A new recording of a classic public domain text from 1901. Narrated/performed by me, Simon Stanhope, aka Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, there are a few ways you can support me:

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A lady travelling in a first class carriage of an underground train, alongside several other passengers, is found dead at the end of the line. Could it be suicide, or a most ingenious murder?

00:00:00 Introduction and biographical notes, written and read by Simon Stanhope
00:02:51 The Story begins
00:49:03 Credits and thanks

Emma (Emmushka) Orczy (1865–1947) was born Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci, to an aristocratic family in Hungary. Her father was the composer Baron Félix Orczy de Orci, her mother Countess Emma Wass de Szentegyed et Cege, and her grandparents on both sides included senior politicians and royal councillors. The family fled their country estate in Tarnaörs when Emma was two years old, following a local peasant uprising, and her childhood was spent travelling through Europe, including periods in Budapest, Paris and Brussels, before eventually settling in London when she was 14. Emma's early ambition was to be a painter and she attended art school, where she met her future husband Henry George Montagu MacLean Barstow. They married in 1894 and were together for almost 50 years until Henry's death in 1942. They had one child, John, born in 1899.

It was after John's birth that she took up writing and her first success was a series of detective stories submitted to the Royal Magazine in 1901, featuring the character of the Old Man in the Corner. The old man is an "armchair detective" who sits in the corner of a tea room and – while tying and untying knots in a piece of string – unravels unsolved mysteries which have baffled the police, for the benefit of his regular listener, Miss Polly Burton, a "lady journalist". He is not a conventional detective as he doesn't work with the police, and very often sympathises with the criminals, so that even after he has explained the mystery he doesn't alert the authorities. The stories are also notable for their indirect style of narration: while they are told in the third person, the majority of the words are actually narrated by the Old Man talking to Polly. After his 1901 debut the Old Man went on to feature in regular magazine stories through the early 1900s, and his adventures were collected in book form in three volumes: The Case of Miss Elliot (1905), The Old Man in the Corner (1909, but chronologically the first stories) and Unravelled Knots (1925).

In 1903 Baroness Orczy created her most famous character, for which she is best remembered today: Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel. This character established the idea of a dashing and daring figure who hides behind a meek disguise, so Orczy was in effect the originator of an enduring trope which was later followed by the creators of Superman, Batman and many others. In the same year the Pimpernel appeared in print, the character also became a huge stage hit in London, and the play (co-written by Emma and her husband) ran for over four years, a record-breaking run at that time. She was very proud of her Pimpernel stories, to the exclusion of most of her other work: her memoirs, published just weeks before her death, are dominated by the character, whereas she barely mentions the Old Man in the Corner at all. Baroness Orczy died at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, in November 1947, aged 82.

'The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway' first appeared in the Royal Magazine in July 1901. It later appeared in book form as part of the 1908 collection 'The Old Man in the Corner'. The story takes place on the Metropolitan Railway, in the days when steam trains still operated at the turn of the 20th century (as opposed to the electric "tube" trains which had been introduced on the new and deeper underground lines a decade or so earlier). Those who know the London transport system will be aware that the Metropolitan Line is still part of the wider Underground network, although some of the stations have closed or been renamed. In this story there's a reference to Aldersgate Street Station, which is now known as Barbican.

The title card shows a detail from an illustration by Samuel J. Hodson (1831–1908) depicting a steam train on the Metropolitan Railway c.1863, in the newly built tunnel at Praed Street junction near Paddington station.

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2022.