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In 1917, on the day before Valentine's Day, eighteen-year-old Ruth Cruger disappeared. When the police gave up, a mysterious woman in black vowed to find her. Mrs. Sherlock Holmes tells the true story of Grace Humiston, the detective and lawyer who turned her back on New York society life to become one of the nation's greatest crime fighters during an era when women were rarely involved with investigations. After agreeing to take the sensational Cruger case, Grace and her partner, the hardboiled detective Julius J. Kron, navigated a dangerous web of secret boyfriends, two-faced cops, underground tunnels, rumors of white slavery, and a mysterious pale man, in a desperate race against time. Grace's motto "Justice for those of limited means" led her to strange cases all over the world. From defending an innocent giant on death row to investigating an island in Arkansas with a terrible secret, from the warring halls of Congress to a crumbling medieval tower in Italy, Grace solved crimes in between shopping at Bergdorf Goodman and being marked for death by the sinister Black Hand. Grace was appointed the first female U.S. district attorney in history and the first female consulting detective to the New York Police Department. Despite her many successes in social justice, at the height of her powers Grace began to see chilling connections in the cases she solved, leading to a final showdown with her most fearsome adversary of all. Mrs. Sherlock Holmes is a biography of this singular woman the press nicknamed after fiction's greatest detective. Her poignant story reveals important clues about the relationship between missing girls, the media, and the real truth of crime stories. The great mystery of Grace's life -- and the haunting twist ending of the book -- is how one woman could become so famous only to disappear from history completely.… (altro)
There might have been a great story in there somewhere but I never found it. Told in an extremely disjointed manner with chapters that had nothing at all to do with the purported subject of the book. Extremely disappointed ( )
I enjoyed it. It was depressing in that, despite her qualifications and passions, things did not end well for her. I guess it was to be expected a woman, at that time, wholeheartedly going after the military, the church and the government, her luck had to run out sometime ( )
I enjoyed the book but thought the author stretched his story dangerous close to fiction for a book that is suppose to be true. Probably a 3.5 for me. ( )
Meticulous research and deep respect bleed through this well-crafted work of true crime, bringing a well-deserved spotlight to what would otherwise be a forgotten story and a forgotten historical heroine. ( )
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CAVEAT EMPTOR
This story is intended for three classes of readers, and no more. It is intended for those who have to bring up children, for those who have to bring up themselves, and for those who, in order that they may think of bettering the weaker, are, on their own part, strong enough to begin that task by bearing a knowledge of the truth.
For it is the truth only that I have told. Throughout this narrative there is no incident that is not a daily commonplace in the life of the underworld of every large city. If proof were needed, the newspapers have, during the last twelvemonth, proved as much. I have written only what I have myself seen and myself heard, and I set it down for none but those who may profit by it.
Reginald Wright Kauffman, preface to The House of Bondage (1910)
If ever prayer came from the depths of a broken heart, it was that forlorn plea for a lost sister.
Eustace Hale Ball, Traffic in Souls: A Novel of Crime and its Cure (1914)
Dedica
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For my mom
Incipit
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May 27, 1914
Pushing through the water, the massive steamship Olympic, sister of the lost Titanic, docked at New York City carrying passengers, thousands of sacks of mail, and the mind of the world's greatest detective. (Prologue)
A single electric bulb looped down from the uneven ceiling.
Citazioni
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The night class was its own creature; it wasn't easier, it was just different.
He always started with facts. In his view, there was no correct solution, only the logic of a good defense. He valued opinions but made his bacon in the argument itself. He taught the importance of contracts and hated recitation. Famous names and cases didn't matter to him. Ashley's students were taught to analyze the facts of a case, select the important points, and reason correctly in order to deduce principles from such facts. It was in this crucible of ideas that not only the lawyer but the detective was born.
With the personal aid of Dean Ashley, Grace Quackenbos had been moved to the regular program. She completed a three-year law degree in two short years, graduating in 1903, one of only twelve women in her class. She immediately received a clerkship with the Legal Aid Society of New York, which offered low-cost legal help to the poor. Grace was admitted to the bar in the state of New York in 1905, becoming one of only a thousand female lawyers in the whole United States.
Made of Hurrican Island granite and white Georgia marble, the church was the cornerstone of the neighborhood and rose from the sidewalk like the very mind of God Himself cut and hammered down into architecture.
Known as the mother of New York churches, it could seat a thousand parishioners. When it was full, it looked like a neighborhood version of the afterlife.
Soon, the little headquarters itself had to be moved to 10 Bible House, across from Cooper Union, the free institution of higher education whose great hall was still filled with the invisible words of presidents, including the echo of Lincoln himself.
"There is something deeply tragic about these little cases that are spread out before lawyers," Grace said. "The newly-made Americans are almost at the mercy of any older, cleverer citizen that wants to grind down the heel of oppression on their necks. Things are all so strange to them, and the law is so curiously complicated that they awake suddenly to find themselves tangled hopelessly in muddles that seem often to choke them and blind them. It is to fight the battles of these poor and ignorant without taking all their profits that the People's Law Firm was started, to fight as eagerly for $5 as for $500."
"To begin with, the police are no good," Grace told the reporter. "They had all the facts to start on that I had and did nothing. Even after I had made out the case against Lane it was necessary for me to find him. The police wouldn't help."
But even as more calls began to come in, it was still the "little cases" that remained the firm's bread and butter.
Even here, on the river, it was hot as the hinges of hell.
This far up, the lines between things got lazy.
They were thin and hot and looked like wrung-out, dirty rags.
Percy plucked profit numbers out of the warm air like they were fruit and recited them to Grace with great satisfaction.
The mosquitoes came in and out as they wanted, as if they were part of the air itself.
"The point is that we Americans are exploiting the aliens," she explained. "For while our Federal laws are excellent for keeping them out of the country, we show a noticeable lack of interest in them after they are admitted."
"If you saw a child that had been neglected or abused so that it had run away from home, wouldn't you try to find out what was wrong with the home or the parents? That's all I did about those immigrants with the whip marks on their backs; followed them into the turpentine camps, from there back to the railroad and steamship companies across the Atlantic, and into their homes. And there I found what was wrong. They were poor, hungry, tax ridden and their Government didn't care enough about them to protect them against kidnappers."
As he disappeared against the grain of the crowd, he seemed barely able to walk.
As Cocchi smiled and told his endless stories, Judge Zucconi couldn't tell if he was just stupid, desperate, or playing at some dark, larger game.
Wallstein dipped his nose and read the page through his thin glasses.
When Independence Day came, New York City was ablaze with red-and-blue streamers and portraits of the new symbol of America, a fictional character called Uncle Sam, who had white hair and stern, glittering eyes.
They felt like pieces on a gameboard dwarfed by large, invisible players.
"The issue in this case," said Wallstein, "was boneheadedness vs. criminality. Boneheadedness was proved. Criminality has yet to be proved."
The transcripts had already been unofficially leaked; rumor and news were becoming the same thing.
He looked at Cocchi and finally saw the monster he always knew was there.
Earlier in her career, when Grace was juggling dozens of immigration cases, she said that "I could go into these cases very fully and show you the sadness which attached to each individual story." That was always her methodology: to find the story of a case in order to evoke a response from others.
Though Poe introduced the full character of the detective in fiction, the word first appears in Dickens's Bleak House to describe a Scotland Yard inspector.
"William J. Burns looks like a detective," wrote a reporter, "but Mrs. Grace Humiston does not at all look like an investigator. You may see her type presiding over civic or mothers club meetings."
Another wrote that it was like dropping in at Baker Street and having Holmes throw the pipe, the violin, and the hypodermic out the window and begin to discuss how many strawberries make a shortcake.
Rumor said that on their steamship honeymoon to London, the boat came down with typhoid fever. Grace saved the day by single-handedly instituting strict quarantine procedures, thus getting them safely back to England.
The long article published in the New York Sun after the interview built Grace up like one of the new Gotham skyscrapers.
"Trying to stop her is like flashing a red flag in a bull's face."
"The born criminal is the man who carefully plans his crime; the made criminal is one who commits it in a moment of passion."
"I want to tell you just a little about my girls," Grace said, "for they are all mine; each and every one of them, of all the thousands I know well, has a particular place in my heart."
Ultime parole
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"Makes me mad, makes me hurt," Thomas Kuhn, her father, told the local television station. "All I know is we are going to catch you, whoever you are." "We are coming for you," he said.
In 1917, on the day before Valentine's Day, eighteen-year-old Ruth Cruger disappeared. When the police gave up, a mysterious woman in black vowed to find her. Mrs. Sherlock Holmes tells the true story of Grace Humiston, the detective and lawyer who turned her back on New York society life to become one of the nation's greatest crime fighters during an era when women were rarely involved with investigations. After agreeing to take the sensational Cruger case, Grace and her partner, the hardboiled detective Julius J. Kron, navigated a dangerous web of secret boyfriends, two-faced cops, underground tunnels, rumors of white slavery, and a mysterious pale man, in a desperate race against time. Grace's motto "Justice for those of limited means" led her to strange cases all over the world. From defending an innocent giant on death row to investigating an island in Arkansas with a terrible secret, from the warring halls of Congress to a crumbling medieval tower in Italy, Grace solved crimes in between shopping at Bergdorf Goodman and being marked for death by the sinister Black Hand. Grace was appointed the first female U.S. district attorney in history and the first female consulting detective to the New York Police Department. Despite her many successes in social justice, at the height of her powers Grace began to see chilling connections in the cases she solved, leading to a final showdown with her most fearsome adversary of all. Mrs. Sherlock Holmes is a biography of this singular woman the press nicknamed after fiction's greatest detective. Her poignant story reveals important clues about the relationship between missing girls, the media, and the real truth of crime stories. The great mystery of Grace's life -- and the haunting twist ending of the book -- is how one woman could become so famous only to disappear from history completely.
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