She looked disdainfully at her pretty suit. 'All this,' she went on with a little hopeless gesture indicating her tailor-made, 'is Mother's investment.... we are living on our capital until I have caught a rich husband...'
So admits Mary Trevert to Robin Greve in Valentine Williams’ The Yellow Streak. Clothes play an interesting role in this a novel set in England and published in 1921. They are part of Mary’s net of charm while trawling the marriage market and clearly having them custom-made cost money. Yet clothing also works to disguise government men in the Secret Service.
Robin wants to marry Mary himself, but is a young man at the beginning of his career in the law. Mary has agreed to marry a much older man, a business tycoon, as much for her mother’s sake as for her own, and that man turns up dead. Did Robin do it? Robin investigates the crime to clear his own name from suspicion. Williams was a journalist turned soldier who made the most of his experience and travels during WWI to write novels where his heroes cross Europe to solve their cases.
