The Black Lizard, by Edogawa Rampo

"Outside was the boulevard at night, like a land of death where only the streetlights and asphalt were visible."
-- Setting the tone of The Black Lizard (7)

I have meant to read this famous Japanese thriller (originally published in 1934) for at least a decade, largely based on the reputation of the 1968 film adaptation, which I still haven't seen. There's never been a legitimate home video/DVD release, that I can find, although I just discovered it's on YouTube. So it's strange that when I finally did, the timing made me aware of its numerous similarities to the The Sorceress of the Strand!

There's a beautiful woman at the head of a vast criminal network, who covets famous jewels, befriends the young women she plans to victimize, and enjoys close-quarters cat-and-mouse games with the detective on the case. Even the style, relatively straight-to-the-point, at least in the 2006 English translation, has more in common with Meade's than it does that of a Poe or a Conan Doyle.

Instead of operating out of a posh beauty salon, though, this mastermind, who I kept thinking of as the Girl with the Lizard Tattoo, seems to have kidnapping and jewelry theft as her main occupations. And she's far less inhibited, introduced dancing naked at a Christmas Eve party, which shows off that lifelike tattoo: "it seemed as if it would crawl from shoulder to neck, neck to chin, and to her red and shining lips" (5).

That definitely sets a tone, and her plan to steal both a jeweler's prize gem and his beautiful daughter leads to a lot more nudity and general weirdness. Followed by the intrepid Detective Akechi Kogoro, himself a master of disguise and deception, the Black Lizard takes her victim to a perverse art museum/full-on Bond villain lair, complete with a human-scale aquarium, former victims stuffed and posed as trophies, and a man (who may be a kidnapped movie star) naked in a giant cage. The baroque quality of all this has a lot more in common with something like 1968's Danger: Diabolik than it does, say, noir stalwart Raymond Chandler, whose first novel wouldn't be published until five years after this one.

Along the way, there's an amount of direct address to the reader, which makes it feel like an old-time serial (or maybe the '60s Batman series), with rhetorical questions about the plot and statements like "doubtless the reader will have divined that this dark-garbed woman was none other than our heroine, the Black Lizard" (30).

I was interested to see that, by 1934, some people in Japan were already wearing gauze face masks, "commonly used to prevent colds from spreading" (103), which comes in handy when escaping the police, and that Akechi enlists the aid of a "modern girl of somewhat dubious morals" in his plans (167), since that gives her the "guts" to stand up to the stress.

Edogawa, Rampo, Ian Hughes, Mark Schreiber, and Hiroaki Kawajiri. The Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows. Fukuoka, Japan: Kurodahan Press, 2006.

The Sorceress of the Strand, by L.T. Meade

"Is it possible that success has turned my brain?"
-- Madame Sara prepares to meet her fate in "The Teeth of the Wolf" (245)

The prolific L.T. Meade wrote popular girls' fiction before going into competition with Arthur Conan Doyle in series of short thrillers, featuring her own recurring first-person male narrators who hunt international conspiracies of anarchists and thieves, but headed, in her versions, by glamorous female masterminds. One of the most successful was The Sorceress of the Strand (1902), originally appearing in The Strand magazine, in which the titular Sorceress, Madame Sara, operates out of her business as a "professional beautifier" (120). Her elegant salon offers cutting-edge dentistry and  plastic surgery alongside cosmetics and hair styling, and provides her with open access to the rich and powerful.

While Madame Sara targets some male victims in these stories, often in the interest of expanding her criminal influence, the most interesting relationships are those she forges with her young women clients, who revere her even as she exploits them for her own ends. Given the limited opportunities most women have, the role model of a successful, independent woman has great power over their imaginations. When confronted with her criminal activity, it's easy for them to believe Madame Sara is being unjustly persecuted by men who want to put her back in her place. As one of them says, "He would be sure to suspect any very clever woman" (213).

The stories include an emphasis on good manners and honorable behavior, where enemies make their plans known, and assume that all sides will abide by agreements. This creates the sense of a bygone, more naive time, also noticeable when one character, a police sergeant, no less, asks "Is this is a civilized country when death can walk abroad like this, invisible, not to be avoided?" (134)

My personal favorite tale was probably the haunted house outing "The Face of the Abbott," in which it's drily noted that "ghosts have a way of suppressing themselves when most earnestly desired to put in an appearance" (175). I also enjoyed the character of Madame Sara frenemy Mrs. Bensasan, "the best tamer of wild animals in Europe" (231), another fairly unconventional path that it's nice to see represented, even if the character herself is pretty unlikable, trying to control her daughter as much as any patriarch.

True to the tales' international flavor, the background characters are of varied ethnicity, and some of this material is casually dismissive, like  the cavalier treatment of a courtly Persian delegate, certain to be executed for the theft of a jewel, who's just collateral damage in the detectives' schemes to capture their prey.

The Madame Sara stories are available online through the University of Pennsylvania. I read the Broadview Press edition, which is great as always, with a lot of interesting supporting material. It collects all the stories in the "Sorceress of the Strand" cycle, along with "Other Stories" that feature similarly sinister female Moriarty types (and a few seemingly sweet young things with secret agendas).

Meade's contemporary E.A. Bennett, whose review appears in this volume's appendices, does have a point about the style when he states that "there is no padding whatever; incident follows incident with the curtness of an official dispatch" (258). Characterization is very thin, and the protagonist detective characters lack any meaningful interior life, or even the kind of background context that we get for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, which makes the more famous detectives much more memorable. .

Meade's comments in an interview about writing for the market, also included in the Broadview Press edition, suggests that the shift in magazine fiction, from serialized novels to singular short narratives with recurring characters (exemplified by the Sherlock Holmes series) may have stifled her style: "It is so difficult to make one's points tell in short stories" (254).

 

Meade, L T, and Janis Dawson. The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2016. 

A Superfluous Woman, by Emma Frances Brooke

"I think sometimes that no girl would be married at all if there were anything else possible."

"What she was feeling might be right or wrong, decorous or indecorous; that was not the point."

- Jessamine Halliday has a few revelations in A Superfluous Woman (47, 85)

Spoilers ahead!

A doctor with unconventionally psychological ideas is called upon to treat the ailing beauty of the London season, whom he finds literally dying of boredom. Following his advice, which is basically to get over herself and be useful, she runs away to a remote Scottish farm, where she learns to do everyday household chores and revel in the beauty of nature. The latter includes Colin, her handsome neighbor, and a relationship develops that's equal parts "opposites attract" and the inevitable hook-up of the two most attractive people in the area.

As they grow closer, "Jessie" realizes that she isn't cut out for a lifetime of toil as a farmer's wife, especially after she visits the squalid hovel her beloved shares with his elderly parents, and she sees that "all the best gifts he had to offer seemed to her as fetters and a dungeon" (169). She's perfectly willing to sleep with him, even to have his baby, but unfortunately, his intentions are purely honorable, which brings their romance to a crisis point.

After the opening with the sardonic Dr. Cornerstone, this 1894 novel by the socialist reformer Emma Frances Brooke is split into two sections, with very different tones. The first is a pastoral love story, very much in the heroine's point of view. The second, a more objective denunciation of a society that will take a syphilitic creep and turn him into its most eligible bachelor, just because of his title and his money, reads like the "realistic" fictions of social reform.

Brooke's strong suit is mostly her philosophical bent, with a lot of quotable doozies: for example, "By my 'manners' I mean the woman's way of being soft and sweet and smiling when she is really eaten up with fury and hate" (46). Or, when pondering her conundrum, Jessamine muses on "the inadequacy of all she had been taught ... goodness to her was synonymous with prim negation, and she glowed with life. It made her bitter to think with what a defenceless heart and ill-furnished mind she had set out on her quest for reality" (117).

This might be a bit didactic for some tastes, since while the story illustrates Brooke's ideas in a readable way, the characters don't come alive so much on their own terms; certainly, neither of the lovers are particularly vivid. Among other things, however, I did appreciate its early depiction of existential despair, which seems very contemporary: "There was a hollow place where my heart ought to be, a burning confusion where my thoughts should have been. There was nothing to which I cared to put my life. ... On looking back, I cannot see what path was meant for me ... I have been perishing ever since I began to exist. There has never been a way for me at all" (196, 220, 221). In line with that, I appreciate that the novel doesn't blame people for doing the best they could, even if it falls short.

 

You can read this at the Internet Archive, but I picked up a copy from the newest edition to my "favorite publishers" list: Victorian Secrets, based  out of Brighton in the U.K. Adding their recent increase in output to what's coming out from Broadview, and Valancourt, my to-read list has just exploded! 

Brooke, Emma, and Barbara Tilley. A Superfluous Woman. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2015.