The Lost Despatch

The Lost Despatch is a mystery novel by Natalie Sumner Lincoln, originally published in 1913. Lincoln, who lived from 1881 to 1935, was an American mystery and historical fiction writer who produced a substantial body of work during the first decades of the twentieth century, much of it set in Washington DC and drawing on her substantial knowledge of the social and political world of the American capital.

The novel is set in the period of the American Civil War and combines mystery plot with historical romance in a way that was characteristic of the better commercial fiction of the period. The lost despatch of the title is a confidential military document that has gone missing in circumstances that suggest deliberate theft for purposes of espionage. The novel works through the investigation into the disappearance of the despatch, with various suspects, complications, and dramatic revelations across the course of the narrative.

Lincoln was working within the developing American mystery fiction tradition of the early twentieth century, alongside other women writers like Anna Katharine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart who were producing some of the most capable commercial mystery fiction of the period. The genre had been established by Edgar Allan Poe in the mid nineteenth century and substantially developed by Anna Katharine Green from the 1870s onward, and by the time Lincoln began publishing in the 1910s the American mystery novel had become one of the major forms of popular fiction with a substantial female readership.

Lincoln’s particular contribution to the genre was her Washington setting and her ability to bring to her fiction the kind of detailed knowledge of the actual social and political world of the American capital that few of her contemporaries could match. Her mysteries typically involve government officials, military officers, diplomats, and the various other figures who populated the Washington world she had grown up in. The historical settings, like the Civil War of The Lost Despatch, draw on the substantial Washington historical material that surrounded her.

The novel runs about three hundred pages and reads quickly. For readers interested in early twentieth century American mystery fiction, particularly fiction with historical settings and Washington political backgrounds, this is a representative example by one of the more capable writers of the genre. It pairs naturally with Lincoln’s other novels including The Moving Finger and The Red Seal.