Friday, October 22, 2021

Hilda Adams (Miss Pinkerton)

I've discovered a new lady detective, who is actually a nurse, named Hilda Adams. She works with a police inspector Patton who jokingly calls her Miss Pinkerton after the famous detective agency. Hilda Adams is even written by a woman author, Mary Roberts Rinehart, known as the "American Agatha Christie."

Having been tricked into reading the horrible Hilda Wade book, I was wary about this Hilda Adams, but fortunately, there was nothing to fear! Hilda Adams is everything I had wanted, a competent nurse who helps solve mysteries by gathering clues and reasoning things out. She's not on some ludicrous, convoluted revenge quest, nor is she anti-feminist. There's just a murder mystery to solve, and some characters to get to know. What a relief. The Miss Pinkerton book also taught me about "hypodermic tablets" which are tablets to be dissolved in sterile water before filling a hypodermic syringe with the solution; these tablets used to be a thing before vials were common in medicine. Nowadays they just have the powder in a vial, break it, and reconstitute it with water or lidocaine for injections, so they don't bother forming tablets with it.

Apparently I've started the series out of order. I just finished the Miss Pinkerton novel, published in 1934, but I need to go back and read The Buckled Bag novella of 1914. I couldn't find this novella in ebook form, except on Amazon, so I bought it as a hardcopy instead.

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