The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction by Samuel Saunders

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction by Samuel Saunders Troy J. Bassett (bio) Samuel Saunders, The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 256, $128/£96 hardcover. Samuel Saunders’s book, The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction, joins a long tradition of scholarly works tracing the invention and evolution of detective fiction in the nineteenth century. Based, as we are told, on his dissertation, Saunders’s book identifies two gaps in the existing scholarship on detective fiction: first, generic studies “insecurely connect sporadically-published texts together” to create a literary timeline; and second, historical studies rarely explore detective fiction’s “connection to contemporary representations of actual law enforcement” (1). Saunders aims to rectify these oversights by examining Victorian journalism about the police and crime and connecting this journalism to the fiction. The book is divided into three parts roughly corresponding to the early, mid-, and late Victorian periods. The first part examines reportage of the police and crime in Victorian periodicals. Crime reporting has a long history dating from the eighteenth century, ranging from broadsides to the Newgate Calendar to criminal court reports, but reports on policing are more recent and center on the various acts of Parliament that created the modern police force. As Saunders argues, discussions of the police in periodicals depended strongly on the title’s political leanings and audience, with conservative newspapers and magazines generally supportive and liberal ones more skeptical of the police. His grouping of the periodicals in making this claim is a bit simplistic, but effective. As crime reporting evolves over the century, Saunders finds the police rarely figure in the coverage as more than passing figures “who occupied a transitional, fringe or somehow threshold social space, located somewhere in between the criminal and the rest of society” (54–55). As the second part of the book shows, the liminal police officer becomes a fixture in social exploration journalism, such as that written by Charles Dickens, where the genteel explorer has safer access to criminal neighborhoods with the police officer as a guide. Saunders locates the first detective fiction in the fictional detective memoirs pioneered by William Russell. His argument that Russell’s stories were a “successful literary blending” of crime reporting and social exploration journalism convinced this reader of their probable origins as a “microgenre” of detective fiction (116, 122). The following chapter on sensation fiction, however, is less compelling: though sensation fiction often contains detective figures (such as Robert Audley in Lady Audley’s Secret), the police themselves rarely appear as important characters. The two forms—fictional police memoir and [End Page 658] sensation—follow separate tracks, though Saunders finds a handful of contemporary reviewers who note their cross-connections. Whereas sensation fiction is often cited as bridging the gap between Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and Sherlock Holmes, Saunders places the fictional detective memoir as another, coequal bridge in the development of detective fiction. The final part examines press coverage of the 1877 turf fraud detective scandal in which four detective inspectors and an attorney accepted bribes from two criminals convicted of illegally obtaining £10,000 from a French noblewoman based on fake horse races. The criminals turned on their police accomplices for more lenient sentences. The case fueled much outrage at the police and led to a reorganization of Scotland Yard the following year. More importantly, as Saunders adeptly shows, the scandal led to a long-lasting change in how the periodical press depicted the police, ranging from simply inept or bumbling to outright dangerously criminal. This clear shift in the public perception of the police, Saunders argues, led to the rise of the amateur or private detective in fiction. Holmes himself, to give the most famous example, continually lambasts Lestrade and Scotland Yard as unimaginative if not inept detectives—a fact Lestrade himself tacitly admits in bringing difficult cases to Holmes. The amateur or private detective is free of the questions, limitations, or scandal hanging over the police force. The Strand Magazine and its imitators capitalized on the figure of the private detective, which proved...