Readers unfamiliar with The Heart of a Mystery. may prefer to read these notes only after reading the collection.
The Heart of a Mystery (1901) is a Victorian espionage short story sequence set just before the Boer War.
English painter Rupert Phenays visits the Paris deathbed of his friend Maurice Escott. Escott reveals he is a member of the British secret service, and advises Phenays that he's about to entrust him with the secret plans of the French government to exploit the Transvaal crisis.
Alas, Escott dies before he can do this.
Phenays then becomes a man on the run, since no one believes he did not hear the secret. The chief organizer of the campaign against him is a French secret service agent, Francesca Delacourt.
True to other female villains in the Meade/Eustace fleuve, Madame Delacourt recruits/seduces/mesmerizes puppets and cat's paws among men and women on both sides of the Channel to carry out her plans. This means Phenays remains on dangerous ground even when he has reached homes of friends or an isolated Portuguese mountain village.
Meade/Eustace portray the British secret service as organized by gentlemen from their clubs and country houses. There is none of Erskine Childers' immediacy: political complications wax and wane from story to story, and no story element takes the real inter-imperialist conflicts of the period seriously.
Early in the collection, there is a macabre moment when Phenays' dog is turned into a bomb. At the book's climax, when Phenays is left to die in the bottom of a disused well, the hero seems to achieve a psychic or astral level of communication with an ally. These moments strike a note of weird incongruity, but are not pursued by Meade/Eustace.
The Heart of a Mystery is short, and adequate for an evening's diversion.
Jay
21 November 2022
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