Old Man in the Corner : the Teahouse Detective

This first volume of Orczy's Teahouse Detective series, The Old Man In The Corner, is a difficult book for me to review. On the one hand, I enjoyed the intricate setups of each previously unsolvable mystery and the eponymous Old Man has an engaging way of telling his stories. Each short story is linked by the literary device of an amateur sleuth mansplaining his interpretation of an unsolved crime while he and his audience relax over a teashop luncheon. The crimes display a wonderful understanding of English class snobbery and, with only very limited space for physical descriptions of people and place, manage to impart a pretty good idea of cities such as London and Birmingham at the time.

On the other hand, however, several aspects of this collection really haven't aged well meaning I was frequently irritated by instances of sexism and xenophobia. I understand that The Old Man In The Corner was written well over a century ago, but its author was a Hungarian-born woman. Perhaps the blithe dismissals of women and foreigners were meant to be satirising English society attitudes of the early 1900s? If that was the case though, then I would expect Orczy's recurring female character, Polly, to have been a more realistic creation. We are told she is a journalist - an independent and educated woman - yet from the moment the Old Man starts rhapsodising, Polly is nothing more than a practically silent sounding board for his ideas, and more often than not is referred to as a 'young girl'. I felt she needed to be a much stronger foil in order for her role to be viable. As it is, the Old Man might just as well have spoken directly to us readers.