Mrs Holmes: Murder, Kidnap and the True Story of an Extraordinary Lady Detective by Brad Ricca
| Mrs Holmes: Murder, Kidnap and the True Story of an Extraordinary Lady Detective by Brad Ricca | |
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| Category: True Crime | |
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Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
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| Summary: Grace Humiston, nicknamed 'Mrs Holmes' was a pioneering American woman lawyer in the early twentieth century. Much of this book deals with her solving of the case of Ruth Cruger, a teenager who disappeared suddenly in 1917. It tells a good story well, but although a true crime story, I found it a little over-novelised in style, and the chronology constantly shifts backwards and forwards, making the main story a little hard to follow clearly. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 456 | Date: January 2017 |
| Publisher: Amberley | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1445663449 | |
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Grace Humiston, an American lawyer and travelling detective in the early years of the twentieth century, was well ahead of her time. Long before women were readily accepted in the legal profession, she became the first female US District Attorney, taking on cases nobody else wanted, setting herself up as an advocate for the disadvantaged, charging minimal fees and working hard on what seemed to be utterly hopeless cases. With her flair for publicity she made good copy, and was always good for a story in the papers. Her nickname 'Mrs. Sherlock Holmes' was an apt one.
Much of this book tells the story of the investigation into the disappearance of eighteen-year-old Ruth Cruger, who suddenly went missing from her New York home one snowy evening in February 1917 after going out to skate. Grace Humiston was keen to take a major part in the investigation as she was convinced she would do a more thorough job than the police, who tended to take the same line as the news media and act on the assumption that missing girls or women had either eloped, run away from an unhappy home or simply wandered off and would soon return of their own accord. They certainly did not share her concern that too many crimes against women were not being taken seriously, or that young girls in New York were all too frequently being kidnapped by white slavers.
It proved a very convoluted matter, the New York Police Department investigation was less than thorough. 'Mrs Holmes' cut to the chase, and in the process uncovered a trail of corruption that led all the way to Italy. Investigating a suspected murder with repercussions that crossed the Atlantic to the heart of war-torn Europe was a superhuman task in itself, and she earned the gratitude of the Cruger family but not of the local authorities or the legal establishment.
This book reads like a novel most of the time, and in fact almost turns into one. Personally I have very mixed feelings about non-fiction which seeks rather too much immediacy in terms of setting the scene like this, with its purple prose descriptions of the characters' physical surroundings, invented dialogue and a plethora of one-sentence paragraphs. For novels and faction this is fine, but in the case of a true crime story, for me it doesn't quite ring true and smacks of padding. Moreover, as in the case of a number of otherwise very good novels I have read in the last few years, I feel a little editing and pruning would have resulted in a better book at the end. This could partly be explained by the lack of a reasonable paper trail. When the author came across the story and began his research, he was both fascinated and frustrated by finding that not only was there strangely little written about her, but also he could trace no archives containing correspondence or diaries. The sources were very slender, and because of that he has done an effective job in filling out the picture, if perhaps a little over-adequately.
Another issue I had with this book is that interwoven with the central story are other criminal cases and investigations with which Grace Humiston was involved during her career. The chronology does tend to shift forwards and backwards, over a period of fifteen years or so. How relevant, for instance, is the description in the foreword of Arthur Conan Doyle's visit to New York City in 1914? - and despite its positive qualities the result is a somewhat disjointed, sometimes hard to follow read.
If you enjoy this, you might also like to read two other American true crime stories. A case from the 1930s is featured in Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips, and one from thirty years after that in A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Mrs Holmes: Murder, Kidnap and the True Story of an Extraordinary Lady Detective by Brad Ricca at Amazon.com.
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