An excellent introduction by Klinger, complete with footnoted references. I'll review the stories and add them here as I read them.

Mrs. Todhetley’s Earrings by Ellen Wood ✭✭✭: I read this as a make-up/catch-up for my Deal-me-in Challenge of 2023, as I got a late start. First published in 1873 in the third volume of collected stories concerning Johnny Ludlow, this one was crippled right off the bat by introducing 4 characters off-handedly in the opening paragraph. I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to the story by assuming that these characters were well-known or at least familiar to those that read the collected stories during their heyday, but I was scrambling to catch up before I’d even begun. The character introductions didn’t stop at the first paragraph either, but at least their pace of entrance slowed marginally.

The setup of the ‘mystery’ – which it isn’t, by the way, in any real investigative sense – starts from that first paragraph. It’s well written (aside from the cascade of characters), but as I just said, it’s not really so much a mystery as it is a comedy of sorts. I don’t know how to explain it without spoiling the story and I know there are some reading this that have plans of reading the collection, so I’ll just say there’s a deserved comeuppance involved and that the true tragedy of this story were some of the characters involved in it. I wouldn’t run away from reading further Ludlow stories, but I wouldn’t seek them out, either.


The Ghost of Fountain Lane by C.L. Pirkis ✭✭✭✭: I liked this one much more than the previous story. This was a true mystery – two of them, actually, handled by a lady detective and an Inspector with the local constabulary of Brighton. Miss Loveday Brooke is supposed to be on holiday in Brighton when the Inspector finds her pouring over newspaper accounts of the “Ghost of Fountain Lane”, a mystery she says contains several points that elevate it from the ridiculous and mundane. Inspector Clampe insists that the mystery he offers is ‘far from ridiculous and much more interesting’. As she can go nor further with the ghost mystery, given that she only has the newspaper accounts and has not been hired to solve it, she agrees to assist Clampe with his problem.

It’s not a fair-play mystery; the clues are found but the details of those clues, which are the important parts, are left out until the end. It isn’t, in fact, a very hard mystery to solve for Miss Loveday Brooke, our intrepid detective – more a matter of being in the right place at the right time, with the knowledge she has about the titular mystery allowing her to put it all into the correct context, but it’s an entertaining and very well written mystery nonetheless.

I’d happily read more mysteries by C.L. Pirkis.

An uneven but perfectly readable and interesting collection of short crime fiction by women. ( )

The thing that struck me as I read the small biographies for each of these pre-Golden Age female crime fiction writers was how prolific they were, how many novels each one of them had written, how much choice late Victorian readers would have had.

Most of them were British, and from a 21st century perspective, many of them were Victorian and rather wordy even cumbersome in style. Agatha Christie would have felt like a breath of fresh air. I don't think I had realised how different readers in 1920 would have found THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES.

But these writers paved the way for crime fiction by female writers as an acceptable, if not quite literary, genre.

An interesting and educative anthology. ( )

Stories of varying quality, as expected in an anthology.