The Crime Doctor by E. W. Hornung

While not quite the end of the E. W. Hornung read-through, this is the last of Hornung's books published before the First World War, and in a sense his last 'regular' work. He stopped writing fiction during the war and didn't take it up again afterwards before he died in 1921; his works from after 1914 consist of some war-related non-fiction and one posthumously published collection of short stories written earlier. So it's not quite the end, but it is kind of the end, in a way!

And although I can't really complain that we didn't get enough books from Hornung—this is the twenty-eighth entry in my read-through—The Crime Doctor (1914) really made me wish he hadn't given up on fiction and/or died so young, because it has a real sense of things progressing in a direction it would have been fascinating to see more of. It's not my favourite of his books so far by any means, but it is definitely one of the most suggestively interesting. Its structure is similar to that of the Raffles books and Witching Hill: a series of connected short episodes forming a single overarching story, in between a typical short story collection and a novel (I sometimes think Hornung would have liked modern TV series writing!). These episodes centre on the life and adventures of Doctor John Dollar, who came to medicine in an unusual way. Fighting in the Second Boer War, he suffered a head wound from which he recovered 'physically and even mentally... but not morally'—the damage to his brain gave him a terrible compulsion to steal. Eventually he found a doctor who was able to perform a surgery which cured his kleptomania; after that, he decided to train in medicine himself and use the foundation of his own experiences to develop and put into practice a new theory of medical criminology, founding a nursing home where he attempts to treat more subtle cases of physically-influenced criminality than his own.

(if all of this is sounding rather humorously like a bizarre inverse of Raffles, yeah, I said it was interesting...!)

'When another sudden injury makes a monkey of an honest man, I know where to take him; but the average injury is too gradual, too subtle for the knife. Congenital cases are, of course, quite hopeless in that respect. Yet there are ways of curing even what I regard as the very worst type of congenital criminal at the present day.'

These ideas are all introduced in the first story, in which Dollar meets and befriends the fictional Home Secretary Topham Vinson, who is deeply impressed by his ideas. My immediate reaction was that this was a fascinating development of Hornung's interest in exploring crime and criminals in fiction—he's tackled the subject from variously moral, social, spiritual, romantic and supernatural perspectives in his previous books, and now in 1914 here he is taking a thoroughly modern scientific approach. The development of these ideas later on in the stories is perhaps not what it could have been—it kind of gets lost in the plot and ends inconclusively—but it's still a very interesting element.

The plot! What about that? Well, the mystery of the first story involves the murder of a policeman during an episode of shop window-breaking by militant suffragettes. An opportunistic burglarious bystander, Alfred Croucher, has been arrested for the murder, but Dollar is approached by one of the suffragettes, Lady Vera Moyle, who reveals that she was the real killer—although it was an accident rather than deliberate murder. Now Lady Vera wants to save the innocent Croucher by turning herself in. Lady Vera, Croucher and the general topic of suffragette criminality all return in the later stories, with lots of Hornung's exciting plot-twisting; and here we have the second very interesting thing about the book, its treatment of suffragettes.

Hornung has throughout his writing been generally on the side of viewing women as fully human, complex people, and has always been particularly admiring of a certain type of spirited, courageous woman with a character and attitudes which contemporary conservatives would have frowned on—of which Lady Vera is another instance—but I don't think he's ever made a clear political statement about women's rights as such before. The general upshot here seems to be that the suffragists are right, even admirable in their dedication, but that suffragette violence and militant tactics are wrong and to be condemned. Lady Vera is the heroine and is deeply admired by both Dollar and the narrative in general, and she gets to make several determined speeches about the importance of the suffragette cause and the 'shabby' way the Government have treated women fighting for the right to 'political existence'. But her participation in shop window-breaking and other destructive tactics is treated as sadly regrettable, and Dollar has a bit of a breakdown over finding her apparently taking part in burning down the house of a particularly unpleasant misogynist later on in the book. ( Eventually... )

It's another very interesting treatment of a contemporary issue; I have to wonder how Hornung reacted when women in the UK actually got the vote four years later (there is a mention of the fact that they already had in Hornung's beloved Australia!).

Anyway, the story develops: Lady Vera and Doctor Dollar fall in love, of course, and some further dramatically exciting mysteries are encountered and solved by the crime doctor. There are more notably modern features, such as the prominence of motor cars and lengthy descriptions of Dollar's drives out to his cases in his own motor (not an enthusiasm of Hornung's I can endorse, sadly; I think E. M. Forster amongst contemporary writers has the correct attitude to cars). The ending is characteristically swift, and I would have appreciated a bit more room for the character development as well as for the book's themes—but it is all very exciting, and all terribly interesting. I recommend this one, especially if you've enjoyed the Raffles stories and some of Hornung's other earlier books involving crime.