Brotherhood of the Seven Kings

Robert Eustace, who lived from 1868 to 1943, and L. T. Meade, who lived from 1844 to 1914, collaborated on several detective and mystery stories in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Meade was a prolific Irish-born author of girls’ stories and later of sensational crime fiction, and Eustace, a doctor by training, often supplied the medical and scientific ideas.

The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, published in 1899, is a series of linked stories belonging to detective fiction. It opens with a bold assurance: that a secret society modelled on the sinister brotherhoods notorious on the Continent in the previous century may seem impossible in the London of that day, yet did exist, built up by a woman of unparalleled capacity and genius. The authors then set out to show that it did, and the book follows what happens when that claim is put to the test.

The stories are in the tradition of the sensation novel, with improbable crimes, cunning methods and dramatic confrontations. The authors liked to introduce scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas into their plots, a feature of much detective fiction in the 1890s. As is common for popular fiction of its time, it also carries the attitudes and stereotypes of its age.

The recording has nineteen parts, read by a single LibriVox volunteer, and lasts nearly eight hours. The chapters are split into two parts where they are long, so the book is easy to take in instalments. Today it is worth hearing for lovers of early crime stories and for anyone curious about how detective fiction developed in the years just after Sherlock Holmes.