Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (Crime Files)

This book examines crime fiction in the years 1886–1900, a formative and fascinating period in the history of the genre. The 1880s and 1890s have been termed the ‘First Golden Age of Detective Fiction’ (Smith, Golden iii). These were the years in which detective fiction firmly established itself as a genre and sealed its popularity with the reading public.1 At this time the very first print article to refer to detective fiction as a separate genre was also published. The piece — entitled simply ‘Detective Fiction’ — informed readers that the ‘demand’ for detective fiction was ‘great and increasing’, and that the genre was one of ‘the greatest successes of the day’ (749). Indeed, thousands of detective stories and novels were produced in these years, eagerly consumed by the new mass literate readership brought about by the passing of Forster’s Elementary Education Act in 1870. As a clerk employed at one of London’s many W.H. Smith railway book stalls told an interviewer for the Speaker magazine in 1893, ‘Any detective story, whatever its merits might be, I could sell from morning till night’ (‘A Literary Causerie’ 383). Chapter 1 focuses on Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), 1 a ‘Christmas crawler’ produced by Robert Louis Stevenson in answer to his publisher’s request for something sensational for the 1885 Christmas literary marketplace (Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde xvii). The novel, recounting a respectable doctor’s transformation into a hideous criminal, was published in January 1886. Early reviews were extremely positive — writing in the Saturday Review, Andrew Lang called the novel ‘excellent and horrific and captivating’; likewise, for The Times it was a ‘finished study in the art of the fantastic’ comparable to classic works such as ‘the sombre masterpieces of Poe’ (Lang, ‘Stevenson’s New Story’; ‘Strange’). Indeed, it created an immediate sensation — selling over 40,000 copies in its first few months and running to seven... The 1880s and 1890s were the years in which detective fiction firmly established itself as a genre and sealed its popularity with the reading public. "Late-Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock, 1885-1900" investigates representations of detectives and criminals in both canonical and forgotten crime fiction at this key juncture, challenging studies which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures. This study offers an alternative, and much fuller, account of late-Victorian detective fiction, concentrating particularly on the stories which illustrate the nascent genre's often overlooked capacity for narrative and moral complexity. It examines a selection of stories where detectives are criminals and murderers, where criminals are heroes, or where crimes go unsolved. Arthur Conan Doyle's canonical Sherlock Holmes stories and Robert Louis Stevenson's novels are considered alongside works by neglected authors Fergus Hume, Israel Zangwill, Arthur Morrison, and Guy Boothby. These fascinating 'Shadows of Sherlock' showcase the often wholly overlooked formal and moral diversity of late-Victorian crime writing, forcing us to rethink our preconceptions about what the nineteenth-century detective genre is and does. Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories, films, radio, television and now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, prim poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators one mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, detective fiction, gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-12 ‘Ordinary Secret Sinners’: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)....Pages 13-42 ‘The Most Popular Book of Modern Times’: Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886)....Pages 43-71 ‘L’homme c’est rien — l’oeuvre c’est tout’: The Sherlock Holmes Stories and Work....Pages 72-103 Something for ‘the Silly Season’: Policing and the Press in Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery (1891)....Pages 104-127 Tales of ‘Mean Streets’: The Criminal-Detective in Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897)....Pages 128-154 ‘A Criminal in Disguise’: Class and Empire in Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers (1897)....Pages 155-180 Conclusion....Pages 181-183 Back Matter....Pages 184-221 This book investigates the development of crime fiction in the 1880s and 1890s, challenging studies of late-Victorian crime fiction which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures and have offered an over-simplified analytical framework, thereby overlooking the generic, moral, and formal complexities of the nascent genre.