Mr Bazalgette’s Agent Read online

  MR. BAZALGETTE’S

  AGENT

  LEONARD MERRICK

  With an Introduction by Mike Ashley

  THE BRITISH LIBRARY

  This edition published in 2013 by

  The British Library

  96 Huston Road

  London NW1 2DB

  Originally published in London in 1888 by George Routledge and Sons

  Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library

  ISBN 978 0 7123 57029

  Typeset by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

  Printed and bound in Hong Kong by Great Wall Printing Co. Ltd

  INTRODUCTION

  Mike Ashley

  THE book you are holding is both rare and intriguing.

  Until this republication it was almost impossible to locate a copy outside of the major research libraries. The online catalogue of all of the major UK libraries, COPAC, lists only five copies, though it’s probable there are a few more held by dedicated collectors. The reason it is so rare is that the author, Leonard Merrick, apparently tried to buy up all of the copies he could find and destroyed them. Why? He never said, other than that he thought the book was terrible. Its not the first time that an author has come to dislike his first published book, for that’s what it was, but it is unusual for them to go to the expense of buying as many copies as they can in order to destroy them. There has to be a reason, and I shall speculate on this shortly.

  First published in 1888, this book is almost certainly the first ever British novel to feature a professional female detective. There were quite a few short stories about female detectives published during the middle of the nineteenth century. The British Library has republished two of the earliest such collections, The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester and the anonymous Revelations of a Lady Detective, most likely written by William Stephens Hayward. Both first appeared in 1864.

  In the late 1860s the evolution of the detective novel as a distinct literary medium began to gather pace, starting in 1868 with the publication of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, featuring Sergeant Cuff. Other notable works include Monsieur Lecoq (1869) by Emile Gaboriau, with his eponymous police detective; The Leavenworth Case (1878) by the American writer Anna Katharine Green, with her police detective Ebenezer Gryce; and, most sensationally, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) by Fergus Hume, who was born in Britain but was then living in New Zealand. He had the book privately published in New Zealand, where it was ignored by one and all, but when it was reprinted in Britain it sold in its hundreds of thousands, becoming one of the bestselling crime novels of the period. Then came A Study in Scarlet, the first of the Sherlock Holmes adventures by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 – and from then the detective novel really started to flourish.

  But in all of these novels, and their lesser-known contemporaries, the detectives were men. So when in 1888 Leonard Merrick detailed the adventures of the unemployed twenty-eight-year-old Miriam Lea, after she responds to an advertisement by Mr Alfred Bazalgette’s private detective agency, he was embarking upon the first full-length novel about a female detective.

  Or was he? There are two possible forerunners that may challenge this claim, but we have to consider them carefully. One book often cited as featuring the first ever female detective is Ruth the Betrayer; or, The Female Spy by Edward Ellis, which was first serialized in weekly parts starting in February 1862. Ellis was the pseudonym of Charles H. Ross (1835-1897), though he sometimes wrote with a retinue of collaborators. He produced a mass of cheap penny dreadful and stage melodramas under several pen names and although he is almost forgotten today, the name of his best-known comic creation, Ally Sloper, at one time passed into the language. At the start of Ruth the Betrayer, she is actually called ‘the female detective’, by a policeman who whispers to a victim, ‘she’s a female detective – a sort of spy we use in the hanky-panky way when a man would be too clumsy.’ But it is soon revealed that she is not a female detective at all, but is ‘attached to a notorious Secret Intelligence Office, established by an ex-member of the police force.’ The suggestion is that she is an undercover agent, at times an agent provocateur, but as the novel progresses it soon becomes evident that she’s not really that either. She is her own agent, more than happy to use the police to her own ends to exact revenge on her enemies. Even her name is uncertain. Some call her Ruth Trail, but she’s also known as Belinda Belvidere, a rich widow who runs a bawdy establishment. Whoever she is, she was not a detective, except when it suited her purpose to adopt such a guise.

  The other forerunner to Mr Bazalgetie’s Agent is another matter entirely. The American equivalent of the penny dreadful was the dime novel: cheap fiction written for the masses, often serialised in story-papers and then issued in paperbound booklets with extremely small print. One of the most productive of the dime novelists was Harlan Page Halsey (1837-1898), who, in 1872, created the private detective Old Sleuth. The character became sufficiently popular for the publisher to release the Old Sleuth Library, which ran for twenty years from 1885 and was then recycled as Old Sleuth Weekly. Halsey wrote the original stories under the alias Tony Pastor, but soon the stories appeared as if told by Old Sleuth himself, narrating either his cases or those of fellow detectives, and other writers contributed to the series. One that Halsey almost certainly wrote was The Lady Detective, first published in 1880 and later reprinted under the title The Great Bond Robbery; or, Tracked by a Female Detective. This introduced Kate Goelet, a twenty-three-year-old woman of ‘rare beauty and intelligence’ who occasionally works for Captain Young, a former chief of the New York detective force but who now runs his own private agency. Young employs Goelet to become acquainted with Henry Wilbur, who works for a New York bank and is known to have embezzled a million dollars. It is Young’s belief that Wilbur is an innocent victim controlled by an unknown woman, and it is Goelets task to pursue Wilbur, identify the ‘siren’ who controls him, and recover the stolen bonds, for which she will be rewarded with a fee often per cent of what she recovers.

  There is no question that Goelet is a genuine detective and that she is almost certainly the first female detective in a novel-length story, albeit a dime novel.

  Which brings us to Miriam Lea and Mr Bazalgette’s Agent, which was published in July 1888, eight years after Halsey s The Lady Detective. Lea is taken on as a private detective by Mr Bazalgette’s firm and her first task is to find a bankers clerk, Jasper Vining, who had previously forged financial documents which allowed him to acquire £40,000, and who has now absconded, with two bonds totalling £1,500. They do not know where Vining has gone, but suspect him to be somewhere in Europe. All that Miss Lea has to identify him is a year-old photograph. And so the pursuit begins.

  On the surface it might seem that Mr Bazalgette’s Agent could owe some debt to Halsey’s dime novel, because they share not only a starting point but also, to some extent, an ending, which I shall not reveal here. However, these are the only points of similarity. Merrick’s novel takes a totally different route from Halsey’s. It is a much more lighthearted and less formulaic journey, taking us through a Europe with which Merrick was clearly familiar and leading on to South Africa, depicting the Kimberley diamond fields where Merrick had in fact worked between 1882 and 1885 as a superintendent of labour and where he had nearly died of typhus (which was then known as camp fever).

  But could Merrick have read Halsey’s The Lady Detective, and did he later feel some guilt over using that novel as the starting point of his first book and thus seek to destroy all copies? We will probably never know. Merrick’s early years, according to his biographers William Baker and Jeanette Robert
s Shumaker, in Leonard Merrick: A Forgotten Novelist’s Novelist (2009) are clouded in obscurity’. He was born in Belsize Park, London in February 1864, and his surname was Miller. His father, William Miller, was a successful businessman who ensured that young Leonard had a first-class education, but when the boy was in his late teens his father lost money in a business venture and that was when, in 1882, he went to South Africa. He returned to London around 1885, changed his name to Merrick and became an actor, touring England, but he soon became disillusioned and turned to writing. After a few short stories he produced his first novel. Mr Bazalgette’s Agent was neither critically nor commercially successful, so Merrick returned to the stage, this time in New York, but gainful employment was limited and he wrote a second novel which he discovered, when he returned to England, had proved a success. From then on he produced a stream of short stories, novels and plays to much critical acclaim. It seems he was admired by his fellow writers more than the public. No less than J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, called Merrick ‘the novelist s novelist’.

  Merrick never wrote another detective novel. Many of his books, such as When Love Flies Out O’ the Window (1902) and Conrad in Quest of His Youth (1903), explore the tribulations of individuals trying to make their way in the world. Of particular interest is The Worldings (1900), which is strongly autobiographical and is a study of manipulation and deception. The novel concerns Maurice Blake, the overseer of a diamond mine in South Africa, who has a sufficient resemblance to his friend Phil Jardine that after Phil’s death Maurice takes on Phil’s identity with a view to inheriting the dead man’s family fortune. Before arriving in South Africa, Maurice had travelled to both the United States and Australia. There is no evidence that Merrick did this, but the question hangs there. Did Merrick, or Leonard Miller as he then was, happen to read Halsey’s The Lady Detective? Did the idea of that story stay with him so that when he turned to writing he used it, perhaps subconsciously, as the basis for his own first novel? And did he later regret that and therefore seek to destroy all copies?

  Its an intriguing line of speculation, but perhaps, on balance, the question is academic. Mr Bazalgette’s Agent is a far superior novel to The Lady Detective. Its writing and plotting are considerably more ingenious. It uses the diary form, which allows much to be hidden, relating events through the narrator’s eyes rather than a third person’s omniscience. The novel thus works as much on what is concealed as what is revealed. Even though it is a first novel it shows an unexpected sophistication and maturity, far removed from the brash crudeness of the American dime novel.

  Merrick died in 1939, just a month before the outbreak of the Second World War. His first novel has been virtually unknown for over a century, yet Mr Bazalgette’s Agent is well worth reviving, and should proudly claim the honour of being the first British detective novel to feature a professional female detective.

  TO

  THE EDITOR OF “WIT AND WISDOM,”

  I Dedicate

  THIS MY EARLIEST ATTEMPT AT BOOK-FORM,

  IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE

  OF THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL ENCOURAGEMENT

  I RECEIVED TO WRITE.

  LEONARD MERRICK.

  LONDON, June, 1888.

  CHAPTER I.

  July 4th, 1887.

  A DREARY boarding-house sitting-room commanding a view, when the slatternly domestic chances to clean the windows, of an equally dismal London street.

  The society usually met with, I imagine, in an establishment where a refined home and superior cuisine are advertised as procurable in a musical family at twenty-five shillings per week, and the inevitable landlady who assures you, à propos of nothing, she was “brought up to be a lady,” evidently conscious you would never find it out.

  The “musical family” has in this instance resolved itself into a red-haired child who murders “The Carnival of Venice” with the pertinacity of a barrel-organ deprived of its variety; and the society, to be explicit, consists of several young men who hurriedly depart after an early breakfast, two middle-aged females, and a valetudinarian who interests himself in floriculture, assiduously raising something impossible to determine, but presumably mustard-and-cress, against the wall in the backyard.

  And these are my surroundings! For the time being, I am alone in the long bare apartment where Susan will presently come to lay the dinner. The pièce de resistance yesterday was beef, resistance indeed so strong that it defied your teeth; to-day therefore the entrée will be “curried mutton,”—otherwise beef, but réchauffé and rechristened.

  Let me review my position! I have earned my living in the schoolroom and on the stage; that is to say, I was a governess until people discovered I had been an actress, and I was actress till they discovered I could not act. What next? I have nothing to do; I am eight-and-twenty; and I own precisely four pounds thirteen and sixpence in the world. Three weeks more of the “refined home” to anticipate, and after that the deluge, with perhaps half-a-sovereign to buy an umbrella. Truly, Miss Lea, your prospects are brilliant!

  And yet I believe I could smile at it all in other companionship; I fancy I could enjoy the present, and leave the future to take care of itself, if (detestable conjunction) there were only a present to enjoy. The sepulchral gloom of this ménage communicates itself and weighs me down in spite of my disposition; the ghastly silence and the faded respectability play havoc with my nervous system. Low spirits are as infectious as scarlet fever; and there is nothing upon earth more infections than scarlet fever,—excepting a rich man’s laugh!

  I suppose it was dulness that drove me to these blank pages as a confidant, on the principle on which we always seek a friend, to share our sorrows, not to divide our joys. This, by-the-bye, suggests that if there were no trouble in life there would be no friendship either; how unflattering a reflection for humanity!

  Nevertheless I know that to commence a diary is a mistake; I feel it while I yield to the temptation. It permits you, that fatal volume, to write all the spiteful things you must not say; and once begin to make spiteful comments on your neighbours, and you tacitly admit your own life to be a failure. Mine is to be a success. Yes, future repository of all my peccadilloes, I am not forgetting I shall be thirty in two years; I am painfully aware that unless something unforeseen turns up before the end of the month I shall bid Mrs. Everett’s select circle a reluctant adieu at the express recommendation of my physician to try the South of France; and notwithstanding, I repeat it emphatically,—my life shall be a success! How? I wonder!—Goodness, what a fool I am, and here is Susan with the cloth!

  * * * * *

  July 7th.

  When I penned the foregoing entry three days ago, I was idealess; to-night, on the contrary, I am revolving a suggestion so positively original, that for the moment it deprived me of breath. The credit of this achievement belongs to a Mr. Claussen, perhaps the only man in the house with whom my conversation has extended further than admitting it was a fine morning, or saying “thank you” for the salt.

  He is a clerk in an insurance broker’s office somewhere in the City, and being a foreigner contrasts to advantage, socially, with the other residents, Messrs. Smith, Brown, and Robinson,—also clerks, but British ones. This evening he came upon me as I was studying the “wanted” sheet of the newspaper, and, to my own astonishment, I presently found myself explaining a good deal more of my circumstances than was necessary, even going so far as to hint that an occupation would not be totally undesirable.

  “ ‘Everything comes to him who knows how to wait,’ does not the proverb tell us?” he remarked in English. “Ach, but that is a proverb so little understood. He has to know how to wait, and by the time he has learnt, the knowledge is of trifling personal use; he is too old, yes?”

  “Precisely,” I returned, “waiting in an armchair, for instance, is scarcely the advice intended?”

  “Ha, ha, yon see my meaning, yon have perception!”

  “Some while ago one of our periodicals published
a series of articles informing people how to live on a pound a week; an interesting sequel would be ‘How to make it.’ The instruction does not go so far as that, however,” I observed, “yet I wonder of how many thousand lives it is the chief, the only study!”

  “But,” said Mr. Claussen, “you are a lady of brains, of education—”

  “And,” I added boldly, “I am looking here to ascertain their marketable price!”

  “So, so! Nevertheless, my dear Miss, you are wrong; for it is not to this page, I would say to such a woman, she should look!”

  He laid a squat forefinger contemptuously upon it as he spoke, completely filling a vacant situation!

  “No,” he repeated, “not there!”

  “ ‘Not there, not there, my child!’ Where then, Mr. Claussen?”

  “Turn to the last sheet, my dear Miss; to the back of the paper instead!”

  “You don’t mean the ‘Agony Column’?”

  “Yes,” he exclaimed, “you have it now! Certainly it has occurred to me that a woman of the world, a woman of appearance, of capacity, with whom, you follow me, the path is not of rosebuds, might glance there with advantage! Es ist nur ein Einfall, but it has been my thought! Here is a business where breeding must be a recommendation; do they pay for breeding in the linen-draper’s shop? Here is a work where beauty is a passport; it is no passport to the schoolmistress, not at all. I am right, yes? Look!”

  I did look, and this is what I read:

  “ALFRED BAZALGETTE, 7, Queen’s Row, High Holborn.—Suspected persons watched for divorce, and private matters investigated with secrecy and despatch. Agents of both sexes. Consultations free.”

  CHAPTER II.

  July 8th.

  I PASSED a bad night; perhaps it was only to be expected. At four A.M. I told myself even to have considered such a vocation was preposterous; at five I decided that, should the weather be fine after breakfast, I ought at least to obtain particulars; and then I grew alarmed again, and prayed it might be wet. It having rained persistently for three weeks the compromise calmed me, and I finally fell asleep.