The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective

By Catherine Louisa Pirkis and Michele Slung

Meet the indomitable lady detective Loveday Brooke: able to assume a multitude of disguises and possessed of analytical powers rivaling those of the great Sherlock Holmes, she masters every baffling situation and solves each perplexing crime in these seven atmospheric and entertaining Victorian mysteries. While Holmes dominated the pages of The Strand, Loveday entertained readers of The Ludgate Monthly, employing her intuitive powers to unravel the connection between a jewel theft and a suicide note, to detect the reasons for the furtive behavior among members of a religious sisterhood, and to reveal the hidden truth in other intriguing cases.
This edition of these hard-to-find tales from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction features an Introduction by a noted authority on fictional female detectives. Michele Slung discusses the importance of these stories in the context of Victorian life and literature and offers a bibliographical profile of author Catherine Louisa Pirkis.
Catherine Louisa Pirkis (1839–1910) was a British mystery writer whose Loveday Brooke series was notable for being the first detective stories that featured a heroine created by a woman author. Dubbed "the female Sherlock Holmes," Loveday starred in adventures that were among the bestselling successors to those of the Baker Street sleuth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Apr 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780486846736

Catherine Louisa Pirkis

Catherine Louisa Pirkis (1839-1910) was a British author known for her detective fiction. Pirkis wrote fourteen novels and contributed to many magazines and journals, sometimes publishing under her initials, C.L Pirkis, to avoid gender discrimination. Later in her life, Pirkis transitioned away from her writing career to join her husband, Frederick Pirkis, in his fight for animals’ rights. Together, the couple founded an activist organization to save animals from cruel conditions. Their organization continues their advocacy today, and now goes by the name “Dogs Trust”.

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The Princess Half Reclining on a Sofa (from a Princess’s Vengeance)

THE EXPERIENCES OF LOVEDAY BROOKE,

LADY DETECTIVE

Copyright

Copyright © 1986 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2020, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published in 1894 by Hutchinson and Company, London. The first six stories initially appeared in The Ludgate Monthly, from February to June of 1893. The seventh story was added to the book edition. The Introduction by Michele Slung was first published in 1986.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pirkis, Catherine Louisa, 1839-1910, author. | Higham, Bernard, illustrator. | Slung, Michele B., 1947- writer of introduction.

Title: The experiences of Loveday Brooke, lady detective / Catherine Louisa Pirkis ; illustrated by Bernard Higham ; introduction by Michele Slung.

Description: Dover edition. | Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2020. | Series: Dover crime classics | Originally published: 1894. | Summary: Able to assume a multitude of disguises and with analytical powers rivaling those of the great Sherlock Holmes, the indomitable Loveday Brooke masters every baffling situation and solves each perplexing crime in these seven atmospheric and entertaining Victorian mysteries. This edition of these hard-to-find tales from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction features an informative Introduction that places the stories within the context of their era— Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045195 | ISBN 9780486841885 (trade paperback) | ISBN 048684188X (trade paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Brooke, Loveday (Fictitious character) —Fiction. | Detective and mystery stories, English. | Women detectives—England—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PR5185.P57 E97 2020 | DDC 823/.8—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045195

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

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CONTENTS

Introduction

The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep

The Murder at Troyte’s Hill

The Redhill Sisterhood

A Princess’s Vengeance

Drawn Daggers

The Ghost of Fountain Lane

Missing!

INTRODUCTION

Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ Loveday Brooke is one of the odd women. A discussion of the meaning and background of this phrase will be helpful before examining Loveday as both representative heroine and female sleuth, late-Victorian variety. In George Gissing’s novel of that name ( The Odd Women, 1893), the feminist character Rhoda Nunn identifies such women as the ones there is no making a pair with. An altogether different source similarly but rather pejoratively used the adjective redundant. This word, in a notorious 1869 pamphlet from the pen of one William Rathbone Greg, ¹ referred to the excess of women who occupied nonvalid roles in society simply because circumstances forced them to stand on the sidelines. Without a partner, Greg implied, there can be no dance.

Rhoda Nunn, however, allies herself with the would-be independent woman, as she and her colleague Mary Barfoot conduct a combination training school, employment agency and halfway house that enables some of the legion of odd women to find the professional skills and emotional wherewithal needed to function in a shifting society which would otherwise demean them, ignore them or leave them behind.² Greg’s intemperate solution was emigration for surplus females—shipping them off to some colony like Australia, where the supply did not yet equal the demand.³

By such an extreme proposal, Greg typified the most infuriating brand of antifeminist thinker, the kind who above all felt it incumbent upon the guardians of the status quo to attempt to keep single women from becoming self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency, after all, might lead to women’s joining men in reaping the benefits of independence. Furthermore, if being single could be a pleasant or even bearable experience, it might encourage emulation by other women, thus seditiously causing a still greater imbalance between the sexes. Rather than risk this disaster, better to get the redundant women out of the way.

A look at Ayala’s Angel (1881), one of Anthony Trollope’s last novels, casts further corroborative light on the gloomy predicament of the Victorian odd women, this story’s heroines being two sisters who, finding themselves orphaned, temporarily join the ranks of the redundant. Trollope’s scheme of things extols the ritualistic arts of courtship and brooks no tampering with the inevitable felicity of matrimony—or the passivity of female candidates for that blessed state. Neither Lucy nor Ayala Dormer makes the slightest move toward creative interference with her own fate. The sisters can be stubborn or willful. They can reject the oppressive actions of the relations upon whose mercy they are thrown. Nonetheless, it is their underlying passivity that sets the tone of the book.

The thought of breaking away, holding the reins and steering her own course never occurs to either one. Death and the workhouse are the only alternatives they can imagine. The sole act of independence comes when one sister, ignoring her family’s disapproval, calmly announces her intention to marry a penniless sculptor. But this is merely a case of independence acting as handmaiden to absolute dependence.

Though the close of an era was fast approaching, with the signs making themselves known in the streets, as it were, this late novel by Trollope reveals little of such progress.⁴ The book’s inconsistencies, its complacency and its other flaws show the author’s powers in decline, despite some air of unease that suggests an ill wind circulating about Trollope’s large, secure cosmos. So, not without an intruding whiff of ambiguity (possibly unintentional on Trollope’s part), it is the firm purpose of Lucy Dormer and her sister Ayala to become un-odd, unredundant. In this, they are like scores of heroines in his and other Victorian fiction.

For—taking these altar-bound heroines to stand for thousands of others—it is as if the positive option symbolized by Nunn and Barfoot in the next decade (and even the negative option, outlined by Greg a dozen years earlier) existed in an adjoining but inaccessible sphere of influence. And it is simply that, until well into the twentieth century, it was problematic to delineate in fiction a respectable economic, intellectual or spiritual place for the unattached woman—and much more problematic to occupy such a place in real life.

But who exactly were these odd women, this group without caste? Primarily of the middle class, they were the daughters, sisters and, sometimes, widows of clergymen with insufficient livings, of unsuccessful merchants, of underpaid civil servants and schoolmasters with large broods. Their lives were circumscribed by gentility, chastity, prudery, submission and low expectations. It was possible for such a woman to take refuge in being a bluestocking, but this answered for little without means. For fully the first three-quarters of the century—except among the lower classes—it was not counted as desirable or alluring to have robust health, let alone a strong will or a sturdy intelligence. An appropriate amount of fainting and weeping was what was wanted in a truly womanly sensibility, as was a degree of blushing and simpering most becoming to a hothouse delicacy. It is of prime importance to remember that the lack of occupation (other than such duties and pastimes as needlework, prayers, good works, approved reading, social visits and husband hunting) indicated the presence of genteel respectability. And, for years on end, there seemed to be no way to escape from the double bind: she was doomed if she didn’t conform, damned if she did. That is, until external stirrings began to arouse corresponding awakenings in the minds and hearts of the so-called odd women.

The gradual erosion of the old order meant that the single female’s survival rites could be made up of activities more genuinely life-sustaining than insipid clock-watching. There were, in fact, unguarded moments during the nineteenth century when polite civilization’s attention was elsewhere, its virgins and spinsters freed from cloying indifference: this was when progress was made.

The traditional occupations previously open to a self-supporting woman covered a wide but uninteresting spectrum, depending on her class. The most popular by far was that of governess.⁵ Odd women could be milliners, dressmakers, seamstresses and shopgirls, while their poorer sisters could be laundresses, factory girls, milkmaids, pit girls and fishwives. Artisan work, often in cottage industries, offered some women employment in watchmaking, painting china and miniatures, gilding and lacemaking. As time went on, schoolmistresses, female bookkeepers, nurses and secretaries became more common. Bohemian circles and raffish crowds admitted artists’ models and actresses; the well-bred did not, or kept them at arm’s length. Scores of volumes have been written on the Victorian prostitute and her position as symbol of the darker side of the era. Not infrequently, women driven to sell their bodies had failed to succeed at or endure any of the jobs listed above. (And, of course, some of the odd women took up pen and paper.)

There is one particular career, however, that women did not follow, a role that to this day is a singular one for either sex; yet is is in such a role that Catherine Louisa Pirkis cast her heroine, Loveday Brooke, in a set of stories almost exactly contemporary with Gissing’s The Odd Women.

The stories in The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1893, 1894), taken as a whole, are, as well as can be determined, among the first seven or eight works of fiction in which a woman performs as an investigator of criminal cases.⁶ Loveday⁷ is directly in the mode of her few predecessors, for she turns her natural talents to sleuthing and quickly outdistances her male colleagues in providing solutions to mysterious puzzles. Like Anonyma’s Mrs. Paschal and like Andrew Forrester’s Female Detective, her two most important ancestresses, she is a perfect example of the odd woman.

Says Mrs. Paschal:

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. An offer was made me through a peculiar channel. I accepted it without hesitation, and became one of the much-dreaded, but little-known people called Female Detectives. . . .

The Female Detective herself had taken up her work as a way of avoiding genteel poverty, and Forrester has her explain that while she recognizes that her trade is a despised one [she is] not ashamed of it.⁸ Both she and Mrs. Paschal are highly valued employees, bearing out the idea that since criminals may be of either sex, so may be those that bring them to justice.

As for Loveday:

Some five or six years previously, by a jerk of Fortune’s wheel, [she] had been thrown upon the world penniless and all but friendless. Marketable accomplishments she had found she had none, so she had forthwith defied convention, and had chosen for herself a career that had cut her off sharply from her former associates and her position in society. For five or six years she drudged away patiently in the lower walks of her profession; then chance, or, to speak more precisely, an intricate criminal case, threw her in the way of the experienced head of the flourishing detective agency in Lynch Court.

This man, Mr. Ebenezer Dyer, quickly perceives Loveday’s outstanding abilities and soon foresees that she will bring both fresh profit and credit to the business.

Speaking of his favorite operative in glowing terms that are out-of-character for him, he enumerates her virtues:

Too much of a lady, do you say? . . . I don’t care twopence-halfpenny whether she is or is not a lady. I only know she is the most sensible and practical woman I ever met. In the first place, she has the faculty—so rare among women—of carrying out orders to the very letter; in the second place, she has a clear, shrewd brain, unhampered by any hard-and-fast theories; thirdly, and most important item of all, she has so much common sense that it amounts to genius—positively to genius, sir.

All of these attributes save that in the first place are borne out by the seven tales detailing Loveday’s experiences; as for the first, she follows orders only according to her own interpretation of the exigent facts of the case at hand. She does not hesitate to talk back to Mr. Dyer or to be mysterious about her methods. Needless to say, the male stereotype of the female unable to carry out a set of commands could scarcely have applied to the oppressed and submissive Victorian woman, and while, in this final decade of the century, it is intended as a mark of jocular approbation that Loveday can do so, in fact it is a sign of her uniqueness that she chooses not to.

From these rather scanty biographical data, one thing emerges as contrary to virtually all historical reality: the fact of her chosen profession. It is difficult to comprehend how their creators came to decide on such an anomalous career for their heroines when there were no real-life models to work from, or to understand how they could make those heroines’ decisions convincing even within the context of their stories. The decisions, it seems, must simply be taken as given. Some light can be shed on the more fundamental problem, however, if we look at popular literature rather than social fact. Detective stories were the rage, and lady anythings were equally faddish; the combination of these two drawing cards thus meant surefire success for escapist reading. (Similarly, women explored space in the pages of science fiction long before NASA appointed them as astronauts in early 1978.)

The Female Detective’s use of the word despised to describe the low regard in which her career was held by the very society that demanded its services raises yet another point worth mentioning. The very essence of criminal investigation is antithetical to what was considered proper feminine breeding, involving as it does eavesdropping, snooping and spying, dissimulation, immodest and aggressive pursuit and physical danger. The ability to perform these acts, even as portrayed in a fictional character, required a hardening that stemmed not from the example of the so-called New Woman (whether the Girton girl, i.e., the hearty, athletic university graduate, or the suffragist) but rather from the intuitive perception that to be an odd woman could have emancipating advantages, enabling one to act deliberately outside of the system.

Talk about the emancipation of women, complains a male character in A Dateless Bargain, an 1887 Pirkis novel, nine-tenths of them want protection, not emancipation. The Mrs. Paschals, the Female Detectives and the Loveday Brookes are of the remaining one-tenth who clearly do not want or need protection,⁹ and as petticoated police (Mrs. Paschal’s phrase) they are unflinchingly self-reliant. Readers of the exploits of the Female Detective are reminded that the woman detective has far greater opportunities than a man of intimate watching, and all three of these women make solo forays into the suspects’ midst, ignoring risks and caring only about bringing their cases to successful conclusion. Loveday, with no protection other than her wits, proceeds on her assignments in the various disguises of secretary, unemployed nursery governess, interior decorator and lady lodger and, once, as herself (this last in order to smoke out a wrongdoer); it is no coincidence that in four of these masquerades she resembles the sort of woman so often forgotten and invisible in a household or neighborhood, a Loveday diminuendo. When she does need assistance, she seeks it with professional dignity and receives it as an equal.

Loveday is described as nondescript in her visage and prim in her dress; her appearance is belied by her assertiveness and her ability to command immediate respect. She is both logical and intuitive; her method is to begin each case with her mind a perfect blank. She is shrewd and highly observant, very sure of her own powers and courageous. Although she lives and breathes her work and never seems to rest, she is not particularly eager for glory and, in fact, frequently sees others (men) taking credit for the fruits of her labor. As a sleuth appearing less than six years after Sherlock Holmes, she makes use of a magnifying glass, as well as such tricks of the trade as invisible ink and ciphered messages. But perhaps the most significant thing about Loveday Brooke can be seen in the story The Redhill Sisterhood. The most telling clue for her in that case is the way the two women suspects handle children; Loveday’s perception of their tenderness—which she distinguishes from rough kindness—convinces her that these are not the criminals she is seeking.

There is no romantic interest in Loveday’s life, although her circumstances may be regarded as, in a certain sense, romantic in themselves. Yet, as the incident illustrates, she is neither sexless nor oblivious to her sex. Her empathy for women in unfortunate situations makes her more than one-dimensional. As a genuine odd woman she stands outside of mainstream society, but she is a woman all the same. By this single stroke Pirkis indicates the tenderness with which she regards her heroine, and it is why Loveday occupies a secure if minor place among her ilk.

The first six of the seven stories that constitute The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective initially appeared in the pages of The Ludgate Monthly, a popular London miscellaneous magazine. The first episode was published in the February 1893 issue (Vol. IV) and the stories continued to come out, one a month, through July 1893 (Vol. V). These six stories are reprinted here exactly as they appeared in The Ludgate Monthly, with all 59 of the original illustrations by Bernard Higham.

In March 1894 Hutchinson & Co., London, brought out the first book edition, reprinting the six Ludgate Monthly tales and adding a seventh, Missing! (the text of which has also been reprinted in the present edition, following the Ludgate Monthly stories). The cloth cover had set in it an unusual ornament: a calling card inscribed in script with the name Loveday Brooke. A second edition was published in July 1895.

Catherine Louisa Pirkis was born on the sixth of October, 1839, in Hoxton Old Town, Shoreditch, Middlesex. Her father was Lewis Stephens Lyne, a stockbroker; her mother had been a Miss Susan Dixson. Her grandfather, the Reverend Richard Lyne, had written both a Latin grammar and a primer, and another relation was Sir William Lyne, formerly Premier of New South Wales, Australia. When she was thirty-three she married Fleet Paymaster Frederick Edward Pirkis, of the Royal Navy, who had been decorated for service on the Comus in the British-Chinese conflict of 1856–58. After retiring from active duty (in the year following his marriage), ending nineteen years of service, Frederick Pirkis, along with his wife, devoted himself to humanitarian causes and, in particular, to the work of the National Canine Defence League, of which he became Chairman and Honorary Treasurer. Mrs. Pirkis supported her husband’s position with wide organizing activities; moreover, she wrote energetically in support of the antivivisection movement.

Apart from The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ best-known books were Lady Lovelace (1885) and A Dateless Bargain (1887). Loveday, her last published book of fiction, is quite different from the earlier works, which are typically overwrought romantic melodramas, dealing with missing heirs, family skeletons, blackmail, revenge and the like. In none of these stories is one character’s pervading intelligence so firmly in control as is Loveday’s in hers. Mrs. Pirkis wrote many short stories for magazines, contributing to, among others, Belgravia (of which Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of the sensational Lady Audley’s Secret [1862], had been the editor from 1866 to 1876). In the early part of her career, much of Mrs. Pirkis’ work was published anonymously.

In 1910, on the twenty-ninth of September, she died at her home in Redcliffe Square, South Kensington; exactly a week later, Frederick Pirkis also died, and they were buried at Kensal Green.¹⁰

MICHELE SLUNG

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¹ Why Are Women Redundant? was published originally in the National Review in 1862.

² The theories and activities of Nunn and Barfoot interestingly prefigure Miss Climpson’s Cattery, a curious institution that appears in several of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Because Lord Peter believes that Miss Climpson and her ilk—the hordes of unemployed, untrained and underoccupied middle-aged ladies in the British Isles—are an untapped natural resource, he

Reviews for The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective

[antiquary_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not the first lady detective, but an early one; interesting short stories though with a rather mushy sentimental frame story.

[devenish_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Catherine Louisa Pirkis who died in 1910,wrote several melodramas and this one volume of short stories. These seven stories which feature the early female detective Loveday Brooke are of considerable interest both to the general reader of crime fiction and to the more enthusiastic specialist.Brooke is employed by Ebenezer Dyer who runs a detective agency in London. This firm is frequently consulted by the official police (things just don't change do they ?) Loveday is most useful in working undercover in a variety of jobs close to the scene of the crime,where a man could not go. These are well written early stories in this ever popular genre.

[drled_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

These stories were first published in The Ludgate Monthly, London, February-July 1893, with the exception of "Missing", which was first published in book form as part of The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1894.This is a collection of stories about one of the first female detectives. I found them to be delightful.