Loveday Brooke

Lately I've been reading the detective stories of Catherine Louisa Pirkis. Loveday Brooke is one of several fictional female detectives created in the Victorian era, long before real women were hired as police detectives. I don't like Miss Brooke as much as I liked Judith Lee, but she's an interesting character all the same. I wonder if the unusual name "Loveday" was supposed to indicate a Cornish ancestry or if it was just to echo Sherlock's unusual first name.

Anyway, she seems to work for a private detective agency owned by Mr. Dyer, but from the first story, she feels free to argue spiritedly with Mr. Dyer, and he never scolds her in sexist terms. He admits that she's a great detective, and his praise for her reminds me of how Allan Pinkerton often praised Kate Warne in his accounts of the cases they worked together. I do notice that the stories don't always give the clues that you need to solve them. For example, the narration will say that Brooke spent 15 minutes closely examining a room, but not tell you any of the clues she found there, until the end of the story when she explains her solution to Dyer. Then you'll suddenly find out "I found long blond locks in the fireplace, meaning somebody cut their hair and burned it to disguise themselves." So that's not entirely fair to the reader trying to figure out the mystery.

Also, I noticed in one of the tales the phenomenon of Church vs. Chapel. (I also came across this in one of the Daisy Dalyrmple mysteries.) Not being Christian myself, I thought the main religious divisions were between Catholics and various Protestant denominations. But it seems that, in England at least, religious people also make the distinction between High Anglican Church and the so-called "low" dissenters from the Church of England, who nevertheless are still Protestants sneering at the "papists". The so-called nonconformists call themselves "chapel" or by the specific name of their sect, such as the Wesleyans. It's a weird quirk for someone like me who doesn't know that there's any difference between church and chapel. Weird how religious people are so insistent on their tiny differences in doctrine. Oh, and the Loveday Brooke mystery features end-of-the-world cultists known as millenarians. The more things change, the more they stay the same.