British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes by Clare Clarke (review)

After Sherlock Holmes disappeared over the Reichenbach Falls, his absence left a gaping void in the marketplace for detective fiction. This void is the starting point for Clare Clarke's engaging study of the 1890s short story series, which offered alternative manifestations of the detective and crime plots so popular with late Victorian readers. Before Holmes's resurrection in 1901 in The Hound of the Baskervilles, new detective figures took his place in the pages of fin de siècle periodicals: lavish monthlies like the Strand Magazine and the Windsor, but also weekend miscellanies, urban daily newspapers, and provincial weeklies. The book develops discussions from Clarke's earlier monograph, Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (2014), which challenged the cosy reputation of crime fiction between 1886 and 1900; this second investigation pursues notions of narrative complexity and the blurring of boundaries between detective fiction and other popular genres, such as the ghost story, adventure stories, and slum fiction. This is an ambitious and diverse study that places detective fiction in its broader periodical contexts and makes an important contribution to a growing critical field.

The six case studies focus on the writing of L. T. Meade, C. L. (Catherine Louisa) Pirkis, Arthur Morrison, Fergus Hume, Richard Marsh, and mother-and-son duo Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard (under the pseudonyms E. and H. Heron). Clarke adds to recent discussions of Meade, Hume, and Marsh in relation to the city, poverty, and contamination by critics such as Christopher Pittard and Minna Vuohelainen; she provides a broader vision of the periodical landscape, genre hybridities, and the gendering of detection in her surveys of key stories and her close attention to reviews and readerships. Her extensive knowledge of Victorian detective fiction comes to the fore in her challenge to limited genealogies of the genre, showing how key tropes were borrowed, reworked, and refreshed. The chapter on Morrison is particularly interesting in terms of his recycling of slum fiction conventions and his representations of the East End, taking the reader to the darker side of the city where Holmes rarely ventured. Morrison's "criminalization of the detective hero" Horace Dorrington confused reviewers, particularly given the disturbingly chaotic setting of London's mean streets where "no one is what they pretend to be" (70, 79). Clarke's study also usefully identifies areas for future research. Footnotes point toward other sources, including the Australian newspaper database Trove which allows access to Mrs. George Corbett's Dora Bell stories, Behind the Veil; or Revelations by a Lady Detective (1891); their complicated publishing history still needs to be deciphered.

One of the book's key arguments is that the diversity of the detective story at the fin de siècle can only be understood if we recognise "the importance of flexibility and permeability in our conception of what the detective narrative can do and be" (150). Clarke shows how the Holmesian model of the detective as rational man of science and purveyor of English middle-class values is both copied and challenged, generating new narratives and new perspectives on crime, class, and the city. The master criminals who followed in the wake of Moriarty also receive a lot of coverage. This component of the genre overlaps in interesting ways with the trope of the foreigner as threat. Clarke's analysis of the development of the under-researched female detective is particularly impressive, focussing on the ways in which disguise allowed female investigators to infiltrate homes and to assist socially marginal women. Pirkis's detective, Loveday Brooke, appeared in the Ludgate Monthly which, Clarke suggests, was targeted at the woman reader with its articles on fashion, servants, and royal women. Clarke illuminates Hagar of the Pawn-Shop (1897–98), by New Zealand author Fergus Hume, by considering its syndicated publication in serial form in several provincial newspapers, including the Liverpool Weekly Mercury and the Woolwich Gazette. Anchored in discussions of thing theory...