The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

Prince Zaleski (1895)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

Prince Zaleski was written by M.P. Shiel. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1865-1947) was a professional writer best-known for detective and science fiction novels.

Prince Zaleski is one of the most memorable of the Victorian detectives and is on a level with Sherlock Holmes (see: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries) himself. This is not so much because of the essential quality of the stories–although Shiel's mystery stories are better written than Doyle's, Doyle's are better mysteries–but because of Zaleski himself. He is Russian royalty, a voluntary expatriate who never leaves his crumbling mansion home in England. Zaleski was “victim of too importunate, too unfortunate love, which the fulgor of the throne itself could not abash; exile perforce from his native land, and voluntary exile from the rest of men.”¹ Now he occupies his days languorously indulging in the “base of the ‘bhang’ of the Mohammedans,”² a drug which brings him dream-like hallucinations and helps to pass the time and disperse his ennui. In his ruined abbey home he is surrounded by “Flemish sepulchral brasses, Egyptian mummies, gem encrusted medieval reliquaries, Brahmin gods, runic tablets, miniature paintings, winged bulls, Tamil sculptures on lacquered leaves of the talipot.”³ And he listens to the “low, liquid, tinkling of an invisible musical box,”⁴ and in the “semi-darkness, a very faint greenish lustre radiated from an open censer-like ‘lampas’ of fretted gold in the centre of the domed encased roof.”⁵ 

However, because of Zaleski’s overwhelming ennui, none of the objects he has surrounded himself with seem to matter to him. Life itself seems to be not worth the effort. It is only under unusual circumstances that Zaleski can be stirred to even rise from his couch. Zaleski is (in his own mind, at least, and that of his only friend, “Shiel,” the narrator of the stories) a superior man, superior in intellect, breeding, and learning to the hoi polloi, to the great mass of humanity, and to the “culture” of the outside world. With the exceptions of those few ancients and more recent geniuses, like Goethe, there is no one of Zaleski's worth, no one to equal him, and there are few things that deserve the consideration of his mind. So it is not just easier to spend his days alone, seeking the bhang, it is also what the outer world deserves, to be deprived of his genius, and the resulting solitude and proud isolation are a fitting reward rather than a punishment.

Zaleski is well-educated; his speech is full of quotations in Greek and allusions to obscure historical and mythological figures. He is well-respected by the royalty of Europe as well as various high ranking officials in the British government. His knowledge of the history of various British families is unmatched, and there seem to be few subjects he does not know everything about. He is sibylline; his insight into human nature is so precise that he can and does correctly predict what people are going to do before they do them. And he is a good detective; he solves all the cases he is involved with, correctly pointing out who the guilty party is and why the police have not identified them.

But his personality is problematic. In all likelihood Shiel was not deliberately making Zaleski unlikable. Shiel undoubtedly meant for Zaleski to be seen as admirable. But character traits which might have been admirable to Shiel’s audience in 1895 will likely strike modern readers as contrived and overdone. Zaleski heaps nearly as much genial abuse on “Shiel” as Holmes puts on poor Watson; Zaleski's superiority complex extends even to his sole friend. Zaleski thinks so little of modern man and modern culture that he does not even read the newspaper. In addition to his contempt for nearly everyone else, he has the usual set of class stereotypes, especially with regard to the upper classes. In discussing a murder suspect Zaleski states that the man is of “gentle blood” and an Earl's son, and “it is impossible to imagine that such a person would commit an assassination, or even countenance one.”⁶ Zaleski is also a firm believer in eugenics, reflecting M.P. Shiel's own beliefs; Zaleski believes that the most “destructive...subtle, sure, horrible, disgusting...pestilence” is “Medical Science,” because it “sedulously conserve(s) our worst” rather than letting the “very best men: the strong boned, the heart stout, the sound in wind and limb” flourish.⁷ 

The modern reader’s reaction to Zaleski will depend on their tolerance for the Decadent pose. Actually, calling it a “pose” is unjust. Zaleski, like Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël (see: Axël), is sincere in his Decadence. Both are symbols and even embodiments of fin-de-siècle Decadence. They have the bad health of the Decadent heroes, the ennui and feeling of loss and isolation, the tendency toward dandyism, the attempt to triumph over nature through artifice. Like other fin-de-siècle Decadent works, the Zaleski stories stress intensely sensual moments, make use of literary and Classical allusion for effect, and portray the world as grotesque and long since fallen from an original state of grace. Shiel is successful in saturating the Zaleski stories with a fin-de-siècle atmosphere. But the modern reader is likely to feel that the basic assumptions of the Decadents, and the way Shiel and Zaleski and display them, are affected, self-indulgent, and tiresome.

Like Zaleski himself, the stories are memorable without being entirely good. As a writer Shiel is skilled enough to achieve the effects he strives for, and he succeeds in creating a unique atmosphere in the Zaleski stories. Just as Zaleski is the ultimate in Decadent detectives, so too are the Zaleski stories achievements of Decadent mystery fiction. The stories have a languorous, almost dream-like air. There is no real action in the stories, just discussion between the narrator “Shiel” and Zaleski, and Zaleski’s long explanations of the truth behind the mysteries. Even “The S.S.,” in which Zaleski is forced to leave his home to confront a group of serial murdering, would-be Nietzschean übermenschen, lacks action. Zaleski’s confrontation with the Society of Sparta is relayed to “Shiel” (and the reader) by Zaleski, rather than narrated as it happens. In this sense Zaleski both hearkens back to the first armchair detective, Poe’s Dupin (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries), and anticipates and acts as a model for Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner (see: The Old Man In The Corner Mysteries) and the other armchair detectives who followed him.

Shiel achieves the air of Decadence and the fin-de-siècle atmosphere primarily through his language. The descriptions are lush and overripe, Zaleski’s conversations are studded with offhanded references to obscure history and mythology, and the vocabulary is lapidary and overwrought. The Zaleski stories are hothouse flowers, too lush, too rococo for an ordinary environment. How much the reader enjoys this sort of thing will depend on the reader’s tolerance for the Decadent writers. However, even setting aside the issue of Shiel’s language, the Zaleski stories are not entirely successful. Purely as mysteries, the Zaleski stories are not failures, but neither are the equal of even mediocre detective stories, the kind J.E.P. Muddock churned out for the Dick Donovan (see: The Dick Donovan Mysteries) franchise. This may be because Shiel saw himself writing Decadent stories with the trappings of detective fiction rather than Decadent mystery fiction. The clues used to solve the crimes are obscure, in the case of “The S.S.” absurdly so, and Zaleski's chains of reasoning and deductions turn out to be true not through compelling logic but because Shiel arranges for them to be true. Moreover, Zaleski bases his deductions on preconceptions–about class, about crime, and about the subjects of his philosophical beliefs–which any normal detective would immediately jettison. Zaleski is right, in his stories, because Shiel wants him to be, not because (as in, for example, Doyle) there is no other alternative that works within the context of the story.

The scenarios themselves are entertaining in a Decadent way: a family suffering from congenital madness, a turquoise stolen by an Assassin, and a society of murderers waging war against “diseased life, but not against life in general.”⁸ But at the same time these scenarios are extreme–nearly ludicrously so–and in making them so extreme Shiel loses the virtue of believability and emotional credibility which most mysteries have to some degree. Shiel is trying for a dream-like feel in the stories, and the Decadent crimes and lack of believability are a part of that. But mysteries, at their core, are linear, about cause and effect: there is a crime, and then there is an investigation, and then the crime is solved. Dreams are not linear. So the mystery aspect of Shiel's stories are overwhelmed by the dreamlike aspect, and this leaves the crimes absurd.

There are other aspects to the stories which mitigate against the reader’s enjoyment of the stories. Shiel flaunts his own learning with Zaleski’s references and quotes; what likely was intended as a display of erudition instead becomes simple showing off. Zaleski’s long disquisitions on matters not germane to the mystery, pages-long monologues containing statements of philosophy, are more often tedious than interesting. And Zaleski’s dissections of the crimes and the criminals and suspects are long and verbose, and his tone can be tiresome. Prince Zaleski received mixed reviews and poor sales on publication,⁹ which was appropriate and fitting.

Recommended Edition

Print: M.P. Shiel, Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk. Sauk City, WI: Mycroft & Moran, 1977.

Online: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10709

For Further Research

Kirsten MacLeod, Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.