Morley Roberts

MARKUS NEACEY’S edited collection, Selected Stories of Morley Roberts, brings much needed attention to a short story writer who shrewdly navigated the shifting landscape of late-Victorian and Edwardian publication markets. Between 1887 and 1941, Roberts published approximately 300 short stories, thirty-two novels, 200 articles, three poetry books, two biographies, and five travel books. The sheer volume of work produced by Roberts, not to mention the variety of popular genres he thoroughly worked over as a writer, speaks to the numerous professional opportunities made available by a burgeoning print culture and the wide-ranging tastes of a consumer audience hungry to partake in new, less expensive entertainment forums. As Neacey’s introduction informs readers, it was Roberts’s skill to negotiate his own contracts and promote his own work that illustrated his ability to steer a growing consumer culture in his favor.

During the peak of his writing career, roughly 1890–1920, Roberts earned £3–£6.6 per 1,000 words, publishing regularly in leading periodicals such as the Strand Magazine, a print outlet estimated to have a reading circulation of at least 400,000. As Neacey reveals, these rates were less than what Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Ouida earned for similar work, but nonetheless Roberts created a profitable income with a rapid output and syndication rights that assured a portion of subsequent sales when the short stories were republished in America, Canada, and the British colonies or reproduced in dramatic performances. Both businessman and creative artist, Roberts joined the Author’s Club to fraternize with writers and editors alike, where he often garnered professional support and acquired new contracts. He further advanced his career with publicity stunts that captivated journalists, such as giving interviews about his impending travel adventures as a seaman minutes before setting sail. Roberts publicly cast himself in the role of a man’s man, and it did not hurt that he actually looked the part physically. Described as ruggedly handsome and “broad-shouldered,” he earned his chops as an actual outdoorsman before writing about his experiences as a ranch hand in the Australian bush; a farm hand, railway worker, miner, and cattle driver in North America; and a mountain climber at the summit of the Matterhorn.

It remains somewhat curious, then, that in 1942, an eighty-four-year-old Roberts would die a solitary creature in a modest London flat, having outlived both his family and his popularity as a fiction writer—a life’s end distinctly different from the celebrity status he achieved as an athletic outdoorsman, a globe-trotting adventurer, and a profitable writer. The trajectory of his quick rise to popular success and his later stagnation perhaps indicates more about the changing trends in popular culture than about the efforts of Roberts, who throughout his career took up a variety of creative endeavors to occupy his imagination, including painting, writing scientific articles, and penning dramas for the theater. The selection of thirty short stories collected by Neacey represents Roberts’s experiments with a variety of entertaining genres published at the apex of his career: cowboy and frontier tales, sea adventures, occult romances, horror mysteries, comedies, crime dramas, and imperial adventures. Common themes include mental degeneration, criminal degradation, heroic men facing unimaginable danger, vigilante justice, and survival in the wild frontier.

Drawing on comparisons to Kipling and Stevenson, reviewers often praised Roberts’s thrilling depictions of psychological disease, and his crime mysteries are full of decadent writers, geniuses, and artists suffering from mental maladies, nervous dispositions, uncontrollable compulsions, and psychic sensitivities, who become agents of violence. Contemporary readers are likely to appreciate the plot twists and details of such stories. In “The Suggester of Crime” (1898), for example, Roberts incorporates the fin-de-siècle interest in telepathy to concoct a creepy plot about a dangerous psychic connection between a telepath and a crime novelist that culminates in a violent confrontation, posing a scary question about the influence of popular culture on amenable minds. “An Edited Story” (1896) features another...