The Haunted Lady

 Earlier this year I read Mary Roberts Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton, which is about a nurse named Hilda Adams. Perceptive, organised, and efficient, she occasionally assisted the police with delicate inquiries, enabled by her work providing at-home care, usually to the very rich. Her usual partner in these efforts was Inspector Fuller, a policeman who vociferously defended her talents to all doubters, insisting she was as effective as any of his policemen. Fuller affectionately calls her ???Miss Pinkerton??? for her detection skills.

The Haunted Lady is the fourth, and last of Rinehart's Hilda Adams novels. She did have a small run of short stories to follow, but the series ended here. It really is a shame that we got so few of these, because they are quite charming, and on the whole manage to avoid the common pitfalls of mid-century mystery novels such as overt anti-Semitism, classism, sexism, and racism. I say “on the whole” because these books are, after all, a product of a certain time and era and it's a bit hopeless to expect them to reflect our sentiments today. But problems, as there are, are less obvious than those I encountered in books by Ngaio Marsh or Agatha Christie, for example. Really the only jarring note in this book is when Inspector Fuller says he'd like to take Hilda over his knee after she does something that puts herself at risk - the kind of thing that might happen in I Love Lucy. I know it's meant playfully and is supposed to show how he's concerned about her and also, that it doesn't actually happen (she'd kick his ass) , but I still didn't like it, even as a joke. What I did like most about these books is Hilda's inner conflict: she's constantly torn between feeling revulsed at poking around the private lives of people she's meant to care for, and at the same time, her strong commitment to seeing justice done in the face of crime. It lends the books a nice depth and tension that a boilerplate mystery might lack.

In The Haunted Lady, an elderly, wealthy woman named Mrs. Eliza Fairbanks is perturbed by a series of occurrences in her house. She hears odd noises, finds rats and snakes released in her chamber, and finds her belongings disturbed despite locking her door. Given her age, most people assume that she???s approaching senility, or is paranoid. Mrs Fairbanks, though, is strong-willed, decisive, and firm, and insists she isn???t imagining things. When the sugar for her strawberries is found to be laced with arsenic, she is finally taken seriously. Inspector Fuller of Scotland Yard calls up Miss Hilda Adams, the efficient, observant nurse, and asks her if she will stay at the Fairbanks residence and keep an eye on the old lady, while they try to find out what is happening. 

At the Fairbanks House, Hilda finds a whole cast of suspects. There???s Marian, Eliza???s daughter, who divorced her unfaithful husband, resulting in scandal and ire from Eliza. There???s Frank, Marian???s husband, now married to their former governess, Eileen, who is broke and still paying alimony. There???s Jan, their daughter, seemingly the only guardian of Eliza???s welfare, but Jan is in love with Eliza???s doctor, and they both need money to get started in life. Of course, there???s the doctor too. And then there???s Eliza???s son and daughter-in-law, weak-willed, impoverished Carlton, and Susie, his gauche, ill-mannered wife, who need money as well. When Eliza Fairbanks, who holds the purse strings, is stabbed inside her locked room, Inspector Fuller and Miss Hilda Adams have to figure out who it was that killed her ??? and how? 

The mystery is of the ???had I but known??? variety, combined with a standard locked-room setup, with plenty of clues sprinkled in to aid the reader, but still a satisfying twist at the end. It???s actually Hilda who does most of the detecting, putting herself at risk sometimes, and amassing a series of clues. When she explains it at the end to Inspector Fuller, he is mixed with frustration and admiration and perhaps something more. ???Oh, subtle little Miss Pinkerton!??? he tells her. ???Lovable and clever and entirely terrible Miss Pinkerton! What I am to do about you? I???m afraid to take you and I can???t leave you alone.??? The reader may well agree. I really enjoyed it.