2002: Fenella Vorpel
Letter to the physicist
Having recently perused the article you kindly shared from The Unrequited Detective (1990) featuring your late father’s reflections on the curious Mallard case of 1934, I felt compelled to write to you. As the grand-niece of Euphemia Mallard and a scholar in socio-economics and political theory, I have long been intrigued by the family lore surrounding that vanished relative—and by the trunk so memorably depicted in the investigations and in your father’s writing.
Allow me to be candid: both you and your father are, I think, mistaken in some respects regarding the infamous trunk. Indeed, it exists as delineated—an ornate, heavy, and beautifully carved trunk of unusual woods and with three locks, as was recorded—but it is, in truth, little more than an old family strongbox for important papers and personal correspondence. There is no hidden chamber within, no grotesque concealment of a dead body or dreadful secret consumed therein. The “trunk bigger on the inside than the outside” is, in my family’s archival experience, a fanciful and metaphorical idea, rather than fact.
I confess to some puzzlement over the fuss that has continually circled around it, for it was always merely a repository of wills, deeds, letters, and the like. Nevertheless, I remain fascinated by how your father was able to access and weave from these documents a narrative long thought lost. The family papers were scattered or sequestered away, mislaid in the decades following Euphemia’s disappearance and the consequent social scandal. Few have seen them—and fewer still have read them so extensively. Your father’s achievement in bringing them back into discourse is commendable.
May I ask if you still retain originals or copies of these papers? Should you hold them, I would be most eager to learn more of their provenance and history—and would cherish the opportunity for academic collaboration, perhaps to better situate the Mallard story within its broader socio-political context.
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