Clarke sets out to look at the detective fiction published during Sherlock Holmes’s absence, that is, from the time Conan Doyle killed him off at the Reichenbach Falls, along with Professor Moriarty, in “The Final Problem,” which came out in the December, 1893 issue of The Strand Magazine, and Holmes’s return in The Hound of the Baskervilles, whose first instalment appeared in the Strand in 1901.
Most of the successors to Sherlock Holmes during this period which Holmes fans call “the hiatus,” began their lives in the pages of periodicals like the monthly Strand and its imitators/rivals, Pearson’s, Windsor, Ludgate, and Harmsworth magazines, as well as weekly magazines and city newspapers. Clarke examines a sampling of the many authors who published detective fiction during this time, choosing six writers. She begins with a writer second only to Conan Doyle himself in the number of stories published in the Strand, L. T. Meade. She selects from the six series of detective stories published by Meade in the Strand two: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor, which appeared there from 1893 to 1895 and were collected in two volumes in 1894 and 1896; and The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, serialized and then published in book form in 1898.
Next, she looks at C. L. Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, serialized in the Ludgate Magazine, which Clarke calls “a female-oriented version of the Strand,” in 1893-1894 and appearing in book form the 1894. Then she turns to Arthur Morrison’s two detectives. The law-abiding one, Martin Hewitt, showed up in the Strand in 1894, while the criminal one, Horace Dorrington, was apparently a little too strong for the conservative Strand and was featured in Windsor Magazine in 1897. She turns then to Fergus Hume’s remarkable stories about the Romany girl Hagar Stanley which were published in provincial newspapers in Liverpool and Woolwich in 1897 and in book form the following year as Hagar of the Pawn-Shop.
Her penultimate detective is an aristocrat, Augustus Champnell, who appeared first in short stories in newspapers in Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle between July, 1895 and October, 1899 and came out in book form as An Aristocratic Detective in 1900. Finally, Clarke discusses the Flaxman Low stories written by Kate Prichard and her son, Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard, serialized in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898 and 1899 and published in 1899 as Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low. Clarke makes the argument that detectives like Low who investigate “diabolical agency” instead of confining themselves, like Sherlock Holmes, to material signs and material agency are a product of a certain genre fluidity inevitable as authors were in the process of inventing what detective fiction was going to be.
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