R. Austin Freeman: The Mystery of Angelina Frood
The Mystery of Angelina Frood (1924) is one of Freeman's most politically interesting novels. It opens with a portrait of wife abuse, done in Freeman's most elaborate style (Chapters 1-5). The novel was written long before feminists started treating spousal abuse as a political issue. Freeman has no consciousness that there should be systematic remedies addressed to the problem, such as new laws or shelters. Such political solutions will come much later. What there is in Freeman is a detailed look at the problem, one that refuses to sweep it under the rug. Freeman shows how serious such a situation can be for women. Nothing in the novel suggests it is an atypical problem: the events could clearly be typical for a lot of women. Freeman's doctor narrator looks into the situation from a medical point of view. The book also views it as a practical and legal plight.
Freeman is trying to generate more light than heat: all the abuse takes place off stage, and is talked about, not depicted live. Instead, Freeman concentrates on making us understand all the aspects of the situation.
The spousal abuse is treated as a Freeman "case", one of those collections of events he studies in full detail, and investigates from every angle. Often such cases are at the center of a mystery in Freeman, and that is what happens here, as the case tuns into one of Freeman's baffling mysteries. Such cases are primary structural building blocks of Freeman's books. A case as a whole is what Thorndyke investigates. It is also what the narrator of Freeman's later novels often sets forth in detail as a witness. The fact that the wife abuse is treated as a Freeman case gives it a weight and gravity it would not otherwise possess. Freeman regarded his cases as important: they have prestige and centrality in his books. Making the wife abuse into a case is Freeman's way of stressing its significance.
The book opens with the structure familiar from Freeman's trilogy: a young doctor narrator, substituting for an established doctor and his practice, is called out at night on a sinister emergency. However, this early incident is more closely integrated in what follows than in the trilogy. It is not a separate event, marked off from the rest of the book, but merely the opening salvo. It does add to the book's feeling of mystery, but it is also something of the "wrong shape" into which the opening sections could be poured.
Angelina Frood is paradigmatic of Freeman's later mysteries in several ways. As Thorndyke himself points out, most of the information in the story is obtained from a single witness. This witness is also the narrator, as is common, for all or part of the late novels. The book concerns a disappearance, with all the horrible uncertainty this presupposes. Freeman's characters almost never find a body in the library: instead, somebody disappears, and everyone spends weeks just trying to establish the simplest facts. The police confine themselves to trying to track down the corpse. The other characters in the book are not treated as suspects, and there is little investigation of their lives or activities, as there would be in say, Van Dine school writers. Even scraps of information are hard to come by, and are clutched at tenaciously by everyone investigating the crime. Great stress is laid on photographs, drawings and visual descriptions of people. These are usually produced completely independently of any help from the police, as are fingerprints. There is a sense of darkness hovering over the book.
Except for the ultimate solution, the first half of The Mystery of Angelina Frood (1924) is much more interesting than the second. The first half sets forth a well-constructed mystery plot about an abused woman. The second half is full of red herrings. Both the writing and the plotting become arch. The reader is being treated to less of a genuine detective story here. — Mike Grost