The Fenchurch Street Mystery | Emma Orczy | A Bitesized Audiobook

Journalist Polly Burton is initially annoyed to have her lunch disturbed by a strange man who sits at her corner table. But her interest is piqued when he begins to talk to her about a baffling murder case which has confounded the police and the public for more than a year...

A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio.

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Emma (Emmushka) Orczy (1865–1947) was born Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci, to an aristocratic family in Hungary. Her father was the composer Baron Félix Orczy de Orci, her mother Countess Emma Wass de Szentegyed et Cege, and her grandparents on both sides included senior politicians and royal councillors. The family fled their country estate in in Tarnaörs when Emma was two years old, following a local peasant uprising, and her childhood was spent travelling through Europe, including periods in Budapest, Paris and Brussels, before eventually settling in London when she was 14. Emma's early ambition was to be a painter and she attended art school, where she met her future husband Henry George Montagu MacLean Barstow. They married in 1894 and had one child, John, born in 1899.

t was after John's birth that she took up writing and her first success was a series of detective stories submitted to the Royal Magazine in 1901, featuring the character of the Old Man in the Corner. The old man is an "armchair detective" who sits in the corner of a tea room and – while tying and untying knots in a piece of string – unravels unsolved mysteries which have baffled the police, for the benefit of his regular listener, Miss Polly Burton, a "lady journalist". He is not a conventional detective as he doesn't work with the police, and very often sympathises with the criminals, so that even after he has explained the mystery he doesn't alert the authorities. The stories are also notable for their indirect style of narration: while they are told in the third person, the majority of the words are actually narrated by the Old Man talking to Polly. After his 1901 debut the Old Man went on to feature in regular magazine stories through the early 1900s, and his adventures were collected in book form in three volumes: The Case of Miss Elliot (1905), The Old Man in the Corner (1909, but chronologically the first stories) and Unravelled Knots (1925).

In 1903 Baroness Orczy created her most famous character, for which she is best remembered today: Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel. This character established the idea of a dashing and daring figure who hides behind a meek disguise, so Orczy was in effect the originator of an enduring trope which was later followed by the creators of Superman, Batman and many others. She was very proud of her Pimpernel stories, to the exclusion of most of her other work: her memoirs, published just weeks before her death in 1947, are dominated by the character, whereas she barely mentions the Old Man in the Corner at all.

'The Fenchurch Street Mystery' was the first Old Man in the Corner story, featuring in the Royal Magazine on 31 May 1901. It later appeared in book form as the first story in the 1908 collection 'The Old Man in the Corner' (although, rather strangely, several of the later Old Man stories from magazine serialisation actually appeared in book form first, in her 1905 volume 'The Case of Miss Elliot', so the stories were reprinted out of chronological order).

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2021.