The Old Man in the Corner
These detective stories introduced one of the genre’s oddest sleuths: a nameless old man who sits in the corner of a London tea-shop, ties and unties knots in a length of string, and solves notorious crimes without ever leaving his chair. He lays out each case to a young woman journalist, reasoning from newspaper reports alone and taking a cool, almost cynical pleasure in showing how the guilty slipped past the police. First appearing in magazines from 1901 and collected in book form in 1908, the tales helped establish the armchair detective and remain sharp, ironic puzzles. Orczy, better known for the Scarlet Pimpernel, proves just as clever at plotting a mystery. Free PDF and EPUB edition available here.
About the Author
Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1865 to 1947) was a Hungarian-born British author who settled in London and made her name with The Scarlet Pimpernel. Her sweeping romances of the French Revolution created one of fiction’s first masked heroes and shaped a century of adventure storytelling.
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