Baroness Orczy

• Born: September 23, 1865
• Birthplace: Tarna-Örs, Hungary
• Died: November 12, 1947
• Place of death: London, England

Type of Plot: Amateur sleuth

Principal Series: The Old Man in the Corner, 1905-1925; Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, 1910; Patrick Mulligan, 1928

Contribution

One student of crime literature calls Baroness Orczy’s stories about the Old Man in the Corner “the first significant modern stories about an armchair detective.” They are also rather unusual because of the purely cerebral interest the old man has in crime as a kind of mind game. The extent of his amorality is brought out in the story of “The Mysterious Death in Percy Street.” In this story, Polly Burton realizes, after the old man has laid all the evidence and a damning piece of evidence—a length of rope with expert knots in it—before her, that the old man is the murderer, reveling in his own cleverness.

All the stories about the Old Man in the Corner and his journalist friend, Polly Burton, are set in the A.B.C. Shop, where he habitually sits, as the baroness describes him in her autobiography, “in his big checked ulster [and] his horn-rimmed spectacles,” with “his cracked voice and dribbling nose and above all . . . his lean, bony fingers fidgeting, always fidgeting with a bit of string.” Either he or Polly brings up some mysterious death or crime that is currently intriguing the public. The events are outlined by the old man, who, when he is not sitting in his corner, is an avid reader of newspapers and spectator in courtrooms. He is unfailingly—and jeeringly—contemptuous of the police and their feeble efforts at untying the knots clever criminals tie. With Polly as a respectful but not necessarily credulous listener, he proceeds—once the facts as he sees them are presented—to point to the logical and necessary solution to the mystery. He scoffs at offering his insights to the police because he is sure that they would not listen to him, a mere amateur, and because he admires the clever criminal who can outwit the entire Scotland Yard. Thus, the emphasis is on the ingeniously planned crime and the intelligent, rigidly logical unraveling of it, not on psychology, human relations, or morality.

Biography

Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy was born in Hungary on September 23, 1865, the daughter of Baron Felix Orczy, an able composer and conductor, and Emma (née Wass) Orczy. Problems, including a peasant uprising, persuaded the Orczys to move first to Budapest, then to Brussels, followed by Paris and, finally, London. Young Emma, or Emmuska, as she preferred to be called, was educated first as a musician and later, when it was decided on the advice of Franz Liszt—a family friend—that she did not have the gift of music, as an artist. Emmuska attended the West London and Heatherly schools of art. She showed promise and was for several years an exhibitor at the Royal Academy. While she was at the Heatherly School of Art, the young Hungarian met another student, Montagu Barstow, who was to become her husband.

It is intriguing that a woman who did not speak a word of English until she was fifteen years of age should have become one of the most prolific and popular writers of her time, writing more than thirty books in her adopted language. Baroness Orczy explained how the idea of becoming a writer first came to her. She and her husband were staying with a family whose members wrote stories that they sold to popular magazines. Orczy, observing that people with little education who had never traveled were successful as authors, decided that she, with her international background and solid education, should be able to do at least as well. She wrote two stories and found to her joy not only that they were accepted immediately—by Pearson’s Magazine—for the amount of ten guineas but also that the editor asked that she give him first refusal on any future stories she wrote. A literary career had begun.

It was suggested to the baroness that she write detective stories, somewhat in the style of the then very popular Sherlock Holmes stories. As a result, she created the strange old man who sits in his unobtrusive corner, playing with his string and expounding in a haughty and self-assured manner to the reporter from The Evening Observer on crime and criminals. The stories caught on and ran as a series in The Royal Magazine before their publication in book form under the title The Old Man in the Corner in 1909.

Baroness Orczy produced four series of stories featuring Bill Owen, the peculiar old man, and Polly Burton. The first two series ran in The Royal Magazine from 1901 to 1904 and were later published as The Old Man in the Corner; the third series was first published in book form as The Case of Miss Elliott in 1905. The fourth and last series was published in 1925 as Unravelled Knots. Baroness Orczy is most famous, however, not for her detective stories but for being the author of that epic of trans-Channel derring-do and genteel romance, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905).

At the outbreak of World War I, Barstow and Orczy moved to Monte Carlo, where they lived until his death in 1943; at that time, the baroness moved back to London. During her later years, Orczy’s literary output slowed down considerably, although she kept writing until the end—her autobiography, Links in the Chain of Life (1947), being her last published work. Baroness Orczy died in London, at the age of eighty-two, in 1947.

Analysis

Although Baroness Orczy wrote more than thirty volumes of fiction, she is remembered principally as the author of the books about the Scarlet Pimpernel and to a lesser degree for her stories about the armchair detective in the corner of the A.B.C. Shop, Bill Owen. The first of these stories, “The Fenchurch Street Mystery,” appeared in the May, 1901, issue of The Royal Magazine and is typical of all of them.

“The Fenchurch Street Mystery”

Polly Burton, a journalist at The Evening Observer, is sitting in the A.B.C. Shop reading her newspaper and minding her own business when a curious little man irritably pushes his glass away and exclaims, “Mysteries! . . . There is no such thing as a mystery in connection with any crime, provided intelligence is brought to bear on its investigation.” Burton is, not surprisingly, somewhat taken aback by being spoken to by a total—and very strange—stranger, but even more so because he seems to have read her thoughts: She is reading an article in the paper dealing with crimes that have frustrated the police.

Such is the opening of the first story about the Old Man in the Corner. Each of the stories is structured in the same way: First, the reader is drawn into the mystery to be investigated and solved via a conversation in the A.B.C. Shop between the two series protagonists; next, the data of the case in question are presented, usually by Bill Owen; and finally, Owen presents a neat, logical solution.

In the exposition phase, the old man gives what almost amounts to an eyewitness account of the facts of the case. He often carries with him photographs he has taken or obtained of the protagonists of the case or, as is the case in “The Fenchurch Street Mystery,” copies of pertinent letters or other documents. The old man also spends a considerable amount of his time in courtrooms listening to cases and taking notes. He is always early enough to get a seat in the first row, enabling him to see and hear everything. His account of the facts is lively and full of colorful adjectives and verbatim quotations from witnesses. He makes sure to call Burton’s attention to those aspects of the case that seem to him pertinent to its solution.

Despite the old man’s care to present the case so that all an intelligent person has to do is make logical deductions, Burton, like the police before her, invariably has to give up and leave the unraveling of the mystery to her interlocutor. The cases discussed at the A.B.C. Shop are to everyone but Owen true mysteries that seem to resist all attacks. To Owen there are no mysteries. He is so cocksure about this that he irritates Burton, who insists that crimes the police have despaired of solving are, for all intents and purposes, insoluble. The old man demurs: “I never for a moment ventured to suggest that there were no mysteries to the police; I merely remarked that there were none where intelligence was brought to bear on the investigation of crime.” He has deep contempt for the public, the journalists covering crimes, and, especially, the police. The last phase of each story is the protracted denouement: the Old Man in the Corner demonstrating how, with a minimum of insight into the human psyche and a keen intelligence, he can make any case that to the rest of the world is opaque become crystal clear.

This three-part structure is characteristic of every one of the stories about the Old Man in the Corner. Orczy makes the reader her confidant and interlocutor. The stories are told in the first person by Polly Burton as if she were telling them to a friend over a cup of tea. The relationship between the reader and the narrator is, in other words, somewhat like that between Polly Burton and the old man who tells his stories to her. This device of pulling the reader into the narrative by making him an intimate, common in nineteenth century literature, is used to great effect by Orczy.

The stories move back and forth in time and place, between the present in the A.B.C. Shop and the various events in the past that are presented as facts pertinent to the case. The old man creates in vivid narrative the situations in which the protagonists in the case have found themselves, or he re-creates the testimonies of witnesses at the trial in colloquial detail and color. Thus, the reader must follow the case on two levels: as Polly Burton’s alter ego or confidant and as a witness to key events and the proceedings in court. The mixture is both entertaining and pleasing.

In the end, the reader, along with Polly Burton, must put up with the old man’s annoying complacency and self-congratulatory air as he points out where the police and everybody else went wrong. The old man jeers at the police and brims over with conceit because he has presented all the evidence so that any intelligent person should be able to come to the one and only conclusion to the case, the conclusion that he has made and that makes sense of all the facts. When he has made the last knot on his string and thrown his pearls before the swine, he gets up, leaving Polly and the reader to wonder what exactly has happened. Have they just witnessed a brilliant amateur sleuth at work, or is the old man a hoax, fleet of fingers and mouth but actually merely testing the credulity of novelists and their readers?

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the stories about the Old Man in the Corner is that they are totally devoid of morality and human compassion. The world conjured up by the author is one where greed and the will to outsmart society’s laws and their representatives reign supreme. The emphasis is on how a smart criminal can get away with nearly anything. The criminal described and hailed as a hero by the old man—and by extension by his author and her alter ego, Polly Burton, who is only minimally interested in seeing justice served—is a virtual Nietzschean superman, a Raskolnikov who is not plagued by the monsters of conscience and who is never caught. If a criminal comes to a bad end in the stories, it is through the agency of fate, not the police or society. The successful culprit, as in “The Dublin Mystery,” sometimes lives only a short time to enjoy the results of his mischief before being overtaken by fate and a natural death. It is almost as if the author wanted to suggest that even if the agents of socially defined justice are slow of wit, the most vicious of malefactors—the father murderer (“The Dublin Mystery”) and the murderer of the rightful heir to the earldom (“The Tremarn Case”), to name two examples—will eventually be brought to justice and executed by some kind of higher agency.

This bare-knuckled social Darwinism, where the smart outwit, defraud, and kill the less smart with no immediate punishment, is both the strength and the weakness of Orczy’s stories. The Old Man in the Corner and his cases are interesting because they introduce readers to an amoral universe that lies beyond the stories found in the newspapers. These stories are superior to the later series about Lady Molly of Scotland Yard and the Irish lawyer Patrick Mulligan because they are not sentimental. Their amoral tone is refreshing because it is so unexpected and so unusual. The weakness, however, is that it is hard for the reader to care about anything or anybody in the stories. The two protagonists, Polly Burton and Bill Owen, are too sketchy and, in Owen’s case, too unsympathetic to like, and the people whose dramas are being retold are unreal and even unbelievable, mere shadows of real people, pawns to be moved about on the old man’s chessboard.

The stories about the Old Man in the Corner are good early examples of the armchair-detective subgenre, with interesting and well-designed plots. Their weakness lies in the characterizations and in a certain moral and emotional callousness.

Principal Series Characters:

• The Old Man in the Corner (Bill Owen) is an extremely eccentric man who spends much of his time in a restaurant, the A.B.C. Shop, working untiringly at tying and untying knots in a piece of string. He is ageless and apparently unchanging. Not much concerned with justice or morality, he is interested in crime “only when it resembles a clever game of chess, with many intricate moves which all tend to one solution, the checkmating of the antagonist—the detective force of the country.”
• Polly Burton , a journalist, is the Old Man in the Corner’s foil. An invariably baffled reader of stories of mysterious deaths in the newspapers, she comes to the A.B.C. Shop to hear the old man unravel the mystery.
• Lady Molly of Scotland Yard is a strong-willed, direct, and clever woman who time after time manages to beat her male colleagues at the game of crime solving. She is somewhat of a feminist, if only in the sense that she claims that her feminine intuition—as opposed, presumably, to male intellect and logical thinking—equips her better for the job of detecting than any man.
• Mary is Lady Molly’s confidant and foil. This young police officer tells the story and represents the intrigued but skeptical reader.
• Patrick Mulligan , an Irish lawyer, is a hero of still another volume of detective stories written by the prolific baroness. Both the Lady Molly and the Patrick Mulligan stories are far inferior to the first two volumes of stories about the Old Man in the Corner, although they are very similar in construction and execution.

Bibliography

Bleiler, E. F. Introduction to The Old Man in the Corner: Twelve Mysteries. New York: Dover, 1980. Appreciation and contextualization of Orczy’s contribution to mystery fiction.

Braybrooke, Patrick. Some Goddesses of the Pen. London: C. W. Daniel, 1927. Discussion of best-selling female authors, their literary prowess, and the source of their appeal to the public imagination. Provides background for understanding Orczy’s work.

Dubose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. Essay on Orczy notes how she invented a Female Department to create a female officer for Scotland Yard.

Furst, Alan. Introduction to The Book of Spies: An Anthology of Literary Espionage, edited by Alan Furst. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Compares Orczy to such other espionage authors as Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and John le Carré.

Hanson, Gillian Mary. City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Analyzes Orczy’s use of setting in the Old Man in the Corner series. Bibliographic references and index.

Kestner, Joseph A. The Edwardian Detective, 1901-1915. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. This narrowly focused reading of British detective fiction compares Orczy to her fellow Edwardians.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Places the baroness within the lineage of great women mystery writers and analyzes her influence on her successors.