Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Idler | M.P. Shiel | Baroness Orczy | Max Pemberton | Arthur Morrison | Catherine Louisa Pirkis | Harry Blyth | George R. Sims | Headon Hill
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
New Arabian Nights
The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
Complete Sherlock Holmes stories
Australian Tales of the Victorian Goldfields
Colonial Tales
Early Mystery Stories
Martin Hewitt, Investigator (1893)
The Chronicles of Martin Hewitt (1894)
The Adventures of Martin Hewitt (1895)
The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1893)
Jewel Mysteries I Have Known (collected 1895)
Clues From a Detective's Camera
The Divinations of Kala Persad (collected 1895)
Jules Gervaise stories
Dorcas Dene, Detective (collected 1897)
The Strange Adventures of Bromley Barnes (collected 1910)
Prince Zaleski
"The Case of Euphemia Raphash" (1895)
"The Red Carnation" (1898)
The Old Man In The Corner (1901 - 1902)
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (collected 1910)
The Final Proof
Doyle's link to Australian police stories can be supported in some detail by circumstantial evidence. First, Doyle wrote a series of tales set in the Victorian Gold fields; this was precisely the setting of such Australian casebook writers as James Skipp Borlase and Mary Fortune. Doyle in fact got his start as a writer this way, mining this branch of literature from 1879 to 1885 - stopping roughly about the time that he created Sherlock Holmes. Secondly, there is the similarity between Holmes and Borlase's and Fortune's detective James Brooke, discussed at length in the casebook article cited above. Third, "Mystery and Murder" (which might be by either Borlase or Fortune) could in fact be a model for "The Speckled Band". Fourth, I recently read an obscure story by Doyle, "De Profundis" (1892). In it, a body emerges from the ocean in exactly the same way that the body shoots out of the waterhole in Fortune's "The Dead Witness". Either this is a startling coincidence, or Doyle actually read Fortune's tale. One other possibility: it is possible that both Doyle and Fortune are referring to some real life case, now obscure.
After all, Doyle had to get his information about the Australian Gold Rush from somewhere. What could be more natural, as Professor Stephen Knight has suggested, than a reading of Borlase and Fortune? Conventional literary historians always ascribe these tales to the influence of Bret Harte. This is certainly possible - even likely. Harte is probably one influence on Doyle. But is he the only one? Harte's tales tend to be pure Westerns, whereas Borlase and Fortune usually mixed crime elements in their work - the same paradigm as many of Doyle's stories.
Doyle was clearly influenced by Melville's "Benito Cereno". One can cite evidence: 1) In later years Doyle praised this piece highly. 2) Many of his early mysteries are influenced by it in plot content, notably "That Little Square Box" (1881), "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1883), "The Parson of Jackman's Gulch" (1885) and "Uncle Jeremy's Household" (written by 1885). In fact, it seems to be the role model for Doyle's early mystery fiction.
Most importantly, "Benito Cereno" is one of the most perfectly plotted stories of the 19th Century, and the one most closely approximating Golden Age mystery technique in pre-Doyle fiction. From it, if no other mystery fiction had existed, Doyle could have learned the whole art of mystery plotting. One begins to see that Doyle had some powerful role models available to him when he created Sherlock Holmes: Poe and Gaboriau for the paradigms of the detective story. Robert Louis Stevenson for atmosphere and the concept of high adventure lurking in the fog of London. Borlase's and Fortune's detective James Brooks as a role model for the character of Sherlock Holmes. Melville's "Benito Cereno" for plotting technique.
Doyle's "Uncle Jeremy's Household" (1887) is the early work of his most nearly in the style and story telling technique of his Holmes mysteries. It seems to be one of the last tales he wrote before starting "A Study in Scarlet". Clearly, here Doyle found his voice. It is far less static than some of his early fiction; it has a dynamic quality, as the plot situation is not just stated, but evolves, with one situation developing into another, and different subplots playing off one another.
Doyle never reprinted this work. One possible reason is that he might have been embarrassed by the racism and religious prejudice in the choice of Indian villains. Their villainy is related to their alleged 'primitive' character, and their lack of Christianity, by the narrator of the story. As far as I can tell, Doyle never did this later in his fiction. The Indian sect in the story is one of a series of "murderous conspiracies" in Doyle's work: a group of early religious cultists in "A Study in Scarlet", Moriarty and his gang, the KKK in "The Five Orange Pips", the nihilists, and the Molly McGuires in "The Valley of Fear". These better known groups of Doyle villains differ from the Indians in "Uncle Jeremy" in that they are white, Christian males. Most of these groups (at least in Doyle's fiction - whose historical accuracy has often been challenged!) engage in a near public reign of terror, often dominating whole communities. Doyle does not posit them as any sort of racial "other". In keeping with Doyle's democratic views, they are just the same sort of people as the good characters in the story, including Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. These groups form a memorable leitmotiv running through Doyle's tales. Even the "Bravoes of Market-Drayton", in Doyle's little historical account, adhere to the same pattern.
Doyle's choice of villains aside, "Uncle Jeremy's Household" is an excellent piece of storytelling. It uses the technique found in the Holmes stories of a subplot entering the tale, destined to mysteriously alter the balance of power in the future, but in a way not immediately clear to the reader.
Doyle's "Our Midnight Visitor" (1891) has a Scots setting, and clearly has the feel of a Robert Louis Stevenson adventure tale, such as "The Pavilion on the Links", a story Doyle admired highly. Also Stevensonian is the theme of father-son conflict.
The core of Doyle's accomplishment are the three first volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories, The Adventures, The Memoirs and The Return. Many of these tales contain brilliant puzzle plots, with remarkable surprise endings. They also are loaded with genuinely colorful and imaginative events.
Doyle's mysteries tend to center around situations. He tends to present the reader with some extremely puzzling situation, one that is difficult to explain. He then solves the mystery, by developing some brilliant twist that stands the apparent situation on its head.
Doyle had little interest in alibis in his work. This is not because mystery fiction was unaware of them: they were used by such 1860's writers as Harriet Prescott Spofford and Charles Martel. In general, Doyle was not deeply interested in whodunit. He did not present a crime, have several suspects around who might equally have committed it, and then challenge the reader to pick which one of them actually did. Doyle's very popular contemporary Fergus Hume did this in The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), a book Doyle had read, and disliked. So Doyle could have set up his mysteries this way: he had certainly seen the pattern in Hume's work. Whodunits were also used by Anna Katherine Green, another author whose work Doyle knew. Doyle only rarely begins his stories with a murder. Instead, Holmes is most commonly called on to investigate a theft, blackmail, a disappearance, or a strange job a middle class person is asked to do, as in "The Red-Headed League", "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" or "The Stockbroker's Clerk". When there is a killing, it is usually a byproduct of a theft, such as in "Silver Blaze" or "The Reigate Puzzle".
Doyle, and Holmes and Watson, loved the fantastic, the outré and the bizarre in his cases. He is at the start of a great tradition of surrealism in modern mystery fiction. Virtually all the great 20th Century authors of detective stories had a strong surrealist element to their work. This cuts across schools. It is a dominant tradition among intuitionist writers, such as Carr, Queen and Chesterton, but one also finds it in Rinehart, Frederick Irving Anderson, and other Early American writers of their generation, and among Freeman, Sayers and the Realist school. Most of these writers were strongly influenced by Doyle, and paid written tribute to his work. Throughout this Guide I have often referred to this as a "surrealist" aspect of their work; but Doyle's fiction preceded by many years both Surrealism, and its ancestor Dada. Dada emerged around World War I, c1917, with Surrealism following in the 1920's, while Doyle's love for the bizarre was emphasized in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes of 1891 - 1892. Doyle also influenced surrealist-like activity in other media, such as film. For example, take Juve contre Fantômas (1913). This hour long film is Chapter 2 of Louis Feuillade's movie serial Fantômas. The bedroom scenes here seem to be directly derived from Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (1892). Feuillade's work was much admired by the Surrealists.
Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories were huge popular successes. It has become de rigeur for histories of mystery fiction to attempt to explain why. But, after reading a dozen or so such purported explanations, I remain skeptical that critics actually know why. Shouldn't any genuine explanation involve interviewing the public, asking them questions about why they like the stories, and analyzing their responses, perhaps using statistics? A critic can explain why he or she likes the stories; but just by analyzing the story itself, cannot really determine what the public thinks about it. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there were no pollsters around in the 1890's measuring public attitudes.
I first read the Sherlock Holmes stories as a child. I was overwhelmed by them. They seemed magical. Many other people have described such an experience: Ellery Queen's account of how he discovered the tales as a youth is superb. One cannot recapture childhood wonder as an adult, of course. But I was surprised at how well these stories stand up, on my recent rereading of them at age 44. A story like "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" had me completely fascinated, hanging on every twist of Doyle's plot, and every line of dialogue.
Doyle's puzzle plot stories are on the direct line that leads to the Intuitionist writers of the 20th Century. Such brilliantly conceived works as "The Red-Headed League" (1891), "A Case of Identity" (1891), "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (1891), "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" (1892), "Silver Blaze" (1892) and "The Naval Treaty" (1893) display the ingenious plots that are the hallmark of the later Intuitionist school of Chesterton, Christie, Carr and Queen. Holmes also solves the cases by the methods to be used by the Intuitionist detectives: insight into the central aspects of the mysterious situation, combined with logical deduction. There is much emphasis on how Holmes solves the cases through pure thinking. The finale of "The Man with the Twisted Lip", where Holmes comes up with his solution through a night of pure thinking, seems paradigmatic of later Intuitionist writers. So does the use of logical deduction in "Silver Blaze" and "The Naval Treaty". In these works, Holmes shows how clues embedded in the tale logically imply that one and only one of the suspects is guilty of the crime. This approach will also be much used by later Intuitionist authors.
Doyle did not confine himself exclusively to this Intuitionist approach. In two stories, he emphasized instead the analysis of physical evidence. "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" (1892) and "The Reigate Puzzle" (1893) are both stories of theft, in which Holmes uses trails of physical evidence to track down the guilty parties. This approach was used by the Casebook writers and Gaboriau in the 1860's, and it will be used after Doyle by the Realist writers of the 20th Century. This approach was used less often by Doyle in his tales. It seems less central to his work than the Intuitionist method. But the ability to read physical clues also seems like definite part of the equipment of a great detective, in Doyle's view. Sherlock Holmes would not be the Complete Detective, without demonstrating these kinds of skills. It is significant that Doyle segregated the physical evidence approach out in these stories, rather than mixing it in throughout his career. It is as if he saw it as a separate kind of approach to mystery fiction, one that deserved to be concentrated in its own special stories.
In contrast, "Silver Blaze" and "The Naval Treaty" are also stories of theft, but their clues are entirely the non-physical concepts of the Intuitionist tradition. For example, the wonderful "incident of the dog in the night-time" from "Silver Blaze". This clue involves an ingenious situation. It is a clue that Holmes can understand only through the Intuitionist approach of insight combined with logical deduction.
"Fair play", the idea that all clues to a mystery must be set forth to the reader before the solution, so that he or she has a chance to solve the mystery on their own, is an important concept in 20th Century mystery fiction. The first explicit discussion of this principle known to me occurs in Israel Zangwill's 1895 preface to his "The Big Bow Mystery" (1891), although Zangwill does not use the actual words "fair play". Doyle's stories sometimes use fair play, and sometimes do not. It is significant that most of the Doyle tales that anticipate the Intuitionist school use fair play in their treatment of clues. For example, in "Silver Blaze" Doyle provides a complete set of clues that would allow readers to solve the mystery. Sherlock Holmes even underlines some of the clues in his discussions with the police. By contrast, in the stories concentrating on physical evidence, "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" and "The Reigate Puzzle", some of the evidence is shared with the reader, and some of it is not. This different treatment of fair play emphasizes the separateness of approach in these two kinds of stories.
"The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" (1892) is in the tradition of the Casebook stories and Gaboriau, of the 1860's. Like many Casebook stories, it is about a robbery, and Holmes has to penetrate the gang of thieves to recover the stolen gems. Also Casebook like is the emphasis on money in the tale. The realistic, prominent treatment of the servants in the story is also a Casebook feature. Holmes' deduction from prints in the snow is a homage to Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1867). The use of disguise by Holmes in the tale is also reminiscent of Gaboriau. The whole work is a throwback to an earlier tradition. In part, this is a homage, a tribute to earlier authors. It also demonstrates Holmes' versatility: the story shows that in addition to his other talents, he has all the skills that were in the repertoire of the Casebook- Gaboriau school of detectives. While the Casebook tradition emerged in the 1850's and 1860's, it was still going strong in Britain in the 1890's. Several of the writers who followed Doyle, such as Max Pemberton, Arthur Morrison, and C.L. Pirkis, were not so much influenced by him in their actual stories, but continued to write mysteries in the Casebook tradition.
"The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" (1904) is Doyle's homage to the Raffles tales of his brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung. Holmes and Watson burglarize a blackmailer, just like Raffles and Bunny. The tale makes clear the tremendous affection between Holmes and Watson. It is also better, in my opinion, than most of Hornung's originals. This tale is also in the tradition of Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes short story, "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891), which was written long before any of Hornung's Raffles stories. Both "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "Milverton" are unusual in Doyle's work in that there is no mystery for Holmes, or the reader to solve. Instead, Holmes is asked to frustrate a blackmailer's efforts. Holmes does this in both tales by engaging in theft, and essentially functioning as a crook himself, although in a good cause.
Contributors to the list VICTORIA pointed out that Doyle's quote about crime in the countryside in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" (1892) was influenced by the Sensation writer Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Lucy Sussex has traced the influence of Braddon's theme of the "incarcerated woman" on Doyle, in the same tale. The remarks below build upon their insights.
Some of the stories in Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891 - 1892) remind one of Braddon. In these works, Doyle seems to have taken plot material both Braddon's works, given it new, ingenious twists, and developed it into mystery plots. In all cases, Doyle has come up with something original. He has also made the plots more purely mystery oriented. Doyle has also made Braddon's initial situations more optimistic, and more with a happy ending. There is also an alteration of the social roles of the women and men. He has altered the plots to make the leading woman character more morally pure. Also, in Braddon, the men in the story have both the money, and the power of the patriarchy behind them. The women have nothing. In Doyle, the women typically have money, and they are preyed on by men, who attempt to use their patriarchal power to control them. Doyle's approach is closer to such Wilkie Collins works as The Woman in White (1859 - 1860). In all three authors, there is a feminist subtext, in which women struggle with all their might to resist being controlled by the patriarchy. Doyle's approach makes the duel between the two characters slightly more evenly matched. It is unclear whether it is more realistic however.
"The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" (1892) reminds one of Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861 - 1862). Here, Doyle has shifted the background story away from Braddon's English and Australian setting, and into a California mining camp that recalls one of Doyle's favorite writers, Bret Harte. He has also made the heroine's response to the situation much more idealistic. However, one might point out that Doyle's heroine can afford to be idealistic - she has money of her own, while Lady Audley does not. In "the Noble Bachelor", the unsympathetic nobleman combines in one package the patriarchy which attempts to control women, and the aristocratic rule from which Americans successfully escaped. This is a clever symbolic union, and makes him an ingenious emblem of everything Doyle detests.
Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" (1892) is in the tradition of Braddon's "The Mystery at Ferndale". In both tales there is a locked wing of the house, in both a woman sleuth explores both the outside and the inside of the locked wing. Both have solutions involving a similar concept, although Doyle has come up with some ingenious new approaches here. Both take place at lonely country houses, each with a plant name.
One can also see touches of "The Mystery at Ferndale" in Doyle's "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (1891). The scene where the heroine looks up and sees her husband at the window of the room, rather recall similar ones where characters in "Ferndale" see mysterious characters at an upper window. And there is some relationship of mystery approach here too, although it is a distant one.
Some of the Holmes era magazines had their own distinctive approach to choosing mystery fiction. The Windsor Magazine emphasized mysteries by famous literary figures: Arthur Morrison, Arnold Bennett. Perhaps most interesting in this regard is the Idler. This magazine emphasized game playing among detectives. Examples include Ottolengui's The Final Proof, with its rivalry among the professional detective and the amateur, and Chesterton's The Club of Queer Trades, with the "Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown" (1903) provided by an adventure service. Together with Zangwill's playful "Cheating the Gallows" (1893), the Idler's tongue in cheek, even campy approach to the mystery is clear. Perhaps the influence here of the magazine's cofounder, Robert Barr, had something to do with this. Barr's own detective series, Eugène Valmont, also has elements of parody and playfulness.
M.P. Shiel wrote two mystery short stories in 1895 that show real skill at the construction of pure puzzle plot mysteries. Neither is especially plausible or realistic, but each constructs complex situations loaded with many unanswered, mysterious questions. Shiel then proceeds to uncover ingenious hidden truths about the central situations of the tales, and provides answers to all the mysterious questions based on these new perspectives. By these two works, Shiel has certainly earned at least a footnote in detective history. Shiel also successfully develops an atmosphere of 1890's decadence and bizarrie around these tales. The tales, in their plot construction, their use of central situations that reveal paradoxical elements, their eccentric aristocratic characters that live isolated lives at lonely country houses, and their bizarre atmosphere, seem to anticipate the works of G.K. Chesterton. I have no idea whether Chesterton read Shiel, or not.
Later tales by Shiel in the Prince Zaleski series are not as good; "The S.S." in particular is ridiculous, although it is much admired by some critics. Shiel wrote and collaborated on many other mystery novels and tales of intrigue. All of these are virtually unknown today, and one wonders whether there are any outstanding detective works among them. Shiel promoted crackpot (and worse) religious and political ideas in his work; ideas in "The S.S." and some of the Cummings Monk short stories are offensive to me, and surely to other people as well.
Baroness Orczy's The Old Man in the Corner is an early series of mystery stories. The tales follow a common format. The Old Man narrates a sensational murder case of the day. Usually it involves the collision of two groups of people, and often there is a substantial sum of money involved. There is one principal suspect, against whom evidence looks bad. This person is tried for murder, (or arraigned or discussed at an inquest), but at the courtroom trial the defense attorney introduces evidence that seriously complicates the case, often making a situation that is logically contradictory, and difficult to explain consistently in any fashion. The Old Man then shows the right way to look at the case, instead of the wrong way, and gives an explanation of all the case's peculiar features. The stories are some of the best, early courtroom dramas. The courtroom scenes seem most reminiscent of those in Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886).
Orczy's best tales turn on the impersonation of multiple identities. We see some of this in Bodkin, who perhaps influenced the creation of the Old Man, just as his detective character Dora Myrl perhaps influenced Lady Molly. In addition to her two detectives, Orczy's fiction shows other parallels with Bodkin's. Bodkin's "Murder by Proxy" includes a long Coroner's inquest, whose testimony is used to ultimately reveal the killer. This session is reminiscent of the courtroom dramas of Orczy. Both Bodkin's tale and most of Orczy's are whodunits, with a parade of suspects, a murder case, an obvious suspected party, a clever plot, and a hidden villain. Relations of the characters are often mercenary. The relationships among the characters are set out dispassionately, as if in a game of chess - another mark of Orczy's fiction. Bodkin's story has a similar "feel" to Orczy. There is a static quality to both writers: instead of events happening, relationships are set forth and mysterious events are analyzed. This static quality is not all bad: it is partly a sign that thinking is going on.
Both Orczy and Bodkin show similarities with the mystery fiction of Fergus Hume. Hume's tales are also dispassionate and restrained in their telling. Hume sets up a network of relationships, then shows how those relationships can be reinterpreted to form the surprise solution to the mystery. All of these writers emphasize the fair play, puzzle plot. Hume works like The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, also perform much of their storytelling in the form of trial scenes. There is also a great deal in Hume about public reaction to cases, in the form of newspaper publicity, which is also a feature of Orczy. Marriages tend to be sinister in both authors, with either one party killing the other, or sharing some guilty secret. Hume, like Bodkin and Orczy, also featured female sleuths in his fiction.
Orczy, like Bodkin, also has ties with the Rogue literature of her day. Double identities were fairly common in this literature for bad guys: see Guy S. Boothby, for example. The crimes in Orczy's tales are usually committed for financial gain, and involve a distinct swindle or theft by the villain. Sometimes this is very close to the Rogue school: see the swindle in "The Liverpool Mystery". The Old Man's frank admiration for the clever villains is also an attribute of this school.
Orczy was most famous in her time for the adventure novel, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). The best scene in that book, the intrigue at the party in the center of the novel, is in fact a reworking of her earlier spy story "The Red Carnation" (1898). This story takes place against a background of Russian - Polish conflict, such as would later animate Joseph Conrad. This is one of the few works in Orczy's oeuvre set against the Eastern European background of her youth - it is laid in Vienna. The tale describes how the heroine's instinct and talent for espionage work draws her back into the profession. Orczy would go on to create the similarly talented woman detective, Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. The tale keeps describing the heroine's actions as automatic: first at the beginning of the story, which describes her espionage role as automatic to her as a hunting dog going after its prey, then at the end, where emotionally overwhelming circumstances cause the heroine to move like an "automaton". The heroine's feelings are intense throughout. The story is notable for the vivid sensory impressions of the heroine. Especially towards the end of the story, virtually every sentence describes some perception she has. All of the senses are appealed to: touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste, even heat and cold. There is a riotous mix of textures: a paragraph will describe first furs, then flowers and palms. One wonders if Orczy is participating in the turn of the century literary movement of Impressionism, whose advocates included Stephen Crane and Conrad, and which stressed rich description of sensory effects. Orczy's work has a visionary quality, as if it were a dream. She would have real life visionary experiences, where her creative imagination would present to her both the Old Man in the Corner, then The Scarlet Pimpernel, enabling her to create these characters. These are discussed in her autobiography. Orczy trained as a painter, and apparently "saw" the world through a multitude of media.
Max Pemberton seems to be a pioneering but somewhat artistically minor member of the Rogue school. His Jewel Mysteries I Have Known (1895) is a miscellaneous grab bag of every type of short story about jewels and crime. A lot of the stories are really mediocre, as well. Three are better than the rest. "The Ripening Rubies", anthologized by Hugh Greene in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, is the only story in the collection that is at once good, and of some similarity to the conventional crime story. This is a vividly realistic story of a jewel robbery at an English society party. "The Comedy of the Jeweled Links" is a Biter Bit tale of some sharp dealing involving a pair of emerald cuff links. It is more in the tradition of sardonic tales of con jobs than of the mystery story proper. Somerset Maugham ("A String of Pearls") and Roald Dahl ("Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat") went on to write stories somewhat like this, in which affluent people who engage in dubious business practices eventually find themselves stung. I believe that the tradition has at least some roots in de Maupassant's "The Necklace", although that story is far grimmer than any of the others discussed here. Finally, "The Watch and the Scimitar" is an adventure tale, partly set in the Casbah in Algiers, no less. It shows lots of exotic foreign color.
Pemberton's A Gentleman's Gentleman has been cited as the pioneer Rogue book, but I have never even seen a copy, let alone read it. The tales in Jewel Mysteries I Have Known, while dealing with crime, are not really all that close to the Rogue school. For one thing, there are no memorable rogues on the order of Raffles or Simon Carne in the book. Nor does the book have the anti-social glee one associates with Rogues. "The Ripening Rubies" does anticipate the Rogue school in its look at lower class crooks adopting the clothes of the upper classes, and mingling with them socially, to steal their jewels. Despite the fact that this story dates from the Doyle era, its technique recalls the casebook literature of Waters and Forrester from 30 years previously. There is the same heroic narrator, infiltrating bad guys, detecting their crimes while preserving a certain incognito, and leading a police raid on the bad guys' headquarters, just as Forrester's hero did in "Arrested on Suspicion". There is also considerable, realistic attention paid to servants in this story, just as there was in Forrester. There is also a vivid portrait of London Society in this tale. The title of the story refers to the yellow color of the stolen rubies in the tale; Pemberton has a penchant for color titles.
Arthur Morrison's fiction seems to have only a little in common with Doyle's, despite his often being cited as Doyle's chief imitator. Admittedly, Martin Hewitt is a consulting detective who appeared in a series of short stories in middle class magazines, just like Sherlock Holmes. So Morrison's commercial publication was entirely due to an appetite for Doyle imitations. But the actual content of Morrison's fiction seems quite different from Doyle's. In many ways, Morrison seems closer to the soon to emerge Rogue school. Many of his Hewitt tales focus on some ingenious criminal scheme, often involving robbery of some sort. These tales can also involve impersonation of respectable people by members of the criminal classes. Morrison would go on to make his own direct contribution to the Rogue school with his Dorrington tales.
If Morrison's writings look ahead to the Rogue school in their crimes, their detective work seems rooted in the British casebook fiction of thirty years before, of Waters, Forrester and the rest. In "The Case of Laker, Absconded", Hewitt uses disguise to infiltrate a crooks' den, does lots of legwork querying suspects, and finally leads a police raid of a crime scene: all behavior one associates with the casebook school. Financial considerations loom large in his behavior: another traditional casebook element. The casebook detectives were business people. By contrast, although Holmes is hired by his clients, once he is on the job he seems largely motivated by loyalty to the innocent, and the need to search for truth. Another casebook feature in Morrison: the use of codes and ciphers, both in "Laker" and "The Flitterbat Lancers". This use of codes was introduced by Poe, and was taken up by Forrester into casebook literature. Morrison, like the casebook writer Charles Martel, also wrote his own variation on Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue": Morrison's is "The Case of Mr. Foggatt".
There is perhaps something suggestive about Morrison and Doyle's use of titles. Morrison's stories begin with "The Case of", and Morrison is faithful to the traditions of casebook fiction. The far more innovative Doyle called his tales "The Adventure Of". Doyle's fictions are structured as complex melodramas in which many groups of people, the villain, Holmes, and various innocent suspects, are all struggling in complex, interactive ways. Holmes is far more deeply embedded in the action of the story, than in the casebook tradition. Holmes is indeed having an adventure. He is experiencing something in the first person. Doyle's fictions have elaborate puzzle plots as well, and Holmes' detective attempts to solve these also serve to immerse him far more into the story than is traditional in the more standoffish casebook fiction. In casebook tales, the crook is up to his crimes, the detective is busy detecting him through standard detectival techniques, and the two stay firmly in separate spheres.
The way such pioneers of Rogue fiction as Morrison and Max Pemberton seem rooted in the detective techniques of casebook literature suggests that there is some continuity between the two schools. Just as the early American school of Rinehart and Reeve seems to lay the groundwork for both the pulp and the general American magazine fiction of the 1920's, so does casebook fiction stand in some ancestry to the Rogue school.
None of the above mentions how satisfying "The Case of Laker, Absconded" is, as a work of storytelling.
Many of Morrison's stories deal with elaborate man made "landscapes". These include the under sea world of "The Nicobar Bullion Case", the empty house of "The Case of Laker, Absconded", the trail and camp in "The Case of the Missing Hand", and best of all, the setting of "The Case of Mr. Geldard's Elopement", my favorite Morrison story. In all cases, Morrison's landscapes are full of imaginative detail. They are always set in what might be called "real space": everything in them is precisely located in relation to everything else. The landscapes could be built as movie sets, or as theme part attractions, and allow visitors to walk around in them. One envisions a tourist attraction called "Morrison World". Although the landscapes sometimes take up a lot of space - the trail in "The Case of the Missing Hand" extends across the countryside - each meter of them is precisely described by Morrison, and form a connected landscape without any gaps. They have a connectivity of one, in graph theory terms. The landscapes are perhaps a bit ancestral to the countryside and seaside landscapes later used by realist school writers such as Freeman, Crofts and John Rhode, although Morrison's work tends to stress the man-made aspects of these landscapes more than these Golden Age writers will. There is always something constructed about Morrison's landscapes, an architectural or engineering emphasis. There is also often an element of eccentricity to them, as well. They are something unique to Morrison's story, whereas the realist school writers set their works in "typical" landscapes of the countryside. Elaborate floor plans and buildings will recur in Mary Roberts Rinehart, and her followers, and in S.S. Van Dine and his followers, such as Ellery Queen. These buildings are some of the most imaginative aspects of Golden Age fiction.
Morrison's mainstream writings often use this sort of man made landscape, as well. Morrison wrote a story called "The Street", which imagines a single long street as the metaphorical setting of all of London's poor. His most famous mainstream book is The Hole in the Wall, also an architectural/landscape idea.
Catherine Louisa Pirkis' Loveday Brooke tales (1893) seem partly in the tradition of 1860's British casebook literature, partly puzzle plot stories showing the influence of Sherlock Holmes. Loveday is a professional detective who mainly investigates robberies. She shows up undercover in some new identity in a household or a neighborhood, asking questions and sneaking up on suspects. All of this is right out of the casebook tradition. But her two best stories involve puzzle plots, and both have the surprise solutions of puzzle plots in general, and the Holmes stories in particular.
Pirkis' best stories involve three stages. The first is the setting forth of the mystery; the last is the solution. In between is an episode in which Loveday elaborately interferes in the activities of the culprits, leading to their neutralization and capture. This can become ingeniously complex. "It's all so intricate - so bewildering", one character exclaims as Loveday explains it all to him, in "Drawn Daggers". This stage of mystery fiction seems to be unique to Pirkis. It has its roots in the casebook school - all the casebook detectives had to not just identify the criminal, but lay traps to catch him, (unlike Golden Age detectives, in which the revelation of the killer's identity usually led swiftly to his arrest). Still, Pirkis has developed this into something personal and ingenious.
Pirkis' poorer stories suffer from a lack of what would later be called "fair play". While it is perhaps unfair to judge an earlier writer by the norms of a later age, Pirkis' lesser mysteries (e.g. "Missing!") sometimes have solutions that come at the reader completely out of left field, involving elaborate early histories of the characters or other events that have been completely unprepared for in the tale. The solutions can also involve deductions from clues that have never been shared with the reader. Fair play is sometimes treated today by critics as a campy remnant of a stiff upper lip era of British sportsmanship - good form, and all that. I wish to vehemently disagree. Fair play is deeply embedded in the logic of the mystery form itself. It has nothing to do with manners or social customs or even morality. Instead, the mystery as an art form depends on the logical unfolding of solutions to puzzling events. Unless the solution is logically deductible from the information provided in the earlier parts of the story, the mystery logically falls apart. By the 1920's people began to understand this as an explicit principle of mystery construction, although the principle had been used implicitly much earlier by authors, such as Conan Doyle. It had also been set forth by Israel Zangwill in his 1895 introduction to The Big Bow Mystery (1891), although Zangwill did not use the actual name "fair play". It applies to virtually any tale that involves a mystery, and is not restricted to any one school of detective fiction. (Of course, it is inapplicable and irrelevant to crime novels, books that tell the story of a crime without any mystery in their plots.) The principle is related to the general aesthetic principle of "artistic unity", the idea that all parts of a work of art should work together to create a logically coherent effect. The concept of fair play goes beyond that of artistic unity, however, in that a work of art can lack artistic unity, and still be made up of outstanding pieces, whereas a mystery tale that ignores fair play will probably just be an incoherent mess. The name "fair play" for this principle is perhaps mildly unfortunate. It suggests good sportsmanship and/or honesty, two things highly desirable in themselves, but which actually have little to do with fair play, in the detectival sense.
All of the Loveday stories show a feminist point of view. Women in the tales are often struggling to get out from under male control. This control is often used to lead them into crime or corruption, something the women are struggling to avoid. Society's sympathy for men and lack of sympathy for women is shown to be often deeply misguided, from a moral point of view - not to mention a good source for detective plots. Loveday herself is shown to be a highly professional, intelligent detective. This is one of the most "liberated" portraits in detective fiction history, even by the standards of the 1990's.
Pirkis' religious points of view come through loud and clear in the tales, as well. She admired what she called "practical Christianity": doing good works and charitable activities. She disliked what she called "religious hysteria" and cult groups. She saw the "millennial" sects of the 1890's as purely bad. Pirkis also admired independent thinking, and warned of the dangers of blindly following charismatic leaders.
"The Ghost of Fountain Lane" is an early story in which the detective investigates two seemingly unrelated cases, which gradually coalesce and prove to be linked. Raymond Chandler did this in Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and it has been common in modern private eye and police procedural books. I have no idea who was the first person to write such a mystery story.
Pirkis' two best tales are such triumphs in the history of detective fiction that one wishes she had written much more in our genre. She seems to have turned to detective fiction because it was what was selling in the 1890's, after the success of the Holmes stories. (See remarks in "The Redhill Sisterhood".) Perhaps there are other important Pirkis tales among her uncollected magazine short stories.
Bernard Higham's illustrations to Loveday Brooke are halfway between Sir John Tenniel, and the sort of Victorian narrative art burlesqued in Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strip. There are the props like clocks and food on the table, sentimental portraits of sad heroines and heroes that merely look a bit wimpy by today's standards, an interest in staged tableaux, and an overdone emotionalism in the hand gestures - all part of the Kat tradition. Despite all of this, Higham was not a bad artist. He did have the ability to create his own world. His sentimental pictures seem at odds with Pirkis' forceful, dynamic characters. There is something clean cut and straightforward about Pirkis that seems antithetical to all this Victorian folderol.
In the work of Harry Blyth, creator of Sexton Blake, we can see a major, though now largely hidden influence on later writers. The conspiracy scenes of "The Accusing Shadow" (1894) anticipate similar, later scenes in Chesterton's The Man Who was Thursday, Christie's The Secret of Chimneys, and Sayers' "The Cave of Ali Baba". Sayers wrote appreciatively about Blyth's work, and Lord Peter Wimsey apparently originated as a character in a Sexton Blake story Sayers was attempting to write. I don't know much about spy fiction, but it might be mentally searched by experts for traces of Blythian and Blakean influence, as well. Blyth's fiction has also a strong Sherlock Holmes like feel.
These are all British writers, and one suspects Sexton Blake was a major formative influence on generations of young Britishers, including many future writers. By contrast, one wonders if Blake was much read in this country (the US).
Despite the use of phrases like "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes", most of the detective writers who followed in Doyle's footsteps in the 1890's do not write fiction much in Doyle's style. Arthur Morrison's tales, for example, seem very different from Doyle's in plot and mood. But George R. Sims' "The Man With the Wild Eyes" does seem Doyle-like. There is the same mystery oriented plot, with an ongoing investigation into a continuing mysterious situation that persists through the whole story, rather than just being a puzzle at the start of the tale; the same sense of threat and menace; the same way separate groups of characters seem to carry on independent schemes (in this story, the father, the daughter, and the assailant); the same sort of middle class characters possessed of dynamic energy, who have a certain presence, with forceful personalities all their own. Dorcas Dene's narrator Saxon also seems most Watson like, with his devotion to the detective, and willingness to assist her with her investigations on a volunteer basis. Like Doyle, Sims also has an international perspective, with characters who have just returned from India. Watching Dorcas impersonate a nurse to do detective work also reminds one of the numerous 20th century nurse detectives: is this the first use of this plot?
Sims' use of such archetypal images as a pool and a gate also seems especially well done. The pool seems to represent the return of repressed images and dangerous events. The heroine is found lying half in and half out of it, just barely alive; later the pool will turn up all sorts of information. The pool is a female symbol; it also represents memory. The way the assailant in the case gradually emerges more and more throughout the story is a fine piece of detection, and also a well done example of mise en scene, with a man figuratively emerging from the mists, or from the unconscious.
Like most of the Dene tales, "The Man With the Wild Eyes" shows Sims' careful creativity with detection. We see step by step how Dorcas Dene discovers each new fact in the tale. We see Dene's stratagems, which allow her to explore areas and locales associated with the crime; we see her using clues to reconstruct the crime; we see her ingenious search for new sources of information; we see her tracking characters and following their trails. The detection is very full bodied. Sims clearly feels that such detection is one of the main subjects of a detective story, perhaps the principal one, along with the nature of the crime itself. It makes for a very well developed traditional detective story, which each new fact following logically from genuine detective work.
Also, it enhances the status of Dorcas Dene as a detective. She comes across as a genuine professional. She always uses real detection, never guess work or coincidence, to solve her cases. Her cases are solved by brain work, and lots of it. Certainly she has equal ability to any male detectives: no detective of either gender could work more intelligently or professionally to detect crime. This professional status for her is deeply embedded in the structure of the plot: it is based on the solid detective work she performs throughout her adventures. The feminism of this portrait of a woman detective is deeply enhanced by the careful plotting of Sims' tales.
"The Diamond Lizard" is a tale about stolen jewelry. It is ultimately comic in tone, with Sims coming up with elegant plot constructions tracing the path of the stolen items. Both the crime schemes and Dene's detective work also build up to elegant patterns of plot in "The Mysterious Millionaire".
The Dorcas Dene tales have some ties to Rogue literature, as well. Elegant stories of the flow of jewelry such as "The Diamond Lizard" recall Max Pemberton's "The Comedy of the Jeweled Links". The night club scenes in that tale look forward to E. Phillips Oppenheim, and his fascination with danger and fighting in sinister but exciting night clubs. The way that Dene is always getting disguised and going undercover in different roles, also anticipates the Rogue tradition.
The Dene stories have a nice plotting flow, in which detail after detail is added to some scheme, either detection by the heroine, or the crime by the villain. The flow is a pleasing reading experience, like listening to a piece of music. The details all fit into a logical pattern. They tend to be bigger and more extended than the reader first assumed was possible; it is pleasant to watch such a logical design be preserved and extended. The plot ideas tend to involve activities: actions taken by a character. Many of these actions are secret, and concealed from others.
Both "The Diamond Lizard" and "The Mysterious Millionaire" have feminist overtones, perhaps not surprising in an author who creates a female detective. Sims looks at the dark side of well to do Victorian men, and their treatment of the women in their lives. Doyle had also looked at the exploitative nature of male-female relationships. Telling such "home truths" about male and female social standing seems to be one of the purposes of the 1890's detective story.
Also interesting is the way Dene orders her "Watson" Mr. Saxon around, directing his activities and providing all the brain work and planning for his actions. There is nothing too unusual about this: Sherlock Holmes similarly directed Watson, and such a brain power / leg work division of labor is standard in detective fiction history. What is unusual is that the detective here is a woman, giving a man orders. Dene is completely successful at this, with her instructions to Mr. Saxon always bearing fruit in unearthing new clues and information. This portrait of an able woman boss must have been quite startling in its day.
The end of the first chapter of "The Diamond Lizard" mentions both Gaboriau's Lecoq and Doyle's Sherlock Holmes - another example of the long tradition of detective writers paying homage to their predecessors. Some features of Sims do seem Gaboriau like. Dorcas Dene is a master of disguise. In "The Mysterious Millionaire" Dene uses physical clues ingeniously to track people, and to reconstruct events at crime scenes. Sims shows considerable inventiveness at such use of clues, in the Gaboriau tradition.
"The Haverstock Hill Murder" is notable mainly for the detection Dorcas Dene does. There is a good reconstruction of the crime, something popular in Gaboriau and Anna Katherine Green. There is also much charming use of disguise, and following of race track crooks. Doyle's stories are full of disguise, and Sims' tale is in the tradition of such Doyle works as "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891). Not only does Dorcas Dene show ingenuity in her disguises, but she also disguises subsidiary characters in her schemes, just as in Doyle.
That British staple, the tracing of the bank notes, gets some new wrinkles here. This is one of the earliest stories I remember reading in which such notes play a role.
The introductory chapter of Dorcas Dene, Detective, "The Council of Four", sets up Dene as a character, and introduces us to her husband and mother, with whom she lives, as well as her Watson, Mr. Saxon. This is the weakest part of the book. The mystery case Dene solves here, "The Helsham Mystery", is less inventive than most later Dene stories. Worse, Dene is depicted as subservient to the alleged intellect of her obnoxious male chauvinist husband, and as a follower of all sorts of Victorian nonsense about Womanly Ideals of behavior. This chapter seems to be a sop to chauvinistic ideas about women, popular in their day. It has rightly been criticized by Professor Kathleen Gregory Klein in her book The Woman Detective: Gender & Genre (1988). Fortunately, once the actual cases of Dene start getting underway in the subsequent chapters, all of this is ignored. Dene's dismal husband largely disappears as a character, and Dene shows outstanding detective skills throughout the book. This portrait of a highly intelligent, gifted woman excelling in her profession through ability is deeply feminist.
The Divinations of Kala Persad (in book form 1895) is a story collection starring the detective team of elderly Indian Kala Persad and young Britisher Mark Poignand. Headon Hill's two detectives in are the only Sherlock Holmes era team I know of in Britain who have a division of labor in detection.
The role played by Kala Persad is similar to the pure thinking that Sherlock Holmes often does to solve cases. Holmes and Persad hear the story of a case, learn about its basic situation, analyze it, and come up with a unique insight that shows the hidden, underlying pattern. Both Holmes and Persad do this through pure thinking. In both Doyle and Hill, this hidden solution is often startlingly different from the apparent situation of the case, involving some unique twist. Doyle's approach here is clearly the ancestor of the Intuitionist detectives of the 20th Century, such as those of Chesterton, Christie, Queen and Carr. Hill, who is plainly influenced by Doyle, has separated this function out to one of his two detectives.
Mark Poignand, on the other hand, does Holmes' functions of disguise, on the spot investigation, evidence gathering and probing of motives. The point of view character of the stories, he does not figure out the central solution of the crime, but he has to gather all the evidence that will stand up in court. He is definitely not a Watson, unlike most of the detective associates in the Holmes era. In Doyle's stories, Watson provides bravery and personal support, but he does not actually detect, except on rare occasions when separated from Holmes, as in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).
Kala Persad and Mark Poignand anticipate, to a degree, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Godwin, with Persad being a genius, and narrator Poignand being an energetic young detective who does leg work. However, the roles of Hill's pair are far more strictly defined than Nero and Archie, both of whom can take on each other's typical tasks.
It is worth looking at Kala Persad's thought processes in detail. The narrator at first says that Persad is a mystic Indian who arrives at his processes through some non-rational process, maybe reading minds. But Persad himself says that he arrives at his results through reasoning and insight, and Hill seems to agree.
While Headon Hill is a lone Britisher offering teams of detection, we can find them in an American writer of a different school, Anna Katherine Green. Her detectives, in any given novel, often come in teams, mixing both amateurs and professionals, together with different types of professional. This approach was also followed by some American writers influenced by Green, such as Pauline E. Hopkins and Mary Wilkins Freeman. One also remembers the rivalry in the American Ottolengui between the two detectives Mr. Barnes and Mr. Mitchell. Still, Hill's detective team is different from any of these, in that his detectives are part of a commercial team. They are consulting detectives in the Holmes tradition, not mixtures of police and amateurs as in the Green school.