The British writer who found inspiration in India and the Great Game
Rosina Margaret Hopkins’s short stories followed colonial tropes, with heroic White people and superstitious Orientals. But her writing was vivid and detailed.
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Rattray Carington knew something was off as soon as Albert Mueller stood up from the hammock chair. In Mueller’s salutation there was a distinct “stamp of birth and breeding” that did not match his surroundings. In that moment Carrington, the superintendent of police of Nymoorie, decided to investigate.
Mueller had moved to India from Austria seven years earlier, making “the free British Government” the ruler of his choice. He found a job in the government headquarters in Nymoorie and, foregoing a promotion, took a post in a department that happened to be right adjacent to the British Intelligence Department.
Carington followed his instincts and clues over the next few days. In the end, a trap was laid and Mueller walked right into it. It turned out Mueller was a spy plotting to steal a map that marked the terrain that could give Britain guaranteed access to the northern lands: Tibet and China.
Carington had many such adventures in the short stories of Mayne Lindsay, the nom de plume of Rosina Margaret Hopkins, who had spent years in the early 1890s in India’s North-Western Provinces. His quick actions, intuition and understanding of the Indian milieu helped him speedily resolve many messy situations, exposing diabolical criminals and the...
