Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Professor Braddock, an eminent Egyptologist, buys a rare Peruvian mummy entombed in a jade green sarcophagus and wrapped in green wool from South America so he can compare death rites between the two cultures. Professor Braddock sends his assistant Sidney Bolton to ferry this priceless artifact back to his house-cum-museum. However, Bolton disappears on the voyage home, and when Professor Braddock pries open the sarcophagus, instead of finding his mummy, he finds Bolton dead. Professor Braddock implores Mr. Hope to find his missing mummy. In exchange, he promises that he can marry his beautiful step-daughter, Lucy, with whom Mr. Hope has been in love for some time.

The Review

Dear god, this book is dull! The central premise of The Green Mummy is interesting- a missing mummy and in its place a dead man, but every character is so utterly irritating. The lovelorn Mr. Hope mooning about his beautiful lady love, Lucy, is such an empty-headed strumpet that I don’t care if she gets her prince charming.

The bug-like Professor Braddock, squinting at mummies and endlessly scheming for money, double-crossing everyone in hopes of getting his hands on enough money to fund his next dig, is so utterly vile.

There’s also the charming Mrs. Jasher, who uses every last of her fading feminine wiles to marry Professor Braddock and uses her dubiously acquired fortune to tempt him into marriage so he can pay for his next dig in Egypt. This love story is so weird and unappealing that I’m not heartbroken when the Green Mummy mysteriously ends up in Mrs. Jasher’s garden, causing great lovers to quarrel and break their engagement. Mrs. Jasher’s shady past is brought to the fore, which is the only exciting part of the book, so I don’t want to spoil it here.

However, the most egregious part of the book is Cockatoo, the amalgamation of every racist stereotype about Native Hawaiians mashed into one character; I don’t need to elaborate. Suffice it to say, reading about the treatment and characterization of Cockatoo marred my possible enjoyment of The Green Mummy.

So, if you like unlikeable characters, there’s plenty in this book.

Unfortunately, the reader has to spend so long with every character and their long monologues to space before there’s any stilted action. They open the sarcophagus after what feels like a thousand pages. They then talk about it forever and eventually search for the mummy, but not before driving home that it’s a stolen artifact from a hot-headed Pedro family.

Cue a long, cringy, racist backstory about the stealing of the mummy from the Pedro family. Enter the racist caricature of Sir Pedro, complete with lots of time spent talking about how yellow and suspicious he looks. His one saving grace is that he also brought his daughter, a beautiful, mute Madonna, for Sir Random, the man Lucy Hope was previously engaged to fall in love with and quite literally sail away with on a fancy yacht.

Sigh.

I’ll save you the trouble of reading The Green Mummy and say, the lovers end up together, the baddie gets his comeuppance. The mummy is found and begrudgingly returned to the family from which it was stolen. Save yourself the endless racism, sexism, and boredom and skip The Green Mummy, I wish I had.