Meltham, an employee of the insurance company, investigates her death and identifies the perpetrator.

The author of The Notting Hill Mystery would have almost certainly read those stories and used both ideas and techniques in his serial, taking them to an extreme never seen before, and rarely seen since. In that sense the book is unique and is, so far as the record shows, the first full-length modern English-language detective novel.

Which leaves us with the mystery of the authorship. When the story was serialised in Once a Week there was no author credit, but when published as a book in 1865 it bore the by-line Charles Felix. Felix had written at least one earlier crime novel, Velvet Lawns, published by the same firm, Saunders, Otley & Co., in 1864. Various names have been suggested as to his true identity, but it wasn’t until early 2011 that the American collector and bibliophile Paul Collins, writing in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, drawing upon contemporary evidence, revealed that Felix was Charles Warren Adams (1833–1903), the sole proprietor of Saunders, Otley.

The original Messrs Saunders and Otley had died a few years earlier, and Adams was unable to salvage the firm and return it to its glory days of the 1830s when it had published the likes of Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer-Lytton) and Captain Frederick Marryat. The firm went into liquidation in 1869. Adams became the Secretary of the Anti-Vivisection Society and it was in this capacity that his one hitherto claim to fame, or notoriety, arose. Also on the Society’s committee was Mildred Coleridge, great-grand niece of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In November 1883 she turned her back on her family and moved in with Adams, much to the embarrassment of her father, the first Baron Coleridge who was also the Chief Justice. Her eldest brother, Bernard, wrote her a letter saying what a scoundrel he thought Adams was. This led to a major libel case in the Queen’s Bench Division which dragged on for over two years to no one’s complete satisfaction. In the interim, Adams and Mildred Coleridge married in June 1885 and remained together until Adams died in July 1903.

Mildred lived on until January 1929. Did she, I wonder, know that he was the author of the first modern English detective novel?

Mike Ashley

The Notting Hill Mystery

Mr. R. Henderson to the Secretary of the ——
Life Assurance Association.

‘Private Enquiry Office, Clement’s Inn,
‘17th Jan., 1858.

‘Gentlemen,

‘In laying before you the extraordinary revelations arising from my examination into the case of the late Madame R**, I have to apologise for the delay in carrying out your instructions of November last. It has been occasioned, not by any neglect on my part, but by the unexpected extent and intricacy of the enquiry into which I have been led. I confess that after this minute and laborious investigation I could still have wished a more satisfactory result, but a perusal of the accompanying documents, on the accuracy and completeness of which you may fully rely, will I doubt not satisfy you of the unusual difficulty of the case.

‘My enquiries have had reference to a policy of assurance for 5000l., the maximum amount permitted by your rules, on the life of the late Madame R**, effected in your office by her husband, the Baron R**, and bearing date 1st November, 1855. Similar policies were held in the —— of Manchester, the —— of Liverpool, the —— of Edinburgh, and the —— of Dublin, the whole amounting to 25,000l.; the dates, 23rd December, 1855, 10th January, 25th January, and 15th February, 1856, respectively, being in effect almost identical. These companies joined in the instructions under which I have been acting; and, from the voluminous nature of this letter and its enclosures, I shall be obliged by your considering my present reply as addressed to them conjointly with yourselves.

‘Before entering upon the subject of my investigations, it may be as well to recapitulate the circumstances under which they were originated. Of these the first was the coincidence of dates, above noticed; and an apparent desire on the part of the assurer to conceal from each of the various offices the fact of similar policies having been elsewhere simultaneously effected. On examining further into the matter your Board was also struck with the peculiar conditions under which Madame R**’s marriage appeared to have taken place, and the relation in which she had formerly stood to the Baron. To these points, therefore, my attention was especially directed, and the facts thus elicited form a very important link in the singular chain of evidence I have been enabled to put together.

‘The chief element of suspicion, however, was to be found in the very unusual circumstances attendant on the death of Madame R**, especially following so speedily as it did on the assurance for so large an aggregate amount. This lady died suddenly on the 15th March, 1857, from the effects of a powerful acid taken, it is supposed, in her sleep, from her husband’s laboratory. In the Baron’s answers to the usual preliminary enquiries, forwarded for my assistance, and herewith returned, there is no admission of any propensity to somnambulism. Shortly, however, after the occurrence had been noticed in the public prints, a letter to the Secretary of the Association from a gentleman recently lodging in the same house with Baron R**, gave reason to suspect that in this respect, at least, some concealment had been practised, and the matter was then placed in my hands.

‘On receipt of your instructions, I at once put myself in communication with Mr. Aldridge, the writer of the letter in question. That gentleman’s evidence certainly goes to show that, within at least a very few months after the date of the latest policy, Baron R** was not only himself aware of such a propensity in his wife, but desirous of concealing it from others. Mr. Aldridge’s statements are also to a certain extent supported by those of two other witnesses; but, unfortunately, there are, as will be seen, circumstances calculated to throw considerable doubt upon the whole of this evidence, and especially on that of Mr. Aldridge, from which alone the more important part of the inference is drawn.