British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes [1st ed.] 9781137595621, 9781137595638

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xii
Introduction: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes (Clare Clarke)....Pages 1-14
Detectives Doctor Clifford Halifax and Norman Head, by L.T. Meade (Clare Clarke)....Pages 15-38
Detective Loveday Brooke, by C.L. Pirkis (Clare Clarke)....Pages 39-62
Detectives Martin Hewitt and Horace Dorrington, by Arthur Morrison (Clare Clarke)....Pages 63-84
Detective Hagar Stanley, by Fergus Hume (Clare Clarke)....Pages 85-108
Detective the Honourable Augustus Champnell, by Richard Marsh (Clare Clarke)....Pages 109-132
Detective Flaxman Low, by Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard (Clare Clarke)....Pages 133-154
Conclusion (Clare Clarke)....Pages 155-162
Back Matter ....Pages 163-166

Citation preview

CRIME FILES

British Detective Fiction 1891–1901 The Successors to Sherlock Holmes Clare Clarke

Crime Files Series Editor Clive Bloom Middlesex University London, UK

Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories and films, on the radio, on television and now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators a mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, from detective fiction to the gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation, is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14927

Clare Clarke

British Detective Fiction 1891–1901 The Successors to Sherlock Holmes

Clare Clarke School of English Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

Crime Files ISBN 978-1-137-59562-1    ISBN 978-1-137-59563-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: By Sidney Paget for The Final Problem, 1893, Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo, Image ID: C53384 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Acknowledgements

I would like to begin by thanking Clive Bloom and the team at Palgrave who have granted me the opportunity to think and write about Victorian detectives once again and who have provided excellent support in publishing this volume. Thanks also to Jennifer Jones for her invaluable help copy-editing this book. At Trinity College Dublin, where I have been based since 2012, I am grateful to have been supported by the sabbatical leave programme and the Arts and Humanities Benefactions Fund, both of which have given me the most important thing a scholar can be gifted—time to think, to research, and to write. In the School of English at Trinity, I’m lucky to enjoy the support and friendship of many, many wonderful colleagues—I find myself about to list every department member by name. You all know who you are. Instead, I’ll give particular thanks to my fellow popular literature lecturers—Jarlath Killeen, Darryl Jones, and Bernice M. Murphy. They are ridiculously talented and knowledgeable people who make me better at what I do and who are always happy to indulge my requests to chat about Victorian slums and serial killers. I’m grateful for their collegiality and friendship every day. As always, my greatest debt of gratitude goes to my family, particularly my mother, Carole Ireland, and to my partner in crime and in life, Peter Clarke, and our feline sidekicks, Jerry and Bear.

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Contents

1 Introduction: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes  1 2 Detectives Doctor Clifford Halifax and Norman Head, by L.T. Meade 15 3 Detective Loveday Brooke, by C.L. Pirkis 39 4 Detectives Martin Hewitt and Horace Dorrington, by Arthur Morrison 63 5 Detective Hagar Stanley, by Fergus Hume 85 6 Detective the Honourable Augustus Champnell, by Richard Marsh109 7 Detective Flaxman Low, by Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard133 8 Conclusion155 Index163

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About the Author

Clare Clarke  is Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Co-Director of the MPhil in Popular Literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She has published widely on crime and detective fiction. Her first book, Late-Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (Palgrave, 2014), was awarded the H.R.F.  Keating Prize in 2015.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1

“The Death of Sherlock Holmes” by Sidney Paget. From “The Final Problem,” by Arthur Conan Doyle. Strand Magazine Dec. 1893, p. 558. (Image credit: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo) xii “Hands up, or I fire” by Sidney Paget. From “The Doom,” by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace. Strand Magazine Oct. 1898, p. 42914 “He Introduced Himself ” by Bernard Higham. From “The Redhill Sisterhood,” by C.L. Pirkis. Ludgate Monthly Vol. 4, April 1893, p. 582. (Image credit: Vintage Book Collection/ Alamy Stock Photo) 38 “So much for that!” by Stanley L. Wood. From “The Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co. Ltd,” by Arthur Morrison. Windsor Magazine Dec. 1897, p. 593 62 “The Female Sherlock Holmes. Hagar of the Pawnshop. Adventure No. 1—The First Customer and the Florentine Dante.” The Evening World (New York) 25 July 1906, p. 8. (Public domain image accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress. https:// chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/)84 Cover image from Richard Marsh, An Aristocratic Detective (Digby, Long, & Co., 1900) by Harold Piffard 108 “Real Ghost Stories: The Spaniards” by E. and H. Heron. Pearson’s Magazine, Vol. 5, Jan. to June 1898, p. 60 132

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Fig. 1.1  “The Death of Sherlock Holmes” by Sidney Paget. From “The Final Problem,” by Arthur Conan Doyle. Strand Magazine Dec. 1893, p. 558. (Image credit: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes

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 “The Final Problem,” 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 “dreadful caldron of swirling water and seething foam” (Doyle, “Final” 570). If the full-page Sidney Paget illustration facing the story’s 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 detective’s fate, the legend emblazoned beneath did not: “The Death of Sherlock Holmes,” it trumpeted (Doyle, “Final” 558). At the time of the story’s 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 “lower stratum of literary achievement,” 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 “highest … conscientious, respectable” 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 Gillette’s stage adaptation Sherlock Holmes, which was touring in the United © The Author(s) 2020 C. Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891–1901, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8_1

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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, “Shoscombe Old Place” 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, “The 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 swim” (Knight, Art of Murder 11). Indeed, the Victorian fin-de-siècle 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 “rapid development of provincial journalism,” 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, Forster’s 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

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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. (54–55)

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 magazine’s 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 Doyle’s serialised detective fiction. As John Sutherland has noted, as a reaction to the success of Sherlock Holmes stories for the Strand, “by the mid-1890s, it has been estimated that of the 800 weekly papers in Britain, 240 were carrying some variety of detective story” (181). As a clerk at a W. H. Smith’s bookstall explained, when he was interviewed by The Speaker in 1893 about the public’s reading habits: “He 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 night” (“A Literary Causerie” 383).

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Holmes rivals, clones, parodies, and inversions began to fill up the pages of countless family magazines such as the Windsor, the Ludgate, Pearson’s, 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 1893–1900. 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 Library’s 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 “successors to Sherlock Holmes.” In successive years, similar edited anthologies such as Douglas Greene’s Detection by Gaslight (1997); Alan K.  Russell’s Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1993); Michael Cox’s The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories (2002); Michael Sims’s The Penguin Book of Gaslit Crime (2009), The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (2011), and The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Detective Stories (2011); Nick Rennison’s The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (2008), Supernatural Sherlocks (2017), and More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (2019), all built upon Greene’s 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 Humpherys’ and Andrew Radford’s surveys of scholarship on the crime genre—completed in 1998 and 2008, respectively—both 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 “in favour of an obsessive return of critical analysis to a handful of canonised texts by three male writers—Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle” (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 “so simple or so gratifying a genealogy … as

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the classic account suggests” (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 Ousby’s Bloodhounds of Heaven (1976), Peter Thoms’s Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction (1998), and Lawrence Frank’s 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 fiction—one 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 1886 to 1900, a formative and fascinating period in the history of the genre, which has been termed the “First Golden Age of Detective Fiction” (Smith, Golden iii). That book investigated representations of detectives and criminals in both canonical and forgotten crime fiction at this key juncture, challenging studies of the development of the genre which had awarded undue prominence to a handful of figures—usually Poe, Dickens, Collins, and Doyle. My study built upon the work of scholars such as Joseph Kestner (2003), Maurizio Ascari (2007), Lee Horsley (2010), Caroline Reitz (2004), Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (2003), Christopher Pittard (2007, 2008, 2011), Lucy Sussex (2010), Srdjan Smajic´ (2010), and Michael Cook (2014), who either began and or continue the critical work of offering an alternative, and much fuller, account of late-Victorian crime fiction. Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock concentrated particularly on the frequently overlooked stories which blurred the boundaries between genres and illustrated the burgeoning nineteenth-century detective genre’s often overlooked capacity for narrative and moral complexity. Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock examined a selection of crime stories where detectives are criminals and murderers, where criminals are heroes, or where crimes go unsolved, arguing that such “shadows of Sherlock” demonstrated the need to reconsider the

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“cosy” reputation of the Victorian detective genre. That book closed by reflecting, “There is much more work to be done in this area…The need remains for further processes of re-evaluation, consolidation, and recuperation which this study has begun, with potentially hundreds more valuable ‘Shadows of Sherlock’ as yet undetected” (Clarke 183). At the time, I did not foresee that I would immediately begin to undertake that work. However, in my time investigating Sherlock and his contemporaries, I had discovered dozens of fascinating detective series, all of which were published in periodicals and newspapers in the years when Sherlock was dead, and about which little was known, but which did not necessarily showcase the late-Victorian detective genre’s capacity for moral ambiguity in the way that the stars of Shadows of Sherlock did. I decided that, as a companion piece to Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock, I wanted to bring to light and explore few of the most interesting of those other successors to Sherlock Holmes. I don’t seek to make any claims about this group of stories as an ideologically or formally coherent body of work; I am interested in examining how they showcase the ways in which writers, the magazine market, and the detective genre responded to Sherlock’s death. So, in British Detective Fiction, 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes, I explore a number of short-story series by six popular but little-­ studied, although increasingly commonly anthologised, authors whose collections of stories illuminate the breadth and diversity of the popular late-Victorian detective series in the years following Holmes’s demise. Each chapter details the publication history and contemporary reception of one or more collections of detective short stories, published in periodical or newspaper form, during the years that Holmes was dead. This study demonstrates that insight into generic variety and development can more often be found not in the canonical texts and authors of Victorian detection, but in those published in periodicals and provincial newspapers and hence since (mostly) relegated to the forgotten fringes of the genre. This book is not a survey listing and describing all the works that clamoured to fill the void left by Holmes’s death. That mammoth task has already been at least partially attempted by others such as LeRoy Lad Panek in After Sherlock Holmes: The Evolution of the British and American Detective Stories, 1891–1914 (2014) and Stephen Knight in Towards Sherlock Holmes: A Thematic History of Crime Fiction in the 19th Century World (2017). These recent works take an international approach to the evolution of the detective genre in which they consider the role of British, American, and

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Australian writers in the development of the nineteenth-century detective genre both before and after Holmes. They are broad and brisk surveys which help us to understand the big picture of the detective genre’s worldwide development over the course of the nineteenth century. This book, by contrast, employs a case study format to focus upon six of the most popular and renowned authors whose works appeared in the narrow window between December 1893, when Holmes died, and 1901, when he was resurrected again in the pages of the Strand. In “The Slaughterhouse of Literature” (2000), his pioneering work on non-canonical Victorian detective fiction, Franco Moretti noted that at times when genres are coming into being, no one knows what will work and what will not. Rules and codifications for genres tend to be retrospectively applied, and those stories which do not fit these later narrow definitions are often overlooked or dismissed as inferior or improper versions of that genre. Here, I focus upon such stories—stories which were being written at a time of great upheaval and innovation for the detective genre, a time when no one was certain what the rules were but were desperate to capitalise upon the gap in the market left by the sudden demise of Sherlock Holmes. As a result, most of these stories exist on the borderline of genre—they overlap with the colonial adventure tale, the ghost story, gothic fiction, and the slum novel, among other things. They showcase various incarnations of the figure of the detective, working with varying degrees of success or failure. In the pages of this study, readers will be introduced to all sorts of fascinating late-Victorian detectives—professional, amateur, male, female, old, young. There’s a gypsy pawn shop worker, a forensic scientist, a New Woman detective, a British aristocrat, a ghost-hunter, and an East-End criminal who has carved out a role as one of London’s top private detectives, amongst others. In some cases, the detectives work with the police, in others they are intellectual amateurs intrigued by unsolved puzzles, in others again they are criminals themselves, out to defraud their trusting clients. They feature a variety of crimes that still resonate today—from robbery and murder to blackmail, bigamy, sexual assault, stolen identity, and terrorist attack. If we are truly to understand the diversity of the detective story at the fin-de-siècle, we cannot study only those already-canonised stories which shore up dominant yet limited and prescriptive views of the genre at that time, as cosy and conservative, obsessed with masculine and scientific authority and formal resolution. Rather, if we explore the types of stories that enjoyed widespread circulation or great popularity, but which did not

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conform to later-decided rules of the genre and hence disappeared into the dustbin of history, we attain greater insight into the flexibility and permeability of what the post-Sherlock fin-de-siècle detective narrative could be and do. Each chapter of this study seeks to illuminate a different publication and a different author, assessing their contributions to the late-Victorian detective genre in the post-Holmes era. Chapter 2 begins by focusing upon a sample of the detective fiction by the hugely prolific Irish writer Mrs L[ouise] T[homasina] Meade. After Doyle, Meade was the Strand’s most-published author of crime stories and she was his immediate replacement in the magazine. In the period 1893–1903, Meade published six detective series in the Strand magazine alone and spoke frankly about her business-like approach of “writing to order.” I present Meade as a consummate and canny woman-of-letters who changed genre from children’s fiction to detective stories when the marketplace dictated it after Holmes’s death. By examining her “Stories from the Diary of a Doctor” (1893–95) and “The Brotherhood of Seven Kings” (1898), both published in the Strand at the time of Holmes’s absence, I demonstrate Meade’s market acuity and ability to initiate, borrow from, and blend existing popular tropes and trends, such as the dangerous colonial woman, the scientific detective, and the figure of the master criminal who had become popular following Moriarty’s appearance in “The Final Problem,” in such a way as to satisfy the mostly male, mostly British Strand readers to whom she was most likely personally and politically opposed. Chapter 3 examines C[atherine] L[ouisa] Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, first published in the Ludgate Magazine in 1893–94, one of few series which contemporary reviewers found to be on a par with Doyle’s work; as the Speaker put it, “the lamented Sherlock Holmes has bequeathed us a number of successors, of the majority of whom it may be safely averred that they are unworthy to brush their great exemplar’s boots. But in that majority we shall certainly not include the beautiful and accomplished ‘Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective’” (“Fiction”). Pirkis’s series is only the second work of Victorian detective fiction by a female author and featuring a female detective—the first, discovered by Adrienne Gavin, is Mrs George [Elizabeth Bourgoyne] Corbett’s Behind the Veil; or Revelations by a Lady Detective, starring detective Dora Bell, which was published weekly in the newspaper the Leicester Chronicle in 1891. This chapter focuses on Loveday Brooke’s appearance in the Ludgate, exploring the ways in which this magazine was

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a female-oriented version of the Strand magazine, examining Brooke’s female methodology and interactions with the male police force alongside the real late-Victorian trend for female private investigators many years before the appearance of the first Metropolitan Police female detective in 1922. Chapter 4 focuses on one of Doyle’s most successful rivals, the well-­ known and critically revered author of powerful realist slum fiction such as Tales of Mean Streets (1894), Arthur Morrison. Alongside Meade, Morrison was one of the Strand’s first replacements for Doyle, with his series featuring London-based private detective Martin Hewitt, a character who has been termed a “Sherlock clone” (Greenfield 18). This chapter begins by examining the genesis of detective Martin Hewitt in  the Strand before turning to Morrison’s much more original second detective, Horace Dorrington. Dorrington, who featured in the Windsor magazine in 1897, is a slum-born Londoner who is now operating a successful private detection agency in the city. While Dorrington has left the East End behind socially, he draws upon his criminal upbringing while operating in both high and low areas of the city throughout a collection in which he lies to, steals from, and even attempts to murder clients. The series is an intriguing and gritty hybrid of detective and slum fiction, which undercuts assertions that Victorian detective fiction is “soothing, socially integrating literature despite its concern with crime, violence and murder … the realm of the happy ending” where “the criminal is always caught. Justice is always done. Crime never pays” (Mandel 47). Chapter 5 examines a little-known and little-studied series of stories by New Zealand’s Fergus Hume, author of the bestselling detective novel of the nineteenth century, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1888). While Hume’s Hagar of the Pawn-Shop has been chronicled by Joseph Kestner (2003) and Adrienne Gavin (2010), I believe that this is the first study to reveal the series’ syndicated publication in serial form in several provincial newspapers including the Liverpool Weekly Mercury and the Woolwich Gazette in 1897. Although sneered at by contemporary critics, the series with its young female, gypsy detective offers fascinating insight not only into the practices of newspaper syndication but into the late-Victorian worlds of pawnbroking, capitalism, and material culture. The 11 stories in the collection revolve around Hagar’s investigation of objects brought into her pawnshop to be pawned, leading to wider explorations of the history and crimes involving the objects’ socially, racially, and nationally diverse group of owners.

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Chapter 6 focuses on another series that first appeared in provincial local newspapers across England, including the Manchester Times, the Leeds Mercury, and the Newcastle Weekly Courant in the period 1895–1900— Richard Marsh’s An Aristocratic Detective. The author of over 80 volumes of fiction and more than 300 short stories, Marsh is now best known for his bestselling imperial gothic novel, The Beetle (1897). Published in the same year as Dracula, The Beetle famously outsold Stoker’s novel upon publication and well into the twentieth century. One of the novel’s multiple narrators was the Honourable Augustus Champnell, whose detective adventures are examined here. Specifically, this chapter examines a series of detective stories starring Champnell which were published both before and after Marsh’s success with The Beetle. Not only do these stories have a fascinating publication history, they are also feature one of the first aristocratic private detectives in literary history, appearing some 20 years before Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, meaning that they offer intriguing explorations of the class dynamics of Victorian police-work and criminality. Chapter 7 examines two series of stories featuring Flaxman Low, a detective specialising in investigating criminal matters involving the occult or the supernatural. This detective-ghost story hybrid series is authored by a mother and son team, Kate O’Brien Prichard and Hesketh Vernon HeskethPrichard, writing pseudonymously as E. Heron and H. Heron. The stories were first published in Pearson’s Magazine from 1898–99 and soon thereafter in volume form. Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard was a noted soldier, big-game hunter, and explorer—something of a real-life Allen Quartermain and, as such, the Flaxman Low stories mostly focus on threats emerging from supernatural or haunted/possessed objects and things emanating from foreign lands. The resulting collection is a fascinating example of the innovation that can occur in the border-territories between two traditionally disparate genres—the ghost story and the detective narrative. All the stories analysed here are richly atmospheric and replete with the period details that fans of the Victorian detective story so enjoy—gaslight, gentlemen’s clubs, hansom cabs, and foggy London streets. Beyond this, the stories illuminate the social and political concerns that troubled the late Victorian public and featured almost daily in the national press—topics such as the decline of the British Empire, the Irish question, the problems brought about by poverty in London’s slums, interest in ghosts and the spirit world, and the changes wrought by female empowerment and the New Woman question. They also showcase the ways in which writers of detective fiction engaged with the latest developments in modern technology, such as railways, x-rays, bomb-making, fingerprinting, and forensic analysis.

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For me, one of the most intriguing aspects of these stories is the ways in which they illuminate the mechanics of late-Victorian authorship—how authors producing detective fiction for late-Victorian periodical market plundered the newspapers and recycled popular tropes not only from the Sherlock Holmes stories but also from bestselling mass-market fiction of other genres, in order to rework and refresh existing forms. In doing so, they shed light on the degree to which non-canonical detective fiction wilfully borrows from and blends with other popular late-Victorian genres, such as the adventure narrative, the gothic, the ghost story, and slum fiction, novels such as George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) or Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). Focussing upon a range of series which were published in a diverse range of ephemeral publications, from cheap provincial newspapers to lavish monthly magazines, allows this book to explore the culture of the late-Victorian literary marketplace, touching on issues from newspaper syndication to the importance of illustrations, and the ways in which authors responded to the dictates of editors and the reading public. If Holmes was the king of the “First Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” this book demonstrates that after his death he had many worthy successors (Smith, Golden iii).

References Altick, Richard D. Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel. Ohio State UP, 1991. “A. Conan Doyle.” Strand Magazine, Dec. 1891, p. 606. Allen, Grant. “A Deadly Dilemma.” Strand Magazine, Jan. 1891a, pp. 14–21. ———. “Jerry Stokes.” Strand Magazine, Jan. 1891b, pp. 299–07. ———. “The Great Ruby Robbery.” Strand Magazine, Oct. 1892, pp. 376–87. “A Night with the Thames Police.” Strand Magazine, Jan. 1891, pp. 124–32. Ascari, Maurizio. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Besant, Walter. The Pen and the Book. Thomas Burleigh, 1899. Blathwayt, Raymond. “Lions in their Dens: George Newnes at Putney.” The Idler March 1893, pp. 161–73. Bloom, Clive. Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, eds. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press, 2009. Clarke, Clare. Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock. Palgrave, 2014. Cook, Michael. Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story: The Haunted Text. Palgrave, 2014.

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Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Strand Magazine, July 1891a, pp. 60–75. ———. “The Final Problem.” Strand Magazine, July–Dec 1893, pp. 558–70. ———. Memories and Adventures: An Autobiography. Wordsworth, 2007. ———. “A Case of Identity.” Strand Magazine, July 1891b, pp. 248–59. “Editor’s note.” Strand Magazine, July 1892, p. 82. “Fiction.” The Speaker, 7 April 1894, p. 396. Friedrichs, Hulda. The Life of Sir George Newnes. Hodder and Stoughton, 1911. Gavin, Adrienne E. “Feminist Crime Fiction and Female Sleuths.” A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J.  Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Blackwell, 2010, pp. 258–69. Greenfield, John. “Arthur Morrison’s Sherlock Clone: Martin Hewitt, Victorian Values, and London Magazine Culture, 1894–1903.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 35, no.1, 2002, pp. 18–36. Greenslade, William and Terence Rodgers, eds. Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Ashgate, 2005. Hendrey-Seabrook, Therie. “‘The Accomplished Forms of Human Life’: The Arts and Aesthetics of the Female Detective.” Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction, edited by Paul Fox and Koray Melikoğlu. Ibidem Press, 2012, pp. 197–217. Hobbs, Andrew. A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900. OpenBook Publishers, 2018. Holmes, H.J. “Making a Policeman.” Strand Magazine, April 1902, pp. 386–91. Horsley, Lee. “From Sherlock Holmes to Present.” A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley. John Wiley & Sons, 2010, pp. 28–42. How, Harry. “A Day with Dr. Conan Doyle.” Strand Magazine, July 1892, pp. 182–88. Jackson, Kate. “George Newnes and the ‘loyal Tit-Bitites’: Editorial Identity and Textual Interaction in Tit-Bits.” Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, edited by Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein. Palgrave, 2000, pp. 11–26. Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914. Secker and Warburg, 1989. Kestner, Joseph A. Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913. Ashgate, 2003. Knight, Stephen. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 1980. ———. and H.  Gustav Klaus, eds. The Art of Murder: New Essays on Detective Fiction. Stauffenberg, 1998. Lellenberg, Jon, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley, eds., Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Harper Perennial, 2008. “A Literary Causerie: Bookstall Books.” Speaker 7, Oct. 1893, pp. 383–84.

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“Literature: The Strand Magazine.” Belfast News-Letter. 17 August 1892, p. 7. McDonald, Peter D. British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914. Cambridge UP, 1997. Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. Pluto Press, 1984. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle. U of Michigan P, 2008. Moretti, Franco. “The Slaughterhouse of Literature.” MLQ: Modern Literature Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 1, 2000, pp. 207–27. Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-­ Century Fictions of Crime. Oxford UP, 2003. “The Nightmare at the Lyceum.” Pall Mall Gazette, 7 August 1888, p. 5. “Novels of the Week.” Athenaeum, 6 December 1890, pp. 773–74. Pelham-Clinton, C.S. “Policemen of the World.” Strand Magazine, Feb. 1897, pp. 214–24. Pittard, Christopher. Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction. Ashgate, 2011. ———. “‘Cheap, healthful literature’: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 40. no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–23. ———. “The Real Sensation of 1887: Fergus Hume and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 26, 2008, pp. 37–48. Pound, Reginald. Mirror of the Century: The Strand Magazine 1891–1950. Heinemann, 1966. Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture. Ohio State U, 2004. Shpayer-Makov, Haia. The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England. Oxford UP, 2011. Smith, Marie. Golden Age Detective Stories. Paragon, 1999. Smajic´, Srdjan. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge UP, 2010. Sussex, Lucy. Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: the Mothers of the Mystery Genre. Palgrave, 2010 Sutherland, John. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. Pearson Longman, 2009. Wånggren, Lena. Gender, Technology and the New Woman. Edinburgh UP, 2017. Willis, Chris. “The Detective’s Doppelganger: Conflicting States of Female Consciousness in Grant Allen’s Detective Fiction.” Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin De Siècle, edited by William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers. Ashgate, 2005, pp. 143–54. “What We Think.” The Star, 1 October 1888, p. 1. Young, Arlene. “‘Petticoated police’: Propriety and the Lady Detective in Victorian Fiction.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 26, no. 3, 2008, pp. 15–28.

Fig. 2.1  “Hands up, or I fire” by Sidney Paget. From “The Doom,” by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace. Strand Magazine, Oct. 1898, p. 429

CHAPTER 2

Detectives Doctor Clifford Halifax and Norman Head, by L.T. Meade

“I simply write it to order.” “How I Write My Books: An Interview with L.T. Meade.” Young Woman Vol.1, 1892, p. 122

In 1893, writing in her final editorial column for middle-class girls’ literary magazine Atalanta, prolific and bestselling Irish author of children’s fiction L.T. [Elizabeth Thomasina] Meade, the “Most Popular Lady Novelist of Her Day,” offered some advice to young female readers determined to emulate her success in the ever-expanding late Victorian literary marketplace: “Try and think of yourself as a merchant who has something of Authors: L.T. [Elizabeth Thomasina] Meade (1844–1914), with Clifford Halifax [Edgar Beaumont] (1860–1921) and Robert Eustace [Eustace Robert Barton] (c. 1868–1943) Volume editions: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (George Newnes, 1894) and Stories from the Diary of a Doctor: Second Series (Bliss, Sands, and Co., 1896), by L.T. Meade and Clifford Halifax The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (Ward, Lock, and Co., 1899), by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace Serial publications: “Stories from the Diary of a Doctor” Strand Magazine July 1893–Dec 1895; “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings” Strand Magazine Jan–Oct 1898. © The Author(s) 2020 C. Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891–1901, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8_2

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value for sale. The editor represents the public, who want to buy. He will quickly appreciate you if he sees that you can give him what his readers want” (Meade, “The Black Ribbon” 11; “From the Editor” 841). This was not the first time that Meade had spoken about the necessity for the modern writer to follow the demands of the changing literary marketplace. Indeed, Meade was not an author that harboured any Romantic ideals about writing and inspiration; rather, she spoke frequently and frankly about her authorship as a business career. In an interview for Young Woman magazine in 1892, Meade unapologetically admitted that she followed the demands of the market: “I write my stories a good deal because the publisher wants the book. I simply write it to order, and, of course, if he asks for a girls’ story he gets it, and if he asks for a novel or children’s story he gets that” (“How I Write” 122). Mrs Meade appears to have had a business-like approach not only to genres and the literary market, but also to the practice of writing. In an interview about her working routine she described a regimented schedule: I had to breakfast at half-past seven to be ready for my shorthand writer at eight; from eight to nine I would dictate some three thousand words. Then I attended to household duties until my second secretary came, and worked till half-past eleven, when I always went to town for my editorial duties, which occupied me until seven. Then home to dinner, and I spent every evening correcting proofs, & c. (Black 226–27).

Given this diligence, it is no surprise that alongside her editorial work, Meade went on to author around 300 books and series and to co-author writing manuals such as On the Art of Writing Fiction (1894). In the early 1890s, following the success and subsequent premature death of Sherlock Holmes, what readers and editors wanted was short detective fiction. The year of Holmes’s death, 1893, was also the year that Meade resigned as editor of girls’ magazine Atalanta. In that year, the canny “merchant” expanded her professional repertoire, augmenting her children’s fiction with a new foray into short story detective fiction for the Strand Magazine (Meade “From”).1 An established and prolific author of children’s fiction, with already over forty titles to her name, including the bestselling A World of Girls: The Story of a School (1886), Meade switched genre, producing the kind of short detective series with which the Strand had made its name. In her pioneering study The New Girl (1995), one of the first works to argue for Meade’s importance, Sally Mitchell astutely

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noted that in her girls’ fiction, Meade “deliberately echoed literature her readers already knew,” recycling tropes and plot points from popular authors such as Louisa May Alcott (New 15). For me, Meade also deploys this strategy in her detective fiction. Subsequent scholars of Meade’s girls’ fiction, such as Beth Rodgers, Janis Dawson, and Tina O’Toole have deepened our understanding of Meade’s approach to writing as a business, as an exemplary late-Victorian professional woman writer. Here, I build upon that scholarship, exploring how Meade, a canny professional writer, attuned to the demands and trends of the late-Victorian periodical market, and dependent on her writing for income, strategically switched to producing crime stories for the Strand, once that genre and magazine had gained popularity and proved lucrative. While the Strand had many regular contributors who stepped in to supply detective fiction after Holmes’s “death” (notably all men), Meade went on to become the magazine’s most published author of crime stories in the late-Victorian and early Edwardian period, with six series published between 1893 and 1903: two series of “Stories from the Diary of a Doctor,” running from July 1893 to December 1895; “The Adventures of a Man of Science,” running from July 1896 to February 1897; “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings,” running from January to October 1898; “Stories of the Sanctuary Club,” running from July to December 1899; and “The Sorceress of the Strand,” featuring master-criminal Madame Sara, running from October 1902 to March 1903.2 This patronage by the Strand was rivalled only by Doyle himself. Following the publication of the first six wildly successful Sherlock Holmes stories in 1891, Doyle was bestowed the honour of appearing in the magazine’s series “Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of their Lives.” This series reproduced photographs or engravings of eminent Victorians along with a few lines of biography and featured a range of literary luminaries such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Algernon Swinburne, and H.  Rider Haggard.3 Seven years later, in the issue following the final instalment of The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, the Strand conferred this honour upon Mrs L.T. Meade, described reverentially as “one of the most popular contributors to The Strand Magazine” (“Portraits” 674). The article, accompanied by four photographs of Meade, is also marked by its repeated references to her prodigious work rate—emphasising that she is “one of the most industrious modern writers of fiction” and that, since her literary debut, “she has worked at a rate of four or five volumes a year” (674).

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According to Mitchell, with her first detective series, Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1893–94), written with Clifford Halifax [Edgar Beaumont], Meade invented a new genre—the medical mystery.4 The twelve-part series debuted in July 1893, just before Holmes’s death, running alongside the final few instalments of the first series of Doyle’s detective stories. This concurrent publication indicates not only the speed with which Meade responded to this popular new literary trend, but also the Strand’s desire to introduce Meade’s similar stories to the magazine’s readership before Doyle departed. The void that would be left by Holmes’s death in 1893 had been prefigured by the hiatus between the first and second series of Holmes stories for the Strand in 1892. The first series of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes finished in the June 1892 edition of the Strand with “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” In their July 1892 edition, the editors of the Strand magazine announced apologetically that “it will be observed that this month there is no detective story by Mr. Conan Doyle relating the adventures of the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” The message went on that the “temporary interval” between the first and second series of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories—which, they assured readers, “Mr. Conan Doyle is now engaged upon writing”— would be filled by “an interview with Mr. Conan Doyle, containing amongst other interesting matter some particulars concerning Mr. Sherlock Holmes” and “powerful detective stories by other eminent writers” (“Editor’s note” 82). Meade’s “Stories from the Diary of a Doctor,” one assumes, then, were intended not to compete with Doyle, but to soften the blow of Sherlock’s forthcoming departure. The “Stories from the Diary of a Doctor” are narrated by Clifford Halifax, a newly qualified young doctor who has “not made up [his] mind as to [his] future” (91). The series was written in consultation with Metropolitan Police Surgeon Edgar Beaumont (under the pen name Clifford Halifax, M.D.); as Winnie Chan points out, the “scientifically credentialed, male collaborator” and co-author was a strategic decision by the canny Meade (61). Dr Halifax’s name added to the by-line was a means of offering Mrs Meade gendered credibility and authority in the eyes of the magazine’s predominantly male readership.5 It is widely accepted that when working in collaboration, Meade supplied the plot and writing, while her male ‘co-author’ helped supply medical and scientific information. As a result, I make the conscious choice to refer to Meade alone as the author of the various series she contributed to the Strand. Like Holmes, Halifax lives a reclusive gentlemanly existence, seemingly

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without income, accruing esoteric knowledge whilst deciding on his future in a leisurely fashion; we meet him spending the evening in his comfortable London rooms poring over “a chapter on neurotic poisons in Taylor’s ‘Practice of Medical Jurisprudence’” (91). Meade seems to have recognised, as many modern scholars of the crime genre have since done, that late-Victorian crimefighters like Sherlock Holmes were not only detectives, but the healers of a broken social body, fixing people and things, thus effecting a restoration of order (Messent 120). Meade makes this more literal than Doyle had done: with her doctor detective, the seemingly intractable medical problems Halifax solves always inevitably stem from his ability to detect yet uncovered criminal conspiracies from the examination of his patients. As Halifax puts it, From long practice, [the doctor] becomes to a great extent able to read his many patients, and some characters appear to him as if they were the pages of an open book. The hopes, fears, aims, and motives which influence the human soul are laid bare before him, even in the moment when the patient imagines that he is only giving him a dry statement of some bodily ailment (145).6

In “My First Patient,” published in July 1893, Halifax is called to the country home of a Dr Ogilvie, whose young wife is gravely ill—“seriously ill—seriously! —alarmingly [ill]” (92, emphasis in original). After a cursory examination of the patient, Halifax discovers that she is not suffering from a clot in the brain, as her physician husband and the family doctor concur, but that her malaise and torpor is the result of opium overdose. It transpires that she is being slowly poisoned by her husband, in order that she will not have to endure the shame of soon-to-be-revealed revelations about his unsavoury past. In his youth in Australia, Ogilvie had married “a virago—one of the cruellest, the most heartless, the wickedest women who ever polluted God’s earth” (101). The woman has just reappeared and is attempting to bribe Ogilvie; thus, he resolves to kill himself, but first to murder his wife in order that she “should never hear of the disgrace which would more than break her heart” (101). With these themes of bigamy, female villainy, and domestic murder, Meade is revisiting the staple tropes of mid-century sensation novels such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). She is also anticipating a characterisation that would dominate much of her later work for the Strand: the malign and villainous colonial woman,  and the downfall of previously

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stable and scientific English men. As such, the series is an early indication of Meade’s staple plot points and characters, as well as her market acuity, her ability to produce precisely those genres which were in demand by periodical editors—in her own terms, her ability to give a literary editor “what his public want[s].” Indeed, the series was so successful that it was published in volume form by George Newnes and a second series featuring Halifax was commissioned and published by the Strand beginning January 1895.7 In July 1896 there followed another medical mystery series, The Adventures of a Man of Science, again co-written with Edgar Beaumont, as Clifford Halifax. This series of stories featured another amateur scientist, Paul Gilchrist, “a man whose life study has been science in its most interesting forms” with a “small laboratory in Bloomsbury [that] has been the source of more than one interesting experiment” (Meade, “Ought He?” 169). In 1898, Meade struck out in a slightly different direction, showcasing her self-conscious use of existing generic forms and her ability to playfully reinvigorate popular formulae. In The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, which was serialised in the Strand in ten parts from January to October 1898, with illustrations by Sidney Paget creating a visual call-back to Holmes, and published in volume form by Ward, Lock & Co. later that year, Meade (co-writing with Robert Eustace, another medical man) employed her already tried-and-tested medical detective story formula. At this point, the medical mystery was perhaps becoming a little tired, therefore to the figure of the medical/scientific detective, Meade added a focus upon one of the most popular trends to emerge out of the post-Holmes void—the master-criminal narrative. The master-criminal narrative constituted an inversion of the detective story; the criminal, rather than the detective, is the hero—he usually evades the law and goes unpunished, detection is usually unsuccessful or entirely absent from the stories, leaving the reader dazzled by the criminal’s dastardly schemes.8 The figure of the dashing master-criminal dates back to Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco from The Woman in White (1860), if not before. But, again, the character type was revived and popularised by Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories. In “The Final Problem” (1893), the story in which Holmes was killed off, the detective met his match in master-criminal Professor Moriarty. Moriarty was an Irishman, a genius, and “organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,” controller of shadowy networks of criminality radiating throughout the city of London and, perhaps, the entire Empire (561).9 Thus, alongside dozens of “Sherlock clones,” periodical pages in the second half of the 1890s were also

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bursting with “Napoleons of crime”—powerful foreign master-criminals, doubtless designed to capitalise on the character of Doyle’s enigmatic Moriarty (Greenfield 18). That deft plunderer of literary trends, Guy Boothby, created the most popular antihero of this type, the exotic Dr Nikola: gentleman, mesmerist, scientist, vivisectionist, part Dorian Gray, part Dr Moreau. Nikola appeared in serial form in the Windsor Magazine and went on to star in five bestselling novels published between 1895 and 1901. Nikola’s debut appearance A Bid for Fortune, or Dr Nikola’s Vendetta, published in the Windsor magazine in 1895 and later that year in volume form, captivated the British reading public and catapulted Boothby to celebrity author status.10 In The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, as well as in her later series Sorceress of the Strand (1901–02), Meade drew upon her doctor detective narratives and added a gendered twist to the master-criminal narrative, with the creation and portrayal of two powerful female anti-heroes, Madame Koluchy and Madame Sara. Both women are foreign, female master-criminals pitted against the masculine authority of British men of science. For Chris Willis, with these “female Moriarties,” Meade was seeking “both to mediate and contain the demands of early feminisms” (66). For Willis, Sara and Koluchy are cast as criminal owing to their “assertive, transgressive” female behaviour—for their “intelligence and refusal to conform,” as much as for their crimes (66). Elizabeth Carolyn Miller has termed Madame Koluchy and Madame Sara “New Women Criminals,” which for her are “figure[s] of fantasy” having “little to do with [most] real, historical female criminals of the period,” who were generally poorly educated, destitute, desperate, and often the victims of abuse (Framed 3–4). Whilst this is undoubtedly true, Meade’s “female Moriarty” stories—The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings particularly—illuminate especially well the ways in which her complicated position as a progressive Irish-born woman of business with feminist ideals, writing for a mostly male audience in a conservative English magazine results in complicated and often contradictory portrayals of fraught issues such as gender relations, nationality, and women’s entry into traditionally male spheres, such as science, crime, and law enforcement (Willis 66).11 Many of the most popular fin-de-siècle fictions vocalise anxiety about the vulnerability of the imperial centre to various forms of attack or invasion. The fantastic attacking forces of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Rider Haggard’s She (1888), H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), conceptualise prevalent

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late-­Victorian fears about race, gender, and empire. They are, in Stephen Arata’s memorable phrasing, “narratives of reverse colonisation,” where the civilised centre of the empire is always on the verge of attack from those who are racially or nationally “other” (108). Meade’s Brotherhood of the Seven Kings opens in a London under one such threat. Its aptly-named narrator, Norman Head, lives a life of the mind. He is a scientist and a gentleman, having studied medicine at Cambridge, and is now “something of a recluse” devoted to the empirical study of “biology and physiology” (Meade, “At the Edge” 86). Head’s narrative opens with a confession—ten years ago, when in Naples studying biology, he allowed his heart to overrule his intellect and he “fell a victim to the wiles and fascinations of a beautiful Italian…a scientist of no mean attainments herself, with a beauty beyond that of ordinary mortals” (86). It transpired that the woman, Katherine, was “chief and queen” of a “grotesque and horrible” sect, the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, a nebulous political organisation responsible for “terrible crime[s]” (86).12 For a while, Head succumbed to her both personally and politically. But, after taking part in “a transaction both dishonourable and treacherous,” conscience seized Head—“I fled to England to place myself under the protection of its laws” (86). From the start of this first story, Katherine and her criminal organisation are counterpoised with Head—each are representative of an opposing set of values, organised along lines of nationality and attendant morality. Katherine, Italy, and the Brotherhood are associated with “the heart,” with “passion,” and with criminality; Head and England are representative of, quite literally, “the head,” the “intellect,” and the “law” (86). It is when Katherine reappears in England, practicing medicine at the beating heart of the British Empire with an office on Welbeck Street in London’s prosperous West End, that her threat becomes fully realised. She has enacted a form of “reverse colonisation,” travelling to the imperial centre and attacking the city and populace from within. Now known as Madame Koluchy, the “great lady doctor,” has “science at her finger ends” and “is able to restore youth and beauty by her arts” (88). She has penetrated London society, has a long list of aristocratic patients, and has established for herself a reputation as “the cleverest woman in England … the great specialist, the great consultant (88). London, we are told, “is mad about her” (88). At the same time, she harnesses her scientific skills to carry out a series of deadly crimes utilising, amongst other things, x-rays, untraceable poisons, a virus carried by the tsetse fly. The male members of

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the English medical profession, however, “pooh-pooh” her and believe her to have “bewitched London with her impostures and quackery” (86).13 Katherine Koluchy’s medical status constitutes a threat that is not only gendered, however, but is also colonial.14 She is cast repeatedly in opposition to a particularly English kind of masculine, scientific authority. As her Italian assistant Dr Fietta, who meets a fiery death in Mount Vesuvius at the end of the first story, points out, only those “unfettered by English professional scrupulousness” appreciate her brand of scientific endeavour (90, emphasis mine). At the same time as Katherine’s medical reputation advances, the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings have begun “to accomplish fresh deeds of unparalleled daring and subtlety in London” (86). Her repeated descriptions as royal—she is “the queen of the organisation,” “its chief and queen” and the Brotherhood’s password is “la Regina” [The Queen]—again emphasise Katherine’s threat to English imperial authority (86, 95, 86). Members of British “Royalty” are “among her patients” (86). The implication is clear—Katherine is a threat not only to her London patients and British citizens but to Queen Victoria and to the stability of the British Empire. Over the course of the series’ ten episodes, Head, representative of those empirical values of science, masculinity and Britishness, turns detective. Assisted by representatives of both the law and policing—his friend Colin Dufrayer, “one of the smartest lawyers in London” alongside Detective Ford, one of the “cleverest and most up-to-date detectives” from London’s Criminal Investigation Department—Head tracks Madame Koluchy, determined to bring her before the English judicial system (137; 242). A specifically English justice is central to this pursuit. In almost every story, Head restates his desire “to place this woman and her confederates in the felon’s dock of an English criminal court” (137, emphasis mine). As Rodgers discusses in relation to Meade’s girls’ fiction, Meade’s experiences of growing up as part of a minority Protestant community in Ireland’s West Cork doubtless illuminate the “potentially conflicted nature of national and colonial identity in late-nineteenth-century Ireland” (“I am glad” 154). They also manifest in her perhaps surprisingly pro-­ Imperialist views, as above, where Meade seems to be complicit in the perpetuation of dominant national stereotypes which cast the English as naturally superior to—and rightly fearful of—foreign people.15 James Mussell, drawing upon Ronald R. Thomas’s pioneering work on foreign bodies in detective fiction, has observed that Meade’s earlier medical mysteries—such as Diaries of a Doctor—turn upon the scientific,

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patriarchal, and imperialist authority of the white, British man of science. In these tales, doctor detectives, such as Clifford Halifax, frequently employ their scientific knowledge to “read” the bodies of transgressive, often foreign criminals. In doing so, they “convert the previously private location of the laboratory into a component of imperial surveillance” (70). In Thomas’s terms, this skill came to prominence in fiction “at the very moment when Great Britain needed to secure its identity as the predestined ruler of a great global empire” (Qtd. in Mussell 70). For Victorians, to read these stories, then, was to be reassured by the scientific skill of the man of medicine, that he can read aberrant bodies and people and return them to their rightful places, restoring order to British society. As such, Meade’s scientific mysteries might be viewed as emblematic of the reading of the crime genre as “soothing, socially integrative” literature upon which Marxist interpretations of the crime genre pivot (Mandel 78). At first glance, it seems that The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, with the scientist Head as narrator, and female foreign master-criminal Katherine Koluchy as target, may well follow this narrative pattern. However, this female master-­criminal narrative is somewhat more disruptive of generic norms and codes; Meade’s range of contradictory positions on the intersections of gender, nationality, criminality, and scientific authority at times cuts against, but at other times shores up the Strand’s largely masculine, imperialist, conservative ideology. The investigating duo of Head and Dufrayer, scientist and lawyer, as well as emulating the established Holmes/Watson partnership, are clearly also sops to the Strand’s middle-class male readers, the types of admirable British representatives of masculine scientific authority that feature frequently in the magazine’s pages, in articles such as the “Illustrated Interviews” and “Portraits of Celebrities” with Sir Clements Markham, President of the Royal Geographical Society (Feb 1897); fingerprinting pioneer Francis Galton (Nov 1897); Guglielmo Marconi, developer of long-distance radio transmission (Mar 1897); or Lord Armstrong, inventor of the Armstrong gun and hydro-electricity (Dec 1898).16 In Meade’s crime stories for the magazine, by contrast, the pioneering female medical professional is not a figure to be celebrated or venerated, but instead, as Christopher Pittard suggests, “someone to be feared” (114). As such, Meade’s characterisation of Katherine Koluchy seems to “reinforce the gender stereotyping that underpinned the Strand’s project of making crime narratives respectable” (Pittard 115). And masculine.

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Many scholars have read Meade as decidedly antifeminist; as Rodgers notes, however, “assertions as to Meade’s antifeminist depictions of gender are complicated,” by the fact, among other things, that the writer served on the management committee of the Pioneer Club, the feminist organisation that counted New Woman writers Mona Caird and Sarah Grand among its members (“Irishness” 148). They are also complicated by her commitment to fostering a community of girl readers, providing advice to girl writers, and her repeated depiction in her girls’ fiction of female independence and the pursuit of higher education.17 Her crime stories for the Strand are extremely complicated in terms of gender ideology, however. In Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, feminist sentiments peek out in Meade’s representation of female police detectives and female proto-detective characters. In three of the collection’s ten stories it is women who represent the strongest challenge to Koluchy’s dominance. First, the fifth story, “Twenty Degrees,” published in May 1898, opens with Head and Dufrayer deciding to ignore an anonymous letter warning them that they are in danger and instead to try to go about their business “just as if there were no Mme. Koluchy in the world” (530). However, shortly afterwards a strange client arrives at Head’s home. It is near midnight and she wears the garb of an old woman in “a voluminous cloak and an old-fashioned bonnet” (531). Once inside the apartment, the stranger takes off her disguise to reveal “a slight, handsome, dark-eyed girl,” who introduces herself as “not an adventuress, [but] a lady—one in sore, sore straits” (531). She is Elsie Fancourt, a young journalist and the author of the anonymous note; she has come to warn Head that he and his sidekick are “marked by the Brotherhood” with Dufrayer to be “the first victim” (532). In this story, London’s law and the police are invoked several times but only to confirm that they are ill-equipped to deal with the magnitude of threat posed by Koluchy and her Brotherhood. “No human laws can protect him [Dufrayer],” she warns, “Even here, in this great and guarded city” (532). Fancourt also begs Head for his help in retrieving her erring fiancé, John North, a young solicitor who clerks for Dufrayer and who has become embroiled in “Madame’s set” (535). Koluchy is described as maintaining a terrible hold over North, one which threatens his morality and even his masculinity; as Fancourt puts it, “something is eating into his youth, his manhood, and his beauty” (535). Against Koluchy’s terrible emasculating threat, however, Elsie Fancourt counterposes her own resources of “a woman’s wit and intuition” (532). Indeed, throughout the story, North is emasculated and entirely passive, whereas Fancourt

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possesses the traditionally masculine qualities of intelligence, action, and bravery that have been sapped from her fiancé by Koluchy. As she explains her position to Head, “She [Koluchy] has done me an awful wrong. She has done that which no woman with can forgive. I will avenge myself on her or die” (532). In the collection, it is common for Koluchy’s victims to be young, friendless ladies or children, making her the inverse of many “lady detective” characters such as C.L.  Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke (see Chap. 3) or Fergus Hume’s Hagar Stanley (see Chap. 5), who frequently use their detecting skills to help marginal women. What marks Elsie Fancourt, however, is that while she is young and friendless, she is also clearly a New Woman figure—she has “journalistic work” which “keeps her busy” in the city for “the greater part of the week” and necessitates solo lodgings—“a small room in Soho” (536). As a result, Fancourt is presented as having the intelligence, agency, and chutzpah to take an active role in the investigation of Koluchy and her network. Indeed, throughout the story she repeatedly goes out alone into the city at night, despite believing her life to be in danger, and engages in acts of detection including “follow[ing],” “watch[ing],” and “question[ing]” (536–37). This includes following North to a “large party” held by Madame Koluchy at a house in Mayfair, which turns out to be an “opium den” (536). When Fancourt explains this to Head, she bristles at his suggestion that she may be overestimating all of these perceived threats (536). Indeed, her spiky response is couched in terms akin to that of a detective explaining their panoptic and deductive processes to a particularly slow sidekick: “I know all that…It was easy for me to put two and two together…Have I not followed the thing step by step?” (532, 536; 532). Fancourt explains to Head that when she followed North home to his apartment and found him under the influence of opium, she interrogated him in the manner of a detective, purposefully encouraging him to smoke more in order to “wrest secrets from his lips” (536–37). “My questions were asked with extreme care,” she tells Head, “and deliberately, step by step, I wormed his secrets from him” (537). Indeed, it is entirely Elsie’s painstaking “step by step” investigation and interrogation that forces her fiancé to admit everything and leads to her uncovering and then preventing a “ghastly plot” to murder Dufrayer with a bomb planted—by North— in his office (537). While Fancourt saves Dufrayer, it is intriguing that neither she nor Head succeed in rescuing her fiancé from Koluchy’s clutches (537). Indeed, given the multiple displays of female detection

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and resourcefulness showcased throughout the story, it ends on a curiously conservative note, with Head’s observation that North remains “in madame’s toils” and that Elsie’s new “mission in life” is to rehabilitate and “save” her “scoundrel” lover (541). “The ways of some good women are inexplicable,” muses Head (541). At the story’s close, then, Fancourt’s proto-detective skills are transferred from the investigation of the public sphere, to the domestic sphere and she is relegated to the more traditionally feminine task of winning back and “saving” her immoral fiancé (541). The serious “male” work of detection is handed back to Head for the ensuing stories. However, only two instalments later, in “The Iron Circlet,” published in July 1898, another resourceful female comes to Head’s assistance. Valentia Ward—her forename derived from the Latin for “brave”—an assistant to an eminent London bacteriologist, is described as “a most intelligent and clever girl, one in a thousand” (7). Like Elsie Fancourt, Valentia Ward contacts Head to warn him about Koluchy’s latest criminal enterprise, which the detective has previously learned involves Koluchy’s employment of James Lockhart, a “famous bacteriologist” and “remarkable genius” (7; 4). However, rather than asking for Head’s help, Ward suggests that he and Dufrayer “will run into danger” if they “meddle in this matter” and warns him to call off his plan to warn Lockhart about Koluchy, while refusing to go into further details (4). In Head’s mind, Valentia’s intelligence, alongside her role working with the eminent bacteriologist, and her “thought of embracing the medical profession” aligns her with Madame Koluchy (7). Dufrayer concurs, telling Head that Valentia’s warnings are vague and baseless, and that he is certain she is a member of the Brotherhood, employed simply to throw them off the scent (7). Head and Dufrayer go immediately to Lockhart’s offices where they tell the bemused scientist that Koluchy is “head of a gang…perpetrating some of the most terrible crimes the century has known” (7). The pair “beg” Lockhart: “have nothing to do with her, and beyond all other things, not to put into her hands or into the hands of any of her confederates one or more of the great secrets of bacteriology,” warning him “how omnipotent such powers would be in the hands of the unscrupulous” (7). Lockhart assures the men that the work he has undertaken for Koluchy is “perfectly honourable” and that if he ascertains the smallest likelihood of his work being used for “dishonourable purposes,” he will quit his employment immediately (8).

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When Lockhart visits Head later that day to inform him of a suspicious instruction from Madame to take a trip to Lymington Bay along with “three broth cultures of a certain bacillus,” Head thrusts a revolver into his pocket and accompanies the scientist, secure in the knowledge that he will have the opportunity to confront and perhaps defeat Koluchy at last (9). When Valentia Ward surreptitiously follows and once more warns Head not to take a boat trip with Lockhart, the detective offers the woman a stern admonishment: “how can I respect you or believe your words? …you are showing me all too plainly that you are on the side of [Mme. Koluchy]” (9). Head ignores her warnings and continues to fraternise with Lockhart until suddenly, while alone on a desolate coastal path, Lockhart attacks him: “his great hands clutched at my throat like a vice, and with all the weight of his huge body he knelt upon my chest and pinned me to the ground” (12). Head realises almost immediately that Valentia Ward’s warnings had been in earnest and that he has been “the duped victim of some hideous plot” (12). He loses consciousness and awakes confronted by “a pair of eyes of terrible power and satanic beauty”—Koluchy has captured him and intends to punish his betrayal, and Valentia’s, with death by drowning in a scuttled boat (13). In fact, it had been Lockhart who all along was a member of the Brotherhood; meanwhile, the brave Valentia dies “a lingering death” by drowning while helping Head to escape (16). As Head puts it, “she had risked and lost her life for mine” (16). As in “Twenty Degrees,” brave and resourceful female intervention has taken place only to save a male character. So, both Elsie and Valentia are thwarted and contained, perhaps even punished, for their bold behaviour and their entries into the male sphere of detection. The final—and most intriguing—story to feature an active female is the collection’s ninth episode, “The Bloodhound.” The eponymous bloodhound is Anna Beringer, a “good-looking girl with a keen clever face” and “a strong masculine look of determination” (324–25). “There is not a cleverer lady detective in the whole of London,” we are told, and she is brought in by the Metropolitan Police in cases where “a woman is to be hunted down … she is like a bloodhound when she scents the prey, and never lets go of the scent” (304; 309). Indeed, Beringer proves a worthy adversary for Koluchy and gets much closer to the master-criminal than anyone previously has. Meade draws clear links between the two women— like Koluchy, Beringer is described in “masculine,” even animalistic, terms—there is a “hardness about her lips,” “absolute cruelty” in her eyes, she has “a grip of her subject” which none of her male peers possess, she

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“never rests,” has “never failed,” and bears “the expression of a tigress about to spring” (305; 304; 307; 307; 308; 308; 308). Emulating Holmes’s admiration for Moriarty, when Koluchy and Beringer meet, the master-criminal refers to her as “a smart woman, the smartest with one exception in all London” (317). The exception is herself, an assertion Koluchy confirms by outmanoeuvring Beringer, gagging her, and leaving her to die in a locked underground dungeon (317). Koluchy escapes once again but Head admits that while “she [Koluchy] feared no man in London … she had a wholesome dread of Anna Beringer” (316). After the pair’s showdown, Koluchy goes underground for the first time in the collection: “her house was deserted, her numerous satellites were not to be found” and “nearly every detective was engaged in her pursuit” (416). This is a fascinating end to the collection’s penultimate chapter, so it is surprising and disappointing that Beringer then drops out of the narrative and is not mentioned again. She plays no further part in the hunt for Koluchy, despite having come closer to apprehending her than any of her male colleagues. Again, it seems that despite producing resourceful female helpers or detectives, Meade’s narratives of detection always defer to the gentlemen heroes of the story. Given the ignominious endings of all three women investigators in this collection, it’s difficult to endorse fully Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s assertion that Meade’s Madame Koluchy and Madame Sara stories constitute work at “the new front lines of feminism” (100). Whilst its certainly true that Meade’s female master-criminal collections for the Strand depict female agency, professionalism, and participation in the largely masculine scientific and commercial spheres, this agency is always curtailed and contained; the detective work is ultimately left to their largely less resourceful male counterparts. The final story, “The Doom,” published in October 1898, opens with Head sick with worry about Koluchy’s disappearance, her “cruel face” haunting his dreams (416). Dufrayer persuades the “haggard” Head to accompany him to Rokesby Rectory in Lake Windermere to convalesce over Christmas and to try to put Koluchy out of his mind (416). The eminently safe, “picturesque” and respectable country home of Dufrayer’s friend the rector (“one of the best fellows I know”) is contrasted with the dangerous, unguarded streets of London, where Koluchy is on the loose, untraceable even by Scotland Yard (416). In this story, however, the collection’s overarching theme of Koluchy’s penetration of national boundaries is mirrored by a more personal penetration of the safe domestic space of the country rectory where Head and Dufrayer are staying. Koluchy has

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secretly followed the pair to the countryside and on Boxing Day she enters Dufrayer’s bedroom and kills him by administering an injection of “trinitrin—or nitro-glycerine” and then slips away unnoticed (426). The only clues of her visit are a discarded cloak, a bonnet, and a broken syringe containing traces of “a terrible poison” (426). As Head describes it, he entered the purportedly safe rectory bedroom to find “the friend of my life,” with whom he had spoken just a few hours before, having fallen victim to the arch-enemy that he believed to be miles away (426). In his groundbreaking formalist study of the crime genre, The Poetics of Prose (1977), Tzvetan Todorov famously argued that, in classical detective fiction, the dangerous action of “the story of the crime” takes place before the detective or his sidekick become involved in the narrative (45). This guarantees the “immunity” of the detective and the sidekick (often also the narrator) who are involved only in the safe and cerebral “story of the investigation” (47). Because the criminal event has already occurred, Todorov explains, the characters in the story of the investigation are insulated from the dangerous narrative space containing crime. As he bluntly puts it: “Nothing can happen to them” (44). In Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, Meade overturns this convention and allows Head’s friend and sidekick no such immunity. In the final story, the sidekick is suddenly murdered by the criminal they had been tracking for the whole collection. It is a shocking twist and one whereby Koluchy physically and emotionally emasculates Head in much the same way as she had done to John North earlier in the collection. Immediately after finding Dufrayer’s body, Head lays his hand tenderly upon his friend’s unbeating heart, describing the sidekick as “the man I loved best on earth” (426). In the wake of the murder he describes himself as “alone, utterly alone,” in “an excess of agony,” and as “faint and giddy” as the hysterical female servant who discovered the body (426). This incident, then, blurs and overturns many of the gender and power binaries that had so far structured the series: suddenly the cool, rational, English scientist becomes passionate, emotional, and ultimately possessed with a hot-blooded desire to enact the kind of bodily harm upon Koluchy which she has so frequently visited upon others. He describes this powerful emotional response as a “deadly thirst for vengeance,” which engulfs him like “a fire burning in my brain, [growing] hotter each instant” (426). Head and a band of detectives set out for Koluchy’s London laboratory, where they agree to take her “either alive or dead” (428). However, given that they are all heavily armed and there is, as Head puts it,

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“vengeance in each man’s breast,” it seems unlikely that they intend to allow her to live (428). They arrive to find the house which had lain empty for so long “brightly lit up” and occupied with a “fresh staff of servants” (428). Once inside, Koluchy lures Head and his band of Metropolitan police detectives to her laboratory—“the very sanctuary of her fiendish arts and appliances”—where she greets them with “a scornful laugh” (428). “This is your supposed hour of victory,” she tells Head, “but you will never take me dead or alive” (428). With that, she flicks a switch and disappears in a “huge sheet of white flame,” so “bright and dazzling” that it blinds the men and knocks them to the ground (428). When the men regain consciousness, they inspect the laboratory and discover a sunken iron chamber fitted out with “oxyhydrogen” jets, which Head explains give out “the intensest heat known … the enormous temperature of 2,400deg Centigrade” (429). Alongside the dead body of Detective Ford, described as one of the “cleverest and most up-to-date detectives” in the Metropolitan police force, but cut down easily by the female master-­ criminal, they find a “small heap of smouldering ashes” which they assume to be Koluchy (242; 429). The closing words of the final story plainly state “These were all the earthly remains of the brain that had conceived and the body that had executed some of the most malignant designs against mankind that the history of the world has ever shown” (429). This ending is not quite as definitive as Head claims it to be, however. Indeed, we can interpret Koluchy’s demise one of two ways. First, we might agree with Chris Willis that there is “no way of proving” that the “small heap of smouldering ashes” discovered by Head are definitely Koluchy’s remains—after all, no corpse is seen or found, and “she has made supposedly impossible escapes in previous episodes” (64; 429; 64).18 If, on the other hand, we accept that Koluchy is dead (and certainly, Meade did not ever choose to resurrect her, as Doyle did with Holmes after his ambiguous demise), then the master-criminal’s death looks like a way for Meade to formally and morally restore the status quo with the containment of the foreign, female threat. Koluchy’s entrapment and death as a result of Head’s dogged investigations might therefore be read as the act of a writer who is intimately acquainted with the specific iteration of genre popular with this periodical and its readers—that is, the “healthy” Doylean crime narrative in which British masculine authority triumphs—and who flexibly bends the ideological leaning of her story to fit in with their preferences (Pittard 103). Those less generously inclined towards Meade might interpret her decision to kill off the female

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master-­criminal, thus quashing and punishing Koluchy’s agency, as the actions of a female writer betraying her feminist beliefs to satisfy the demand for depictions of strong and masculine British authority preferred by the Strand’s male editors and largely male readership. Either way, it is difficult to make a case for these stories as assuredly feminist. Ultimately, Koluchy’s capture and ‘death’ in the collection’s final story underscores the difficulty of reading this collection as an unproblematic parable of female empowerment. Koluchy’s capture by a detective who has not enjoyed great success throughout the collection demonstrates that Meade’s position on feminism is difficult to pin down and is fraught with problems and contradictions. What moments of feminist sentiment there are, seem to exist within a formal and ideological schema that is palatable for the Strand’s mainly male readership. Indeed, what dominates Meade’s crime stories for the Strand is the impression of a writer whose primary aim is not to engage in a project of daring generic innovation: this is simply a fortuitous by-product of her tendency to borrow from and combine multiple current popular fiction tropes and trends—the scientific male detective; the dangerous colonial woman; the master criminal. Nor indeed is her aim political progressiveness, even though her stories include more women than many of their predecessors and are more suggestive of the possibility of female empowerment and agency than most of Doyle’s Holmes stories had been. She is simply “writing to order” (Meade, “How” 122). Nonetheless, there is much to enjoy here, and Meade’s stories for the Strand are an integral component of the expanding nineteenth-century canon of female-­ authored crime fiction, much of which also featured female criminals and detectives. But the sad ending, defeat, or disappearance of all Meade’s strong and dangerous female characters in her detective fiction for the Strand means that ultimately, she chose to make the (probably quite sensible and necessary) commercial decision to acquiesce to the formulae preferred by the masculine, “healthy,” and conservative crime story preferred by the periodical in which they featured (Pittard 103).19 I don’t think we can judge Meade too harshly for this decision—it is perhaps more than anything else a reflection and indication of the compromises that nineteenth-­century women writers needed to make in order to compete with male authors, to make money, and to survive in the crowded and Darwinian late-Victorian periodical marketplace. And as Doyle’s most prolific successor in the Strand, her choice to make these compromises was doubtless an astute one.

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Notes 1. Despite Meade’s popularity in her own time, she has not been the subject of a tremendous amount of academic attention, and most of her oeuvre is out of print today. Sally Mitchell’s pioneering New Girl (1995) did much to rehabilitate Meade’s reputation as an important author of fiction for Victorian girls, leading in turn to important recuperative work by, amongst others, Susan Cahill (2016), Janis Dawson (2009, 2013), Tina O’Toole (2013), and Beth Rodgers (2013; 2016a, 2016b). Fewer critics have made claims for the significance of her crime writing, although this has begun to change in the past ten years or so. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (2008) and Janis Dawson (2015, 2016) have recently made persuasive cases for the importance of Meade’s crime fiction. 2. Alongside these, Meade, often in collaboration with a male author, produced numerous other series of short detective stories for the Strand’s rival magazines such as Cassell’s and the Harmsworth, including a short series featuring a female detective, Florence Cusack, “respected by every detective in Scotland Yard” (Meade, “Mr. Bovey” 168). 3. See ‘A. Conan Doyle’ Strand Magazine, July 1891, p. 606. 4. Sally Mitchell, “Elizabeth Thomasina Meade,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxforddnb.com.elib.tcd.ie/view/article/52740. Accessed 13 June 2017. 5. According to Douglas G. Greene, “it is generally concluded that Meade did the actual writing, while Eustace supplied the scientific gimmicks and gadgets” (“Introduction,” ix). 6. This recalls Holmes’s ability to read and decode the bodies of clients, a skill that Doyle witnessed in his Professor at Edinburgh University, Dr Joseph Bell. For a discussion of this see Doyle (2007). 7. As Dawson notes, three of the stories feature femmes fatale, meaning that in this collection we can see the genesis of the two female master-criminals who star in her next series for the Strand, The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1898) and The Sorceress of the Strand (1902–03) (Sorceress 22). 8. For more on the late-Victorian return of the rogue or criminal hero see Clarke (2014). 9. Doyle had not invented this criminal type. Arguably the first fictional master criminal is Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco in The Woman in White (1860). 10. For more on this see Clarke (2014). 11. Meade’s female master-criminal stories, particularly The Sorceress of the Strand, have been discussed by a small number of critics. See: Chan (2008); Dawson (2015, 2016); Halloran (2002); Miller (2008); Pittard (2011); Willis (2002). The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, has been the subject of briefer critical scrutiny, see: Chan (2008); Dawson (2015, 2016); Miller (2008); Pittard (2011); Willis (2002).

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12. Willis persuasively suggests that Meade was drawing upon the influence of such Italian societies in texts such as Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). 13. At this time, women’s entrance into the medical profession was a site of hot debate—as W.F. Bynum recounts, the International Medical Congress in London, held in 1881, did not allow women to register as delegates, inciting a protest by forty-three qualified female medical practitioners (147). 14. As such, she recalls Guy Boothby’s Trincomalee Liz from A Prince of Swindlers (1897). See Clarke (2014) for more on this character and collection. 15. For more on Meade’s conflicted Irish identity see O’Toole (2013). 16. As former Strand editor Reginald Pound notes, “while posing as a family magazine, the Strand primarily appealed to men” and that “some issues went to press with no story or article of compelling interest for women” (Pound 70). 17. For more on this see Rodgers (2013). 18. These types of ambiguous endings were common in the master-criminal narratives that ran in other periodicals such as The Windsor and Pearson’s; these include Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897) and Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers (1897), which are discussed in Clarke (2014). 19. Chan (2008) makes a similar observation (70).

References “A. Conan Doyle.” Strand Magazine, July 1891, p. 606. Arata, Stephen D. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Cambridge UP, 1996. Black, Helen C. “Mrs. L.T. Meade.” Pen, Pencil, Baton and Mask: Biographical Sketches. Spottiswoode, 1896, pp. 222–29. Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press, 2009. Bynum, W.F. Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 1994. Cahill, Susan. “Where Are the Irish Girls?: Girlhood, Irishness and L.T. Meade.” Girlhood Studies and the Politics of Place: Contemporary Paradigms for Research, edited by Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler. Berghahn Books, 2016, pp. 212–27. Chan, Winnie. “The Linked Excitements of L.T Meade and … in the Strand Magazine.” Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form: Approaches by American and British Women Writers, Edited by Ellen Burton Harrington. Peter Lang, 2008, pp. 60–73.

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Clarke, Clare. Late-Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Dawson, Janis. “‘Not for girls alone, but for anyone who can relish really good literature’: L.  T. Meade, Atalanta, and the Family Literary Magazine.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 46, no. 4, 2013, pp. 475–98. ———. “Rivaling Conan Doyle: L. T. Meade’s Medical Mysteries, New Woman Criminals, and Literary Celebrity at the Victorian Fin de Siècle.” English Literature in Transition, vol. 58, no. 1, 2015, pp. 54–72. ———., ed. The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories, by L.T. Meade. Broadview Press, 2016. ———. “‘Write a little bit every day’: L.T. Meade, Self-Representation, and the Professional Woman Writer.” Victorian Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2009, pp. 132–52. Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: A Case of Identity.” Strand Magazine, 1891, pp. 248–59. ———. “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Problem.” Strand Magazine, Dec. 1893, pp. 558–70. ———. Memories and Adventures: An Autobiography. Wordsworth, 2007. “Editor’s note.” Strand Magazine, July 1892, p. 82. Greene, Douglas G. “Introduction.” The Detections of Miss Cusack, by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace. Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 1998, pp. vii–xiii. Greenfield, John. “Arthur Morrison’s Sherlock Clone: Martin Hewitt, Victorian Values, and London Magazine Culture, 1894–1903.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2002, pp. 18–36. Halloran, Jennifer. “The Ideology behind the Sorceress of the Strand: Gender, Race, and Criminal Witchcraft.” English Literature in Transition, vol. 45, no. 2, 2002, pp. 176–94. Knight, Stephen. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Indiana UP, 1980. Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. Pluto Press, 1984. Meade, L.T. “The Black Ribbon.” Leeds Mercury, 1 Oct. 1904, p. 11. ———. “Mr. Bovey’s Unexpected Will” (1898). Detection by Gaslight: Fourteen Victorian Detective Stories, edited by Douglas G.  Greene. Dover, 1997, pp. 168–81. ———. “From the Editor’s Standpoint.” Atalanta, vol. 6, Oct. 1892–Sept. 1893, pp. 839–42. ———. “How I Write My Books: An Interview with L.T. Meade.” Young Woman, vol. 1, 1892, pp. 122–23. ———. and Robert Eustace, “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings: At the Edge of the Crater.” Strand Magazine, Jan. 1898a, pp. 86–98.

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———. and Robert Eustace, “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings: The Bloodhound.” Strand Magazine, Sept. 1898f, pp. 304–17. ———. and Robert Eustace, “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings: The Doom.” Strand Magazine, Oct. 1898g, pp. 416–29. ———. and Robert Eustace, “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings: The Iron Circlet.” Strand Magazine, June 1898e, pp. 2–16. ———. and Robert Eustace, “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings: The Swing of the Pendulum.” Strand Magazine, Mar. 1898c, pp. 241–56. ———. and Robert Eustace, “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings: Twenty Degrees.” Strand Magazine, May 1898d, pp. 529–41. ———. and Robert Eustace, “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings: The Winged Assassin.” Strand Magazine, Feb. 1898b, pp. 137–50. ———. and Clifford Halifax, M.D., “The Adventures of a Man of Science II: Ought He to Marry Her?” Strand Magazine, July 1896, pp. 169–81. ———. and Clifford Halifax M.D., “My First Patient: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor.” Strand Magazine, July 1893, pp. 91–102. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle. U of Michigan P, 2008. Mitchell, Sally. The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915. Columbia UP, 1995. ———. “Elizabeth Thomasina Meade.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxforddnb.com.elib.tcd.ie/view/article/52740. Accessed 13 June 2017. Mussell, James. Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. O’Toole, Tina. The Irish New Woman. Palgrave, 2013. Pittard, Christopher. Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction. Ashgate, 2011. “Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives: Mrs L.T.  Meade.” Strand Magazine, Dec. 1898, p. 674. Pound, Reginald. The Strand Magazine 1891–1950. Heinemann, 1966. Rodgers, Beth. Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle: Daughters of Today. Palgrave, 2016b. ———. “‘I am glad I am Irish through and through and through’: Irish Girlhood and Identity in L.T. Meade’s Light O’ the Morning; or, The Story of an Irish Girl.” Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture, and History, 1840–1950, edited by Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J.  Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016a, pp. 154–65.

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———. “Irishness, Professional Authorship and the ‘Wild Irish Girls’ of L. T. Meade.” English Literature in Transition, vol. 56, no. 2, 2013, pp. 146–66. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Blackwell, 1977. Willis, Chris. “The Female Moriarty: The Arch-Villainess in Victorian Popular Fiction.” The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, edited by Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates. Greenwood Press, 2002, pp. 57–68.

Fig. 3.1  “He Introduced Himself” by Bernard Higham. From “The Redhill Sisterhood,” by C.L.  Pirkis. Ludgate Monthly Vol. 4, April 1893, p.  582. (Image credit: Vintage Book Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

CHAPTER 3

Detective Loveday Brooke, by C.L. Pirkis

“The Detective Story is ever with us. It appeals too directly to the love of mystery and the pleasures of the chase to have any fear of losing its popularity” Review of The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective. Saturday Review, 5 May 1894: 477

This chapter focuses on Loveday Brooke, who until recently was believed to be the first female detective in fiction created by a female author. The first Victorian female detectives in fiction appeared in 1864—in May of that year Andrew Forrester’s [James Redding Ware] The Female Detective was published. This casebook-style collection of stories was narrated by the mysterious Mrs G., a female private detective who keeps her name hidden from the reader. Six months later followed Mrs Paschal, the heroine of William Stephens Hayward’s The Revelations of a Lady Detective, a widow of around forty years old, whom the original yellowback depicts as a saucy ankle-baring, cigarette-smoking woman who brazenly stares out at

Author: C[atherine] L[ouisa] Pirkis (1839–1910). Volume edition: The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894). Serial publication: The Ludgate Monthly, Feb. 1893–July 1893. Seventh and final story published in the newly-titled The Ludgate Illustrated Magazine Feb. 1894. © The Author(s) 2020 C. Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891–1901, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8_3

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the reader from the book cover. As Michele Slung’s pioneering work has shown, in the years between the appearance of these first female detectives in fiction and the turn of the century, more than twenty female detectives appeared in print, a number of whom were created by female authors. Amongst the wave of Holmes clones and imitators created by writers desperate to fill the void caused by Sherlock Holmes’s “death” in December 1893 were a number of ‘lady detectives.’ A substantial number of female detectives were created by male writers in the 1890s alongside the emergence of the New Woman in fiction. This period saw the serial publication and later publication in volume form of Grant Allen’s detectives Lois Cayley (Miss Cayley’s Adventures, 1899) and Hilda Wade (Hilda Wade, 1900); Fergus Hume’s Hagar Stanley (Hagar of the Pawn Shop, 1898—see Chap. 5); Matthias McDonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl (Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective, 1900), and George Sims’s Dorcas Dene (Dorcas Dene, Detective, 1897).1 The majority of these “lady detectives” were New Women of one sort or another and undertook detective work in a casual way, as a means of adventure, or to clear the name of a wronged male relative or husband. At the end of twelve stories or thereabouts, they would usually retire from detecting in favour of marriage as soon as a husband was found or exonerated. As Slung has pithily put it, most late-Victorian female detectives are therefore “finish[ed] off, not at the Reichenbach Falls, but at the matrimonial altar” (Slung 1975, xx). In finishing off their lady detectives’ adventures with the “happy ending” of marriage and maternity, such stories “betray a noticeable unease with th[e] subversion of established gender roles” that the figure of a working female detective represents and ultimately end up reinscribing, instead of unsettling, the gender status quo (Willis 143). The first female detective created by a female author was Mrs George [Elizabeth Bourgoyne] Corbett’s Dora Bell. Corbett, whose career as a journalist and novelist began in the 1880s, was a vocal supporter of suffrage and women’s rights, best known—if at all—for a feminist utopian novel set in Ireland, New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889). Her first female detective, Dora Bell, made her debut appearance as a marginal character in the collection of short stories, Secrets of a Private Enquiry Office, published by George Routledge & Sons in 1891. This was followed by a second series of ten stories where Bell took more of a leading role; this little-known series which was later collected as Behind the Veil; or Revelations by a Lady Detective, originally ran in weekly instalments on Saturdays in the Leicester Chronicle beginning on 31 October 1891

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(Klinger 87). This series was followed by Experiences of a Lady Detective, narrated by Dora, which ran serially in the Leeds Mercury beginning in April 1892. In 1894, a further series of twelve stories were published in the South Wales Echo and the Adelaide Observer—and possibly on other as yet undiscovered venues—under the title The Adventures of Dora Bell, Detective. Little is known about any of the Dora Bell stories, owing to their publication in provincial papers which have not been digitised until recently if at all. Although not all Corbett’s female sleuth stories were published in book form, they were popular enough that an 1893 edition of Hearth and Home magazine listed Corbett alongside Arthur Conan Doyle as one of the current masters of detective fiction (“People, Places”). Given that before Corbett, fin-de-siècle female detectives had only been created by male authors, Corbett and Dora Bell all occupy an important, yet almost entirely unexplored, place in the history of the detective genre. These stories will doubtless soon be investigated by scholars of crime fiction.2 The author of the slightly more well-known Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, Catherine Louisa Pirkis, was a successful, prolific, and popular late-Victorian author who has now fallen into relative obscurity. In 1877 she published her first novel, a mystery entitled Disappeared from Her Home, as Mrs Fred E. Pirkis.3 After this, Pirkis laboured successfully in the late-Victorian literary marketplace for almost twenty years. Under the gender-neutral name C.L.  Pirkis, she published roughly one novel a year and numerous short stories over the next 15 years until her retirement in 1894. Pirkis seems to have been an astute observer of literary trends, producing the type of romance, mystery, and sensational fiction that secured publication with established popular presses such as Chatto & Windus and Hutchinson—firms that carried works by established bestselling authors like Wilkie Collins and Robert Louis Stevenson. Many of Pirkis’s works feature strong and resourceful female protagonists and at least one of her novels, Lady Lovelace (1885), was adapted for the London stage, attesting to its broad popular and commercial appeal (“Slashes”). The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, the author’s only foray into the short-story detective genre, is a perfect illustration of Pirkis’s skill in appropriating and adding to the most current and popular late-­Victorian literary trends. The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, however, was to be Pirkis’s final publication: in 1894 she gave up professional authorship to devote her energies to animal welfare and a number of reformist political causes, on which she and her husband worked closely with well-known

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figures from the suffrage and anti-vivisection movements including Frances Cobbe Power.4 The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective was first published as series of six short stories in the Ludgate Monthly from February to July 1893, with a seventh story, “Missing!”, added in the newly titled Ludgate Illustrated Magazine in February 1894. The Ludgate Monthly was one of many popular “illustrated family magazines” which sprang up in the wake of George Newnes’ success with the Strand. The magazine ran for thirty issues from May 1891 to October 1893 under the title The Ludgate Monthly, for twenty-four issues from November 1893 to October 1895 as the Ludgate Illustrated Magazine, and for sixty-four issues from November 1895 to February 1901 under the title The Ludgate, after which it merged with The Universal Magazine. Its editor, Philip May, claimed that the Ludgate enjoyed “the largest circulation of any threepenny magazine in the United Kingdom,” with each edition reaching around 100,000 readers (May 320). This success may be reliant on the fact that in its various incarnations the Ludgate’s contents closely resembled those of leading illustrated monthlies like the Strand—it featured a heterogenous mix of fiction, poetry, articles on royalty and empire, interviews, and illustrations, that could be enjoyed by all the family. However, as former Strand editor Reginald Pound has pointed out, “while posing as a family magazine, the Strand primarily appealed to men” and that “some issues went to press with no story or article of compelling interest for women” (70). By contrast—and while not explicitly marketed as a women’s periodical—the Ludgate contained many regular features and single articles that seemed specifically targeted to the female reader. In the volumes which published the serialisation of The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, for instance, there is an article on “The Queens of Europe” accompanied by a sixteen-page “photo-tint” spread of all the royal women (May, “Editor’s” 335). The article naturally gives pride of place to “her Majesty the Queen of England and Empress of India,” Queen Victoria, reverentially described as “Woman, Wife, Mother, and Ruler of a Mighty Empire…a bright and shining example, not only to her subjects but to the world at large”: her roles of woman, wife, and mother, notably given precedence to those of Queen and Empress (“Queens” 273). Alongside this, the magazine contained regular features such as “Whispers from the Woman’s World” by Florence Mary Gardiner, a series giving tips on domestic matters from “fashion and fripperies” to “spring cleaning,” furnishings, and hiring servants (Gardiner 98).5 The “Editor’s Gossip”

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column in the November 1892 issue noted that “in deference to the wishes of many lady correspondents” and “encomiums from men who usually pooh-pooh such matters” this column was to be expanded and awarded a “more prominent position” within future issues of the magazine (May, “Editor’s” 223). Gardiner also authored many of the articles in a series entitled “Famous Women,” which interviewed or profiled leading female luminaries from the worlds of acting, philanthropy, fine art, and literature. “Famous Women: Novelists,” published in April 1893, featured profiles on popular current authors such as Mrs Humphry Ward, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Yonge, and Eliza Lynn Linton, amongst others (Gardiner, “Famous”). The first in the series, “Famous Women: Philanthropists,” opened with an unattributed verse promulgating a progressive message about the women’s importance beyond the limited “women’s sphere”: They talk about a woman’s sphere As though it had a limit. There’s not a place in earth or heaven, There’s not a task to mankind given, There’s not a blessing nor a woe, There’s not a whisper, yes or no, There’s not a life, nor death, nor birth, That has a feather’s weight of worth Without a woman in it. (May, “Famous” 476)6

In this publication, which emulated the Strand but seemed more geared towards a female audience, with its profusion of prominent features on female characters, Pirkis’s stories about a professional female detective found the perfect home. Indeed, the stories were immediately popular with reviewers and enjoyed far greater critical favour than many of the Sherlock imitators published in the years after the super-detective’s demise. A key feature of almost every early review of the Loveday Brooke series was reference and comparison to Sherlock Holmes, with Brooke often considered the great detective’s equal. For the Saturday Review for instance, Pirkis’s stories were “exciting in a Sherlock-Holmsey way” (477). Likewise, for the Liverpool Mercury, “The lady detective is as Sherlock Holmes was … ‘too clever by half’” (“Literary Notices”). This type of comparison to Sherlock was common to many reviews of post-Holmes short detective stories, but the majority of series were deemed unoriginal

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copies of, or inferior to, Doyle’s. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke stories, by contrast, were almost universally praised as being on a par with, or even superior to, Doyle’s Holmes stories for the Strand. The Glasgow Herald review of the May magazines, for instance, deemed that, “the Ludgate Monthly seems to improve in attractiveness month by month,” linking this improvement directly to the way that “month by month Miss Loveday Brooke continues to outshine the detective Sherlock Holmes in preternatural prescience” (10). The periodical series was so popular that in March 1894 the seven stories were published in book form by London firm Hutchinson and Co., an established publisher of popular fiction by well-known names such as Marie Corelli, Florence Marryat, and Ouida [Maria Louise Ramé]. Hutchinson cannily advertised Loveday Brooke as “A Female Sherlock Holmes”—a phrase first used in the a review for the Glasgow Herald and doubtless appropriated by the publishers to accelerate the collection’s popularity and sales (“Novels and Stories”). Advertisements for the volume in the book columns of newspapers like The Times, the Glasgow Herald, the Pall Mall Gazette, and the Morning Post all reproduced this phrase. Reviews in papers and periodicals followed suit, again playing up the connections between Loveday Brooke and Holmes, and again finding that Brooke held her own in comparison to Doyle’s great detective. As the Speaker, for instance, put it: “the lamented Sherlock Holmes has bequeathed to us a number of successors, of the majority of whom it may be safely averred that they are unworthy to brush their great exemplar’s boots. But in that majority we shall certainly not include the beautiful and accomplished ‘Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective’” (“Fiction”). Likewise, as the advertisement in the Athenaeum posited, “people who like detective stories are little likely to get anything better,” adding emphatically, “Even the great Sherlock Holmes is not more clever than Loveday Brooke” (“Messrs”). Thus, in volume form, the series enjoyed greater success than the vast majority of its post-Holmes detective fiction rivals, running to several editions over the next couple of years (“Books”). The stories even achieved international popularity, being translated into Danish and published in Copenhagen in 1894 (“Notes and News”). For Mike Ashley, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective is “the most significant series” published in the Ludgate and Pirkis’s “role in popularizing the [detective] genre” is “every bit as important” as more well-known ‘mothers’ of the mystery genre like Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Anna Katharine Green, as well as male authors like Conan Doyle (Age

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119; Sisters 13).7 Indeed, as Elizabeth Miller and Adrienne Gavin have both observed, whilst The Experiences of Loveday Brooke was not the first or only late-Victorian work by a female author to feature a ‘lady detective,’ it was one of the only late-Victorian series by any author, male or female, to envisage a truly professional female private detective.8 The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, with its presentation of a paid professional female detective, represents a more forceful challenge to established gender norms with regard to women’s work, appearing as it does more than 25  years before female detectives were officially employed by the Metropolitan Police force. The Metropolitan Police of London—the first professional police force in England—was formed in 1829, with a detective branch comprising only eight men following in 1842.9 There would be no female members of the Metropolitan Police until 1883, however, when two women were appointed as ‘police-matrons’ to oversee care of female prisoners awaiting trial. The first female bobbies on the beat went to work in November 1918, the first female detective arrived only in 1922; the next in 1932. As Haia Shpayer-Makov has pointed out, the decision to exclude women from the police force and the detective branch was based on dominant assumptions about gender held by policy-makers, that policing was “a masculine occupation” and that “jobs requiring strength and the use of force were best performed by men” (“Shedding” 141). Added to this was the paternalistic belief, as a Saturday Review article on female policing put it, “what a man cannot discover a woman would have but scant chance of finding out” (“The Metropolitan Police”). This is not to say that detection and policing were universally disparaged as a career for women in the late-Victorian era. Whilst women remained officially excluded from the police service until the twentieth century, the advertising columns of newspapers like the Times show that from the early 1890s there were a growing number of private female detectives employed by agencies operating in London.10 In an interview with the Westminster Gazette, which was reprinted in papers worldwide, Henry Slater, the owner of “the best known private detective agency in England,” confirms that he employs large numbers of young female detectives (“Detective Agency”). He makes the revelation that men were not the only, or even the preferred employees in his agencies. As he explained it, “you must not imagine that our staff consists only of men. As a matter of fact, we employ very few … Most of the members of the staff are women …” (“Detective Agency”).

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In 1899, the Western Chronicle speculated that Scotland Yard was probably employing female detectives to augment their services: a great deal of good detective work is done by women …More than one… is working fairly regularly for the department, who they are none of the authorities know. They are paid by fees, and frequently receive as much as £10 for a single case… Women detectives are largely employed by private enquiry agents, and for shadowing a suspected person they would be hard to beat by the cleverest male rival. (“Women”)

Loveday Brooke, “a little over thirty years of age,” “neither handsome nor ugly,” “prim,” “neat,” “shrewd,” “sensible,” and “practical,” works for an agency much like Slater’s. She is a full-time professional private detective employed by Ebenezer Dyer’s Detective Agency in London’s Fleet Street and is regularly called in to work alongside the Metropolitan Police (8).11 Unlike her ‘lady detective’ contemporaries Lois Cayley, Lady Molly, Clarence Van Snoop, or Dora Myrl, Loveday Brooke is a middle-­ aged spinster who performs her professional duties to earn a living for herself, rather than to support an ailing husband, to clear the name of a wrongly accused relation, or to experience adventure, after which she returns to “normal” life or finds marital bliss. Some years ago, we are told, Brooke “defied convention” and “chose for herself” the masculine career of detection after an unspecified “jerk of Fortune’s wheel” had left her “penniless” and “all but friendless” (8). As the title of the series itself underscores, Loveday’s detection is not undertaken merely for amusement, but to earn a living—her cases are “experiences” as opposed to more frivolous “adventures” (Hendrey-Seabrook 79; Gavin 148). So great is her skill in the field of detection that she commands cases of the highest quality—“better-class work—work, indeed, that brought an increase of pay” to both Loveday and her agency (Pirkis 7). And, as Stephen Knight and Adrienne Gavin have noted, even the cover of the first volume edition of the collection, which simply depicts her well-worn business card, emphasises the importance of Brooke’s professionalism (Knight, Crime 78; Gavin 148). Likewise, as Therie Hendrey-Seabrook has astutely observed, Bernard Higham’s illustrations to the periodical edition of the text again show Brooke “always on duty” (182). Indeed, many of the illustrations emphasise the similarity between Loveday Brooke’s work and the masculine, empirical professional methods employed by Sherlock Holmes in his detection, depicting the ‘lady detective’ at work examining

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newspaper cuttings, travelling to the scene of the crime by cab, liaising with the local constabulary, or performing secret surveillance. Indeed, as Christopher Pittard has correctly pointed out, Higham’s illustration “Loveday Explained the Whole Thing” clearly owes “a considerable debt…(to put it charitably)” to Sidney Paget’s Sherlock Holmes illustrations “We had the Carriage to Ourselves” and “Holmes Gave Me a Sketch of Events” from “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” and “Silver Blaze,” as does the illustration “He Introduced Himself” (Pittard 2018) [See Fig. 3.1]. The first story, “The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step,” published in the Ludgate Monthly in February 1893 opens, as all but one of the Loveday Brooke stories do, in the London office of Ebenezer Dyer’s Detective Agency. Dyer instructs Brooke to travel to Craigen Court, the country house of Sir George and Lady Cathrow, to investigate the Christmas Eve robbery of a diamond necklace worth £30,000. The necklace was stolen from a locked safe, for which only the French lady’s maid, Stephanie Delcroix, possessed the key. A mocking message, ‘To be let, unfurnished,’ was scrawled across the door of the safe in chalk. The male Scotland Yard detectives naturally suspect Lady Cathrow’s maid, although their suspicions seem to turn on little more than biases associated with her youth, her gender, her national identity, and the fact that she “goes from one fit of hysterics into another” when questioned about the robbery (7). In order to gain definitive proof of her guilt, the men from Scotland Yard have asked Dyer for “the shrewdest and most clear-headed of [his] female detectives”—Loveday Brooke fits the bill (7). In almost all her cases, Loveday Brooke works in disguise inside the houses where crimes have been perpetrated, the idea being that a female servant is socially invisible and therefore able to watch all of the goings-on without herself being noticed. Indeed, with this mode of female detection, Pirkis appears to have astutely foreseen the ways in which later women detectives would be employed by the police in their investigations. The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective (2019), Susannah Stapleton’s recent book about the true life adventures of one of London’s most successful Edwardian lady detectives, notes that West often infiltrated houses at the behest of the police in the guise of a parlour maid, a housemaid, or secretary (80). Before she leaves the Detective Agency office, Brooke extracts a newspaper clipping about another local mystery—the discovery of the eponymous “black bag left on a doorstep,” inside which was a curate’s outfit and a suicide note. Dyer quickly dismisses Loveday’s desire to seek out a link

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between the two cases. Duly admonished, Loveday leaves the office and travels by train to Craigen Court. At the country station, Brooke is met by Inspector Jeremiah Bates of Scotland Yard who tells her that the case is “as plain as a pikestaff” and “quite a simple affair” with “no complications” (12). For Bates, Delcroix is clearly guilty—“You see I look at it this way, Miss Brooke: all girls have lovers, I say to myself, but a pretty girl like that French maid, is bound to have double the number of lovers than the plain ones. Now, of course, the greater the number of lovers, the greater the chance there is of a criminal being found among them” (12). The Scotland Yard man, therefore, wants the skills of a female on the case—“someone within the walls to hob-nob with the maids generally, and to find out if she [Stephanie] has taken any of them into her confidence respecting her lovers” (12). In the collection, Brooke’s working life is often marked by conflict with professional male rivals; the various members of Scotland Yard with whom the ‘lady detective’ works are frequently cast as lazy and incompetent officers whose cursory, inefficient investigations seem always to lead erroneously to the suspicion of a working-class, often young, often foreign, female. “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep,” therefore, turns upon Loveday Brooke’s desire to prove that Bates’ assumptions about the natural and obvious guilt of the young French housemaid are wrong— unlike her male counterparts, her “clear, shrewd brain [is] unhampered by any hard-and-fast theories” (7). Once at the house, disguised as the housekeeper’s niece, Loveday’s investigation employs the kind of “gossiping friendliness” with servants that Bates desires, using her “easy, pleasant manner” to “elicit … the whole history of the events of the day of the robbery, the number and names of the guests who sat down to dinner that night, together with some other apparently trivial details.” Like her male counterparts, Loveday also quickly examines the crime scene, the safe, the window, and the house’s “weak points,” paying particular attention to a scrap of handwriting which she compares with the lettering on the safe door. Unlike the “gentlemen detectives,” however, who “spent over an hour” examining Lady Cathrow’s room, Loveday Brooke spends a mere five minutes inside, before asking a number of seemingly irrelevant questions about a chair left in the hall, the Craigen Court Christmas festivities, and local actors. It turns out that Loveday Brooke connected the words “To Let, Unfurnished” to some of the phrases left in the suicide note with the eponymous black bag. Both were taken from “The Reciter’s Treasury,” a collection of lurid stories used at “low-class penny readings, given in the South London

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slums.” As Loveday later explains to Dyer, “it was not difficult to see a thread of connection between the writer of the black-bag letter and the thief who wrote across the empty safe at Craigen Court.” She compared the writing on the note and the safe and “came to the conclusion that there could be but little doubt but what both were written by the same hand.” Following this thread, Brooke “unearthed the story of Harry Emmett—footman, reciter, general lover and scamp.” Loveday deduced that Emmett had presented himself at Craigen Court on the night of the robbery, dressed as a young clergyman. He asked to take a seat in the hall of Craigen Court to rest before his long walk to the train station, seizing this opportunity to enter Lady Cathrow’s room, open the window, and admit his accomplices to crack the safe and purloin the necklace. Using her arcane knowledge of London cabbies’ vernacular to crack the code of Emmet’s whereabouts, Loveday traces the thief to the local branch of the Cabdriver’s Association. Stephanie, convinced that she will be unable to prove her innocence, is found nearly drowned in a stream at Craigen Court—her attempted suicide emphasising the dangerous consequences of the Scotland Yard detectives’ misplaced suspicions about her guilt. Unlike many of the successful detectives from this period, Loveday has no sidekick to narrate her stories, meaning that much of the information which allows Loveday to solve the crime is withheld from the reader until she unveils the solution to Dyer after an arrest has been made. As such, the collection’s solutions can seem a little far-fetched and surprising—they certainly don’t subscribe to the notion of ‘fair-play’ to the reader that would later become thought of as so fundamental to the detective genre. After Brooke lays out her solution, Dyer seems to articulate the reader’s confusion when he exclaims: “It’s all so intricate—so bewildering … I can scarcely get it all into my head!” (99; 25). Nonetheless, Pirkis’s focus on Loveday’s particularly feminine skills and perspective, as well as her desire to exonerate “poor little Stephanie,” from the presumptions of her male counterparts make this an intriguing story about the class and gender implications of both female detection and female criminality. In the second story, “The Murder at Troyte’s Hill,” where Loveday is called in to investigate the murder of the lodge-keeper of a country house—the ‘lady detective’ once again gains a position “inside the house” to conduct her investigations (26). The local constabulary secure work for Loveday as an “amanuensis” to Mr Craven, a “scholar and learned philologist,” and master of the house where the murder occurred (29). At her briefing with Dyer, Loveday learns that despite the Craven family’s relative

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poverty, Sandy the lodge-keeper was paid an inordinately high salary, but that he “[didn’t] appear to have troubled much about his duties as a lodge-keeper” (28). The local police suspect young Harry Craven, the master’s son, who is home from Oxford University, and has been “at loggerheads” with Sandy the lodge-keeper since he was a boy (28). Alongside their notoriously fraught relationship, Sandy’s room was trashed in the manner of “the room of an unpopular Oxford freshman after a raid upon it by undergrads” (32). More damningly still, Harry Craven has a reputation as “as much a gentleman-blackleg as it is possible for such a young fellow to be … as full of wickedness as an egg is full of meat” (27; 30). The police advise Loveday that Master Craven has been ill in bed with typhoid fever since the murder occurred, opining “there is something suspicious about this illness of his” (27). While the police focus on the clear evidence against Harry Craven, Loveday Brooke focuses instead on the troubling disjuncture between the family’s purported poverty and Sandy’s inflated wages. As in a number of the Sherlock Holmes stories, such as “The Red-­ Headed League,” “The Copper Beeches” and “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” Loveday immediately recognises overpriced labour as a potentially worrying signifier of criminality.12 Once installed as Mr Craven’s amanuensis, Loveday’s position within the household allows her the unique opportunity to examine both the family dynamic and the finer details of the house and grounds. She meets with servants and family members alike, finding Mr Craven in particular to be worryingly “eccentric” and “ill-tempered,” obsessively working on a philology volume which he believes “will leave its impress upon thought in all the ages to come” (41; 44; 36). On her reconnoitre of the house itself, Loveday observes unpainted doors and windowsills, signifying poverty and neglect. She inspects the family bedrooms closely, observing ashes in a bedroom fireplace, a strand of long blonde hair in a bedroom drawer and other seemingly mundane details. More distressingly, she finds the family dog dead on the estate grounds, murdered by a blow to a head with a blunt object—killed in a manner strikingly similar to old Sandy. Unsurprisingly, given Pirkis’s later founding of the Canine Defence League, in her fiction maltreatment of animals often signals criminality.13 In the course of her duties as amanuensis logging details of Craven’s work, Loveday persuades her increasingly unstable master to confess that he himself killed the dog in a bizarre philological experiment to determine whether a dying dog yelps or groans. It is the obvious link between the canine and human murders that first alerts Loveday Brooke to Mr Craven’s

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guilt in Sandy’s death. Loveday learns from the raving Craven that he killed Sandy with the same hammer that killed Captain the dog, that he sent his son away to Natal to evade suspicion, and that he cut off his daughter’s hair so she might pose as her ill brother (41). It turns out that Sandy, “a bad man [and] …a whining, canting hypocrite,” had been blackmailing Craven for years—the old lodge-keeper was the only one who knew that as a young man Craven had married to “a disreputable girl—a barmaid in the town” and that his subsequent marriage had been bigamous (42). Craven had finally cracked under the strain, bludgeoning Old Sandy with his hammer to free himself of the malign servant’s control. In one of the collection’s only instances where self-reliant Loveday requires male assistance, the lady detective is rescued through Craven’s study window “by three pairs of strong arms” belonging to the local constabulary (43). This happens in the nick of time as the old man swings his hammer at Loveday’s head with “the light of madness dancing in his eyes” (43). In the third story in the collection, “The Redhill Sisterhood,” Loveday is sent for by the Redhill police. The local constabulary need assistance with their investigation of a group of nuns—the so-called Redhill sisterhood—believed to be a gang of thieves responsible for robbing nearby country houses. As in the majority of Loveday’s cases, the local constabulary want a woman detective secretly to watch and investigate the suspects: in this case, a  group of nuns. Disguised as a  nursery governess on the lookout for work, Loveday secures a room above a local shop and sets about observing the sisterhood. In an ironic employment of Victorian crime fiction’s frequent appropriation of the contemporary science of physiognomy, as popularised by Cesare Lombroso’s L’Uomo Delinquente [Criminal Man] (1876), the local (male) Redhill police are particularly fixated on Sister Monica—an old and particularly ugly member of the Sisterhood. For the local officers, Sister’s Monica’s grotesque appearance marks her as a criminal. As the local policeman investigating the case tells Loveday: “I have heard of a man’s face being enough to hang him, but until I saw Sister Monica’s, I never saw a woman’s face that could perform the same kind office for her. Of all the lowest criminal types of faces I have ever seen, I think hers is about the lowest and most repulsive” (50). When Loveday observes Sister Monica she too admits that she “had never before seen … a more coarse-faced and generally repellent face” (51). However, during her “secret watching” of the Sisterhood in their work with sick and disabled children, Loveday notes that although Sister Monica is “not pleasant to look at” there is “something absolutely beautiful” in the way

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she tenderly lifts a crippled child from a cart (64). For Loveday, this gentleness marks Sister Monica as genuine: as she tells her male counterpart, “I have seen female criminals of all kinds handling children … of tenderness they are utterly incapable” (64). In the course of her investigation, Loveday is approached by a young man named George White, who offers his assistance. He tells the lady detective that he is “reporter,” and “literary man”—“here he gave a glance towards his side pocket, from which protruded a small volume of Tennyson’s poems”—whose sweetheart Anna has been forced to join the disreputable Sisterhood (54). This story is a red herring, intended to misdirect Loveday Brooke; the Sisterhood is wholly innocent, White is a “first-class criminal,” whose real name is George Lee. It is his sister, not his sweetheart, who is a member of the holy order. Unbeknown to Anna, White and their father follow her on her day’s work, rob the houses where the nuns undertake charitable works, and allow the Sisterhood to come under suspicion for the ensuing robbery. For the skilled lady detective, however, it is immediately apparent that White is not all he seems (54). Loveday notices a few “details” in White’s “manner and appearance” which “gave rise to other suspicions” about his profession and hence his overall credibility (54). His assertion that he is a press reporter, for instance, does not square with Loveday’s perception that “his hands were coarse and grimy as only a mechanic’s could be” (64–65). Likewise, his claim to be a “literary man,” is called into question by Loveday’s observation that “the Tennyson that showed so obtrusively from his pocket was new, and in parts uncut, and totally unlike the well-thumbed volume of the literary student” (65). Finally, Loveday notices the end of “a soft coil of electric fuse” protruding from White’s waistcoat pocket—this is the type of thing, she deduces, “that a literary man or a press reporter could have no possible use for” (65). Loveday allows White to believe that he has duped her, but the lady detective is actually on the trail of his criminal gang. In a neat piece of plotting, Loveday boldly requisitions White to carry a note to the local Inspector of police (written in invisible ink) which leads to his arrest. Anna is left with the Sisterhood, happy in her charitable work and blissfully ignorant as to the crimes of her brother and father. The story, then, once again turns on the danger of allowing assumptions about appearance to influence police work and ideas about criminality. As Joseph Kestner astutely observes, its message (as with so many of the collection’s stories) seems also to relate to women’s marginal position in society—with

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Pirkis suggesting that a woman may be “better off” in a community of females than “in a family of criminal males” (78). The fourth story in the collection, “A Princess’s Vengeance,” published in the May edition of the Ludgate, once again focuses on the assistance that Loveday can bring to a socially marginal female. In a neat inversion of “The Murder at Troyte’s Hill,” where Loveday posed as “amanuensis” to Mr Craven, this case involves her search for a missing young female amanuensis. In drawing this link, Pirkis forcefully underlines the frequently vulnerable position of young, socially marginal women in late-Victorian society. As Loveday notes at her briefing with Dyer, Lucie Cunier, amanuensis to a rich society lady, is “young, pretty, friendless, and a foreigner” and has “disappeared as completely as if the earth opened to receive her” (66). Yet, the Scotland Yard police “do not seem to have taken up the case very heartily”—instead, as Dyer notes, they have “as good as dropped it” (66). The police believe that this is a case for “private rather than police investigation,” owing to the delicate fact that Lucie Cunier was known to have caught the eye of her employer’s son, Major Druce, who is already engaged to an Egyptian princess (66). In a touch that harks back to Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” a cherished photograph of Lucie which the Major kept hidden in his bedroom drawer has also gone missing. This is one of only two cases in the collection where Loveday chooses to work openly as a “detective,” instead of disguising herself as a teacher, a housemaid, an amanuensis, or a house decorator. When she arrives at a society party hosted by Mrs Bruce, she asks to be seated in “some quiet corner, where I can see without being seen” (71). As the accompanying illustration shows, Loveday is seated “half screened from view” behind a large palm, where she can watch unnoticed (71). Pirkis uses this opportunity for some social satire—Mrs Bruce is shown as the type of ‘telescopic philanthropist’ satirized in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), her “latest fad” is a “Harem Mission” to alleviate the suffering of “our sisters in the East” (67). The Egyptian princess is the stereotypical odalisque figure—an “Oriental beauty,” languishing on a chaise like the “Queen of Sheba” (72). Closer inspection of her interactions with others reveals a “scornful” demeanour and a “violent, jealous temper” (72). Having undertaken her surveillance, Loveday asks to meet the group, including Mrs Druce, the princess, and the butler. Unusually, she asks to be introduced as the detective investigating Lucie’s disappearance. This move is calculated to illuminate the “weak point[s]” of all of the group—as Loveday puts it, “to raise the sudden cry, ‘The enemy is upon you’” (80).

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Indeed, the strategy proves successful, leading the butler surreptitiously to remove his betrothal ring, Mrs Druce to glance “nervously” at a fancy French hat, and the princess to flounce off in a rage (80). Somewhat unbelievably, these details allow Loveday to decipher Mrs Druce and the princess have hatched a scheme where Lucie Cunier has been offered money to marry the butler and immigrate to France to become a milliner. The story ends with the Major’s ironic insistence that he only cared about Lucie Cunier “out of kindness to a young and friendless foreigner”—the reasons that motivated Loveday Brooke’s investigation into her disappearance (82). The fifth story in the collection, “Drawn Daggers,” reverts to the established formula of Loveday Brooke penetrating a disordered domestic environment in the guise of a member of staff. In this case, Loveday assumes the role of a “lady house decorator” in the Tavistock Square household of Reverend Hawke to investigate a jewel theft. The stolen necklace belongs to Hawke’s houseguest Miss Monroe—a friend’s daughter sent from Peking to stay with the Reverend to “get her out of the way of a troublesome and undesirable suitor” (83). Since the robbery, Rev. Hawke has also received a number of anonymous letters from Cork in Ireland bearing crudely drawn heraldic daggers. Dyer considers the two matters to be unrelated: “the episode of the drawn daggers … should be treated entirely on its own merits, considered as a thing apart from the loss of the necklace … when we have gone a little further into the matter we shall find that each circumstance belongs to a different group of facts” (85). By contrast, Loveday immediately sees that the two matters must be connected, correcting Dyer “I think we are bound to … admit the possibility of these daggers being sent in right-down sober earnest by persons concerned in the robbery, with the intention of intimidating [Hawke] and preventing full investigation of the matter” (85). Again, it is assumed that Loveday’s investigation should take place “inside the house” where she can monitor Miss Monroe, gossip with servants, and examine the crime scene (86). A disguise as a “lady house decorator” is necessary as Miss Monroe is oddly insistent that no investigation should take place (89). Once “inside the house” the “lady house decorator” uses her assumed role to undertake a detailed examination of the environment, which yields many clues to the case (89). She immediately notes the dated “early Victorian” décor and furnishings—“faded white and gold wallpaper,” “chairs covered in lilies and roses in cross-stitch,” and many “knick-knacks of a past generation” (89). The old-fashioned

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stultifying atmosphere of the home, where “young life is evidently an excrescence,” is in marked contrast to the lively laughs and chatter of Miss Monroe and Reverend Hawke’s nephew which echo throughout its rooms (90). The laughs and flirtation, Loveday notes, seem “utterly destitute of that echo of heartache” expected from a young lady who has lost a valuable necklace (90). It is Miss Monroe’s room itself that yields most information, however. Loveday’s trained eye immediately notices that “the extreme neatness that prevailed throughout … seemed to proclaim the hand of a first-class maid” (91). The housekeeper confirms that, unlike a lady of her class, Miss Monroe “declines much assistance”—straightening her room herself every morning and refusing help in dressing (91). Tipped off by this odd behaviour, it does not take Loveday long to work out that “Miss Monroe” has eloped with an unsuitable suitor and that the self-sufficient girl staying in the neat bedroom is a maid, Mary O’Grady. Once again, Loveday’s particularly female brand of detection is attuned to the signifiers of female work and class—the neatness of the room, which had escaped others, alerting the lady detective to the dual identity here. It turns out that the two young ladies met on the passage from Peking to Plymouth, where O’Grady was offered one hundred pounds to switch identity and destination with Monroe. The two communicated via the code of the drawn daggers—with a letter with three daggers from Monroe signifying that the deception was over and that Miss O’Grady could leave the household. Naturally, Loveday herself sends O’Grady a letter with three daggers, follows and questions the girl when she flees the house, and thus unlocks the mystery. Once the hundred pounds has been retrieved and she has been sternly admonished for her foolish behaviour, the girl is let go by Loveday. Hawkes is happy to drop the matter, grateful of the “narrow escape” his nephew Jack has had from the clutches of the flirtatious Irish maid (100). Once again, this is a story fascinated with issues of women’s class, work, and matrimonial status, albeit one that ultimately upholds the status quo, with the admonishment of the lower-class young woman guilty of transgressing class boundaries and potentially capable of ensnaring a respectable member of the middle classes. “The Ghost of Fountain Lane,” is the final story to be published in the Ludgate’s original six-part series of The Experiences of Loveday Brooke. This story opens in Brighton, with Loveday Brooke on holiday and struggling to relax. “We hard-workers,” she admits, “lose our capacity for holiday-­ keeping,” and thus the lady detective has been “set[ting] her brains to

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work” on a “ridiculous case” about a local ghost-sighting featured in the daily newspaper (101). Inspector Clampe of the local constabulary offers to give Loveday something a little meatier—a case which is “far from ridiculous, and most interesting” (101). Despite Clampe’s description, his is a mundane case—“a stupid, commonplace fraud” as Loveday terms it— involving the theft of a blank cheque from the home of a local vicar (103). Police “suspicion” rests “in the direction of the [vicar’s] young wife”—a “hard-featured,” “Roman Catholic” who spends beyond her means and is “fond of gaiety” (105). Things “look ugly” for the lady as she is known to have paid off a £500 debt within days of her husband’s cheque being stolen and cashed (102; 104). When Loveday admonishes Clampe that he is “supposing … a vast amount of cunning as well as of simplicity on the lady’s part,” the policeman coolly replies “Quite so. Three parts cunning to one of simplicity is precisely what lady criminals are composed of” (104). As in so many of the collection’s stories, therefore, Loveday is persuaded to take on the case so that the male constabulary’s gendered suspicions “can be lifted form the young wife and directed to the proper quarter” (103). Once again, Loveday secures an “invaluable” position inside the house of the village schoolmistress, situated directly opposite the vicarage (105). Her plan is to befriend and glean information from “the servants of the house” (105). Once ensconced in the schoolhouse, Loveday’s natural charm and friendly disposition persuade Mrs Brown, the schoolmistress, to “speedily unloose her tongue,” detailing all the latest gossip on the robbery (107). Indeed, within fifteen minutes with Mrs Brown, “Loveday could have passed an examination in the events of the daily family life in the vicarage” (108). Loveday’s attention is piqued by mention of a servant, Maria Lisle, who is paid “£30 a year for doing nothing” (109). As with “The Murder at Troyte’s Hill,” Loveday identifies this as a sign of a potentially distorted relationship between employee and employer. A quick visit to the parish garden where Lisle often walks at night reveals her diary in an old summer-house, which provides for Loveday “the last links in her chain of evidence that was to bring the theft of the cheque home to the criminal” (112). As with so many of the Loveday Brooke stories, the reader is frustratingly not privy to this “chain of evidence” and so has no idea what this diary means until the lady detective reveals all later in the story. It turns out that the diary provides evidence of Maria Lisle’s religious fervour, also connecting her to the sightings of the ghost by members of a local Millenarian church sect. Lisle had fallen under the “magnetic

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influence” of the “rascally” local preacher, who persuaded her to steal the cheque, just as he persuaded other gullible souls that they had seen a ghost (115). Lisle was under the misguided belief that her crime was excusable as the vicar’s wife was a “scarlet woman” and “daughter of Babylon,” on account of her Catholicism (117). In her summation of the case, Loveday stresses that Lisle is “not one of the criminal classes,” but a “weak-minded person” who will be better off in “Portland or Broadmoor” with those others suffering from a “diseased brain” (117). Nonetheless, this is a tonally odd ending to the story, which on one hand serves as a warning about judging women on account of their religion, while at the same time warning of the dangers to women of falling under the influence of the church. When the book version of The Experiences of Loveday Brooke was published in March 1894, Pirkis added a seventh story “Missing!” to the collection. At this time, the story was published simultaneously in the newly titled Ludgate Illustrated Magazine. The story crystallizes many of the main themes found in the earlier stories—once again it revolves around themes of male domestic violence and male police incompetence, which is contrasted with Brooke’s female common sense and intuitive approach. Loveday is called in to investigate the disappearance of Irene Golding, a wealthy merchant’s only daughter. The local officers have gone ten days without discovering so much as a lead, mainly because of their inability or unwillingness to penetrate the respectable domestic sphere. As Dyer puts it, “it is just possible that they have concentrated too much attention on the search outside the house and that a promising field for investigation may lead within” (120). Loveday reluctantly agrees to take on the cold and “practically hopeless” case, noting with disgust that “cases are like fevers; they should be taken in hand within twenty-four hours” (120). Suspicion rests on Irene’s fiancé, Gordon Cleeve, with whom the missing girl quarrelled after she saw him “cruelly thrashing” one of his dogs— as in “The Murder at Troyte’s Hill” violence to animals is again a signifier of cruelty and possible criminality. A body is found in the stream on the family property (with the help of a family dog) and it seems that the case is now a femicide. However, once inside the house, Loveday befriends a female servant, Maddalena, who appears to have information which she is unwilling to give police as she and the other servants have already been cross examined “a little too rigorously … on matters of which they could have absolutely no knowledge” (125). Brooke’s respectful conversation with Maddalena soon leads to the revelation that the body in the stream is Irene’s estranged mother—the dying woman had returned to make

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amends with the husband by whom she had been “cruelly treated” (136). Irene herself had separately travelled to Italy to reconcile with her dying mother, unaware that her mother was making a journey to her. The case ends abruptly with Loveday’s pointed observation that the case has been “most injudiciously handled” (137). Once again drawing a link between the female detective and the female servants she takes into her confidence, Loveday admits that, like Maddalena, she kept information from the police, remarking pointedly: “To be quite frank with you, I would have admitted you long ago into my confidence, and told you, step by step, how things were working themselves out, if you had not offended me by criticizing my method of doing my work” (141). As Kestner notes, the end of this concluding story, fittingly and forcefully delivers “the strongest possible assertion of the detective’s professionalism and independence” (83). As such, Pirkis shows herself to be one of the most progressive authors of the many “lady detective” stories published at this time—giving us a truly assertive and autonomous female detective. Such were the lady detective’s professional skills that one reviewer was moved to voice his paternalistic concern that “Miss Brooke is too clever in catching criminals ever to catch a husband” (“The May Magazines” 10). He need not have feared, however, there is never any suggestion that Loveday Brooke wants a husband—her stories end as they had begun, with Brooke independent and seemingly wholly fulfilled by her professional duties; marriage, maternity, and romance do not feature at all.14

Notes 1. For more on all these lady detectives see: Kestner (2003). 2. I discovered that I could access some of Corbett’s Dora Bell stories via Australian newspaper database Trove almost at the end of the process of writing this book. At that point, it was too late to include her stories in it. In any case, more work needs to be done to decipher their complicated publishing history. I hope to write an article on Corbett and Dora Bell soon. 3. “Obituary: Mrs F. E. Pirkis,” Times 5 Oct. 1910, p. 1. We can only speculate as to why Pirkis took up authorship in the years after her husband’s retirement and the birth of their children. It may be significant, however, that the Pirkises took on the care of Catherine’s young niece and nephew after the death of her sister in 1878. The extra earnings brought in by authorship would have provided a boost to a household suddenly responsible for two extra children.

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4. This politically progressive personal background may help explain the attitudes to gender and work in Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke. 5. Many of these articles would be collected and published in the volumes, The Evolution of Fashion (The Cotton Press, 1897) and Furnishings and Fittings for Every Home (Record Press, 1894). 6. This verse seems to be “Woman’s Sphere” (date unknown) by the American journalist Kate Field. The poem is attributed to Kate Field in Dental Independent: A Monthly Record of Dental Literature, “Items of Interest” (Volume XII, 1890, p. 189), with the added information that the poem came from her weekly newspaper Kate Field’s Washington. My thanks to Bob Nicholson, Lydia Craig, Martha Baldwin, Timothy Stunt, and Lee Jackson for their help in tracing this attribution. 7. The Loveday Brooke stories are now considered to be Pirkis’s most popular and enduring works and have enjoyed a brief renaissance following recent projects of recuperation by feminist literary critics Adrienne Gavin (2012) and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (2005), as well as scholars of the detective genre such as Joseph Kestner (2003), Therie-Hendry Seabrook (2008), Arlene Young (2008), Eva Burke (2016), and Christopher Pittard (2018). 8. As Gavin discovered, the first female detective created by a female author was Mrs George [Elizabeth Bourgoyne] Corbett’s Dora Bell, who, Gavin notes, starred in Behind the Veil; or Revelations by a Lady Detective, which ran weekly in the Leicester Chronicle in 1891. See Gavin (2012), p. 139. As I have since discovered, Bell appeared in a number of other stories and publications (see above, pp. 52–53). 9. For more on the history of the Metropolitan police force see Shpayer-­ Makov (2011). 10. As the Spectator observed with distaste, “One has only to glance down the advertisement-sheet of more than one morning paper to find not one but a dozen advertisements of Private Detective Offices, where spies are provided for any purpose that their patrons may require …” “Espionnage as a Profession” The Spectator 18 Feb 1893, pp. 221–22. 11. This and all subsequent references to the stories are taken from the 2014 Wildeside Press edition of the collection. 12. See Clarke (2014), pp. 72–104. 13. Miller also makes this observation. See Miller (2005), p.  64, n. 17. Christopher Pittard has recently published an article on “The Murder at Troyte’s Hill” and late-Victorian debates on morality and vivisection. See Pittard (2018). 14. The character can therefore be read as both an “odd woman” and a “New Woman”—this aspect of Loveday Brooke’s character is covered in detail by Gavin (2012), Miller (2005), and Hendrey-Seabrook (2008).

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References Ashley, Mike. The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880–1950. British Library, 2006. ———. Sisters in Crime: Early Detective and Mystery Stories by Women. Peter Owen Publishers, 2013. Black, Helen C. Notable Women Authors of the Day, edited by Troy J. Bassett and Catherine Pope. Victorian Secrets, 2011. “Books, Magazines, Periodicals etc.” The Standard, 10 April 1894, p. 9. Burke, Eva. “Exploring the Shifting Dynamics of Female Victimhood and Vocality in Poe and Pirkis.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2016, pp. 43–53. Carrier, John. The Campaign for the Employment of Women as Police Officers. Avebury, 1988. Clarke, Clare. Late-Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. “Detective Agency.” New York Times, 24 April 1904, p. 1. “Espionnage as a Profession.” The Spectator, 18 Feb 1893, pp. 221–22. “Fiction.” The Speaker, 7 April 1894, p. 396. Gavin, Adrienne E. “C.L. Pirkis (not ‘Miss): Public Women, Private Lives and The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective.” Writing Women of the Fin-­de-­ Siècle: Authors of Change, edited by Adrienne. E. Gavin and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton. Palgrave, 2012, pp. 137–52. Hendrey-Seabrook, Therie. “Reclassifying the Female Detective of the Fin de Siècle: Loveday Brooke, Vocation, and Vocality.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 26, no. 1, 2008, pp. 75–88. Kestner, Joseph. Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913. Ashgate, 2003. Klinger, Leslie. In the Shadow of Agatha Christie. Pegasus Books, 2018. “Lady Detectives” Tit-Bits, 20 Sept 1890. “Literary Notices.” Liverpool Mercury, 4 April 1894, pp. 7. May, Philip. “Philip May Returns, Thanks, and Introduces the Ludgate Weekly Magazine.” Ludgate Monthly, March 1892, pp. 320. “The May Magazines.” Glasgow Herald, 11 May 1893, p. 10. “Messrs Hutchinson’s List – The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective.” Athenaeum, 14 April 1894, p. 466. “The Metropolitan Police.” Saturday Review, 3 Nov. 1888, pp. 521–22. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. “Trouble with She-Dicks: Private Eyes and Public Women in The Adventures [sic] of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 33, no. 1, 2005, pp. 47–65. “Notes and News.” The Academy, 18 Aug. 1894, p. 117. “Obituary: Mrs F. E. Pirkis,” Times, 5 Oct. 1910, p. 1.

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“People, Places and Things.” Hearth and Home, 1893, p. 72. Pirkis, Catherine Louisa. The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective. Wildside Press, 2014. Pittard, Christopher. “Animal Voices: Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective and the Crimes of Animality.” Humanities Vol. 7. No. 65, 2018, pp 1–16. Review of The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, by C.L.  Pirkis. Saturday Review, 5 May 1894, p. 477. Shpayer-Makov, Haia. The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England. Oxford UP, 2011. ———. “Shedding the Uniform and Acquiring a New Masculine Image.” A History of Police and Masculinities, edited by David G.  Barrie and Susan Broomhall. Routledge, 2012, pp. 141–63. “Slashes and Puffs” FUN, 15 July 1885, p. 24. Slung, Michele. Crime on Her Mind. Pantheon, 1975. Stapleton, Susannah. The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective: Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime. Picador, 2019. Willis, Chris. “The Detective’s Doppelgänger: Conflicting States of Female Consciousness in Grant Allen’s Detective Fiction.” Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, edited by William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers. Ashgate, 2008, pp. 143–53. “Women as Detectives.” Western Chronicle. 20 October 1899, p. 3. Young, Arlene. “‘Petticoated police’: Propriety and the Lady Detective in Victorian Fiction.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 26, no. 3, 2008, pp. 15–28.

Fig. 4.1  “So much for that!” by Stanley L. Wood. From “The Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co. Ltd,” by Arthur Morrison. Windsor Magazine Dec. 1897, p. 593

CHAPTER 4

Detectives Martin Hewitt and Horace Dorrington, by Arthur Morrison

“These are really entertaining stories: yet withal we could wish that Mr. Morrison would leave detective fiction to the many who write it as well as he, and, unlike him, can write nothing better.” Review of Martin Hewitt, Investigator, Saturday Review 30 March 1895, p. 421

As the above review demonstrates, while Arthur Morrison produced a number of “entertaining” and well-received collections of detective stories in the 1890s, he is an author held in highest regard for his work in other genres. He is best known as a brutally pessimistic chronicler of London East-End slum life in Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and A Child of the Jago (1896), realist novels immediately recognised by contemporary reviewers as works “of uncommon power” (“New Writers”). The son of a dockland engine-fitter and a haberdasher, born in the poverty-stricken area of Poplar, Morrison had abundant first-hand experience of East-End life. His first proper job was a secretarial role at the People’s Palace on the Mile End Road, the philanthropically funded centre for culture for the lower

Volume editions: Martin Hewitt, Investigator (1894); Chronicles of Martin Hewitt (1895); Adventures of Martin Hewitt (1896); The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897), by Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) Serial publication: Strand Magazine 1894; Windsor Magazine 1896–97 © The Author(s) 2020 C. Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891–1901, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8_4

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classes, which was less than a mile from the sites of the Jack the Ripper murders. Three years later, in 1889, Morrison became assistant editor of the centre’s magazine, the Palace Journal, under its founder Walter Besant, where his work drew upon his knowledge as a resident of the East End. One of his first commissions for the Palace Journal, a series of sketches of various districts of London’s East End entitled “Cockney Corners,” published in 1889, display what would become Morrison’s characteristically fearless approach to portraying East-End slum life. In “Whitechapel,” published on 14 April 1889, the area is rendered as a “horrible black labyrinth … swarming with human vermin whose trade is robbery and whose recreation is murder” (Morrison “Cockney”). Morrison left the Palace Journal in 1890 to pursue journalism full-­ time. For the next few years he worked as a typical late-Victorian hack of the type described in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), publishing articles and stories in numerous newspapers and magazines in an attempt to establish himself as a writer. He was, for instance, a key figure in one of the famous prize competitions run by George Newnes’s Tit-Bits magazine. Morrison wrote the detective story “Hidden not Lost,” about 500 buried gold sovereigns, in which the twist was that the prize money was real and was buried in a field outside London. Hulda Friedrichs’s biography of Newnes emphasises the lowly status of Morrison’s position, however, describing how he himself had to travel to the field, dig the hole, and then bury the prize money.1 The year 1891 saw the publication of Morrison’s first book, a now mostly forgotten collection of supernatural stories, The Shadows Around Us. The same year, he enjoyed his first real literary success with the appearance in Macmillan’s Magazine of “A Street,” a “quietly despairing” article on the “the mean streets” of East London, which showcased his disillusionment with the idealistic philanthropic work undertaken at the People’s Palace (Qtd. in Keating 20). The article attracted the attention of National Observer editor, W.E.  Henley, an influential figure in the late-Victorian literary scene, who invited Morrison to expand “A Street” into a series of short stories. The result was Tales of Mean Streets, published serially in the National Observer in 1893 and in volume form the following year.2 Despite their depressing subject matter, Tales of Mean Streets’ semi-­ autobiographical stories about the squalid lives of the denizens of the London slums were an immediate commercial and critical success, with the collection running into several editions and establishing Morrison as one of the leading lights of British realism. As the Academy put it, “[Mr.

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Morrison’s] success has been achieved in pictures of the brutal” (“Mr. Arthur Morrison”). The success of Tales of Mean Streets led Reverend Arthur Osborne Jay, rector of the local parish church of one of London’s worst slums, the Old Nichol, to invite Morrison to visit the area and write about its hardships. The Old Nichol was an area of around thirty streets located off the East End’s Shoreditch High Street. It comprised a “district of barely-mapped alleyways, sunless cellars, tunnels and courts, cul-de-sacs, stables, barrows, and sheds,” where poverty, disease, and crime proliferated (Miles ix). Inside the Old Nichol the mortality rate was twice as high as in the surrounding area of Bethnal Green, in which the mortality rate was itself four times higher than in London as a whole (Miles ix). The result of Morrison’s research there was his second successful work of slum fiction, A Child of the Jago (1896). In the novel, Old Nichol is fictionalised as the “useless, incapable, and corrupt” criminal ghetto, the Jago (Morrison, Jago 11). Henley termed it “a dreadful book,”—not a value judgement, but a sober reflection on its power in conveying the “dreadful” reality of slum life (“Some Novels”). As with Morrison’s later novels To London Town (1899) and The Hole in the Wall (1902), the central question around which A Child of the Jago is structured is how Dicky Perrott, a slum-born child, may escape a life of brutality and crime to become a decent citizen. Morrison’s emphatic answer in all these novels is that he cannot. What’s clear from A Child of the Jago, as well as contemporary interviews with the author about his work, however, is that Morrison was in no way a left-leaning or “socialist” writer, as some critics have claimed (Priestman 17). Nor were his slum novels meant to function as a platform arguing for the rehabilitation of London’s poor and criminal classes. Instead, his representation of the lifestyles, values, and morality of the East End poor reveals “distaste and a deep scepticism towards possibilities of their amendment, rehabilitation, or redemption” (Miles xxiv). Indeed, Morrison harboured eugenicist views on how to deal with the problem of London’s slum dwellers, involving emigration, penal settlements, and sterilisation. As he chillingly outlined in an interview on A Child of the Jago. The majority of Jago people are semi-criminal … Look at these long lists of families going back to the third or fourth generation and all criminals or lunatics … for my part, I believe … in penal settlements [for the poor] … Why not confine them as lunatics are confined? Let the weed die out, and then proceed to raise the raisable. That is why I killed Dicky Perrott. He

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could not escape from his environment, and had he lived, would have become perforce, as bad as his surroundings. (“Children of the Jago”)

Like many of the authors studied in this book, even after he began to enjoy literary acclaim, Morrison remained a jobbing writer, a hard-­working and market-conscious inhabitant of New Grub Street. And so alongside his slum fiction, he continued to write for the literary market of magazines and periodicals—specifically, detective stories for the Strand, and later for a couple of its rivals, the Windsor and the Harmsworth. Indeed, it should be no surprise that the author of the novel dubbed “the most important literary work of the 1890s focusing on criminality” would naturally turn his hand to genre fiction on crime for periodicals (Wiener 242). Morrison already had a relationship with the Strand—during 1891–92 his comic children’s series “Zig Zags at the Zoo” appeared in the magazine alongside the Sherlock Holmes adventures. A few months after Sherlock’s tumble at Reichenbach, Morrison’s detective Martin Hewitt joined L.T.  Meade’s Stories from the Diary of a Doctor as one of the Strand’s replacements for Holmes, appearing in a series of seven stories beginning in the magazine’s March 1894 issue. With illustrations by Sidney Paget suggesting a visual link between the two collections, the Strand seemed keen to cast Hewitt as Holmes’s natural heir. Early reviews of the Hewitt collection were reasonably favourable yet tended to focus upon Morrison’s indebtedness to Doyle’s detective stories and the similarities between Holmes and Hewitt. The Leeds Mercury, for instance, generously suggested that Morrison’s Hewitt tales were “the only stories worthy to succeed Dr. Conan Doyle’s ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”’ (“Magazines and Reviews”). The Times review more bluntly concluded that Hewitt was simply “a second Sherlock Holmes” (Rev. of Martin Hewitt, Investigator).3 These reviews may not have been far from the mark; in a piece for the Bookman, Morrison remarked on writing: “of things that may be cultivated, the command of form is first; indeed, I think it is all” (“How to” 42). He suggested that aspiring writers take a story by Guy de Maupassant, strip it down to its bare bones, remove extraneous words and description, and observe the structure. By this process, Morrison believed, the writer could learn to “see the machinery, and in time he may learn to apply it for himself” (“How to” 42). In his Hewitt stories, with their sidekick narrator, Hewitt’s use of disguise and observation, his professional office in London, and the fact that Hewitt often takes over from Scotland Yard’s bumbling Inspector Plummer, Morrison

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seems to have observed the Doylean “machinery” and applied it to his own detective series. Hewitt’s character and appearance are not identical to Doyle’s detective but do seem to be “based on Holmes via the identity of opposites” (Bleiler xiii). Where Holmes is tall and thin, Hewitt is short and stout, where Holmes is fractious and condescending with the police, Hewitt is “genial and companionable,” where Holmes is bohemian and intellectual, Hewitt is an everyman who solves his cases, he says, simply by “a judicious use of ordinary faculties” (Morrison “Lenton” 308). Morrison did take care to make his detective different from Holmes in some ways, however; Hewitt frequently makes clear that he takes jobs because he is paid to do so—not for the love of the intellectual puzzle, or the sense of adventure. As he puts it to the client in his first adventure, “as a professional man … a good fee always stimulates my interest” (“Lenton” 308). As John Greenfield astutely notes, this focus on “professionalism” is a canny move on Morrison’s part as it naturally aligns Hewitt with the “emerging class of professionals” and members of the middle-class that constituted the Strand’s readership (20). The first Hewitt story, “The Lenton Croft Robberies,” published in March 1894, is a classic locked-room mystery in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band” (1891). The story opens, establishing Hewitt’s credentials—his private detecting business was set up after he enjoyed “brilliant professional success” as an investigator for the law firm Messrs. Crellan, Hunt, and Crellan, where he alone gathered “a smashing weight of irresistible evidence” (Bleiler 1).4 Like Holmes’s adventures, Hewitt’s stories are narrated by a friend and sometime colleague, Brett, a journalist. Also, like Holmes, his first adventure opens with Hewitt ensconced in his office where a client comes to call. There is a distinct difference from Holmes here, however. Whereas Sherlock Holmes’s comfortable bachelor-pad apartment in prosperous Baker Street (surrounded by red and gold in Charles Booth’s Poverty Map) illustrated both his elevated position and the blurred lines between Holmes’s professional and amateur status, Hewitt’s office is a more prosaic “dingy,” “dusty” upstairs room with “an ever-open portal in a street by the Strand” (Bleiler 3). Its open door and location on the Strand is significant—this thoroughfare was Victorian London’s main East/West artery, uniting the poor East End and affluent West End of the city. The office’s location here suggests Hewitt’s figurative placing between London’s high and low areas and hints at the necessity for him to accept both high and low status clients.

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Vernon Lloyd, secretary for Sir James Norris, comes to Hewitt with the case of three puzzling jewel robberies, all of which occurred in  locked rooms at Norris’s Lenton Croft estate. At the scene of each robbery, a piece of costume jewellery was stolen while other more expensive items were left behind, and a burnt match was deposited in place of the purloined item. The case has been tackled by a detective from Scotland Yard who “seemed a pretty smart fellow” but ultimately got nowhere and “gave it up altogether” (7, emphasis mine). As in Holmes stories such as “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Beryl Coronet,” Hewitt’s high-status client is infinitely more concerned about the damage to his reputation than about the crimes themselves. Upon visiting the house and surveying the scene, Hewitt takes note of Lloyd’s grey parrot and his mind goes immediately to “these birds’ thievish reputations” (24). Thus, he deduces that Lloyd trained the bird to enter each upper-storey room through an open window, and to steal a trinket. Lloyd placed a match in its beak before sending it off to commit the crime in order “to keep [it] quiet … while going for…its plunder” (24). Again, this trained animal trope is highly reminiscent of the snake in Doyle’s “The Speckled Band.” That the criminal is a trusted employee, is glossed over—“he’ll confess; of that I’m sure. I know the sort of man” (26)—and the story ends with Hewitt and Sir James enjoying a cigar together and Hewitt musing that the crime was “not a bad plan” (27). Hewitt solved the case, he says, using “nothing but common-sense and a sharp pair of eyes” (22). As Holmes does in so many stories, Hewitt outperforms the previous investigator from Scotland Yard, promises discretion, and helps the naïve aristocrat, Sir James, to maintain his respectable reputation. This story establishes a formula that the ensuing Hewitt adventures stick to: the narrator tells us that most of Hewitt’s cases are “uninteresting, though often difficult”; like many of the Holmes adventures, the crimes that are recorded instead focus upon ‘bizarre little problems’, not serious or everyday crimes—there are no street robberies, no domestic violence, no visits to the slum (Morrison, “Martin” 269). Like Holmes, Hewitt relies on a blend of observation and esoteric knowledge to solve these cases—he observes details and decodes, in G.K. Chesterton’s terms, the “significant symbols” of the city, like footprints and window-locks (75). The stories strongly call back to the Holmes adventures: Morrison’s collection of seven stories for the Strand contains another locked-room mystery (“The Case of Mr Foggatt”), a further two stolen jewellery stories (“The Stanway Cameo Mystery,” “The Quinton Jewel Affair”), a tale of

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inheritance theft (“The Holford Will Case”), the case of a missing racehorse jockey (“The Loss of Sammy Crockett”), the story of stolen secret government papers (“The Case of the Dixon Torpedo”), and a bizarre and racist tale of “blood-thirsty foreigners” (“The Affair of the Tortoise”).5 As Morrison left instructions for his personal papers to be destroyed after his death, we can only hazard guesses as to why certain editorial decisions were made, and by whom. I do wonder, however, if “The Affair of the Tortoise” proved too bloody and too sensational for the avowedly conservative editors of the Strand and that they parted company with Morrison as a result. What we know for certain is that the second and third series of the Hewitt stories moved to the Windsor, a family magazine launched in January 1895 and modelled on the Strand. One crucial difference with the Windsor, however, was that from its first issue its editorial policy set out to “loosen the collar” of moral censoriousness found in the Strand (Ashley 223). The foreword to the Windsor’s first number sets out its departure from the mid-Victorian values of the Strand clearly: There is no moral necessity for a home magazine to be tedious, to regale the wife with solemn precepts when she wants to be cheered, and the husband with little tales which never touch the strong currents of life  … the chief purpose of the Windsor magazine is to illuminate the hearth with genial philosophy, to widen its outlook … to make it crackle with good humour which is born of true tolerance, and puts to fight the exaggerated self-­ consciousness of aggressive virtue. (“Foreword” 1–3)

A feature of the Windsor’s fiction, then, was that it should be “lively and exciting,” and that it need not concentrate on the activities of the virtuous. And in 1895 the magazine enjoyed its first “runaway success” with “A Bid for Fortune,” Guy Boothby’s headlining story for its first issue, the first of a series about Machiavellian master-criminal, mesmerist, and vivisector, Dr Nikola (Ashley 224). The second and third series of Hewitt stories, published after Dr Nikola, in the 1895 and 1896 volumes of the Windsor, were notably much more sensational than those for the Strand. As Christopher Pittard has correctly observed, “the change in periodical marked a change in tone” for Morrison, and it was a change that brought Morrison into alignment with the Windsor’s ‘tolerant’ editorial policy and the sensational fiction with which it enjoyed its first commercial success (102).

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An 1895 review of the volume edition of Martin Hewitt, Investigator, asked “what is Mr. Arthur Morrison doing at Scotland Yard?”, voicing dismay that the author had foregone writing about “the drab slums he has painted so forcibly and so well” in favour of a turn to detective stories (“Martin Hewitt, Investigator”). Likewise, a portrait of the author in the Bookman dismissed his detective stories as “potboilers,” adding, “the work which counts is that which depicts for us the shame and sorrow of the little squalid streets” (“Arthur Morrison”). However, in 1897 with his new series of detective stories for the Windsor, Morrison produced a collection that has much more in common with the “mean streets” of his slum fiction than with the “fancy hotels, mansions overlooking the park, great banks, [and] diplomatic secrets” of the Sherlock Holmes adventures (Moretti 137). With the series of six stories, The Dorrington Deed-Box, published in the Windsor, Morrison broke a number of Doyle’s commandments for the detective story: that it was wrong to make the criminal a hero, that the number of legally punishable crimes should be kept to a minimum, and that sensationalism should be suppressed.6 Horace Dorrington, the “private enquiry agent” hero of this series, is not only a detective, but also a criminal (Morrison, Dorrington 18).7 He is always on the lookout for an “opening for any piece of rascality by which he might make more of the case than by serving his client loyally” and, throughout his adventures he lies to, steals from, poisons, blackmails, and attempts to kill various clients and criminals (65). Like A Child of the Jago’s Dicky Perrott, Dorrington is East-End slum-born and seems unable to avoid a life of criminality. The six stories in the collection detail the desperation and amorality of Dorrington’s milieu, charting, in reverse order, his rise from an East-End petty criminal to a respected and successful, but corrupt, West-End professional detective. Dorrington may have escaped the geographic confines of the East End, but his story is not one of heart-warming bad-boy-made-good. He is no heroic avatar of the disciplinary system and his detective consultancy does not provide a reassuring service to the imperilled citizens of London. Instead, it affords him the misleading appearance of middle-class respectability and the attendant opportunity to exploit, cheat, or even kill his clients if it profits him to do so. Much of the action of the stories takes place in London’s East End—a location Holmes visited precisely once in all his 56 adventures—and the clients Dorrington meets are poor, corrupt, and often criminal. The Metropolitan Police is almost entirely absent. As with A Child of the Jago and Tales of Mean Streets, the result is a disturbingly chaotic and unsettling

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portrait of a late-Victorian London pervaded by poverty, greed, and crime.8 As Andrew Pepper has succinctly put it, the Dorrington stories operate in “a culture of acute self-interest” leading to “divisiveness, disunity, murder, violent competition, and speculative greed” (Pepper 116).9 In the opening lines of the first story in the Dorrington collection, narrator James Rigby introduces himself as a wealthy, unworldly young man whom the detective had befriended a few years earlier. Rigby’s reliability as a narrator is immediately established—he is an “intelligent” young man with an “exceptional upbringing” (3). Rigby recounts how he met Dorrington on a steamship voyage from Australia to England. Only later do readers discover that Dorrington had approached Rigby as part of an elaborate plan to enlist him as a client, before murdering him and stealing his inheritance. Rigby, then, is immediately an unusual narrator in that he is Dorrington’s victim rather than a trusty sidekick in the Watson mould. With this character, Morrison is inverting one of the successful narrative strategies of the burgeoning detective short-story genre—that of the neutral sidekick narrator. Like Watson, Rigby has firsthand experience of the action, but, as victim, he is much more implicated in the story of the crime than Holmes’s friend and partner had been seen to be up to this point.10 In his influential analysis of the formal properties of the crime genre, The Poetics of Prose (1977), Tzvetan Todorov famously characterises classical detective fiction as containing two competing and opposing narrative points of view—the “story of the crime” and the “story of the investigation.” Todorov argues the dangerous action of “the story of the crime” conventionally takes place before either the detective or the narrator is involved (45). The pages that separate the discovery of the crime from the revelation of the criminal, “are devoted to a slow apprenticeship: [where] we examine clue after clue, lead after lead” (45). The second story, the story of the investigation, “is often told by a friend of the detective who explicitly acknowledges that he is writing a book” (45). This guarantees the “immunity” of the narrator who deals only with the dynamic, but ultimately safe, “story of the investigation” (47). Because the crime has already occurred, the characters in the story of the investigation are insulated from dangerous narrative space containing the actual crime. As Todorov puts it, “Nothing can happen to them” (44). In “The Narrative of Mr James Rigby,” by contrast, the narrator is also the victim and is dangerously physically embroiled in the “story of the crime” itself. Investigation plays no part in this first story of the collection—instead the crime perpetrated against him is simply documented and narrated by Rigby.

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At the start of the story, Dorrington appears respectable and trustworthy; grateful of some companionship, Rigby finds Dorrington “altogether the most charming person I had ever met” and the pair soon become friends (15). Morrison points out that this is not simply naiveté on Rigby’s part, however, all the ship’s passengers find Dorrington “a most pleasant [and]… engaging acquaintance” (14–15). Physical descriptions and illustrations help to endorse the respectability of Dorrington’s appearance and physiognomy: he is a “tall, well-built … handsome fellow” with a “military moustache” (14–15). Sidney L.  Wood’s illustrations (see Fig.  4.1) show a character highly reminiscent of Holmes’s eminently respectable narrator, Dr Watson. Dorrington tells Rigby that he is a “private enquiry agent,” like Sherlock Holmes, who is “pretty well known” and “stands as high as any—if not a trifle higher” in the trade than other private detectives, once again underlining his apparent respectability (18–19). Rigby in turn tells Dorrington that he became an orphan when his father, who had killed a robber who was a member of the Sicilian mafia, on a trip to Italy twenty years ago, was murdered by the vengeful Camorra a short time later. Learning about the manner of the father’s death, Dorrington advises Rigby that the Camorra may still want revenge. When, on their return to England, Rigby finds the “sign of the Camorra” on the door of his hotel room he consults Dorrington (37). Dorrington proposes that Rigby must go in to hiding and takes him to the apparently respectable suburban home of the Croftings, a “very trustworthy” couple who are friends of the detective (38). Believing himself to be safe, Rigby retires to his room with some of Mrs Crofting’s “excellent” coffee and falls asleep (46). Rigby awakens abruptly in terrifying circumstances: I woke with a sensation of numbing cold in my right side, a terrible stiffness in my limbs, and a sound of splashing water in my ears. All was pitch dark, and—what was this? Water! Water all about me. I was lying in six inches of cold water, and more was pouring down on top of me from above. My head was afflicted with a splitting ache. But where was I? … And then the conviction struck me with a blow—I was in a covered iron tank, and the water was pouring in to drown me! (47–48)

Far from possessing the “immunity” postulated by Todorov, our narrator has been given drugged coffee, dumped in a water cistern, and left to drown by Dorrington’s accomplices (44). The reader discovers that the threats from the Camorra were an elaborate ruse fabricated by Dorrington in order that he might persuade Rigby to go into hiding, before killing him, and stealing his inheritance.

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Rigby manages to escape and immediately goes to Dorrington’s office accompanied by the police. They find the office abandoned; Dorrington is on the run and is never caught (52). In the discarded office, Rigby discovers the detective’s “deed-box” containing his casebook and files. “Months have passed,” Rigby tells us, since the crime occurred, “and neither Dorrington, his partner Hicks, nor the Croftings have been caught” (52). That the police have been unable to catch Dorrington or his accomplices, and that the law is not mentioned again underlines the emphatic absence in these stories of the resolution often associated with late-Victorian detective fiction. The remaining five stories are a meta-story of Rigby’s investigation into Dorrington’s past, yet their overall narrative trajectory moves not toward the restoration of order nor the apprehension of Dorrington. Instead, the stories outline the shocking amorality of Dorrington’s universe. Early reviews of the stories tended to focus on the collection’s similarities to and departures from the expected narrative and moral conventions of the nascent short story detective genre. Similarities to the Holmes adventures, then, were generally taken to add to the stories’ appeal. However, differences from the Holmes stories, specifically the appearance of more serious crimes and the criminalization of the detective hero, were found by almost all reviewers to detract from the appeal of Morrison’s Dorrington tales. The Pall Mall Gazette, for example, initially found that “the idea of a private enquiry agent who, when it suits his ends, turns round and bites the hand that feeds him, is distinctly ingenious” (“Bran-­ Pie of Current Literature”). However, in the end, the review objected to the stories’ dubious morality and argued that the stories were “marred by the futile attempt at murder which is dragged in by the shoulders.” The reviewer laments, “Mr. Morrison is always sacrificing his constructive skill to the demands of cheap sensationalism” (“Bran-Pie”). In the Saturday Review, H.G.  Wells similarly lamented that Morrison’s literary talents were being wasted on a lowbrow medium: “Just as we have admired Mr Morrison for his ‘Lizerunt’; we have disliked him for his despicable detective stories” (“A Slum Novel” 573). The Times review of The Dorrington Deed-Box complained that Dorrington “is a criminal himself, and murders or steals, or otherwise infringes the Decalogue, for his own hand.” “Hence,” the review concludes, “these ingenious but deplorably shabby

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romances are hardly sympathetic” (“Recent Novels”). Contemporary reviewers were evidently disarmed by and unhappy with Morrison’s deliberate inversions of the conventions of the nascent detective short-­ story genre. The Dorrington Deed-Box’s second episode, “The Case of Janissary,” published in February 1897, employs a slightly different narrative strategy from the collection’s opening story. This appears to be a case in which Dorrington has resolved to work honestly. This story involves the theft and nobbling of racehorses, the work of an illegal betting ring, and the mysterious death-by-drowning of several customers of a bookmaker. Dorrington is asked to investigate the deaths by the owner of the promising racehorse, Janissary. Rigby explains that in this instance Dorrington “could see no opening for any piece of rascality by which he might make more of the case than by serving his client loyally” and that the detective therefore resolves to serve the client honestly (65). As such, it initially appears that this story will follow a narrative and moral structure that more closely adheres to Doyle’s model of the detective genre. Indeed, early in the story, we see Dorrington engaged in what we might term “real” detective work—he is approached by the client and takes on the case, he then pores over cuttings about the crime from the local newspaper, as Sherlock Holmes often does, and draws upon his valuable store of esoteric knowledge about the racing world (87). Suspecting a bookmaker of drowning customers in order to avoid paying their winnings, Dorrington sets out to watch the man’s house. Like Doyle’s Holmes, Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket, or Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff, it seems that Dorrington possesses a super-detective’s skills of unseen observation and deduction—he is extremely “skilled at watching without drawing attention to himself” (88). As D.A. Miller has famously pointed out, detective fiction often turns on the importance of the practices of watching and observing: it is “always implicitly punning on the detective’s brilliant super-vision and the police supervision that it embodies” (35, emphasis in original). The detective’s skill is in his ability to deduce the importance of small, seemingly inconsequential details, “the ordinary ‘trivial’ facts of everyday life” (Miller 35). Indeed, from his observation of various unremarkable everyday practices—lights being switched on and off, blinds being drawn, and the dismissal of a servant girl while there is a dinner guest—Dorrington deduces that a crime is about to take place: “Dorrington thought for a minute, and then suddenly stopped, with a snap of his fingers. He saw it all now” (91). By showing Dorrington engaged in genuine

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detecting work, and by more closely emulating the narrative formula of investigation-driven detective fiction, Morrison is demurring to fans of Holmes. However, as with “The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby,” this story’s morality turns out to be highly ambiguous. Despite his resolution to work honestly, Dorrington breaks into the criminals’ house. Once there, he finds the bookmaker and his wife in the act of drowning their victim. Dorrington does not apprehend or admonish the criminals, however, but congratulates them on their “meritorious” enterprise: … that isn’t a bad idea in its way, that of drugging a man and drowning him in your cistern up there in the roof, when you prefer not to pay his winnings. It has the very considerable merit that, after the body has been fished out of any river you may choose to fling it into, the stupid coroner’s jury will never suspect it was drowned in any other water. (95)

He then confides, “I may as well tell you that I’m a bit of a scoundrel myself by way of profession,” before informing the couple that he will not turn them over to the law because their water tank is “too useful an invention to give away to the police” (95). Instead, he blackmails the couple into becoming his partners in crime, telling them, “you and your tank may come in very handy from time to time” (95). This is the husband and wife team who had tried to drown Rigby in The Dorrington Deed-Box’s opening story. In a story that had initially suggested that it might follow a more conventional detecting case, then, the detective engages in blackmail and burglary, overlooks murder, lets the criminals go free, enlists accomplices, and plans to commit future murders. The tale ends with Rigby’s unsettling observation that “The Case of Janissary” occurred three years before the Croftings attempted to drown him in their tank. “In the meantime,” Rigby asks readers, “how many people, whose deaths might be turned to profit, had fallen victims to the murderous cunning of Dorrington and his tools?” (97). We are never given the answer to this unsettling question. At this point it is useful to jump forward to the collection’s final two stories, as these deal with Dorrington’s past and the breakthrough case that sealed his reputation as a detective. Only at this late stage does it become clear that Dorrington does not share Sherlock Holmes’s cultured and educated background. Instead, these stories chart the ways in which Morrison’s criminal-detective has been compelled to better himself unconventionally by employing ingenuity, cunning, and criminality. The last

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story in the collection (published in May 1897), although the first chronologically, “Old Cater’s Money,” illuminates Dorrington’s beginnings as a lower-class ruffian. The story is set in London’s Deptford, across the Thames from Poplar where Morrison was born, where the young Dorrington is working “at very cheap rates” as a collector for a “two hundred percent money-lender” (282; 260). When Charles Booth visited Deptford in July 1899 to survey the area for his social map of the city, he classified it as inhabited by the poor, very poor, and vicious and semi-­ criminal, coded as light blue, dark blue, and black on the finished map. In his memoir of life as a Detective Inspector of the Metropolitan Police, Joseph F. Broadhurst likewise classified late-nineteenth-century Deptford as “the blackest spot in London at the time” (20).11 The story outlines the disreputable nature of Dorrington’s first job—in this case, his attempt to steal the will of the eponymous “Old Cater” (another money-lender) for his boss. Although the reader is not told the precise details of his upbringing, Dorrington’s need to take on this type of criminal work for such “wretchedly ill pay” seems to indicate the desperation of his personal circumstances and the negative effect of his poor background on his opportunities for respectable employment (258). Morrison worked his way out of the poor area of his birth and for the rest of his life was seemingly desperate to obscure his humble beginnings. The author worked hard to obscure his humble origins, repeatedly misleading census enumerators and interviewers about his East-End place of birth and working-class family background. In 1897, he informed Who’s Who that he was born in Kent, the son of a professional man, and had been educated at private school—information erroneously reproduced in the Times obituary for the author. Many of the characters that featured prominently in the naturalistic slum fiction, with which he achieved such critical acclaim, however, were depicted with neither agency nor options for the kind of self-improvement or upward mobility achieved by Morrison himself. In A Child of the Jago, for instance, Morrison depicts the situation of the residents unflinchingly and without optimism—the forces of Victorian self-improvement, philanthropy, education, and the police make no impact upon the amoral and closed world of the Jago, or the characters trapped within. The novel’s central character, Dicky Perrott, is the child of both a petty-criminal alcoholic father and of the Jago streets themselves; as such he is heir to “a black inheritance” (Morrison, Jago 133). His tragic life wholly determined by his amoral Jago surroundings, from which he cannot escape and which drag him down into criminality and ultimately to self-destruction and untimely death.

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Morrison’s representation of Dorrington’s slum background in “Old Cater’s Money” represents an intriguing twist on that of his brutally pessimistic slum novels, however. In the final Dorrington Deed-Box story, we learn that Dorrington’s criminality and cunning (represented as an inevitable and determinist product of his corruptingly poor East-End upbringing) are employed as necessary methods of social mobility, which facilitate his escape from his slum surroundings. One might view Dorrington as a second Dicky Perrott—but a Dicky who manages to escape (geographically, if not morally) his criminal background. In A Child of the Jago, Dicky is advised by one of his elders that there are only three ways out of the Jago: the gaol, the gallows, or to become ruthless enough to become a “grandee of rascality” (51). Dicky dies, but Dorrington appears to have managed option three: his criminality in “Old Cater’s Money,” and the opportunity to escape the drudgery of his life of poverty that it provides, represents a kind of subversion of the Smilesian “self-help” so common in Victorian fiction. He has succeeded in using his criminal intelligence to become a “grandee of rascality.” His first impulse is, and must be, to get what he can for himself, to extort, to cheat, to steal, if necessary. For Dorrington, this is a decision borne of necessity, with no regard for ethics. As he says to an East-End money lender, “It is my business, just as much as it is yours, to get as much as I can for nothing” (258).12 The next story chronologically, “The Case of Mr Loftus Deacon,” published in April 1897, emphasises the extent of the social and geographical mobility offered to Dorrington by the criminal act depicted in “Old Cater’s Money.” The story opens with Dorrington already comfortably operating as a private detective in the Holmesian mould. He has emulated Holmes in making his professional base in the prosperous West End of London, with consulting rooms in Bedford Street, a real street off the Strand. On Booth’s 1898–99 Poverty Map, the area surrounding Dorrington’s office is coloured wholly in red—marking it as a solidly “middle-class” and “wellto-do” area, emphasising again the extent of Dorrington’s social advances.13 The story opens as Dorrington is visited at his office by Henry Colson, a retired lawyer, who calls the detective to Bedford Mansions in London’s prosperous St James to investigate the murder of his friend, Loftus Deacon. The location of the crime—at the heart of the wealthy and prestigious West End—as well as the respectable profession of the client signify gravity and respectability. Indeed, the reader is informed that the “Case of Loftus Deacon,” was the job “that had helped to give Dorrington much of that reputation which unfortunately too often enabled him to profit far beyond the extent to which his clients intended” (201). Dorrington’s successful

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resolution of the case, a conventional locked-room murder mystery of the sort pioneered by Poe in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), gave the detective “one of his best advertisements” (201).14 It is significant, then, that this is the only story in the collection where Dorrington works completely honestly. In this case, which occurred a “few” years ago, “there was such a stir at the time over the mysterious death of Mr Loftus Deacon,” that “it well paid Dorrington to use his utmost diligence in an honest effort to uncover the mystery” (201).15 The fact that Dorrington works honestly on the case only partially explains why it helps to secure his reputation as a professional consulting detective. The location and status of the crime more closely emulate the Holmesian model: as Moretti has astutely noted, despite the tendency to remember Sherlock Holmes as having had frequent associations with the underworld of Victorian London, the crimes that the super-detective investigates are almost always situated in London’s wealthiest and most respectable areas. “The epicentre” of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Franco Moretti points out, “is clearly in the West End” (134). It is significant, then, that East-End Dorrington emulates Holmes in forging his professional reputation with a case in West End’s St James. Unlike Holmes, however, who rarely leaves his home environment of London’s West End, Dorrington is also comfortable and accepted at the other “End” of the social and geographical spectrum. Indeed, Dorrington seems to be able to negotiate, and flourish in, both low and high areas of the city. In “Old Cater’s Money,” he takes on and beats the criminals and lowlifes of his native East End. In “The Case of Loftus Deacon,” he is equally comfortable negotiating with respectable clients, fraternising with Deacon’s upper-class acquaintances, and ultimately penetrating the mysteries harboured in a prosperous West-End villa. Elsewhere in the collection, this flexibility is employed for the furtherance of the detective’s malign plans. As such, the social mobility that might in other circumstances have signalled Dorrington’s panoptic powers and success as a detective instead represents a worrying challenge to the possibility of knowing and fixing his social identity. For the socially conservative Morrison, this enterprising criminal behaviour highlights the worrying consequences of someone from the East End slums escaping from his environment. In the Dorrington stories, then, Morrison follows Doyle in depicting a number of crimes, clients, and criminals emanating from the wealthy West End of London. But alongside these, he sets a number of his stories in its

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poor East End and his detective anti-hero is a slum-born criminal. He refuses to ignore crimes associated with the London of poverty. In doing so, Morrison creates a collection of stories that, although still often sensational in tone and subject, acknowledge some of the grittier, more unsavoury realities of crime in late-Victorian London. Alongside the diamond robberies, revenge plots, and threats of stolen inheritance and identity, which had provided the intrigue in so many of Holmes’s cases, Dorrington’s adventures also touch on some of the realities of poverty, environmental determinism, and class exploitation that had suffused Morrison’s critically acclaimed slum novels. In his seminal essay on crime fiction, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler used Morrison’s term “mean streets” to define Dashiell Hammett’s fictional world.16 This world is “an urban chaos, devoid of spiritual and moral values, pervaded by viciousness and random savagery” (Grella 110). In it, no one is what they pretend to be: criminals wield political power, police are corrupt and embroiled in criminality, and justice is hardly ever served. “It is not a very fragrant world,” Chandler claimed, “but it is the world you live in” (236). Whilst Chandler, and many later critics of detective fiction might disagree, this hopeless and amoral urban milieu did not originate with Hammett, however, or even in the twentieth-century American crime genre; this too is the unfragrant world that Morrison, the author that rose to fame with his unflinchingly grim portrayals of urban slum life and popularised the expression “mean streets,” evokes in his Dorrington stories.

Notes 1. See Hulda Friedrichs, The Life of Sir George Newnes (1911), pp. 94–95. 2. The phrase “mean streets” would later famously be employed by Raymond Chandler in his seminal essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), securing its association with the crime genre. 3. As Christopher Pittard has noted, however, “The Ward Lane Tabernacle,” the final story in the third Hewitt collection, “ends on a note of uncertainty unusual in detective fiction,” with an inquest where parts of the crime go unsolved. This overturns what is read as the usual formal structure of detective fiction and thus anticipates Morrison’s more morally and formally ambivalent—and hence much more interesting—second foray into the detective short-story genre, The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897) (103). See Pittard, (2011), p. 103.

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4. Unless otherwise noted, this and subsequent quotations from the Martin Hewitt stories are taken from Bleiler (1976). 5. In order, then, the stories recall Doyle’s “The Speckled Band;” “The Blue Carbuncle” and “The Beryl Coronet;” “A Case of Identity,” “The Copper Beeches,” and “The Speckled Band;” “The Adventure of Silver Blaze;” and “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty.” Morrison’s “The Affair of the Tortoise” goes much further than Doyle ever did in terms of the promulgation of nineteenth-century racist ideology. For more detailed analysis of these stories see Greenfield (2002). To cover these stories in detail would be to repeat much of Greenfield’s astute analysis. 6. These were commandments that Doyle would eventually break, however: his twentieth-century Holmes stories forego some of his old dictums about decorum. The later tales constitute something of a formal and thematic departure from his earlier work, becoming bloodier and less conservative, more morally ambiguous and less concerned with resolution. 7. Unless otherwise noted, this and subsequent references to The Dorrington Deed-Box, are taken from the 2002 reprint edition. 8. It’s difficult to determine exactly why Morrison chose to transgress so many of the burgeoning rules of the emerging detective genre by creating a world inhabited with corrupt private detectives, self-serving (and often criminal) clients, and absent official police. He was an almost inordinately reticent and private figure who gave few interviews in comparison with fellow late-­Victorian crime writers such as Doyle or Boothby. A letter that has recently come to light shows Morrison refusing an interview with a book reviewer on the grounds that, “I prefer my private concerns not to be written about,” adding cryptically: “a man has only to make a very small success to make a great many enemies, and the less they know of him, the less harm they can do” (Qtd. in Newens 37). Perhaps related to this desire for privacy and misdirection, Morrison left instructions for his personal papers to be destroyed after his death. Sadly, these instructions were carried out and we are left with only a tiny amount of Morrison’s correspondence and manuscripts. 9. The first full-length academic article on the Dorrington stories was my own “Horace Dorrington, Criminal-Detective: Investigating the Re-Emergence of the Rogue in Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington DeedBox (1897)” (2010) and the expanded chapter in Clarke (2014). The collection has since been examined by Andrew Pepper (2016). Elsewhere, for the fullest and best analyses of the collection see Lee Horsley (2005) and Christopher Pittard (2011). For other brief descriptions see: Stephen Knight (2004); Martin Priestman (1990); LeRoy Panek (1987); Joseph Kestner (2000). Hugh Greene reprints “The Affair of the Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Company” in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1970).

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There is an entry on Arthur Morrison in Rosemary Herbert, ed., Whodunit? Who’s Who in Crime and Mystery Writing (2003). This entry wrongly concludes that, with Dorrington, Morrison “conformed to the status quo, working smoothly within established tradition without breaking new ground” (135). 10. In a number of the Holmes stories published after Dorrington, however, Watson’s moral position becomes more ambiguous. In “Charles Augustus Milverton,” for instance, Watson burgles a flat with Holmes and does not reveal the identity of Milverton’s murderer. 11. For more on the social history of Deptford see Bullman, Hegarty, and Hill (2012). 12. For more on anxiety about social deception in Victorian London, see Nead (2000). 13. See Charles Booth, Maps Descriptive of London Poverty 1898–99. Charles Booth Online Archive. Accessed: 24 Nov. 2018 http://booth.lse.ac.uk/. 14. For more on the development of the locked-room mystery see Cook (2011). 15. The story is not without sensational details; Loftus Deacon’s corpse is graphically described and depicted in a visceral full-page illustration. Deacon is discovered “lying in a pool of blood with two large fearful gashes in his head” which, we are told, had clearly been made by “something heavy and exceedingly sharp” (209). 16. As Raymond Chandler described the relationship between the detective and the city: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be … a man of honour … He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world … If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in.” See Chandler (1944).

References “Arthur Morrison.” The Bookman July 1905, p. 115. Ashley, Mike. The Age of Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines 1880–1950. British Library Press, 2006. Bleiler, E.  F. [Everett Franklin], ed. Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories. Dover, 1976. Booth, Charles. “Maps Descriptive of London Poverty 1898–9.” Charles Booth Online Archive. Accessed: 24 Nov. 2018 http://booth.lse.ac.uk/. “Bran-Pie of Current Literature.” Pall-Mall Gazette, 9 Oct. 1897, p. 1. Broadhurst, Joseph F. From Vine Street to Jerusalem. Stanley Paul, 1936. Bullman, Joseph, Neil Hegarty, and Brian Hill, The Secret History of Our Streets: London. Random House, 2012.

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Calder, Robert. “Arthur Morrison: A Commentary with an Annotated Bibliography of Writings about him.” ELT, vol. 28, no. 3, 1985, pp. 276–97. Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” (1944) University of Texas American Literature Website. 25 Nov. 2018 http://www.en.utexas.edu/ amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html. Chesterton, G.K. “A Defence of Detective Stories.” The Defendant, edited by Dale Ahlquist. Dover Publications, 2012, pp. 74–78. “Children of the Jago: A Talk with Mr. Arthur Morrison.” Daily News, 12 Dec. 1896, p. 6. Clarke, Clare. “Horace Dorrington, Criminal-Detective: Investigating the Re-Emergence of the Rogue in Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897).” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 28, no. 2, 2010, pp. 7–18. ———. Late-Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Cook, Michael. Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction: The Locked Room Mystery. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. “Foreword.” The Windsor Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, Jan. 1895, pp. 1–3. Friedrichs, Hulda. The Life of Sir George Newnes. Hodder and Stoughton, 1911. Greene, Hugh, ed. The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Early Detective Stories. Bodley Head, 1970. Greenfield, John. “Arthur Morrison’s Sherlock Clone: Martin Hewitt, Victorian Values, and London Magazine Culture, 1894–1903.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2002, pp. 18–36. Grella, George. “The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel.” Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robin W. Winks. Prentice Hall, 1980, pp. 103–20. Henley, W.E. “Some Novels of 1899.” North American Review, Feb. 1900, pp. 253–62. Herbert, Rosemary, ed. Whodunit?: A Who’s Who in Crime and Mystery Writing. Oxford UP, 2003. Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford UP, 2005. “How to Write a Short Story: A Symposium. III. By Arthur Morrison, Author of Tales of Mean Streets, Etc.” Bookman, March 1897, pp. 42–43. Keating, Peter. “Biographical Study.” A Child of the Jago, by Arthur Morrison. The Boydell Press, 1982, pp. 11–37. Kestner, Joseph A. The Edwardian Detective 1901–1915. Ashgate, 2000. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. “Magazines and Reviews.” The Leeds Mercury. 6 Dec. 1894, p. 3. “Martin Hewitt, Investigator.” Saturday Review 30 March 1895, p. 421. Miles, Peter. “Introduction”. A Child of the Jago, by Arthur Morrison. Oxford UP, 2012, pp. vii–xxvii. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. U of California P, 1988.

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Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998. Morrison, Arthur. “The Case of Janissary.” The Windsor Magazine, Feb. 1897b, pp. 370–82. ———. “The Case of the Mirror of Portugal.” The Windsor Magazine, Mar. 1897c, pp. 458–72. ———. “The Case of Mr Loftus Deacon.” The Windsor Magazine, Apr. 1897d, pp. 692–707. ———. A Child of the Jago, edited by Peter Miles. Oxford UP, 2012. ———. “Cockney Corners: Whitechapel.” Palace Journal, 14 April 1889. ———. The Dorrington Deed-Box. Rockville, MD: James A.  Rock & Company, Publishers, 2002. ———. “The Lenton Croft Robberies.” Strand Magazine, 1894b, pp. 308–21. ———. Martin Hewitt, Investigator. BiblioBazaar, 2008. ———. “Martin Hewitt, Investigator: The Affair of the Tortoise.” Strand Magazine, vol. 8, July 1894a, pp. 269–78. ———. “The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby.” The Windsor Magazine, Jan. 1897a, pp. 244–258. ———. “Old Cater’s Money.” The Windsor Magazine, May 1897e, pp. 97–101. “Mr. Arthur Morrison” Academy, 4 Dec 1897, p. 493. Nead, Lynda. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. Yale UP, 2000. Newens, Stan. Arthur Morrison. The Alderton Press, 2008. “New Writers: Mr. Arthur Morrison.” Bookman, Jan. 1895, p. 107. Panek, LeRoy. An Introduction to the Detective Story. Bowling Green UP, 1987. Pepper, Andrew. Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State. Oxford UP, 2016. Pittard, Christopher. Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction. Ashgate, 2011. Priestman, Martin. Figure on the Carpet: Detective Fiction and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 1990. ———. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2003. “Recent Novels.” The Times, 27 Dec. 1897, p. 4. Rev. of Martin Hewitt, Investigator, by Arthur Morrison. Bookman, vol. 7, no. 41, Feb. 1895a, p. 156. Rev. of Martin Hewitt, Investigator, by Arthur Morrison. The Times, 22 Feb. 1895b, p. 15A. Rev. of Martin Hewitt, Investigator, by Arthur Morrison. Saturday Review, 30 March 1895c, p. 421. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Blackwell, 1977. Wells, H.G. “A Slum Novel: A Child of the Jago.” The Saturday Review, 28 Nov. 1896, p. 573. Wiener, Martin. Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England 1850–1914. Cambridge UP, 1990.

Fig. 5.1  “The Female Sherlock Holmes. Hagar of the Pawnshop. Adventure No. 1—The First Customer and the Florentine Dante.” The Evening World (New York) 25 July 1906, p. 8. (Public domain image accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica. loc.gov/)

CHAPTER 5

Detective Hagar Stanley, by Fergus Hume

“‘Hagar of the Pawnshop’ (Skeffington) by Fergus Hume, reads like a parody of Sherlock Holmes. Hagar makes the most momentous discoveries with a maidenly modesty only equalled by the extreme idiocy of every one with whom she comes into contact.” “Fiction.” The Saturday Review 2 April 1898, p. 471 “Fergus Hume is without doubt one of the most brilliant novelists of the day. His stories have enormous circulation in Book form and they are equally popular as newspaper serials.” “Our new serial story.” Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser and General Intelligencer 5 May 1904, p. 7

The two reviews above encapsulate the class dimensions underpinning the literary views of two different types of publication. For the Saturday Review, Fergus Hume’s Hagar of the Pawnshop, a volume collecting twelve serial stories about Hagar Stanley, Romany pawnshop worker and female detective, was “like a parody of Sherlock Holmes,” characterised by Author: Fergus Hume (1859–1932). Volume edition: Hagar of the Pawn-shop. Skeffington & Son, 1898. Serial publication: “Hagar of the Pawnshop.” Liverpool Weekly Mercury 31 July 1897–16 October 1897 and Woolwich Gazette 10 Sept 1897–26 November 1897. © The Author(s) 2020 C. Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891–1901, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8_5

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“idiocy” (“Fiction” 471). For Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser and General Intelligencer, a provincial newspaper of the type in which the stories were first serialised, Fergus Hume was a “brilliant novelist”: his brilliance proven by his commercial appeal, the “enormous circulation” of his books and the popularity of his newspaper serials (“Our New”). The Saturday Review, a highbrow weekly magazine established in 1855, was “largely written by clever university men and exud[ed] a distinct aura of intellectual snobbery” (Garlick and Harris 79). The magazine was written for men like its writers—“the educated upper middle class”; as Thompson explains, it was “explicitly geared to university-educated men with classical educations” and “was often quite rude about people who lacked these ‘advantages’” (Tilley 558; Thompson 122). As a result, the “robust, at times rambunctious nature of its prejudices and reviews” led to the caustic nickname, The Saturday Reviler (Tilley 558). By contrast, Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser and General Intelligencer was a provincial local newspaper based in the “neat and well-built market town and port” of Ulverston, Lancashire (Mannex 439). The weekly paper reported on births, deaths, marriages, farming and shipping news, and local tragedies, alongside which it published syndicated serial fiction by popular authors. Its low price and provincial location suggest it was a publication “aimed squarely at working class readers” of the area: workers in the town’s iron, brick, wire, or gas works or Samuel Pollitt’s paper mill (Hobbs 57). As the two reviews above encapsulate, Hume’s work was clearly enjoyed by the newly mass-literate working classes and pooh-poohed by the educated upper classes. Although no longer a household name, in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods Fergus Hume was exceptionally popular with an “enormous circulation”—he was the author of the bestselling detective novel of the nineteenth century. His literary debut—The Mystery of a Hansom Cab—a murder mystery set in Melbourne, published in 1886, was the first crime novel to sell over half a million copies. In the year before the publication of the novella often taken to be the first significant work of late-­ Victorian detective fiction—Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887)—The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was published in Australia and sold more than 25,000 copies in just three months. Before the turn of the century, Hume’s novel had become a global hit: it had been re-published in the UK, France, and America; it had been turned into a successful stage play in London, Melbourne, and New York (running for over 500 performances in London).

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In October 1886, Hume had 5000 copies of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab printed and published at his own expense. According to the Illustrated London News, this edition sold out in spectacularly quick time: “in seven days after its publication not only 500 but 5000 copies were sold in Melbourne” (“The Author of Madame Midas” 410). A second and third printing followed “until in three months 25,000 copies were disposed of, a circulation unexampled in the history of the colony” (410). A few months after its Australian debut, Hume sold the rights to the novel to a group of London-based speculators who promptly rebranded themselves the “Hansom Cab Publishing Company” (Hume “Preface”). Although the rights were purchased for the then large sum of fifty pounds (A Study in Scarlet earned Doyle only half that amount), Hume could have made thousands if it he had had the foresight to retain them. The first London printing of the novel followed in November 1887, with the subtitle “a startling and realistic story of Melbourne social life.” In Britain, as in Australia, readers were swept away by Hansom Cab, where it soon enjoyed further tremendous sales. As J. W. Trischler, founder of the Hansom Cab Publishing Company, advised the London Evening News in January 1888: On 3rd December [1887] we published an edition of 50,000; early in January a further edition of 25,000; at the end of the month an edition of 50,000, of which we have only 7000 left; and now there is another edition of 50,000 in the hands of the printers, who are working night and day. We can’t supply the trade fast enough. (“An Australian Author” 5)

In May 1888, the Inquirer and Commercial News advised readers that “the Hansom Cab Publishing Company, Ludgate Hill, have already sold 200,000 copies and their present steady sale is at the rate of 3,000 daily” (“Our Adelaide Letter”). In October 1888, just eleven months after the novel was first published in the UK, the Illustrated London News reported that sales were now well in excess of 300,000 copies, declaring the novel to be a “startling” and “unparalleled success” and “the most popular book of modern times” (“The Author of Madame Midas” 410). Indeed, so remarkable was the novel’s international success that numerous newspapers and magazines across the globe reported on its extraordinary sales figures—in August 1888 the New York Times divulged that Hansom Cab had sold 300,000 copies in the UK alone, as did English magazines the Athenaeum and the Graphic, and Australian newspapers the Argus and the Launceston Examiner (“Brevities”). To put this in context, Marie Corelli’s

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The Sorrows of Satan (1895), the book widely believed to have been the bestselling novel of the nineteenth century, sold around 100,000 copies per year (Ferguson 67). As Hume’s 1932 obituary in the Times summed up Hansom Cab’s popularity, “everybody read it eagerly, and in fact it went all over the world” (“Obituary” 17). Flushed with the literary success of Hansom Cab, Hume moved to England in 1888 to pursue authorship full-time, by which time he had published a further three novels; by 1900 that number had risen to forty-­ six. Hume was one of the new type of writers of commercial fiction working to the market, frowned upon by guardians of established literary culture and satirised in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). For Hume, as for Gissing’s Jasper Milvain, literature was “a trade” and he was a “skilful tradesman” (3). Like Milvain, Hume thought “first and foremost of the markets” and was always “ready with something new and appetising” (12). As he bluntly put it in an 1893 interview with Raymond Blathwayt, “I don’t know that books are written primarily, as a rule, with any other object but that of getting money for the authors of them” (Blathwayt). Later in the interview, Hume divulged with pride that his fifth novel, The Piccadilly Puzzle, published by F.V.  White and Co. in 1889, had “the distinction of obtaining the highest price ever paid for any 1s book in England” (Blathwayt). One might imagine that this level of global, commercial success would establish Hume as one of the biggest stars of nineteenth-century popular fiction. This, however, is not the case. In the 1893 Blathwayt interview, Hume describes the juxtaposition of his commercial and popular success with his lowly reception from British literary critics: “critics are very irritating … they have been hostile for many years. They believed no good could come from the writer of ‘The Hansom Cab’” (Blathwayt). As an adjunct to this, he discusses his own irritation with Hansom Cab and his desire to break free of his reputation as a “one-book man”: “To go back to the ‘Hansom Cab,’ of which I may say I am heartily sick now, I want you to understand that I am doing all I can to get away from it … I will not be bound down by the Tradition of the Hansom Cab” (“Fergus Hume Dead”; Blathwayt). In words that voice a concern strikingly similar to Arthur Conan Doyle’s later desire to get away from his mythopoeic creation, Sherlock Holmes, Hume discusses his desire to leave behind Hansom Cab and detective fiction, to branch out into poetry, romance,

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and theatre. Speaking only seven years after Hansom Cab’s publication, Hume termed the novel “a regular Frankenstein’s monster,” concluding, “I am pursued through life by this monster, which, after all, is but the creation of an immature boy” (Blathwayt). Much like Doyle, Hume found that he could not escape Hansom Cab and that publishers and readers preferred him to produce the type of crime and detective fiction with which he had made his reputation; as one obituary put it, “Mr Hume used to complain that as a result of his success as a writer of detective stories his publishers would not hear of him writing anything else” (“Death of Fergus Hume” 6). Indeed, the Australian Dictionary of Biography records that he regularly published as many as seven crime novels per year (Kirk). In 1932, the year of his death, Hume’s final novel—aptly named The Last Straw—was published. His final publication tally stood at around 140 novels alongside a few collections of short stories. Many of these were serialised, but not in the better-known middle-­ market periodicals such as the Strand or Pearson’s. Instead, the novels and collections that were serialised featured in provincial local newspapers like the Liverpool Weekly Mercury and the Cork Weekly News, which were “weekly news miscellanies…full of magazine-style material” (Hobbs 184).1 This was not necessarily a bad thing, however; as Graham Law and Andrew Hobbs’s work has shown, the provincial weekly news miscellany was “one of the most popular types of newspaper from the 1860s until the First World War,” with impressive sales figures in the tens of thousands per week (Hobbs 244). Hume’s decision to publish using this mode of serialisation likely occurred because of the late-nineteenth-century growth of newspaper fiction syndication that accompanied the popularity of provincial newspapers. As Graham Law has explained, the mid-century predominance of “monthly serialization in relatively expensive, low-circulation formats, produced as petty commodities for the bourgeois market by book publishers” was overtaken in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s by “weekly serialization in relatively cheap, high-circulation formats, produced as commodities for the mass market newspaper proprietors” (14). This syndicated fiction was published in “groups of provincial weekly papers with complementary circulations”—papers such as the Leeds Mercury, the Newcastle Weekly Courant, and the Bolton Weekly Journal (Law 33). This change depended largely on the establishment of the Bolton-based Tillotson’s ‘Fiction

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Bureau’, a newspaper syndication agency founded in 1873 to sell serial fiction to provincial newspapers (Law 33). Starting with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Taken at the Flood in 1873, Tillotson’s “worked to create a ‘coterie’ of up to a dozen major provincial weeklies with complementary circulations  …  to serialize new novels simultaneously, or virtually so, in advance of volume publication, which typically occurred shortly before the appearance of the final serial instalment” (Law 69). As Law’s scholarship demonstrates, however, by the late 1890s, this turned around once more, with the provincial local newspaper no longer at the vanguard of periodical publication and “a decline in the prestige of authors” publishing in provincial newspapers, as the top authors were poached instead by “mass-circulation periodicals produced in London”—magazines such as the Strand, Pearson’s, and the Harmsworth (Law 87; 85). Hagar of the Pawnshop is representative of the above publication pattern in that it was initially serialised in provincial British newspapers, the Liverpool Weekly Mercury (31 July 1897–16 October 1897) and the Woolwich Gazette (10 Sept 1897–26 November 1897), as well as in the Toronto-based Canadian Magazine, before its release in volume form by Skeffington & Son in 1898.2 In 1906 the stories were again serialized, with illustrations, in a number of American newspapers: The Evening World (New York)—under the title “The Female Sherlock Holmes,” The Salt Lake Herald, The San Francisco Call, The Barre Daily Times (Barre, Vermont), The Evening Stateman (Barra Barra, Washington)3 (See Fig. 5.1). That the stories were serialized via newspaper syndication at a time when that format was declining in popularity, instead of in a higher-­ status monthly periodical like the Strand, seems to confirm that Hume was not considered one of the top tier of popular fiction writers, as were Doyle, L.T. Meade, or Arthur Morrison. Nonetheless, with their examination of the intersections between class, gender, racial identity, and consumerism, the stories constitute an intriguing and unusual addition to the collection of New Woman lady detectives who appeared in fiction in the late 1890s. Hagar of the Pawnshop is Hume’s only detective short-story series, following the Doylean model of twelve self-contained adventures featuring a private investigator. “The Coming of Hagar,” the first story in the collection, depicts the circumstances in which the young Romany gypsy woman comes to manage a pawnshop in London’s Lambeth, belonging to her soon-to-be-deceased uncle, Jacob Dix. The Hagar to whom we are introduced is in some ways the stereotypical Oriental woman of much

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late-­Victorian popular fiction; she is dark and beautiful, mysterious and exotic; Dix thinks of her as “like some dead Syrian princess” (16). To this, though, is married the independence and practicality of the New Woman; Hagar has fled her patriarchal “tribe” which insists she be forced into marriage with a man she hates (19). In the city she hopes to learn a trade in return for board and lodgings. Under Dix’s tyrannical tutelage, Hagar works hard, scrubbing, cooking, and cleaning as well as becoming “a connoisseur” of pawned items, accruing “a knowledge of pictures, gems, silverware, china—in fact all the information about such things necessary to an expert” (20). The ensuing eleven stories revolve around Hagar minding the pawnshop until Dix’s son and rightful heir can be located and, in the meantime, using her “clear mind and unerring judgement” to investigate the objects brought into the shop to be pawned; these investigations leading not only to crimes, but to Hagar’s exploration of the social history of the objects’ socially and geographically heterogenous bunch of owners (22). Lending money on the security of pledged items is a practice dating back thousands of years, but it was during the nineteenth century that pawnbroking experienced its greatest expansion. In 1826, there were 269 licensed pawnshops in Great Britain; by 1890 that number had grown to 4433, a number that would continue to rise every year until 1914 (Minkes 18). As a result, the pawnshop became a common site of investigation for Victorian journalists and authors. In Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1835), for instance, the author visits a “low, dirty-looking” pawn shop near London’s Drury Lane, from which he extrapolates the tragic backstories of three sets of female customers at different stages of social descent as they are forced to part with sentimental or necessary personal items. As he puts it: Of the numerous receptacles for misery and distress with which the streets of London unhappily abound, there are, perhaps, none which present such striking scenes as the pawnbrokers’ shops. The very nature and description of these places occasions their being but little known, except to the unfortunate beings whose profligacy or misfortune drives them to seek the temporary relief they offer. (Dickens 217)

In nineteenth-century Britain, there were two kinds of pawn shop: the rarer ‘city’ pawn shop, which lent money on fine goods such as jewellery and silver to affluent customers in financial difficulties, and the more

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common ‘industrial’ pawn shop, of the type visited by Dickens, which handled the everyday items of the poor and working classes: items like coats, workmen’s tools, and cooking pots. A typical cycle in an industrial pawnshop saw customers’ Sunday best clothes pawned on Monday morning in exchange for weekday work tools, then the tools pawned again on a Saturday evening to retrieve the clothes needed for church on Sunday morning. Others might pawn daily, depositing their blankets first thing in the morning and redeeming them at night with the overcoat that they would not need until the following day.4 In Hume’s stories, Jacob Dix’s pawnshop is “an ogre’s castle,” “begrimed with the dust of years” and located in the centre of “a dingy crescent” (7–8). “Carby’s Crescent,” in Lambeth, is a real district south of the river Thames and coloured in the blues and greys of poverty in Charles Booth’s Poverty Maps. Yet, despite its grimy appearance and poor locale, it appears not to be entirely a downmarket establishment, the premises appear to be an amalgamation of both the city and the industrial pawnshop. We can tell this by its windows, which display a “heterogenous” and socially-diverse mixture of high and low items, “ranging from silver teapots to well-worn saucepans; from gold watches to rusty flat-irons; from the chisel of a carpenter to the ivory framed mirror of a fashionable beauty” (8). Whether from high or low patrons, however, every pawned article is full of pathos, illuminating “the relics and wreckage, the flotsam and jetsam, of many lives, of many households” (8). Alongside prosaic domestic items, Hume describes a collection of sensational and exotic artefacts from foreign lands: “a small cabinet of Japanese lacquer,” “a silver-handled dagger of the Renaissance,” “the bandaged hand of a Pharaonic mummy,” “jewelled pipes of Turkey,” and “talismans of coral from Southern Italy, designed to avert the evil eye” (8–9). For the text’s narrator, this melting-­ pot of forgotten objects from once-great foreign nations are “a commentary on the durability of empire,” the “wreckage of many centuries; dry bones of a hundred social systems, dead or dying!” (9) It is clear, then, that this a collection in which we are invited to pay close attention to the layers of signification contained within material things. Under the broad, nebulous umbrella of ‘thing theory,’ stuff, things, and objects in Victorian fiction have recently begun to receive a lot of critical attention; this attention aiming to “recuperate literary objects from the realms of mere description,” that is, from the realms of background description and clutter (Mills 33).5 Both Elaine Freedgood and John Plotz stage useful interventions into this debate by arguing that it is an

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over-­simplification that the nineteenth-century growth of commodity culture alone explains the attention to things in Victorian fiction. For Freedgood, objects can tell us “about their own social lives,” which can be brought to bear on the “manifest or dominant narrative” of the literature in which they feature (12). For Plotz, Victorian objects and things are “dually endowed,” that is, “they are at once products of a cash market and, potentially, the rare fruits of a highly sentimentalized realm of value” (Plotz, Portable 2). Certainly, this mixture of marketability and sentimentality seems highly applicable to the diverse range of objects regretfully pledged to Jacob Dix’s pawnshop out of necessity. While I do not wish to get too bound up in the intricacies of thing theory, Freedgood rightly points out that “thing culture” has a particular resonance in detective fiction, which she describes as a “cultural site in which a found object can be convincingly stripped of its randomness” (8). Indeed, a stolen moonstone or a purloined letter would be obvious examples. To Freedgood’s astute observation I would add that “thing culture” has a greater resonance still in late-Victorian detective fiction—as it is most often focused on crimes of property, as opposed to crimes upon the body. Using the example of Sherlock Holmes (who else?), Freedgood suggests that “detective fiction not only tells us which things to read for meaning, in the person of Sherlock Holmes … it allows us to witness a ‘reader’ who almost always possesses the necessary empirical information to tease out the precisely right meanings in each case” (152).6 Indeed, from a man’s trouser leg, from a woman’s sleeve, from a footprint, from any sort of matter or thing out of place, Sherlock often reads details pertaining to his cases. Hume’s Hagar of the Pawnshop takes further than the Sherlock stories, and makes more literal, the possibilities opened up by the detective’s interpretation of objects and things. Each of Hagar’s cases derive from her contact with objects pledged by individuals of all social classes, ages, and values: from close to home, a worthless Georgian silver-plate teapot stuffed with letters explaining its spinster owner’s jilting and subsequent descent into lonely poverty and a pair of “strong labourer’s boots,” pawned to cover up a murder (157; 204). From far-flung countries, an “extremely rare” Florentine second edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy; an “Egyptian” necklace of “magnificent amber beads”; a “revoltingly ugly” carved jade idol of Kwan-tai, the Chinese god of war; a Renaissance-era Italian silver crucifix-cum-dagger; a copper key engraved in Arabic; a lacquer Chinese toy from “the other side of Nowhere”; a “Renaissance casket of silver”; and, finally, a Persian ring of gold and turquoise with “the look of a

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talisman or amulet” (37; 63; 90; 110; 133; 182; 228; 252). It is by investigating the history of the pawned things—and people who pledge them— that Hagar uncovers mysteries and solves crimes involving the most racially and socially diverse group of characters in late-Victorian detective fiction, ranging from English aristocrats and Irish labourers to African and Middle-­ Eastern immigrants. The Hagar stories go beyond this focus on objects and owners as the locus of mystery, however, by also opening up questions of Hagar herself as thing or object. As Plotz, and others have pointed out, alongside inanimate objects, human beings can also be considered things: as Susan M. Pearce succinctly puts it, “bodies are capable of being objectified. They can be bought and sold like any other commodity” (Pearce 162). Plotz gives the example of the original subtitle for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—“The Man Who Was a Thing”—as constituting a shocking confrontation of the ways in which humans were made into objects by the slave trade (Plotz, “Can” 110). As a woman, as a gypsy, and as a person of low-status, Hagar is presented as an object throughout this collection. She flees her Romany tribe as she is an object of too-intense affection from Goliath, a fellow tribe member who “would have forced me to be his wife”. Her escape is necessary, as her tribe leader “would have forced me also to be the man’s rani,” refusing to allow her to be defined in any other way than as Goliath’s rightful possession. After her escape to London she becomes an object of the pawnshop; Jacob Dix takes her on as he is “alive to the advantage of possessing a white slave” and Hagar herself often speaks of how she “sold [her]self into bondage” by agreeing to work there for free. Once installed in the pawnshop, the news that “a young and beautiful woman” is established in Dix’s premises soon spreads like wildfire through the neighbourhood. Hagar’s beauty and exoticism are commodities that attract customers and unwanted suitors alike— almost every case involves her pursuit by a male admirer. One such suitor is the malign Mr Vark, her uncle’s corrupt solicitor, who describes his love for Hagar in proprietary terms, as “wish[ing] to possess this treasure.” When he later declares himself her “slave” she replies, “What you call yourself in jest…I am in reality,” yet she maintains that she would prefer to remain a serf to the pawnshop than enter the enslavement of marriage with him. In this and other numerous small ways, Hagar is quick to distance her own worth from the commodity culture into which she has become embroiled; she professes disdain for people who “make capital out of everything,” she refuses wages, makes clear that she does not want, and

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will not accept, her dead uncle’s inheritance, and rejects the marriage proposal of Mr Vark, with the bold words: “I’m not for sale!” (24). Despite her work as a pawnbroker, then, Hume makes clear that Hagar stands above and outside of her learned trade, an exemplar of honesty and morality, with a “strict sense of duty, [an] upright nature, and [a] determination to act honestly, even when her own interests [were] at stake,” signalling her status as a trustworthy detective of the Holmesian type. The first proper detective story, “The Florentine Dante,” sets up the trajectory for Hagar’s ensuing adventures. In this story, Hagar meets a young man, Eustace Lorn, with whom she falls in love when he comes to the shop to pawn an extremely rare and valuable second edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Like a proto-Dan Brown story, Lorn tells Hagar that the ancient Italian book contains a secret code, revealing buried treasure. Based on her knowledge of the invisible ink used by Jacob Dix to send notes about nefarious transactions involving stolen goods, Hagar soon reveals the Dante’s invisible code and travels with Lorn to the site of the buried treasure. However, they find that no treasure is there—the false promise of a buried fortune mapped in the Dante was cruel hoax devised by Lorn’s deceased uncle to keep Lorn and others beholden to him. A neat twist to the story, however, is that the book itself is much more valuable than the uncle realised, and, in the final story of the collection, its sale facilitates Hagar’s escape from the pawnshop into an equitable marriage with the newly wealthy Lorn. In “The Second Customer and the Amber Beads,” Hagar joins forces with Detective Luke Horval of the Metropolitan Police; her keen eye and attention to detail mean that she notes important details that he misses. In the tradition of Doyle’s Inspector Lestrade or Wilkie Collins’s Superintendent Seegrave, Horval is a confident but wrong-footed detective who relies upon his often-incorrect assumptions based around issues of race and gender. Hagar, by contrast, is unencumbered by such prejudices. The story opens when a statuesque black woman comes to Hagar’s shop to pawn an expensive necklace of “magnificent amber beads threaded on a slender chain of gold” (47). She gives her name only as “Rosa, Marylebone Road” and does not speak through the whole transaction, appearing anxious to hide her face (47). An astute observer of behaviour and social status, Hagar feels that “the whole affair was queer” and that “the necklace seemed too fine for her to possess” (47). Nonetheless she accepts the pledge, taking the “judicious” precaution of noting the number of the five-pound note she gives the woman in case the item should

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turn out to be stolen (48). She also notes a “mark of identification” on the woman’s right hand, although the reader is not privy to what that mark is (48). Six days later, when Hagar receives a notice from Scotland Yard about a stolen necklace of amber beads, she immediately writes to the Detective Department. Horval, “a fat little man, with a healthy red face and shrewd twinkling eyes,” appears at the shop a short time later and relays to Hagar that a Mrs Arryford, the owner of the necklace, was murdered when the necklace was stolen (49). Flirting with Hagar and relaying his theory that “Rosa” murdered Mrs Arryford, Horval brags, “I guessed as much…The negress did it” (49). Mrs Arryford, Horval explains, was “the widder of a West Indian gent, and as rich as Solomon” (50). Both the amber beads, and her servant Rosa, were brought to England from the West Indies. In Horval’s theory, the girl and the necklace are linked together by an assumption of “some debased African superstition,” namely that “the necklace is a fetish, or charm, or luck-penny …  and Rosa was always wanting [it]” (53; 50). When Hagar asks how it is that Horval can be sure Rosa was the murderer, the detective answers blithely, “Cause I ain’t a fool, miss” (50). His theory seems to rely on an assumption of Rosa’s inherent criminality and acquisitiveness based solely on her West Indian nationality. Indeed, Horval appears to have overlooked entirely any suspicion attached to a Frederick Jevons, who is the beneficiary of Mrs Arryford’s estate. By contrast, Hagar’s interest is piqued by this information and “with true feminine curiosity” she accompanies the detective to the Arryford home to meet Rosa and Jevons (51). When she meets Rosa and inspects her “short…stout” appearance, Hagar immediately declares “that is not the woman who pawned the beads” (53). Convinced of the servant’s guilt, Jevons and his mother demand that Rosa be arrested. When the detective refuses to do so, based upon Hagar’s testimony that Rosa did not pawn the beads, the pair throw the servant out of the house. Like C.L. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke, Hagar is shown to be a defender of friendless immigrant women, in whom she clearly recognises her own socially-marginal position. Therefore, she immediately suggests that Rosa stay with her at the pawnshop until the matter is cleared up. Hagar speaks privately to Horval and imparts some information—withheld from the reader—about Rosa and Jevons, which appears to solve the case. Horval

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responds: “You ought to be a man, with that head of yours… you’re too good to be a woman,” to which Hagar bluntly replies: “And not bad enough to be a man” (56). In a detail that hardly conforms to the rules of fair play later deemed so necessary to detective fiction, the reader is finally told that the physical detail Hagar noted when the beads were being pawned was that “Rosa” had a missing little finger on her right hand. As the real Rosa did not have this mutilation, but Mr Jevons did, Hagar immediately deduced that Jevons disguised himself as Rosa to pawn the beads. It turns out that his mother had killed Mrs Arryford so that her son could gain his inheritance and had hoped to frame Rosa for the crime. At the story’s close, Jevon’s mother commits suicide leaving behind a note in which she admits the murder and blames the “clever…woman who kept the pawn-shop” for the downfall of her plans (62). While divine justice takes care of the murderer, Hagar’s main concern is justice for the wronged Rosa, who has lost her job and her mistress. Hagar insists that Jevons “must do justice to Rosa” by giving her the amber necklace and “an annuity” (63). This idea of Hagar as a defender of marginalised women comes to the  fore again in “The Sixth Customer and the Silver Teapot,” where Hagar acts as “a very practical angel” to Margaret Snow, a “blind old maid,” who lives in a nearby attic, earning a “hard and penurious living” by weaving straw hand-baskets for one of London’s “great emporium[s]” (115; 111). In these baskets—a “speciality of the shop”—affluent customers carry away their expensive purchases (111). Again, this is a story that foregrounds the notion of capital, commenting upon the exploitative relationship between London’s developing consumer capitalism and its poorest citizens. In his extensive survey of the late-Victorian London poor, Charles Booth distinguished between those living in “poverty” and those in “want or distress”. For Booth, while the lives of the poor were “an unending struggle,” they were “neither ill-nourished nor ill-clad according to any standard that can be reasonably used.” Those “in want,” by contrast, were “ill-nourished, “poorly clad,” and “in distress” (Booth 43). Snow works and lives in a “freezing garret,” where she “denied herself a fire and reduced the amount of food she took;” her clothes are “thin” and her shoes “well-worn” (114). With her meagre standard of living and income of “ten shillings a week” on an extremely good week, Margaret Snow certainly falls well within Booth’s mooted poverty line of earnings below 18 shillings per week and seems

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to be one of London’s poorest citizens in a permanent state of “want or distress” (Booth 42).7 This is confirmed as Snow comes to Hagar to pawn her most prized possession, a silver teapot, when she falls ill and is unable to work or support herself in any way, “reduced to her last crust” (113). As the teapot is soldered shut, apparently filled with the old maid’s ancient love letters, it is practically worthless; Hagar is dubious about taking it as a pledge and offers instead to lend Miss Snow three pounds. The woman will take no charity, however, and demands that the teapot be pawned and reclaimed in three months. The “kind-hearted gipsy girl” takes the pawn, but also accompanies Miss Snow to her “freezing garret” where she nurses her, providing her with “fire and food and blankets,” with wine to drink and candles for light and cheer (115). It is while taking care of the dying woman that Hagar learns the story of her sealed teapot— it contains letters from John Mask, who was Snow’s fiancé 30 years ago and who suddenly broke off their engagement and immediately married her best friend Jane. “Now they are rich and prosperous and happy,” Snow cries, “while I—I am dying a pauper in a garret” (116). When Snow asks Hagar to unseal the teapot and to read aloud the letters, the girl-detective uncovers a deception. Taking advantage of her friend’s blindness, Jane had mailed forged letters to Margaret Snow’s fiancé breaking off their engagement. When John wrote back begging to know what had changed, Jane ‘read’ aloud fake missives to her blind friend, informing Margaret that he no longer loved her and wished to end the relationship. Heartbroken, Margaret accepted this news and sealed up all the letters in the silver teapot which he had given her. Jane, always in love with John, went on to contrive their engagement. The pair, now grandparents, live in London’s prosperous West End. Seeing herself as “Nemesis,” a restorer of moral justice, Hagar is determined that “the secret, buried in a silver teapot for thirty years, should be known, if not to the world, at least to John Mask” (123). She travels to the Masks’ West End home, asking them to pay a final visit to their old friend before her death. Hagar “urge[s] revenge” and implores Margaret Snow to “punish the vixen [Jane]” by telling John Mask about his wife’s deception (125). Margaret Snow, however, is a “martyr and a saint,” to the last; she is a “weak, sweet soul—leant to the side of charity” (111; 125). With her last breath she forgives Jane and implores Hagar not to tell John the truth about his wife’s cruel deception. Hagar reluctantly complies.

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This is a story full of links between face value and real value, between monetary and moral worth: a penniless basket-weaver who supplies goods for the city’s richest consumers but cannot afford to feed or clothe herself; a dearly-valued but ultimately worthless teapot containing prized letters that unveil the story of a marriage and a life built on deception and cruelty. A well-off “happy wife and mother” from London’s West End who has stolen the place of her friend and condemned her to “thirty years of wasted life” in the slums (126). In the story, Hume invites us to appreciate the values of kindness and forgiveness, as opposed to financial and social success. Although “well-off, trusted, and comfortable,” Jane Mask is filled with shame and has “suffered in secret” all her life (126). Despite her poverty and privation, Margaret Snow is “a lady born,” graced with a kind heart and “god-like forgiveness” (114; 127). In spite of her lowly station as a pawn-shop worker and a gypsy, Hagar is “an angel,” but not the mid-­ Victorian ideal of the passive Angel in the House popularised in Coventry Patmore’s poem of that name; instead, she is “a very practical angel” who understands how to care for a sick woman and how to detect and go about avenging the moral wrongs done against her (115). In “The Ninth Customer and the Casket” Hume returns to the plot point of hidden love letters. In this story, Hagar is visited by John Peters, a “gentleman’s gentleman”—the “West-end servant” of a Lord Averley, who is trying to pawn a valuable silver casket dating back to the Renaissance (162). In appearance the man is “a respectable servant” in “an immaculate suit of black broad-cloth” (162). Hagar’s superior skills at decoding physiognomy immediately warn her, however, that despite appearances, this man is “a noxious thing, like a snake or a toad” (163). Underpinning the popular nineteenth-century interest in the science of physiognomy, which followed the publication of studies of criminal faces in Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man (1876), was the widespread belief that from the outward appearance, especially the facial features of strangers, one could easily detect their moral character. As an article in the prestigious Quarterly Review entitled “Physiognomy of the Human Form” reminded readers, “Everyone is in some degree a master of the art which is generally distinguished by the name Physiognomy and naturally forms to himself the character or fortune of a stranger from the features and lineaments of his face” (453). Therefore, “upon our first going into a company of strangers, our benevolence or aversion, awe or contempt rises naturally towards persons before we have heard them speak a single word” (453). Lombroso’s

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works, in which he catalogued and photographed prisoners according to their crimes, were reprinted many times throughout the nineteenth century and popular physiognomic pocket guides such as William Frith’s How to Read Character in Features, Forms, and Faces: A Guide to the General Outlines of Physiognomy (1891), traced the history and practice of the science, detailing the ways in which “our good and evil tempers, our besetting sins, habits and so on, mark our faces” (7). As Frith’s guide explains, “moral degradation induces physical decline … the lower a person descends in his own estimation, the more vulgar he becomes, the more disfigured he is” (111).8 Much critical work on Victorian fiction, especially the crime genre, argues that late-nineteenth-century authors drew heavily on physiognomic theory in their descriptions of criminal characters. One of the starkest examples of Frith’s mooted physical declines caused by moral degradation would be Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), in which the Dorian maintains his beautiful, youthful appearance while his hidden portrait displays the stigmata of his moral depravity. Likewise, Stephen Arata, has correctly pointed out that in the grotesque appearance of Edward Hyde, “[Robert Louis] Stevenson’s first readers could easily discern the lineaments of Lombroso’s atavistic criminal” (“Sedulous” 233). In Hume’s Hansom Cab, the author playfully inverted the association between physiognomy and criminality with the malign appearance of detective Kilsip signifying his untrustworthy nature: he was “hardly a pleasant object to look at” and “his strange looks seemed to warn people [off]” (92). In “The Ninth Customer,” Hagar immediately recoils from the servant who brings in the casket—she takes “an instant and violent dislike” to him and we are told that it is “by his physiognomy she knew him to be a scoundrel” (162, emphasis mine). Hagar is not wrong, and her instinct that “this valet was a thief and a scoundrel, who was abusing the trust his employer placed in him” is soon confirmed (164). Hagar accepts the pawned casket, which she believes to be stolen from his employer, with the plan to return it to its true owner. Somehow, she feels sure that the box contains a “secret drawer” and inspects the item closely in order to discover its hidden mysteries (164). Hagar hopes that she will find “evidence of some old Florentine tragedy” (165). Instead she finds a more sordid and prosaic secret—a bundle of late-nineteenth-century love letters addressed to the valet’s master.

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These hidden letters are “full of passionate and undisciplined love,” detailing “an intrigue between a married woman and a man,” in which “the writer lamented her marriage, raged that she was bound to a dull husband and called upon her dearest Paul to deliver her” (165). Hagar’s “pure and virginal soul shrank back from the abyss revealed by this lustful adoration”—she deems the author “a light woman—a bad woman” who “deserves punishment” (166).9 “In every line there was divorce,” Hagar recognises (166). Indeed, the 1857 Divorce Act allowed affluent middleand upper-class men to divorce their wives if they could prove they had committed adultery—women, by contrast, could divorce their husbands only if they could prove adultery in addition to “cruelty, desertion, bigamy, or incest” (Diamond 124). As Michael Diamond has detailed, the Victorian reading public feasted almost daily upon newspaper accounts of aristocratic scandals aired in the Divorce Court, many of which relied upon the evidence of diaries or love-letters (Diamond 124). High profile cases included those of adulterous aristocratic husbands Colonel Valentine Baker and Sir Charles Dilke; Kate Summerscale’s Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace (2013) is a recent study of a one of the most notorious divorce cases of the nineteenth century featuring a female adulterer, which used the evidence of her own words against her. As Summerscale puts it, “Over the five days of the trial, thousands of Isabella Robinson’s private words were read out in court, and the newspapers printed every one”; the diaries detailed a “sensual,” “godless and abandoned” affair between a respectable thirty-­ seven-­year-old Englishwoman and a young doctor whom she met at a society party in Edinburgh (xv). Thus, with an understanding of how useful love-letters could be in a case of divorce against this woman, Hagar deigns that, despite her repulsion at the woman’s actions, the letters must not fall into the hands of the loathsome valet, who she feels sure has “the face of a blackmailer” (166). “I won’t give her into the power of that reptile,” Hagar exclaims— “he would only fatten on her agony” (166). Blackmailing servants were a frequent topic of discussion in the late-Victorian British press; their unique position inside the homes of influential people gave them powerful access to potentially damaging secrets. “Servants Who Levy Blackmail,” first published in Cassell’s Saturday Journal and picked up by a number of regional papers, for instance, asserts that in West London, there exist a large number of “bona fide servants” who, with “ingenuity

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and shrewd cunning,” employ knowledge of the secrets of their aristocratic masters to “nefarious but profitable account,” trumpeting: “The blackmailing valet or lady’s-maid is a recognised terror to society.” Letters, the article explains, are a particularly valuable asset in the blackmailer’s armoury, recounting the example of “a lady of much wealth” who had been “paying a third of her income to her discharged maid, who had obtained possession of some incriminating letters written by her mistress” (“Servants”). Hagar immediately recognises that, as with the case above, in the hands of the loathsome valet, the woman’s letters could lead their author to be extorted and threatened with exposure leading to the divorce court. As keeper of the box and its contents, Hagar enjoys “a power over the [valet] which she exercised mercilessly” (167). So, when he returns to the pawnshop in search of the letters, Hagar questions him about the identities of their author and recipient and forces him to admit his blackmail plan. Peters tells her that Mrs Delamere, the author of the letters, is a “very great lady” and “a beautiful one” with “no end of money!” (171). Her husband is a well-known society figure, “immersed in politics and Blue-books,” and thus would not hesitate to “seek either a separation or a divorce … if once the name of Delamere was whispered about in connection with a scandal” (171). Armed with this knowledge, Hagar hatches a dummy plan with the valet, insisting that she visit Mrs Delamere to extort money from her—saying “I’ll get more out of her than you would”— which she will then share with him (170). On the detective’s visit to the woman’s home, Hume immediately contrasts the women’s social and moral worth—with the wealthy Mrs Delamere cast as a “frivolous doll,” a “foolish,” “weak little creature” against which low-status Hagar is “a noble woman” with a “grave, dark, poetic face” (172). Hume belabours this moral discrepancy and so, despite beginning their interview in a “proud and haughty” manner, we are told that Mrs Delamere soon realises “her foolish epistles were in the hands of a woman far more honourable than herself” and that Hagar was “not the kind of woman to blackmail an erring sister” (172). Returning the letters to Mrs Delamere with a stern admonishment to destroy them, Hagar continues to prove her moral superiority by refusing to accept a financial reward, or even a piece of jewellery, saying, “I take nothing from a woman who betrays her husband” (173). In this sense, Hume draws a distinction between Hagar and Holmes, who had often shown disdain for the aristocratic clients who

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came to him for help clearing up embarrassing affairs, such as the King of Bohemia, from whom he initially refused the gift of an emerald snake ring in favour of a photograph of Irene Adler. At the start of the next story, “A Case of Identity,” however, Holmes admits that he eventually accepted from the King an extremely valuable “souvenir” in the form of a “snuffbox of old gold with a great amethyst in the centre of its lid” (Doyle “A Case” 469). At the same time, Watson notices a “remarkable” ring upon his finger which Holmes admits is “from the reigning family of Holland, though the matter in which I served them was of such delicacy that I cannot confide it even to you” (469). As I’ve suggested elsewhere, while Holmes is usually disdainful of aristocrats, this does not make him a straightforward repository of middle-class values. Indeed, throughout his adventures, he is also condescending to many members of the middle and working classes, disrespectful to policemen, and full of admiration for clever criminals; thus, he is “not at all the straightforward embodiment of ‘solidity’ and ‘morality’” that is often claimed (Clarke 98). Instead, Holmes has an extremely inconsistent and complicated moral position, “displaying elements which are at once hardworking/lazy, normal/abnormal, and criminal/respectable” (Reitz xxi). Hagar, by contrast, in this and the other stories in the collection is resolutely unimpressed by any wrongdoer, choosing to see herself always as friend to the disenfranchised and a defender of solid moral values such as loyalty and fidelity. That Hagar is an unmarried gypsy girl running a business in one of London’s poorest regions is perhaps transgressive enough—Hume must imbue her with an unimpeachable moral code for fear of making her unpalatable to readers. The final story of the collection, “The Passing of Hagar” contains another formally conservative touch, with Hagar’s detective career “finish[ed] off, not at the Reichenbach Falls, but at the matrimonial altar,” as happens with most late-Victorian female detectives (Slung 17). Hagar’s betrothed returns with Goliath, the rightful heir of the pawnshop; Goliath’s return and the sale of the “Florentine Dante,” featured in the first story, facilitates Hagar’s release from the pawnshop and its “yoke of commerce” into an equitable marriage with the newly wealthy Lorn (252). The story ends with the pair taking to the roads, selling books from a gypsy caravan. While this story makes it hard to disagree with the Saturday Review’s assessment of the “extreme idiocy of every one with whom she [Hagar] comes into contact,” its larger story-arc of the sale of one special book facilitating a release from the sordid world of commerce and the sale

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of yet more books being intimately bound up in a continued life of happiness and prosperity seems to be a pointed rejoinder from Hume to those who had criticised The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and his career as a purveyor of marketable fiction.

Notes 1. They were subsequently published in volume form for six shillings by downmarket publishers of popular fiction such as Digby, Long, or Jarrold & Sons. None, however achieved the commercial success of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. 2. While Hagar of the Pawnshop has been mentioned in many surveys of the nineteenth-century detective story (see Knight 2004) and written about in more detail by a number of critics of the crime genre—see Kestner (2003); Slung (1975); Craig and Cadogan (1981)—this is the first chapter to uncover and discuss the stories’ serialisation. My thanks to Christopher Pittard, Andrew Hobbs, and Silvia Granata for their assistance in tracing the serial publication history of the text. 3. These newspapers are digitised by the Library of Congress and can be viewed online at the open-access Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers database. The Library of Congress states that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. See https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ 4. For more on the history and practices of pawnbroking see Tebbutt (1983). 5. For more on literature and ‘thing theory’ see Bill Brown (2003); Elaine Freedgood (2010). 6. I should point out that Freedgood does not analyse detective fiction in her study. 7. For more on Booth’s definitions of poverty and the subsequent challenges to the definitions see Spicker (1990). 8. For more on the nineteenth-century fascination with physiognomy see Pearl (2011) and Pick (1989). 9. The OED online shows that the phrase “light woman” was historically synonymous with being unchaste; “Of persons (chiefly of women) and their behaviour: Wanton, unchaste.” See “light, adj.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/108174. Accessed 11 December 2018.

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References “An Australian Author.” Otago Daily Times, 12 May 1888, p. 5. “The Author of Madame Midas.” Illustrated London News, 6 Oct. 1888, p. 410. Blathwayt, Raymond. “A Talk with Mr. Fergus Hume.” The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, 19 Jan. 1893, p. 6. Booth, Charles. Routledge Revivals: Charles Booth’s London, A Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century from His “Life and Labour of the People in London,” edited by Albert Fried and Richard M Elman. Routledge, 2017. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object in American Literature. U of Chicago P, 2003. Craig, Patricia, and Mary Cadogan. The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction. Gollanz, 1981. “Death of Fergus Hume: Novel Which Brought Him Fame.” Gloucester Citizen, 13 July 1932, p. 6. Diamond, Michael. Victorian Sensation. Anthem Press, 2003. Dickens, Charles. “The Pawnbroker’s Shop.” Sketches by Boz, with Illustrations by George Cruikshank (1835). Chapman and Hall, 1874, pp. 217–25. Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Case of Identity.” Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories with Illustrations from The Strand Magazine. Wordsworth, 2006, pp. 469–84. “Fergus Hume Dead.” Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 20 July 1932, p. 10. Ferguson, Christine. Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-­ de-­Siécle. Ashgate, 2006. “Fiction.” The Scotsman, 4 Dec 1899, p. 3. “Fiction.” The Speaker, 7 April 1894, p. 396. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. U of Chicago P, 2010. Frith, William. How to Read Character in Features, Forms, and Faces; A Guide to the General Outlines of Physiognomy. Ward, Lock, Bowden, & Co, 1891. Garlick, Barbara, and Margaret Harris. eds. Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic. Essays in Honour of P.D. Edwards. Queensland UP, 1998. Gavin, Adrienne E. “C.L. Pirkis (not ‘Miss): Public Women, Private Lives and The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective.” Writing Women of the Fin-­de-­ Siècle: Authors of Change, edited by Adrienne. E. Gavin and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton. Palgrave, 2012, pp. 137–52. Gissing, George. New Grub Street, edited by Katherine Malone. UP, 2016. Hume, Fergus. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. London: Hogarth Press, 1985. ———. Preface. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (revised edition). London: Jarrold, 1896. ———. Hagar of the Pawn-shop. Skeffington & Son, 1898.

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Kestner, Joseph A. Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913. Ashgate, 2003. Kirk, Pauline M. “Hume, Fergusson Wright (Fergus) (1859–1932).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hume-fergusson-wright-fergus-3817/text6053. Date of access: 10 December 2018. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Law, Graham. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. “light, adj.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2018, www.oed. com/view/Entry/108174. Accessed 11 December 2018. Mannex, P.J. History, Topography, and Directory, of Westmoreland. Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1849. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. “Trouble with She-Dicks: Private Eyes and Public Women in The Adventures [sic] of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 33, no. 1, 2005, pp. 47–65. Mills, Victoria. “Bricbracomania! Collecting, Corporeality and the Problem of Things in Victorian Fiction.” Literary Bric-a-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities, edited by Jen Harrison. Routledge, 2016, pp. 33–48. Minkes, A.L. “The Decline of Pawnbroking.” Economica, New Series, vol. 20, no. 77, 1953, pp. 10–23. “Murder in Manchester.” The Star [Christchurch, NZ], 25 May 1889, p. 2. “Obituary: Mr. Fergus Hume.” Times, 14 Jul. 1932, p. 17. “Our Adelaide Letter.” Inquirer and Commercial News, 2 May 1888, p. 5. “Our New Serial Story.” Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser and General Intelligencer, 5 May 1904, p. 7. Pearce, Susan M. Collecting in Contemporary Practice. Sage, 1998. Pearl, Sharrona. About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain Harvard UP, 2011. Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848–1914. Cambridge UP, 1989. Plotz, John. “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory” Criticism. Vol. 47. No. 1, 2005, pp. 109–118. ———. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton UP, 2008. “Servants Who Levy Blackmail.” South Wales Daily News, 4 Nov. 1895, p. 6. Slung, Michele. Crime on Her Mind. Pantheon, 1975. Spicker, Paul. “Charles Booth: The Examination of Poverty.” Social Policy and Administration, vol. 24, no. 1, 1990, pp. 21–38. Summerscale, Kate. Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace; The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady. Bloomsbury, 2012. Sutherland, John. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. Longman, 1988.

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Tebbutt, Melanie. Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-Class Credit. St. Martin’s, 1983. Thompson, Nicola Diane. Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels. New York UP, 1996. Tilley, Elizabeth. “Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art [1855–1938].” Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor. The British Library/Academia Press, 2009, pp. 557–58. Turner, T. The Three Gilt Balls: Or, My Uncle, His Stock-in-Trade and Customers. Marlborough, 1864.

Fig. 6.1  Cover image from Richard Marsh, An Aristocratic Detective (Digby, Long, & Co., 1900) by Harold Piffard

CHAPTER 6

Detective the Honourable Augustus Champnell, by Richard Marsh

“We do our best to keep up with Mr. Marsh. This is the eighth volume he has published this year. We have begun to take quite a sporting interest in Mr. Marsh, and ask ourselves anxiously—‘Can he manage twelve in the year?’” Review of An Aristocratic Detective The Academy 17 November 1900, p. 468

Although now best-known, if at all, for just one novel, The Beetle, which outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula upon their near-simultaneous publications in autumn 1897, Richard Marsh churned out a bewildering number of stories and volumes over the course of his career. As Minna Vuohelainen has discovered, between 1879 and 1915, Marsh published “under two names and also anonymously, 83 volumes of fiction and some 300 short stories” (“Introduction” xvi).1 The sheer volume of his output, taking in a wide range of popular genres—including the gothic, detection, popular romance, and comedy—alongside the diverse range of publishing formats and publishers he worked with, indicates someone who seems determined above all to earn well, gauging and accommodating the tastes of the newly Author: Richard Marsh [Richard Bernard Heldmann] (1857–1915) Volume edition: An Aristocratic Detective (Digby Long, & Co., 1900). Periodical publication: Manchester Times, Leeds Mercury, Newcastle Weekly Courant. © The Author(s) 2020 C. Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891–1901, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8_6

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massifying late-Victorian reading public. This chapter focuses on An Aristocratic Detective, one of only two collections of detective fiction penned by Marsh and one of the first detective series to feature an amateur sleuth drawn from the ranks of the British aristocracy (Fig. 6.1). As such, the collection, although uneven in quality, gives fascinating insight into late-Victorian ideas and anxieties about class and policing, while also demonstrating the ways in which popular and prolific authors plundered current popular fiction and news stories for plot ideas. As Bernard Heldmann, Marsh began his writing career in 1879 with the short adventure story “A Whale Hunt,” published in the juvenile monthly Peep-Show: A Magazine for the Young of All Ages. A number of short stories and serials followed, but his writing career began in earnest when, in 1880, he began to publish a number of school stories and adventure tales in G.A. Henty’s boys’ weekly magazine, Union Jack.2 By 1882, Heldmann had contributed at least seventy-eight instalments to 144 issues of the magazine, and in October of that year he was promoted to co-­ editor (Vuohelainen, “Bernard” 120). His relationship with the magazine ended promptly, however, with the curt announcement in the issue dated 5 June 1883: “Mr Heldmann has ceased to be connected in any way with the Union Jack” (“Notice”). Vuohelainen astutely suggests that the severing of the relationship resulted from the “unsuitable turn towards the violent and the supernatural” taken in the final instalment of Heldmann’s most recent story for the magazine, “A Couple of Scamps,” which would have been at odds with Henty’s ideal of “healthy” boys’ fiction (“Richard Marsh’s” 90). The magazine folded later that year, unable to compete with the more popular Boy’s Own Paper, and Heldmann did not publish again under that name, re-emerging after a five-year absence with the new pen-name Richard Marsh. Vuohelainen has uncovered the reason behind Heldmann’s five-year disappearance and change of name: Whether out of improvidence, greed or genuine hardship, Heldmann had been issuing forged cheques throughout much of 1883, moving from place to place in France and Britain, until he was finally apprehended by the police in February 1884. At the Maidstone Quarter Sessions in April 1884, he was sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour. After his release, he adopted the pseudonym ‘Richard Marsh’, a combination of his own first name and his mother’s maiden name. (Victorian Fiction Research Guide 3)

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As Richard Marsh, he began publishing in 1888, with a short story for the Belgravia magazine, after which he produced a further seventy-six volumes alongside an astonishing number of short stories for a range of established periodicals, regional newspapers, and cheap weekly magazines, before his death in 1915.3 The Beetle, Marsh’s greatest critical and commercial success, was initially serialised over fifteen weeks, beginning 13 March 1897, under the title “The Peril of Paul Lessingham: The Story of a Haunted Man.” It appeared in Answers, Alfred Harmsworth’s penny weekly paper, founded in 1888, which purportedly reached a readership of half a million per issue (Altick 396). As a testament to its commercial appeal, it was quickly released in six-shilling volume form by Skeffington in September 1897, with a blood-­ red cloth cover  and the snappier gothic title, The Beetle. The novel is a bewildering generic blend of the Imperial gothic, invasion narrative, romantic melodrama, and detective fiction with which Marsh no doubt hoped to emulate the recent successes of authors working in those genres, such as Marie Corelli, George Du Maurier, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Told by multiple narrators, The Beetle focuses on the assaults upon Paul Lessingham, a rising British politician, by a shape-shifting, gender-fluid Egyptian insect-woman. The beetle-woman, a priestess of Isis, has travelled to London to avenge Lessingham for his murder of one of her sisters when he was a young man. We learn that, in his youth, Lessingham had travelled to Egypt in search of unspecified pleasure and adventures; once there, he was mesmerised and captured by an exotic priestess who forced him to engage in sexual acts and to watch orgies and human sacrifices. He escaped by killing the priestess, whose descendant has come to exact revenge. She does so by stalking Lessingham—who now has an intense terror of beetles of any kind—, his fiancée Marjorie Lindon, his friend Sydney Atherton, and a number of others. Although he had previously featured in several short stories,  now almost completely forgotten, the aristocratic private detective the Honourable Augustus Champnell’s most enduring appearance occurs in its final chapters. Champnell narrates the closing part of the story—the investigation into the kidnap and assault of Marjorie Lindon by the shape-shifting Egyptian priestess, culminating in a high-speed chase across London, ending with the beetle’s eventual demise in a train derailment.4 The first volume edition of the novel sold out quickly, with three more impressions following in October, November, and December that year (Dalby 82). Indeed, not only did it outsell Bram Stoker’s Dracula upon their near-simultaneous publication but continued to do so well into

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the early twentieth century. The novel had reached its fifteenth impression by 1913, twentieth in 1917, and twenty-fourth in 1927 (Wolfreys 11). After his success with The Beetle in 1897, Marsh’s stories began to be picked up by the better-quality illustrated six-shilling monthlies, such as Cassell’s, the Windsor, and the Strand. Indeed, as Vuohelainen has traced, from 1900, the Strand “emerged clearly as Marsh’s primary and, after 1910, sole magazine contact, issuing sixty items by him between 1892 and 1916” (“Introduction” xvii). And in 1911, the Strand featured Marsh’s second detective series, “The Adventures of Judith Lee,” featuring a deaf, lip-reading female detective. It is perhaps surprising that Marsh did not turn his hand more often to the commercially viable genre of detective fiction, but as Victoria Margree and Johann Högland have both observed, perhaps as a result of his own experience of being convicted of white-collar crime, “Marsh’s main interest seem[ed] often to lie not with those who investigate crime but with those who commit it or are punished for it” (Margree, Orrells, and Vuohelainen 19). Unfortunately for Marsh, despite his prodigious literary production, he was never to repeat the tremendous critical and commercial success that he enjoyed with The Beetle. Owing to his immense output, as the epigraph from the Academy review above illustrates, critics and reviewers of his work were often glib in their assessment of the author’s merits and quick to focus instead upon the speed and tremendous quantity of his compositions. The review of An Aristocratic Detective in The Speaker witheringly termed the book “machine-made” and “not very satisfying as a stimulant even to the most jaded brain,” adding, “Mr. Marsh has… a fatal facility for turning out inferior stuff in endless quantities” (“An Aristocratic Detective”). The mechanical and mercenary production of literature, the notion of literature as a product, and concerns about the modern man-of-­ letters merely as a writing machine was a pressing preoccupation in the late-Victorian literary scene. George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), which focuses on the contrasting fates of two types of author—Edward Reardon, the man of art and principle, writing long, earnest books that don’t sell and Jasper Milvain, the man of business, commercial hack writer, happy to supply the types of lightweight literature and articles demanded by the new mass readership—is perhaps the most famous examination of the exigencies of the industrialisation and commercialisation of the late-­ Victorian literary marketplace. In the novel, Marian Yule, “a modern literary girl,” who performs drudge-like writing work as her father’s amanuensis, spots an advertisement for a “Literary Machine,” which she

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imagines is a new invention: an “automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself, to turn out books and articles” (Gissing 15; 96; 96). The Literary Machine is not such an invention (it is, more prosaically, merely a book-holder), but still Marian muses that machine-written literature is surely not far away: “some Edison would make the true automaton … Only to throw in a given number of old books, and to have them reduced, blended, and modernised into a single one for today’s consumption” (Gissing 96). Literature, she imagines, will soon be written by a machine, which will blend elements from the most popular contemporary novels, producing something familiar but new. Only a few years later, critics and reviewers were suggesting that Richard Marsh’s books might have been made by just such a “Literary Machine.” The year after his hit with The Beetle, doubtless in part to try to capitalise upon that success, Marsh brought detective Augustus Champnell back in a novel, The House of Mystery (1898), another highly sensational tale of kidnap, stolen identity, murder, and mesmerism, in which heiress and singer Maud Dorrincourt falls under the malign influence of evil hypnotist Aaron Lazarus, who takes away her singing voice and forces her to stab her fiancé. Lazarus is eventually tracked down by Champnell and falls to his death at the end of the novel. With its focus on singing and mesmerism, the novel was almost certainly inspired (to put it kindly) by George du Maurier’s bestseller of 1894, Trilby. In du Maurier’s novel, the mesmerist Svengali—now one of the most enduring figures in literary history—hypnotises a tone-deaf Irish girl, Trilby O’Ferrall, to become a famous operatic diva. The novel is widely recognised as one of “the first modern best seller[s],” with sales of over 200,000 copies in its first year (Showalter vii). But, even before his appearances in The Beetle and The House of Mystery, Champnell had starred in three short stories for British regional newspapers, with two further Champnell stories appearing after 1897. Together, these five Champnell stories have not been the subject of any sustained critical attention and are largely forgotten minor components in Marsh’s vast bibliography. However, as the stories’ review in the Bookman points out, with his detective drawn from the ranks of the aristocracy, Marsh had “conceived something new in the matter of detective stories” (“An Aristocratic” Bookman). Indeed, these stories appear to be the first detective series to feature an aristocratic detective (predating Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey by more than 20 years); as such, they are worth examining for their intriguing explorations of the class dynamics of late-­ Victorian criminality and policing.5

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Some nineteen months or so after Sherlock Holmes had met his “death” at Reichenbach, the first story in Marsh’s Augustus Champnell series—“The Lost Letter”—was published on 13 July 1895  in the Newcastle Weekly Courant, a regional paper that had been in operation in Newcastle-­ Upon-­ Tyne since the beginning of the eighteenth century. This mode of serial publication illustrates the growing possibilities for authors offered by newspaper fiction syndication at this time. As Graham Law has explained, the mid-century predominance of “monthly serialization in relatively expensive, low-circulation formats” was overtaken in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s by “weekly serialization in relatively cheap, high-circulation formats, produced as commodities for the mass market newspaper proprietors” (14). This syndicated fiction was published in “groups of provincial weekly papers” with overlapping and complementary circulations—papers such as the Newcastle Weekly Courant and the Leeds Mercury (Law 33). The second story in the sequence, “Lady Majendie’s Disappearance” appeared in the Leeds Mercury, in August 1896 and a week later in the Thetford and Watton Times. The third, “The Robbery on the Stormy Petrel” was published in the Newcastle Weekly Courant in March 1896 and in the Leeds Mercury on the same day.6 “The Lost Letter” was re-published in the South Wales Echo in July 1897, just after the final instalment of The Beetle in Answers magazine, and three months before the volume publication of the novel. Perhaps as part of a bid to capitalise upon the previous commercial success of that novel and to reignite interest in it, Marsh released two further short stories featuring Augustus Champnell in 1899. This may have been precipitated by the fact that, by the end of 1898, The Beetle had dropped off its regular spot on the Bookman’s list of wholesale bestsellers, “Monthly Report of the Wholesale Book Trade,” for the first time since its release in 1897. Thus, “The Burglary at Azalea Villa” was published in the Manchester Times in January 1899 and in the Newcastle Weekly Courant later that month.7 “The Stolen Treaty” was published in the Manchester Times on 27 October and the Newcastle Weekly Courant on 28 October.8 The range of publications in which these stories appeared is something of a mixed bag—while they are all provincial publications, some are of higher status than others. As Andrew Hobbs’ work delineates, the “provincial press” included “many different types of non-metropolitan newspapers,” including “local weeklies  … typically serving a market town or borough; the county weekly … based in the county town and circulating across the entire shire … the weekend regional miscellany paper … [and] higher status city morning

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papers, such as the Manchester Guardian  … with a largely middle-class readership” (Hobbs 16). The Leeds Mercury, for instance, was a daily city newspaper, described by Hobbs as “particularly close in style to the [London] Times;” the Newcastle Weekly Courant was a weekly miscellany, “published on Saturday, and aimed mainly at working-class readers,” featuring “a summary of the week’s regional, national and international news, slanted towards the more sensational stories, plus middle-brow magazine-style material aimed at a family audience, including serial fiction” (Hobbs, Fleet 148). In all these tales, Champnell, the son of the aristocratic Earl of Glenlean, is called in by high-status clients who wish to hush up an embarrassing crime or avoid dealing with the proletarian police. As Vuohelainen’s pioneering work on Marsh has shown, Champnell is only one of many serial characters in Marsh’s fiction, and thus just one example of the type of opportunistic “recycling” prudent, and perhaps necessary, when one is a hugely prolific author. Four of the Champnell stories were later collected and published by Digby, Long, and Co. as An Aristocratic Detective (1900), a rag-tag volume edition containing a miscellany of thirteen tales of romance and adventure, all of which had first been published in magazines and newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s.9 A fifth Champnell tale— “The Robbery on the Stormy Petrel”—was collected along with assorted unrelated stories in another collection, The Seen and the Unseen (1900). That all the Champnell stories were not collected and published together in one volume seems erratic and a little puzzling; it is perhaps an indication of Marsh’s straitened circumstances or, at the least, an indication of inattention to detail beyond the swift realisation of commercial value. The action of “The Lost Letter,” the first story of the series, opens by setting the scene for how Champnell came to take up private detection and therefore takes place before his appearance in The Beetle (1897), in which he was already established and operating as a  successful private detective, known for his “skill and tact” in cases of “a very delicate nature” (206). Indeed, the story was written and published a couple of years before Marsh’s success with The Beetle, first appearing in the Newcastle Courant on 13 July 1895. It was also re-published in the South Wales Echo after The Beetle’s release, on 22 July 1897. In the story, the Hon. Augustus Champnell is introduced as a “tall, well-built, good-looking young fellow” of aristocratic birth—his father is the Earl of Glenlean with the “family seat” in the Northern Highlands of Scotland (5).10 Champnell has travelled home to ask his father’s permission that he may take up “the

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profession of detective” (5). His justification for asking to take up this profession suggests that he and the family have hit straitened circumstances: “I have … no money of my own; you have none to give me.” He adds, wryly, “I have no taste for heiress-hunting,” referring to the late-­ Victorian trend which saw “titled men with narrow incomes marr[y] American heiresses who would bring dowries of £100,000 and even £500,000 to the union” (Mitchell 104). “I have always had a sleuth-­ hound sort of instinct ever since I was a child,” he adds; Marsh’s description of Champnell’s “light-blue eyes which were curiously keen” seems to endorse this assertion—eyesight and observation being key weapons in a detective’s arsenal (5). D.A. Miller, detective fiction is “always implicitly punning on the detective’s super-vision and the police supervision it implies” (emphasis in original, 35). As Miller, Martin Kayman, Ronald R. Thomas, and others who conducted pioneering investigations into the detective genre have noted, the thematic links between eyesight and deduction are there in the first detective stories. In Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories, for instance, the detective’s eyes, hidden behind coloured glasses, spot things—like missing letters and jagged nails in window frames—that his colleagues in the Paris Prefecture do not. Likewise, when Sherlock Holmes confounds Watson and others by observing visual details that they have overlooked, he scolds them, “You see, but you do not observe … I see it, I deduce it” (Doyle, “Scandal” 430). Such feats lead Watson to label Sherlock as “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” (430). As Thomas puts it, “the detective’s unique talent is an uncanny ability to see what no one else can see” (134). Champnell’s father, however, is deeply offended at the suggestion that his son could work as a detective—“he looked as if he could scarcely believe his eyes—and ears… Do you mean a policeman?” He goes on, “Heaven knows I have been worried enough in my time, but that a son of mine, a Champnell, should ever ask me if I had any objection to his becoming a common policeman—the thing is nothing else, sir, nothing else!” (5). A client in a later episode shares this astonishment about the class confusion of an aristocrat working as a common detective, exclaiming hyperbolically, “you’re the son of a hearl [sic]. My sakes! I don’t know what things are a-coming to! We shall soon have the Prince of Wales a-sweeping of a crossing!” (6). The perceived lack of distinction between a private detective and a policeman here is crucial in people’s horrified reaction to Champnell’s career plans. London’s first detective branch at Scotland Yard

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was established in 1842, poised between the two Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867, which extended voting rights to male members of the middleclasses and later the working class. As such, this was a time of intense challenge to old class structures. That a “significant sector” of the newly recruited police officers and detectives originated from “the countryside and the less privileged strata of the population” meant that there prevailed a “condescending attitude towards the background of real-life police detectives” (Makov 258). Underpinning this was the concern about lower-class men being able to investigate the affairs of their social superiors, a topic addressed by much early detective fiction, such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), in which Lady Verinder is reluctant to let a lowly policeman into her home to investigate the theft of her daughter’s priceless diamond. As she confides to her manservant, “There is something in that police-officer from London which I recoil from … I have a presentiment that he is bringing trouble and misery with him into the house.” (Chapter XIII). The middle- and upper-classes could accept the idea of police investigating the so-called “dangerous classes”—career criminals and the poor and disenfranchised. However, “when his enquiries took him to the door of the middle-class [or upper-class] home … he becomes a different figure … a threat to the privacy of the middle-class home” (Trodd 7). As Makov puts it, “to present lower-class people as potent representatives of the law was to invest them with menacing power that might strengthen their position in society” (258). For a member of the landed gentry such as the Earl of Glenlean, the idea that his son would join the lowly ranks of any police force was an affront to his ideas of class and propriety. However, Champnell’s idea of a private detective is a different proposition entirely, based on the figure of gentleman detectives like Sherlock Holmes: he is a figure of a higher social class, imbued with autonomy, breeding, education, and intelligence, hardworking, yet free of institutional bureaucracy, entirely respectable and proper, and aligned with longstanding “gentleman’s professions” (5). As Champnell tells his father, “That sort of thing is all the rage now … [and is] … at least as decent as the tea-trade, or the Stock Exchange” (5). According to W.J. Reader, in the late 1800s, there were only four truly “respectable professions”—state service, medicine, law, and the clergy (8–10). Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick, Dr Watson belongs to one of these safely respectable professions, having studied medicine at the University of London and gone on to serve in the army. Holmes’s professional and class status is somewhat more uncertain;

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he seems also to have studied at the University of London, but, as Stamford explains to Watson, he is “well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes” (Doyle, Study 20–21). Certainly, despite his lack of medical degree, Holmes considered his detecting work “a profession” and an eminently respectable one at that, telling Watson soon after meeting him: “I suppose I am the only one in the world. I’m a consulting detective, if you can understand what that means” (Study 18–19). For Harold Perkin, the late-­Victorian educated professional man felt a sense of “close alliance with the aristocracy and gentry stemm[ing], for those at the upper end, from their common education” at private schools and universities (84). As a result, “the idea of moral and intellectual superiority was being linked to a new concept of the gentleman, no longer the aristocratic code of militaristic honour … but the notion of a ‘gentle man,’ educated, courteous, well-­spoken, and considerate” (84). And so, in the Holmes stories, Doyle worked hard to demonstrate Holmes’s exacting professional standards, his intellect, his discretion, and his courtesy. Watson frequently remarks upon “the discretion and high sense of professional honour which have always distinguished my friend,” noting the times that Holmes defends the helpless or protects the identities and reputations of his clients (Doyle, “Veiled Lodger” 1374). Indeed, for Heather Worthington, it is Sherlock Holmes’s “higher social status,” as compared to forbears like Cuff, that made him “more acceptable to the reader” and, one assumes, to the many high-­ status characters that employed his services (172).  Champnell’s aristocratic status, which places him higher on the social ladder than Holmes, signifies that he has the experience and discretion to deal with the misdemeanours of blue-blooded friends and associates. The following day, when “a letter of an extremely confidential character” goes missing from the Earl’s study, Champnell is presented with a fortuitous opportunity to showcase his detecting skills and Glenlean reluctantly relents to allow his son to investigate (5). He tells Champnell, that he would rather “give ten years of my life” than allow “anybody about the house” to become acquainted with its contents (5). Clearly, the letter contains secret information of a kind that could bring shame and disgrace to the Earl. As such, this missing or purloined letter aligns with some of its famous literary forbears, such as the eponymous “purloined letter” of Poe’s 1844 story or the stolen photograph around which revolves the action of Sherlock Holmes’s first adventure in the Strand, “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891). Both stories focus on the power of a compromising document—a letter and a photograph, respectively—to unleash scandal upon their royal

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owners if made public. The Earl promises Champnell that if he finds the “scoundrel [who] has laid felonious hands on that letter” and, crucially, returns it “unread,” he will grant him permission to set up as a detective and donate one hundred guineas to the establishment of the business (5). This is Champnell’s first opportunity to show off his detecting mettle and he emulates Holmes by having a close look at the scene of the crime. Champnell inspects the study, finding the window open, but the flowerbeds outside intact, he observes a few drops of a sticky substance on his father’s desk and, like Holmes does in cases like “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” goes outside to smoke and ruminate on the seemingly trifling visual clues that he has observed. While outside, in a chance encounter with his half-brother, the Earl’s young son, Ronald Champnell, Champnell discovers that the boy had discovered a discarded letter and is  opportunistically employed it in the making of a paper kite. Piecing together his previous few simple acts of observation and deduction, Champnell correctly assesses that his father had knocked over a bottle of glue (the sticky substance on the desk) and had inadvertently stuck the letter to his cuff, carrying it with him as he went upstairs to speak to his wife and unknowingly dropping it on his way. His young son had innocently picked it up and decided to use it to make a kite. No crime had taken place. “You perceive, sir, that the whole affair is very simple,” Champnell explains to his father, clearly echoing Holmes’s frequent maxim that observation and deduction is “simplicity itself” once one knows what to do (5; Doyle, “Scandal” 429). Champnell’s father gets the final word, however, snidely asserting, “If this sort of thing is the art of detection it is an art which any simpleton could master … therefore, the profession of detective should be within the range of even your capacities  …” (5). Nonetheless, he is suitably relieved that he grants his son permission to become a detective and hands over a cheque to get him started. The issue of the letter’s compromising contents is never again referred to, underlining the idea that respectable men of the time often had skeletons in their closets.11 The next story in the series, “Lady Majendie’s Disappearance,” also written and published before The Beetle, appeared in the Leeds Mercury on 22 August 1896 and 29 August in the Thetford and Watton Times. The story, which recounts Champnell’s “first professional case of any importance,” opens with Champnell’s receipt of a desperate and hastily composed letter from an acquaintance, Cyril Majendie, whose wife has gone missing (6).12 While it is free of specifics, the letter’s mention of “murder,” “suicide,” and “madness” hints that this Champnell adventure will forge

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into much more serious and sensational territory than its predecessor (6). As Champnell is about to head out in response, another friend, Perky Parker, comes to see the detective to discuss a problem with his wife, an “American heiress” of the type that Champnell was unwilling to form an alliance with merely for financial reasons. This story is underpinned by the structural pairing of two troubled marriages—by questions about missing persons, disguise, and identity, the secrets contained within respectable upper-class homes, and the hidden connections between the two couples. When Champnell arrives at Majendie’s home, he discovers his friend a dishevelled mess, surrounded by “a collection of bottles and glasses” (6). To see him, the detective muses, “no one would have supposed him to be, in general, one of the best-dressed men in town”—clearly, he is Champnell’s social equal, a man of wealth and high standing (6). Drunk and hysterical, Majendie explains to Champnell that his wife Nora disappeared a week ago after running up “a heap of expenses” while out with “that confounded wife of Perky Parker’s” (6). However, Majendie himself spends more money than he has coming in and is “five thousand to the bad” with gambling debts (6). Shortly before her disappearance he had issued his wife a stern—and misplaced—warning that she had “ruined” him: “I told Nora … that if I couldn’t find the five thousand, nothing remained for me but suicide” (6). She disappeared immediately saying “she couldn’t think of living” if she had financially ruined her husband (6). In this story, the weak and ineffectual Majendie is in sharp contrast to strong and masculine Champnell. Majendie is continuously rendered in traditionally feminine terms, weeping and almost hysterical: “he rushed to Champnell with outstretched hands;” he is “anxious;” his speech is “remarkable for neither coherence nor eloquence” (6). He is half drunk and insistent on drinking more to “drown thought;” he talks frequently of “suicide” and “going mad” (6). Champnell, by contrast, is described as possessing “sharp wits;” his tone is “curt and hard;” and his eyes are “steely blue” (6). The interactions between the two men are marked by Champnell’s masculine scorn: he catches his client’s arm “in a grip of steel;” he chastises him as “a tippling and spendthrift husband” and advises him that his unmanly behaviour may have urged Lady Majendie to take “fatal courses” (6). He lectures the man: “I take the liberty to tell you that the law looks with reasonable suspicion upon the man who, having concealed the disappearance of his wife for a whole week, resorts to alcohol to ease the pinchings of a remorseful conscience” (6).

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We might think about the contrast between the two men as representative of what James Eli Adams has called “one of the founding symbolic oppositions of Victorian symbolic discourse”—the contrast between “the hero and the dandy” (21). Adams is referring here to two paradigms of masculinity outlined in Thomas Carlyle’s “The Dandiacal Body” from Sartor Resartus (1833). In this essay, the dandy “becomes the grotesque icon of an outworn aristocratic order, a figure of self-absorbed parasitic existence,” against which Carlyle contrasts “a heroism founded on superbly self-forgetful devotion to productive labour—an ideal most famously celebrated as the reign of the ‘Captains of Industry’ in Past and Present” (Adams 21). Particularly in the Victorian fin-de-siècle years after Oscar Wilde’s trial and conviction for “gross indecency” in 1895 and following the publication of Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895), which personally attacked Wilde (“Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime”) and lumped together queer men, aristocrats, aesthetes, and dandies all as dangers to the future of the race; thus, to be aristocratic, idle, or non-productive was to be a figure of anxiety and fear (Nordau 320). Given that Marsh’s initial readers, as consumers of regional newspapers, would have been members of the working and lower middle-classes, it would have been important that his “aristocratic detective” in some way disavowed the worryingly unmanly implications associated with his aristocratic origins, becoming instead more of a Carlylean “Captain of Industry” figure. Marsh has him do this in a number of ways: by his refusal to stay home at and take up the family seat, his refusal to marry an heiress for money and be a kept man (unlike his acquaintances Parker and Majendie) and by taking up paid, active, masculine work. The idle and feminised aristocratic figure of Majendie, by contrast, is an object of pity and scorn— drunk, in debt, and unable to manage his own wife or household. Indeed, it transpires that again no crime has occurred; Lady Majendie has not disappeared. She has been hiding in plain sight—in cross-gender disguise, “working” as a male servant in her own home. She did this as a “sporting bet” with her friend Mrs Parker to earn the 5000 pounds required to save her profligate husband from his debts (6). After revealing the deception, Champnell leaves the two couples “to fight this out” between themselves and disappears from the scene (6). The next Champnell story, “The Burglary at Azalea Villa,” which appeared two years after The Beetle, was first published on 13 January 1899  in the Manchester Times, and the following day in the Newcastle Weekly Courant. The story continues this idea of presenting the English

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male aristocrat as foolish and weak, something we must read as a calculated appeal to the working-class readers of regional newspapers.13 This story opens with a visit to Champnell’s apartment from Lord George Carman. With his “polished shoes,” “pointed toes,” “eyeglass” and “transcendental” air, Carman is presented as a braying buffoon (2). He is imbued also with a gift for comic reticence and understatement: “‘Haw!’ … Awkward affair last night. Burglary and I don’t know what. Devil of a nuisance” (2). It turns out that there has been a burglary at Azalea Villa, the residence of his actress “friend,” the fantastically named Miss Tottie Darling (2). Like Majendie, Carman is in debt, having purchased “lots of jewellery” for Miss Darling, much of which has now been stolen (2). The jewels, he says, will cost him “no end of money by the time they’re paid for” (2). He makes clear that he “couldn’t go to the beastly police” and consulted Champnell instead as the aristocratic detective is “one of us” (2). Like Majendie, Carman is concerned about the threat of public exposure and knows that Champnell has a reputation for being “strictly private and confidential” (2). Stolen along with the jewels was “a written promise of marriage” from Carman that Miss Darling had secreted at the bottom of her jewellery case (2). Miss Darling is clearly not an appropriate bride for someone of Carman’s wealth and status and the man is frantic with worry that the “promise of marriage” will be “handed around town” and that his father will find out (2). He is concerned that Miss Darling has orchestrated the robbery herself in order “to put the screw on”—in other words, to blackmail or pressure him into marriage (2). The plot point of the stolen compromising billet-doux with its potential to unleash shame and scandal once again reminds the reader of the photograph of Irene Adler which threatens to embarrass the King of Bohemia in the first Sherlock Holmes’s adventure for the Strand. Marsh takes this blackmail trope further, with the plot of “Azalea Villa” pivoting upon multiple suspicions and instances of blackmail, of cross and double-cross, as lovers betray lovers, servants betray masters, and criminals betray their accomplices. Angus McLaren’s pioneering study of blackmail points out that “although most blackmailers in both America and England were men,” nineteenth-century blackmail stories in fiction and the press “fixated upon the threat posed by unscrupulous females” (49). For instance, a New York Times article entitled “Female Blackmailers” (1872) opined, “few persons have any idea of the extent to which the female practitioners of the art of blackmailing victimize timid and nervous men” (Qtd. in McLaren 49).

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Indeed, British newspaper archives for the years 1880–1900 contain many hundreds of articles about blackmail. In February 1898, just a few months before the publication of “The Burglary at Azalea Villa,” one such article featured in Reynold’s Newspaper, a popular politically radical paper priced at one penny and read by the lower and lower-middle classes. The article focuses on female blackmailers, such as the woman who was “once a Society belle, until drink and the Divorce Court brought her to ruin.” Such women, the reader is advised, “prefer to inveigle a person of position and responsibility.” “One female in particular,” we are told, “with her violet innocent eyes, [and] golden hair… has through her wiles succeeded in ruining many an otherwise respectable man’s life!” Her strategy is to befriend a respectable man, take him to her house, and then, some days afterwards, when the gentleman is having breakfast with his wife and daughters, a letter addressed to him arrives. The letter describes a photograph of the encounter between the man and the young lady, and demands a fee for its return. Once that is paid, another letter arrives, demanding further fee for the negative. And so on. Upwards of £2500 may be obtained from a suitably affluent victim. (“West End Blackmailers”)

In this story, not only is Carman suspicious that Tottie Darling has staged the robbery of the jewels and letter to blackmail him with his promise of marriage, she in turn suspects that Carman has arranged the robbery to retrieve his incriminating document. Over the course of the investigation, a further threat of blackmail and a further double-cross is revealed—a “seedy” local robber had “formed some time ago the intention of burglarously entering Azalea Villa” (2). Experience had taught him, we are told, that “the best aid to a burglar was a maid that he could pump” (2). In other words, his modus operandi was to befriend a female servant from whom he could extract information under the pretext of wooing. Yet, in this case, “while he thought he was pumping her, she in reality was pumping him” (2). Champnell deduces that Miss Darling’s lady’s maid, who knew about the written promise of marriage, had for some time “imagined that if she could only get it into her possession, it would be worth a fortune to her” (2). Therefore, the maid had cunningly decided “to allow Mr Miles to commit his burglary, and then, under the cover of his burglary, to steal that little document” (2). Recalling Holmes’s admiration of particularly skilful criminals, such as John Clay from “The Red-Headed League,” Champnell is almost impressed by the ingenuity of the enterprise, saying “The idea, one must own … was a neat one” (2).

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The blackmailing female servant turns up in a number of classic Victorian crime novels; we might think, for instance, of lady’s maid Phoebe Marks in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), who has “a hundred methods for the finding out of her mistress’s secrets,” which she and her husband then use to extort money from the duplicitous Lucy Audley (Braddon 286). And while none of the servants in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) actually know Dorian’s dark secret, he fears that they do and frequently ruminates on how it is “a horrible thing to have a spy in one’s house. He had heard of rich men who had been blackmailed all their lives by some servant who had read a letter” (101). As also discussed in chapter five, the topic of blackmailing servants was also a pressing concern in the late-Victorian British press. “Servants Who Levy Blackmail by the Possession of Dangerous Secrets,” published first in Cassell’s Saturday Journal in November 1895, and picked up by a number of regional newspapers, sheds light on the prevalence of this concern. The article turns upon the assumption that the wealthy and respectable often harbour secrets which, if revealed, could cause damage to reputation: “skeletons exist in not a small number of gilded cupboards.” Alongside this, the article asserts that there are in West London, a large number of individuals “in the guise of bona fide servants” who, with “ingenuity and shrewd cunning,” employ knowledge of the secrets of their aristocratic masters to “nefarious but profitable account,” trumpeting: “The blackmailing valet or lady’s-maid is a recognised terror to society.” Letters, the article explains, are a particularly valuable asset in the blackmailer’s armoury. The article recounts the example of “a lady of much wealth” who had been “paying a third of her income to her discharged maid, who had obtained possession of some incriminating letters written by her mistress.” Respectable and wealthy ladies and gentlemen almost always pay, as “fear of exposure in nearly every case precludes resistance”. The article wraps up with the stern warning: “The blackmailing servant is one of the most formidable foes of any that dog the footsteps of the individual ‘with a past’” (“Servants”). The key anxiety underpinning fear of the blackmailing servant in late-Victorian fiction and fact is a reversal of class-based power dynamics. Once a servant has hold of powerful secret information, they wield power over their social superior. Indeed, in Marsh’s story, we are told that Miss Darling’s maid is motivated entirely by the desire to have her mistress “at her mercy” (2). In a somewhat disturbing end to the story, the maid is publicly shamed and humiliated for her crime. Champnell extracts the letter from the female servant under threat of a physical, almost sexual, force: “his tone

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became, stern and his manner commanding” (2) “His force dominated hers,” we are told, and the frightened girl is made to undress in front of everyone to produce the letter, which is secreted in her undergarments (2).14 The girl “quailed before his searching glance” and “with trembling fingers, unfasten[ed] the buttons of her bodice” and “drew the paper from her breast” (2). It is difficult to avoid the strong connotations of rape and domination in this interaction, which emphatically redresses the attempted subversion of power relations relating to gender and class which had been so integral to the story. The remaining two stories in the collection, “The Stolen Treaty” and “The Robbery on the Stormy Petrel,” are noticeably weaker than the others. “The Stolen Treaty,” first published in the Manchester Times on 27 October 1899 and later in the Newcastle Courant (28 October 1899) and the Cardiff Times (3 February 1900), in particular, is almost completely devoid of detection. It was the last Champnell story to be written, suggesting that Marsh had lost interest or run out of ideas for the character at this point. The story revolves around Champnell’s handling of the robbery of a confidential government treaty orchestrated by the Plenipotentiaries from Panama and Caracas. The story offers almost nothing in the way of detection, concentrating instead on describing a feud between the two Plenipotentiaries, both disagreeable con-men. The story is brimming with xenophobic characterisations of South America (“This isn’t a country in which shooting’s free … This isn’t Caracas, or one of those happy hunting grounds; but a mean-spirited low-down place where you have to pay for every drop of whisky you put your lips to”), Ireland, and Germany as lawless, underhanded, and untrustworthy, against which Britain is defined as honourable, law-abiding, and serious (3).15 Indeed, foregoing detection, the story concentrates mainly on broad, xenophobic descriptions of the “curious representatives” of Panama and Caracas; the Panamanian diplomat is Timothy O’Rourke, a permanently drunk “impudent-­looking … big and broad … dirty Irishman.” The diplomat from Caracas is German: “tall and thin, with fair hair and moustache, a shifty, disagreeable manner, and a dry, sarcastic fashion of speech.” For men in such positions, we are told, both “have about as bad a record as men very well could” (3). The story revolves around a dispute between the two thieves over the stolen treaty and tells how Champnell disguises himself to steal it back for the British government. Luckily, its confidential contents were not compromised as neither Plenipotentiary could read Spanish, the language in which it was written.

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“The Robbery on The Stormy Petrel,” first published in the Leeds Mercury on 28 March 1896, and later in the Cardiff Times (20 May 1899) and the Dundee Evening Post (19 August 1901), is slightly more accomplished. It opens with Champnell being visited by the Marquis of Bewlay when “business was slack” (6).16 Over the last thirteen days, the Marquis has been sent anonymously thirteen “infernal machines” (explosive devices) by post, each bearing “a different postmark” (6). He is concerned that he is being sent a message by “a certain secret society” in which he foolishly enrolled as a young man (6). He tells Champnell, “I have broken since nearly every one of its rules … and I think it is quite on the cards that these things may have come from some of the society’s agents” (6). With this plotline, Marsh is clearly drawing on the case presented by John Openshaw in Doyle’s “The Five Orange Pips.” The Marquis offers Champnell 150 guineas if he solves the case and 200 guineas if he proves “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that they have come from another source (6). Like most of Champnell’s clients, he will not go to the police as he wants the matter “kept private” (6). Minutes later, Champnell is visited by a second client, one who also requires help in “business of a kind which requires the intervention of a diplomat rather than of a policeman” (6). He is the junior partner in “a famous firm of jewellers” and needs help retrieving a large quantity of jewels bought on credit by the debt-ridden Lord Hardaway (6). The two cases converge as Champnell discovers that Hardaway secreted the jewels inside infernal machines filled with sea-water and sent them to the Marquis as “only a practical joke” as payback for “a dozen different things” (6). Champnell does not see the funny side and threatens to have Hardaway arrested; he promises not to only after the extraction of £200, for which he promises “to make things square with Ruby and Golden [the jewellers], and with old Bewlay,” emphasising that “no questions will be asked” (6). In his final appearance, Champnell earns a £200 fee from the Marquis and £100 from the jewellers, a total income, as he puts it, of “five hundred guineas for doing nothing at all” (6).17 “I don’t think that’s a bad morning’s stroke of business,” he muses, in the story’s closing line (6). Champnell’s focus on the pecuniary advantages to his career might well be read as an amusing ventriloquising of Marsh’s own reasons for writing detective fiction: “There’s a heap of money to be made at it—that is if you are up to the mark. And I flatter myself I am” (6). Indeed, Richard Marsh would continue to produce vast amounts of popular fiction until his death

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in 1915; however, he would never repeat the commercial or critical success that he enjoyed with The Beetle. Indeed, it was not long after the advent of moving pictures that Dracula made the transition to screen in way that The Beetle did not, securing Stoker’s novel a place in history and allowing Marsh’s novel and the character of Augustus Champnell to disappear into relative obscurity.

Notes 1. For recent scholarship on Marsh, see Minna Vuohelainen (2009, 2013, 2014a); Stephan Karschay (2015); Leslie Allin (2015); Anna Maria Jones (2011); Victoria Margree (2016); Margree, Orrells, Vuohelainen, eds (2018). 2. For more information on Heldmann’s early career see Vuohelainen (2014b), “Bernard Heldmann and the Union Jack, 1880–83.” 3. For a full list of Heldmann/Marsh’s known work see Vuohelainen, Victorian Fiction Research Guide: Richard Marsh. 4. My thanks to Johann Högland for generously allowing me to read his (as yet) unpublished piece on Marsh. In this piece, Höglund has astutely noted that Champnell’s investigation of criminal forces which exist beyond the material world means that the character might be considered one of the first occult detectives. 5. Champnell is predated by M.P.  Shiel’s Prince Zaleski (1895), a Russian nobleman and armchair detective who smokes opium and solves puzzles or conundrums from his remote Welsh castle, which he never leaves. As his ‘detection’ is so passive, it’s debatable whether Zaleski can properly be termed a detective. Four Zaleski stories were published in volume form as part of John Lane’s decadent Keynotes series. 6. Clearly, Marsh, or his agent, had some kind of ongoing deal with the Newcastle Weekly Courant and the Leeds Mercury, as well as a number of other regional papers, probably via Tillotson’s, although I have been unable to ascertain the details of this deal as Marsh did not leave behind many personal papers, diaries, or letters. For further details of which of Marsh’s dozens of short stories were published in these and other newspapers see Vuohelainen, Victorian Fiction Research Guide: Richard Marsh. “The Robbery on the Stormy Petrel” was also republished in three Australian Newspapers: The Australian Town and Country Journal, The Express and Telegraph, and The Chronicle, on 17 December 1898, 1 October 1898, and 1 October 1898, respectively. 7. This story was also re-published in twenty Australian and New Zealand newspapers, including The Argus, The Queanbeyan Observer, and The

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Gympie Times and River Mining Gazette, between 1899 and 1908. Each publication was accompanied by the notes “[Copyright]” and “[Published by special arrangement].” 8. This story was re-published in either one or two parts in six Australian newspapers between 1900 and 1918: The Telegraph (4 and 9 April 1900); Bundara and Tingha Advocate (15 November 1902); Barrier Miner (3 November 1906); The Week (30 March 1900); The Gundagi Independent and Pastoral, Agricultural, and Mining Advocate (25 July 1918). 9. For further details on the contents of this volume and the stories’ periodical publications, see Vuohelainen, Victorian Fiction Research Guide: Richard Marsh, p. 38. 10. This and all subsequent references to this story are taken from “The Lost Letter,” The Newcastle Courant 13 July 1895, p. 5. 11. For more on the idea of Victorian gentlemen often harbouring disreputable secrets see Clarke (2014), pp. 13–42. 12. This and all subsequent references to the story are taken from “Lady Majendie’s Disappearance” The Leeds Mercury 22 August 1896, p. 6. 13. This and all subsequent references to the story are taken from “The Burglary at Azalea Villa,” The Newcastle Weekly Courant, 14 January 1899, p. 2. 14. Champnell’s action of forcing the maid to undress prefigures a similarly sexually-charged and uncomfortable scene in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), where Sam Spade forces Brigid O’Shaughnessy to strip in front of him in order to prove that she has no stolen money concealed about her person. 15. This and all subsequent references to the story are taken from “The Stolen Treaty,” Cardiff Times 3 Feb 1900, p. 3. 16. This and all subsequent references to the story are taken from “The Robbery on The Stormy Petrel,” Leeds Mercury. 28 March 1896, p. 6. 17. According to measuringworth.com, the average yearly salary in the UK in 1896 was £63.10 per annum. For just this one case, albeit with three clients, Champnell is paid £500. Given that the Champnell stories indicate he worked upon a number of cases, we can extrapolate that he made a good income with private detection.

References Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Cornell UP, 1995. Allin, Leslie. “Leaky Bodies: Masculinity, Narrative and Imperial Decay in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle.” Victorian Network, vol. 6, no. 1, 2015, pp. 113–35.

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Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader. A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (1957). Ohio State UP, 1998. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret, edited by David Skilton. Oxford UP, 2008. Clarke, Clare. Late-Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock. Palgrave, 2014. Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone, edited by John Sutherland. Oxford UP, 2008. Dalby, Richard. “Richard Marsh: Novelist Extraordinaire.” Book and Magazine Collector, 163, October 1997, pp. 76–89. Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories with Illustrations from The Strand Magazine. Wordsworth, 2006b, pp. 429–48. ———. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories with Illustrations from The Strand Magazine. Wordsworth, 2006a. ———. A Study in Scarlet. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories with Illustrations from The Strand Magazine. Wordsworth, 2006c, pp. 13–96. ———. “The Veiled Lodger.” The Complete Stories with Illustrations from The Strand Magazine. Wordsworth, 2006d, pp. 1374–82. Gissing, George. New Grub Street, edited by Katherine Malone. Oxford UP, 2016. Hobbs, Andrew. A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900. Open Book Publishers, 2018. ———. “When the Provincial Press was the National Press (c.1836–c.1900).” The International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2009, pp. 16–43. http://doi.org/101179/jrl.2009.5.1.16 Jones, Anna Maria. “Conservation of Energy, Individual Agency, and Gothic Terror in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, or, What’s Scarier than an Ancient, Evil, Shape-shifting Bug?” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 39, no. 1, 2011, pp. 65–85. Karschay, Stephan. Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Law, Graham. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. McLaren, Angus. Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History. Harvard University Press, 2002. Margree, Victoria. “Metanarratives of Authorship in Fin-De-Siècle Popular Fiction: ‘Is That All You Do, Write Stories?’” English Literature in Transition, vol. 59, no. 3, 2016, pp. 362–89. ———, Daniel Orrells, and Minna Vuohelainen, eds. Richard Marsh, Popular Fiction, and Literary Culture, 1890–1915: Rereading the Fin de Siècle. Oxford UP, 2018.

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Marsh, Richard. An Aristocratic Detective. Digby, Long, & Co, 1900a. ———. The Beetle: A Mystery, edited by Minna Vuohelainen. Valancourt Press, 2008. ———. The Beetle. A Mystery. Skeffington & Co., 1897a. ———. “The Burglary at Azalea Villa.” Manchester Times, 13 January 1899a, pp. 10–11. ———. “The Burglary at Azalea Villa.” The Newcastle Weekly Courant, 14 January 1899b, p. 2. ———. “The Burglary at Azalea Villa.” Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 22 Oct 1902, p. 2. ———. The House of Mystery. F. V. White, 1898. ———. “Lady Majendie’s Disappearance.” The Leeds Mercury, 22 August 1896a, p. 6. ———. “Lady Majendie’s Disappearance.” Thetford And Watton Times, 29 Aug 1896b, p.3. ———. “The Lost Letter.” The Newcastle Courant, 13 July 1895, p. 5. ———. “The Lost Letter.” South Wales Echo, 22 July 1897b, p. 4. ———. “The Robbery on The Stormy Petrel.” Cardiff Times, 20 May 1899e, p. 2. ———. “The Robbery on The Stormy Petrel.” Dundee Evening Post, 19 Aug. 1901, p. 6. ———. “The Robbery on The Stormy Petrel.” Leeds Mercury, 28 March 1896c, p. 6. ———. “The Robbery on The Stormy Petrel.” Newcastle Weekly Courant, 28 March 1896d, p. 6. ———. “The Stolen Treaty.” Cardiff Times, 3 Feb 1900b, p. 3. ———. “The Stolen Treaty.” Manchester Times, 27 October 1899c, pp. 10–11. ———. “The Stolen Treaty.” The Newcastle Courant, 28 October 1899d, p. 2. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. U of California P, 1988. Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. Greenwood Press, 1996. Nordau, Max. Degeneration [First English edition 1895]. William Heinemann, 1898. “Notice.” Union Jack, 36, 5 June 1883, p. 576. “Novels and Stories.” Glasgow Herald, 8 November 1900, p. 10. Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. Routledge, 2002. Reader, W.J. Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-­ Century England. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966. Rev. of An Aristocratic Detective, by Richard Marsh. The Academy, 17 Nov. 1900a, p. 468. Rev. of An Aristocratic Detective, by Richard Marsh. Bookman, Dec 1900b, p. 21. Rev. of An Aristocratic Detective, by Richard Marsh. The Speaker, 24 Nov. 1900c, pp. 216–17.

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“Servants Who Levy Blackmail by the Possession of Dangerous Secrets.” Cardiff Times, 2 November 1895, p. 1. Shpayer-Makov, Haia. The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England. Oxford UP, 2011. Showalter, Elaine, ed. “Introduction.” Trilby, by George Du Maurier. Oxford UP, 1995, pp. vii–xxi. Thomas, Ronald R. “Making Darkness Visible: Capturing the Criminal and Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction.” Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, edited by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan. U of California P, 1995, pp. 134–69. Trodd, Anthea. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 1988. Vuohelainen, Minna. Victorian Research Guide 35: Richard Marsh. Canterbury Christ Church University, 2009. ———. “From ‘Vulgar’ And ‘Impossible’ to ‘Pre-Eminently Readable’: Richard Marsh’s Critical Fortunes, 1893–1915”. English Studies, vol. 95, no. 3, 2014a, pp. 278–301. ———. “‘Contributing to Most Things’”: Richard Marsh, Literary Production, and the Fin de Siècle Periodicals Market.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 46, no. 3, 2013, pp. 401–22. ———. “Bernard Heldmann and the Union Jack, 1880–83: The Making of a Professional Author.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 47, no. 1, 2014b, pp. 105–42. “West End Blackmailers.” Reynold’s Newspaper 13 February 1898, p. 1. Wolfreys, Julian, ed. “Introduction.” The Beetle, by Richard Marsh. Broadview Press, 2004, pp. 9–34.

Fig. 7.1  “Real Ghost Stories: The Spaniards” by E. and H.  Heron. Pearson’s Magazine, Vol. 5, Jan. to June 1898, p. 60

CHAPTER 7

Detective Flaxman Low, by Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard

“Flaxman Low is the Sherlock Holmes of the ghost world.” “Belles Lettres” London Quarterly Review April 1900, p. 391

As E. and H. Heron (one of only a few occasions on which they used this pseudonym), Kate O’Brien Prichard and her son Hesketh-Prichard co-­ authored twelve stories featuring Flaxman Low, “the Sherlock Holmes of the ghost world,” which were first published as “Real Ghost Stories” in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898 and 1899 and published in volume form by Pearson in 1899 as Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low. Doubtless in part a response to the contemporary interest in ghosts and spiritualism exemplified by the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, Low was one of a number of “occult detectives” who appeared in late-Victorian and Edwardian magazines after the death of Sherlock Holmes; the investigation of supernatural crimes being one way by which

Volume edition: Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low (C. Arthur Pearson, 1899) by Katherine O’Brien Prichard [E. Heron] (1851–1935) and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard [H. Heron] (1876–1922) Serial publication: “Real Ghost Stories: First Series” Pearson’s Magazine January– June 1898 and “Real Ghost Stories: Second Series” Pearson’s Magazine January– June 1899 © The Author(s) 2020 C. Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891–1901, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8_7

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writers of popular periodical detective fiction drew upon and simultaneously ‘inverted’ the Holmes adventures. While Sherlock Holmes emphatically disavowed the supernatural— “The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply”—Flaxman Low is open to its place in the world of modern crime-fighting. He is introduced by the Prichards as “the first student in this field of inquiry;” his aim being “the elucidation of so-called supernatural problems on the lines of natural law” (Crofton 29; Prichard and Prichard, “Spaniards” 60). The tales exist on the border between detective fiction and the ghost or gothic story and Low is clearly the offspring of the Holmesian materialist detective and a scientist of the occult, like Bram Stoker’s vampire-slayer Van Helsing or Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr Hesselius (Doyle “Sussex Vampire”).1 Low’s adventures combine the investigations of murders and haunted houses with the Holmesian reading of clues, application of data, examination of chains of evidence, and employment of esoteric knowledge. Like Holmes, to solve his cases the Prichards’ detective pontificates and smokes: “Low sank back into his chair with his hands clasped behind his head—a favourite position of his—and the smoke of a long pipe curled up lazily” (Prichard and Prichard, “Yand Manor House” 583). Like Holmes, Low is called in when the police are at a loss; as one character puts it: “The police and the doctors have done their best over this business, and they’re just where they were at the beginning. There’s only one man in Europe can help you—Flaxman Low…” (Prichard and Prichard 129). Indeed, practically all reviews of the collection focus on Low’s indebtedness to Holmes: he is, variously, “the Sherlock Holmes of the ghost world,” “a sort of Sherlock Holmes of the immaterial world,” “a variation on Sherlock Holmes [for] … people who like something weird and uncanny,” “a sort of Sherlock Holmes, except that he deals in ghosts not in crimes,” “evidently formed on the model of Holmes, the difference being that he confines his detective work to apparently supernatural problems” (“Belles Lettres;” “New Novels;” “Recent Fiction;” “Fiction;” “Fiction and Poetry”). While not the first “occult detective” in the detective genre—that accolade belonging to L.T.  Meade’s (with Robert Eustace)2 John Bell, who appeared in Cassell’s Magazine in 1896—he is the first such investigator whose work appears to accept or prove rather than disavow the existence of the ghostly and occult forces behind the crimes he investigates (Crofton 30).3 Meade and Eustace’s Bell, for instance, is different from Low, in that the majority of his investigations of supernatural goings-on are unmasked

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as hoaxes, whereas in Low’s cases the investigator finds that the hauntings are real (30). Indeed, several of Low’s adventures are actively framed as reports to the Society for Psychical Research, which had an “Apparitions and Haunted Houses Committee” dedicated to recording firsthand accounts of haunted houses, or as they termed them, “phantasmogenetic centres” (Luckhurst 197).4 In the two Flaxman Low series for Pearson’s, emphasis is repeatedly placed upon these stories being “real”: in a preface to the stories, the reader is told that Low is an alias for one whom “many are sure to recognise as one of the leading scientists of the day, with whose works on Psychology and kindred spirits they are familiar” (Prichard and Prichard “Spaniards” 60). In the periodical, each illustrated story is also accompanied by one real photograph, supposedly of the haunted property involved in the case, further blurring the lines between fact and fiction (See Fig. 7.1). The volume form contains a slightly expanded introduction describing a letter dated February 1896 from Low to the authors, containing all his notes on “occult phenomena” and “spirits and ghosts” (vii). In it, Low asks them to “prepare from them [the notes] some sort of volume of a popular character” (viii). As a 1903 Tatler article on the Prichards rightly pointed out, “one often hears of the combined literary effort of husband and wife … but it is much rarer … that one hears of the collaboration of mother and son. This is, however, the case with K. and Hesketh Prichard who between them have written at least four romances” (“Some Good Short Stories”). The mother and son authorial team had jointly authored a good deal more than more than four romances. In monthly magazines such as the Strand, the Windsor, and Pearson’s they published over forty standalone short stories and several series which would go on to be published in volume form, including The Chronicles of Don Q. (1899), The New Chronicles of Don Q. (1906), Don Q. in the Sierra (1906), about a Spanish Robin Hood; Tammers’ Duel (1898); A Modern Mercenary (1898); Karadac, Count of Gersay (1901); The Fortunes of Lolita the Dancer (1910); and Roving Hearts (1903), mostly romances and adventures. Not much is known about Kate O’Brien Prichard, but the life story of Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard to give him his full—wonderful—name is itself the stuff of fiction.5 Of Scottish and Irish descent, Prichard was born in India, the son of Lieutenant Hesketh Brodrick Prichard (1851–76) of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and Katherine O’Brien Prichard. Following the death of Lieutenant Prichard, six weeks before Hesketh was born, mother and infant son returned to Britain. Prichard went on to attend schools in

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Gorey, Jersey, and Rugby, before winning a scholarship to Fettes College. A “golden-haired, gray-eyed giant of six feet four inches,” and a character of “conspicuous and unspoiled virility,” Prichard read law, but never practiced, instead going on to become a writer, big-game hunter, explorer, a well-known cricketer, and a war hero, leading a programme of teaching marksmanship and sniping during WWI6 (Sutherland, Companion 518; “Obituary: Major H.V. Hesketh-Prichard” 319–20). Building upon his success as a writer of fiction, Prichard chronicled his explorations in several popular works of travel writing. Several of his assignments were commissioned by Arthur Pearson for the newly established Daily Express. Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti (1900), for instance, described his observation of voodoo rites in Haiti. For Pearson, he also undertook an expedition to Patagonia in 1900, chronicled in Through the Heart of Patagonia (1902), to look for a reportedly extinct giant ground sloth. (He did not find it.) Prichard also travelled widely on big game shooting expeditions, including trips to Newfoundland and Labrador to hunt caribou in 1903 and 1904. Prichard detailed a subsequent expedition to the interior of Labrador, through regions where previous explorers had died, in Through Trackless Labrador (1911).7 For these services, he was made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.8 Prichard died from sepsis at forty-five, following a wartime injury, and his obituaries struggle to convey all the achievements accrued in his short life. As the Leeds Mercury put it, “It is difficult to say whether Major Hesketh Prichard was more famous as a writer, big game hunter, or explorer. He had a world-wide reputation in all these” (“A National Loss”). Other obituaries mention his prowess as a cricketer: playing for Hampshire from 1899 to 1913, for the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord’s in 1904–05, and renowned as “one of the best fast bowlers in the country” (“Novelist and Cricketer”).9 The Times lists his accomplishments as “traveller, big game hunter, excellent cricketer, a keen naturalist, and author,” but describes his “most important work” as “a teacher of marksmanship during the war” for which he received “the D.S.O. and M.C. and the Military Order of Avis” (“Major Hesketh Prichard”). Doubtless, Hesketh-Prichard’s experiences as a traveller contributed to the Flaxman Low stories’ preoccupation with empire and mysteries emanating from foreign lands. As has long been acknowledged, much popular fiction of the 1890s is “saturated with the sense that the entire nation—as a race of people, as a political and imperial force, as a social and cultural

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power—was in irretrievable decline” (Arata, “Occidental” 622). In some of the most popular novels and stories of the 1890s, anxieties about the decline of imperial might is betrayed by a preoccupation with the vulnerability of the centre of the British Empire to various types of invasion, miscegenation, and degeneration. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897)—first serialised in Pearson’s— and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), amongst others, distances between imperial centre and periphery collapse as problematic figures repeatedly travel (or plan to travel) from various outposts to wreak havoc upon Britain.10 In these works, the imperial centre comes under attack from a fantastic assortment of invaders—including vampires, aliens, and oriental insects—in which a variety of contemporary anxieties about race, gender, crime, and degeneration are fused. These works are, in Stephen Arata’s memorable phrasing, “narratives of reverse colonisation,” where the civilised centre of the empire is always on the verge of attack from those who are racially or nationally “other” (Fictions of Loss 108). For Arata these reverse colonization narratives express late-Victorian Britain’s colonial fear and guilt. The fear is that the civilized world is on the verge of being attacked by primitive forces, a product of the “cultural guilt” of a “troubled imperial society” where “British culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms” (108). Similarly, in what Patrick Brantlinger has termed the “imperial gothic,” “going native” and “an invasion of civilisation by forces of barbarism” are recurrent tropes (230).11 Arata and Brantlinger do not consider crime writing in their studies, yet many of the detective stories of the late-Victorian period share anxieties with the imperial gothic and reverse colonization fiction about the links between criminality, race, nationality, and border transgression. Despite Arthur Conan Doyle’s enthusiastic personal support of the British imperial project, for instance, his Sherlock Holmes stories and novels clearly betray anxieties about both the possibility of “going native,” and the instability of distances between the empire’s domestic core and foreign periphery. In the opening lines of the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887), Doyle strongly articulates an anxiety about the permeability of national boundaries (Brantlinger 230). Before the super-­detective is even introduced, Dr Watson famously describes the London to which he has returned as “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained” (Doyle, Study 11). London is characterised by Doyle, then, not as the stable and impenetrable heart of the

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empire but as a dirty, deregulated space, easily permeable to foreign substances and things. Doyle repeatedly returned to this imperial theme in the later Holmes tales; a common feature of stories such as “The Speckled Band,” “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” and “The Crooked Man,” for instance, is the appearance of an Englishman who has experienced moral decline in the colonies, becoming more like the savage natives that had surrounded him. This tainted colonial figure then returns to the imperial centre, where his criminal urges or past cannot be suppressed and where he therefore threatens the peace. In these stories, Holmes’s work involves the identification of the invader and his attempts to minimise their threat to the existing social order.12 In 1896, the first volume of Pearson’s Magazine was notably preoccupied with similar anxieties about nationality, borders, and empire—alongside patriotic features on the Empire and Britain’s war heroes sit anxious articles about future wars and national boundaries.13 The first four volumes alone, published in 1896–97, include series on “Gates and Pillars of the Empire,” “The Bravest Deed I Ever Saw” [about war heroes], and self-contained articles on “The Men Who Will Lead if War Comes,” “The Native Soldiery of India,” “How the Frontiers of Europe Are Kept,” “How Our Army Is Clothed,” “Captain Ronald Campbell’s Heroism in the Transvaal,” “Soldiers of the Khedive,” amongst others. These volumes also include various series of colonial adventure short stories, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Tales of the High Seas,” Cutcliffe Hyne’s “The Adventures of Captain Kettle,” Louis Becke’s “Mrs Malleron’s Rival,” which tells the story of the only white man on Tarawa [Polynesia], and Rudyard Kipling’s “Captains Courageous.” While on the face of it the Prichards’ “occult detective” stories are something different in terms of genre from Pearson’s list of imperial articles, at the core of many of the Flaxman Low stories is a similar preoccupation with the anxiety-provoking aspects of foreign lands and the imperial project. As Maurizio Ascari has noted, many of Low’s stories “capitalise on the latent anxiety that the imperial experience evoked in the Victorian public, on fears of possible forms of contamination that accompanied the early stages of globalisation” (82). More specifically, the stories display an anxiety about “travelling and living in foreign lands, as well as importing goods or receiving people from non-European territories” (82). Indeed, even the stories’ introduction ends on a note of troubling geographical uncertainty with an authors’ note informing the reader that “Mr. Low ha[s] disappeared into the wilderness of West Africa on that expedition which he refers to in these pages” and has not since been heard from (viii).

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In the course of the stories themselves, Low comes up against an assortment of supernatural threats with a specifically foreign flavour: he investigates the ghost of what Arata would call a “maimed colonial”—a leper returned from Trinidad (“Spaniards”); the haunting of a house belonging to an unsavoury gentleman who has made his money running tea plantations in Assam (“Medhans Lea”); the murderous rampage of a reanimated Egyptian mummy (“Baelbrow”); the killing spree of a possessed imported Malayan vine (“Grey House”); a house haunted by the ghost of an ancestor obsessed with Eastern magic (“Yand Manor House”); a spate of suicides caused by the ghost of a man involved in the French Revolution’s “Reign of Terror” (“Sevens Hall”); the possession of a naïve American heiress who invites evil foreign ghosts into her English home by dabbling in spiritualism (“Saddler’s Croft”); deaths occurring in a London house occupied by an Chinese secret society (“Karma Crescent”); the evil brought to a family by their employment of an African servant versed in Obeah, a form of “sorcery, witchcraft, or folk medicine originating in West Africa and mainly practised in the English-speaking areas of the Caribbean” (“Konnor Old House”); and, in the final two stories, Low’s showdown with foreign master-criminal and mesmerist, Dr Kalmarkane (“Crowsedge” and “Flaxman Low”) (Arata, Fictions 140).14 Against these foreign threats is posed the Englishman Flaxman Low, psychologist, Oxford graduate, “sensible and practical,” “fearless,” “scholarly” and “athletic”: “the sort of man one could count on in almost any emergency” (“Spaniards” 61). As well as combining the best traits of the athlete and the scholar, Low is emphatically English: he is “an unassuming English gentleman, who combines in his own personality the reckless courage of Regency blood and the knowledge of a profound scholar” (“Crowsedge” 155). Drawing upon Ronald R. Thomas’s pioneering work on foreign bodies in detective fiction, James Mussell has observed that many late-Victorian detective stories turn upon the scientific, patriarchal, and imperialist authority of the white, British man of science.15 In Thomas’s terms, this skill came to prominence in fiction “at the very moment when Great Britain needed to secure its identity as the predestined ruler of a great global empire” (Qtd. in Mussell 70). For Victorians to read these stories, then, was to be reassured by the skill of the man of science; that he could identify aberrant beings and return them to their rightful places, restoring order to British society. In the Flaxman Low stories, where threats of the criminal, foreign, and supernatural combine, these threats are assuredly countered only by a particularly English sort of masculine, scientific, and moral authority.

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In the first story in the Flaxman Low collection, “The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith,” Low is called upon by Roderick Houston, a friend from schooldays, to investigate The Spaniards, a house bequeathed to him by his great-aunt’s deceased husband, which appears to be haunted (61). The Spaniards is within fifteen minutes’ walk of London’s Hammersmith Bridge, yet it is immediately described as something foreign, presenting “an odd contrast to the commonplace dullness of the narrow streets crowded about it” (61). For Flaxman Low, it has the air of “something exotic” and gives “some curious suggestion of the tropics” (61). Once inside, following the Sherlockian act of observing trifles—“a couple of bottles of Gulf weed and lace-plant ornament”—Low deduces that the owner “had been in the West Indies” (62). A “surprise[d]” Houston replies that indeed Van Nuysen, his invalid great-uncle, the house’s previous owner, “owned sugar plantations in Trinidad, where he passed the greater part of his life, while his wife mostly remained in England” (62). Within a year of his return to London from Trinidad, his wife was found dead in bed, seemingly smothered by a pillow after having taken a narcotic sleeping draught. Van Nuysen disappeared shortly afterward and was never seen again. Since then, the upstairs passageways and Mrs Van Nuysen’s bedroom have been haunted by a tapping sound accompanied by the appearance of a “swollen … leonine” yellow face and a “cold and glutinous” bladder [ball], which tries to smother any inhabitants (63). In what is generally accepted to be the first English detective novel, The Moonstone (1868), Wilkie Collins interrogates the malign impact of imperial expansion upon the British domestic world as a “quiet English house” is “invaded by a devilish Indian diamond”—the diamond itself having been seized in an act of colonial rapacity (47). Drawing upon these established associations between the criminal and the colonial, in this opening Flaxman Low story, the “exotic” appearance of the haunted house and its associations with Trinidad are immediate clues to the diabolical secrets contained inside. The house, like London itself, has been penetrated by a physically and psychically damaged colonial, a plantation owner, and by extension a slave-holder.16 In this story, the porous national boundaries facilitated by imperial travel are mirrored by the porous boundaries between the material and spirit worlds. Both are equally capable of unleashing dangerous, criminal, and malign forces upon the imperial centre.

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For Low, the story of the aunt’s death, the uncle’s disappearance, and the subsequent appearance of the ghost, “doesn’t sound very satisfactory” and he sets about dismantling the lines of supposition that underpin it (63). “There are isolated facts,” Low says, “and we must look for the links which lie between … If a saddle and a horse-shoe were to be shown to a man who had never seen a horse, I doubt whether he, however intelligent, could evolve the connecting idea! The ways of the spirits are strange to us simply because we need further data to help us interpret them.” (63). This is a formulation which seems to invoke but invert Sherlock Holmes’s famous assertion in A Study in Scarlet that “From a drop of water … a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.”17 If, as Sherlock has it, life is a great chain that can be interpreted after the observation of one link, it seems that the afterlife is not so easily decoded. As Houston opines, “perhaps you may be able to read reason into it. If it were anything tangible, anything a man could meet with his fists, it would be easier for me.” (63). On the sixth night at The Spaniards, after Low wakes to find a “horrible,” “pulpy, ponderous body,” upon his chest, with “a pair of glassy eyes, with livid, everted lids, looking into his own,” he knows “that he had been at handgrips with some grotesque form of death,” yet also feels “great pleasure” that he “may be on the verge of some valuable discovery” (63–64). As the ghost has a “palpable body,” he surmises that its footsteps may also be tracked and so he spreads a barrowful of sand over the house’s upper floors. The next morning Low and Houston awake to find a set of footprints suggesting the movement of a stick and a “large, clawless pad” (66). In another act of Sherlockian emulation, Low asks his companion to make a deduction based on the physical evidence before them: “What do you make of it, Houston? ... Think it over. The tapping, the bladder, and the fact that Mr. Van Nuysen had lived in Trinidad. Add to these things a single pad-like print. Does nothing strike you by way of a solution?” (66). As was so often the case for Holmes’s sidekick, no solution strikes Houston. In a flourish of Sherlockian explanation, Low lays out that this “chain of evidence” tells him the house is “haunted by the ghost of Mr Van Nuysen, and he was a leper” (66). The footprints indicate a man who walked with a stick, the “bladder” is a swollen, leprous foot wrapped in linen, the other pad-like print is a “toeless foot” (66). The swollen leonine face corresponds to those observed in Chinese lepers (66). Unlike

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Sherlock, however, Low admits uncertainty: continuing his explanation by demurring that from hereon, he is “on less certain ground,” but he believes Van Nuysen murdered his wife and then committed suicide in the house (66). In further speculative mode, he suggests that Van Nuysen’s body, like all bodies of suicides, was “susceptible to spiritual influences” and thus became possessed by a “diabolical agency” (67). “The highest aim of an evil spirit,” he advises Houston, “is to gain possession of a material body” (67). Although his solution is only theoretical, he adds that he can recall “quite a number of cases” which have borne out this hypothesis (67). The only way to prove his theory, Low suggests, is to pull down the house, find the skeleton and examine “the condition of the remains” (66). When the house is demolished, the skeletal remains of a leper are indeed found buried. They are removed to a London hospital museum and the ghost is banished. As Sarah Crofton points out, while there is a solution of sorts, the story ends in uncertainty; while Low has banished the ghost, “the skeleton … can prove nothing of the crimes that took place in the house” (36). Unlike the empirical detectives which preceded him, the occult detective’s first case has been only partially concluded with hypotheses rather than facts. “The Story of Baelbrow” (Pearson’s, April 1898), is a fantastic amalgam of the detective story with what Roger Luckhurst has termed “the museum gothic,” a sub-genre where ancient foreign objects, often mummies, unleash some curse or malign mystical power upon British owners or bystanders (175). Prime late-Victorian examples include Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” (1894), a story about an Oxford student whose studies of the occult allow him to reanimate an Egyptian mummy for the purposes of carrying out murder. In “The Story of Baelbrow,” the Swaffam family home on the East Anglian coast has “always been haunted” and the family are “proud of the Baelbrow Ghost, which … lent distinction to the house, but never in any way interfered with the comfort of the inmates” (366–67). “No one dreamt of complaining about it,” we are told, until suddenly female members of the house begin to be followed by a bandaged creature with gleaming nails that is coming and going from the house’s museum room where Mr Swaffam senior “stored the various curios he picked up during his excursions abroad” (368). “The terror culminate[s]” when a housemaid, Eliza Freeman, is “found dead in a corridor,” anaemic and with a small red pustule behind her ear (367). Despite this death, the men of the Swaffam family maintain that “the women in this house are suffering from an epidemic of hysteria” and that “hysterical women cannot be

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taken into account” (369; 371). A defender of low-status women throughout the story, Low coolly rebukes such statements with the assertions that “hysteria could hardly account for Freeman’s death” (369). Low formulates a theory using traditional modes of detection—interviewing the residents and examining the doors and floors of the museum, which he concludes cannot be accessed from outside. However, his deducement that the “house is haunted by a mummy” recently sent back from Swaffam’s travels, is outside the bounds of traditional late-Victorian detective fiction, which tends to find rational explanations for seemingly supernatural phenomena (373). In Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901), for instance, the ghost hound turns out not to be a phantom but merely a dog covered in luminous paint. As Baelbrow was built upon an ancient barrow or burial ground, Low explains, it has always contained the “elemental psychic germ … [of] a vampire” in the form of the ghost which benignly haunted the house for years (374). Once the mummy was unwrapped in the museum, however, the “vampire intelligence” took possession of the “physical medium” and began to seek out victims to suck their blood (374).18 When Swaffam Jnr. and Low lie in wait for and confront the mummy, the former attacks it with tremendous violence: “[he] stood over the thing; then with a curse he raised the revolver and shot into the grinning face again and again with a deliberate vindictiveness. Finally, he rammed the thing down into the box, and, clubbing the weapon, smashed the head into fragments with a vicious energy that coloured the whole horrible scene with a suggestion of murder done” (375). The pair pile the smashed bones into a canoe and burn them far out at sea. It is the collection’s most violent and visceral scene of retribution, which “openly expresses phobic colonial violence,” especially notable as Swaffam Jnr. had remained so sceptical to the threat of the supernatural and so unbothered by the family’s longstanding English family ghost (Luckhurst 176). “The Story of the Grey House,” published in the May 1898 edition of Pearson’s, continues the collection’s focus on the malign effects of colonial rapacity, by extending Arata’s idea of reverse colonisation along botanical lines. The story concerns a house in the Devon countryside which is haunted not by a ghost but by the murders of several people who have stayed there, all “hanged by the neck until they are dead” (474). When Low first observes the property, he notes the abundant vegetation with which it is surrounded, observing that “the grounds seem neglected” including a “belt of African grass,” and a “teeming exuberance of wild and

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tangled growth,” and adding, “I don’t remember to have seen such rank growth anywhere” (474; 476). His companion’s answer—“Certainly not inside the British Isles”—is significant, framing this “luxuriance of growth” in terms of a distinctly ‘other’ nationality (474). In this story, British order and tidiness is continually poised against the “dank rottenness” of foreign disorder and decay (474). After the Grey House’s owner died, it was left in the care of a Mr Lampurt, “a horticulturalist,” who had “a bad name” and was widely disliked in the county (474). Despite being “a healthy man,” Lampurt died suddenly of “a kind of fit” while out gardening, but not before he had “planted the place with a wonderful variety of foreign shrubs and flowers” (474). Since Lampurt’s death, any tenant of the house’s front bedroom has died, hanged by the neck, with the rope removed and with “no trace of the murderer” left behind (475). For his first theory, Low turns to the annals of outré crime fiction. He posits that the murders are so “purposeless and disconnected,” they must have been committed by an “irresponsible agency” (475). He thinks of “Poe’s story of the Rue Morgue,” generally agreed to be the first work of detective fiction, where the murders of a mother and daughter were committed by an ourang-outang, brought to Paris from Borneo by a seaman (475). In Poe’s story, the imported primate murdered the two women by accident, simply mimicking the actions it observed in its sailor-owner while the man was shaving with a cut-throat razor. I tend to agree with the large number of critics who have argued that the transport of people and goods at the heart of the colonial project is the real root cause of the murders in this story. For Christopher Rollason, for instance, “The sailor’s presence in the ‘Indian Archipelago’ (modern Indonesia) is not fortuitous but dictated by European economic interests: he is French, the ‘Maltese vessel’ hails from a British colony, and Borneo was colonized by the British and Dutch. The murders are ultimately a consequence of European colonialism” (Rollason 10).19 It is significant here, in a collection of stories so preoccupied with the colonies, that Low’s first thought should turn to a seminal detective tale that warns about the outré crimes that can occur as a consequence of imperial trade and movement. However, as a gap of more than five years has passed between murders in the Low stories, the detective eventually discounts his theory of ape-as-­ murderer, stating that “no big ape could live in England all those five years” without being noticed (476). As soon as one colonial import is discounted, however, another takes its place—suspicion of the abundant imported plants that surround the house. Armed with knives, Low and his

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companion decide to spend the night in the room where the murders occurred and soon are attacked by “a flexuous, snaky thing” with a “winding grasp” which appears to be “sentient” and leaves behind a smear of blood when attacked (480). It is not a snake or an octopus, however, as Low’s companion suspects, but a red-blossomed Malayan creeper, “belonging to a family that possess strange powers,” imported by Lampurt, and somehow animated and infused with “will and knowledge and malevolence” (482; 481). The creeper strangles its victims before draining them of blood and then retreating; hence the hanged victims with no sign of a noose. As Low explains it, such murderous plants have long been known about by “occultists in other countries,” for instance the “upas tree” and “the murder tree discovered near Kolwe in East Africa” (482). The Prichards were not the first authors to employ the idea of malign or man-eating plants in their work. The idea of the carnivorous plant took hold of the Victorian public imagination after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants in 1875 and began to crop up in popular fictional forms shortly thereafter. Carl Liche’s “The Man-Eating Tree” (1878), Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The American’s Tale” (1879), Phil Robinson’s “The Man-Eating Tree” (1881), and Frank Aubrey’s The Devil Tree of El Dorado (1897) are early examples of carnivorous colonial plant narratives, where diabolical plants are encountered by British explorers on foreign soil. For Cheryl Blake Price, such narratives are one iteration of Brantlinger’s Imperial Gothic, in which pre-existing British fears about colonial contamination are fused with concerns about real-life dangerous foreign plants—such as the poisonous Upas tree—and Gothicised, thus creating “vegetable monsters that were not only deadly, but active predators as well” (312).20 Elizabeth Chang suggests that in such works, “Victorian empire extended itself along botanical lines” and that “plants were increasingly understood as mobile, malleable agents of empire that enacted significant revisions in the landscape” (Chang 85). Carnivorous plant narratives, then, are “allegories of the bad effects of British colonial rapaciousness” in which the landscape can “fight back” (Chang 85). Not all carnivorous plants stayed on colonial soil, however: in Wells’s The War of the Worlds, for instance, which was also serialised in Pearson’s in 1897, the Martian invasion of England is accompanied by the ubiquitous appearance of sprawling red weed, which “grew with astonishing vigour and luxuriance,” threatening to choke and kill the landscape that it engulfs (Wells  128). In stories like “The Grey House,” explorers or collectors, instead of aliens, are responsible for the arrival of deadly foreign plants

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upon British soil. For Chang, bringing plants back from the colonies is a “‘fantas[y] of appropriation’ cloaked as ‘zoological and ethnological acquisitiveness’” (Chang 92). In “The Story of the Grey House,” the result of this zoological acquisitiveness is a narrative of reverse colonisation where the agents of terror are botanical and supernatural, rather than extra-terrestrial. With the Malayan “vegetable monster” destroyed on Flaxman Low’s advice, the threat is dispatched, and order is restored with the Grey House “now occupied and safe,” although “no plant, not even the hardy ivy, will live where the red-blossomed creeper once grew” (Blake Price 312; Prichard and Prichard 482). “The Story of No.1 Karma Crescent,” published in the March 1899 edition of Pearson’s, concerns a purportedly haunted house in South London and is presented as “an example of the many dark and sinister mysteries London carries in her unfathomed heart” (126).21 The papers report “Strange Deaths in South London,” occurring in a house haunted by a “dark, evil, whispering, face” that has so far killed four tenants (127). In contrast with the rest of the stories in the Flaxman Low collection, however, the mooted haunting turns out to be a hoax (of the Scooby-Doo variety) orchestrated by a Chinese secret society to keep rents low and the property unoccupied, so that they may use it for as a “convenient headquarters for Chinese and other ruffianism” (138). The society has killed tenants of the house by harnessing “the Blue Death” a toxin employed by a “dreaded secret society in China, which owes much of its power and prestige” to the possession of a cache of deadly poisons used to destroy its enemies (137). We are told that with his uncovering of this secret society, “a very distinct danger had been warded off” by Flaxman Low, as “the society in question were making alarming headway in London, chiefly by allying themselves with other bands of criminals in the country” (139). The house, like the presence of the secret society itself, passes unnoticed until deaths begin to occur. That the house can exist within a residential development in South London—albeit one in “the outer crust of a poor district, of which no more need be said than that it provides a certain amount of dock labour”—is an anxious representation of the dangers posed by immigration and anonymous, heterogeneous metropolitan living (127). Indeed, the stories play upon specific fears about immigration from China that were circulating in the last few years of the nineteenth century. In this story, the Prichards participate in what would become one of the biggest trends in late-Victorian and Edwardian genre fiction—that is, the “yellow peril” novel, where reverse colonisation threats emanated from

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China or Japan. The work which set this trend in motion, M.P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898), began life as The Empress of the Earth, a series of stories commissioned for the Pearson publishing group’s Short Stories magazine. Pearson’s asked Shiel for a series which would respond to public interest in crisis in China, beginning with the murder of the two German missionaries in China in November 1897 and culminating in what came to be known as the ‘Scramble for Concessions,’ in which Western nations sought grants of territory and improved trading opportunities with China. The stories, which ran weekly from 5 February to 18 June 1898, interwove actual newspaper headlines on the crisis with a narrative of world war predicated upon the threat of invasion from China. The stories proved popular with readers and were rushed out in book form as The Yellow Danger in July 1898. The book went through eight editions between 1898 and 1908 and enjoyed a boost in public interest during the events of the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901, which seemed to confirm Shiel’s portrayal of Chinese hostility towards the West.22 The formula for ensuing ‘Yellow Peril’ novels—such as Shiel’s The Yellow Wave (1905), Percy F. Westermann’s East Meets West (1913), and, perhaps most famously, Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913), the first in a long series of books and films starring Fu Manchu—was remarkably similar. They were “Asiatic invasion novels” published in the years “between the Boxer Rebellion and the First World War,” featuring Chinese or Japanese master-­criminals intent on invading and conquering England by way of technology, germ warfare, or Eastern mystical means, such as hypnosis (Forman 132). The stories are almost always set in London, “enshrined as the metropole under threat from a periphery beyond its colonies,” with a Chinese or Japanese master-criminal or secret society lying hidden in the Empire’s “literal and figurative heart” (Forman 132). Given that the Prichards were writing for Pearson’s only a few months after Shiel’s The Yellow Danger had enjoyed such commercial success, it is unsurprising that they would capitalise upon this trend by incorporating a “yellow peril” story into their Flaxman Low series for the publisher. The final two stories in the Flaxman Low collection also borrow from a popular trend in recent detective fiction—the idea of the master-criminal nemesis. In “The Final Problem” (Dec. 1893), Sherlock Holmes met his match in master-criminal Professor Moriarty, Irishman, genius, and “organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,” controller of shadowy networks of criminality radiating throughout the city of London and, perhaps, the entire Empire (561).23 Holmes died in a struggle with his nemesis, tumbling over the edge of a cliff and into

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the Reichenbach Falls; his loss is necessary to rid the world of Moriarty’s evil influence. Thus, alongside the dozens of “Sherlock clones,” periodical pages in the second half of the 1890s were also bursting with ‘Napoleons of crime’—powerful foreign master-criminals, doubtless wanting to capitalise on the character of Doyle’s enigmatic Moriarty. That deft plunderer of literary trends, Guy Boothby, created the most popular antihero of this type, the exotic Dr Nikola; gentleman, mesmerist, scientist, vivisectionist, part Dorian Gray, part Dr Moreau. Nikola’s debut appearance A Bid for Fortune, or Dr Nikola’s Vendetta, published in the Windsor magazine in 1895, and later that year in volume form, captivated the British reading public and catapulted Boothby to celebrity author status and Nikola went on to star in five bestselling novels published between 1895 and 1901.24 It should be no surprise, then, that the Flaxman Low series ends with two stories, “Crowsedge” and “Mr. Flaxman Low,” published in May and June 1899, where Low comes up against a worthy adversary, the master-­ criminal Dr Kalmarkane, “a man of extraordinary ability, whose researches had led him very deeply into those recesses of knowledge to the exploration of which Mr. Low has given his own life” (156).25 Kalmarkane is rendered as a “hirsute giant,” “possessed of strange powers,” who “leads the life of a savage,” secluded in an isolated house called Crowsedge (157; 159; 157). There he “works eighteen hours out of twenty-four,” accruing an “incredible” body of knowledge on medicine and the occult (158). His newly-appointed research assistant, a Dr Gerald D’Imiran, the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships that endorse his impeccable credentials, comes to beg Low for help when he finds a reanimated Bronze Age arm in Kalmarkane’s lab and begins to fear that his employer is a powerful exponent of “Black Magic” (163). Like Boothby’s Dr Nikola, Kalmarkane’s power is couched in distinctly Eastern terms: Low particularly fears the “psychical secrets” he has picked up in “his extensive travels in Thibet,” and following a confrontation between the pair, the detective is drugged with opium and hypnotised “using some parasite intelligence to prey upon and wreck [his] mind and body” (169; 179). In the final showdown between the pair, Low threatens to shoot Kalmarkane, fully aware that “shooting means the gallows” (181). As with elsewhere in the collection, Low accepts this personal sacrifice as worthwhile if it will rid the earth of Kalmarkane: “as the law cannot help me, I must take its function into my own hands” (181). Throughout the collection, Low maintains that facing danger is his “duty to the public,” that “good is always inherently stronger than evil,” and that risking or losing his life is worthwhile if it is for “the

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good of mankind” (76; 101; 75). Low eventually does shoot Kalmarkane in the head, killing him, after which he disappears from public view and the stories cease. As Crofton notes, the Flaxman Low tales produce yet disavow the late-­ Victorian’s detective story’s focus on resolution and restoration of order (38). They appear to offer solutions—ghosts, mummies, secret societies, killer plants, and diabolical master-criminals have been discovered and dispatched by each story’s close. Yet that resolution can only ever be partial and provisional: the serial nature of the form itself, as with all serial detective fiction, emphasizes that where one threat is closed off, another pops up to take its place. More worryingly still, until the threatening porosity of the national and spiritual borders described in the Flaxman Low stories can be closed off permanently—which they surely never fully can be?—the threat of haunting and/or criminality remains. At the collection’s close, Flaxman Low is missing in Africa and at least of one the creatures he encountered, the vampiric “mysterious figure” who haunts “The Story of the Moor Road,” appears to have resurfaced in “the lonelier spots about North London” (256). In his pioneering work on the overlaps between detective, horror, and supernatural fiction, Maurizio Ascari astutely notes that “implicit in the act of naming a genre is the idea of a border which delimits and circumscribes” (xii). Part of this critical limiting of the detective story has traditionally been the refutation of the supernatural—the idea that supernatural intrusion to the rational and material world of the detective is a cheat or an authorial misstep. Certainly, the rejection of the supernatural is something that was spelled out explicitly during the early twentieth-century codification of the detective story: for instance, in Ronald Knox’s “‘Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction,” published in 1939, commandment number two baldly states that “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course” (xiii). Might this canonisation of the material in detective fiction partly be due to Holmes’s strong refutation of the supernatural and Doyle’s strict cleaving of his detective and gothic stories? Possibly. Yet, as Ascari, Cook, and others have noted, the ghost story and the detective story share a heritage: gothic and sensation fiction and, as a result, many of the genre’s earliest works—Poe’s “The Murders on the Rue Morgue” (1841); Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872); Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868)—hover on the boundaries between the gothic, sensation, the ghost story, simply adding to them a pronounced “detecting” element of

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Holmesian ratiocination. For Ascari, it is in these “border-territories” of genres that “processes of creative innovation take place” (xii). Indeed, when one allows the supernatural in, as it were, one finds a treasure trove of fascinating little-known stories that have been omitted or glossed over in many early critical histories of the detective genre because they fail to conform to retroactively imposed rules about what the detective genre is supposed to be. The Prichards’ Flaxman Low series is one such collection that clearly exists on the blurry boundaries between the detective story and ghost story. The creative interchange between these two distinct popular genres in the Low stories brings something new to the tired reworking of the Holmes model that proliferated in the years after his death at Reichenbach. Indeed, the Flaxman Low collection showcases the idea of permeability and porosity not only at a level of plot (with its insistent focus on the transgressing of both national and material boundaries, where houses are haunted by a series of colonial ghosts and invaders), but at a meta-level of genre. If we are truly to understand the diversity of the detective story at the fin-de-siècle we cannot select, study, and canonize only those stories which shore up our own limited and prescriptive view of the genre at that time as material, restorative, rational. The Flaxman Low collection, and the assortment of more well-known occult investigators that came in its wake—from John Silence and Carnacki the Ghost Hunter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer—suggest the importance of flexibility and permeability in our conception of what the detective narrative can do and be.

Notes 1. The figure of the occult investigator dates back to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr Martin Hesselius, who featured in In a Glass Darkly (1872). 2. See Chap. 2, note 5, where I discuss how Meade was the primary author of her ‘co-authored’ stories for the Strand, with her male co-authors providing scientific and/or medical information. 3. I follow Sarah Crofton in terming Low an “occult detective”, although, as Crofton has pointed out, there is no critical consensus about the terminology used to describe the type of character, which others have called “psychic detective,” “occult doctor,” or “ghost-breaker” (30). 4. For more on the Society for Psychical Research see Luckhurst (2004). 5. John Sutherland’s Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1990) and his Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (2014) are two of the only reference works to mention Kate Prichard; in each, a small amount of biographical information is included under the entry for her son. Unlike her son, Kate O’Brien Prichard has no entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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6. Chronicled in H.  Hesketh-Prichard, Sniping in France: Winning the Sniping War in the Trenches (Hutchinson, 1920). 7. In 1913, Prichard sole-authored November Joe: The Detective of the Woods, a tracker and detective employed by the Quebec Provincial Police, whom Otto Penzler has termed “the only backwoods detective in literature,” doubtless influenced by his own experiences in backwoods Canada (Penzler 320). 8. Despite his reputation as a hunter, Prichard also worked to outlaw the clubbing of grey seals that had brought them to the verge of extinction in the Outer Hebrides and was a key player in securing the Grey Seals Protection Act of 1914, which outlawed the killing of seals during breeding season. See Lee. 9. John Sutherland suggests that E.W.  Hornung’s character of gentleman-­ cricketer (and thief) Raffles may have been based upon his friend, Hesketh Prichard (Companion 518). 10. For more on late-Victorian invasion literature see Otis (2000); Arata (1990); Bulfin (2018). 11. See Brantlinger (1988). 12. For more on Doyle’s imperial stories, see Wynne (2002); Siddiqi (2006). 13. Pearson’s was one of many Strand-inspired family magazines founded in the 1890s on the heels of the Strand’s tremendous success. Indeed, Pearson’s also had a direct link to the Strand: its founder, late-Victorian media baron Cyril Arthur Pearson, started his career in journalism in 1884 after winning a general knowledge quiz in Strand editor George Newnes’s Tit-Bits Magazine, where the prize was a clerkship at the magazine’s London office. By 1890 Pearson had been appointed business manager of W.T. Stead’s Review of Reviews, but in July that year broke away, founding his own magazine, Pearson’s Weekly. Pearson’s Magazine, a sixpenny monthly, followed in 1896, the Royal Magazine in 1897, the Daily Express in 1900, and the Standard and Evening Standard in 1910. 14. “obeah, adj. and n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/129542. Accessed 14 November 2018. 15. Specifically, Mussell is discussing L.T. Meade’s medical mysteries—Stories from the Diaries of a Doctor, which were published in the Strand between 1893 and 1895. 16. Slave narratives, that is memoirs written by slaves detailing the cruelty and abuse suffered at the hands of slave-holders, were extremely popular in the second half of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) sold 30,000 copies between 1845 and 1860 and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) sold 27,000 copies during its first two years in print. As a result, the figure of the cruel slave-holder begins to crop up as a villain in works of popular literature such as Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897).

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17. Robert Perret makes a similar observation in “Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist” 84. 18. Here, the Prichards are doubtless capitalising upon the cultural currency of vampire stories, with the recent successes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire in 1897. 19. For more on Poe and empire see Thompson (1993); Gruesser (2013); Orr (2010). 20. For more on late-Victorian murderous plants see Price (2013). 21. All page number references to this story are taken from: E and H Heron and Arabella Kenealy, Supernatural Detectives 3. Coachwhip Publications, 2011. 22. For more on M.P.  Shiel and “Yellow Peril” fiction see Billings (2010); Forman (2013). 23. Doyle had not invented this criminal type. Arguably the first fictional master criminal is Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco in The Woman in White (1860). 24. For more on this see Clarke (2014). 25. All page number references to this story are taken from: E and H Heron and Arabella Kenealy, Supernatural Detectives 3. Coachwhip Publications, 2011.

References Arata, Stephen D. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Cambridge UP, 1996. ———. “The Occidental Tourist: Stoker and Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, vol. 33, 1990, pp. 621–45. Ascari, Maurizio. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. “Belles Lettres.” London Quarterly Review, April 1900, p. 391. Billings, Harold. M.P. Shiel: The Middle Years, 1897–1923. Roger Beacham, 2010. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism: 1830–1914. Cornell UP, 1988. Bulfin, Ailise. Gothic Invasions: Imperialism, War, and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction. U of Wales P, 2018. C.A.P. [Cyril Arthur Pearson]. “The Editorial Mind.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 1, Jan. 1896, p. 112. Chang, Elizabeth. “Killer Plants of the Late Nineteenth Century.” Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age. Ed. L. Karpenko and S. Claggett. U of Michigan P, 2016, pp. 81–101. Clarke, Clare. Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock. Palgrave, 2014. Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Ed. John Sutherland. Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. Crofton, Sarah. “CSΨ: Occult Detectives of the Fin de Siècle and the Interpretation of Evidence.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 30, no. 2, Fall 2012, pp. 29–39.

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Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Problem.” Strand Magazine, Dec. 1893, pp. 558–70. ———. “The American’s Tale.” My Friend the Murderer: and other Mysteries and Adventures. International Book, 1898, pp. 248–57. ———. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories with Illustrations from The Strand Magazine. Wordsworth, 2006a. ———. A Study in Scarlet. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories with Illustrations from The Strand Magazine. Wordsworth, 2006b, pp. 13–96. “Fiction.” The Scotsman, 4 Dec. 1899, p.3. “Fiction and Poetry.” Dundee Advertiser, 12 Dec. 1899, p.8. Forman, Ross G. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined. Cambridge UP, 2013. Gruesser, John Cullen. Race, Gender, and Empire in American Detective Fiction. McFarland, 2013. Heron, E. [Katherine O’Brien Prichard] and H. Heron [Hesketh Vernon HeskethPrichard]. Experiences of Flaxman Low. Coachwhip, 2011. ———. Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low. C. Arthur Pearson, 1899g. http://access.bl.uk/item/pdf/lsidyv3547887c. Accessed 16 July 2018. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of Baelbrow.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 5, Jan. to June 1898d, pp. 366–75. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of Crowsedge.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 7, Jan. to June 1899e, pp. 482–91. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of the Grey House.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 5, Jan. to June 1898e, pp. 473–82. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of Konnor Old House.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 7, Jan. to June 1899d, pp. 430–39. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of Medhans Lea.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 5, Jan. to June 1898b, pp. 137–46. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of the Moor Road.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 5, Jan. to June 1898c, pp. 247–56. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of Mr. Flaxman Low.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 7, Jan. to June 1899f, pp. 578–87. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of No. 1, Karma Crescent.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 7, Jan. to June 1899c, pp. 259–67. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of Saddler’s Croft.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 7, Jan. to June 1899b, pp. 176–85. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of Sevens Hall.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 7, Jan. to June 1899a, pp. 30–38. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 5, Jan. to June 1898a, pp. 60–69. ———. “Real Ghost Stories: The Story of the Yand Manor House.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 5, Jan. to June 1898f, pp. 582–90.

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Heron, E. [Katherine O’Brien Prichard], H. Heron [Hesketh Vernon HeskethPrichard], and Arabella Kenealy. Supernatural Detectives 3. Coachwhip Publications, 2011. Lee, John. “Prichard, Hesketh Vernon Hesketh.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:ondb/98115. Accessed 16 July 2018. Luckhurst, Roger. Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford UP, 2012. ———. “Knowledge, Belief and the Supernatural at the Imperial Margin.” The Victorian Supernatural, edited by Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell. Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 197–217. “Major Hesketh Prichard.” Times, 15 June 1922, p. 12. Mussell, James. Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. “A National Loss.” Leeds Mercury, 15 June 1922, p. 6. “New Novels.” The Graphic, 10 Feb. 1900, p. 210. “Novelist and Cricketer.” Tatler, 6 May 1903, p. 200. “Obituary: Major H.V Hesketh-Prichard, D.S.O.M.C.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 60, no. 4, October 1922, pp. 319–20. Orr, Stanley. Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir. Ohio State UP, 2010. Otis, Laura. Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. Perret, Robert. “Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist.” Victorian Detectives in Contemporary Culture: Beyond Sherlock Holmes, edited by Lucyna Krawczyk-­ Żywko. Springer, 2017, pp. 77–90. Penzler, Otto. Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection. McGraw-Hill, 1976. Price, Cheryl Blake, “Vegetable Monsters: Man-Eating Trees in Fin de Siècle Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 41, no. 2, 2013, pp. 311–27. “Recent Fiction.” Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 13 Dec 1899, p. 5. Robinson, Phil. “The Man-Eating Tree.” Under the Sun. Roberts Brothers, 1882, pp. 295–305. Rollason, Christopher. “The Detective Myth in Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin Trilogy.” American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, edited by Brian Docherty. St Martin’s, 1988, pp. 4–22. Siddiqi, Yumna. “The Cesspool of Empire: Sherlock Holmes and the Return of the Repressed,” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 34, 2006, pp. 233–47. “Some Good Short Stories.” Tatler, 6 May 1903, p. 6. Sutherland, John. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. Routledge, 2014. Thompson, Jon. Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism. U of Illinois P, 1993. Wynne, Catherine. The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic. Greenwood Press, 2002.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

In 1928, shortly after its foundation, the members of the Detection Club in Britain—a club which would count amongst its number luminaries such as Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton, and John Dickson Carr—were asked to swear an oath promising that their fictional detectives would “well and truly detect the crimes presented to them” and do so by “not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God.” Members also promised never to conceal clues from the reader and “to observe a seemly moderation” in the use of “Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-­ Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trapdoors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and for ever to foreswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science” (Qtd. in Haycraft 198). The 1920s was a rich period for the codification of crime and detective narratives, which happened alongside the development of the Golden Age crime writing. As well as a set of rules sworn in the Detection Club, Monsignor Ronald Knox laid out “A Detective Story Decalogue” in the introduction to The Best [English] Detective Stories of 1928: for Knox, all supernatural agency must be ruled out, no Chinaman must figure in the story, not more than one secret passage per story was allowed, and the detective himself must not commit the crime. The same year, in “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” American author S.S. Van Dine likewise suggested that the detective should never turn out to be the culprit, there should be no love interest, there should be no secret societies, mafias, or camorras, and that the © The Author(s) 2020 C. Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891–1901, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8_8

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crime should be solved by naturalistic means which should not involve “compet[ing] with the world of spirits” (Qtd. in Haycraft 190–91). The writers of the 1920s were striking out against their forebears: these lists of no-nos for Golden Age detective fiction—secret societies, mysterious poisons, Chinamen, ghosts, death rays, feminine intuition, love interests, master-criminals, and crooked detectives—read like roll calls of the features of the 1890s detective stories that appeared in newspapers and periodicals after Sherlock’s death and which I have studied in this book. L.T. Meade had introduced death-rays, master criminals, and secret societies; Pirkis employed lunatics, conspiracies, and feminine intuition; Morrison blurred the boundaries between criminal and investigator and had his detective break the law multiple times; Hume’s stories were framed by a love interest and Hagar’s feminine intuition, alongside the investigation of conspiracies, gangs, and malign Chinamen; the Prichards’s two Flaxman Low series make great use of mysterious poisons, criminal gangs, hypnotism, super criminals, and pretty much every item on the above lists; Marsh’s stories, the most comedic of the bunch, undoubtedly feature coincidence, alongside a good deal of mumbo-jumbo and jiggery-pokery. Although these lists were undoubtedly somewhat tongue-in-cheek, many of the first scholars of crime fiction nonetheless exhibited an abhorrence for stories containing the features pooh-poohed in rules for the genre laid down in the 1920s. In the 1970s and 1980s, the first wave of crime fiction critics overlooked or denigrated most of the rivals and successors to Sherlock Holmes and omitted from their surveys of the detective genre the many works by late-Victorian authors which broke one or more of the rules laid down in the early twentieth century. As Humpherys (1998) and Radford (2008), amongst others have noted, this led to an uneven and unrepresentative picture of the development of the genre over the course of the nineteenth century, which focused on Doyle as the only writer of importance in the 1890s, and disregarded the many hundreds of detective stories published in newspapers and periodicals. For instance, in Bloody Murder, Julian Symons devotes a full chapter to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories but does not discuss any other writer of detective fiction from the 1890s. As he put it, the explanation for this is “simple”: “the history of the crime story up to the end of the nineteenth century is linked chiefly with a few writers of talent who were interested in police work, and the form itself was not yet sufficiently attractive to the public or sufficiently well-defined to receive much attention from hacks” (79).

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From the 1970s and 1980s onwards, anthologists of the crime genre, beginning with Hugh Greene—former director-general of the British Broadcasting Company and elder brother of the author Graham Greene— started to track down Sherlock’s rivals and successors and to publish their works. As Greene put it in his introduction to The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, published by The Bodley Head in 1970 and reprinted by Penguin in 1971, 1974, and 1976, “The rivals of Sherlock Holmes have remained for too long in the shadow of the master” (13). Two TV series of Greene’s rivals were produced by the British TV company Thames Television and broadcast on ITV in 1971 and 1973: those series featured Fergus Hume’s Hagar Stanley, Arthur Morrison’s Horace Dorrington and Martin Hewitt and L.T. Meade’s Madame Sara, amongst others. That there is still a market for such anthologies, with more being published every year, such as Nick Rennison’s Supernatural Sherlocks (2017) and More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (2019), suggests that there is still interest from both publishers and readers in the Victorian detective genre beyond Sherlock Holmes. It was only in the late 1990s and 2000s, however, beginning with the work of Stephen Knight, a critic who has always been highly attentive to the bigger picture of the development of the crime genre, that literary scholars began to study some of the authors uncovered by anthologists such as Greene and started to fill in gaps and oversights in the history and development of detective fiction. In an essay entitled “Enter the Detective: early patterns of crime fiction” (1998), Knight noted that “the usual approach, typified by Julian Symons’s somewhat sweeping and connoisseurish book Bloody Murder” produces “the usual simplified sequence [which] leaps to the highly sophisticated reformation of a detecting figure in Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories … [then] sweeps on to Conan Doyle, master of masterful detection with his fully developed, ironised, and strongly gendered version in Sherlock Holmes” (10). For Knight, “this account, as is usual with grand narratives, obscures certain facts and issues and serves certain interests.” He believes that the interests these simplified accounts of the crime genre serve are “that of books and the writers of books;” as he continues, outside the traditional and narrowly book-based cursus honorum of crime fiction there are other sources, other genres and different dispositions of the rise of the detective narrative. The vast majority of detective and indeed crime stories written in the nineteenth century did not appear in book form, but in the pages of the elusive magazines and regularly appearing n ­ ewspapers.

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This is the sea in which the detectives are born and first swim, and it does not when examined produce so simple or so gratifying a genealogy of the detective as the classic account suggests. (11)

The work of Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (2003), Joseph Kestner (2003), Caroline Reitz (2004), Maurizio Ascari (2007), Christopher Pittard (2007, 2008, 2011), Lee Horsley (2010), Lucy Sussex (2010), Srdjan Smajic´ (2010), and Michael Cook (2014), amongst others, alongside my own previous work, shares Knight’s scepticism towards overly simplistic genealogies of crime fiction and his commitment to showcasing the plurality and diversity of late-Victorian detective narratives. While others before me have concentrated on recovering work omitted from the crime fiction canon on the basis of race, gender, and nationality, amongst other things, in this study I have been guided by Knight’s rejoinder that most late-nineteenth-century crime and detective stories appeared in the pages of magazines and newspapers—many of which were not available or studied by early critics of the genre and most of which are still unstudied and largely unknown. My aim has been to showcase the existence and variety of popular detective stories published in serial form in the press in the period after Doyle had introduced (and then killed off) Holmes. I have been particularly eager to uncover the lesser-known places and the publications in which late Victorian British readers consumed detective fiction. Most scholars, students, and fans of the genre will know the well-­ known account of white-collar London middle-class male workers on their commuter trains reading sixpenny or shilling monthlies, like the Strand. And certainly, that is how many late-Victorian readers consumed the Sherlock Holmes stories. However, this scenario does not tell the whole story of the relationship between detective stories, readers, and the late Victorian press. Stories did not only appear in these lavish monthly periodicals, like the Strand and the magazines that were set up to emulate its format and success such as the Harmsworth, the Windsor, and Pearson’s, but also in weekend miscellanies, in urban daily newspapers, as well as in provincial weeklies. As Kestner noted in 2003, “short stories are elusive unless published as a collection or diligently excavated by anthologizers;” indeed, many of the stories studied in this book—and especially the details of their publication history—would have been almost impossible to trace before recent processes of newspaper and periodical digitisation began to make them more easily accessible to scholars and the public (Kestner 227). Indeed, as my

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work on this book was nearly complete, I discovered the latest publication on the crime genre by the prominent and prolific scholar LeRoy Lad Panek benefited from these processes of digitisation. In the introduction to The Essential Elements of the Detective Story, 1820–1891 (2017), co-­ written with Mary M.  Bendel-Simso, Panek and Bendel-Simso discuss how the digitisation and online publication of American nineteenth-­ century newspapers led to their discovery of (so far) over 1300 unknown and uncatalogued detective stories published in the pages of these ephemeral publications in the years before the emergence of Sherlock Holmes: “The basic discovery we have made is that newspapers played a vital role in the creation and development of the detective story” (2). The same is true in Britain, and doubtless elsewhere. In traditional accounts of the crime genre, the late nineteenth century has been known as the period that saw the inevitable rise of super-­detective Sherlock Holmes. But it was also the period which saw the emergence of a great many other detectives, who are—or should be—of compelling interest to historians of the crime genre, as well as to scholars of newspapers and periodicals. This book has not sought to present a survey of all the unknown detective fiction published in British magazines and newspapers over the course of the nineteenth century. To some extent, that work has already been partially undertaken by Panek in After Sherlock Holmes: The Evolution of the British and American Detective Stories, 1891–1914 (2014) and Knight in Towards Sherlock Holmes: A Thematic History of Crime Fiction in the 19th Century World (2017). Instead, this book has focused on six case studies of detective fiction series published in British newspapers and periodicals in the years 1891–1901. Its aim has been to offer an account of the ways in which writers, editors, and a variety of sorts of publication responded to the death of Sherlock Holmes and to examine in detail how the minor, often unknown, detectives who sprung up in his wake reveal not only the proper complexity of the historical development of the detective genre at that time but also its formal, generic, and ideological variety. There is admittedly something a little arbitrary in the choices I have made on which authors to study and which to omit. As in all publications, the limits of word count forced some omissions upon me. I have chosen what, for me, are the best, most interesting series published in the period when Sherlock was dead: six series which showcase the variety of responses to Sherlock’s death and the various types of ephemeral publication which attempted to fill the post-Holmes void. So, Chap. 2 began with the

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Strand’s immediate response to the death of Sherlock Holmes, with an examination of a number of series by Doyle’s immediate replacement in the magazine and his most prolific rival, L.T. Meade. Chapter 3 looked at lady detective Loveday Brooke’s appearance in the Ludgate, exploring the ways in which this magazine appeared to be a female-oriented version of the Strand magazine, examining Brooke’s female methodology and interactions with the male police force alongside the real late-Victorian trend for female private investigators many years before the appearance of the first Metropolitan Police female detective in 1922. Chapter 4 focused upon Arthur Morrison’s detective series for the Strand and Windsor magazines, examining how his departure from the Strand to its more risqué rival allowed Morrison to experiment and create a detective-slum-fiction hybrid collection, which situated the detective genre firmly in the “mean streets” some decades before Raymond Chandler used that phrase. Chapter 5 examined the ‘Hagar of the Pawnshop’ stories by Fergus Hume, the author of the bestselling work of detective fiction of the 1800s, revealing and exploring their appearance in serial syndicated form in a number of British provincial newspapers. The chapter examined how Hagar’s cases revolved around the investigation of material objects brought into her pawnshop, allowing the series to achieve one of the fullest explorations of issues of class, race, gender, national identity in late-Victorian detective fiction. Chapter 6 focused upon Richard Marsh’s Augustus Champnell stories, which were published in several provincial newspapers in the 1890s, both before and after his phenomenal success with the Gothic mystery The Beetle. The chapter argued that the Champnell stories feature one of the first aristocratic private detectives in the history of the crime genre, and therefore offer intriguing explorations of the intersection between class, criminality, and policework. Chapter 7 examined the Flaxman Low stories by mother-and-son team Kate and Hesketh Prichard, featuring a detective who investigated threats on British soil which emanated both from abroad and from the spirit world. This chapter looked at the ways in which the stories’ serial publication in Pearson’s fit in with the magazine’s preoccupation with imperial issues and the policing of borders. The six case studies which have been presented here are part introduction, part sample, part description, part book and reception history, part analysis of the themes and tropes of nineteenth-century detective fiction. They show that, despite their use of death-rays, poisons, Chinamen, and secret societies, the overlooked writers of the 1890s detective story didn’t get the genre wrong—in fact, they foresaw many of the tropes and features

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that would dominate twentieth- and twenty-first-century crime fiction. There are women detectives using gossip to help solve crimes (which would later feature in Christie’s Miss Marple stories), or helping fellow women without agency to help themselves (as in Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski novels); investigators taking on threats from the supernatural world (as in Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, or Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently tales); crossing the line between criminal and detective (as in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series, David Peace’s Red Riding Trilogy, or James Ellroy’s LA Quartet); aristocratic detectives (such as Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion, or Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn); and fiendish master-­criminals (pretty much every serial killer novel ever written). They have been, moreover, a reminder the Doyle’s Holmes stories are not the whole story of late Victorian detective fiction. There is much to learn about the Victorian detective genre from the successors of both Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes and still more to learn by trawling the physical and digital archives of lesser-known nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals. I have made a small contribution to this task with this study; I look forward to continuing this work and to learning more from others about further rivals and successors of Sherlock Holmes.

References Ascari, Maurizio. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Clarke, Clare. Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock. Palgrave, 2014. Cook, Michael. Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story: The Haunted Text. Palgrave, 2014. “The Detection Club Oath.” in Ed. Howard Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Grosset and Dunlap, 1946, pp. 197–202. Greene, Hugh, ed. The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Early Detective Stories. Bodley Head, 1970. Haycraft, Howard. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Grosset and Dunlap, 1946. ———. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. D. AppletonCentury Company, 1941. Horsley, Lee. “From Sherlock Holmes to Present.” A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley. John Wiley & Sons, 2010, pp. 28–42.

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Humpherys, Anne. “Who’s Doing It? Fifteen Years of Work on Victorian Detective Fiction.” Dickens Studies Annual, 1998, pp. 259–74. Kestner, Joseph A. Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913. Ashgate, 2003. Knight, Stephen. “Enter the Detective: early patterns of crime fiction.” The Art of Murder: New Essays on Detective Fiction, edited by Stephen Knight and H. Gustav Klaus. Stauffenburg, 1998a, pp. 10–25. ———. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 1980. ———. and H.  Gustav Klaus, eds. The Art of Murder: New Essays on Detective Fiction. Stauffenburg, 1998b. Knox, Ronald A. “Detective Story Decalogue.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Howard Haycraft. Grosset and Dunlap, 1946, pp. 194–46. Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-­ Century Fictions of Crime. Oxford UP, 2003. Panek, LeRoy Lad. Before Sherlock Holmes: How Magazines and Newspapers Invented the Detective Story. McFarland and Company Inc., 2011. ———, and Mary M. Bendel-Simso. The Essential Elements of the Detective Story, 1820-1891. McFarland and Co. Inc, 2017. Pittard, Christopher. “‘Cheap, healthful literature’: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 40, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–23. ———. Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction. Ashgate, 2011. ———. “The Real Sensation of 1887: Fergus Hume and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 26, no. 1, 2008, pp. 37–48. Radford, Andrew. “Victorian Detective Fiction.” Literature Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, 2008, pp. 1179–96. Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture. Ohio State UP, 2004. Smajic´, Srdjan. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge UP, 2010. Sussex, Lucy. Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre. Palgrave, 2010. Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History. Penguin, 1972. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Howard Haycraft. Grosset and Dunlap, 1946, pp. 189–93.

Index1

A Angel in the House, 99 Answers, 111 Augustus Champnell, 109–127 “The Author of Madame Midas,” 87 B Baker, Colonel Valentine, 101 The Barre Daily Times, 90 The Beetle, 111 “The Beryl Coronet,” 68 Besant, Walter, 64 The Blood of the Vampire, 152n16 Booth, Charles, 67, 76, 92, 97 Boothby, Guy, 69 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 90, 124 “The Burglary at Azalea Villa,” 114, 121

C Canadian Magazine, 90 Cardiff Times, 125, 126 Carlyle, Thomas, 121 “The Case of Janissary,” 74 “The Case of Mr Loftus Deacon,” 77 Chandler, Raymond, 79 Chesterton, G.K., 68 A Child of the Jago, 63, 70 Collins, Wilkie, 74, 95, 117 “The Coming of Hagar,” 90 Corelli, Marie, 87, 111 Criminal Man, 99 D Dandy, 121 Dante, 95 Degeneration, 121 Dickens, Charles, 74, 91 Dilke, Charles, 101

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891–1901, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8

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INDEX

Divorce Court, 101, 123 Douglass, Frederick, 151n16 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 88, 111 Dracula, 109, 127 Dr. Nikola, 69 Dr. Watson, 72 Du Maurier, George, 111 Dundee Evening Post, 126 Dupin, 116 E East End, 63 Evening Stateman, 90 The Evening World (New York), 90 F Fiction Bureau, 89–90 “The Five Orange Pips,” 126 “The Florentine Dante,” 95 Frankenstein, Victor, 89 Frith, William, 100 G Gissing, George, 64, 88, 112 H Hammett, Dashiell, 128n14 Harmsworth, 66 Harmsworth, Alfred, 111 Henley, W.E., 64 Hewitt, Martin, 66 The House of Mystery, 113 How to Read Character in Features Form and Faces: A Guide to the General Outlines of Physiognomy, 100 Hyde, Edward, 100

I Inspector Bucket, 74 Inspector Lestrade, 95 J Jack the Ripper, 64 K Kestner, Joseph, 58n1 L Lady Audley’s Secret, 124 “Lady Majendie’s Disappearance,” 114, 119 The Last Straw, 89 Leeds Mercury, 126 “The Lenton Croft Robberies,” 67 Locked-room mystery, 68 Lombroso, Cesare, 99 Lord Peter Wimsey, 113 Loveday Brooke, 96 M The Maltese Falcon, 128n14 Manchester Times, 121, 125 “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” 119 Marryat, Florence, 152n16 Master-criminal, 69 Meade, L.T., 66 Metropolitan Police, 70, 95 Miller, D.A., 74, 116 The Moonstone, 117 Moretti, Franco, 70 Morrison, Arthur, 63 Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, 101 “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 67 The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, 86

 INDEX 

N “The Narrative of Mr James Rigby,” 71 Newcastle Courant, 125 Newcastle Weekly Courant, 114, 121 New Grub Street, 64, 88, 112 Newnes, George, 64 “New Woman,” 59n14 “The Ninth Customer and the Casket,” 99 Nordau, Max, 121 Northup, Solomon, 151n16 O “Old Cater’s Money,” 76 P “The Passing of Hagar,” 103 Past and Present, 121 Pawnbroking, 91 Pawnshops, 91 “The Peril of Paul Lessingham: The Story of a Haunted Man,” 111 The Piccadilly Puzzle, 88 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 100 Pirkis, C.L., 96 Poe, Edgar Allan, 67, 116 Poverty Maps, 92 R Realist novels, 63 Reform Acts, 117 “The Robbery on the Stormy Petrel,” 114, 125, 126 S The Salt Lake Herald, 90 The San Francisco Call, 90

165

Sartor Resartus, 121 Sayers, Dorothy L., 113 “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 68, 118 Scotland Yard, 66, 68, 96, 116 “The Second Customer and the Amber Beads,” 95 The Seen and the Unseen, 115 Sergeant Cuff, 74 Sherlock Holmes, 66, 85, 88, 116 Sidekick, 66, 71 “The Sixth Customer and the Silver Teapot,” 97 Sketches by Boz, 91 Slum, 63 Slum fiction, 70 The Sorrows of Satan, 88 Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser and General Intelligencer, 86 “The Speckled Band,” 67, 68 Stanley, Hagar, 85 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 100 Stoker, Bram, 109 “The Stolen Treaty,” 114, 125 Stories from the Diary of a Doctor, 66, 151n15 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 94 A Study in Scarlet, 86 Summerscale, Kate, 101 Superintendent Seegrave, 95 Svengali, 113 Syndicated, 114 Syndication, 89, 114 T Taken at the Flood, 90 Tales of Mean Streets, 63 Thetford and Watton Times, 119 Thing theory, 92 Tillotson, 89 Tit-Bits, 64 Todorov, Tzvetan, 71

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INDEX

U Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 94 V “Veiled Lodger,” 118 W Watson, 71, 116

Wells, H.G., 73 West End, 78 Wilde, Oscar, 100, 121 Windsor, 66, 69 Z “Zig Zags at the Zoo,” 66