After I finished reading Loveday Brooks, I read both the Hilda Wade and Dorcas Dene books. Though she's not available in ebooks and I had to buy a paper copy, Dorcas Dene was better by far. She is a former actress who marries an artist, but after he goes blind from an illness and cannot work any longer, Dorcas needs to support their family. She takes up detective work through a recommendation from a neighbor and friend; eventually she inherits the whole detective agency from him, becoming famous and working with police and private clients alike. Dorcas's adventures are narrated by Mr. Saxon, a playwright and former employer from Dorcas's days as an actress. He runs into her one day, is fascinated by her new career, and eventually becomes her informal "assistant" on cases. He'll drop by, or Dorcas will send for him, and he'll get to listen to or sometimes participate in a mystery with her. It's nice that he doesn't mind obeying her orders and that there's no love triangle with her husband Paul. They're just mature adults, all happy to be friends with each other with no jealousy or rivalry. I do wish sometimes that Saxon wouldn't blank out certain people's names, in typically Victorian style, because it makes some tales hard to follow. If you don't want to name Prince ___ of ____ and his former wife the Countess, then make up a fake name and fake country, please! Otherwise the tales are entertaining mysteries.
Hilda Wade on the other hand was a huge disappointment. I thought she might be fun, being a nurse, and that she'd be like Judith Lee, who had a regular job teaching deaf people but did her detection on the side. But no, Hilda Wade's book was maybe 40% mysteries then devolved into travel/adventure/revenge plot. It was a lame revenge plot to boot, not clever at all. SPOILERS below.
Hilda Wade (not her real name) is wealthy but becomes a nurse because she's trying to get to Professor Sebastian, whom she blames for her father being accused of murder and killing himself. Hilda has a big Plan with a capital P, which she deems her life's work, and reason to refuse her love interest, a doctor, because she will never marry until her father's name is cleared. But her plan seems very vague and passive, mostly just working at the hospital with Sebastian, hinting to him about the past, and hoping to work on his conscience somehow. She doesn't seem to have any particular trick or scheme planned to get the proof she needs. It's Sebastian who makes the first decisive move, attempting to infect her and kill her with an injection. She narrowly escapes, gives the proof to her love interest, then quits the hospital and resolves to disappear. The love interest also quits because he doesn't need to worry about money, and he follows her to Rhodesia in Africa, even buying a farm to be near her while she teaches local children and tries to formulate a new Plan. Eventually of course Sebastian follows them and tries to kill both of them by inciting a rebellion by the Matabele! What the fuck kind of James Bond villain has he transformed into? When they survive, he chases them to India and conspires to murder them again by getting them tricked into the forbidden Tibet. Long story sort, he gets infected with some plague, so the doctor and nurse have to rescue him and keep him alive until he finally gets grateful and remorseful enough to agree to confess and clear the name of Hilda's father.
It's such a shitty Plan of Hilda's, relying on so much luck and happenstance. Plus the book is terribly misogynistic, imperialist, and racist. I know, it was written by a Victorian, but so were other books I've read, such as Dorcas Dene, Loveday Brooke, and Judith Lee. But none of those contemporaries are nearly as god-awful as Hilda Wade by Grant Allen (with no less then Arthur Conan Doyle finishing the last story after Grant Allen died). One of the so-called mysteries is actually about Hilda Wade predicting that a man will murder his wife in a year, and it coming true. Hilda claims that there's a physical type of woman with some hunched back, particular profile, and nagging tendency who she sees frequently in the hospital because they are always being assaulted by their husbands. She claims it's the women's fault, and that there's no "type" of man who is inclined to beat women. That even a high-class gentleman who won't beat such a nagging woman will eventually let the anger build up inside until he explodes into murder, and that the murder is of course the woman's fault for inciting him. And never once does Hilda suggest that the solution is to warn the man to just divorce her or, due to difficult divorce laws, to just leave that woman and take custody of the children, because fucking Victorian men had that power. They had the power to shut up their wives in asylums and do plenty more to make women's lives miserable and restricted of any freedoms. Yet Hilda Wade continually says the man was forced into the murder and plots with his family to "save" the husband who flees the murder (leaving behind his children who were supposedly so precious that he needed to save them from his wife!) and eventually goes out on a boat to let a storm kill him, because these suicide-by-danger things run in his family whenever someone feels they've lost their honor in battle, etc.
Fuck Hilda Wade's victim-blaming and whitewashing the cowardly murderer. And fuck Grant Allen writing racist shit about the black people in Rhodesia, whom he acknowledges have a reason to rebel against the white people who stole their country, yet roots for the whites to win anyway. And fuck him for the depiction of the Tibetan Buddhist monks as being intent on murdering the white intruders whom they suspect of being Christian missionaries. Even worse, because Hilda has read one book about prayer wheels, she pretends that they're Buddhists too, and fools the monks, and shows tourist photos, and her doctor invents an automatic prayer wheel, so all the monks now regard the white visitors as holy and/or magical. Fuck Grant Allen writing the Buddhists as stupid primitives who cannot even recognize that a bottle of alcohol is not a sacred artifact! Fuck his shitty book that I almost didn't finish several times. I should have skipped several chapters of his NONSENSE so I could get to the end where Sebastian finally confesses his wrongdoing. Fuck Conan Doyle for reading this tripe, being friends with this dude, and helping finish his shit book. Fuck, fuck, fuck! What I resent most of all is that anyone would characterize Hilda Wade as a "detective" or this book as a detective novel when most of the book is NOT the promised mystery set in a hospital. False advertising. A deplorable bait and switch.
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