Before the
Golden Age of the mystery novel (1920s-1930s), there was the first golden age,
roughly from the late 1880s to the early 1910s. This was the era of Arthur
Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, R. Austin Freeman and Dr. Thorndyke, Arthur
Morrison and Martin Hewitt, and many other authors and their detectives.
And there
was Robert Barr and Eugene Valmont. Barr launched his detective in the early
1890s, and in 1906 a collection of the stories was published under the title of
The
Triumphs of Eugene Valmont.
Valmont is
a private detective in London, something of his city for exile after his dismissal
as the top police detective in Paris. He wasn’t dismissed for incompetence or
failure – Valmont often muses on the incompetence of the police – but for
ridicule, detailed in the first story in the collection, “The Mystery of the
500 Diamonds,” which involves the theft of a necklace originally designed for
Marie Antoinette. The French can stand anything, apparently, except ridicule.
Barr’s
tales of Valmont’s cases are as much about his failures as his successes. In
fact, many of his success are off stage and only occasionally referred to in
these stories. The reader is often led to wonder how much fun Barr was actually
having at his fictional detective’s expense.
The
stories are as varied as they are intriguing. Valmont poses as an anarchist to
uncover a bombing plot. The theft of 100 pounds at a gentleman’s dinner is
solved by a connection to missing silver spoons. A new earl is unable to find
what his predecessor did with his fortune; all he knows is that the fortune is
to be found “between two pages.” Valmont is asked, by two different people, to
find a ghost with a club-foot. The detective finds himself involved in a game
of blackmail that he solves by becoming a possible accessory to manslaughter. And
then he’s asked to find a missing emerald necklace, which the police have been
unable to do.
 |
| Robert Barr |
Barr was
born in Glasgow and spent his early years in Canada. He was a teacher in
Canada, and began to write short stories for the Detroit Free Press. In 1876, he joined the Free Press fulltime. In 1881, he moved to London to establish the
English edition of the newspaper. He retired from the Free Press in 1895, and
continued to write stories and novels, many in the crime genre like those in The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont. In his
day, Barr was as well-known as such poplar writers as Stephen Crane and Bret
Harte.
Barr also
wrote two parodies of Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs”
and “The Adventure of the Second Swag,” and both are included in this edition,
even though they are not Eugene Valmont stories.
Currently
available on Amazon for 99 cents is a collection of Barr novels – 21 Mystery and Romance Novels.
The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont is a fascinating collection of
stories from the Gaslight Crime Era – contemporaries of Sherlock Holmes who
deserve to be better known.
Top illustration: A scene from one
of the stories in
The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont, “The
Ghost with the Club-Foot.”
No comments:
Post a Comment