I did not propose to sit still [...and] allow those three uncanny beings, undisturbed, to work their evil wills.
—Richard Marsh, "Conscience" (1913)
 |
"He had me by the throat before I had
even realized that danger
threatened." Illustration from
"Mandragora" by Richard Marsh
Washington Herald 1 Mar. 1914 |
Judith Lee is a "teacher of the deaf and dumb"—in other words, she can read lips. This skill tends to embroil her in trouble. In "
The Man Who Cut Off My Hair," Lee encounters jewel thieves; the reader might be annoyed that Lee is enraged by her unwanted haircut rather than the robbery of an elderly man. In "
Conscience," Lee connects cryptic utterances with two murders and takes action to avoid further deaths. In "
Matched," Lee looks into the case of a bride who has vanished. In "
Auld Lang Syne" she thwarts a bombing. In "
The Miracle," Lee prevents a prospective marriage based on fraud. In "
Isolda," Lee steps in to flout a fraudulent fortuneteller. In "
Uncle Jack" she bests an American con man. In "
The Restaurant Napolitain," Lee confronts agents of the Mafia. In "
Mandragora," she works to free an innocent man from prison.
Lee does not always act wisely (as in "The Restaurant Napolitain" when she faces the bad guy—alone—and tells him she knows he has murdered someone). In some respects, she may resemble Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange (
The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, 1915).
Richard Marsh (aka Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) is best known for
The Beetle, which outsold Bram Stoker's
Dracula in 1897. His grandson was the horror writer
Robert Aickman (1914–81). Few copies of
Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life (1912) and
The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916) exist in U.S. libraries, and the sole copy of
The Adventures of Judith Lee on abebooks is priced at more than $1200. I am hoping that
Valancourt Books, which has been reprinting Marsh's works, will eventually get to Judith Lee.
Via the Library of Congress'
Chronicling America project I downloaded 10 of the
Washington Herald versions of the Judith Lee stories that are collected in
Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life (unfortunately, "Was It Luck or Chance?" was not entirely legible). As an aid to those who may wish to read these stories, I have uploaded the readable copies to my Web site; the links on the story titles in this blog post will take readers to them.
Update, 1-22-16. There's a new edition of
Judith Lee stories from Valancourt Books, edited by
Minna Vuohelainen (Edge Hill University, UK)
that I edit (vol. 1 on John Buchan; vol. 2 on E. X., aka Elizabeth, Ferrars; vol. 3 on Ed McBain/Evan Hunter). It is tentatively scheduled for publication in summer 2012. In this work Beller details the life and career of an important figure in the development of the mystery in the nineteenth century; as Lucy Sussex noted in Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre, Braddon created the first clerical sleuth and other characters who detect (such as Robert Audley in Lady Audley's Secret [1861–62] and Eleanor Vane in Eleanor's Victory [1863]). Her first novel, Three Times Dead (aka Trail of the Serpent), was serialized not long after the first installments of Collins's Woman in White. Braddon's long and lucrative career in sensation fiction stretched from the 1860s to 1916, a year after her death in 1915.
