This book examines the developments in British serial detective fiction which took place in the seven years when Sherlock Holmes was dead. In December 1893, at the height of Sherlock's popularity with the Strand Magazine 's worldwide readership, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his detective. At the time, he firmly believed that Holmes would not be resurrected. This book introduces and showcases a range of Sherlock's most fascinating successors, exploring the ways in which a huge range of popular magazines and newspapers clamoured to ensnare Sherlock's bereft fans. The book's case-study format examines a range of detective series-- created by L.T. Meade; C.L. Pirkis; Arthur Morrison; Fergus Hume; Richard Marsh; Kate and Vernon Hesketh-Prichardâ that filled the pages of a variety of periodicals, from plush monthly magazines to cheap newspapers, in the years while Sherlock was dead. Readers will be introduced to an array of detectivesâprofessional and amateur, male and female, oldand young; among them a pawn-shop worker, a scientist, a British aristocrat, a ghost-hunter. The study of these series shows that there was life after Sherlock and proves that there is much to learn about the development of the detective genre from the successors to Sherlock Holmes.
"In this brilliant, incisive study of late Victorian detective fiction, Clarke emphatically shows us there is life beyond Sherlock Holmes. Rich in contextual detail and with her customary eye for the intricacies of publishing history, Clarke's wonderfully accessible book brings to the fore a collection of hitherto neglected writers simultaneously made possible but pushed to the margins by Conan Doyle's most famous creation."
â Andrew Pepper, Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature, Queen's University, Belfast
Professor Clarke's superb new book, British Detective: TheSuccessorsto Sherlock Holmes, is required reading for anyone interestedin Victorian crime and detective fiction. Building on her award-winning first monograph, Late-Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock, Dr. Clarke further explores the history of serial detective fiction published after the "death" of Conan Doyle's famous detective in 1893.This is a path-breaking book that advances scholarship in the field of late-Victorian detective fiction while at the same time introducing non-specialist readers to a treasure trove of stories that indeed rival the Sherlock Holmes series in their ability to puzzle and entertain the most discerning reader.
â Alexis Easley, Professor of English, University of St.Paul, Minnesota
At the heart of this book is an absence: a person missing, presumed dead. That person is Sherlock Holmes. In December 1893, a mere six years after his natal appearance, when the great detective had been starring in The Strand Magazine for less than two years, at the height of his popularity with the late-Victorian reading public, his creator Arthur Conan Doyle killed him. In âThe Final Problem,â Sherlock disappeared over the Reichenbach Falls in a struggle with master-criminal Professor Moriarty (never previously mentioned in a Holmes story), and both were swallowed up by a âdreadful caldron of swirling water and seething foamâ (Doyle, âFinalâ 570). If the full-page Sidney Paget illustration facing the storyâs opening page (Fig. 1.1), depicting Holmes in a tussle with another man and seemingly about to topple off the side of the waterfall, left readers in some doubt about the detectiveâs fate, the legend emblazoned beneath did not: âThe Death of Sherlock Holmes,â it trumpeted (Doyle, âFinalâ 558). At the time of the storyâs composition and publication, Doyle firmly believed that his creation was dead and that this would be the last of Holmes. He considered his detective fiction a âlower stratum of literary achievement,â and felt that with Holmes out of the way he could capitalise on his literary celebrity and attract an audience for what he termed his âhighest ⊠conscientious, respectableâ work, his long historical novels (Memories 84; Stashower, Lellenberg, and Foley 301). Authors, it seems, are not always the best arbiters of their own work.
Indeed, seven years later, provoked by the wild success of William Gilletteâs stage adaptation Sherlock Holmes, which was touring in the United States, Doyle, ever the savvy businessman, had second thoughts and decided to resurrect Holmes. He pitched the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles to the editors of the Strand. It went on to be serialised in the magazine from 1901 to 1902 and set in motion the rekindling of the relationship between Doyle, Holmes, and the Strand which would last for almost another 30 years. The final Holmes story, âShoscombe Old Placeâ was published by the Strand in April 1927. But this book is concerned with the years when Sherlock Holmes was dead. With the successors who took his place.
As Stephen Knight reminds us, âThe vast majority of detective, and indeed crime, stories written in the nineteenth century did not appear in book form, but in the pages of elusive magazines and regularly appearing newspapers. This the sea in which the detectives are born and first swimâ (Knight, Art of Murder 11). Indeed, the Victorian fin-de-siĂšcle was truly the age of the periodical press. The expensive and bulky triple-decker novel was dying; by 1897, the number of three-volume novels published annually in Britain had fallen to four (Keating 26). Publishing costs were dropping as taxes on paper and advertising were repealed, at the same time as paper production and printing technology advanced. The abolition of taxation on newspapers also led to the ârapid development of provincial journalism,â with provincial newspapers outnumbering and outselling London publications from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s; these provincial weekly newspapers combined local news with features borrowed from the new journalism of the London press, including competitions, London letters, and syndicated serial fiction (Qtd. in Hobbs 4). Typesetting, which at the start of the nineteenth century had been done by hand, was revolutionised by the invention of the linotype machine, allowing multiple lines of text to be run at once. The commercialisation of half-tone technology as a means of producing low-cost, high-quality illustrations meant that photographs and drawings could be incorporated with basic linotype printing. Growing train networks also enabled fast and wide distribution of print material. Over 800 W. H. Smith railway bookstalls were established in the second half of the nineteenth century, meaning that the middle-class commuter could not only buy good quality reading material for their journey but could even borrow it at one station and return it at another.
Perhaps most importantly of all, Forsterâs 1870 Education Act made elementary education compulsory for those between the ages of five and twelve in England and Wales, as well as setting up board schools for the children of the working classes for the first time. Literacy rates rose and, by the time the first generation of children to benefit from the Act became adults in the late 1880s, new forms of cheap ephemeral media and genres of popular fiction were springing up to cater for their reading tastes and preferences. Periodicals and cheap provincial newspapers were born of this combination of social change and new technology and catered to this new mass literate reading public. By 1900 there were over 50,000 periodicals in circulation in Britain and the colonies; magazines and newspapers catering to every taste and budget: from cheap weekly penny papers to six-shilling deluxe monthly magazines. As the president of the newly formed Society of Authors, Walter Besant, described in The Pen and the Book (1899), his guidebook for aspiring authors, this development presented boundless opportunities for writers and publishers:
there are at this moment in the country hundreds of papers and journals and magazines, weekly and monthly ⊠The circulation of some is enormous, far beyond the wildest dreams of twenty years ago: they are the favourite reading of millions who until the last few years never read anything: they are the outcome of the School Board, which pours out every year by thousands, by the hundred thousand, boys and girls into whom they have instilled ⊠a love of reading. (54â55)
It was not in novels, but in short stories published in weekly or monthly magazines or newspapers catering to this newly literate mass readership that most Victorian fictional detectives were born, conferring immense popularity on the publications in which they appeared. Following the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes short story in July 1891, the magazineâs already impressive sales figures soon boomed at well over 500,000 copies per issue (Brake and Demoor 604). After Holmes disappeared over the Reichenbach Falls, apparently never to return, the Strand and other newspapers and magazines became desperate to retain or capture the readers who had become addicted to Doyleâs serialised detective fiction. As John Sutherland has noted, as a reaction to the success of Sherlock Holmes stories for the Strand, âby the mid-1890s, it has been estimated that of the 800 weekly papers in Britain, 240 were carrying some variety of detective storyâ (181). As a clerk at a W. H. Smithâs bookstall explained, when he was interviewed by The Speaker in 1893 about the publicâs reading habits: âHe would not undertake to phrophesy the success of any book outside the limits of detective fiction. Any detective story, whatever its merits might be, he could sell from morning to nightâ (âA Literary Causerieâ 383).
Holmes rivals, clones, parodies, and inversions began to fill up the pages of countless family magazines such as the Windsor, the Ludgate, Pearsonâs, and in the Strand itself, as well as provincial newspapers, for the rest of the century. A vast (and largely uncharted) treasure trove of detective stories was published in periodicals, newspapers, and magazines in the years 1893â1900. Many of these works have been unknown, undiscovered, or inaccessible, owing to the nature of their ephemeral modes of publication. Victorian newspapers and periodicals were until recently only available to those who had the time and wherewithal to visit the British Libraryâs Colindale depository and to sift through catalogues, boxes, and microfiche in order to access frail copies of magazines and papers, whose pages were filled with multiple columns of tiny print. In the 1970s, many decades before newspaper and periodical digitisation, Hugh Greene trawled the archives to produce four fine anthologies of lesser-known Victorian detective fiction for Penguin, which unearthed many of these forgotten âsuccessors to Sherlock Holmes.â In successive years, similar edited anthologies such as Douglas Greeneâs Detection by Gaslight (1997); Alan K. Russellâs Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1993); Michael Coxâs The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories (2002); Michael Simsâs The Penguin Book of Gaslit Crime (2009), The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (2011), and The Dead Witness: A Connoisseurâs Collection of Victorian Detective Stories (2011); Nick Rennisonâs The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (2008), Supernatural Sherlocks (2017), and More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (2019), all built upon Greeneâs work, concentrating on collecting stories from well-known nineteenth-century authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, alongside less well-known writers such as Headon Hill, Arthur Morrison, and L.T. Meade.
However, as Anne Humpherysâ and Andrew Radfordâs surveys of scholarship on the crime genreâcompleted in 1998 and 2008, respectivelyâboth noted, critical work on Victorian detective fiction was slower and more resistant to include these lesser-known and difficult-to-access works, which, until the early 2000s at least, were still being mostly overlooked by scholars âin favour of an obsessive return of critical analysis to a handful of canonised texts by three male writersâCharles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyleâ (259). In The Art of Murder (1998) Stephen Knight also argued that the notion of the crime genre being rooted in a small number of canonical texts by Poe and Doyle was more than somewhat problematic. For Knight, the fact that so many crime and detective stories appeared in the pages of periodicals and magazines meant that the genre did not have âso simple or so gratifying a genealogy ⊠as the classic account suggestsâ (The Art of Murder 11). Indeed, this type of limited genealogy of genre is notable in a number of otherwise valuable critical histories of crime fiction such as Ian Ousbyâs Bloodhounds of Heaven (1976), Peter Thomsâs Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction (1998), and Lawrence Frankâs Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence (2003).
Thankfully, processes of Victorian newspaper and magazine digitisation by the British Library, Gale-Cengage, and the British Newspaper Archive have recently begun to make access to these stories much easier. We can now begin to search for and identify the detective serials in those 240 weekly papers carrying detective stories, mentioned by Sutherland, amongst other things. And by doing this, we can undertake the important work of developing a broader and more inclusive picture of nineteenth-century detective fictionâone that goes beyond traditional canonical boundaries and recuperates popular yet virtually unknown writers and stories. This book hopes to build upon a body of scholarship appearing in the last ten years or so which has helped to uncover and illuminate such works of Victorian detective fiction. As such, this study is a companion piece to my monograph Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (2014). In it, I examined crime fiction from the years 1...