More than 130 years after his first appearance in print, Sherlock Holmes remains the most famous fictional detective in the world. Yet he and his dependable sidekick, Dr Watson, were not the only ones racing down Victorian and Edwardian London’s gaslit streets in pursuit of criminal masterminds. The years between 1890 and 1914 were a golden age for English magazines and nearly all of them published crime and detective fiction. Sherlock Holmes had plenty of rivals.
In the last few years I’ve compiled several anthologies of crime stories from that era. I’ve scoured the back numbers of old magazines and blown the dust off half-forgotten volumes of short stories in second-hand bookshops in search of Holmes’s competitors. In The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes and More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes I highlighted 30 of them. Some, like GK Chesterton’s Father Brown, still have their own fame. Others, such as Addington Peace, created by the man who gave Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the basic idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Percy Brebner’s Christopher Quarles, are scarcely remembered today. Some were such Holmes clones you wondered why their authors were never charged with plagiarism; others, like the wizened Hindu sage Kala Persad and Hagar, the Romany pawnbroker, were more exotic.
In Supernatural Sherlocks I gathered together stories of a special type of crime-solver – the occult detective whose investigations took in the supernatural world. The most famous of these is probably William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder. In Sherlock’s Sisters I put together tales of women detectives. They range from Catherine Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke, representative of what was known at the time as ‘The New Woman’, independent and intent on her own career, to the lip-reader Judith Lee who can never go anywhere without encountering villains discussing outrageous crimes, blithely unaware that their every word has been understood by the young woman on the far side of the room.
My latest anthology is American Sherlocks. The title is self-explanatory. Its heroes are transatlantic ones. We all have a picture in our mind of the archetypal detective of American fiction. He (and it very nearly always is a he) is a hardboiled, wisecracking private eye, walking a city’s mean streets. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or one of the hundreds, probably thousands, of other gumshoes who have trodden in their footsteps. But that style of detective only came into being in the late 1920s and early 1930s. American crime fiction has a much longer history.
It began with Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories (‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ etc) in the 1840s. It’s tempting to believe that then nothing much happened in American crime fiction between Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’ and the arrival of writers like SS Van Dine, Hammett and Ellery Queen in the 1920s but this is far from being the case. The USA had as many fictional crimebusters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Britain. Broadly, they fell into two categories.
The first was the dime novel hero. Dime novels, first appearing in the 1860s, were the American equivalents of British ‘penny dreadfuls’. They came in a range of genres, including crime fiction in which characters like ‘Old Sleuth’ and ‘Sam Strong the Cowboy Detective’ battled bad guys in stories that made up in lively action for what they lacked in literary sophistication. However, the major detective to emerge from the dime novel was Nick Carter. He arrived in 1886 and new stories about him were still being published a century later. I’ve included one from 1914 in my anthology.
The second type of American detective was one modelled much more closely on Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle’s stories were just as popular in the USA as they were at home. Scores of American rivals to Holmes appeared in magazines and collections of short stories. The impressively named Professor Augustus SFX Van Dusen, known as ‘The Thinking Machine’, was even more cerebral than Holmes. Madelyn Mack, who chewed on cola berries for stimulus while exercising her formidable deductive powers, was a female Sherlock, working as a private detective in New York. The blind detective Thornley Colton was a wealthy New Yorker who took on cases purely for intellectual interest.
Both in the USA and in Britain there are plenty of Sherlock’s rivals to be enjoyed. In my five anthologies I have highlighted a few dozen. There are even more out there to be discovered and I hope to do so in the future.
American Sherlocks Edited by Nick Rennison (Oldcastle Books) Out Now
Sherlock Holmes is the most famous of all fictional detectives but, across the Atlantic, he had plenty of rivals. Between 1890 and 1920, American writers created dozens and dozens of crime-solvers. This thrilling, unusual anthology features stories about 15 of them, including Professor Augustus SFX Van Dusen, 'The Thinking Machine', even more cerebral than Holmes; Craig Kennedy, the so-called 'scientific detective'; Uncle Abner, a shrewd backwoodsman in pre-Civil War Virginia; Violet Strange, New York debutante turned criminologist; and Nick Carter, the original pulp private eye. Editor Nick Rennison gathers together often neglected tales which highlight American crime fiction's early years.
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