Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
Sitting at his usual corner table, the old man unravels a new mystery for Polly Burton, involving kidnap, blackmail and fraud, in which a wealthy businessman disappears in the popular seaside resort of Brighton. The story begins at 00:01:20
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):
* Occasional/one-off support via Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/bitesizedaudio
* Monthly support on Patreon: patreon.com/bitesizedaudio
* Donate via PayPal: paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=HMMUWZ7URN26A
* Visit my Bandcamp page to hear more of my performances of classic stories, and you can purchase and download high quality audio files to listen offline: bitesizedaudio.bandcamp.com
* Become a Bitesized Audio Classics member on YouTube, from $1 / £1 / €1 per month:
youtube.com/c/BitesizedAudioClassics/join
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:20 The Brighton Mystery
00:42:35 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 Brighton Mystery' first appeared in the July 1902 issue of The Royal Magazine. It was subsequently printed in book form in the 1908 collection 'The Man in the Corner', where it was given the title 'An Unparalleled Outrage', and it sometimes appears in mystery anthologies under this alternative title.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2025.
Sitting at his usual corner table, the old man unravels a new mystery for Polly Burton, involving kidnap, blackmail and fraud, in which a wealthy businessman disappears in the popular seaside resort of Brighton. The story begins at 00:01:20
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):
* Occasional/one-off support via Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/bitesizedaudio
* Monthly support on Patreon: patreon.com/bitesizedaudio
* Donate via PayPal: paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=HMMUWZ7URN26A
* Visit my Bandcamp page to hear more of my performances of classic stories, and you can purchase and download high quality audio files to listen offline: bitesizedaudio.bandcamp.com
* Become a Bitesized Audio Classics member on YouTube, from $1 / £1 / €1 per month:
youtube.com/c/BitesizedAudioClassics/join
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:20 The Brighton Mystery
00:42:35 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 Brighton Mystery' first appeared in the July 1902 issue of The Royal Magazine. It was subsequently printed in book form in the 1908 collection 'The Man in the Corner', where it was given the title 'An Unparalleled Outrage', and it sometimes appears in mystery anthologies under this alternative title.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2025.
