The Female Detective
Read The Female Detective Online
Authors: Andrew Forrester
The Female Detective
Andrew Forrester
With a Foreword by Alexander McCall Smith
and an Introduction by Mike Ashley
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Originally published in 1864
Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library
First E-book Edition 2016
ISBN: 9781464206481 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
Contents
Alexander McCall Smith
One of the questions I am asked most frequently at literary events is this: why have you chosen to write about women? This question, I suspect, is a familiar one for male authors who choose to have female protagonists in their books, and no doubt the answers they give are varied. My own answer focuses on the nature of the conversation that my female detectives have. If that small office in Gaborone were to be home to two male detectives rather than two female sleuths, I imagine that the conversation would be much less interesting. This is not to say that menâand male detectivesâdo not talk about things that matter; it is just that they would be less likely to make the same observations that Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi make. Their conversation, in effect, would be less personal, less subjectiveâand less emotionally engaging. Of course any generalizations about the behaviour of men and women will give rise to accusations of gender stereotyping, but why deny that, for one reason or another, there are differences in the perspective that men and women have on the world? Certainly it would be an unobservant detective who failed to notice these.
Why do we so enjoy reading about female detectives? Part of the enjoyment, I suspect, lies in the satisfaction that we derive from 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. We live today in a society in which gender equality has been, to a very large extent, realised. At the time at which
The Female Detective
was written, of course, things were very different. The relegation of women to a subservient position within societyâa position in which they were outsiders to the world of work and affairs that was dominated by menâmeant that there was a novel thing for women in the investigation of crime. Today one might expect that novelty to have faded, as women do all the jobs previously monopolised by men. Yet the idea of the female detective as being special or unusual still persists in literary and cinematic treatments of criminal investigation. Why do we still think that female detectives are in some way special and make, for that reason, good reading?
The explanation probably has to do with gender stereotypes. At the time at which
The Female Detective
was written, these stereotypes would have had the force of established truth. Middle-class women did not engage in what were seen as âunladylike activities'. They were protected from the harsh realities of life; they were thought to be in regular need of smelling salts; they were assumed to have no interest in sex; there were many jobs that a woman simply could not be expected to do because they were viewed as unsuitable for finer female sensibilities. The idea of a woman being involved in the murkiness of criminal detection must have seemed a radical and adventurous one in Victorian times: women simply did not do that sort of thing. That, of course, has changed. Women are expected now to do everything that men do, including taking on the role of submariners, infantry soldiers, and, of course, forensic pathologists. Yet even as they are cast in these roles, there may be a residual feeling, shared, perhaps, by women as much as by men, that there is something in certain functionsâincluding fighting crimeâthat is at odds with the more gentle nature of women. Nonsense say the proponents of equality: men and women are the same when it comes to the vices and the virtues. That may well be true, but it is also true that there is a residual belief that women are inherently more endowed than men are with qualities of sympathy and care. A concomitant of this, then, would be that the woman sleuth is somehow slumming when she ventures into a criminal world that is dominated by crude, unsympathetic and cruel men.
Of course there are those who argue that such a view of woman's nature is old-fashioned and sexist. That may be so in certain expressions of it, but then feminist philosophers themselves have been at pains to stress what they call the âethics of care', suggesting that woman do have a greater ability to show care in their dealings with others than do men.
There are other factors, though, that I suspect lie behind the popularity of the female detective. One is that the woman sleuth is often portrayed as the outsider in the male world of policing and criminal investigation. This operates in two ways: one where the woman is a member of a police force, and one where she is the freelance who operates either at the request of the official investigators or as a well-meaning bystander. In the case of the female detective who is part of a police team, the outsider status results from the fact that women police detectives frequently operate in a male-dominated force. They are frequently portrayed as having to deal with sceptical and sexist superiors who are only too eager to detect weakness and when we see them defeat these overbearing men we feel the satisfaction that usually accompanies the victory of the underdog.
Another source of pleasure is the way in which the female detective uses the apparent marginality of her position to good effect. Once again we are in the territory of stereotype. Men are to be distrusted but women are assumed not to be interested in whatever it is that is being concealed. Then 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. Of course the world is not like that. If one is in the position of having to distrust others, then one would be well advised to distrust everybody regardless of gender.
This book has a claim to be the beginning of a rich and continuing tradition in crime literature of the female detective. That tradition shows no signs of abating, even if the factors that distinguish the respective roles of men and women in society are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Society may be becoming more androgynous, but the niche occupied by the female detective will continue to be a rich source of literary pleasure. The world of the narrator in
The Female Detective
is far removed from our own, but just as we recognise hers then she would probably recognise ours. Human nature and the struggle between good and badâthat essential kernel of the detective novel, as Auden famously declaredâhas not changed much in the years that separate us from Victorian England. Crime and deception still flourish, but so too do the curiosity and intuition that we see so charmingly portrayed in these pages. Ultimately there may be a woman to set things right, which prompts the Freudian conclusion that the female detective, when all is said and done, is mother.
Mike Ashley
The detective you will meet in the following stories is usually regarded as the first female professional detective to appear in fiction. She is a mysterious and somewhat shadowy figure. We learn little about herâeven her name is not revealed. At times she calls herself Miss Gladden, though admits that this is âthe name I assume most frequently in my business'. Even the police don't seem to know her real name, referring to her simply as âG'. She often works undercover and only introduces herself as a detective when the need arises and her investigations come to a close.
All this obfuscation makes sense when you realise that when
The Female Detective
was first published in May 1864 there were no women detectives in Britainâin fact there were no women police officers either, and would not be, officially, for another fifty years. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police Force, the first organised police agency in Britain, had only been established since 1829, and its plain-clothes detective branch, the first Scotland Yard, was not created until 1842. The word âdetective' did not pass into common usage until 1843.
In the United States the Scottish-born Alan Pinkerton, whose renowned private-detective agency had been established in 1850, employed Kate Warne as a detective from 1856. She was aged only twenty-three at the time and was the first professional woman detective in America. It was not until 1908 that America employed its first official policewoman, Lola Baldwin, who assumed her duties in Portland, Oregon in April of that year.
In Britain, the Women Police Volunteers was formed in 1914 chiefly to patrol the streets and parks to keep an eye on the activities of young women. Eventually, in 1918, the London Metropolitan Police established its own Women's Police Patrols.
All this shows that
The Female Detective
was years ahead of its time. Little wonder that âMiss Gladden' operated undercover and regarded herself as one of the âsecret' police. And the nation seemed more than prepared to accept the idea. Only months after
The Female Detective
appeared,
Revelations of a Lady Detective
was published anonymously but usually attributed to William Stephens Hayward. Both volumes were an attempt to chart new territory in the âpolice procedural' novel or âcasebook' which had become popular following the publication of
The Recollections of a Policeman
by the pseudonymous âWaters' in 1852.
Both these books, though, are something of a false dawn. Further stories or novels featuring women detectives did not appear for some years and did not start to become popular until the turn of the century. In Britain, Catherine L. Pirkis introduced her resourceful amateur detective in
The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective
in 1894. Baroness Orczy, best known as the creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel, created her police detective, Molly Robertson-Kirk, in
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
(1910). Often credited as featuring the first professional female detectives, these books appeared over thirty years after
The Female Detective
, serving to emphasise the book's significance.
Women had appeared as amateur detectives, not always willing ones, in many stories and novels prior to 1864, notably in âDas Fräulein von Scuderi' by E. T. A. Hoffmann, published in 1819, where the eponymous fräulein helps establish the innocence of a man accused of murder. In
The Adventures of Susan Hopley
(1841) by Catherine Crowe, Hopley finds herself in the role of an amateur detective in trying to right many wrongs which her family have suffered. Wilkie Collins's heroine in the short story âThe Diary of Anne Rodway' (1856) shows exceptional detective skills in her pursuit of a murderer.
These works, though, involved women who, by circumstance, were forced to investigate matters. The idea of a woman actually being paid as a detective was something else entirely. Despite her secrecy, it becomes evident in
The Female Detective
that the mysterious âG' is not employed directly by the police force. Rather she is a form of enquiry agent who works independently but on behalf of the police. The police officers certainly know her, but not all would necessarily be aware of the cases in which she is involved, some of which, such as âTenant for Life' which opens the collection and is illustrated on the cover, are ones that she herself initiates. She therefore acts independently but also in collusion with the police. It is also evident that by the time these stories are told she has retired as a detective and is now able to reveal all.
By all accounts the police did employ such female agents, their identities usually hidden, but their work occasionally reported when cases came to court. The benefits of their role were not overlooked. Reflecting upon her own work, âG' acknowledges that women can get into places that men cannot, as they are not seen as a threat, and also that other women will frequently talk openly to them when they would not speak to men. Such opportunities come to the fore in the following stories which may well be based on true events, for all that the activities of female agents were usually unreported and unpublicized.
If so, how did the author create such cases, and who was the author? When the book was first published it was credited to Andrew Forrester, Jr. Forrester's name had appeared on two earlier collections, both of the police casebook variety:
The Revelations of a Private Detective
, published in July 1863, and
Secret Service, or Recollections of a City Detective
, which followed in January 1864. A later volume was
The Private Detective
(1868). Written in the first person, these stories purported to be true, though the first volume had barely been on the shelves a fortnight when two retired London police officers, the brothers John and Daniel Forrester, wrote to
The Times
disclaiming that any of the accounts related to their own work and that âno such person as Andrew Forrester' was known to them.
The Forrester brothers, former Bow Street Runners, were well known in their day. The editor Edmund Yates recalled how alike they looked, as he often saw them standing outside the Mansion House in the City of London. George Augustus Sala passed their offices in Whitechapel, noting that they were already at work early in the day. They were regarded as âbounty hunters' by some and enquiry agents by others. Their activities became especially well known in 1858 due to their involvement in the high-profile case of the Royal British Bank where the bank's directors were charged with conspiring to defraud their shareholders and customers. The Forresters were the leading City detectives for forty years. Even if the stories by âAndrew Forrester' were not drawn directly from their cases, theirs was a notable name to adopt.
The true identity of Andrew Forrester remained something of a mystery, though it should not have done.
The Female Detective
contains a story âA Child Found Dead: Murder or No Murder' which had first appeared as a separate pamphlet in 1862 under the title
The Road Murder
by J. Ware. Apart from the two versions of the story having a slightly different form of opening words, they are basically the same. It was a reworking of the notorious murder of the infant Francis Saville Kent at Road House in Wiltshire in 1860, a case that Forrester specifically refers to in a footnote at the start of âA Child Found Dead'.
The Road Murder became one of the most infamous murders of the decade and has more recently been resurrected for a new generation of readers by Kate Summerscale in
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
(2008). In her endnotes to this thoroughly researched book, Summerscale draws attention to the connection between Ware and Forrester, a link that had otherwise been overlooked or forgotten for over 140 years.
J. Ware was James Redding Ware (1832â1909), a writer and editor who turned his hand to all kinds of subjects, producing books on such diverse matters as the Isle of Wight, card and board games, dreams, famous centenarians and English slang. It is unlikely that he earned much money from his writings because in 1877 he reported (in
The Times
) that his lodgings in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London were in a dilapidated state of repair but that he lived there because it was cheap. He even had to suffer another resident playing a chamber organ in the rooms below and went so far as to bring an injunction against the organist to stop the nuisance, though his action failed.
The fact that âA Child Found Dead' had first appeared in 1862 might suggest that the character of the âFemale Detective' had been created two years before the appearance of the book, but in fact she does not appear in the 1862 version. In the 1864 version âG' is simply recounting a case that she says had been given to her in manuscript form and thus the investigation is not her own. The same applies to âThe Mystery', the final story in the collection. This is also presented as a story told by another, and had first appeared without an introduction by âG' in the issue of the weekly magazine
Grave and Gay
for 14 June 1862 under the title âThe Mystery of Harley Street'. This tells us that Ware did not create the character âG' until he came to write
The Female Detective
in 1864.
Grave and Gay
may well have been edited by Ware. It ran much of his material under both his own name and as Forrester, as well as anonymously (at least one example later appeared in a collection of stories credited to Ware). This included an historical novel set in medieval France,
Rolande: A Tale of the Great Massacre
which does not appear to have been collected in book-form. Another story, âWhat Happened at a Morning Concert' in the issue for 26 July 1862, later appeared in
The Private Detective
as âThe Troubles and the Escape of a “Perfect Young Lady”'. Perhaps most remarkable of all, and worth a brief aside, is that
Grave and Gay
began, in its short life, the first English serialization of Victor Hugo's
Les Misérables
, which was not available in a book edition in England for another three months. The English translation was undertaken by Lascelles Wraxelles, but the abbreviated serialization in
Grave and Gay
is uncredited and one cannot help but wonder if it was abridged by Ware himself.
In
The Female Detective
, especially in the longer stories âTenant for Life', âThe Unravelled Mystery' and âThe Unknown Weapon', Ware developed a strong, three-dimensional character, with ingenious skills of deduction and logic. âG' is not a woman who undertakes her investigations lightly or simply for the thrill of adventure. She has a conscience that, though it does not interfere with her following her investigations to their natural conclusion, does often present her with a dilemma and a feeling that seeking a legal right is not necessarily the same as finding true justice.
Although these cases are written by a man, they depict a woman's outlook, and one of determination and conviction. It is quite probable that, inspired by his investigations into the Road Murder, James Ware became fascinated by other police cases which resulted not only in his Forrester books but also a later collection,
Before the Bench: Sketches of Police Court Life
(1880), and in the process he might have encountered some cases involving women enquiry agents. Whether inspired by real events or entirely fictional it is clear that the mysterious âG' is first and foremost the pioneering female detective.