Miss Maitland Private Secretary

[from review in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Apr 26 1919]

Story of a Woman Detective

The handsome jewels of wealthy Mrs. Samuel Janney were stolen from a safe in her country home juts after her daughter, Mrs. Chapman Price, and her husband had agreed to separate. Mrs. Janney called in one detective and Mrs. Price engaged another, but neither succeeded in finding any clew. They suspected Chapman Price and also Miss Maitland, Mrs. Janney's private secretary, but failed to obtain any evidence. So the family lawyers engaged Molly Babbitts, a former telephone girl, and she set to work on the mystery. Then Mrs. Price's little daughter Babette is kidnapped and held for ransom, and Molly has another case to clear up. But she finally does so in a very satisfactory manner, and all ends as it should.

I picked up this book expecting it to be a kind of "woman at work" novel -- like, say, David Graham Phillips' The Social Secretary and I guess it kind of was, re. a very different occupation. It turns out Miss Maitland Private Secretary is the third and last in a series of detective stories starring Molly Morgenthau Babbits, (former) telephone girl. In the first -- The Girl at Central -- Molly introduces herself:

My name's Morgenthau because my father was a Polish Jew -- a piece worker on pants -- but my two front names,
Mary McKenna, are after my mother who was from County Galway, Ireland. I was raised in an East Side
tenement, but I went steady to the Grammar school and through the High and I'm not throwing bouquets at
myself when I say I made a good record." (2)

"Breezy, clever" and "keen" [Oakland Tribune May 4 1919], Molly's now 27, married to a star reporter, "in love and happy and prosperous", but she still continues detecting from time to time because, as the lawyer who calls her in puts it, "she has the passion of the artist". (72)

The narrative voice in Miss Maitland is interesting in that it goes back and forth between third-person omniscient, following various characters, and first-person, Molly, as she relates her role in the story. Initially, the writing's a bit rough -- we get lines like "Her bare neck was as smooth as curds, not a bone rippled its gracious contours" (36) and "he teetered his head in quiet comprehension" -- but as the plot develops, Bonner drops the frills, focuses on the mystery, and things get much better. Molly's voice, in particular, is assured and delightful. She's really just a great character -- a smart working class girl, a second-gen American success story, who gets along with the "plutocrats", even likes some of them, but can outfigure any of them and wouldn't want to be one. Her detecting is kind of a hoot, too: when she goes undercover as a nursery governess, she asks to be roomed near the branch telephone as "the telephone played an important part in her work." (74) How, you might wonder? Well, she spends a lot of time waiting around for the phone to ring, then dashing out to the hall alcove, where she draws on all her professional expertise to silently lift the receiver and...listen in. It's fun and really gives you a sense of how this new technology (in 1920, only 35% of American households had a telephone) was fitting into people's lives and into their stories, and how exciting it was to be experiencing it. As in many of these early 20th century reads, the same thing can be said for the automobile. There's a really nice passage conveying the thrills (and terror) of racing along in a car "that can make seventy-five miles an hour" (179) and the book's climax is a carefully-crafted counter plot involving 14 cars and a Long Island country turnpike on a hot summer night.

The whodunit aspect isn't especially baffling, but Bonner unspools her line with skill and there's a decent little romance on the side. Per Molly: "I'd have been interested if it was just an ordinary love story, but it wasn't. It was a love story with a mystery for good measure." (142) I enjoyed it and I'm definitely going to look out for Molly's other adventures (The Girl at Central and The Black Eagle Mystery -- both in the public domain).

Side notes:

- In 1920, Miss Maitland was adapted into a 6-reel silent "The Girl in the Web", directed by Robert Thornby and starring Blanche Sweet, Nigel Barrie, Christine Mayo, and Peaches Jackson. Motion Picture News called it "A Splendid Production from All Angles".
- At one point, a character declares, triumphantly: "that account for the milk in the cocoanut!" The expression, which was new to me, gets a fun write-up here.

Flags: Two instances of ethnic/racial slurs.