The Experience of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective

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"C. L. Pirkis..." Catherine Louisa Pirkis (1841-1910) was a British author who published numerous short stories and 14 novels between 1877 and 1894. Best known today for her detective stories featuring Loveday Brooke, Pirkis, who published as "C. L. Pirkis" during her lifetime, was one of the earliest of many notable female mystery writers, and her creation, Loveday Brooke, was an early example of the formidable female sleuth mystery sub-genre. "Loveday Brooke..." By circumstances upon which Pirkis never elaborated, at about 24 years of age "Loveday had been thrown upon the world penniless and all but friendless." Discovering that she had no "marketable accomplishments," she embarked, for reasons never made clear, upon a career as a private detective, eventually coming to the attention of Ebenezer Dyer, head of a "flourishing" detective agency, who characterized his unconventional operative as having "so much common sense that it amounts to genius-positively to genius." Pirkis' stories include all the elements that fans of the classic "British" mystery expect-false identities, disguises, ciphers, secret messages, romantic entanglements, false clues and plot twists-but the occasionally unorthodox methods of the detective may be a bit unexpected. Relying more on deduction, intuition, and that "common sense" than upon minute scientific investigation of physical evidence, Loveday Brooke frequently surprises clients and suspects alike by making only the most cursory inspection of places and objects which would seem the most obvious, and important, possible sources of clues. But wrongdoers underestimate her at their peril, and clients, and occasionally colleagues, do so at the risk of personal or professional embarrassment, while generations of readers have enjoyed following along in "The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective." This volume contains these classic mystery short stories, first published in "The Ludgate Monthly" in London between February and July, 1893, with the exception of "Missing!" which first appeared in the original edition of this book in 1894: The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step; The Murder at Troyte's Hill; The Redhill Sisterhood; A Princess's Vengeance; Drawn Daggers; The Ghost of Fountain Lane; Missing! The unabridged text of the 1894 compilation is faithfully reproduced in this volume. The cover illustration by Bernard Higham was among the illustrations which accompanied the stories in "Ludgate's," after the fashion of the British periodicals of the day, and originally appeared with "A Princess's Vengeance."