Show Notes
Not by Mary Agnes Clerke but her sister Ellen Mary Clerke...
A country‑house dinner, a proud gem‑collector, and a bishop who turns suddenly pale at the sight of a certain blue stone. The menu is flawless, the conversation carefully civilised, yet something crooked sits at the table: a sapphire whose history is supposed to be locked away in an ecclesiastical strong‑room, not winking at the candles from the throat of a woman with altogether too much laughter and altogether too much past. As the evening lengthens, old scandals, forged loyalties, and the uneasy difference between knowing and merely believing begin to press in on the assembled guests, until the question of what is genuine—stone, story, or reputation—refuses to stay politely buried.
The Great Valdez Sapphire, written by the Irish author, poet, and scholar Ellen Mary Clerke (1840–1906), first appeared in the April 1892 issue of the British monthly periodical The Argosy (Vol. 53, No. 317). It achieved a long afterlife in early twentieth‑century crime and mystery collections, including Julian Hawthorne’s multivolume The Lock and Key Library (1909) and Joseph Lewis French’s Masterpieces of Mystery (1920), and was often misattributed as “Anonymous” due to its frequent reprinting without a clear byline.
Ellen Mary Clerke was a Skibereen born journalist, translator, and popular science writer who worked in several European languages and published on subjects ranging from Italian poetry to astronomy and world geography. Best known in her lifetime for essays and leaders in The Tablet and the Dublin Review, she also produced poetry, fiction, and informed, quietly incisive work on the cultural and scientific concerns of her age.v Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Classic Detective Stories
Following on from The Story of the Naval Attaché last week, we move onto part 2 of Richard Harding Davis's novella: In The Fog, in which a Queen's Messenger has an encounter with the seductive, charming, ruthless, femme fatale, Russian spy Princess Zichy.
On a winter night when London has quite forgotten the idea of light, an American naval attaché loses his way in the yellow murk near Knightsbridge. The streets are gone, the landmarks drowned; only an occasional scrap of gaslight or distant music proves the city is still there at all. Groping along an iron railing, he finds an open gate, a half‑closed door, and a silent, richly furnished house that should not be open to the fog or to him. Someone has just left in haste. Someone else, he soon discovers, has not left at all. In that strange, luxurious quiet, the fog outside begins to feel less dangerous than whatever is waiting in the rooms within.
Miss Violet Hunter has been offered a post as governess at a salary so far above the ordinary. The conditions attached are small, and each on its own might be put down to an employer's eccentricity. She goes a handsome house in the Hampshire countryside, where the beech trees burn copper in the evening light. But, as you might imagine, things are not what they seem.
On a bitter winter morning in London, a respected banker arrives at Baker Street half‑mad with terror. In his keeping was one of the most precious ornaments of the British Empire; now it lies twisted and mutilated, and every sign points to betrayal within his own house. Snow has fallen, secrets have stirred, and somewhere between a locked bureau and a silent suburban garden, honour, love, and ruin have become entangled. Holmes listens, then walks out into the cold to read what the night has written on the world.
A bride vanishes from her own wedding breakfast. Her clothes are found floating in the Serpentine. A jealous woman is taken away by the police. Every sign points toward something dark, something final — and yet Sherlock Holmes, reading the morning papers over his breakfast in Baker Street, has already seen something that no one else has thought to look for.