A Recoiling Vengeance was written by Frank Barrett (1848-1926), an English author of mystery and adventure novels. Barrett wrote a sequel to A Recoiling Vengeance: Under a Strange Mask (1889).

A Recoiling Vengeance and Under a Strange Mask are mysteries involving Mr. Keene, a family lawyer who solves crimes involving his clients or prevents his clients from being victimized. A sort of nineteenth century Perry Mason, Keene describes himself as “a simple country lawyer,” but he is substantially more than that. He is sixty-four and is enjoyably sardonic. When describing the difference between first- and second-rate hypocrites and manipulators, he says,

Your second-rate player opens the game well, but in the critical finish, exalted by success into an undue appreciation of his own ability, or his adversary's inability, he abandons careful tactics, and makes rash and reckless moves that inevitably lead to his own ruin.¹

Keene takes a dim view of the mass of humanity, as might be expected from someone in his position, but he is nonetheless an idealist, in his own rather jaded way, and is pleased when people do the right thing and help others before themselves. He works in the small town of Coneyford, but finds more than enough business there to keep him busy, what with human nature and all: “Plums that have the appearance of ripeness before their season are rotten at the kernel invariably.”²

Keene is one of the first lawyer heroes in detective fiction, predating Melville Davisson Post’s Randolph Mason (see: The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason) by almost a decade. Although neither Anthony Keene novel is a classic, Keene’s amiably cynical outlook offsets the more pedestrian romance elements, and the novels are told in a clean narrative style, similar to the slick style of commercial magazine fiction in the 1890s. Keene’s cynicism does have surface similarities to Randolph Mason’s, but the reader never doubts that Keene is a cynical hero, as opposed to a villain like Mason.

A Recoiling Vengeance is also of interest to modern readers because of when it appeared. Although Arthur Conan Doyle had published his first Sherlock Holmes (see: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries) novel, A Study in Scarlet, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual (1887), one year before A Recoiling Vengeance was published, A Study in Scarlet attracted relatively little attention, and it wasn’t until 1891 and 1892, when Doyle began publishing Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand, that Holmes became a runaway success and national icon. Mr. Keene therefore represents not a rival or contemporary of Sherlock Holmes, but a predecessor–and one whose character hints at how the detective character might have evolved in British and American fiction (for both of the Mr. Keene novels were simultaneously published in the U.S. and the U.K.). Where Holmes is a genius–the prototypical Great Detective–Keene is merely (but more realistically) intelligent and experienced. Keene’s sardonic and hardened attitude is certainly fitting for a character with his experience, but represents a departure from the more idealistic detectives of the 1870s and 1880s, and can be seen as a return of the hard-boiled attitude of the detectives in the casebook mysteries. Keene is an outlier now, of course, but absent the presence and massive influence of Holmes, the hard-boiled detective might have arrived for good in British fiction in the 1890s, and Keene and A Recoiling Vengeance would have been in some part responsible for that arrival.

Print: Frank Barrett, A Recoiling Vengeance (London: Chatto and Windus, 1892); Under a Strange Mask (London: Cassell, 1910).

¹ Frank Barrett, A Recoiling Vengeance (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1888), 187-188.

² Frank Barrett, A Recoiling Vengeance, 54.