American Sherlocks (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

We all have a picture in our minds of the archetypal detective of American fiction. The hardboiled, wisecracking private eye, walking a city’s mean streets. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or one of the hundreds, probably thousands, of other gumshoes who have trodden in their footsteps. But that style of detective only came into being in the late 1920s and early 1930s, most influentially in Hammett’s novels and in the pages of the legendary magazine Black Mask. American crime fiction has a much longer history.

It really begins with Edgar Allan Poe. (The history of most genre fiction in the USA really begins with Edgar Allan Poe.) Claims for precedence have been made on behalf of earlier works such as Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Edgar Huntly and some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter fiction. However, it was Poe who established many of the tropes of crime fiction which are still being used by writers today. In three short stories published in the 1840s – ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’ – he created the templates for much of what was to come. The locked-room mystery; the story based on a true crime; the clues, sometimes hidden in plain sight, which point towards a satisfying explanation of what initially seems inexplicable; the bumbling police outshone by the brilliant amateur. All of these derive ultimately from what Poe himself called his ‘tales of ratiocination’. His character C Auguste Dupin is the archetype of the detective hero with superior powers of deduction and his influence on later creations, most notably Sherlock Holmes, is clear.

Yet Poe’s impact was not markedly felt in his own country in the decades immediately following his death in 1849. There are stories and novels from the 1850s and 1860s which can be classed retrospectively as crime fiction. The Dead Letter of 1866 by Seeley Regester (the pseudonym of the woman writer Metta Victoria Fuller Victor), for instance, is the story of the narrator’s quest to track down a murderer. Another female author, Harriet Spofford, created what was arguably one of the first ‘series’ detectives in history in Mr Furbush who appeared in several stories published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. However, the genre Poe had pioneered did not gain much more than a toehold in the traditional publishing houses and magazines of the American literary world.

It was in the more downmarket arena of the so-called ‘dime novel’ that the figure of the detective finally emerged from the wings and, often enough, took centre stage. The equivalent of the British ‘penny dreadful’, the dime novel began to flourish in the 1860s. The first example of the genre is usually said to be Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the Great Hunter, written by a prolific author and editor, Ann S Stephens, and published by the firm of Beadle & Adams in 1860. Thousands of titles followed in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the opening ones of the twentieth. Several factors fuelled this explosion in cheap genre fiction. Literacy levels began to increase around the time of the American Civil War and continued to do so in the years between 1870 and 1900. At the same time, new printing technologies meant that publishers could issue more books at cheaper prices.

As the title of Ann Stephens’s original dime novel indicates, tales of Native Americans and what was increasingly becoming known as the ‘Wild West’ were popular. The army scout and bison hunter William Cody was transformed into the national hero ‘Buffalo Bill’ by the adventures attributed to him in stories by writers such as Ned Buntline and Prentiss Ingraham. Other genres thrived as well. One of these was the detective novel. Characters like ‘Old Sleuth’, ‘Lady Kate, the Dashing Female Detective’, ‘Sam Strong the Cowboy Detective’ and ‘Old King Brady’ battled bad guys in stories that made up in lively action for what they lacked in literary sophistication. However, the major detective to emerge from the dime novel was Nick Carter.

After his first appearance in the New York Weekly in 1886, Carter soon graduated to his own series, the Nick Carter Weekly. A square-jawed, two-fisted, all-American hero, Carter proved to be a character of astonishing longevity. Transformed into a kind of sub-James Bond figure, he appeared in dozens of cheap paperbacks in the 1960s and new stories about him were still appearing in the early 1990s. In his earliest incarnations, he was kept busy righting wrongs across America and around the world in a series of breath-taking and occasionally fantastical adventures. He gathered about him a small platoon of willing assistants and faced a rogues’ gallery of memorable opponents, including the supervillain Doctor Quartz, Dazaar the Arch Fiend, and Zanoni the Woman Wizard. Authors such as Frederick van Rensselaer Day, George C Jenks and Thomas C Harbaugh churned out scores of stories which were published anonymously or attributed to the fictional ‘Chick Carter’, Nick’s adopted son. After the success of Sherlock Holmes in America, Carter evolved into a more traditional gentleman detective, mainly operating in New York, and I have included a typical tale from this period in this anthology.

During the heyday of the dime novel, crime fiction gradually gained popularity in more upmarket fiction. Many of these new crime novels, appearing under the imprint of publishers who would have turned their noses up at the likes of Nick Carter and ‘Old Sleuth’, were by women writers. The Leavenworth Case, for example, was the work of Anna Katharine Green, a Brooklyn-born author who turned to fiction after failing to make much of a mark as a poet. First published in 1878, this introduced a detective from the New York Metropolitan Police Force named Ebenezer Gryce who went on to feature in a number of Green’s later novels. Although The Leavenworth Case is very much a novel of its time, it continued to have an influence well into the twentieth century. Agatha Christie later cited the book as an inspiration for her when she was just setting out on her career. (Green herself was still writing in the 1920s and created other recurring characters, including nosy spinster Amelia Butterworth, a prototype Miss Marple, and Violet Strange, a wealthy young New Yorker moonlighting as a detective, who features in one of the stories in this anthology.)

The Leavenworth Case was a bestseller and other crime novels of the 1870s and 1880s made their mark. By the early 1890s the figure of the fictional detective was firmly established with readers of both ‘downmarket’ and ‘upmarket’ literature. However, one character was about to change the ways in which they all imagined that figure. His name, of course, was Sherlock Holmes. His impact was to be felt almost as profoundly in the USA as it was in Britain. Although the first Holmes tale, the novel A Study in Scarlet, had to wait more than two years for an American edition, the stories after that appeared almost simultaneously in the UK and across the Atlantic. Indeed, in some instances, Americans could enjoy Holmes’s latest adventure before his home readership. Some of the stories later collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, for example, were published in the US Collier’s magazine a week or two prior to their appearances in the UK Strand Magazine.

The Sherlock Holmes effect was soon evident. Just as in Britain, scores upon scores of rivals made their bow in books and magazines in the years between 1880 and 1920. Of the characters who feature in the stories in this anthology, it is difficult to believe that Bromley Barnes, LeDroit Conners, Craig Kennedy and others would have been created in quite the same way without the influence of Doyle’s great detective. They all carry echoes of the man from Baker Street’s genius and personality. And Ellis Parker Butler’s Philo Gubb, the inept ‘hero’ of a series of comic crime stories, may be the polar opposite of Doyle’s hero in terms of intellectual prowess but even he was an avowed admirer of Holmes.

A host of other American fictional detectives, not included in this anthology, largely for reasons of space, also operate in the shadow of Sherlock. ‘Average’ Jones, the creation of the muckraking journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams, may seem something of an original in that he comes across all his cases through the classified ads of the daily newspapers but even that idiosyncrasy is an echo of Holmes’s abiding interest in the agony column of The Times. Luther Trant, the so-called ‘psychological detective’ who was the invention of William MacHarg and Edwin Balmer, was hailed in the magazine that published their first story in 1909 as propounding a ‘new detective theory… as important as Poe’s deductive theory of ratiocination’. Yet readers of Conan Doyle could have pointed to the pages of The Strand Magazine and justifiably disputed its novelty.

All these detectives, whether included in this anthology or not, had distinctly American attributes but equally they all owed something to the man from Baker Street. Only a handful of characters escaped the influence of Conan Doyle almost entirely. Perhaps the most original of all the American detectives of this period was Uncle Abner, the creation of the lawyer and author Melville Davisson Post. Post turned to the past as the setting for the 22 stories which feature his God-fearing hero,...