The Detective
Baum introduces the character of the private detective Quintus Fogerty in this book; the character re-appears in a later volume of the series, Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation. Fogerty serves the "purpose of extricating the girls when necessary" from plot difficulties. Critic Fred Erisman has judged Baum's use of this "real world" character as a tacit admission that the genial milieu of his gentler characters, the cousins and their family, cannot accommodate the darker elements of American society.
Read more about this topic: Aunt Jane's Nieces In Society
Famous quotes containing the word detective:
“The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practiced by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The detective novel is the art-for-art’s-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.”
—V.S. (Victor Sawdon)