"VIXERE fortes ante Agamemnona," wrote E. M. Wrong in his
admirable Introduction to the Oxford collection of Crime and Detection
stories, "but we have forgotten them, and tend to think of the
pre-HOLMES detectives as of the pre-Shakespearean drama; to call them
precursors only." And mere precursors they were, for the most part,
though recent attempts have been made to disinter their literary bones,
chiefly for the benefit of those aficionados of the esoteric, the
edition collectors. John Carter has performed particularly able
investigation in this field, uncovering a sizable list of writers in the
form who flourished after Gaboriau and Collins but before Doyle. The
specialist whose interests lie in collecting is referred to this
valuable authority (see Chapter XIII). The rest of us can have little
concern with authors who neither influenced the development of the
detective story seriously in their own time nor are. remembered for
themselves to-day. The few pre-HOLMESIANS who were exceptions on either
ground will be discussed in due course.
One pre-HOLMESIAN (by a few months) who neither influenced others nor is
remembered for himself to-day, but who deserves our brief attention for
a unique cause, is the Anglo-Australian fiction writer, Fergus Hume
(1859-1932). Although he published more than 130 hack works in his long
lifetime, at least half of them in the mystery-detective category, his
sole bid for fame rests on his first story, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab,
written while he was a barrister's clerk in Melbourne, and first
published there.* For some unfathomable reason this shoddy pot-boiler
received vastly more contemporary attention than Doyle's Study in
Scarlet, issued about the same time. It was dignified by a full-length
parody only slightly worse than the original; and by the time of its
author's death it had sold more than half a million copies —making it,
according to Willard Huntington Wright and other authorities, the
greatest commercial success in the annals of detective fiction. Scarcely
readable to-day, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab belongs among the famous
"freak books" and is mentioned here for its historical interest only.
* Bibliographers have hitherto unanimously given the date
of the Melbourne publication as 1887. However, an article in the London.
Illustrated News, October 6, 1888, discovered by the present writer,
places it a year earlier. This is confirmed by E. M. Miller's recent
Australian Literature From Us Beginnings (Melbourne University Press,
1940), which gives a detailed account of the writing of the story and
further states that the only known copy of the 1886 imprint is preserved
in the Mitchell Library, Melbourne. Nevertheless, the real fame of the
book dates from its London printing of 1887, so that the usual
comparisons of it with A Study m Scarlet, issued in that year, are not
without good basis.
them, as could only be expected, were cheap imitations long
since forgotten. A few, however, deserve consideration on their own
merits.
The first important English writer of detective fiction after Conan
Doyle was Arthur Morrison. Born in Kent in 1863, he entered journalism
after a short career in the civil service; to-day he is the last living
survivor of the old National Observer staff, the famous "Henley group."
Aside from his detective stories, which he belittles, he is well known
for his sketches and novels; His graphic pictures of nineteenth-century
London slum life in Tales of Mean Streets were classics of their time
and place and have been credited with strongly influencing contemporary
housing legislation (in which Britain has led America by so many years).
His Painters of Japan, published in 1911, is still a leading work on
that subject, and the British Museum acquired his collection of Chinese
and Japanese paintings in 1913. In the First World War he held an
important post in the civilian defense and personally telephoned the
earliest warning of the first Zeppelin raid on London. An only son
fought through the entire war and died in 1921 as the consequence of his
service. To-day Arthur Morrison lives in quiet retirement at his rural
home in Buckinghamshire, surrounded by his art treasures, a mellow
septuagenarian survivor of what may well have been a better age. He is a
Fellow and Member of Council of the Royal Society of Literature.
It was in 1894 that Arthur Morrison began his series of stories relating
the adventures of MARTIN HEWITT, a barrister-turned-sleuth. HEWITT bears
a resemblance both to HOLMES, who preceded him, and to R Austin Freeman
medical-legal expert, DR. THORNDYKE, whom he antedated by a little more
than a decade. He is less dramatic than the former and less scientific
than the latter, but the tales in which he takes part (most of them of
the short variety) are good if conventional detection, set against
HOLMESIAN backdrops. He has his Watson, of course: one Brett, a
journalist. Despite his similarity in many ways to Doyle's hero, he
represents the first symptomatic reaction against the eccentric
detective in fiction: the author lays considerable stress (which is not
always borne out) on the investigator's commonplaceness.
For the most part the stories are well written (one must except a few
unfortunate occasions when Morrison attempted to employ the argot of the
underworld), and the problems, if not too baffling to-day, still make
pleasant reading nearly half a century after they first saw print. The
HEWITT books are four in number: Martin Hewitt: Investigator (1894),
Chronicles of Martin Hewitt (1895), The Adventures of Martin Hewitt
(1896), and The Red Triangle (1903). The first three are collections of
short stories, the fourth, an episodic novel. They are almost impossible
to find in their original state to-day, but HEWITT is well represented
in the more carefully compiled anthologies.
Arthur Morrison added little that was new to the HOLMES formula, but his
quiet and literate touch helped the detective story to survive an era
when too many of its practitioners were second-rate workmen, content to
imitate the more obvious and less admirable characteristics of the Doyle
romances. A less direct contributor to the detective story in the
HOLMES era, but one of some technical importance, was Robert Barr
(1850-1912). Born in Glasgow, he was taken to Canada by his parents at
an early age. He grew up to become headmaster of a school in Windsor,
Ontario, at scarcely twenty, and then drifted across the border to join
the staff of the Detroit Free Press as a reporter. The exuberant
American journalism of the 1870's was to his liking, and in 1881 his
services were rewarded when the Free Press sent him to London as its
representative. His facile pen quickly won him admission to the English
popular magazines with his light and humorous tales, of which he wrote
and sold hundreds. He died at sixty-two, at the height of his career.
As a writer, Robert Barr was literally that dubious entity, "a born
story-teller," with little art in composition save an effortless
narrative style. (Yet Stephen Crane, on his death-bed, chose Barr to
complete his The O'Ruddy; and so acute a critic as Vincent Starrett has
pronounced the touching collaboration "perfectly performed.") The public
eagerly absorbed his ephemeral works, which were written first for
magazine consumption and later made into books, only to forget them
almost immediately. He would be virtually unknown to-day except for the
presence in historical anthologies of some of the episodes from his
Triumphs of Eugene Valmont (1906), his lone excursion into the detective
field.
VALMONT was as Gallic as his name presumes, ludicrously pompous, and
exceedingly fallible. His only present-day significance is as the first
humorous detective of any standing. Creation of such a type was
inevitable, as a reaction against the "master-mind" school of sleuthing.
But, as many authors have discovered, it is a device that is singularly
difficult to handle; for the instant that a detective becomes ridiculous
or stupid, he is ipso facto a failure within the meaning of the act. A
fictional sleuth may have his little vanities, he may even come to wrong
conclusions; but, by the unwritten rules of the form, he must retain
sufficient underlying dignity and skill in his profession to hold the
respect of his readers: otherwise the whole structure falls. A
successful modern example of the humorous detective is Agatha Christie
popular HERCULE POIROT (who, incidentally, bears a pictured resemblance
to VALMONT that seems more than accidental). But VALMONT himself was too
broadly drawn. Only one or two of the stories in which he figured are at
all readable to-day, and it must be concluded that Robert Barr was more
important for the style he founded than for his own success within that
mode. From the earliest days of the police novel there has been a vast
deal of high-flown talk about the "scientific31 detective. The plain
truth is that few of the sleuths of fiction wearing this designation
would know which way to turn if they found themselves in a real-life
laboratory. The shining exception for all time is R. Austin Freeman's
DR JOHN THORNDYKE. No other literary criminologist, so far as this
writer knows, has been paid the tribute of having his fictional methods
put Into use by the real police.
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