Review: The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories by L. T. Meade

Trade paperback, 311 pages
Published 2015 (contents: 1895-1903)
Acquired April 2016
Read August 2016

The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories by L. T. Meade

"There is no doubt that she is very clever. She knows a little bit of everything, and has wonderful recipes with regard to medicines, surgery, and dentistry. She is a most lovely woman herself, very fair, with blue eyes, an innocent, childlike manner, and quantities of rippling gold hair. [...] This woman deals in all sorts of curious, secrets, but principally in cosmetics. Her shop in the Strand could, I fancy, tell many a strange history. Her clients go there, and she does what is necessary for them." (120)

L. T. Meade was a force to be reckoned with in the British magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She wrote many recurring features, kind of like Sherlock Holmes. This Broadview edition collects single installments from Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1893-95), The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1898), and The Heart of a Mystery (1901), as well as all six installments of The Sorceress of the Strand (1902-03). There's a lot of medicine and/or science in the stories collected here: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor is about the weird crimes a doctor discovers in the course of his medical duties, while the villain of The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is an evil, female Italian chemist who works for a secret society, while The Sorceress of the Strand is about an amateur chemist who works doing insurance investigations who ends up repeatedly encountering one Madame Sara, an evil surgeon/physician/dentist (described in the above quotation). Ostensibly these stories are about science, but science in the world of L. T. Meade has a very occult register: there's a lot of hypnotism and gothic overtones in these stories.

They're fun enough, but not terribly amazing. A little repetitive in that Madame Sara always has some incredibly convoluted plot-- in one, she makes a woman metal teeth so she can attack someone but people will think it was a wolf-- for which there often seems to be a supernatural explanation, but the dogged investigations of Dixon (the insurance investigator) and his friend Vandeleur (a police surgeon) always make it clear it's Madame Sara's tricks at the root of it all. Sara has scientific powers, but is no scientist, I would say-- the title "sorceress" given to her by the serial's title is much more appropriate. I couldn't help but feel, though, that The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings sounded more interesting than The Sorceress of the Strand, and wished we'd got the former in its entirety and just an excerpt of the latter. Still, thank goodness that Broadview opted to reprint even just a limited selection of these long-forgotten tales.