Nellie Bly, who lived from 1864 to 1922 was a pioneering American woman journalist. And now she is a fictional character, appropriated by Carol McCleary, to play the leading role in two novels.

I’m often dubious about this kind of literary borrowing, but I have to say that Carol McClearly does it very, very cleverly. She takes the facts of Nellie’s life and weaves in crime, mystery, and scandal, that had to be suppressed from the reports that Nellie wrote. And she introduces prominent figures of the age who Nellie may well have met.

At the end of the first book of the series, The Alchemy of Murder, Jules Verne challenged Nellie to match the 80 days that it took his fictional hero, Phileas Fogg, to circumnavigate the globe. Nellie vowed to do better, to take a mere 75 days.

The Illusion of Murder is set on this journey, a journey documented by the real Nellie in the book “Around the World in 72 Days.”

But, of course, some facts had been suppressed:

“How do I make a connection between a murder in an Egyptian marketplace, a holy war to drive the British from Egypt, a train car named Amelia, the world’s greatest actress and an American racehorse enthusiast rich as Midas?”

The story opens as Nellie’s journey reaches Egypt.

In a busy marketplace in Port Nellie sees a man stabbed. She rushes forward to try to help, and the dying man passes her a key and whispers the  word ‘Amelia.’

 Nellie is convinced that the man is European, and that he had been travelling on the same ship as her. Her companions deny it, insisting that what she saw was a dispute between natives, something that needn’t trouble them.

Nellie is unconvinced. She knew what she saw, She will not abandon her journey, but she will uncover the truth. But the truth is elusive as Nellie has to cope with fellow travellers who dismiss her as a troublesome,  hysterical, attention-seeker, officials who are not prepared to acknowledge that something irregular may have happened, and quite a number of others who would like to silence her.

Nellie doesn’t know who to trust. She would like to trust Frederick Selous, the man who was the model for both Alan Quartermain and Indiana Jones, but she senses that he is keeping something from her. As is Sarah Bernhardt, the legendary French actress, whose reasons for making the journey are far from clear.

The balancing of a complex mystery and an exciting race around the world is very well done.

Which is not to say that there aren’t problems: the style and the characterisation are a little simple, the wonder of such an extraordinary journey is a little underplayed, and there are times when the plot slips for a while leaving characters rushing around for no particular reason.

In the end though I was swept away an eminently likeable and inspiring heroine, and by the wonderful colour and drama of her story.

The mystery was solved on the final leg of Nellie’s journey. She found answers, quite extraordinary answers, to her questions on a train from Chicago to New York.

It was such a clever conclusion. It was completely unguessable, and yet it brought everything together perfectly.

The story was ludicrous, but it was very, very, readable, and I couldn’t fault the logic.

And so I am wondering what Nellie’s next adventure might be.

“I’ve never feared any man as much as I fear the man in black. His is an evil that seeks blood in the darkest places of gaslit streets and forgotten alleys. The Alchemist if how I’ve come to think of him…”

The opening paragraph speaks well for the book that is to follow. It is historical, it is at the same time clearly modern, and yet it works.

The speaker of those words is Nellie Bly and she is in Paris as an investigative reporter during the World’s Fair in 1889.

Nellie, we learn, has had a difficult life but she has learned to stand on her own two feet and build a life for herself and her mother. A combination of luck and her own inherent curiosity led her to become a reporter and she has established herself by taking risks and by exploiting the fact that she can goes to places and see things that men cannot.

Along the way Nellie encountered the man she believes to be “The Alchemist”, and it is to track him down that she has come to Paris.

Her investigation is set against not only the World’s Fair but also an epidemic of Black Fever and anarchists plotting to overthrow the government.

Jules Verne and Oscar Wilde became involved in the investigation; Louis Pasteur has a signigicant role to pay; and Toulouse Lautrec and Paul Verlaine put in appearances too.

It sounds ludicrous, and yet Carol McCleary makes it work.

Nellie is a charming heroine, and although she rather too modern, she is a woman you can warm to and such a positive figure than you can easily forgive her for that.

The mystery is well constructed and all of the characters and themes that the author has at her disposal are well used. It is simply and clearly written, making it very easy to fly through the pages.

The story has clearly been well researched, and the line that lies between informing and preaching has been walked well. There were moments when I couldn’t believe the story, but I could never disprove it!

And I didn’t really want to disprove it – the Alchemy of Murder was a wonderfully entertaining journey.

The conclusion lays a clear path for a sequel, and I could easily see this being the start of a very successful series.