The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

Dora Myrl, the Lady Detecitve (1899)  

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

Dora Myrl, The Lady Detective was written by McDonnell Bodkin and first appeared as a series of a dozen stories in Pearson’s Weekly (May 27-Sept. 16, 1899). Matthias McDonnell Bodkin (1850-1933) was a judge, journalist, politician, and author of several detective series.

Dora Myrl is a bright young woman of unusual talents. Her father, an “old-fashioned Cambridge don,” wanted Dora to be “a lady and a scholar,” and he lived to see her become, at age eighteen, a “Cambridge wrangler.” He died soon after and left her with enough money to be comfortable for life. She was not interested in teaching, and after becoming a medical doctor realized that the profession bored her and that male patients would not consult with her. She tried other professions, including working a telegraph, working a telephone, and journalism. It wasn't until she began detecting that she found a profession which held her interest. Her first case involved her helping a woman whose child had been kidnapped. Myrl found that she was good at the job and enjoyed it, so she continued at it.

As a detective, she is efficient and even slick. She is knowledgeable about a great many things, from violins to cipher breaking to rare and valuable stamps. She puts this knowledge to good use, along with a close observation of people and crime scenes and a great deal of ingenuity in deducing how a crime might have been committed and who might have done it. She consults to the middle and upper classes and eventually becomes famous as a female detective, although in her own words there is “nothing of the New Woman” about her. This is an assessment with which the modern reader will disagree, as modern critics have:

If the female detective signifies the culmination of the New Woman’s use of technologies at the fin de siècle, Dora is the New Woman detective par excellence: solving crimes with the help of modern technologies and using them to produce evidence in her investigations, she proves her place in the supposedly male spheres of medico-legal knowledge production.¹ 

The crimes Myrl solves are unusual and interesting. They include the theft of rare violin, the theft of gold in a clever way, the actions of evil male roués, the actions of poisoner, a horse swindler, a rare stamp thief, and even a man attempting to blackmail Pussie, Myrl’s best friend. The blackmailer is clever but is eventually defeated by Myrl and bows politely to her in defeat. Disappointingly, in the later stories of the Paul Beck series—another detective series Bodkin wrote—Myrl meets and falls in love with Beck. She marries him, retires from detecting, and raises their son, who eventually becomes a detective in turn. (The marriage plot (see: “The Lady Detective”) was by no means restricted to dime novels).

Dora Myrl, The Lady Detective is enjoyable without being groundbreaking, although it does in its way represent the high point of the New Woman detective. Myrl's lack of a Watson figure meant that Bodkin could experiment with the focus of the story. In one story he begins by concentrating on the victim of the crime, rather than on Myrl. The stories are more than occasionally clever, have a few genuinely clever twists, and sometimes end on a brisk, punchy note. Dora Myrl is not Art, but it is enjoyable to read, and has more vigor and life than many similar collections.

Recommended Edition

Print: Dora Myrl, The Lady Detective (London: Chatto & Windus, 1900).