A classic mystery set in the swirling fog of Edwardian London. The residents of Park Square are woken at 3am by cries of "murder". Police soon identify a likely suspect with a strong motive, only to find the case falls apart when it becomes apparent he couldn't possibly have done it... The story begins at 00:01:28

Narrated/performed by 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 (and get access to exclusive content):

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Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:15 The Regent's Park Murder
00:35:01 Credits, thanks and further listening

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 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 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 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 featured in magazine stories throughout 1900s; his adventures were later collected 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 the character for which she is best remembered today: Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel. Blakeney is 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. She was very proud of her Pimpernel stories, to the exclusion of her other work: her memoirs, published just weeks before her death in 1947, are dominated by the character, whereas she barely mentions the Old Man in the Corner at all.

'The Regent's Park Murder' is listed as having appeared in the Royal Magazine in September 1901, part of the first series of Old Man stories printed that year. However, references in the text to events taking place in 1907 indicate that it was re-written, presumably for the publication in book form as part of the 1909 collection 'The Old Man in the Corner'. The text read here is from that 1909 publication; I've not been able to locate the earlier version.

In re-drafting the story to be set in 1907, however, the Baroness appears to have made a mistake: the Old Man says that the events took place before the tube station in Park Square (Regent's Park, on what's now called the Bakerloo line) was built, or even planned. This might have been true in 1901, but records show that Regent's Park tube station opened in March 1906.

The geography of the story is still very recognisable today. Park Square was built in the early 1820s, to the north of Park Crescent (built 1806–21), which joins Portland Place to the south. The large gardens joining Square and Crescent are bisected by the Marylebone Road, a major traffic thoroughfare even in 1907, and the two sides are linked by an underpass known as the "Nursemaids' Tunnel". All these features are referenced in the story.

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2024.