The Heart of a Woman (Orczy)
By the title, you'd think this might well be a romance, but although there's a young love element to the plot, it in fact is more of a murder mystery, albeit a fairly easily solved one. There are two (not) coincidentally similar deaths, both linked to certain estate-related shenanigans. One death is very much too coincidentally witnessed by the young lady who is the fiancée of the heir apparent to the estate in question.
Orczy, even though she's writing a generic "modern" novel, places her events firmly nine years after an actual natural disaster - a catastrophic volcanic eruption in Martinique in 1902, which would have been well within living memory for her readers. The novel was in fact published in 1911. This gives a slight but curious verisimilitude to an otherwise entirely hoary old plot device of missing heirs and missing documents destroyed in a catastrophe.
OK, herewith the reason for the spoiler tags. Two young men are murdered, each in a carriage with a stiletto through the throat; one in Brussels, one in London. In the latter case the murder weapon, a stiletto stick, indubitably belongs to our young hero, Luke, and he is known to have quarreled with the victim in a club just before.
In fact, Luke is protecting his elderly Uncle Radclyffe, a surrogate father to him, who has killed not once but twice (a real newly-discovered heir, and then a fraudster who impersonates the murdered man and blackmails the murderous uncle) in order to protect the inheritance of the only member of the younger generation of the family that Radclyffe cares for - Luke. Radclyffe also conveniently becomes terminally ill before he can convey to anyone his actions or his motives. It is Luke's beloved fiancee, behaving in ever-so-slightly unladylike (but not at all New Woman-ish) ways, who eventually ferrets out the truth and saves her stubborn self-sacrificing lover from the gibbet. There is no dramatic trial scene: just an arrest and a lot of society whispering at parties. There is also, of course a deathbed confession.
Orczy's weakness, as ever, is characterization. She is impelled to kill off wicked but beloved Uncle Rad because there really is no way to let him go on living, not because of his morality but because his continued existence imperils the social standing of her young couple; we never really get a convincing sense of why an established, if notoriously grumpy, member of the British upper classes would suddenly go on a killing spree to resolve matters that surely could have been worked out with a good lawyer.
The oddest, and yet not unexpected, characterizations are those of Luke and Louisa, who are constantly referred to with adjectives like "ordinary" or "common." This is particularly true for Louisa, but here's what the author writes of Luke: "Luke de Mountford was no fool. Men of his stamp - we are accustomed to call them commonplace - take a very straight outlook on life. They are not hampered by the psychological problems which affect the moral balance of a certain class of people of to-day; they have no sexual problems to solve. Theirs is a steady, wholesome, and clean life, and the mirrors of nature have not been blurred by the breath of psychologists."
Neither Luke nor Louisa is commonplace in any sense we'd recognize today. They both lead extremely comfortable upper-class lives, and they both repress their emotions and obey the conventions of their class to a rigorous degree: "The puppets were still dancing, moved by the invisible strings held by the hand of the implacable giant called Convention."
What this means, however, is that they have more than a whiff of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Orczy revels in the agonized repression of real emotion, especially by the man, and frankly the kind of man she writes as a hero comes off as highly emotionally damaged and constantly having to be rescued from his own self-obliterating impulses. Poor Louisa! She, however, is similarly "whole", "common", and, in the British title of the work, "a True Woman".
Notwithstanding the much over-praised lead characters, the tale is amusing, the plot unfolded well, and the depiction of of the tyranny of social mores in pre-WWI England instructive if hardly sympathetic.
