30 pages • 1 hour read
Henry Sydnor HarrisonMiss Hinch
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1911A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Alliteration
The story’s alliteration, or repetition of initial consonant sounds, intensifies its sense of foreboding and its pacing. Using many words with the same consonant sound allows the reader’s eyes to move over them more quickly, mimicking the train wheels’ spinning. This is evident in the following passage:
Side by side, they retraced their steps down the platform, ascertained the schedule from the sleepy chopper, and, as by some tacit consent, started slowly back again. But, before they had gone very far, the woman all at once stopped short and, with a white face, leaned against the wall (564).
The repetition of the “s” sound accelerates and propels the reading forward; the pace grinds to a halt, much like a stopping train, as the repetition ends. Harrison also draws attention to important physical characteristics with alliteration, such as “big bold blue eyes. And that terrible long chin of hers. They do say she can change the color of her eyes” (563). His use of repetition makes these traits more memorable.
Foreshadowing
When the older man on the train tells the young gentleman that Jessie Dark will call for the police when she catches Miss Hinch, he counters, “And have Miss Hinch shoot her—and then herself, too? Wouldn’t she have to—” (562). This foreshadows the demise of the heroine, Dark. The old man rightly predicts that Dark will reach out for help in capturing the killer, which provides the reader clues for interpreting the notes that are left later in the story. Dark desperately seeks the help of all those around her, but her life ends, as the young gentleman predicted. The sense of foreboding grows as the clergyman and the elderly woman return to the train platform. The narration calls attention to the icy patch and the beastly roaring of the train as the final confrontation approaches. Having exhausted her resources, Dark is backed into a corner by Miss Hinch, whose only possible means of escape is to kill the woman. Miss Hinch is ultimately captured, rather than killed, but at the cost of Dark’s life.
Mood
The tense and suspicious mood of the story is designed to draw the reader into the mystery and intensify its sense of danger. The entire city is on edge:
Through days of fruitless searching for a fugitive outlaw of extraordinary gifts, the nerve of the city had been slowly strained to the breaking point. All jumped, now, when anybody cried ‘Boo!’ and the hue and cry went up falsely twenty times a day (559).
Harrison sustains the mood of suspense throughout the story through his short descriptions of the two characters’ suspicions of one another. The two begin the story “by circling” each other around the station entrance. Each move the other makes is met with a suspicious glare. Their interactions are punctuated with sideways glances and stares: “At the same moment the woman turned her head and stared full at the clergyman. When he turned back, her gaze had gone off toward the front of the car, and he picked up the paper thoughtfully” (561). Harrison uses this intense mood to heighten the readers’ tension and investment in the plot, trying to drive them to search for clues along with the detective.
Exposition
Harrison delays exposition for dramatic effect throughout the story. “Miss Hinch” opens with two unnamed characters suspiciously circling one another. The cause of the paranoia is not revealed until they enter the train, when the story of the murderer on the story is relayed. The author exposes the basic plot on the train car through dialogue that reveals the struggle between the cunning murderess’s skills and the female detective’s professional pride.
The covert glances between the pair at the restaurant intensify the sense of tension, but the details of their underlying struggle are hidden until the next burst of plot exposition occurs through the dialogue between the police officers and the restaurant employees. This interaction reveals the desperate notes written by one of the two characters. Adhering to conventions of the whodunit, if the reader notices the detail that the notes are written with blue lead, they will still be thrown off the track of the killer’s identity, believing the elderly woman who borrowed the pencil wrote the note. At the train station, it appears that the final twist that is standard for the genre is the revelation of Miss Harris’s identity as the elderly woman. However, the author holds out the final exposition until the end. The story is not fully known until the fateful scrape of the hat pin.
