces—and Mr Bazalgette’s Agent glamorises this somewhat, sending Miriam on her first adventure overseas, across Europe and then to South Africa, in pursuit of a fraudster. Although Meinir doesn’t get to travel quite so far afield, she shares some traits with Miriam and her predecessors, another of whom we’ll meet tomorrow!
5. An African Millionaire
I did warn you that there would be more Grant Allen on this list! There is not a great deal of detection going on in this novel, which follows An African Millionaire from South Africa as he is repeatedly swindled, duped, and humiliated by a single adversary who is a master of disguise. Narrated by his disdainful and jealous brother-in-law and secretary, Seymour Wilbraham Wentworth, the millionaire in question is the pompous Sir Charles Vandrift, and he is persecuted across Europe, South Africa, and America. Divided into 12 episodes, akin to a collection of short stories, the stories are nevertheless connected by a journey towards justice, and the punishment of the man known as Colonel Clay. Although Meinir’s stories don’t have a single persecuting villain (spoiler alert?), there is a hint of Allen’s persistent, performative villain in The Case of the Ivory Skull, and I was inspired by the fun that having deeply interconnected tales offers both writer and reader!
6. When the Sea Gives up its Dead
I have reviewed this novel here already, and a bit like Lois Cayley’s adventures the novel features an amateur female detective seeking to clear the name of a loved one. What I particularly like about Anne Cory, the heroine of When the Sea, is the avenging aspect of her character, though. Not content with freeing her fiancé from jail, she yearns to see the real wrongdoers punished. There is a thread of viciousness in some early female detective stories that some people might find surprising, so she is not alone in it, amongst the professionals or the amateurs. Although Meinir doesn’t feel quite that strongly about any of the criminals whom she meets (at least not in this set of stories), she does have a certain steel to her, and her strong moral compass and desire to keep right from wrong come through, especially when she encounters wanton cruelty, as in The Adventure of the Red Cross.
7. The Murder of Patience Brooke
This 2014 novel is one that I need to get around to reviewing at some point! It’s the first in a series by JC Briggs in which the novelist Charles Dickens investigates crimes alongside Superintendent Sam Jones. Detection work was a relatively new concept in the 1840s, when this novel is set, but real-life Dickens was fascinated by it. He used to shadow police officers on patrol, and he and friends, including fellow author Wilkie Collins, attended public hangings to witness the grisly end of criminal life. So, this novel’s concept is a very intuitive one, and it’s based in researched historical facts, even if the plot itself is a work of fiction. That’s something I tried to emulate with Meinir’s scribe, a real-world reformer and philanthropist from the fin de siècle.
8. Murder at Mansfield Park
Whereas The Murder of Patience Brooke takes in real historical people and embeds them within a new historical fiction, Murder at Mansfield Park introduces C19 historical characters into a new situation. I’ve reviewed Lynn Shepherd’s book here already (click the link!), but what I found wonderful as a reader, and inspiring as a writer, was how she retains Austen’s keen eye for the economic details of upper-class family life and the mechanics of these relationships. Meinir lives in a rather different world—although she has climbed somewhat over the course of their life—but I tried to capture some of the economic truths about late-Victorian life in her stories.
9. The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective
After two days’ worth of neo-Victorian fiction, back to one of the pivotal female detectives of the nineteenth century. C.L. Pirkis wrote only a handful of Loveday Brooke stories, but they capture many of the traits that are common in female detective stories. Although Brooke doesn’t appear directly in The Meinir Davies Casebook, unlike Dorcas Dene, the eagle-eyed may spot some indirect references, and I hope she’ll appear in the next book!
10. Revelations of a Lady Detective
Going back a few decades more, to one of the very first female detectives, Mrs Paschal, created by WS Hayward. Technically the second (we’ll meet the first soon!), Mrs Paschal is depicted smoking—bold for the 1860s!—and undertaking daring adventures. An apparent widow, like Meinir, she faces torture and death at the hands of a criminal gang, carries a fire arm, and relishes the physical capture of some of the female criminals she traces. Because she predates Meinir by several decades, she doesn’t appear personally in the collection, but there are some glimmers of her in Meinir’s steely determination.
11. Martin Hewitt
This list is largely about female detectives—my main research and writing interest at the moment!—but of course there are plenty of male detecting characters too. Like Sims and Allen, Arthur Morrison was an author steeped in late-C19 East London. Better known for his The Child of the Jago (now a rather bougie fashion label), Morrison’s detective is a fascinating entry in the Victorian crime annals because he’s such an interesting corrective to the Sherlock Holmes figure. Introduced during the interregnum after The Final Problem, Hewitt is a practical, rather staid man with an unassuming air; realistic and workmanlike, he is minutely observant but does not make any fantastical leaps of logic. Although Hewitt hasn’t appeared working with Meinir yet, there are shades of his robbery-solving skills in A Question of Time.
12. The Mangle Street Murders
Another neo-Victorian entry today, but as that is my genre, this is probably not surprising! I didn’t give The Mangle Street Murders a top rating when I reviewed it here, but it has a lot of elements that were really important to me when crafting Meinir’s twelve stories. In particular, the attention to locale and especially London, the bustle of its streets and perils of its poverty, but also the challenges of being a professional woman in the period. Several of the earliest nineteenth-century female detective stories talk about the advantages of females working in the field, in particular “in cases of mere suspicion”, although there was a stigma attached to the work. There were certain elements of wish-fulfilment in those stories, as there is too in MRC Kasasian’s novel, and that’s a useful reminder that detective fiction is always really a pretext for something else!
13. The Female Detective
Even earlier than Mrs Paschal (number 10 on this list), we have G, sometimes called Mrs Gladden. Andrew Forrester’s collection, baldly titled The Female Detective, predates Hayward’s by six months or so, and follows a similar characteristic casebook style, just like The Meinir Davies Casebook. She uses methods similar to those that eventually appear in the Holmes stories, including various reflexive passages about the methods she chooses to use in particular cases. Technically, she works for the “regular police”, rather than acting as a private detective, although her general disdain for the force and the general absence of other police officers obscure this fact in many stories. G carries with her more of an air of mystery than some other female detectives, going largely unnamed, and telling us that her true profession is concealed from almost all who know her. I tried to introduce a bit of that mystery with Meinir too.
14. Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective
As you can see from the list above, lots of early collections featuring female detectives were keen to advertise that fact overtly. This is common in genuine adverts from the period for private detective agencies, which promoted the fact that they had women working for them, as well as men. Here, “lady” is meant also too in its sense of a class signifier, as Myrl is well-to-do, but fallen on hard times. Cambridge-educated and trained as a doctor, she now makes a living as a detective on the grounds of needing money, like so many of her female predecessors. Sadly, her academic accomplishments are rarely, if ever, employed. I don’t write about Myrl much, as she first appears at the very end of the C19, and many of her stories are published well into the C20. (Matthias McDonald Bodkin married her off to another detective of his, Paul Beck, the “rule of thumb detective”.) Still, there are hints of Dora in The Case of the Anonymous Writer.
15. Flaxman Low: Occult Psychologist
Series like Psych and Medium are not the first to pair detection and the otherworldly. The first ever psychic detective, Flaxman Low, appeared in 1898, at a time when mediums and Spiritualism were all the rage. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself became deeply interested in Spiritualism post-WWI.) Written by Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard and his mother, Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard, Low is presented as a scientific pioneer, and his investigations combine a sceptical and credulous outlook to the “occult” phenomenon experienced. Some of the tropes, such as a hallucinogenic fungus, feel decidedly modern now! There is a little hint of Low and his psychic investigations in The Case of the Ivory Skull.
16. Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder
Slightly out of our time period, but on a theme with #15, and fitting for the Halloween month, the short stories featuring Thomas Carnacki are framed as after-dinner tales about haunting investigations. In some, Carnacki concludes the haunting is genuine, while in others there is some fabrication. They feature an assortment of mystic rituals and texts invented by William Hope Hodgson, now best known for his The House on the Borderland, an inspiration to Lovecraft and Pratchett. It is in the atmosphere and inventiveness of the stories, rather than in the characterisation, that Hodgson makes a mark on the detective genre.
17. Susan Hopley
Like Lois Cayley, Susan Hopley is not quite a detective, but central to the efforts to clear the name of a male loved one, in this case her brother. More properly crime fiction, rather than detective fiction, Susan Hopley is a rambling tale in many respects, without detective fiction’s tighter focus on a smaller cast and set of clues, still its various strands eventually unravel to reveal the true criminals and free her brother, Andrew. I enjoy this novel because of its sensitive portrayal of women’s lives and experiences, and that’s part of why I enjoy female detective fiction more broadly as a genre. That’s something I tried to bring to Meinir and her cast of long-standing (and newer) female friends.
18. Ruth the Betrayer
Tomorrow is publication day, so we end at the very beginning: although she doesn’t do a great deal of detecting, Ruth the Betrayer (aka Ruth the Spy) predates both G and Mrs Paschal (#10 and #13). Published as a penny dreadful, rather than a yellowback, Ruth is a cross-dressing informal member of the police force, “a sort of spy we use in the hanky-panky way when a man would be too clumsy”, and in that way prefaces all that is to come. Over the course of more than 50 issues, there are axe murders, courtroom scenes, and daring adventures.
Grab a copy of The Meinir Davies Casebook now!
Dominique Gracia 
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