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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The Holmes stories then got big successful and spawned zillions of imitators of varying quality. The most interesting one to me is Sexton Blake. Blake first appeared in 1893 or so, pretty much immediately after Conan Doyle killed Holmes off. He was a fairly generic Holmes rip-off for a while whose stories ran the gamut from straightforward detective stuff to Rider Haggard style "Darkest Africa" adventure stories, handled by an array of authors, many of them working under pseudonyms. He was the star of story papers like Union Jack and The Sexton Blake Library (which ran continuously from 1915 to 1968). With the onset of the 20th century, someone decided to stop beating about the bush and moved Blake into rooms on Baker Street, gave him a streetwise teen sidekick called Tinker, an intelligent bloodhound called Pedro and eventually a Rolls Royce called the Grey Panther. He gathered a coterie of prototypical supervillains like Monsieur Zenith the Albino, a Byronic master thief who established a bit of a following of his own, George Marsden Plummer, a master criminal with the perfect cover of being a supremely skilled Scotland Yard inspector responsible for catching the other master criminals, and so on. He had all these adventures more in line with American pulps than Sherlockiana, where he'd always get conked on the head or tied up in a room slowly filling with water, from which he'd have to make a daring escape; this was coincident with the emergence of Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey originated as her Sexton Blake fanfiction), Allingham, Christie, Marsh et al. and the Golden Age of locked room mysteries and high society detective puzzles and that's what made Blake so popular; whereas Wimsey, Poirot, Alleyne, Campion etc. were intellectuals who outsmarted the villain, he was the action hero who rolled up his sleeves and put the boot in. For a decent stretch, Blake was arguably more popular than Holmes in Britain. As time went by, he fought Nazi spies in the 40s, communist saboteurs in the 50s and by the 1960s had moved into offices in the City, acquired a beautiful secretary and essentially become James Bond for hire (I've never read any of these stories). Hundreds of people wrote Blake and he appeared in literally thousands of stories in magazines, story papers and novels between the 1890s and the 1970s. He was featured in movies and he had a very popular TV series in the 60s which starred Laurence Payne. But perhaps therein lies the problem. He was around for so long and appeared in so many stories which varied so much in terms of quality that it's hard to develop a definitive picture or profile for the character. He could be a Sherlock Holmes ripoff, a pulp hero, a spy smasher, a super-secret agent and more. He had existed for about 20 years before his most recognisable supporting characters showed up and they eventually phased in and out. With all the other famous detectives, there's some readily identifiable hook. Blake had so many that none became definitive, and thus none of them could ever work. If you're interested in reading them, it's pretty hard to find the stories. The only good collection there's been was The Casebook of Sexton Blake, published by Wordsworth as part of their Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural line for some reason. It's edited by David Stuart Davies, who's a bit of an authority on this era of detective fiction, and collects stories from Blake's golden age of the 1920s and 1930s (I should say it leads off with one of those Rider Haggard "white man's burden" stories I mentioned, which I found a bit of a chore to get through, but it's good after that: there's one very amusing story where Blake has to join the English football team to rescue its honour from a seemingly superhuman continental side).
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Mar 9, 2018 00:14
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Apart from the very modern stuff like Study in Emerald, I devoured a lot of the Solar Pons stuff when I was younger -- basically an unapologetic Holmes knockoff, but pleasantly unashamed. Sexton Blake (and Harry Dickson, "the American Sherlock Holmes") are just the most egregious to me because they're the ones who were actually stated to live in rooms on Baker Street just like Holmes. I'm not as familiar with a lot of the other Holmes copycats.
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Mar 9, 2018 09:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:If you like that sort of thing, he's worth checking out: written by August Derleth. Have you read Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles by Kim Newman? It's a pretty fun pastiche.
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Mar 9, 2018 18:37
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