Review: Judith Lee: Some Pages from her Life

Judith Lee: Some Pages from her Life by Richard Marsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Judith Lee is sometimes described as a "lady detective," but she's really not a detective. She's a superhero, a couple of decades before that consciously became a thing. (This collection of stories was published in 1911, and several more were published five years later, after the author's death.)

Her superpower is that she can read lips with slightly implausible accuracy from some distance away, since she - like her father and grandfather before her - is a teacher of the deaf and dumb, using the "oral method," which involves teaching deaf people to lipread. This doesn't seem to be her only source of income; she moves in moderately well-off circles, a policeman at one point notes that she's wearing an expensive frock, and most of the stories in the volume take place while she's on holiday at some resort or other, or at least eating at a nice restaurant. She's a bit of a snob, and is prejudiced against foreigners (of course), the lower classes, people who look unusual, and... gingers. Any character who has red hair is definitely going to be up to no good. So it's a surprise when she disguises herself at one point with a red wig.

It's also surprising that she has dark skin (a Sicilian refers to her "black face" at one point, and even allowing for exaggeration that suggests she's quite dark for an English person), very dark hair, and gets referred to by one of the less grateful people she helps as "that half-bred gipsy-looking creature." The surname Lee is sometimes held by Roma in Britain, so perhaps she's supposed to be of Roma descent.

As well as foreigners, common people and gingers, she's not a big fan of men either, saying at one point, "Why are some men so silly—so many men—nearly all of them?" Having said that, women are sometimes the perpetrators and men occasionally the victims of the crimes and crime-adjacent schemes that she keeps stumbling upon through her unacknowledged second superpower, incredible luck. And by "incredible" I mean I didn't believe in it; it's authorial interference, is what it is. In one of the longer stories, she hangs a lampshade on the coincidence of bumping into the same people over and over, sometimes years apart, at random places, just at the moments that are essential for the plot to progress. Some higher power, she says, must be involved. Indeed it is, and that power is an author who can't make his plot work without this level of coincidence. Although when she is confronting wrongdoers, she sometimes claims to be the instrument of God, and if that isn't just part of the bluff, the "higher power" bit may be intended to be taken seriously. In one story, it's "borne in upon her" that she should go to a particular place because something is happening there, so maybe she is supposed to be acting under the direct guidance of God. Outside these contexts, she doesn't express religious sentiments or ideas, so it's hard to say.

I say she's not a detective because she never really solves mysteries in any conventional sense. She just eavesdrops visually on chance conversations plotting harm to people, and then involves herself in obtaining justice, either by attempting to warn the victims or, in several cases, using her knowledge of what the people having them were convinced were private conversations, in order to frighten them into abandoning their plots. She does sometimes involve the police, but she pretends they're involved at other times when they're actually not, in order to put the frighteners on the villains. She has plenty of self-assurance, and bluffs like a poker world champion; it's almost a third superpower. She says at one point that she makes it a rule never to do anything important while angry, but this is patently untrue. When she's enraged at injustice, her typical first move is to go and confront the villain, without much thought for her own safety.

Her bluffs often work, but as the stories go on, they're less and less effective, and in the last story she has a physical fight for her life that leaves her permanently scarred. She also, in one of the later stories, uses Jiu Jitsu, which she's been practicing, but I'm not going to count that as a superpower because it only gets mentioned that once.

Her fourth superpower is that she can gain near-native fluency in languages in a short amount of time, which is useful a couple of times when she's lip-reading people who speak a particular German or Italian dialect from somewhere she happens to have been.

Overall, the various superpowers make for a setup that's pretty implausible, unless you consider these as pulp stories in the vein of, say, Doc Savage. Judith is an interesting character, though: independent, intelligent, capable, with a powerful sense of justice that sometimes overrides her better judgement. She will go to considerable trouble and even risk her own life to help people who she has, in most cases, never met before, even ones she doesn't like or who don't like her, and if that's not a superhero, I'd like to know what is.

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