The Red Seal

The Red Seal is a mystery and espionage novel by Natalie Sumner Lincoln, originally published in 1915. The novel combines mystery plot with the kind of espionage and political intrigue material that was becoming increasingly common in American popular fiction during the years around the First World War when international tensions had brought espionage themes into wider popular consciousness.

The red seal of the title refers to a sealed document or other object whose contents are central to the mystery and whose investigation drives the plot of the novel. The exact nature of the red seal becomes clear only gradually across the course of the story, with the various characters working at the puzzle from different angles and with their various motivations only fully revealed in the final chapters.

Lincoln was working within the developing genre of American espionage and political mystery fiction that the years around the First World War were producing in substantial quantity. The genre was an outgrowth of the broader mystery fiction tradition and was responding to the increased public interest in international espionage that the war and the events leading up to it had produced. Various writers of the period including E Phillips Oppenheim, William Le Queux, and various Americans were producing fiction in this mode for the substantial popular audience.

Lincoln’s particular contribution was the Washington setting and the kind of insider knowledge of the actual social and political world of the American capital that gave her novels their distinctive quality. The various government officials, military and naval officers, diplomats, and society figures who populate her espionage fiction are drawn from the world she had grown up in. The plots involve the kinds of intrigue and confidential matters that an alert observer of Washington political life would recognize as plausible, even when the specific events of any particular novel were invented for the fictional purposes.

The novel runs about three hundred pages and reads quickly as a single weekend project. For readers interested in early twentieth century American espionage and political mystery fiction, this is a representative example by one of the more capable women writers of the period. It pairs naturally with Lincoln’s other Washington mysteries and with the broader pre war American mystery and espionage fiction tradition.