Three Victorian Detective Novels: The Unknown Weapon/My Lady's Monkey/The Big Bow Mystery by E.F. Bleiler

Three Victorian Detective Novels: The Unknown Weapon/My Lady's Monkey/The Big Bow Mystery Reviews

• 
  Leslie

  There are three novellas in this book: "The Unknown Weapon" (1864) by Andrew Forrester (I'd never heard of him either), "My Lady's Money" (1877) by Wilkie Collins, and "The Big Bow Mystery" (1891) by Israel Zangwill (of whom I had heard but whom I'd never read). Of the three, I like the one by the least-well-known writer best. If someone told me that "The Unknown Weapon" had just been published a few years ago by a writer of historical mysteries, I'd believe her. It feels remarkably modern. There's a female detective who's smart and perceptive, willing to use other people's faulty expectations of a woman to her own advantage in doing her job. The writing is clear and straightforward, and the solution to the mystery makes sense. I enjoyed this story very much. I love some of Collins's fiction, but the story here isn't one of his best (sometimes things sink into oblivion for good reason). The solution to the mystery, which holds the lives of all the characters in suspense for months, is screamingly obvious, and the flights of highmindedness (especially by the heroine, Isabel) irritated me (and I love Victorian novels, which are often full of highminded characters doing highminded things). I was supposed to find Lady Lydiard eccentric and amusing, but I just found her unbearably smug, and the novel's implicit endorsement of her assumptions about class was pretty hard to take. The last novel, by Zangwill, is quite good, the earliest example of the locked room type of puzzle I've read. Altogether, a good collection.
• 
  Crissy

  The jewel in this Crown is the middle story by Wilkie Collins, "My Lady's Money" which has some top rate original characters and laugh-out-loud moments. Old Sharon really needed a series!
  Zangwill's "The Big Bow Mystery" started out slow but the solution was very interesting and surprising! I wish the cast of suspects had been a bit wider but really enjoyed the reveal.
• 
  Bev

  Three Victorian Detective Novels edited and introduced by E. F. Bleiler contains some of the earliest modern detective novels available. The stories selected are meant to represent various moments in the history of the detective novel. We have a story that gives us one of the first more fictional accounts of police work. Previous works were more like casebooks--more factual and less narrative license. Then we have a story of theft that is more typical of the Victorian domestic novel spice up with sensation. The final story gives us one of the earliest locked room mysteries...and one of the first stories to deliberately attempt to outwit the reader.
  
  The first novel is The Unknown Weapon (1864) by Andrew Forrester. It is about the death of the son of a miserly old man who is killed while apparently in the the process of breaking into his own father's house. He has been stabbed with a weapon that no seems to be able to identify. This story has the honor of being quite probably the first novel about the Metropolitan Police (formed in 1829) , the first modern detective novel, and the first novel featuring a professional female detective. She is absolutely unnamed in this volume, but in other stories by Forrester, she is referred to as Mrs. G---- of the Metropolitan Police. She makes reference to herself and another female officer as constables...and I find it interesting to have references to female constables at this early date. Mrs. G---- is a thoroughly scientific detective, reminding the reader of Holmes. Had she the advantages of his training at university, I'm sure she would have examined her own bits of fluff under the microscope rather than sending them off in a tin box and directing "it to the gentleman who is good enough to control these kind of investigations." She faithfully takes up every piece of evidence, giving it a more thorough going-over than the local constable, looks over the scene of the crime, and thinks the problem through with logic that Holmes could not fault. There is no "feminine intuition" at work; it is a thoughtful, orderly investigation. The grand finale is a bit of a let-down--but over all a very good early detective story. Three and a half stars.
  
  Next up: My Lady's Money (1877) by Wilkie Collins, a tale of theft. Lady Lydiard's husband has died and while going through his effects she finds letters indicating that he had a cousin with a family in desperate circumstances. The cousin, who has since passed on himself, had been led to believe that Lady Lydiard prevented her husband from being any assistance to his family. So she decides to make things right by anonymously sending the cousin's family 500 pounds sealed in an envelope and to be distributed by a minister. However, when the minister receives the envelope, the money has vanished. Suspicion falls upon Lady Lydiard's young companion--a girl that Lady Lydiard has taken a great fancy to and whom her ladyship believes absolutely to be innocent. The police are no help in clearing the young woman's name and soon "Old Sharon"--an eccentric former lawyer--is hired to get to the bottom of the mystery. Even the dullest of readers ought to spot the thief straight away. True to the most common Victorian forms, Collins does not spend any effort in trying to keep the criminal's identity hidden. The main point of the story is to figure out how the detective will be able to bring the crime home to him and what justice there will be. I enjoyed Collins' style very much--it was closer to The Moonstone than I felt The Woman in White to be. But I didn't warm to his "Old Sharon" as much as I did to Forrester's Mrs. G---------. One of the best parts was Tommie, the little Scotch Terrier--to whom Collins surpisingly gave a "speaking" part. For instance, "A low growl followed the fresh young voice, and added (in dog's language), 'Much worse, my lady--much worse!'" A nice little story--not quite as good as the first. Three stars.
  
  The third novel is Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery. As mentioned above, it is one of the earliest examples of the locked room mystery. The solution may seem a bit trite to those of us in the 21st Century, but it is good to remember how puzzling and fresh it must have been to readers of the London Star in 1891. The story begins at the rooming house of Mrs. Drabdump (gotta love those Victorian names). She has been directed to wake one of her tenants, Mr. Arthur Constant, early so he can make an important meeting. Naturally, she finds that she has overslept and is rushing 'round to prepare breakfast. But when she tries to rouse Constant, she receives no answer. At first she is not too alarmed. The poor man had been suffering from toothache and perhaps he feel into a deep slumber once he finally did get to sleep. But when repeated efforts fail to waken him and a final, violent assault on his door does not bring him out, she feels sure that he must be lying murdered in his bed. She rushes across the street to the home of retired policeman, George Grodman. Grodman succeeds in breaking down the locked and bolted door and a terrible sight is revealed. Constant is lying in bed with his throat cut. He is still warm...so he has not been long dead. The windows are all fastened tight. There is no weapon to be found in the room and no way the culprit could have escaped. Inspector Edward Wimp (snort) of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate officially. But there seems to be no solution. There is no item in the room with which the dead man could have harmed himself, therefore it cannot be suicide. There is no way anyone could have gotten out of the room, therefore it cannot be murder. Eventually, however, clues come Wimp's way that convince him that Tom Mortlake, Constant's fellow tenant and supposed rival, has committed the crime. A trial and conviction follows....but Grodman produces the final twist that produces the complete solution. This is a well-written and quite witty short novel. The final twist is ingenious for its time. Four stars for this story. And a final rating of three and a half stars for the entire collection.
• 
  Carol Risez

  Bought it for a book club, but did not read it. Not into this type of read.
• 
  Carol Aldred

  DNF
• 
  William

  Since my obsession with Golden Age Detection bloomed, one side project fueled by that obsession has been to trace the development of the detective novel. I've read some Poe- most importantly "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" written in 1841. At the other end, I've read Trent's Last Case written in 1911 and very near in structure to an Agatha Christie. This leaves a 70 year period to explore, and this volume takes a first stab at fillling the gap.
  
  As there are three different novellas by three different authors contained within, I do not find it productive to supply a rating overall- I'll talk about each separately:
  
  "The Unknown Weapon", as the introduction suggests, is arguably the first detective novel (1864). It represents the first time a writer strayed from the popular form of making a narrative of real crime and, instead, organizing the structure of the work to withhold detail and puzzle the reader. It's a short 65 pages, but we get a mysterious death, a number of suspects, an inquest scene, a female detective, and a surprising amount of charm. The solution and reasoning towards the end aim to achieve a bit too much with too little evidence, though they do make sense of all the clues. Ultimately, I found this highly engaging and, what's more, suggestive that the beginnings of an artistic form do not necessarily have to be dull in retrospect.
  
  "My Lady's Money" (1877) is a longer bit of Wilkie Collins. It's a bit of a stretch to call this a Detective Novel, as the detective in question occupies, at best, 20 pages of 130, and a great bulk of the narrative is dedicated not to the solution of the crime but to the social impact that the crime causes. Ultimately, I find myself thinking much the same as I thought of Collins' better known Moonstone: it has its moments stylistically but none of the good things I can say follow from the mystery portion of the plot. Collins' widely gets credit for writing the first full-sized detective novel (Moonstone), but had he not, I don't think the editor of this volume would have seen need to include him here.
  
  "The Big Bow Mystery" (1891) is the first Locked Room novel. There had been a small number of short stories up to this point (again, see Rue Morgue), but this was the first long-form example- and would precede a great many more. Israel Zangwill writes with a great bit of wit- I chuckled periodically. Moreover, the story moves at a nice clip, and, by this time, has most of the elements we would expect in such a story. The one thing missing is the more procedural element of a single detective tracking down clues and interviews one by one. Otherwise, you have a narrative with clues being trotted out before the reader, assembling a seemingly impossible situation, and then solving it. I did not much care for the solution- in this sub-genre, it takes real brilliance to come up with something that doesn't feel a bit fudged, and Zangwill doesn't quite make the grade, but it was otherwise a very enjoyable read.
  
  On the whole, I would recommend the first and third novellas to either A) victorian lit fans or B) people again tracing the development of the detective novel. The second piece, though not without some charm, I would recommend only to folks that have read longer-form Collins and want more.
• 
  Alexis Neal

  Definitely a worthwhile read. It's strange to think that there was a time when no one had yet thought of the idea of detective stories. This collection boasts three of the earliest. Andrew Forrester's The Unknown Weapon features one of the first female detectives in fiction--and not just an amateur or free lance detective, but an official one. Forrester highlights the many avenues of investigation uniquely available to women. This is quite a surprising (and feminist) elevation of ability over gender, considering the state of gender relations at the time.
  
  My Lady's Money, by Wilkie Collins (best known for The Woman in White, another mystery), presents a more classic mystery: the theft of a 500 pound bank note from an open envelope. The detective here is a dirty, unprepossessing old man with keen powers of perception--the unlikely amateur detective at his best.
  
  The final novel in the collection, The Big Bow Mystery is one of the very first "locked room" mysteries. A man in found dead, his throat slit, in a locked room--the windows and doors all locked from the inside. Israel Zangwill injects a healthy dose of humor into the tale, which was not always a characteristic of the genre. Also, Zangwill's introduction sheds some interesting light on the serial nature of Victorian mystery writing. Because he wrote in installments, readers had an opportunity to write in their guesses as to who perpetrated the crime and Zangwill had an opportunity to interact with those guesses. The extent to which those guesses affected his writing is anyone's guess, but it's fascinating to think of that sort of interaction predating television or the fan-fic so prevalent in the internet age.
  
  All in all, an enjoyable and interesting collection, well worth reading. The mysteries aren't the most brilliant, but then the genre was still quite nascent. As first forays into a new kind of literature, they are quite good.
• 
  Coyle

  I wasn't really sure how to rate this book. It's three short detective novels (not quite novellas) from the Victorian era. Both the novel and the detective story were fairly new (Poe had only recently published
  The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales), so it's probably not fair to hold them to too high a standard. I settled on 3 stars because of the way the stories fell, the first I thought was terrible (not because it had a female lead, but because the story was slow-paced); the second was better, but long and overly focused on class and station (Victorian, remember); and the third was actually pretty good, though the ending was... well, read it yourself.
  (Side note: I was tempted to give it an extra star just because Goodreads turned "My Lady's Money" into "My Lady's Monkey", which frankly might have been a better book...)
• 
  Lisa Kucharski

  I read the first and third story in this book. My main interest was in reading the Israel Zangwill story - The Bow Mystery, considered to be one of the earlier locked room mysteries. The writing was a bit effusive and focused a bit on characters of the time a bit more than actually solving the crime. It also reflected on the public and media's obsession with talking about the murder. For the time it reads with a bit more humor than I usually see, which did help the story a lot. The first story I read was more of a case study, which is a blow by blow search through clues, information, and talking to suspects and seeing the location of the murder. Both are interesting in terms of reading early mystery books but I don't find them to be the finest point of the genre.
  
  If you're interested in the roots of a genre, specifically detective works, this is a good book to peruse.
• 
  Delphine

  The Big Bow Mystery is the first closed-room murder mystery.