We have one man and three of the best women detectives possible.
Staff Captain Clifford Harland, 1893, professional detective and head of the Salvation Army Enquiry Bureau, London
By Sheilla Jones and Jim Burns
Updated October 2021
The idea for a historical murder mystery series based on the Salvation Army was born of a collision of ideas: my on-going search for a mystery premise that is new and fresh, and co-author Jim Burns' discovery that his great-great grandmother, Ensign Matilda Langtry, was the first matron of the Salvation Army’s Rescue Home for fallen women in 1896 Helena, Montana. It was the proverbial “aha!” moment. What better place for a strong female “detective” than managing a house full of prostitutes, drunks and outlaws struggling to leave behind lives of degradation and crime, in a town where the values and spirit of the Wild West frontier days were under siege by the trainloads of settlers arriving from the East.
Writing a murder mystery series requires, first and foremost, a protagonist who is repeatedly thrown into the middle of murder investigations. That’s why so many mystery series are based in police departments, detective agencies, spy agencies, legal firms, forensic laboratories or coroner’s offices. Murder has a natural home there.
When you go outside these conventional venues, it becomes more challenging to create a character that will regularly get themselves mixed up in murder inquiries. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is a classic example of a “detective” who has no real reason to be investigating other than the fact that her friends and family keep pulling her into problem situations—and that she is an observant busybody.
An even bigger challenge when setting a mystery series in the Victorian era is the limited number of opportunities women had to become sleuths. That’s why, for verisimilitude, historical mystery writers using a female protagonist must resort to the heroine being a wealthy aristocrat who can defy social convention or she must have a husband, father, beau, detective inspector or some other male figure to give her acceptable cover. They couldn’t be detectives in their own right. Or could they?
Jim’s great-great-grandmother got us on the scent of something even more intriguing than the challenges of a Rescue Home matron. Our research on her hinted that the Salvation Army also had its own detective agency. It was remarkably difficult to find documentation on this agency, or even confirmation of its existence—until we connected the SA Enquiry Bureau and the detective agency.
The SA Archives in London suffered extensive damage during the WWII Blitz. However, with the aid of the SA International HQ in London and SA archivists in the UK, France, USA and Canada, we were able to piece together the start of the Bureau in 1885 and its expansion to include a detective agency in 1888. We wrote about it in Mrs. Booth’s Most Unusual Enquiry Bureau, published in the UK journal Ripperologist in June 2020.
The Enquiry Bureau, by 1896, was considered London’s largest private detective agency, and, according to the London dailies, it had a reach that exceeded Scotland Yard and Pinkerton’s combined. And the majority of its “Hallelujah detectives” were women.
Another “aha!” moment. We’d found a model for a female sleuth in Victorian London who had authority and status of her own to pursue cases. She didn’t need a man to give her cover. Of course, London society at the time looked askance at a woman detective, but the egalitarian Salvation Army often challenged the comfortableness of the well-to-do and powerful by exposing the extreme poverty and desperation of the men, women and children of the underclasses.
Thus, from a collision of ideas married to tenacious research, was born our protagonist, Captain Addie Langley, professional detective, London, 1888.
Curious facts about the Salvation Army
Much of what people know about the colourful history of the Salvation Army is shaped by George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 play Major Barbara and the 1941 movie based on that play, or by the 1983 British television sit-com Hallelujah! starring the inimitable Thora Hird.
In its early days, the SA—founded by William and Catherine Booth in 1865 as a Methodist-style evangelical church focussed on Victorian England’s lowest classes—was a decidedly eccentric organization that challenged society’s conventions.
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