Charles Pleydell receives an unexpected visit from his old friend Oscar Digby, an explorer, with news of an exciting discovery in South America. But it soon becomes clear that some devious villains are on Digby's track... Can Pleydell act in time to save his friend and secure the secret? Story begins at 00:01:18
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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:18 The Man Who Disappeared
01:01:00 Credits and thanks
L. T. Meade (Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith, 1844-1914) was born in County Cork, Ireland. She began writing fiction at the age of 17, and had a highly prolific career, publishing almost 300 books in her lifetime. She married Alfred Toulmin Smith in London, in 1879, when she was in her mid-30s. She was an advocate of feminist causes, and as a solo writer became most associated with adventure stories for girls and young people, of which the most famous was ‘A World of Girls’, published in 1886.
However, she was also well known for her many mystery and suspense stories, and her name appeared frequently in the periodicals of the 1890s and early 1900s. Interestingly, in this genre she often wrote in collaboration with medical practitioners; first with Dr. Clifford Halifax, with whom she produced a series entitled ‘Stories from the Diaries of a Doctor’ in 1893, and later with Robert Eustace, who collaborated with her on several successful series from the mid-1890s onwards. It’s not fully known how the collaborations worked, but it seems likely that she did the majority of the actual writing while the doctors supplied the ideas and scientific details which underpin many of the plots.
Robert Eustace is something of a shadowy figure. It's obviously a pen name, but the identity of the person behind the name is very uncertain. The most often cited candidate is Dr. Eustace Robert Barton, although there’s no certainty or consensus about that, not least because his given birth date varies wildly between sources (1854, 1869 or 1871, depending on the source), and he’s recorded as having died in both 1932 and 1943, and also as still living (but retired) in 1947. This confusion suggests to me that two different people may have used the same pseudonym. Whoever he was, aside from his work with L. T. Meade, the pen name of Robert Eustace is probably best remembered today for a much later work of crime fiction, collaborating with Dorothy L. Sayers on her 1930 novel 'The Documents of the Case'.
Together Meade and Eustace created a number of recurring characters, including John Bell, who describes himself in the introduction to his collected stories as "a professional exposer of ghosts, and one who can clear away the mysteries of most haunted houses" - making him in effect a more sceptical counterpart to William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (who first appeared in print a decade or so later). Bell featured in a series of stories in Cassell’s Magazine in 1897, which were later published in book form under the title 'A Master of Mysteries' in 1898. I've recorded this series, which is available to listen here:
• A Master of Mysteries ...
'The Man Who Disappeared' first appeared in the December 1901 issue of The Strand Magazine.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2024