of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories inspired a sudden dash by a large number of authors to write similar fiction. One of the least likely may have been L. T. Meade, the nom de plume of Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1844–1914), who was a prolific (approximately two hundred titles) and highly successful author of books for teenage girls.
Unlike the work of many of her contemporaries, Meade’s mystery fiction broke significant new ground when it was written and remains highly readable today. Some of her most memorable story collections were written in collaboration with Dr. Clifford Halifax, the pseudonym of Dr. Edgar Beaumont (1860–1921), or with Robert Eustace, the pseudonym of Dr. Eustace Robert Barton (1868–1943). Two of Meade’s collections were selected for Queen’s Quorum as being among the 106 most important short story collections in the history of the genre: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1894) with Halifax, the first series to feature a physician detective, who happens to be Halifax himself, and The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1899) with Eustace, the first collection to feature a female criminal.
Stories about Miss Florence Cusack, by Meade and Eustace, appeared in The Harmsworth Magazine between April 1899 and March 1901; there were only five stories, and they remained uncollected until 1998. Miss Cusack, like Holmes and his many imitators, had her devoted and admiring “Watson”—Dr. Lonsdale. An unusual element of the stories is that the culprit is known to both the detective and the reader early on, the challenge being to learn how the criminal committed the crime.
“The Outside Ledge: A Cablegram Mystery” was originally published in the October 1900 issue of The Harmsworth Magazine; it was first collected in The Detections of Miss Cusack (Shelburne, Ontario, The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box Press, 1998).