The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara Lodge

Yale University Press have published some interesting books of late - one that I hope to get round to before long is about 'murders in blackout London' - and I recently had the pleasure of reading The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara Lodge. Sara Lodge is an academic, but she belongs to that growing band of academic writers in the crime field who write engagingly with a view to sharing their erudition and the fruits of their research with a wide readership. This is a trend that I find very appealing.

In her introduction, Sara Lodge explains that her interest in her subject was stirred in 2012 at the British Library, when she read those intriguing books The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective. That must have been about the time that the British Library's Publications Department started to delve into its vaults for historic crime titles, for both books were republished, with characteristically excellent intros by Mike Ashley. In those early days, sales of these titles (and also The Notting Hill Mystery, which is in many ways even more interesting) were modest and this prompted the Publications Department to move on to the Golden Age, reviving three novels by Mavis Doriel Hay (two with intros by Stephen Booth) before Rob Davies had the brilliant idea of using railway artwork posters for the cover art, and the rest is history.

Anyway, I digress. There is a wealth of material about women in Victorian times who undertook various forms of detective work. I learned a good deal. You can get some idea of the author's wit from the title of chapter 4: 'Sex and the Female Dick: The Secrets of the Private Enquiry Agency'. This contains some fascinating stories and plenty of information that would provide good background for fiction set in the period, as well as insights into social attitudes of the time. Only occasionally does the author lapse, unnecessarily I thought, into academic-speak like 'I will argue...' and 'I will be examining two cases in detail', but on the whole the text is very readable, and this is an important plus.

There is some excellent discussion of Victorian detective fiction in which female detectives appear. There is more of this than you might think, and Sara Lodge discusses, interestingly, a couple of authors about whom I knew little, Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett and Florence Marryat (daughter of Captain Marryat, once a popular author himself). She made me want to explore their work in some depth. I also think that the illustrations are well chosen - for instance, there's a map of detective agencies, publishers and newspaper offices in Victorian London which helps to underline a rather important point made in the text, about the close relationship between journalism and detection. The inclusion of this map is just one nice, imaginative touch in a book which has them in abundance. Recommended reading and surely a contender for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction.