Review: Kate Plus Ten

Kate Plus Ten by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kate is a young woman (in her late teens) who has been raised by her uncle, a career criminal, and absorbed his attitude to law and order. She doesn't commit crimes herself, but she's brilliant at planning them in exhaustive detail for other people to commit.

Mike is a mass of contradictions. He's heir to a title of nobility (early on, we're told the current holder is his sickly cousin, but later it changes to his brother without notice), but he also holds radical economic views - not just fashionable Socialism but something more complicated. Yet this doesn't prevent him from living, in part, off inherited wealth and keeping a manservant and a cook. It also doesn't prevent him from becoming a police inspector, first through the Special Branch (more or less the UK equivalent of the US Secret Service; they protect politicians and investigate threats to the state), and then transferring to the CID for reasons that are brushed past quickly.

Together, Kate and Mike fight about crime. He knows she's planning something. She knows he knows. He tries to convince her to give up crime; she counters that her only alternative is to be severely underpaid in some soul-deadening job and regularly hit on by her male employers. No thanks!

Kate isn't the only young woman in the book (though I don't remember the two of them having a full conversation about anything). There's also Lady Moya, daughter of one of the marks for Kate's latest heist. Mike once asked her to marry him, but their views on life were incompatible. She gets engaged to one of her father's business associates, but then she meets a young artist... This subplot isn't at all closely related to the main plot, but Moya serves as a thematic counterpart or foil to Kate. Both of them are "New Women," starting to make their own decisions in life about money and romance and the relative value of the two.

It's quite a short book to have two plots, even though the Moya subplot isn't that complicated, and yet the author does manage to raise some philosophical questions and give his characters inner as well as outer conflicts. In his lifetime, Wallace was seen as a prolific hack, but this is decent work which stands up well against a lot of today's authors. The heist is clever, the inspector's investigation intelligent and courageous, and we get crime, romance, philosophy worked out to some degree in practice, action and suspense in the package.

A weakness for me was that the resolution involved a bit of fortunate coincidence (fortunate, at least, from the point of view of the protagonists, whose decisions don't bring it about and who are, therefore, not to blame for the negative aspects of it, and who are put in a much better situation as a result). But it's not too implausible, at least. The text could do with more commas in places, but it isn't too bad. Overall, a solid effort.

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