Mr Bazalgette's Agent

by Leonard Merrick Narrated by Candida Gubbins

Overview

When Miriam Lea falls on hard times, an advertisement calling for private agents catches her eye, and within weeks she finds herself in Mr Bazalgette's employ as a private detective, travelling on a train to Hamburg in pursuit of an audacious fraudster. What follows is a journey through some of the great cities of Europe - and eventually to South Africa - as Miss Lea attempts to find her man. Miriam Lea is only the third ever British professional female detective to appear in a work of crime fiction. Originally published in 1888, Mr Bazalgette's Agent presents a determined and resourceful heroine in the figure of Miss Lea, who grapples with some very modern dilemmas of female virtue and vice.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

08/19/2013
As scholar Mike Ashley notes in his introduction, this reissue of Merrick’s first novel, originally published in 1888, is “almost certainly the first ever British novel to feature a professional female detective.” Miriam Lea, the narrator, says of herself, “I was a governess until people discovered I had been an actress, and I was an actress till they discovered I could not act.” Of the “musical family” with whom she lodges in London, Miriam says it “resolved itself into a red-haired child who murders ‘The Carnival of Venice’ with the pertinacity of a barrel-organ deprived of its variety.” A suggestion that she check out the agony column of the newspaper for a suitable position leads her to a job with a detective agency. Her initial assignment puts her on the trail of an embezzler, sending her to Europe and later South Africa. A surprising amount of dry humor helps compensate for the disappointing ending. (Oct.)

Times Literary Supplement

Merrick’s Mr. Bazalgette’s Agent marks an important text in the evolution of detective fiction. . . . This is an absorbing early detective story, with a plucky and interesting female central character. It is intermittently and surely consciously funny, too. . . . Reissues like [this] are in everybody’s interest.

Classic Mysteries blog

“Mr. Bazalgette’s Agent is the story of her search for that man, a search which takes her first through Europe and, eventually, all the way to South Africa in pursuit of her man. There are a fair number of surprises along the way. It is, I must say, a fairly gentle mystery—no violence, really, and a certain Victorian sensibility. But it is a very enjoyable story, quite worth reading.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192025222
Publisher:	Soundings, Limited
Publication date:	08/01/2024
Series:	British Library Crime Classics
Edition description:	Unabridged