When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead (crime fiction spoiler-free review)
This is part of a series about fun and free Victorian literature, inspired by my initial recommendation list in ‘Victorian literature’s good for you in a crisis’. If you’d like to recommend a particularly fun piece of Victorian literature that people can find for free (or ask me to review it), comment here!
When the Sea…
When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead, subtitled A Thrilling Detective Story, was published in 1894, written by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (usually credited as Mrs George Corbett). And it’s a great title, isn’t it? It’s inspired by Revelation and a line about the Final Judgment: “The sea gave up its dead, and Death and Hades gave up their dead, and each one was judged according to his deeds” (20:13). Crime, judgment, and punishment? Sounds good, right?
In When the Sea, Anne/Annie Cory leads her father, aunt, and future brother-in-law in an endeavour to find a jewel thief who framed her fiancé, Harley, for a diamond theft. Although it’s more than a century old, I doubt its plot is widely known, so this is going to remain spoiler free!
When the Sea is a fairly light read. It’s not overly long, at just 162 pages on Kindle (which estimates a reading time of about 4 hours), and it’s written in an accessible style that gets to the point, so the story rolls along quite nicely. The plot, as one might expect, stretches credulity at times, but is none the worse for it.
Cory is often referred to as “one of the first female detectives”, along with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Penrith (from Thou Art the Man, also published in 1894). Both women investigate to clear the name of a man they love, acting on their own behalf rather than as a professional detective, but that shouldn’t take away from the excitement of Cory’s story.
Although there were still more than 20 years to go before a woman would have full powers of arrest in the UK ( Edith Smith), writers had already imagined a whole array of detective work that a woman could do just as well, if not better, than a man. When the Sea thus reflects Corbett’s feminist ethic that had led to her publishing New Amazonia in response to fellow author Mrs Humphrey Ward ‘s ‘Appeal Against Female Suffrage’. As Annie says at the very start of the efforts to exonerate Harley: “I am anxious to do some real work, and I am sure you would find me clever and capable”.
She surely is, and Annie largely directs the plot, including instructing her co-detectives in taking rather extreme steps like stowing aboard a ship (which leads to high drama on the seas, giving the title an interesting dual meaning).
One of my favourite things about a lot of early female detectives is their propensity for disguise, which really reveals a lot of late-Victorian anxieties about trust between strangers, in particular between classes and employers and employees. Cory joins figures like Dora Myrl and Miriam Lea (ex-actresses turned detectives) in taking up rôles that allow her to investigate in secret. Female detectives have a distinct advantage over their male fellows in readily finding domestic positions that allow them to investigate upper-class criminals from within their households, and Cory takes advantage of a governess position for precisely that reason.
Cory is by no means ‘domesticated’, even as a detective, however. She’s described as an “avenger”, which puts her alongside some of the more bloodthirsty early female detectives like Mrs Paschal (who relishes physical punishments of various criminals) and penny-dreadful lead Ruth the Betrayer. Cory doesn’t go so far as axe-murder herself (unlike Ruth!), but vengeance certainly co-exists alongside the desire to free her beloved for marriage, and it helps give When the Sea its “thrilling” bite.
Corbett’s other detective stories (bonus/aside)
On the inside cover of When the Sea, Corbett is credited as the author of a number of other novels, including Adventures of a Lady Detective, Secrets of a Private Enquiry Office, and The Adventures of an Ugly Girl.
Despite a lot of work on female detectives, I’ve never been able to track down Adventures, and many other scholars have been similarly baffled. Like Secrets, it is often referred to as a set of short stories in a format that will be familiar to most readers of early detective fiction, but there are no currently known copies. Don’t be disappointed, though. Cory has plenty of other professional sisters from other great authors, many of whom are mentioned in the links above (and you can read my article on female detectives, ‘ Back to Bodies’, for more!). And, if you enjoy When the Sea, you can always try out some of Corbett’s other work.
Originally published at https://graciado.substack.com.
