Hachette India

The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective

Catherine Louisa Pirkis

Meet Loveday Brooke!

Meet Loveday Brooke who worked with the police nearly twenty-five years before women were let onto the police force in the United Kingdom. Loveday has both the skills of disguise and analytical reasoning that helps her solve each crime in these seven atmospheric and entertaining mysteries from the gaslit era. While Holmes dominated the pages of The Strand, Loveday entertained readers of The Ludgate Monthly, employing her deductive or even intuitive powers to unravel the mysteries that come her way.

"Continues to outshine the detective Sherlock Holmes in preternatural prescience... We are just afraid Miss Brooke is too clever in catching criminals ever to catch a husband." Glasgow Herald, 1893

"The Loveday Brooke stories, challenge conventional critical assumptions about turn-of-the-century detective fiction, mass culture, and gender roles, and invite a more balanced view of the volatile cultural and literary climate of 1890s England." Elizabeth Carolyn Miller in Victorian Literature and Culture (CUP)

Catherine Louisa Pirkis

Catherine Louisa Pirkis (6 October 1839 4 October 1910) was a British author of detective fiction. Throughout her career as a writer, Pirkis would sometimes write under the name of "C.L. Pirkis", as to avoid gender association.

Pirkis wrote a total of 14 novels in the years spanning between 1877 and 1894 and contributed to periodicals and magazines such as Belgravia, which had been founded by the sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Her first major novel, Disappeared from Her Home, represented her foray into the mystery genre with the story of a young girl disappearing from her home. This would also serve as a prelude to the creation of the female detective character Loveday Brooke, for which Pirkis is best known.

The character Loveday Brooke was showcased in The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective a collection of seven detective stories that were so popular that she was dubbed the "female Sherlock Holmes".