It is not fair that the year 2025 – which marked 160 years since the birth of Baroness Orczy – ends without anyone having bothered to remember her. Where are the feminists when we need them? Where are the academics, the critics, the occasional eulogists? … Not a sad reissue of his work. Nothing. Silence. And we are talking about a pioneer. Because beyond the Scarlet Pimpernel – if anyone already remembers this vigilante with the bouquets of flowers and the aristocrat’s mask – Baroness Emma “Emmuska” Orczy was an architect of mystery, a silent founder of the logic police, a weaver of intrigue who needed nothing more than a tea table, a piece of string and a slice of cheesecake to unravel London’s most complex crimes.
He created “The Old Man in the Corner,” one of the first “purely logical” detectives in Western literature. A guy who didn’t move from his place, who didn’t use a gun, a magnifying glass, or a raincoat. Just logic, and sometimes hot milk. A lead And next to him, Polly Burton, journalist, young, sharp. Another forgotten one.
But as if that wasn’t enough to give him a place in the pantheon of greats, Orczy also created Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. A female detective before it was fashionable, before it was even possible. And not as an assistant, nor as a secretary, but as a brilliant mind, as a boss. Her assistant, Mary Granard, the Watson woman, looked at her with admiration and recounted her cases. Even Agatha Christie – who was not exactly generous with praise – acknowledged her debt to her. Like that, without further ado.
So we wonder why this omission. Perhaps because Orczy does not fit into the ideological boxes of the present. She was noble, conservative, erudite, an Anglophile at heart. Perhaps he didn’t have the tragic aura or avant-garde pose so popular today. But it was good. Alright. And before many. That should be enough to save him from the dusty basement of forgotten letters.
He died in 1947, just fifteen days after the publication of his memoir, “Links in the Chain of Life.” It was a long chain, woven with threads of intrigue, crime, feminine intelligence and plenty of class. But today, no one seems to remember her. And that is simply inexcusable.
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