The Stories
The Old Man In the Corner (U.S. edition: The Man In the Corner) is one of three books of short stories featuring Orczy's armchair detective. Although it contains the earliest written stories in the series, they were not collected in book form until four years after the chronologically later stories in The Case of Miss Elliott (1905). The last book in the series is the much later Unravelled Knots (1925).
The character first appeared in The Royal Magazine in 1901 in a series of six "Mysteries of London". The following year he returned in seven "Mysteries of Great Cities" set in large provincial centers of the British Isles. The stories are told by an unnamed Lady Journalist who reports the conversation of the 'man in the corner' who sits at the same table in the A.B.C. teashop. For the book, twelve were rewritten in the third person, with the Lady Journalist now named as Polly Burton.
The Old Man relies mostly upon sensationalistic newspaper accounts, with the occasional courtroom visit, and relates all this while tying complicated knots in a piece of string. The plots themselves are typical of Edwardian crime fiction, resting on a foundation of unhappy marriages and the inequitable division of family property. Other period details include a murder in the London Underground; the murder of a female doctor; and two cases involving artists living in "bohemian" lodgings. Another new and noteworthy feature is that no one is ever brought to justice. Though the villains are identified by the narrator (who disdains to inform the police), most cannot be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The stories included in this volume are:
- The Fenchurch Street Mystery
- The Robbery in Phillimore Terrace
- The York Mystery
- The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway
- The Liverpool Mystery
- The Edinburgh Mystery
- The Theft at the English Provident Bank
- The Dublin Mystery
- An Unparalleled Outrage (The Brighton Mystery)
- The Regent's Park Murder
- The De Genneville Peerage (The Birmingham Mystery)
- The Mysterious Death in Percy Street
Read more about this topic: The Old Man In The Corner
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