Baroness Emmuska Orczy Biography

Successful as an author of popular adventure and romance fiction, Baroness Orczy also wrote elaborately plotted detective tales. Orczy's Old Man in the Corner stories develop a brilliant, eccentric, and unlikely armchair detective, a disagreeable raconteur who helps a young woman journalist unravel obscure crimes. Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard tales feature one of the first fictional woman detectives.

Emma Madgalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy was born into the Hungarian landed aristocracy in Tarna-Örs, Hungary, on 23 September 1865. She was named Emma (or Emmuska) after her mother, Countess Wass. Her father, Baron Felix Orczy, a gifted amateur composer who was friends with Liszt, Wagner, Gounod, and Massenet, was forced to leave Hungary because of an 1868 peasant uprising against his agricultural innovations. The family moved to Budapest, to Brussels, to Paris, and finally to London.

Orczy was educated at schools in Brussels and Paris, where she unsuccessfully studied music. In London she studied painting at the West London School of Art and at Heatherley's. While at school she exhibited her work at the Royal Academy. During her studies at Heatherley's she met Montagu Barstow, an illustrator, whom she married in 1894. Their only child, John Montagu Orczy Barstow, was born in 1899.

During the early years of their marriage the Barstows were very active in the aristocratic London social circles to which Orczy's family had introduced her. However, they were poor. To supplement the family income Orczy began to translate and illustrate fairy tales. She also wrote romance and adventure tales for the popular press. Her first novel, The Emperor's Candlesticks (1899), was a failure. Orczy's widespread popularity came only in 1905 with the enormous London stage success of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which ran for years in many different productions. The play called attention to the novel of the same title. It had been written in 1902 but failed to find a publisher until 1905. The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy Blakeney, is an English rescuer of French aristocrats during the Reign of Terror. His rescues depend on a double identity: at home in England he is known as a foppish, effete socialite, but, as the daring Scarlet Pimpernel, he risks his life to save those unjustly accused in France. Orczy wrote many sequels to her most famous book.

All of Orczy's works sold profitably, and the Barstows lived very comfortably. After World War I they purchased a small estate in Monte Carlo, where, apart from trips, they lived until the last years of Orczy's life, which were spent in a secluded country home at Henley-on-Thames. Orczy died in London on 12 November 1947.

The first Old Man in the Corner stories date from the days before the stage success of The Scarlet Pimpernel . The thirty-eight tales make a special contribution to the armchair detective genre because they begin with the denouement, devoting the narrative to the gradual development of the plot by flashback. The first collection (there were seven in all) was published in 1908. Bill Owen, the disagreeable Old Man in the Corner, compulsively knots and unravels a bit of string as he reveals the solutions to unsolved crimes publicized in newspaper accounts and spectacular trials. The Old Man's cases include the whole range of sensational and complex detective puzzles: grisly murder ("The Tremarn Case"), fiendish blackmail ("The Murder of Miss Pebmarsh"), perfect alibis ("The Case of Miss Elliott"), masked motive and identity ("The Regent's Park Murder"), and brilliantly planned thefts ("The Affair at the Novelty Theatre").

Despite his vanity about his own ratiocinative talents, Bill Owen is an unlikely detective. A balding, watery-eyed, mild-mannered little man in violently checked tweed, he haunts a corner of the ABC Teashop. His listener and protégé is the attractive young journalist Polly Burton. Polly is fascinated by the unlikely unravelings she hears, but despite her sarcasm and pride in her own investigative talents she remains the learner, impressed in spite of herself.

Typical of the Old Man in the Corner tales is "The Fenchurch Street Mystery." William Kershaw reveals to his wife and an unsavory friend that he has evidence to blackmail Francis Smethurst, a millionaire who has made his fortune in speculations in Russia (where he has lived for many years). Smethurst's letters to Kershaw reveal the millionaire's willingness to meet on his return to England. After the meeting Kershaw vanishes. A decomposed body found later is identified as Kershaw's by its clothes and property. When Smethurst is brought to trial he proves that he did not write the letters to Kershaw and produces witnesses who saw Kershaw after the time of his supposed death. Bill Owen shows that the murdered man was Smethurst, not Kershaw. Kershaw had murdered Smethurst and has impersonated his victim so completely that he conceals his identity, even from his wife who sees him testify as Smethurst. Those who could uncover the deception by identifying Smethurst are in Russia. Bill Owen's unravelings are completely convincing.

Although Orczy's Old Man is not the first armchair detective who solves crimes from secondhand evidence (an honor belonging to Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin in "The Mystery of Marie Roget"), he is the first truly Socratic problem solver, forcing his listener (and the reader) to question seemingly logical conclusions about a crime to reach a more difficult, but more valid, solution.

Orczy's other contributions to the detective genre include Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910), among the first stories featuring a woman detective, and Skin o' My Tooth (1928). The twelve tales narrated by Lady Molly's loyal maid praise her daring, intelligence, and savoir faire, but they do not develop a truly independent woman-detective character. Lady Molly's cases all involve women and show her social insight into their sexually and socially motivated behavior. Lady Molly depends as much on her sensitivity and intuition as her brilliance and bravery. Her motivation as a crime solver lies in her wish to clear her falsely accused beloved. This task accomplished, she leaves detective forever. Skin o' My Tooth features twelve stories about a particularly sharp Irish lawyer, Patrick Mulligan. Like the Lady Molly series, these tales are elaborately plotted and narrated by an admiring assistant.

Some of Orczy's adventure tales include mystery elements. Most memorable are the M. Hector Ratichon stories of Castles in the Air (1921). These are narrated by Ratichon himself, a vain, unscrupulous trickster and shopworn investigator. Ratichon solves crime puzzles in the Paris of the corrupt early republic-always to his own advantage and often at the expense of his equally shady valet, Theodore.

Orczy's contribution to detective fiction lies chiefly in popularizing the armchair detective, the Socratic Old Man in the Corner, and her introduction of one of the first woman detective characters. At times she transcends the stock conventions of popular fiction to develop fast-moving, cleverly plotted, ratiocinative tales.