Preamble
Take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Review
This was one of my impulsive Libby selections. I have seen it a few times before, and as I’ve been reading more crime fiction from the first half of the twentieth century, I thought it might be interesting to try some historical fiction set there too. Set eight years after Poirot’s debut (in The Mysterious Affair at Styles), this is an era where private detection has really hit the big-time.
Smith’s detective here is a scientifically minded “young miss”, Clara Vale, more or less fresh from Somerville College, Oxford, where she has studied chemistry, but she now works in a generalist library, having been refused from all scientific jobs for which she might be qualified. She learns that her uncle has unexpectedly died and left her an inheritance. She feels strongly connected to him, another scientist oddity in a family of bankers and social climbers, and so takes the trip to Newcastle to hear the reading of the will. What she discovers is that he has not only left her his personal estate (house, cash, etc.), but also a thriving detective business. Will she sell it, or take up a new profession?
While Clara is mulling her options, she is set upon by some of his employees—a fellow detective, a love-struck housekeeper—and his clients, in particular the widow of a picture-house owner who is certain that negligence didn’t destroy their picture house. When their second picture house also burns down, causing the death of one of their employees, Clara feels compelled to investigate.
The plotting here is really very good. There are some excellent red herring traps, in particular the preponderance of characters with names beginning with J, so we can speculate about the true recipient of the loving letter the housekeeper attempts to pass off to prove an engagement. There are also competing potential love interests for Clara that enable us to wonder who will be the wrong ‘un and who might be a knight in shining armour (although eventually Clara takes matters into her own hands, of course!).
The novel deals sensitively with various issues of equality, not just women’s rights to property and employment opportunities, but also the oppression of gay men like Clara’s uncle. It is this oppression (and thus secrecy) that allows his housekeeper to attempt to pass herself off as his fiancée. The novel, like many that deal with more oppressive eras, features few characters who hold to the mores of the time in this regard: everyone who knows or finds out about his sexuality during the novel is perfectly okay with it but notes its criminality. This is less true with the oppression of women, however, and her family and the bank managers she must wrangle with are quite comfortable with prioritising a feckless brother’s potential inheritance than enabling Clara to take what is rightfully hers.
Although there is in the novel a bemoaning of the lack of female detectives, this feels a little odd, as Vale bears a significant similarity to Grant Allen’s 1899 Lois Cayley, who on finishing her mathematics tripos at Girton College, Cambridge (established for women in 1869), is casting around for a career that is not teaching other young women and finds that the detective life suits her rather well. Set 30 years after those stories were published, there is little particularly new or novel about Clara Vale, then, and anyone who is interested in female detective stories of the time (and the preceding decades) may find this a little grating. I would have loved to see Smith refer back to these contemporaneous fictional detectives to help situate her Vale. Who better to seek advice and guidance from than Lois, for example, a female detective of the earlier generation, who would have made a lovely foil to Clara’s socialite mother? Perhaps this emerges in other, later novels in the series, however. We can but hope!
See also
These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie)
- Post After Post-Mortem (ECR Lorac)
- Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders (Kate Griffin)
- Miss Cayley’s Adventures (Grant Allen)
- My own Meinir Davies story, “The Case of the Anonymous Writer”
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Dominique Gracia 
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