The Case of the First Mystery Novelist Book Review By PAUL COLLINS

The Case of the First Mystery Novelist

Book Review By PAUL COLLINS

    Reader, never mind whether the butler did it. Here’s a real mystery for you: Who wrote the first detective novel?

     For years, the usual suspect was Wilkie Collins, who made the great leap from Poe’s short stories to the Victorian triple-decker novel with “The Moonstone,” published in 1868. Across the Channel, there was Émile Gaboriau and his Monsieur Lecoq, who made his first appearance a few years earlier in “L’Affaire Lerouge,” though Arthur Conan Doyle later had Sherlock Holmes declare Lecoq “a miserable bungler.”

In 1975, however, the novelist and critic Julian Symons revealed in The Times of London a veritable hidden panel in the library of detective literature: a third novel that predates them both. It was “The Notting Hill Mystery,” an anonymous eight-part serial that ran in Once a Week magazine starting on Nov. 29, 1862. But the book itself presented something of a mystery.

“It is unnecessary for us to state by what means the following papers came into our hands. . . . ,” the editors of Once a Week declared. And that was just the problem. Symons pointed out that nobody knew who the author — identified by the pseudonym Charles Felix when the novel was released in book form in 1865 — really was.

But reader, I know whodunit.

First, the murders. “The Notting Hill Mystery” begins in London, where the wife of Baron R** dies after sleepwalking into his home laboratory and drinking a bottle of acid. It looks like a tragic accident, until a private investigator, Ralph Henderson, notices that the baron took out five life insurance policies on Madame R**, worth a staggering £25,000. Hired by an insurance company, Henderson descends into a maze of intrigue that is perfectly and deliriously Victorian: there’s a diabolical mesmerist, kidnapping by gypsies, mysterious carnival girls, slow-poisoners and a rich uncle’s will. Oh, and murder . . . or rather, three murders.

“The Notting Hill Mystery,” published with illustrations by George Du Maurier (the grandfather of Daphne), was extraordinarily innovative. It is presented as Henderson’s own findings — diary entries, family letters, depositions of servant girls, even a chemical analyst’s report. Its crime-scene map and reproduced “evidence” were ideas that wouldn’t gain currency again until the 1920s. The book is both utterly of its time and utterly ahead of it. Symons, writing in 1975, admitted it “quite bowled me over.”

Victorian reviewers felt the same way. The Guardian found it “very ingeniously put together,” and The Evening Herald hailed its genius, declaring, “The book in its own line stands alone.” The one mixed appraisal shows a reviewer grappling for the first time with just what a detective novel is. “The Notting Hill Mystery,” according to The London Review, was “a carefully prepared chaos, in which the reader, as in the game called solitaire, is compelled to pick out his own way to the elucidation of the proposed puzzle.”

Charles Felix quickly issued a Christmas gift book called “Barefooted Birdie” and the unremarkable novel “Velvet Lawn.” Another novel appeared so briefly that the British Library now holds one of only four known copies. And with that, the inventor of the detective novel vanished like the killer in a locked-room mystery.

Until now.

After months of investigating with the dogged tenacity of Ralph Henderson pursuing Baron R**, I was no closer than Symons in discovering the solution. Even an 1868 “Handbook of Fictitious Names” didn’t help: Felix is listed, but next to his pseudonym is nothing but a mockingly empty pair of brackets. More mysteriously, correspondence with the man is entirely missing from the archive of Saunders, Otley & Company, his book publisher.

Every detective tale needs a red herring, and I had mine: What if I pursued the author of “Velvet Lawn” instead? I found that just one other work, an earlier and unpublished one, shared the same title. It was written by . . . Benjamin Disraeli.

The novelist and prime minister was an intriguing suspect: authors are loath to leave good titles unused, and Saunders, Otley published some of Disraeli’s books. His political career also gave him good reason for a pseudonym. Yet the mystery’s style didn’t match his, and it’s unmentioned in his copious correspondence. I had a motive, but no smoking gun or fingerprints: Disraeli wasn’t my man.

I’d almost given up when I stumbled upon a Literary Gossip column in The Manchester Times for May 14, 1864. The sole identification of Charles Felix had lain there for 146 years, hidden in this single sentence: “It is understood that ‘Velvet Lawn,’ by Charles Felix, the new novel announced by Messrs. Saunders, Otley & Co., is by Mr. Charles Warren Adams, now the sole representative of that firm.”

The author was hiding in plain sight: There was no publisher correspondence with Charles Felix because he didn’t need to write to himself.

A traveler and journalist once best known for a fractious elopement with a relative of Samuel Coleridge, the publisher Charles Warren Adams (1833–1903) bears other hints of his authorship. There’s his law school training, which underlies the novel’s evidentiary process, and a previous book on parlor games — The London Review’s puzzle comparison struck closer than its reviewer realized.

Adams was also notably religious, which points to an unexpected characteristic of the first detective novel: it’s profoundly moral. It asks not just how evil exists, but what is to be done about it. Detective novels, like sermons, can offer gratifyingly simple answers to those questions, or thoughtful and troubling ones. In some the miscreant is identified and hauled off in cuffs, perhaps after a final demonic rant: Bah! And it could have worked. . . .

Adams offers no such comfort. “The Notting Hill Mystery” ends not in triumph, but in anguish. Its solution is ingenious and utterly mad, leaving its investigator to wonder, pondering the evidence: “Is that chain one of purely accidental coincidences, or does it point with terrible certainty to a series of crimes, in their nature and execution too horrible to contemplate?” We never get an answer.

Adams himself had little more closure: Saunders, Otley soon went bust, and after a desultory series of projects he became the editor for an antivivisection society. He died in 1903 without ever taking credit for the immensely popular genre he had pioneered.

“The Notting Hill Mystery” has languished in obscurity ever since, but thanks to the British Library’s new program to digitize 19th-century novels for print on demand, it’s once again available in an exact copy of its original edition.

We may never know whether the Baron R** did it. But as for the identity of the first detective novelist, the case may finally be closed. 

Paul Collins is the author of “The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars,” to be published in June.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/Collins-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb3&pagewanted=print