Two Early Female Detectives

Loveday Brooke, illustrated by Bernard Higden

The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective

C. L. (Catherine Louisa) Pirkis

1894

3/5 stars

This is a set of short stories, originally a magazine serial, featuring Miss Loveday Brooke, who works for a detective agency in London.  Her services are much in demand, as her employer recognizes in Loveday's intelligence and gentility the traits of a valuable agent, and she is quick to repay his regard with success after success.

Pirkis (1841-1910) is a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle, publishing her stories and novels during some of the same decades, and her plot formula is quite similar.  Loveday, like Holmes, assesses and solves the situation quickly, reaching the right conclusion based on information rarely given to the reader.  She then points out the malefactor, is shown to be right, and, finally, explains to an admiring audience how she solved the case.  

The seven stories in this collection are generally interesting, some quite so, but they would have been  much better if the clues had been provided for the reader.  There is another reason, however, that Loveday -- unlike Holmes -- has been mostly forgotten: Loveday has no life, no personality, and the stories are equally emotionally flat.

The Loveday tales are important in their own way, though, as they are among the earliest written by a woman about a female detective.  Given that, they would be worth reading to those interested in the history of crime fiction.  Otherwise, I don't particularly recommend Loveday's experiences, even to fans of Victorian melodrama and mystery.

Illustration from "the Grotto Specter"

The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange

Anna Katharine Green

1915

3/5 stars

(note: audiobook produced by Tantor Audio as Mystery Stories of Violet Strange)

Violet Strange is a popular, pretty, sparkling society belle of America's Gilded Age.  Secretly, however, she is an agent for a private investigator, willing to use her intelligence and powers of observation to do work she finds unpleasant for a salary that she doesn't appear to need.  Her secret is revealed slowly in a larger story arc that surrounds the nine stories of her cases.

Green (1846-1935), justly popular at the time and one of my favorite American authors, was among the first authors of the modern "detective story". Violet is often credited as the first "girl detective".  

Tantor Audio does a disservice to the stories by referring to them as "mystery stories"; they are in fact, her adventures or experiences or, in some cases, just stories that Violet appears in as a more minor character.  Expecting them to be mysteries will cause unfulfilled expectations in the reader, making the book less enjoyable.

As mentioned above, these stories are not really detective stories; they are, as Green's original title states, "problems".  In some, Violet sets up a trap so that whoever the malefactor is, they will give themselves away.  In others, her intelligence and powers of observation serve her to find a missing object or see an obscure element of the case.  In one instance, she doesn't come to the right conclusion at all.  They are still good tales, though, as Green was good at interesting plots and surprising solutions.  The main flaw in this collection is that Violet is shoehorned into them all even though it's a stretch to do so, and there are times when she doesn't fit in at all.  If Green had written them without Violet and with no connection to each other, this would have been a four star -- if not five -- collection of intriguing puzzles.  

I still recommend them, for those who enjoy mysteries from this time period, as long as the reader takes the above into consideration.