The Passenger from Scotland Yard: A Victorian Detective Novel

by H. Freeman Wood

Five men sat in a railroad compartment on the mail train from London to Dover, sharing the discomfort and amenities of a train ride in the 1880s. The same five men boarded the Channel steamer and crossed to Calais where they entrained for Paris. When the train reached Paris, however, it was revealed that one man was a detective from Scotland Yard, on the trail of a fortune in stolen gems; one man (identity unknown) was a murderer; and another was a corpse!

Genres: Mystery, British Literature, Victorian, Fiction

295 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1888

Reviews

[Mark Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all, this $0.99 edition is a MESS, with missing indentations for the dialogue which makes it extremely annoying to read. I bought it to save my older Dover edition, which is in decent shape but which I was worried would fall apart. But about 10-12 chapters in I went back to the Dover and put this one down. A very shoddy transcription.

The novel itself, which E.F. Bleier calls the best detective novel published between The Moonstone (1866) and Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), was a very enjoyable read, with lots of intriguing characters, surprising relationships, and a double mystery regarding a theft and a murder that had a number of fantastic twists and turns. Yes, the style is Victorian and sometimes the sentences are maybe more of a labyrinth than they need to be. But the detail, the action, and the evocative social and physical environments presented in the novel make for a consistently intriguing read.

Just don't buy the one current edition that seems to be available for e-readers, because this edition just plain stinks.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you don't ever just wake up in the morning and say, "Hey! I feel like I need to read some Victorian Lit!" then this book probably isn't for you. Verbosity, convoluted plot line, and other typically Victorian-isms. I rather enjoyed it. . .

[Bev · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The Passenger from Scotland Yard" is Wood's cute way of trying to keep the other passengers on the train from guessing who the inspector sent hot-foot after the diamond thief is. [I defy anybody, after reading the descriptions of the five passengers we have our eye on, to NOT know which one the inspector is.] But...I've put the cart before the horse. Five passengers get on board the mail train from London to Dover. As they're getting ready to depart, we learn that a diamond theft has taken place. There is a suspect in the case (who gets nabbed at Dover), but there's an inspector on the train bound for the boat to Paris who thinks that man has been framed. Also on board is the man he believes is the true thief, a couple of con men who hope to get their hands on the diamonds, and another man who claims to be a representative of a tee-totaler society but who may not be what he seems either. By the time they reach Dover, one of their number is dead and the diamonds are nowhere to be found. Who killed him? And where are the diamonds. Did the original suspect really steal them and send them to a confederate in Paris? Inspector Byde (our "Passenger from Scotland Yard") plans to find out.

So....according to E. F. Bleiler, who provides the introduction to Wood's novel, this is the best detective novel between Poe and Doyle (and he doesn't really count Doyle's longer works because they are "detective short stories tacked onto historical romances). Bleiler was apparently a scholar of science fiction, detective fiction, and fantasy literature (and I do actually recognize the name), but I have to say--if this was the best thing going, I'm surprised detective fiction took off at all. Because Wood has a bizarre narrative style. Yes, a detective novelist is trying to pull the wool over the reader's eyes in an effort to surprise her with the solution at the end...but never have I read a book where the detective (here, Inspector Byde) almost seems intent on keeping the clues secret from himself. He never refers to any of his suspects by name, always using the most circuitous methods of description to indicate who he's talking about. And his obsession with mathematical theorems were enough to make me want to pull my hair out.

I have an idea that the confusion he strews about and the odd little conversations he has with "Grandpa" (one of the prospective diamond thieves already in Paris who wants to steal the diamonds from the original thief) is supposed to be humorous, but it all just made me tired. I've always thought I liked Victorian literature, but the verbose nature of this detective novel makes me think I'm a bit pickier--give me Doyle's style any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Also, I normally like a good mystery set on a train and maybe I would have liked this one...if it had been a good mystery. One of the blurbs I read about it online said that "the murder comes as a surprise and we are puzzled whether it has any connection to the recent diamond theft." Um, no. Actually "we" aren't surprised at who gets murdered & that they got murdered on the train and "we" were pretty darn sure that it all had something to do with the diamonds. [Spoiler alert: "we" were right.] ★★, maybe. I think.

First posted on my blog My Reader's Block.

[Christopher Borum · Rating 1 out of 5]

Man, this really set me back. It took so long to read that I didn't want to pick up another book for a week after, and then when I did, I forgot it on the train half-finished. I understand that the Victorian style is much more verbose and stilted than we use today, but even accounting for that, this wasn't well written. The author has an annoying habit of containing conversations within a long paragraph, with each person's words presented as a sentence. It was difficult to determine when a paragraph was being used as a conversation rather than as exposition.

The character names were too similar. The detective and one of the key actors he's following were named "Byde" and "Byers" and I couldn't always remember which was which. The back cover blurb touts the ingenious solution which I found to be tedious and uninteresting. And the author spends so much time describing a room or the street or someone's clothes that not much really happens in the story. Again, I understand the stylistic differences between then and now, but all of the action that takes place could have been covered in about 40 pages. I did not get any Victorian "atmosphere", just exasperation at how little was going on.

I know this is supposed to have some historic value as one of the early detective stories, but I found little enough of interest otherwise.

[Ronald · Rating 3 out of 5]

read some time in 1996