The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries: A Mystery Guide and Finding List

The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and
His Contemporaries (Genius Book
Publishing, 2024).

IN 1891, A NEW London magazine, The Strand, decided to publish short mysteries in connected series. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about Sherlock Holmes nearly doubled the magazine’s circulation, and Doyle became rich. Other magazines searched for tales with the same kind of appeal. Dozens of men and women began to write detective stories in the series format of the Holmes Adventures.

An enormous flowering of this kind of tale followed, with stories that featured women and men detectives, professionals and amateurs, young and old, aristocrats, gentlefolk, and plain folk. Detectives went rogue and became burglars and con men. Others developed occult powers. It was a Golden Era of detective fiction, and it lasted for two and a half decades until the First World War. Nothing of its variety had been seen before.

Michael Cohen’s The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries is a guide to this trove of stories that fascinated readers a century and a quarter ago. In clear and crisp prose, Cohen takes you through the variety of stories with brief descriptions, and he shows you where to find the stories online in their original, illustrated magazine versions. Here you’ll find names you knew, such as Chesterton’s Father Brown, and less well-known ones such as Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, Anna Katherine Green’s debutante detective Violet Strange, and Gelett Burgess’s “Seer of Secrets,” Astro.

H. Paul Jeffers, The Forgotten Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, based on the original radio plays by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green (2005).

             These stories are based on radio plays broadcast from 1945 to 1947.  The Holmes was Basil Rathbone until 1946 and Tom Conway thereafter; Nigel Bruce read the Watson parts on all the radio shows.

            Sherlock Holmes radio broadcasts had been a staple by then, on the air pretty much continually in the United States and later in England since 1930.  These had various sponsors and were broadcast on different networks over the years.  The plots of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original four novels and fifty-six short stories were soon exhausted, so the radio play writers began to write their own plots using the familiar Conan Doyle characters of Holmes, Dr. Watson, Inspector Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson the landlady, the evil genius Professor Moriarty, and so on. 

            Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater on the Air produced a Holmes broadcast, and many episodes were written by Leslie Charteris, the creator of his own very popular mystery adventure character, Simon Templar, called “The Saint.”  Eventually Charteris hired Anthony Boucher, an author of mysteries and science fiction stories as well as literary and music criticism.  Boucher’s collaborator was Denis Green, who had been a writer for the Thin Man radio series based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel.

            Jeffers’s adaptations of the radio plays into stories often start with a character or situation mentioned in the original Sherlock Holmes stories.  Conan Doyle would have Watson, his narrator, drop references to cases he had not written up, and some of these show up here, such as “The Adventure of the Paradol Chamber.”  The plots are ingenious, though Jeffers has not mastered Conan Doyle’s construction techniques to preserve the readers’ interest.  A typical Conan Doyle Holmes story begins with mystifying events and then moves to physical adventure before Holmes explains all.  The Jeffers stories tend to be anticlimactic.

            Jeffers also lacks Conan Doyle’s sensitivity to language, and he occasionally slips up on historical and cultural issues.  An Edwardian gentleman would not have referred to his own times with that term, for instance, as Jeffers has Watson do, and baronets are not in the English nobility, though Jeffers gives one the title of “Lord.”

            But Sherlock Holmes lovers will suffer a lot just to be once again in the company of their favorite detective, however attenuated and inarticulate this ghostly manifestation might be.  If you’re a reader like that, you’ll like The Forgotten Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.