British Detective Fiction 1891-1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes, by Clare Clarke

Abstract

Reviewed by: British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes by Clare Clarke Caroline Reitz (bio) British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes, by Clare Clarke; pp. xi + 166. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $74.99, $59.99 ebook. Clare Clarke’s British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes begins like any good detective story: with a missing person. That person is Sherlock Holmes, who died tumbling over Reichenbach Falls with archnemesis Professor Moriarity in “The Final Problem” (1893). Clarke examines six different authors who published detective fiction during “The Great Hiatus,” the decade between Holmes’s fall and Arthur Conan Doyle’s revival of the Great Detective in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2). Focusing on this decade allows Clarke to explore the colorful characters who stepped through the Sherlock-shaped hole. More importantly, the book adds to an ongoing critical correction. Scholarly work on the genre has been theorized disproportionately around the Sherlock Holmes canon. Clarke persuasively and engagingly makes the case that stories that “enjoyed widespread circulation . . . but . . . did not conform to later-decided rules of the genre” allow us to see “what the post-Sherlock fin-de-siècle detective narrative could be and do” (7–8). While some of these stories and series are derivative of Holmes (from archnemeses, to vulnerable female clients, to twelve story collections), and while Holmes is frequently invoked in reviews and marketing as both yardstick and lure, some of these stories represent a real departure in character and tone, including a female Romany pawnbroker, a ghost detective fighting man-eating plants on the “blurry boundaries” of the detective story, and an amoral detective-cum-murderer (150). These innovations challenge some sacred ideas about the genre, such as the immunity of detectives, the American origin of hardboiled detective fiction, and the conservative cultural work that the whodunnit allegedly provides. This book is a sequel of sorts to Clarke’s earlier and excellent Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (2014); like that text, it balances close readings of significant overlooked figures with a broad overview of historical and publication contexts. Indeed, if recovery anthologies have been organized around gender or nationality (for example, Nick Rennison’s Sherlock’s Sisters: Stories from the Golden Age of the Female Detective [2020] or LeRoy Lad Panek and Mary M. Bendel-Simso’s Early American Detective Stories: An Anthology [2014]), Clarke is “particularly eager to uncover the lesser-known places and the publications in which late-Victorian British readers consumed detective fiction” (154). Clarke’s attention to the original publication (and republication) of these stories in regional weekly and daily newspapers is a tremendously useful addition to our [End Page 689] understanding of the popular fiction of this period. As Clarke writes, we are familiar with the “well-known account of white-collar London middle-class male workers on their commuter trains reading sixpenny or shilling monthlies, like the Strand,” the home of Sherlock (154). But regional newspapers outnumbered and outsold London publications from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s. An eager cadre of writers emerged (think George Gissing’s 1891 New Grub Street) to meet a newly literate reading public and drew their topics from a late-nineteenth-century culture anxious about scientific discoveries, shifting gender roles, imperial expansion, urban poverty, and religious crises. Noting that she “simply [wrote] to order,” L. T. Meade’s complicated female criminals replaced Holmes in the Strand (1891–1950) and ticked several of those boxes (qtd. in Clarke 16). While Madame Koluchy and Madame Sara are perhaps the most well-known of Clarke’s subjects, her chapter on Meade goes beyond showing the ways in which femme fatales are brought to heel by the middle-class masculine professional competence of scientists, lawyers, and police. These stories, Clarke notes, feature strong secondary female characters, including a New Woman journalist, a bacteriologist’s assistant, and a woman brought in to assist Scotland Yard who is like a “bloodhound when she scents the prey” (32). Popular fiction at the end of the century is a fertile ground for female characters. C. L. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke, frequently compared to Sherlock...