The Beetle A Mystery

The Beetle: A Mystery by Richard Marsh

A story about a mysterious oriental figure chasing a British politician in London, where he wreaks havoc with his hypnotic and shapeshifting powers, Marsh's novel is a piece with other sensational turn-of-the-century fictions such as Stoker's Dracula, George's Trilby du Maurier and Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer. Like Dracula and many of the sensational novels introduced by Wilkie Collins and others in the 1860s, The Beetle is told from the perspective of multiple characters, a technique used in many late 19th-century novels (those of Wilkie Collins and Stoker, for example) to create suspense Richard Marsh was the pseudonym of the British author Richard Bernard Heldmann. The title character is Mary Louise Burrows. In the first books of the series, she is a fifteen-year-old girl with an unusual maturity (although the other girls at her boarding school find her a bit cheeky). She is suddenly confronted with the fact that her beloved grandfather is suspected no less of a crime than of treason against the United States. With the help of old and new friends of Mary Louise ... the truth is discovered. The novel features a federal agent named John O'Gorman; he is assisted by his daughter Josie, a young woman who he trained himself to function as an investigator. (Josie O'Gorman's character, despite her predating Nancy Drew by over a decade, is far less traditionally female.)