Published 1924; this edition 1953 is the 26th printing 1976
By Pan Books London and Sidney
ISBN 0330-10242-7
190 pages, 36 chapters.
Grade: 4/5
Genre: crime
Keywords: murder, diamonds, family, Anne the Adventurer, London, sailing, South Africa, kidnapping,
In the introduction to Dorothy L. Sayers: Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), she writes that the book ‘on a love interest that interferes with the detective interest’; this book has the same idea. Anne Beddingfeld is the only daughter of professor Beddingfeld, expert on the Primitive man; a firm believer that the “cradle of the race was in Africa” (I looke it up, the original theory came from Darwin, 1868); however, prof Beddingfeld had once mentioned that the monkeys had descended from humans and thus, they were further advanced on the evolutionary tree! Her mother had died when she was young and now Anne was keeping house for her father, she also typed all his writings, she could even do that independently. They lived in a village near an excavation site, had no money, she managed on nothing.
P14: Papa had never loved me. I knew that well enough. If he had I might have loved him in return. No there had not been love between us, but we had belonged together, and I had looked after him, and had secretly admired his learning and his uncompromising devotion to science.
She felt lucky because from the library she read in books about having adventures, being brave, being useful. When her father suddenly dies in the beginning of the book, she is approached by the local doctor to marry. To become a companion to various older women? The lawyer invites her to come to live with him and his wife in London until she finds something to do.
P 16 Anne wondered if husbands know as much about their wives as they think they do.
Anne feels that in that going to London will get her closer to her dreams of adventures and excitement. After some time in London, she witnessed how a man in a heavy coat smelling very strongly of moth-balls died at the underground station died, he had been surprised, panicked and stepped back and fell on the tracks; was it murder? The doctor that volunteered to examine the dead man did not come forward at the inquest. Anne found a note with an address and a number, it turns out to be a ship. The dead man Mr Cantor had stayed at a hotel in Marlow, where another murder of a woman occurred. Anne started to investigate, used her inheritance money to buy a ticket for the ship to South Africa. On the way she met people, made friends; she saved a man that was stabbed; she was almost thrown overboard. In Cape Town she was kidnapped but escaped. She is thrown of a cliff but again rescued and saved.
In the book there are chapters telling the story of Anne and then chapters by Sir Eustace Pedler.
There is quite a lot of funny remarks by Anne, I even laughed out aloud:
P134: there is really nothing a woman enjoys so much as doing all the things she doesn’t like for the sake of someone she does like.
How she persuaded the newspaper editor to let her freelance for the newspaper, hilarious; a female journalist was un-heard of.
This is not a Poirot story or Miss Marple.
It is a story set at a time (1924) when a woman needed to have a man to ‘protect’ her, tell her what to do, she was no allowed or expected to have an independent mind of her own; marriage, kids and servants, was what society expected of her. Anne proclaimed early in the book: p15 I could never marry a man unless I loved him madly’ that is a line out of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen! She did just that at the end of the book; she did find her Darcy.
Anyway, I found it nice to be reminded that as a woman anno 2024 I do have more possibilities and opportunities than Anne had a hundred years ago, and expected to be useful to my family and society.
An easy, light reading, great fun.
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