Review: The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime

This came off my wishlist in part because I was in the mood for something simple and relaxing, and these stories delivered. I find the style of the late 19th and early 20th century to be comforting and welcoming, most likely as a result of having been read too much Dickens as a child. I also enjoy stories about women doing things.

Unfortunately, when someone makes a choice like having a female detective, especially in the 19th century, you have to ask why. In some of the stories, it was clear that it was novelty: there were, even in the 19th century, plenty of male detectives and fewer female ones. Your female detective would stand out. But Lois Cayley, for example, is a Cambridge-educated young woman, who's broke and over-educated. Her friend asks her at the beginning of the story if she's going to teach, since that's one of the few career paths open for an intelligent, educated woman. Cayley's determined to make her own way, even if that means becoming a lady's maid for the present. Cayley questions gender roles - does it really have to be teaching? - but takes on a feminine position.

Contrast Madelyn Mack. There seems to be no reason why she should be a woman. She's educated, intelligent, supercilious (Weir, the author, has modeled her on Holmes, fairly obviously - she makes similar leaps and has a slightly less intelligent friend), deductive. There's no issue made of her gender, though her friend Nora says that she had been expecting someone masculine and got a very beautiful, feminine woman. No one ever doubts her competence or suggests that the crime scene is too terrible for her to see. It's actually quite refreshing: later authors often make too much of the gender of their characters.

As to the plots of the stories, well, some of them are better than others. Many of them are not particularly, well, mysterious. Sometimes the solution works itself out with very little interference.

Madelyn's story is one of the best; Weir's plot is clever, if a bit Conan-Doyle flavored. I was also partial to Anna Katherine Green's The Second Bullet, which was quite depressing, but very clever. Richard Marsh's The Man Who Cut My Hair was weak - it depends entirely on the unlikely ability of the heroine, is less a mystery than a case of the girl being in the right place at either the right or wrong time, and uses the loss of the main character's hair as a plot device. As a whole, though, the collection was interesting and entertaining.