The Old Man in the Corner Mysteries were written by Baroness Emmuska Orczy and began with “The Fenchurch Street Mystery” (The Royal Magazine, May 1901). Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1865-1947) was an Hungarian-English artist, playwright, and author. She is best-known now for the Scarlet Pimpernel (1903), but in her day she was as well-known for her romantic novels and for her paintings, several of which were hung in the Royal Academy.

The Old Man in the Corner is one of the first and remains one of the greatest and most popular of the armchair detectives (see: Detectives), that class of worthies who do not do any investigative work to solve crimes, but sit comfortably in their armchairs or clubs, solving the crimes simply by deduction and the use of their advanced brains (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries, Prince Zaleski). The Old Man sits in a London tea shop, fiddling with a piece of string and talking to Polly Burton, a young reporter for the Evening Observer. She is always eager for a story or a good tale and eggs him on when he says things like

It has often been declared that a murder–a successful murder, I mean–can never be committed single handed in a busy city, and that on the other hand, once a murder is committed by more than one person, one of the accomplices is sure to betray the other, and that is the reason why comparatively so few crimes remain undetected.¹

When he says something along those lines, as he usually does, she instantly contradicts him, thereby irritating him enough to launch him into another story. The Old Man is bored with ordinary crime, only taking on those cases which are most baffling and which have completely mystified the police. But the Old Man never tells the police his conclusions; he is satisfied simply to solve the case and boast about it to Polly. He is interested in a crime only when it “resembles a clever game of chess, with many intricate moves which all tend to one solution.”²

The Old Man in the Corner stories are clever and well-constructed. Some critics have charged that his stories are static and replace deduction with intuition, but neither criticism is particularly valid. Most stories about armchair detectives are in some way static; the armchair detective generally replaces active investigation with vocal theorizing. The focus of such stories is never on what the armchair detective is going to do; he usually does nothing more than talk. The focus is always on what he says, and that is where the reader’s interest usually lies. Nor do the Old Man’s insights come from any type of intuition. They are usually based on deduction, working backward from the crime and making use of newspaper reports and, occasionally, inquests, trials, and personal visits to the crime scenes, although those never occur in the body of the story.

The stories are entertaining. Orczy’s style has held up well. The Old Man is well-characterized (if unpleasantly so) and the story ideas and the Old Man’s solutions to the crimes can be ingenious. The primary flaw of the Old Man stories is a feeling of callousness. Most of this comes from the Old Man himself. He cares far more about solving the puzzle of the crime than in helping the police solve them or in seeing that the guilty party is punished. The Old Man lacks the drive for justice and overall morality of most other late-Victorian detectives, even the recluses like Prince Zaleski. The final Old Man story takes this character trait even further. In “The Mysterious Death in Percy Street” the Old Man tells Polly about how a man named Bill Owen murdered his aunt. The Old Man describes how Owen was never suspected of the crime and was, in the Old Man’s words, “one of the most ingenious men of the age”³ and that his crime was “one of the cleverest bits of work accomplished outside Russian diplomacy.”⁴ The message of the story is that the Old Man himself is Bill Owen, which makes Old Man not merely callous and vain but ultimately a villain.

Print: Baroness Emmuska Orczy, The Old Man in the Corner: Twelve Mysteries. London: House of Stratus, 2003.

¹ Baroness E. Orczy, “The Glasgow Mystery,” Royal Magazine (Apr, 1902): 505.

² Baroness E. Orczy, “The Dublin Mystery,” Royal Magazine (Sept., 1902): 445.

³ Emmuska Orczy, The Man in the Corner (New York: A.L. Burt, 1909), 320.

⁴ Orczy, The Man in the Corner, 298.