Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The (2 page)

  It was not just in Britain that writers created detective heroes for the magazines. Some American authors published their work in British magazines. Several stories by the South Carolina orthodontist and mystery writer Rodrigues Ottolengui, for instance, appeared in
The Idler
in the mid-1890s. And, over on the other side of the Atlantic, there were plenty of home-grown magazines which provided a market for American authors, from Jacques Futrelle, creator of 'The Thinking Machine', to Arthur B. Reeve, whose tales of the 'scientific' detective Craig Kennedy began to appear in the years just before the First World War and continued to be popular for decades. It would have been perfectly possible to compile an anthology that consisted entirely of stories by American writers but, in the end, I have contented myself with choosing three.

   A vast treasure trove of crime fiction, then, was published on both sides of the Atlantic in the years between 1890 and 1914 and it is from this that I have chosen the fifteen stories in this book. Others before me have produced similar anthologies. In the 1970s, Graham Greene's brother Hugh produced four collections of crime short stories from the Victorian and Edwardian era. Rather cheekily, I have borrowed the title of my anthology from one of his. However, the archive of fiction from the magazines of the 1890s and 1900s is so extensive that it is always possible to venture into it again, both to resurrect stories published in previous anthologies and to look for others.

  The question remains – how good were all these rivals of Sherlock Holmes? The problem for those following in the wake of Conan Doyle in the 1890s and 1900s was that they were trying to compete with what rapidly became a phenomenon. Sherlock Holmes became so startlingly popular that writers looking to create successful fictional detectives faced an immediate difficulty. How could they differentiate their creations from Holmes? Some didn't really bother. Many Holmes clones can be found lurking among the back numbers of late Victorian and Edwardian periodicals. Some openly advertised their resemblance to the great detective. Some were rapidly categorised as Holmes lookalikes at the time they were first published. Sexton Blake, for instance, the creation of a prolific writer of stories for boys' papers named Harry Blyth, was soon dubbed 'the office boys' Sherlock Holmes'. And making your central character just like Holmes, only more so, was not necessarily a recipe for poor fiction. Jacques Futrelle's Professor S. F. X. Van Dusen, 'The Thinking Machine', clearly owes a great deal to the Baker Street sleuth – staggering, almost inhuman intelligence, detachment from mundane reality, arcane knowledge, impatience with lesser intelligences etc. – but he is none the less one of the most memorable characters of the period.

  Other writers chose a different strategy. Instead of trying to make their characters even stranger and more intellectual than Holmes, they chose to emphasise their ordinariness. Unlike the eccentric genius of Baker Street, Arthur Morrison's Martin Hewitt, who appeared in stories published in
The Strand
only three years after Holmes's debut in the magazine, is a deliberately colourless character. Hewitt is no deductive superman but someone not too different from the reader who solves his cases by the determined application of common sense. The ultimate embodiment of this technique is Chesterton's Father Brown who made his debut some twenty years after Holmes's first appearance in The Strand. The Roman Catholic priest is so nondescript that other characters in the stories often overlook his presence, so straightforward that he often appears simple-minded to those that do notice him. The paradox (and Chesterton was keen on paradoxes) is that it is Father Brown who sees further and deeper into the human heart than those who seem to be more sophisticated and intelligent.

  By far the most common technique writers used in competing with Holmes, however, and one that is still employed today, was to give their characters a Unique Selling Point which was emphasised in every story. Provide your detective with a particular characteristic or give him or her the kind of career and lifestyle that (you hoped) no other detective had and you were several steps on the path towards success. For this reason, the period offers (amongst others), a blind detective (Max Carrados in the stories of Ernest Bramah), a detective who is a Canadian woodsman and hunter (November Joe, created by Hesketh Prichard), a detective who solves crimes from a corner seat in a London teashop (Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner), a gypsy who own a pawnshop (Fergus Hume's Hagar), a wise old Hindu who travels to London from a remote Indian village (Headon Hill's Kala Persad) and a strangely named Edwardian gentleman whose opponents are largely supernatural (William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki).

  One possible USP which very rapidly became anything but unique was to make your detective a woman. A large number of female detectives can be found in the pages of the magazines, from George R. Sims's Dorcas Dene and Catherine Louisa Pirkis's Loveday Brooke to Grant Allen's Lois Cayley and Baroness Orczy's Lady Emma of Scotland Yard. This may seem surprising at first but the reason is not hard to find. The late 1880s and the 1890s were the years of the 'New Woman', the proto-feminist who challenged men in what had previously been exclusively masculine domains. 'New Women' could be found at the ancient universities, in professions like journalism and running their own businesses. They could be seen riding bicycles and smoking cigarettes. They made their presence felt in ways that previous generations of women had not done. It was only to be expected that they would become detectives as well, if only in the pages of the magazines.

  In the pages of this anthology, readers will find all sorts of crime solvers – women detectives, Holmes clones, deliberately ordinary detectives and detectives whose creators are keen to emphasise their special, defining characteristics. One or two of the protagonists of the stories I have chosen, like Chesterton's Father Brown, are wellknown. I was determined to include a Father Brown story because it seems to me that the meek Roman Catholic priest is one of the very few detectives of the period, indeed perhaps the only one, entirely to escape the shadow of Sherlock Holmes. There are other detectives – Morrison's Martin Hewitt, Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner, R. Austin Freeman's Dr Thorndyke – who are nearly as familiar. I could have included stories featuring these sleuths but I have never found any of them as compelling as their reputations would suggest. Besides, I wanted very much for the anthology to dig more deeply into the mountain of crime fiction that is to be found in the magazines of the era. I wanted to include less familiar heroes and most of those in the anthology fit this description. In the final analysis, I make no apology for preferring November Joe, Thorpe Hazell and Miss Lois Cayley to detectives with greater fame.

  Not all the stories in this anthology are of equal quality. By very nearly every standard known to man, G. K. Chesterton, Arnold Bennett and Grant Allen were better writers than, say, Headon Hill and Victor Whitechurch and it shows in the tales they wrote. None the less all of the stories in the anthology are, in my opinion, well worth reading. Hill and Whitechurch may not have been as sophisticated as Chesterton or Allen but their stories remain engaging yarns and they tell us as much, if not more, about the era in which they were written as those by their literary superiors. Arthur B. Reeve's Craig Kennedy stories are naive when compared to Bennett's witty tales of Cecil Thorold but they have a buoyant enthusiasm for the wonders of newly emerging sciences which makes them just as appealing. The quarter of a century from the beginning of the 1890s to the outbreak of the First World War was a golden age for detective fiction. Sherlock Holmes reigned over it as undisputed king but, as this anthology endeavours to demonstrate, there were plenty of rivals to his crown and many of them are worth rediscovering.

O
NE OF THE MOST memorable crime-solvers in the fiction of the decade before the First World War was the magnificently named Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, otherwise known as 'The Thinking Machine'. Arrogant, cantakerous and eccentric, the very model of the mad scientist, Van Dusen solved a series of apparently insoluble mysteries, usually brought to his attention by his associate, the journalist Hutchinson Hatch. 'The Thinking Machine' was the creation of Jacques Futrelle, an American journalist and novelist born in Georgia in 1875. Futrelle wrote around fifty stories featuring the professor with a brain the size of a planet and doubtless there would have been more if the author had not met an untimely end in one of the most famous disasters of the twentieth century. In 1912, Futrelle and his wife were visiting England and chose to return to New York as first-class passengers on the
Titanic
. When the ship struck the iceberg and sank, Futrelle's wife survived but he was amongst nearly 1,500 who drowned.

Practically all those letters remaining in the alphabet after Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen was named were afterward acquired by that gentleman in the course of a brilliant scientific career, and, being honorably acquired, were tacked on to the other end. His name, therefore, taken with all that belonged to it, was a wonderfully imposing structure. He was a Ph.D., an LL.D., an F.R.S., an M.D., and an M.D.S. He was also some other things – just what he himself couldn't say – through recognition of his ability by various foreign educational and scientific institutions.

  In appearance he was no less striking than in nomenclature. He was slender with the droop of the student in his thin shoulders and the pallor of a close, sedentary life on his clean-shaven face. His eyes wore a perpetual, forbidding squint – the squint of a man who studies little things – and when they could be seen at all through his thick spectacles were mere slits of watery blue. But above his eyes was his most striking feature. This was a tall, broad brow, almost abnormal in height and width, crowned by a heavy shock of bushy, yellow hair. All these things conspired to give him a peculiar, almost grotesque, personality.

  Professor Van Dusen was remotely German. For generations his ancestors had been noted in the sciences; he was the logical result, the master mind. First and above all he was a logician. At least thirtyfive years of the half-century or so of his existence had been devoted exclusively to proving that two and two always equal four, except in unusual cases, where they equal three or five, as the case may be. He stood broadly on the general proposition that all things that start must go somewhere, and was able to bring the concentrated mental force of his forefathers to bear on a given problem. Incidentally it may be remarked that Professor Van Dusen wore a No. 8 hat.

  The world at large had heard vaguely of Professor Van Dusen as The Thinking Machine. It was a newspaper catch-phrase applied to him at the time of a remarkable exhibition at chess; he had demonstrated then that a stranger to the game might, by the force of inevitable logic, defeat a champion who had devoted a lifetime to its study. The Thinking Machine! Perhaps that more nearly described him than all his honorary initials, for he spent week after week, month after month, in the seclusion of his small laboratory from which had gone forth thoughts that staggered scientific associates and deeply stirred the world at large.

  It was only occasionally that The Thinking Machine had visitors, and these were usually men who, themselves high in the sciences, dropped in to argue a point and perhaps convince themselves. Two of these men, Dr Charles Ransome and Alfred Fielding, called one evening to discuss some theory which is not of consequence here.

  'Such a thing is impossible,' declared Dr Ransome emphatically, in the course of the conversation.

  'Nothing is impossible,' declared The Thinking Machine with equal emphasis. He always spoke petulantly. 'The mind is master of all things. When science fully recognizes that fact a great advance will have been made.'

  'How about the airship?' asked Dr Ransome.

  'That's not impossible at all,' asserted The Thinking Machine. 'It will be invented some time. I'd do it myself, but I'm busy.'

  Dr Ransome laughed tolerantly.

  'I've heard you say such things before,' he said. 'But they mean nothing. Mind may be master of matter, but it hasn't yet found a way to apply itself. There are some things that can't be thought out of existence, or rather which would not yield to any amount of thinking.'

  'What, for instance?' demanded The Thinking Machine.

  Dr Ransome was thoughtful for a moment as he smoked.

  'Well, say prison walls,' he replied. 'No man can think himself out of a cell. If he could, there would be no prisoners.'

  'A man can so apply his brain and ingenuity that he can leave a cell, which is the same thing,' snapped The Thinking Machine.