Henry Rider Haggard, K.B.E., wrote tales of romantic adventure which may be termed "mysteries" only in a nonconventional sense of the term. The reader encounters no Poirots, no Lord Peter Wimseys, no clues; and while there are murders aplenty, they are never mysterious nor unsolved. Instead Haggard presents his readers with bizarre situations and events in exotic settings: a demigoddess 2,000 years old, the most beautiful woman ever seen; a treasure greater than any other in the world, hidden since Solomon's time; a white civilization, ruled over by two queens, in the heart of Africa. In some ways these tales are fantastic--librarians usually catalog them under the rubric of "fantasy"--but they are also mysteries in the root sense of the word: "Something that has not been, or cannot be explained; hence something beyond human comprehension. A profound secret; an enigma." From this perspective H. Rider Haggard wrote some of the classic mysteries of all time.
