EDGAR WALLACE

THE GIRL FROM

SCOTLAND YARD

(A MYSTERY)

A. L. BURT COMPANY (©1926, 1927)

Clearly this is a reprint edition, but an early one.  Perhaps even 1927.

CONDITION:  No jacket, book is GOOD with shelfwear, slight crack in the binding at the title page (which is slightly loose), but otherwise well bound.  Previous owner’s name and partial address in pencil on the front flyleaf.

A female sleuth takes over in the fast-moving tale by Wallace.

Commentaries on line:

What a delight this was. Edgar Wallace often writes strong, intelligent women as side characters or, in the case of a favorite of mine - Angel of Terror - villainesses, but here we have a true female detective driving the story. In fact, this was very female-centric because the villain is also a woman.

Edgar Wallace stories are always entertaining, and this is no exception. Leslie Maughan is the only female detective at Scotland Yard, and she's brilliant and focused on her cases. Only her latest one is confusing, because she's convinced that the man who was convicted of forgery was innocent, and now he's out of jail, strange things are happening around him...

A fabulous detective romp with a "girl" detective - who is one step ahead of everyone (including the reader) and generally has jolly good fun solving the case. 

There are several passages that are either sexist, racist, or classist (for want of a better word), but I don't think that's surprising given the book was written in 1926. I do think that a book should be judged by the standards of when it was written rather than today's standards. Therefore, given that it was written two years before women got equal voting rights, it's actually pretty enlightened. In fact, Leslie Maughan is a much more well-rounded character than some of the drippy heroines you see in some of today's films and books.

Leslie Maughan is a treat - a confident investigator who follows her own trail. It is refreshing to find a female protagonist in books of this era, bringing to mind the Madame Rosika Storey series by Hulbert Footner, and the stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart.

Everyone in the story has a secret, and a couple of them are good ones. Druze's "handicap" is revealed, however, the reasoning behind it is not. This story has lots of threads and they are all tied up nicely at the end.

A fast paced detective story set in class conscious London, which surprisingly for that era has a female detective as its main character. Plenty of twists, some obvious, others not so clear, but all tied up neatly at the end.

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