Faced with a sleepless night as I enjoyed my bout of Covid, I fired up Librivox and browsed for an old novel with a catchy title. I ended up with
The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace. It was published in England in 1899.
The book is a "sensational mystery" adventure along the lines of Edgar Wallace and Sax Rohmer. Set in London in the mid-1890s, it's narrated by one Norman Head. Head tells us he is a wealthy man who was trained in biology and medicine. During his younger years he fell helplessly in love with Katherine, a beautiful and manipulative Italian woman who was also an accomplished scientist. Then he discovered that she was in fact the leader of a ruthless criminal society, The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings. Dazzled by her beauty and intellect he allowed himself to be sucked into her world. He joined the Brotherhood and went along with its work until he was ordered to participate in a "dishonorable and treacherous" crime that was too much for him. He shook himself loose and fled to England. Racked with shame and guilt he used his wealth to set up a private research laboratory. There he has spent a decade doing research for the sheer love of it and hiding from the world. Everything changes when an old friend introduces him to Madame Koluchy.
London society is abuzz over this stunning beauty. Charming, witty, intelligent, medically-trained, she is the hit of the season. Mesmerized by her magnetic personality, half the city's upper crust flocks to her for help, advice, and miracle cures. Head recognizes her at once as Katherine, the criminal mastermind, come to drain the pockets of her besotted admirers. Head vows to devote his life to exposing Madame Koluchy, finding sufficient evidence to bring her to court, and putting her gang out of business. He convinces his friend, lawyer Colin Dufrayer, of Madame's true nature. Over the course of the book the two men struggle together to bring her to justice.
The story of his quest is told in ten two-part chapters. In each chapter Head and Dufrayer face a new crisis engineered by Madame Koluchy. Though their story continues through the book, each crisis is resolved--some in their favor, some in Madame's--and the secondary characters involved never reappear. Research told me that the chapters were originally individual stories in
The Strand magazine. Illustrated by Sidney Paget, no less. The stories were even turned into a stage play.
An online review described the book as "pedestrian with flashes of interest." That's a fair assessment. The opening stories hold interest, then fade somewhat, and come roaring back for a slam-bang finish embellished with 19th-century superscience. There's even a Batman-style fiendish death trap. It's worth a read if you like these old-fashioned gaslight adventures.
One peculiarity is that the opening describes the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings as being at least a century old and had "a name hardly whispered without horror and fear in Italy." An early episode suggests the Brotherhood has a long cross-generational history. But this angle is soon dropped and the Brotherhood operates more like a tightly-knit criminal gang than a mini-Mafia. It's made clear that if Madame K were put out of the picture the operation would fall apart. We never learn who the Seven Kings were and why the gang chose that name.
Being in the public domain,
The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is available all over the place. Librivox has a good audiobook, the one I spent seven sleep-free hours listening to. Project Gutenberg has the book in text form, and Wikisource has a good-looking version with the Paget illustrations.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Brotherhood_of_the_Seven_Kings
