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I thought this one was good fun, with a perfect ratio of good values blended in. It’s an amateur-sleuth sort of mystery: in 1898 Chicago, Harriet Morrow seeks to improve her lot in life (earning potential and freedom, both) by applying to work as a detective at the Prescott Detective Agency. Female detectives are quite rare, but the Pinkertons had one recently, and why not Harriet? With her unadorned clothing style and men’s hat and shoes, Harriet already turns heads; she may as well pursue a path that feels more natural than the secretarial pool. And she has a household to support: since the death of their parents and Harriet’s coming of age, she cares for her sixteen-year-old brother as well as herself at just twenty-one years.

The Prescott Detective Agency takes her on, but no one seems exactly to expect her to succeed. The case she’s given first is a bit of a dud: her boss doesn’t believe it for a minute, but his elderly next-door neighbor claims her maid has gone missing, and to mollify his wife (who loves the old woman) he asks Harriet to look into it. Surely the maid has merely taken an extra day off, or the old neighbor lady is senile to begin with. But Mrs. Pearl Bartlett turns out to be a firecracker: unconventional, perhaps a bit like Harriet herself, not a bit dim, and very sure of Agnes Wozniak’s disappearance. She also has misheard our protagonist, and misread her large stout frame and men’s hat: she calls Harriet Harry, and the nascent detective finds she likes it.

Unfortunately for Agnes, but rather fortunately for Harriet, the maid does indeed appear to be missing, and quite possibly in real danger. Harriet has herself a case, and a chance to prove herself, although she is very much learning on the job; she has lots of moxie, and a certain amount of natural instinct, but there is much about the work of detection that she’ll need to figure out. Luckily, the Prescott Detective Agency offers one friendly face: Matthew McCabe seems willing to help. Armed with a mentor (and eventually, properly armed), Harriet will learn her new profession, hopefully find the missing maid, earn a proper living for herself… and maybe learn a bit about underground queer Chicago along the way.

The historical aspects to this novel were great fun, even when frustrating, from Harriet’s clothing conundrums (she does not like women’s styles. but doesn’t really want to impersonate a man. but their options are just so practical, comfortable, and natural feeling…) to the infuriating dismissals she faces from pretty much everyone around her. I was especially delighted to lean into not only a historical inner city Chicago, populated by immigrants and the working class, but a queer underground, including their nightclubs and practices and (nearly literal) secret handshakes. I really appreciated Osler’s Author’s Note, where I felt he did a good job of clarifying what came from research and what was just fun to invent. Terminology, for example, can be difficult: folks we might recognize as queer or as lesbian today would have been less likely to use those terms in 1898. A nightclub that hosted both drag queens and drag kings for the same event is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but it works so beautifully here, both for plot and for fun.

I loved the mystery story itself, and absolutely fell for Harriet, the awkward but admirably strong woman at the lead. I loved the history and the queer framing, and especially that intersection. Just a hell of a tale all around; I can’t wait for more Harriet Morrow. Could hardly put it down; nonstop fun; do recommend.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: historical fiction, LGBTQ, mystery |