Review: THE MYSTERY OF THE INN BY THE SHORE

THE MYSTERY OF THE INN BY THE SHORE by Florence Warden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I spotted this on my feed of new and updated books from Project Gutenberg, and even though I couldn't find much about it anywhere, thought I would give it a try to see what it was like.

The author was an actress and dramatist, and it shows. Everything is highly dramatic, at times overdramatic. Everyone's emotions are extra-extra large, driving them to bad decisions and, in one case, madness; the exception is the villain, who is cool and calculating (though also apparently driven by a psychological quirk) and who puts up a false persona worthy of a masterful actor. The prose, while smooth (even bad 19th-century writers wrote much better prose, or else received much better editing, than the average 21st-century writer), is neither sophisticated nor polished, and the author sometimes gets hold of a word and keeps echoing it rather than finding a synonym. There are five occurrences of "prim" in about three pages at one point.

I'm used to British writers making at least some gesture in the direction of "the class system is silly," but this one is very snobbish and unreflectively class-conscious. I did wonder whether some of that was an assumed narratorial voice based on the probable prejudices of the characters, since one of the characters, who's 40, is referred to twice as "elderly," and the author was herself 38 when the book came out. On the other hand, my grandmother, born in the year this book was published, thought of 40 as "old," meaning that she was (in her own opinion) old for more than half her life - she died at 87. So perhaps the prejudice is sincere.

There's a particularly glaring example of the Instalove trope, and what I call a "thin romance subplot". Not only does the guy fall in love with the girl basically on sight, but less than 24 hours later he asks her to marry him, having spent perhaps one of those hours, maybe less, and certainly not more than a couple of hours, in her actual presence. She refuses him, on the very reasonable grounds that she only met him yesterday. A couple of months later - during which time they've hardly spent any time together at all, nor have they written to each other - he says that surely they've known each other long enough by now? She refuses again, but now it's because nearly everyone (except him, for no reason except he's in love with her and can't believe anything bad of her) suspects her of the crimes that have been committed, and until she's cleared she won't bring the consequences of that suspicion on him.

By about three-quarters of the way through, I was convinced that the author was going to have to cheat to get a resolution. Everyone who could possibly have done the crimes (thefts initially, but a murder halfway through) seemed to have been cleared either by the omniscient narration's account of their inner life or by the evidence. Were we going to get a previously unseen or hardly-seen character as the criminal? Was the omniscient narration misleading? Or was the author just going to ignore some of the established evidence? It was kind of the second one, combined with the false persona I mentioned earlier and some facts kept carefully out of evidence. The next bit seriously is a spoiler for the identity of the criminal: (view spoiler)[A couple of things reduced my suspicion of her: one, that she seemed highly moral, to the point of being outraged by seeing a man in a light suit on a Sunday - which the author lampshaded as part of how she'd misled everyone; and two, that she and her father were desperately poor, showing no signs of benefiting from her thefts. This is explained by her stealing only for the thrill of it and hiding her loot, including currency, in the house rather than spending it, only one of the ways in which the characters act irrationally. A key part of the book was that Clifford, the lover, trusted his love interest Nell implicitly based on his judgement of her character through, frankly, very little time spent observing her, so the fact that the criminal concealed her true character so effectively and plausibly that nobody tumbled to it despite knowing her for years is a bit of irony that I'm not sure the author intended. (hide spoiler)]

Between the melodrama, the prejudice, the instalove and the cheat of the resolution, not a favourite, but it was interesting to see what a lesser writer was doing around the time of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

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