McIntyre, John T - Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent (1912)

This uneven, unsuccessful book is nowhere as good as the first novel about sleuth Ashton-Kirk, Ashton-Kirk: Investigator. It also gets Ashton-Kirk involved in spy intrigue, something not present in Ashton-Kirk: Investigator, which is a pure detective novel.

The Holmes Legacy

Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent starts out promisingly enough, with a household under siege from mysterious incidents of persecution. The whole thing is a direct imitation of the many Sherlock Holmes in which a “man with a past” settles down, only to have all sorts of frightening events constantly plague the family. Doyle loved stories about a household under siege, with mysterious events and warnings occurring in the house over a period of weeks, and many of the members of the household working at cross purposes to each other in the melodrama that envelops the home. We see similar mystery set-ups in Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent. Such tales involve an active struggle, not a simple passive mysterious situation that needs elucidating, although that eventually comes too.

Ashton-Kirk is consulted about the case, just like Holmes. A strange diagram is the center of attention, as in some Holmes tales. Various approaches are used to try to interpret it. At one point (Chapter 11), Ashton-Kirk borrows some books on religious history and symbolism, from a friendly local priest. Ashton-Kirk’s detective assistant Fuller, his “Polton”, remarks humorously:

“They are rather out of your line, are they not?”

“Nothing is out of my line,” said Ashton-Kirk.

The Mystery

The mystery plot resemble the whodunits of the Golden Age to come, especially such intuitionist writers as Agatha Christie and S.S. Van Dine. The resemblance is especially strong in terms of structure, the basic architectural pattern of the book considered as a detective story. There is a murder, a lot of suspects who mainly live in the same household, and a final surprise solution where the crime is pinned on the least likely person. Most of the suspects are involved in various mysterious subplots; these make all the suspects look guilty, when in actual fact their secret activities are not always tied directly to the murder. There is a lot of movement of the suspects around the crime scene both immediately before and immediately after the murder. All of this looks like the ground plan of a Golden Age intuitionist book.

McIntyre puts especial emphasis on long chains of circumstance that make a suspect look guilty, but which are in fact capable of another, more innocent interpretation, as is eventually revealed. This sort of sustained ambiguity of situation recalls the work of Fergus Hume, another pioneer who contributed to the rise of the modern intuitionist detective novel. Ambiguity in Hume is often grounded in ambiguous personal relationships. By contrast, in McIntyre the ambiguity is more typically centered on activities that look specifically criminal, but which in fact are not.

The initial chapters in Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent often seem especially Doyle like, as they concentrate on his Holmes-like sleuth and a Doyle-like plot situation. But as the novel progresses, it becomes more and more similar to a Golden Age intuitionist whodunit, with these aspects of the plot coming to the fore. The transition especially takes place with the murder and its subsequent mystery itself, which seem very close to those in Golden Age books.

Spies

However, McIntyre does not sustain the pure mystery elements. Soon, we are engulfed in a routine spy novel, imitative of William Le Queux. A key character is the household’s next door neighbor, a Japanese spy named Okiu. The sophisticated Okiu employs a whole houseful of spies, including a butler who is a gigantic Sumo wrestler - no well-appointed establishment should be without one! Here things really go bad. Sometimes Okiu is an interesting character - but McIntyre also mixes cheap anti-Asian stereotypes into the story. This turns a story that starts out as a not-bad historical curiosity, into a book that cannot be recommended to anyone.

Okiu oddly mirrors Ashton-Kirk himself. Ashton-Kirk also employs a large staff, who assists him in his detective work. Both men are cultivated intellectuals, who love to read. Both men live in large houses, and have entree into upper crust social circles.

The first novel about sleuth Ashton-Kirk, Ashton-Kirk: Investigator, tells us to watch out for a sequel, called "Ashton-Kirk and the Scarlet Scapular." This is undoubtedly the same book as Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent - the scapular plays a major role in Ashton-Kirk: Secret Agent. But somewhere along the way, the book has undergone a name change.

Mike Grost