A Very British Murder (25 page)

‘I had not long been employed as a female detective, and now having given up my time and attention to what I may call a new profession, I was anxious to acquit myself as well and favourably as I could.’

W. S. Hayward introduces his character Mrs Paschal in his story ‘The Mysterious Countess’ (n.d., probably 1864)

IN DESCRIBING THE
origins of his famous detective Mma Precious Ramotswe, Alexander McCall Smith has written that he chose a female as his lead because, if she were a man, ‘the conversation would be less interesting … less personal, less subjective – and less emotionally engaging’. McCall Smith is a compelling contemporary advocate for the pleasure to be found in following the success of a female detective. Readers take satisfaction in ‘seeing women, who have suffered so much from male arrogance and condescension, either outwitting men or demonstrating that they are just as capable as men of doing something that may have been seen as a male preserve’.

He sees the female detective as often ‘the outsider in the male world of policing and criminal investigation’, a fertile place for a character to come up against the difficulties and tensions which provide the germ of fiction. And she can use her position on the margins to good effect: ‘We suddenly realise that it is the woman who has seen and understood what is happening without ever being suspected of being a threat to anybody.’

While all this holds true of the great Mma Precious Ramotswe, though, it also applies to the earliest female detectives, who existed in fiction long before they did in real life.

A great deal of debate has developed about the exact moment the first fictional female sleuth made her debut. It’s generally agreed that
The Female Detective
, published in 1864 (or possibly in 1861) by Andrew Forrester (the pen-name of James Redding Ware) was the first work in this new genre. His character, Mrs Gladden, investigates crimes in a professional capacity, and is paid for her services.

Mrs Gladden tends to get all the attention, but she was preceded by earlier, if amateur, female detectives, characters who accidentally fall into the role of solving a mystery. Some scholars make the case for a maidservant named Susan Hopley. Catherine Crowe published
The Adventures of Susan Hopley, or Circumstantial Evidence
, a novel in which the heroine solves a murder, as early as 1841. As an amateur female investigator, Susan Hopley developed out of the heroines of Gothic novels who had sought a means of exposing or escaping the evil villains who harassed them, just as Emily does in
The Mysteries of Udolpho
.

But Hopley, the sleuthing maidservant, also looks forward to the fully-formed detective genre. She follows correct procedure in the
gathering of evidence: ‘her most earnest desire’, for example, ‘was to go over the house that had been the scene of the catastrophe, and inspect every part of it’. She solves the crime with apparent effortlessness – the
Athenaeum
magazine noted that ‘through all the intricacies of the story, she winds her way with preternatural ease – the
Dea Vindix
[‘Avenging Goddess’] who unties all knots’. And Susan occupies the classic marginal position of a female detective: working as a servant, relatively powerless, she usually passes unnoticed and unsuspected. She is devoted to her duty of finding out the truth: at one point in her story, she is rewarded for her efforts by being sacked from her day job.

Susan Hopley
was a bestseller, and inspired a stage version, but in many ways she was ahead of her time, and aroused consternation as well as admiration. Detective fiction, let alone detective fiction with a female heroine, was not yet well understood. ‘We hardly know what to say of this book’, wrote one critic:

It perplexes us extremely. It is powerful, beyond all question; but unsatisfactory … precisely as in real life, facts and recollections of apparently the most trivial kind, which have got remotely away in some inaccessible corner of the memory, come gradually out into more and more prominence, until, some last link in a long chain of occurrences wanting, they suddenly and thoroughly supply it. The writer, in a word, has the art of
reality
. You are struck with the trifling minutenesses, yet find them not so trifling as you first supposed.

Today we recognize that sensation of satisfaction that good detective fiction produces. When
Susan Hopley
came out, however,
the Detective Branch had yet to be established, ‘detective fever’ had yet to infect the public in the wake of the Road Hill House case and the ‘sensation’ novel had still to open up the home and all its minute and everyday details as the site of drama.

So why, then, has this groundbreaking author and her character, warmly admired by Mary Elizabeth Bradden among others, been forgotten? The answer lies partly in the fate of her creator, Catherine Crowe, whose reputation dimmed quickly after she produced a much derided work on spiritualism and quack science. She eventually fell into neglect and remains so today, to the extent that her detective fails even to appear in
The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime
(2011).

Crowe was curious and mysterious. Quite a figure on the literary scene in Edinburgh, she and a friend were observed inhaling ether, or laughing-gas, at a dinner party held in 1847 for Hans Christian Andersen, which gave another guest ‘the feeling of being with two mad people’. She was interested in phrenology, was described as ‘a very clever, eccentric person’ and believed that one day the supernatural world would find itself ‘within the bounds of science’.

She became deeply involved with seances and spiritualism until she suffered some sort of mental breakdown in 1854. Charles Dickens, who heard about it, thought she had gone:

stark mad – and stark naked – on the spirit-rapping imposition. She was found t’other day in the street, clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-handkerchief and a visiting card. She had been informed, it appeared, by the spirits, that
if she went in that trim she would be invisible. She is now in a madhouse, and, I fear, hopelessly insane.

This picture, however, was so false that Catherine Crowe had to write to the newspapers defending herself. She had experienced, she protested, only a brief ‘state of unconsciousness’ and hallucination, but the prejudice against female writers and spiritualists translated this into crazed nakedness on the Edinburgh streets.

And so Crowe and her work fell into obscurity, and the crown for producing the first female detective is generally awarded to two men: Andrew Forrester, marginally the winner, and W. S. Hayward in close pursuit. To be fair, their two books,
The Female Detective
and
Revelations of a Lady Detective
, both feature professionals, heroines who, unlike Susan Hopley, are employed purely – and paid accordingly – to solve crimes.

Kathryn Johnson, curator of the British Library exhibition ‘Murder in the Library: An A to Z of Detective Fiction’ (2013), points out that Andrew Forrester most likely decided to try a female lead as a logical next step in a lengthy writing career. He’d started out, and had great success, producing fictionalized ‘memoirs’ of various real-life Bow Street Runners. These works were so realistic and convincing that the genuine Runners had to write to the papers, pointing out that what were apparently their memoirs had actually been made up. Forrester also wrote on the murder at Road Hill House, in both non-fiction and fictional form. There was obviously a market for crime, and a female detective could be seen as an exciting and original angle.

Forrester and Hayward’s female detective novels were published in a new and specialized form called the yellowback. These small,
flimsy and semi-disposable novels took their name from their glossy covers with bright yellow borders. Costing 6d. (when a hardback novel would cost 10s.) they were sold mostly on the railway stations that had by now sprouted up all across 1860s Britain. Promising a soothing interval of cheap entertainment, a yellowback from the bookstall seemed the perfect purchase for a traveller about to start, say, the ten-hour journey to Edinburgh.

Because they were made from such thin and cheap paper, very few have survived in good condition, but the British Library does have a copy of Hayward’s
The Revelations of a Lady Detective
, with its rather racy cover still intact. It could be that the author never selected or even saw the cover art, and, on the basis that ‘sex sells’, it shows a lady rather more racy than the detective herself featured in its pages. A nattily dressed lady is
smoking
, a very fast habit, and she’s also lifting up her skirts to reveal her ankles. The image bears a close resemblance to the Victorian ‘Haymarket Princess’, the ladies of the night who worked around the theatres of London’s Haymarket, the revelation of the ankle beneath the skirt being the age-old indication of a prostitute.

This salacious image was obviously intended to tempt readers into buying a saucy tale, and it is true that the female detective of the story does some rather unladylike things. At one point, while chasing a villain, she finds it necessary to drop down through a hatch into a cellar. Her crinoline won’t fit through the hole, so she simply takes it off and abandons it. It’s a wonderful moment of female emancipation: freed from the ‘obnoxious garment’, as she calls it, she is able to get on with her work. She also carries a silver Colt revolver.

This is strikingly modern behaviour, and both the
Lady Detective
, Mrs Paschal, and the
Female Detective
, Mrs Gladden, are forceful, impressive characters. Mrs Paschal possesses great skill and knows it: verging upon forty years old, she has found a life-long calling in detection. She tells us that her brain is ‘vigorous and subtle’, and that she concentrates all her energies on her work. ‘I was well born and educated,’ she says, and

for the parts I had to play, it was necessary to have nerve and strength, cunning and confidence, resources unlimited [and] numerous other qualities of which actors are totalling ignorant. They strut, and talk, and give expression to the thoughts of others, but it is such as I who create the incidents upon which their dialogue is based and grounded.

The
Female Detective
is varyingly either Mrs or Miss Gladden – perhaps another editorial lapse or perhaps a deliberate part of her shadowy, elusive identity – and elucidates for us the advantages that women possess in detecting crime. Like Mrs Paschal, she possesses the ability to pass invisibly through life. ‘The woman detective,’ says Mrs Gladden, ‘has far greater opportunities than a man of intimate watching, and of keeping her eye upon matters near where a man could not conveniently play the eavesdropper.’ Both heroines illustrate this point in rather melodramatic terms, one of them taking the job of a servant in order to penetrate the household of ‘The Mysterious Countess’, the other dressing up as a nun in order to infiltrate a convent. But here an important new strand of detective fiction is being spun: the crime-solver who blends into the
background, like G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, or, ultimately, Miss Marple.

And yet these two impressive women of the 1860s did not set a lasting trend. After them, female detective characters faded away until the 1890s. The reason for this is that they were just a little too advanced for the taste of the times. Both characters have to justify taking on such dirty, unwomanly work. Mrs Paschal tells us: ‘It is hardly necessary to refer to the circumstances which led me to embark in a career at once strange, exciting and mysterious, but I may say that my husband died suddenly, leaving me badly off.’

Mrs Gladden, meanwhile, defends her actions by saying that when a women turns to criminality, she’s much worse than a man, and it takes a woman to catch her.

And yet, women would not be employed as police officers until just after the First World War. This was not a sudden decision, but a slow change in attitudes triggered by the war itself. During it, of course, women had proved their capacity for driving and making munitions and other work formerly left to men. In 1916 Scotland Yard was forced, by a shortage of male staff, to employ female typists for the first time. Neither were there enough fathers and brothers left in Britain to chaperone wives and sisters on the streets to pre-war standards. In London’s public spaces, voluntary groups of special female police auxiliaries were formed for the protection of other women.

The experiment caused some concern, but was ultimately a success. In 1918, women over 30 were allowed for the first time to vote in elections. On 22 November of the same year, an order was written for 110 permanent female police officers to be appointed,
albeit with fewer powers than male constables. The nascent female force was the victim of financial cutbacks in 1922, but in 1923 they were back for good. Fifty females were sworn in, and this time it was with the power of making arrests. Lillian Wyles (1885–1975), one of the first female sergeants from 1919, was by 1923 working on murder cases, and would end up as a Chief Inspector.

It’s much harder to find evidence that women in real life worked as paid detectives in a private capacity, but they do re-emerge, triumphantly, in post-war fiction, not least in the ‘cattery’ of old ladies employed by Lord Peter Wimsey. It was the beginning of a Golden Age.