Today I am reviewing my final nonfiction read of 2024, and it is a guide looking at mystery fiction, predominantly in the short story format, from 1891, when Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ was published until the conclusion of WW1. Moreover, Cohen mentions at the start of his work that his guide focuses ‘on those features that led to Conan Doyle’s success and how those following him employed and transformed them.’
Furthermore, Cohen also explains how his guide’s scope was ‘[…] determined by a particular moment in publishing history when authors could make a reasonable living at writing detective fiction for the magazines.’ I was aware that short stories were prolific at that time, but I was not cognisant of some of the social factors which supported this. For example, Cohen notes that:
‘Mudie’s Select Library had pulled the plug on the Victorian three-volume novel in 1894. The number of three-deckers dropped from 184 that year to just 4 in 1897. Meanwhile the market for serialised publication of novels was drying up, as the editorial decision of The Strand Magazine to drop serialised novels in favour of short stories was matched by more and more periodicals […]’.
I enjoyed the starting point that Cohen used to launch his introduction, as he compares Baroness Orczy’s “Old Man in the Corner” with Sherlock Holmes. He points out that:
‘One of Sherlock Holmes’s characteristics is very much in evidence in Baroness Orczy’s detective. Both have a disdain for the abilities of the police and an aversion to trying to straighten them out when the police can’t solve a mystery. “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies,” says Holmes in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” In Holmes’s case, he refrains from pointing out the malefactor to the police when his own sense of justice prevails […] But the motivation of the old man is very different indeed. His conscience is not in it. Rather, as he says at the beginning of “The Fenchurch Street Mystery,” “my inclinations and my duty would – were I to become an active member of the detective force – nearly always be in direct conflict. As often as not my sympathies go to the criminal who is clever and astute enough to lead our entire police force by the nose.”
I have read some of Orczy’s short stories, but I had not considered her protagonist in light of Holmes, so I found this section interesting, which explores the darker edge Orczy’s sleuth may have.
Cohen off the back of this raises an important question: ‘But why should we be comparing Baroness Orczy’s stories with Doyle’s at all?’ And the answer certainly seems to indicate that the need to respond to literary marketplace trends was something writers even back then had to do:
‘For one thing, Orczy’s husband, Montagu Barstow, persuaded her to create a detective as unlike Holmes as possible, as she tells us in her autobiography. But this answer only enlarges the question to why he would want to bring up Holmes. And the answer is that for writers who aspired to make money writing detective fiction in the magazines, Sherlock Holmes was the biggest thing in the literary landscape in 1901 […]’
The introduction then goes into some detail about the advent of the first Holmes’ stories, and the responses to it in the literary marketplace. It is these different responses which Cohen’s book explores.
Chapter 1: How He Did It: Sherlock Holmes and The Strand Magazine
The first chapter looks at the stories within The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes collections to consider Doyle’s plotting and storytelling techniques.
Herbert Greenough Smith, editor of The Strand magazine is said to have ‘reflected on what made [Doyle’s] stories a success. He decided it was “the ingenuity of the plot, the limpid clearness of the style, the perfect art of telling a story”’ and Cohen uses this not only as a way to assess the stories within The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collection, but he also states he will use it as a comparison tool with other writers. Looking back on this particular goal, I think this is tool is used inconsistently through the book and perhaps needed to be more directly referred back to.
However, I was interested by Cohen’s comment that Holmes’ talents dismantle the anonymity a criminal can build up in an urban environment:
‘Given the anonymity of the mass of people gathered in the city, and the potential danger that namelessness represents, it is not surprising that one of Holmes’ characteristic weapons is his ability to place someone he observes. Your anonymity disappears as Holmes sees that you are a doctor who has recently been in Afghanistan, a typist, or a retired sergeant of marines […] Holmes nullifies the anonymity of the metropolis so that we become known.’
In addition, Cohen also touches upon the readability of Doyle’s prose (a trait which has also been linked to the writing of Agatha Christie]:
‘The lucidity of Doyle’s style is especially apparent after the passage of more than a century and a quarter. Ordinary readers writing reviews of late Victorian fiction on library apps such as Goodreads and LibraryThing frequently complain about difficulties of style and vocabulary. Practically no such complaints can be found in hundreds of current readers’ reviews of The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes.’
I thought this was an interesting way of researching the readability of a writer, but I think I might have preferred some sharper statistics.
Nevertheless, Cohen is good at succinctly charting the themes and tropes of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes short story collection. Although I did notice that the section on the stories collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is more descriptive than analytical. It is also much shorter. I would say it is about a third of the size of the section devoted to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Chapter 2: To Imitate or Not to Imitate?
A key response to the Holmes stories was for writers to make their detective as different to Holmes as possible. Cohen writes that:
‘The Plain Man Detective was Julian Symons’s name for those characters whose authors wished to make them as free from Sherlock Holmes’s idiosyncrasies as possible, “the inconspicuous ordinary men who solve their cases by the application of common sense rather than by analytic deduction” (Symons 79).’
Which kind of detective do you prefer to read about?
One of the first authors looked at is Arthur Morrison and his sleuth Martin Hewitt. When Cohen mentions one story called ‘The Affair of the Tortoise’, based on its plot description I found it surprising that he did not draw a parallel with A Study in Scarlet as they both have a misleading written clue.
The next writer discussed is B. Fletcher Robinson and his detective Addington Peace. Robinson wrote six stories featuring this sleuth during 1904 and 1905 and they were published in The Lady’s Home Magazine of Fiction. When these stories were collected in The Chronicles of Addington Peace (1905) two further unpublished stories were also included. Peace is a Scotland Yard detective who is aided by narrator James Phillips. Phillips is ‘“a wealthy dilettante” in Peace’s words, and an aesthete who fancies himself a painter.’ It is his artistic leanings which get him involved in ‘The Story of Amaroff the Pole’. I will say the story descriptions Cohen provides can sometimes reveal whodunnit so you may wish to be careful in deciding which sections to read, if you have not tried an author before and think you would like to do so.
Samuel Hopkins Adams’s Average Jones is another less well-known detective that Cohen shines a light on. For those unfamiliar with this character:
‘Jones gets his nickname from his initials – his full name is Adrian van Reypen Egerton Jones – and aside from his wealth, he seems to fit his nickname: “He was, so to speak, a composite photograph of any thousand well-conditioned, clean-living Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty.” ‘He also has an income from inherited investments of twenty-five thousand a year or more […] He has a good liberal education, speaks French, reads Latins, and knows enough ancient Greek to recognise a line from Aeschylus when it’s quoted. And he has an eye for the outré and the slightly out-of-place.’
Physically I can see why Jones would meet the criteria for being one of Symons’ Plain Man Detectives, but his wealth and cultural knowledge makes him seem more like S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance. Nevertheless, Jones’ first case, ‘The B-Flat Trombone’ sounds intriguing, as it is suggested to him by a friend that he should ‘become an “ad-visor,” to people who have been defrauded by false advertisements. In following this idea up, Jones sees a connection between an odd newspaper ad and a recent bomb outrage.’
The second approach Cohen discusses is when authors ‘exaggerat[ed] one Holmesian feature’, however, I did not think the first author/character mentioned, Matthias McDonnell Bodkin’s Paul Beck, really fitted this subheading:
‘At first glance, Beck seems merely a Plain Man Detective, “a stout, strongly built man in dark grey tweed, suggesting rather the notion of a respectable retired milkman than a detective.” Unlike Holmes’ hawklike, penetrating stare, Beck’s look is vacuous and “innocent as a child’s” and he has “a chronic look of mild surprise in his wide-open blue eyes.” We soon learn how useful the appearance of vacuousness can be and how far from innocent Mr. Beck proves.’
The descriptions of the Paul Beck stories that follow, whilst interesting, do not connect to the exaggeration theme. Cohen does not state what trait of Holmes’ that Paul Beck is meant to be exaggerating. At best the above paragraph shows one difference they share, but then that would make this character more befitting of the previous section.
However, the next example is J. S. Fletcher’s The Encyclopaedia of Crime: Archer Dawe, whose very nickname demonstrates what Holmesian trait Archer is exaggerating. I am aware of Fletcher as an author, but I had not come across this character before. Fletcher introduced Archer Dawe in 1907 with ‘The Mystery at Merrill’s Mill’, and I was intrigued by the use of northern settings:
‘Archer Dawe worked at Merrill’s textile mill for decades before retiring […] Dawe is a Yorkshireman, though you hear his accent only when he is in disguise, and the tales take place in York, Leeds, and Sheffield, or more rarely London. When he retired from the mill, Dawe became a consulting detective.’
After Dawe, we seem to move to a new subheading entitled: ‘The Discreet Detectives: Dagobert Trostler and Augustus Champnell’ and it is not overly clear if this new section is totally separate or whether it is a continuation of the previous section i.e. is this section about discretion depicted in an exaggerated fashion?
I am familiar with Baldwin Groller’s Trostler as I reviewed The Adventures of Dagobert Trostler back in 2018. Cohen brings out the fact that banishment is a common punishment in these stories, linking this back to culture of Vienna at that time. Furthermore, Cohen adds that:
‘We might not think of discretion as a distinguishing feature of Sherlock Holmes, but in fact, as Clare Clarke points out, Holmes’s London clientele was almost exclusively from the West End, including cabinet ministers, nobility, and royalty, all of whose secrets he kept close.’
Augustus Champnell is the second discreet detective, and he was created by Richard Marsh. His adventures were collected in An Aristocratic Detective (1900), but originally the five stories were first published in the Newcastle Weekly Courant, the Leeds Mercury, and the Manchester Times from 1895-1899 […]’ Champnell’s father’s disapproving comments about his new chosen profession were amusing to read.
Next another subheading change occurs, with the focus shifting to: ‘The Comic Turn: Hamilton Cleek, Prince Zaleski, and Rivals Barnes and Mitchel’. I felt the examples of Doyle’s humour that Cohen gave held mixed effectiveness in how well they depicted humour. However, this section is more demonstrably connected back to the theme of exaggeration and how comically aspects of Holmes were exaggerated by other contemporary writers.
One such example is Hamilton Cleek, who was created by Thomas Hanshew, who exaggerates ‘Holmes’s mastery of disguise’ as he has ‘an impossibly exaggerated ability to mould the features of his face into any form he wishes. He does not rely on makeup or costume; his face assumes the features he wants to appear there.’
Another example is Prince Zaleski, who features in stories written by M. P. Shiel, who ‘takes the suggestion of a fin de siècle decadence and Bohemianism in Holmes to an absurd length.’ I was amused to read that Barzun & Taylor described these stories as ‘“mix[ing] the amusing and the annoying, and smother[ing] detection under verbiage and incense.”’ They sound like an acquired taste!
Dentist turned crime writer, Rodrigues Ottolengui, produced 12 stories featuring Jack Barnes and Leroy Mitchel, which were collected in Final Proof; or, the Value of Evidence (1898). Barnes is a New York City agency detective, whilst Leroy Mitchel is an amateur sleuth. They are partners of sorts, but also rivals. Cohen writes that:
‘Doyle makes Watson a complete person and invests his and Holmes’s friendship with the warmth of shared space and pleasures as well as the trust of shared danger. Watson admires Holmes’s wit, culture, and sense of honour as a man, and wonders at his remarkable gifts and skills as a detective. Mitchel, by contrast, does not narrate Barnes’s cases, nor does he think him the greater crime solver since Holmes.’
Comedy results from this friction, but I am not sure the idea of exaggeration comes through as strongly and in some ways this difficult relationship between Barnes and Mitchel is more in keeping with the idea of authors who make their characters be opposite to Holmes. In this way it sometimes feels like the theme under discussion swaps around.
The final section of chapter two is concerned with: ‘The Opposite of Imitation? The Bumbling Detective’. Is bumbling really the opposite of imitation? This was a subheading which I think needed rewording to better communicate its idea. I also wondered why this was not made part of the comedy section as Cohen outlines that:
‘About as far as possible from the cold, scientific methods of Holmes are the haphazard, uninformed, bungling ones of a few characters invented by British and American authors. These detectives, whose inept adventures are played for laughs, are the Bumbling Detectives.’
Examples mentioned in this section are Anderson Crow who appears in George Barr McCutcheon’s The Daughter of Anderson Crow (1907), Eugene Valmont who is the eponymous sleuth of Robert Barr’s The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont (1906) whose ‘spectacular failures’ seem to me to be of Pink Panther proportions, as well as Philo Grubb from Ellis Parker Butler’s Philo Grubb: Correspondence-School Detective (1918). This is perhaps a chapter where I might have reordered some of the sections/texts.
Chapter 3: Lady Detectives, Girl Detectives, and Women Who Solve Crime
I liked how Cohen linked back to the previous chapter at the start and I appreciated his mentioning the additional demands or pressures fictional female sleuths faced:
‘The decision to make their detectives female moots part of the question about whether to imitate for these writers. Women detectives are novel and unusual from the first sentence. But their bar in the stories is higher, too. The female detective implicitly has to do something the male cannot do, or to do better what he can do, or why not have the more common male?’
One of the first sleuths discussed is Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ Loveday Brooke. Cohen comments that:
‘Brooke is a kind of female equivalent to Martin Hewitt in the ordinariness of her appearance. But that ordinariness just highlights the fact that a woman detective will never be inconspicuous in the man’s world of the 1890s. A useful feature of female detectives in these stories is to look like anything else: a nurse, a maid, a society teenager, a bicycle saleswoman, a pawnshop clerk, a teacher.’
Fergus Hume’s Hagar Stanley (a young Romany woman) from Hagar of the Pawn-Shop: The Gypsy Detective (1898) is another female detective figure who is explored, and these stories are some that I keep meaning to track down, as the setup sounds intriguing:
‘Clare Clarke says that Hagar and her clients constitute “the most racially and socially diverse group of characters in late-Victorian detective fiction” and she makes the interesting observation that the concentration on the material objects in these stories signals how “late-Victorian detective fiction is most often focused on crimes of property, as opposed to crimes upon the body” […]’
Two of Grant Allen’s creations come under discussion next: Lois Cayley and Hilda Wade. Lois Cayley’s adventures/cases take her around the world, and it was interesting to note that she supported herself by selling bicycles, setting up a typing pool office, and writing travel articles. A further interesting point was that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the final chapter of Hilda Wade: A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose (1900), as Allen was seriously ill and was unable to finish the book before he died. It seems like quite a sensation/thriller type of story, beginning with Hilda’s father being wrongfully accused of murder before dying. To support herself Hilda becomes a nurse and ends up working for the real killer. The finale sees Hilda and her allies in a cat and mouse game with this person in a variety of countries including Rhodesia, Nepal and Tibet.
This is the first chapter in which L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace are mentioned, with their female sleuth Florence Cusack, but this writing duo come up quite a lot in subsequent chapters, which has made me appreciate the scope of Meade’s work more. At the time of her death, she had 12 books still unpublished which were released over many years posthumously. Other female detectives talked about are Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, Anna Katharine Green’s Violet Strange, George R. Sims’ Dorcas Dene, Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee Matthia Macdonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl and Hugh C. Weir’s Madelyn Mack. If you want to thwart a blackmailer then the dynamic Dora Myrl would probably suggest setting fire to some nearby lace curtains, as that will give you time to destroy any incriminating evidence. Although it must be noted that you should then put the other fire out. You don’t want to be completely irresponsible after all… Meanwhile, Madelyn Mack would probably recommend chewing cola berries, as for her at least they ‘can keep her working for forty-eight hours “without sleep, and almost without food.” Could this be the insane new January 2025 diet? Moreover, with all the extra time you will be awake you can surely blast through your TBR pile.
I feel like this chapter had more description and less of a consistent thesis, after the opening paragraphs.
Chapter 4: Doctors, Scientists, and Other Specialists
This chapter is concerned with writers building on the idea of Sherlock Holmes’ knowledge and specialisms, with this skill becoming a greater focus for their own sleuths’ personalities. The medical examples looked at include L. T. Meade and Clifford Halifax’s (penname for Edgar Beaumont) Dr Clifford Halifax stories which began appearing in 1893 and Clifford Ashdown’s (penname for R. Austin Freeman/ John J. Pitcairn) From a Surgeon’s Diary which were published in Cassell’s Magazine. Other specialist sleuths discussed are Jacques Futrelle’s Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Edwin Balmer & William B. MacHarg Luther Trant, R. Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke and Arthur B. Reeve’s Craig Kennedy, the latter being a character I encountered in The Adventuress (1917).
One aspect of forensic science which comes up in this chapter is fingerprints and Cohen writes that:
‘Although the Chinese may have been aware of fingermarks as unique to each individual a millennium ago, the development of fingerprint identification was a nineteenth-century European effort and prints began to be used for identification by Scotland Yard and United States police departments only after the turn of the twentieth century, according to Cole Simon in Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (2001).’
However, I feel this summary misses the crucial role India played in the development of using fingerprints to fight crime. The fingerprint system known as the Henry Classification System (named after Sir Edward Richard Henry), which was devised in the 1890s in Calcutta, was actually developed by two Indian police officers called Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose. Sir Henry had been their supervisor and received the full credit for this invention. You can learn more about this from a blog post Vaseem Khan wrote in 2021. Curious, I looked up Cole Simon’s book, wondering if maybe Haque and Bose were not mentioned, but they are. Consequently, it is a shame that the above summary on fingerprint identification uses the phrase ‘European effort’, as elsewhere in his book Cole Simon writes that:
‘Although Henry later claimed that he scribbled the outline of his classification idea on his cuff after conceiving it in a burst of inspiration on a train, there is evidence that most of the credit belongs to Haque and Bose. There is even a report that they had considerable difficulty explaining the system to their boss.’ (Simon; 81)
The specialisms looked at in this chapter are quite varied as the author writes about the Bernard Sutton stories written by Max Pemberton, where Sutton is a jewel merchant amateur sleuth and C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s stories about a ship purser called Mr Horrocks. Horrocks is an unusual detective as Cohen shares that:
‘Horrocks has a secret life when he is in Liverpool […] He is in fact a philanthropist with a small private income. And he uses his salary and perquisites from his purser’s job to found near Chester a home for orphans from Liverpool. It is called Rock Orphanage and he is known there as Mr Rock.’
However, Mr Horrock is not above turning a blind eye to some forms of smuggling, as he uses his cuts to fund the orphanage. Journalism is the final specialism to come under consideration with Cohen looking at Gaston Leroux’s Joseph Rouletabille and Herbert Cadett The Adventures of a Journalist (1900), which features a journalist named Beverley Gretton. I would have perhaps liked a little more to be said about how Gretton and Rouletabille’s journalist backgrounds benefited their sleuthing.
Chapter 5: Significant Rivals
This chapter is centred on three sleuths who Cohen argues were the best at competing with ‘Doyle in storytelling skill, ingenuity of plots, and a main character who sustained interest.’ These three were: G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados and Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner. Reading this chapter reminded me that I want to try an Uncle Abner story at some point.
Chapter 6: The Rogues Gallery
This chapter sees a shift in focus with Cohen outlining that the following trio of chapters will:
‘[…] look at how writers after Doyle entertained their readers by subverting expectations those readers might have formed about the detective story. The idea that right should triumph and the bad guys should not win is challenged by stories about rogues.’
The first protagonist to be mentioned is Arthur Morrison’s Horace Dorrington, who I encountered last year when reading the British Library Crime Classic anthology, Guilty Creatures: A Menagerie of Mysteries (2021). Dorrington is a crooked detective, who uses his cases to profit himself and the stories are narrated by a man Horrace tried to have murdered. This is unsettling, yet creative.
Melville Davisson Post makes his second appearance as Cohen then talks about his ‘unscrupulous and amoral lawyer’ Randolph Mason, who helps his clients get away with crimes by using the narrowly worded laws to defeat the justice these laws are set out to maintain. These stories are said to have influenced the changing of some real-life laws, and it was also interesting reading how Randolph’s amorality is developed in later tales.
Two other examples mentioned are Guy Boothby’s Simon Carne who is a detective who is often hired to solve crimes he has committed; and R. Austin Freeman and John J. Pitcairn’s Romney Pringle. Following on the heels of these two are criminous millionaires (such as Arnold Bennett’s Cecil Thorold) and adventurers who prey on millionaires, such as Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay, who repeatedly scams Sir Vandrift. It truly is a wonder that Vandrift has any money left by the end of it all!
One of the more well-known rogue characters, discussed in this chapter is Ernes William Hornung’s A. J. Raffles and I was surprised to read that Cohen felt that Raffles was a much more unpopular character these days:
‘Raffles charmed his fin-de-siecle audiences, for whom he was the poster child of rogues in literature of crime after Holmes. The charm lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. Haycraft called him “the Robin Hood-ish and once popular crime hero” […] A century and quarter later, he doesn’t seem admirable at all, and less of an upper-class hero than a betrayer of his class, a man who confirms the working-person’s suspicion of the gentleman and who would make anyone wince who still believed in gentility as an ideal.’
In an age of anti-heroes in films and on the page, is this really the case? It would have been interesting to have seen some evidence of this opinion change.
Chapter 7: Occult Detectives
The detectives written about in this chapter tend to fall into three categories: those who debunk the occult/supernatural (see L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s John Bell), those whose cases can either have a supernatural or natural solution and those who use the world of occultism to promote their detective services.
Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard and his mother Katherine O’Brien Prichard Ryall created Flaxman Low, and he falls into the second camp. It was interesting to learn that the London Quarterly Review in 1900 described Low as ‘the Sherlock Holmes of the ghost world’. Algernon Blackwood’s Dr John Silence is another example from the second category, and he certainly encounters a wide variety of cases. In one a humourist writer visits him wanting the doctor to help him find his sense of humour, whilst in another the doctor has to face a werewolf. Three other occultist detectives explored are William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, Max Rittenberg’s Dr Xavier Wycherley and Sax Rohmer’s Moris Klaw.
Gelett Burgess’s Astro a.k.a. Astrogen Kerby falls into the third and final category. He pretends to be a fortune teller, but really solves his cases more like Holmes. The fortune telling subterfuge allows him to charge more and to encourage more clients. When the stories were collected, they were given a very long-winded title: The Master of Mysteries: Being an Account of the Problems Solved by Astro, Seer of Secrets, and His Love Affair with Valeska Wynne, His Assistant. Readers who love secret codes may be interested to know that:
‘In an introduction to the book, which was published anonymously, Burgess hints that there are three ciphers concealed in the text, and in fact the first letter of each story is an acrostic that identifies Gelett Burgess as the author, and the last letter in each story gives the supposed reason for anonymity: “false to life and false to art”. No one seems to have identified the last cipher.’
Anyone fancy finding the last cipher?
Chapter 8: Iconoclasts
In this chapter Cohen is keen to emphasise how during the time period his guide is focused upon:
‘Doyle and other writers were shattering expectations, mixing genres and testing limits. Some writers were content to take what they saw as a simple Holmes model, modify it, push back against it a little. Others were not. Experimentation was at least as common as conforming to some pattern a previous successful writer had used.’
I don’t disagree with this point, but I do wonder how much this experimentation was influenced by the fact that genres had much less clear-cut boundaries at this time.
This chapter looks at three ‘departures from what readers might expect from a detective story’, which are The Big Bow Mystery (1891) Israel Zangwill, In the Fog (1901) by Richard Harding Davis and Trent’s Last Case (1913) by E. C. Bentley.
Chapter 9: Nothing Gold Can Stay
This final chapter begins by considering the changing nature of publishing come the 1910s and how the shift to novels altered detective fiction. I think the author makes some bold statements, which did not seem in keeping with the meticulous research conducted for the pre-1920 mysteries the rest of the book discussed. This chapter generally seemed to want to promote pre-1920 mysteries by disparaging, criticising and damning with faint praise interwar mysteries. This is not an approach that I appreciated. For example, it is said that:
‘The shift to novels from short stories changed the nature of detective fiction: there was simply less variety. The gems of the First Golden Era were experiment and variation, risk-taking and boundary-stretching. Christie and Sayers and their contemporaries wrote brilliantly, but they wrote within a smaller scope. One of their favourite milieus, for example, was the country house mystery.’
I felt this to be a reductive passage, which overlooks the experimentation and variety of stories provided by Anthony Berkeley, Richard Hull, Leo Bruce, C. S. Forester, (early) Nicholas Blake, Elisabeth Saxnay Holding, Cameron McCabe, John Dickson Carr (see The Burning Court), Philip Macdonald and Dorothy L. Sayers’ epistolary novels (The Maze and The Documents in the Case respectively). Moreover, the variety of stories that Agatha Christie produced are clear to see in her interwar output including the Parker Pyne short stories, the Harlequin short stories, The Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. To give just a few examples. I am sure readers can add further suggestions.
Furthermore, Cohen then writes that:
‘Other limited-scope milieus for mysteries of the 1920s and ‘30s were the academic mysteries set at one of the universities.’
‘Limited-scope milieus’ feels like quite a disparaging term for a mystery, (I wouldn’t say it means the same as a closed set of suspects) and it also seems a bit unfair given that Arthur Conan Doyle used this milieu in some of his stories such as ‘The Adventure of the Three Students’. In some ways, interwar mystery fiction is being deemed inferior simply because it occurred chronologically after WW1:
‘Other such circumscribed settings are law offices, gentlemen’s clubs, trains, ships, and, eventually airplanes. Except for the airplanes, these settings had been anticipated by writers of the First Golden Era.’
I really don’t think you can blame interwar crime fiction for coming second. A mystery set in 1922 is not at fault if a mystery from 1902 chose the same setting. Anticipation can only work forwards, not retrospectively. Moreover, how are these settings positive for pre-1920 mysteries, but become a criticism for post 1920 mysteries?
Cohen also writes of interwar crime fiction that:
‘The atmospheric nostalgia was complemented, in the case of many of these books, with their detective heroes; blithe insouciance. The allusive, poetry-quoting, joke-making of Philip Trent gets magnified in the characters of Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion, and Anthony Berkeley’s Roger Sheringham. There’s a whiff of snobbery too, and several people here are aristocrats […]’
Pre-1920 mystery fiction as demonstrated by this book clearly had aristocratic sleuths such as Augustus Champnell and may I remind you about Samuel Hopkins Adams’s Average Jones…
‘He also has an income from inherited investments of twenty-five thousand a year or more […] He has a good liberal education, speaks French, reads Latins, and knows enough ancient Greek to recognise a line from Aeschylus when it’s quoted.’
In addition, B. Fletcher Robinson’s detective Addington Peace is assisted by ‘a wealthy dilettante’ named James Phillips, who engages in sleuthing work for the thrills and dangers it gives him, which his art cannot.
So, I do not think pre-1920 mystery fiction is devoid of some of these characteristics that Cohen mentions above. Furthermore, you can hardly criticise post-1920 writers for exaggerating earlier fictional detective traits, as chapter 2 of this book has a whole section on the pre-1920 authors who exaggerated traits that Holmes possessed. The comparison of these two periods of writing does not seem to have been handled in as a balanced manner as it could have been.
Overall, I did find the concluding chapter to be disappointing, but the previous eight chapters are very useful and interesting for readers looking to find new authors, who were writing between 1891-1918.
Rating: 4/5
Source: Review Copy (Genius Book Publishing)