I listened to the audio-book version of “Monster, She Wrote” (review for the book here) recently and for L.T. Meade, one of the authors (actually an author team), a couple of books were on the reading list. Among them were “A Master of Mysteries” (the subject of this review), “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings”, and “The Sorceress of the Strand”. I will review those two books as well (and the collection “Moriarty’s Rivals - 12 Female Masterminds” which includes the latter two books), but this is my review of the first book by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace I’ve read. It’s the book which drew me in and made me read the others as well.
“A Master of Mysteries” contains six stories, each a good length for a short story, about Dr. John Bell. Dr. Bell is a man of science investigating supernatural occurrences, mostly by invitation. Each of the six stories represents one case, each is independent of the ones before or afterwards, so they can theoretically be read in any order.
The first thing I noticed was that the writing was very good. Despite the stories being quite old, the writing is fluid and pulls you along. Tension is built nicely and kept throughout the chapters (which usually have a reading time between about 15 and about 20 minutes for a fast reader like me). The first-person viewpoint of Bell himself allows for a very close narration - Bell is not someone else’s Watson, he is an investigator who works alone. Even if he doesn’t always communicate his suspicions, the details he unveils make it easy enough for the audience to see the twist coming and find out what happened, which is always good. A crime story - and nothing else are the stories in “A Master of Mysteries” - should always play fair with the reader.
While Dr. Bell does not drive a mini bus (the stories are set in the last decade of the 1800s) and doesn’t own an easy-to-frighten Great Dane, any fan of “Scooby Doo” will soon recognize the pattern: the cases always look like there is a supernatural element involved, but in the end, it’s ingenious devices or suchlike which were used to make people believe in ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties instead. There is, of course, no ‘…and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!’, but more than one of the culprits Bell unmasks might at least be thinking along those lines (without the ‘meddling kids’ part, as Bell is a grown man).
More than once, Bell gets into a lot of trouble himself. Whether while he’s pretending to be an insistent artist who absolutely won’t go another mile, but wants to sleep in that old inn or whether he’s making haste through the night to stop a murder from happening, action is guaranteed in the stories.
There is no classic ‘you might have wondered why I’ve asked you all here’ in the stories, instead Bell merely explains things to those who have called him in to help. He also does his best to make sure that the culprits are caught, even though he’s often not the one to catch them - the police usually is. His job is not to catch the culprit, but to show how the deed was done, how the supernatural was created. That job he does wonderfully.
Some murder methods used in the stories are highly inventive and rather gruesome - which seems twice as interesting, given L.T. Meade was, at her time, also widely known as a writer of stories for young girls (even today, most matches for the name on Amazon will lead you to her children’s books, not this one or the other two mentioned above). Clearly, the author had more to give to the world than just wholesome books for young ladies.
If there’s something I don’t like about the edition I have (an e-book version), it’s that there is no index of any kind - neither in the beginning of the book, nor in digital form. Since all six stories are independent from each other and can be read in any order, it would be nice to get to pick them directly from the ‘go to…’ feature. That is a minor problem, though, since it’s still possible to search them in the book and reading them all again is not a hardship.
I’ve had a lot of fun with “A Master of Mysteries” and I did thoroughly enjoy my read. As a matter of fact, the book kept me very interested, so I read it in less than a day. I could also imagine it as a good one for your holidays - a read at the pool or the beach or, if you prefer more active vacations, a chapter in the evening to come to a rest after a long and eventful day.
The chapters are a good size, not too long, but also not too short. It’s something to read in bed before sleeping, on the couch during bad weather or on the terrace or balcony in a good one. Yes, it’s an old book, set in old times, focused more on men than on women. Yet, the women who turn up aren’t treated badly or pushed aside as unimportant. They are helpful, sometimes even essential to the survival of the main character or others.
The old pictures integrated with this book (and the other two) are charming and look very good even on a black-and-white kindle. The missing index is a small inconvenience. The reading experience is not hindered by it - I never felt like I needed to go to the next story because the one I was reading was boring me. Would the experience of reading the book be a tad better with a working index? Yes, it would be. Does the missing index make a big difference? No, it does not.
As I wrote above, this book drew me in and made me pick up the other two books as well. I’m always up for mysteries - especially mysteries with a horror touch - and “A Master of Mysteries” by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace certainly delivered for me. The e-book is not that expensive and I can certainly suggest it to everyone who likes to read mysteries and story from the late Victorian era. Be prepared for gruesome and inventive murders - but then, if you like mysteries, you probably are, anyway.
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