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.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda (1957)

Francesco Ingravallo is the thirty-five-year-old homicide detective who investigates the murder of Liliana Balducci, who, along with her husband Remo, is a friend of Ingravallo, who had dinner with them several weeks before the murder. Ingravallo was attracted to Liliana and is emotionally affected by the murder and by his investigation, which first implicates her cousin Giuliano and then her husband, though their account of things is eventually supported by all whom Ingravallo interviews. Ingravallo is dark haired, and his curly mop of hair is often mentioned in the book. He despises Mussolini and calls him all sorts of names, some playing on il Duce, such as “the Douche” or “the Deuce,” and others merely scurrilous, such as “the syphilitic” or just “the Shit.” Yet it irks him that he hasn’t even achieved the first of Mussolini’s two ranks of honorary titles for citizens, cavaliere, let alone the second, commendatore.

He is introspective and philosophical, with a view about causes—not just murder motives but all human causation—that sees them as a complicated mix of individual willed motives, circumstances, character as destiny, and ultimately untraceable influences, “a whole multitude of converging causes” making a “knot, or tangle, or muddle., or gnommero, which in Roman dialect means skein.” For Italo Calvino, who wrote in 1984 an introduction to this 1965 translation by William Weaver, this view of the limitations of our knowledge of human causes “is reflected in Gadda’s style, in his language, which is a thick amalgam of folk expressions and learned speech, of interior monologue and artistic prose, of various dialects and literary quotations.”

The usual level of the style is elevated and philosophical, reflecting Ingravallo’s thought, but he sometimes thinks and talks in a mixture that reflects his native Molise and his adopted Rome, and street language or diction that reflects social class is frequent. He plays language games with names even as the Romans around him just get them wrong half the time. Sometimes Gadda will record Ingravallo’s thought with an ellipsis that indicates he might have used a stronger word, that the one he chooses after a pause is a euphemism, or he merely thus corrects himself. A half-page-long sentence is not unusual. I rarely got through one of the novel’s 388 pages without having to look a word up, and frequently I did not find it because Gadda had made it up: for example, whatever the Italian word was that William Weaver translated as velocipederasts.

The book is widely satiric, encompassing various levels of Roman and Italian society generally, savage in its aim at Mussolini, at the charisma worship of too many Italians, and at fascism in all its manifestations, and it is petty sometimes in going after Gadda’s pet peeves, such as the pictograph road signs newly devised by a Milanese engineer. As Weaver points out in his translator’s preface, sometimes “his attacks are so thoroughly veiled as to be incomprehensible to all but the author himself.”

Commenting on its stature, Weaver asserts that the book “occupies in contemporary Italian literature the position that Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, and The Man Without Qualities occupy in the literatures of their respective countries” in regard to its experimentalism and obsession with language. As Calvino writes in his introduction to the New York Review of Books edition, it is simultaneously a novel about Rome, a book about a philosophical attitude toward causation and our ability to know it, a detective novel, and an attack on the fascism that gripped Italy from the twenties until Mussolini’s death at the hands of partisans in 1945.

As detective novel it’s going to disappoint many of its readers. The murder is memorable, and the detective is an interesting character, but Ingravallo is absent from a lot of the action of the book, as the investigation moves outside of Rome into the Alban hills and is taken up by minor members of the national police, the carabinieri. Gadda is often more interested in finding the picturesque or elaborating on some of his minor characters than he is pursuing the investigation, and once we seem to have the leads to take us straight to the perpetrators of the crimes—there is jewelry theft as well as murder—he simply winds the book up in a few pages without the actual apprehension of the bad actors. As Johnson said about Clarissa, you’re going to be awfully frustrated if you read it for the story. But there are a lot of other things going on in That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana.

 

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

             A game-changer within the mystery genre: before this book, those who told us candidly of their lust, those whose malice we watched, those who concealed, more or less, their sicknesses—all of these came to a sticky end. After Ripley all things are possible.

            At the beginning, Ripley is a small-time grafter in New York expecting to be arrested every minute. He is hired by Richard Greenleaf’s father to go to Italy to try to persuade his son to return. He ends up killing Richard, impersonating him for a time, killing one of Richard’s friends, and ultimately getting away with both murders. These heinous acts are not excused by the narrative, but are made fascinating by Ripley’s characterization. Ripley is an orphan raised by a cruel and stingy aunt who has left him a moral imbecile. Ripley has an abbreviated list of emotions: he can feel fear and hatred, but he’s incapable of remorse or anything like compassion. Ripley is a sexual innocent—probably a homosexual—with a talent for mimicry and acting that has helped him fill in his emotional gaps. When Richard tells him at one point that Ripley needs to be nicer to Richard’s friend Marge Sherwood, Ripley thinks that he must be more convincing when he pretends to be nice to her.

            Ripley kills Richard in a boat at San Remo, an untidy murder reminiscent of the one in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. During the scene he is afraid of falling into the water and drowning, he is afraid of failing, but he never feels compunction or horror at the act itself.

            Our horror at this murder and the nearly motiveless one of Richard’s friend Freddie Miles does not alienate Ripley from our interest, however. His character is compelling precisely because of what it lacks and the kinds of substitutions that Highsmith makes plausible. For Ripley the enjoyment of possessions, however they are obtained, takes part of the place of sex; gradually we come to realize that brushes with danger also have a sexual frisson for him.

            After the second murder Ripley has to negotiate one crisis after another: his forged signatures on Richard’s monthly maintenance checks are called into question, the Italian police accuse him of having killed Richard when he is being himself and accuse him of having killed Ripley when he is impersonating Richard, and eventually Ripley has to confront Marge Sherwood, Richard’s father, and an American detective the father has hired.

            All of these crises look as if they were building to Ripley’s entrapment, but suddenly he escapes the last threat and is free. We reach the last page and there is no retribution. Ripley looks out at the clear skies of Greece with his conscience—what there is of it—unclouded as well. Highsmith cannot make us love Ripley, but she has involved us in his fortunes and made him interesting, she has let him get away with murder, and she has changed crime fiction.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: J. A. Jance, Desert Heat (1993)

             Joanna Brady is Judy Jance’s Arizona detective, forced into that role in this first book of the series when her husband, a Cochise County sheriff’s deputy, is murdered and his death made to look like a suicide.  Worse, there is evidence that Andy Brady was also involved in drug smuggling.

            Jance was not new to mystery writing when she published Desert Heat in 1993; she already had ten books in a series about a Seattle detective named J. P. Beaumont.  But the setting of this book returns to the area where she grew up, in southeastern Arizona, in the copper-mining town of Bisbee and the surrounding Cochise County. 

    Part of the book is set in Tucson as well, and since I grew up in southern Arizona, I keep trying to read mysteries set there, just because it’s pleasant to come across familiar places when I’m allowing my imagination to inhabit the scene of a book.  Unfortunately, not every Southwestern author writes like Tony Hillerman, and I have put down quite a few of these local mysteries after ten or twenty pages of mediocre writing.  Jance is a good writer, though, and a good deal of the interest I found in this book is in the way she has constructed it.  The book has a structure I would call comic.  I don’t mean that it’s funny, but rather that it has a plot arrangement that shows up in Shakespearean as well as classical Greek and Roman comedy.  Before the reputation of the good guy even begins to be threatened by the bad things he seems to have done, we have already been shown that someone other than the villain knows the truth and can eventually reveal it.  This is reassuring for the audience or the reader.  So it may be a test for Joanna Brady to continue to believe in her husband with each new revelation that seems to incriminate him, but we readers never doubt him and know the truth will out.  In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, for instance, we know that the accusation against the beautiful young heroine will come to nothing because the police have already captured the drunken bunglers who helped to manufacture the evidence against her.

            In Desert Heat, Jance concentrates on two characters, Joanna Brady and the woman who has unwittingly become mixed up with Andy Brady’s killer.  In different ways, each finds more strength of character than she thought herself capable of.  And if you want to know how the series will continue, let me give you this hint: Joanna Brady’s father was sheriff of Cochise County, and her husband Andy was running for sheriff when he was killed.  As one of the characters says, “sometimes the best man for the job is a woman.”

Martin Edwards, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017) and The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators (2022)

            In The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, Edwards, who writes mystery stories set in Liverpool and the Lake District, takes as his scope the first half of the twentieth century in primarily British crime fiction. “I see it as a tale of the unexpected,” he writes—what breaks the previous mold in “achievements and sometimes limitations.” I like this take on writers hoping to fashion an uncommon mystery and a novelty each time they begin.

            The 100 books are neither the absolute best nor necessarily his favorites, but each helps him tell a story. This may be disingenuous, but his choices certainly don’t match up with the lists of the best compiled by Haycraft, the Crime Writers Association (of which Edwards was chair at the time of writing), or the Mystery Writers of America. I had read only a third of the hundred books he chooses to write about in detail—that is, about 500 to 600 words each. I was inspired to read many of his choices through Edwards’s convincing arguments for their contribution to the genre, but more by his recommendation of their good writing: Allingham’s The Case of the Late Pig, Philip MacDonald’s The Rasp, and John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man being several examples. With Edwards I have confidence that he’ll tell me if something has historical importance, but is dull, and he does so with Freeman Wills Crofts’ The Cask, for instance. This candor counts for much.

            The organization of the book is muddled. He starts with several chronological chapters and then switches to thematic ones—mysteries set in the countryside, locked-room mysteries, mysteries about law courts, politics, or professors, and so on. Then near the end he treats American mysteries in one brief chapter, then the rest of the world in another, and he ends with another historical round-up and a look at new developments.

            These chapters each mention briefly many more than the 100 books treated in detail, so that Edwards talks about more than three hundred titles in all, another positive for a book that gets mixed marks. On the one hand Edwards seems trustworthy in his assessments of the readability of mystery books and in measuring their importance. On the other hand, he hasn’t written a very coherent book. But if you are a mystery fan you will find much in Edwards to like, and you will not mind that it’s a book to dip into and read a chapter or two rather than a cohesive narrative.

            Seven years after writing The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, Edwards published a more comprehensive history of the genre, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators (2022). Until I read this book, I did not know that Erskine Childers, the author of The Riddle of the Sands (1903), which exposed an actual threat posed by German war preparations in the Friesian Islands, had been executed as a spy by the Irish Free State and at the time of his death was considered a traitor by them as well as the British. Edwards’s method is to intersperse stories about authors’ lives within his history of the books they wrote, and it is an interesting approach, though it extends his book to over seven hundred pages. Edwards tells the story of Poe’s mysterious death, informs us that Mary Elizabeth Braddon was involved in a scandal that echoes some of her bigamy plots, and gives us a good deal of gossip about the love lives of Golden Age authors of the thirties.

            Edwards frequently quotes Julian Symons’s history, Bloody Murder, which he considers the best of its kind, though in need of updating after its third revision in 1992. He tries to be comprehensive, and the result is a somewhat fragmented narrative of short chapters and what often seems merely a list of authors and titles. He tells us about radio mysteries, Borges and the postmodern mystery, parodies of mysteries and comic mysteries, writing on criticism and history of crime fiction, and he devotes the beginnings of chapters to Ellery Queen, P. D. James, Raymond Chandler, and others, then going on to look at authors who worked similar territory. It’s rather a slog to read very much of The Life of Crime at a stretch, but as a source for information and for Edwards’s always perceptive take on a given author or a strain of mystery fiction, the book is at its most useful.

 

           

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve (1886), translated by Robert Martin Adams (U of Illinois P, 1982

            Thomas Edison, in his laboratory in Menlo Park, is developing an Android—de l’Isle-Adam always capitalizes the word—that he thinks will eventually be manufactured in the thousands, which will replace in the affections of besotted men the unworthy women they have fallen in love with. The Androids can be made to have the exact features and forms of those women. To him in his laboratory comes his old friend Lord Celian Ewald, who once saved Edison’s life. Ewald tells his friend that he has fallen for a woman whom he believed must have a soul to match her stunning beauty—she looks uncannily like the armless Venus Anadyomene in the Louvre. Instead, she turned out to be venal and small-minded, without honor or imagination. Edison sees his friend as the perfect candidate for the first Android. He talks Ewald out of committing suicide for the time being—at least the three weeks it will take him to make his prototype, called Hadaly, into the identical image of Ewald’s Alicia Clary.

            Edison tells Ewald the story of his friend, Edward Anderson, who falls for a predatory, and not even very attractive without elaborate makeup, theatre dancer. He gets into money troubles, drinks too much, and ends up leaving a wife and two children when he commits suicide. Edison hopes to stop such waste through “thousands and thousands of marvelous and perfectly innocent facsimiles, who will render wholly superfluous all those beautiful but deceptive mistresses.” The radical nature of Edison’s scientific experiment seems to require a moral purpose. We find out later that Edison helps Anderson’s widow, and in fact she turns out to be his assistant in the creation of Hadaly. Edison takes Ewald down into his underground laboratory and shows him in great detail how he creates the Android to be so like its original as to be indistinguishable. He argues against Ewald’s contention that Hadaly will always be the same and monotonous. Pictures, statues, and books are always the same, he says, but “one discovers every day new beauties in them.” He argues against the wisdom and even the possibility of improvisation in words of love, and for the power of the first moment of realized desire: “perfect repetition is no flaw in love.”

            Ewald summons Alicia Clary to Edison’s Menlo Park estate, and Edison poses as an impresario to her, telling her she will be the star of his new production, thereby getting her to rehearse it while he records her voice for hours. Meanwhile, a supposed sculptress, who is really Mrs. Anderson, who has become reborn as “Sowana,” takes minute measurements and photographs of her in order to reproduce them in Hadaly, but telling her they are creating a nude sculpture of her as Eve. On the last day of the three weeks, Edison springs Hadaly on Ewald, pretending it’s Alicia. Ewald is at first horrified and then once again suicidal. Hadaly speaks to him, saying she has come to rescue him, that Edison was only her servant: “I called myself into existence in the thought of him who created me, so that while he thought he was acting of his own accord, he was also deeply, darkly obedient to me.” Most of this, it turns out, is actually Sowana speaking through Hadaly, as we learn later; Sowana has been partly responsible for enlivening Hadaly and giving her a soul. Ewald’s reason, Hadaly argues, is the enemy of his happiness, and eventually he agrees. Edison, however, says he will make no more Androids.

            Mrs. Anderson/Sowana dies the night her and Edison’s work is complete. And on the voyage back to England, the chest containing Hadaly is burned up in a fire that destroys the ship, while Alicia clary is lost when her lifeboat capsizes. Ewald, however, survives.