Consider the ingredients of this mystery: an evil baron; a mistreated wife; several lucrative insurance policies with fraud suspected; babies switched by Gypsies; poisoning; one of those classic confused English wills - and at least three murders. They're all ingredients in what is said to be the first real detective novel ever written - The Notting Hill Mystery, by Charles Warren Adams. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.
No less an authority than Julian Symons is quoted as calling The Notting Hill Mystery the first detective novel. It first appeared as a serial in a magazine called Once a Week in 1862 and 1863 and was published as a book in 1865. Certainly if not the first (depending on your definition), it is certainly among the first. The story is told through documents, put together by an insurance investigator named Ralph Henderson, who serves as our detective. He is hired by several insurance companies to look into the suspicious death of a young woman whose husband – known as “Baron R.” – had just insured her life with each of those companies for a substantial sum of money. That investigation is carried out and reported to us, not in a narrative, but rather in the form of statements – depositions, letters, diaries, chemical analyses and any number of other documents, and Henderson selects and arranges the documents to reveal a terrifying story of multiple murder. Among the elements uncovered during the investigation, we find a deadly duel, the kidnapping of a young girl by Gypsies, a most curious way to poison someone, and more. At the center of the affair, like some kind of bloated spider, is Baron R., a specialist in mesmerism – what we more generally refer to today as hypnotism. Henderson’s pursuit of witnesses and his analysis of the many different reports slowly but certainly build up the conviction in his own mind and in ours that he is dealing with what we might consider an early serial killer. Many of these elements, to be sure, turn up again in later works - some are still being recycled today - and it's fascinating to see the source of so many plot devices.
The Notting Hill Mystery has been released as one of the British Library's excellent series of Crime Classics, published in the United States by Poisoned Pen Press, which provided me with a copy for this review. This new edition includes an excellent introduction from author and editor Mike Ashley, as well as a number of the illustrations which originally accompanied this story when it was published as a serial.
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