In the Shadow of Agatha Christie (MbD’s Deal-me-in Challenge)

In the Shadow of Agatha Christie
by Leslie S. Klinger (editor)
isbn: 9781681776309
Publication Date: January 1, 2018
Pages: 328
Genre: Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Pegasus Crime

Before Agatha Christie became the world's Queen of Crime, she stood on the talented shoulders of the female crime authors who came before her. This splendid new anthology by Leslie S. Klinger brings these exceptional writers out of her shadow and back into the spotlight they deserve. Agatha Christie is undoubtedly the world's best-selling mystery author, hailed as the "Queen of Crime", with worldwide sales in the billions. Christie burst onto the literary scene in 1920, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles; her last novel was published in 1976, a career longer than even Conan Doyle's forty-year span. The truth is that it was due to the success of writers like Anna Katherine Green in America; L. T. Meade, C. L. Pirkis, the Baroness Orczy and Elizabeth Corbett in England; and Mary Fortune in Australia that the doors were finally opened for women crime-writers. Authors who followed them, such as Patricia Wentworth, Dorothy Sayers and, of course, Agatha Christie would not have thrived without the bold, fearless work of their predecessors and the genre would be much poorer for their absence.

So while Agatha Christie may still reign supreme, it is important to remember that she did not ascend that throne except on the shoulders of the women who came before her and inspired her and who are now removed from her shadow once and for all by this superb new anthology by Leslie S. Klinger.

I read these stories as part of my 2023 short story challenge.  I am also going to append all my short story/individual reviews for this specific anthology to this post (in the order they’re read) so that upon completion it will serve as a review of the whole of the book.

March 12, 2023

The Blood-red Necklace by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace ✭✭✭½:

A mystery, sort of, but definitely a complete story about a string of incredibly valuable pearls, an upcoming wedding and a Moriarity-like villainess of crime.  The method was diabolical, but the doe-like innocence of the bride to be was too child-like, and she was constantly referred to as a child, so that the whole thing just felt tainted by fumes of pedophilia.  She was of an age of consent, but still, the fact that I had to keep reminding myself of that kept me from fully enjoying what was a really well written story.

Previously posted comments about other stories are behind the break.

January 22, 2023

Point in Morals by Ellen Glasgow ✭✭✭✭:  

This wasn’t a mystery at all, but, as the title suggests, a question of morality.  Do we hold all human life to be sacred to the point that humanity in general suffers for it?

The story is set on a yacht, apropos of nothing, but I suppose the story must be set somewhere.  It gets off to a rocky start as the author is writing what would be the perfectly natural sort of conversation a group of people relaxing and enjoying themselves would have: the chaotic kind.  You know, the kind where everyone interrupts everyone else?  This is immediately how the story begins, and it takes a bit of concentration to keep track of not only the introduction of the characters but who is interrupting whom.  This goes on for a page or so before the story settles on the recollection of the mesmerist’s (also, none of the characters have names, just categories).  Once the mesmerist starts his tale everything settles down and becomes straightforward.

What follows is the mesmerist’s story of his encounter with a corrupted man and the results of that encounter.  He leaves it to his fellow sailors: did he do the moral thing under the circumstances?

Ellen Glasgow won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1942 novel In This Our Life, and the skill that won her that prize is evident here.  Initial confusion aside, the story is engrossing and leaves the reader with no answers, just food for thought.

As an aside, at the start of the story – which was written in 1899 – the sailors are all talking about the degeneration of society; it’s amusing in a disheartening way to read their complaints and realise that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

(January 15, 2023 Note: I realised looking at others’ posts that I missed the very first day of this challenge, January 1st, so I drew two cards and read two short stories this week to get me back on schedule.)

Mrs. Todhetley’s Earrings by Ellen Wood ✭✭✭: 

I read this as a make-up/catch-up for my Deal-me-in Challenge of 2023, as I got a late start.  First published in 1873 in the third volume of collected stories concerning Johnny Ludlow, this one was crippled right off the bat by introducing 4 characters off-handedly in the opening paragraph.  I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to the story by assuming that these characters were well-known or at least familiar to those that read the collected stories during their heyday, but I was scrambling to catch up before I’d even begun.  The character introductions didn’t stop at the first paragraph either, but at least their pace of entrance slowed marginally.

The setup of the ‘mystery’ – which it isn’t, by the way, in any real investigative sense – starts from that first paragraph.  It’s well written (aside from the cascade of characters), but as I just said, it’s not really so much a mystery as it is a comedy of sorts.  I don’t know how to explain it without spoiling the story and I know there are some reading this that have plans of reading the collection, so I’ll just say there’s a deserved comeuppance involved and that the true tragedy of this story were some of the characters involved in it.  I wouldn’t run away from reading further Ludlow stories, but I wouldn’t seek them out, either.

The Ghost of Fountain Lane by C.L. Pirkis ✭✭✭✭: 

I liked this one much more than the previous story.  This was a true mystery – two of them, actually, handled by a lady detective and an Inspector with the local constabulary of Brighton.  Miss Loveday Brooke is supposed to be on holiday in Brighton when the Inspector finds her pouring over newspaper accounts of the “Ghost of Fountain Lane”, a mystery she says contains several points that elevate it from the ridiculous and mundane.  Inspector Clampe insists that the mystery he offers is ‘far from ridiculous and much more interesting’.   As she can go nor further with the ghost mystery, given that she only has the newspaper accounts and has not been hired to solve it, she agrees to assist Clampe with his problem.

It’s not a fair-play mystery; the clues are found but the details of those clues, which are the important parts, are left out until the end.  It isn’t, in fact, a very hard mystery to solve for Miss Loveday Brooke, our intrepid detective – more a matter of being in the right place at the right time, with the knowledge she has about the titular mystery allowing her to put it all into the correct context, but it’s an entertaining and very well written mystery nonetheless.

I’d happily read more mysteries by C.L. Pirkis.