Customer Reviews

Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose

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I'm being charitable giving this two stars. After all, the author was dying when he wrote it, and had to ask his friend and neighbor Arthur Conan Doyle to finish it for him. However, it is pretty awful. I finished it for the same reason you keep watching a bad movie on Mystery Science Theater--you keep wondering how much worse it can get.

Grant Allen seems to be fairly well thought of, and this book keeps turning up on lists of early female detective characters. At first I thought it was just me not getting it somehow, but it wasn't. I found the book review online from the Saturday Review, May 26, 1900, which describes it as "twaddle." Elsewhere online I've read that Conan Doyle didn't do his friend any favors by finishing it, and that it wasn't worth the effort to finish. The overall premise of the story isn't bad, and there are some entertaining turns of phrase. (Money is referred to as, "The dibs, old man; the chink; the oof; the ready rhino.") What really had me scratching my head were the "scientific facts" the reader is supposed to accept at face value, such as:

1) An anesthetic can be fatal to some patients, yet safe and effective for others, simply due to the patient's personality type and temperament.

2) Certain women are destined to be beaten by their husbands, and you can identify them by their physical type. Their hair is thin, they have a specific facial structure and profile, and have a certain curve to their spine.

3) Mentally ill people emit a particular odor.

And if you check his bio, the author was supposedly a biologist, a science writer, and a feminist!

A couple of entertaining bits I won't forget--a character named Ram Das (not to be confused with this Ram Dass Remember, Be Here Now. A community of Tibetan Buddhists who keep an English gin bottle as a revered object, which reminded me of the soda bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy.

I'm afraid this book has put me off Grant Allen for quite a while. Maybe it's a bad one of his to start with.