The Adventures of Latimer Field, Curate

by Silas Kitto Hocking

Latimer Field, humble curate of St Mary's Church in the sleepy English town of Banfield enjoys his work curing souls and preaching sermons. But when his keen sense of justice leads to an altercation with a burglar, he finds himself thrown into a world of crime and villainy! In these twelve tales, Field finds himself tackling all manner of disturbances of the peace, from anarchist plots to stolen government secrets; gypsy curses to apparently haunted houses. Originally published in 1903, these vintage Edwardian crime stories are available once more for modern readers to rediscover in this new digital edition.

135 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 21, 2019

Reviews

[Gregory Moses · Rating 2 out of 5]

A composite novel from 1903. The first chapter (“A Perverted Genius”) was anthologized in Douglas Greene's Detection by Gaslight, and I sought out this volume based on it, not because I thought it was particularly interesting as a crime story, but because I thought the narrator was charming. That summary could encompass the entire criminal portion of this collection, really; only one story does something that approaches cleverness (and prefigures a much more famous detective story from about a decade later, Chesterton's ”The Invisible Man”; rich people discussing secrets over dinner and not being able to understand how they leak, because they don't really think of the servants serving the food as people who are aware of their surroundings.). In fact, there's very little detection at all; Field's modus operandi is dumb luck.

Pivoting towards the positive, I do enjoy the prose (“As a matter of fact, I felt pretty confident that if I found a burglar in my room in the dead of night, I should simply collapse, and let him work his will on me and on my property without the least resistance. I did not feel called upon, however, to say so. A man may be a coward, but he need not tell people. They generally find it out quite soon enough.”), and I find the title character charming; existing outside of the tradition of the Great Detective, he feels like an actual human with the kinds of experiences that would be beneath Sherlock Holmes's dignity, but which his readers can readily recognize and sympathize with (I've never been to a country house, but anyone who's gone to a fishing lodge should sympathize with Field, stuck at dinner with strangers whose conversation is making him miserable; and who hasn't ruined their day by looking up symptoms and convincing themselves that something is seriously wrong with them?)

Although published by “Black Heath Crime Classics,” these are not all crime stories. The best of the non-criminal set is “A Fair Mediator”; it's the sort of story Wodehouse would parody (an old rich dude is angry at his son for wanting to marry a poor but honest woman, things work out in an improbable way), and Field doesn't really do anything useful in it, but I have a soft spot for redemption stories.

Unfortunately, the book is marred by anti-Roma prejudice towards the end. Extremely confused prejudice, I have to say; it turns out that a “gipsy” woman is the sister of the villain of the first story, which suggests that Hocking might not have realized that the Romani are an ethnic group? Because the villain in the first story was definitely intended to be White. I guess it's conceivable that he's thinking of the Irish Travelers, but the sister really plays up the Romani stereotypes with her fortune-telling shtick. What is clear, unfortunately, is that the woman who says that “I mistrust the entire race of gipsies” is proven right by the narrative, and Field's attempt to be kind to a boy of that tribe almost gets him killed. The book is better-hearted in other ways (e.g. in terms of class prejudice), but a sour ending will cast a pall over even an otherwise strong work, and this collection was already teetering on the abyss between two and three stars by the time I got to that part.