Golden Age of Detective Fiction

The Million Dollar Suitcase begins with a San Francisco bank’s shocking discovery that one of its employees walked away from the bank with one million dollars in a nondescript suitcase. Tracing the vanished clerk triggers a cascade of events involving the bank’s contracted detective agency, along with concerned directors and investors.

A young war hero from World War I, characterized by his spirited nature, offers to absorb the loss for $800,000 in cash in exchange for the retrieval of the lost securities.

With the agency’s seasoned leader, who has a longstanding acquaintance with the young hero, embarking on the investigation, the plot thickens with the involvement of a childhood friend, Barbara Worth.

Barbara Worth—a perceptive and deductive flapper who’s been keeping a low profile after being paraded around the country, touted as a human “calculator.” She uses her extraordinary observational and deductive reasoning to assist her friend in finding the missing man and money.

The subsequent pursuit of the malefactor intertwines with suspicions regarding the source of the youth’s payment to the bank, believed to be from a contentious interaction with his father, whose subsequent suicide adds layers of complexity.

Throughout the narrative, the romance between the two childhood friends simmers and keeps Barbara invested in the mystery, even though she detests detection. She is terribly afraid that if she cannot solve the case, her beau will be arrested.

The Review

The Million Dollar Suitcase, written in 1922, may not bear familiar author names, but its storyline, characters, and style feel refreshingly contemporary.

One unique story device in The Million Dollar Suitcase is that it is narrated through the lens of the seasoned detective alongside the two youthful protagonists. These differing points of view means the story delves into themes of unhappy marriages, forbidden love, and moral dilemmas, all presented in the genteel narrative style of its era, offering a captivating read for avid mystery enthusiasts.

The Million Dollar Suitcase is much more feminist than many of the mysteries written in the 1920s. It gives Barbara Worth a great deal of depth, exploring her deep love, her childhood trauma, the complicated relationship with her abilities, and her desire to do what’s right, even at significant personal cost. One part of me wishes she would have been the conduit through which we explored the whole story, but then there wouldn’t have been the multiple points of view, which was revolutionary at the time.

The Million Dollar Suitcase is innovative in so many ways that it’s sad to see it terribly marred by it’s extrmely racist depiction of Chinese characters which firmy root it in the early 20th century.

I highly recommend this forgotten gem, but with the huge caveat that it delights in the prevailing racial stereotypes of the time that it was written, so it might not be suitable for all readers.