Femme Fatale (65 page)

Hundreds of fashionable folk quaked when they learned
Comstock had taken hold of her. They dreaded that when she
found herself driven to the wall, abandoned by friends who
were afraid to help her, there would be State’s evidence given
about their affairs, and all the skeletons in the closets would be
brought out to public view
.

—A NEW YORK NEWSPAPER ON MADAME RESTELL’S ARREST, 1878

After more than a decade of reading, studying, and arranging the diaries of Penelope Huxleigh into seven published volumes so far, I have been struck by how many ancillary materials I am finding bundled with the actual diaries as the years progress.

I’m beginning to suspect that a previous scholar had found Miss Huxleigh’s diaries and had integrated them with supporting materials much more readily available at a much earlier time.

The most exciting “find” introduced in this volume are three extracts from case notes that Sherlock Holmes apparently kept but never shared with anyone, not even Dr. Watson. These fragments demonstrate, as the published Holmesian material so amply does, that Dr. Watson was the better chronicler of the detective’s adventures. Holmes himself might cavil at his physician friend’s “unscientific” approach to story telling, but there is no doubt that the good doctor was a more compelling writer.

As usual, my research has proved the portrayal of the personalities
and facts in the Huxleigh accounts correct, in so far as they do not involve matters intentionally kept secret, such as Mina’s murder of Madame Restell. It is a pity the Victorian Age deemed so many matters of normal life worthy of concealment. On the other hand, such habits make the Huxleigh diaries an exciting and enlightening window on the hidden aspects of life then.

Mr. Washington Irving Bishop did indeed perish in the outré manner described in Nell Nelson’s mostly accurate report of his Lambs Club appearance. Madame Restell did indeed service both high society and low in these delicate matters, as depicted by Miss Huxleigh, for much of the middle of the nineteenth century. She was the most noted and notorious of two or three Manhattan abortionists who advertised publicly despite police and court prosecution.

Certainly this New York episode casts fascinating insight into Irene Adler’s early years and mysterious origins.

Where it will all lead only the unpublished volumes of Miss Huxleigh’s epic diaries and my assiduous future studies will reveal.

—Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., A.I.A.
*
November 5, 2002

*
Advocates of Irene Adler

Selected Bibliography

Belford, Barbara.
Bram Stoker
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Browder, Clifford.
The Wickedest Woman in New York
. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1988.

Bunson, Matthew E.
Encyclopedia Sherlockiana
. New York: Macmillan, 1994.

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace.
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Coleman, Elizabeth Ann.
The Opulent Era
. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1989.

Crow, Duncan.
The Victorian Woman
. London: Cox & Wyman, 1971.

Doyle, Arthur Conan.
The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes
. Various editions.

Du Maurier, George.
Trilby
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Homberger, Eric, with Alice Hudson.
The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of Nearly 400 Years of New York City’s History
. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Jackson, Kenneth T., editor.
The Encyclopedia of New York City
. New Haven and London: Yale University, 1995.

Jay, Ricky. Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women:
A History of Unique, Eccentric & Amazing Entertainers
. London: Robert Hale, 1987.

Keller, Allan.
Scandalous Lady: The Life and Times of Madame Restell, New York’s Most Notorious Abortionist
. New York: Atheneum, 1981.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von.
Psychopathia Sexualis
. London: Velvet Publications, 1997.

Kroeger, Brooke.
Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist
. New York: Times Books, 1994.

Mackay, James.
Allan Pinkerton: The Eye Who Never Slept
. Edinburgh, Scotland: Mainstream Publishing Co., 1996.

“Perhaps it has taken until the end of this century for an
author like Douglas to be able to imagine a female protagonist
who could be called ‘the’ woman by Sherlock Holmes
”

—GROUNDS FOR MURDER, 1991

To encourage the reading and discussion of Carole Nelson Douglas’s acclaimed novels examining the Victorian world from the viewpoint of one of the most mysterious women in literature, the following descriptions and discussion topics are offered. The author interview, biography, and bibliography will aid discussion as well.

Set in 1880–1890 London, Paris, Prague, Monaco, and most recently New York City, the Irene Adler novels reinvent the only woman to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes as the complex and compelling protagonist of her own stories. Douglas’s portrayal of “this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her independent way,” noted
The New York Times
, recasts her “not as a loose-living adventuress but a woman ahead of her time.” In Douglas’s hands, the fascinating but sketchy American prima donna from “A Scandal in Bohemia” becomes an aspiring opera singer moonlighting as a private inquiry agent. When events force her from the stage into the art of detection, Adler’s exploits rival those of Sherlock Holmes himself as she crosses paths and swords with the day’s leading creative and political figures while sleuthing among the Bad and the Beautiful of Belle Epoque Europe.

Critics praise the novels’ rich period detail, numerous historical characters, original perspective, wit, and “welcome window on things Victorian.”

“The private and public escapades of Irene Adler Norton [are] as erratic and unexpected and brilliant as the character herself,” noted Mystery Scene of
Another Scandal in Bohemia
(formerly
Irene’s Last Waltz
), “a long and complex jeu d’esprit, simultaneously modeling itself on and critiquing Doylesque novels of ratiocination coupled with emotional distancing. Here is Sherlock Holmes in skirts, but as a detective with an artistic temperament and the passion to match, with the intellect to penetrate to the heart of a crime and the heart to show compassion for the intellect behind it.”

A
BOUT
T
HIS
B
OOK

Femme Fatale
, the seventh Irene Adler novel, opens in the Paris in the late summer of 1889. The series’s main characters are all trying to recover from the previous spring’s hunt for Jack the Ripper. The notorious Whitechapel killer of 1888 had decamped to the Continent for more mayhem. But the rival investigators who forged uneasy alliances during that dangerous time—Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler and friends, and the enterprising American newspaper reporter, Nellie Bly—will be forced into action together again.

Irene Adler’s husband, English barrister Godfrey Norton, has established an office in Paris, leaving Irene and her longtime companion, British spinster Nell Huxleigh, alone at their country cottage in Neuilly-sur Seine (a present-day suburb of Paris). First Sherlock Holmes calls at Neuilly to collect a promised translation of a murderous diary related to the Ripper case. Nell, who has read an unpublished manuscript of Dr. Watson’s version of the first Adler/Holmes encounter, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” loathes and fears Holmes because she knows that “to him” Irene “is always
the
woman.”

Then Nellie Bly reaches out from America with tantalizing talk of murder and Irene’s mother to draw Irene, Nell, and Sherlock Holmes to America. There Irene will confront aspects of her unremembered past and origins and there they confront murders new, and old.

F
OR
D
ISCUSSION
Related to
Femme Fatale