|
A Strand from June 1917
French crime fiction had also had a tradition of 'Great Detectives' for sixty
years before Holmes arrived, starting with François Eugène Vidocq. This
crook-turned-policeman persuaded the French police to forgive him his crimes if,
in return, he established a detective force for them - the Sûreté - in 1811. His
four-volume Mémoires de Vidocq (1828-1829), ghost-written and
sensationalised, in effect created the twin ideas of the felon-detective (which
inspired The Saint) and the infallible, virtuoso crime-solver.
Vidocq turned up (as the criminal Vautrin) in Balzac’s Le
Père Goriot (1834-5) and other books in the Comédie Humaine; as a
detective in Eugène Sue’s Rodolphe; as Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s
Les Miserables (1862) and as the model for C. Auguste Dupin in Edgar Allan
Poe’s detective stories.
Muddock published an account of his life as Eugene Vidocq: Soldier, Thief,
Spy, Detective (Hutchinson 1895)
Dick Donovan adopted Lecoq, the great French fictional detective, as his model, and his
most prized possession was a false beard which once belonged to Gaboriau’s hero.
There were various other real-life detectives who inspired all the crime
writers, apart from Edinburgh's M'Levy (1860s). Glasgow's first detective, Peter
McKinlay, appointed in 1819, set up his detectives in 1821, long before Scotland
Yard's Detective and Public Carriage Office opened (1842).
Another Scotsman, Allan Pinkerton, who started the famous Pinkerton
detective agency in America, published The Gypsies and the Detectives in
1872 and a popular non-fiction book The Expressman and the Detective in
1875. Pinkerton’s books portrayed detectives as super-efficient and infallible.
By the 1890s “Pinkerton” was synonymous with “detective.”
The term 'Dick' as American
slang for 'detective' originated
about 1908 because of Dick
Donovan's fame and status
across the Atlantic.
*Muddock had two pieces in The Strand no. 19 vol. 4 July
1892 - the Dick Donovan tale
The Jewelled Skull and
an 11 page article The Story of Mont Blanc by J E
Muddock, illustrated by W H J Boot.
Was Muddock the only person ever to have two pieces in the same
issue of Strand?
|
When Baker Street had Holmes, Glasgow had Dick
Donovan
Arthur Conan Doyle is
often credited, erroneously, with the following:
|
In Sherlock
Holmes, Conan Doyle invented the very concept of Detective Fiction
 |
...wrong!
|
The first Holmes
story, A Study in Scarlet, had come out in December 1887. But
Muddock's
earliest detective stories were published in The Dundee Weekly News
from early 1888 before being collected as The Man-Hunter later that
year. Moreover, there had
already been:
Tales, Edgar Allan Poe (1854); The Detective's Note-book,
Charles Martel (c1860); The Revelations of a Private Detective,
Andrew Forrester Jr. (c1863); Recollections of a Detective Police
Officer, "Waters" (1856); The Queen of Hearts, Wilkie Collins
(1859); Hunted Down, Charles Dickens (1860); The Experiences of a
Lady Detective, "Anonyma" (possibly W. Stephens Hayward) (1861); Out of
His Head, Thomas Bailey
Aldrich (1862); The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Mark
Twain (1867); Monsieur Lecoq (1868) and The Little Old Man of Batignolles
(1876), Émile Gaboriau; Brought to Bay, "James M'Govan" (William
Crawford Honeyman) (1878); The
Leavenworth Case, Anna Katherine Green (1878); Detective Sketches, "A New York Detective", (1881); New Arabian Nights, Robert Louis
Stevenson (1882); The Swedish Match, Anton Chekhov (1883); The Lady, or the Tiger? Frank R. Stockton (1884)
and many others.
|
|
Conan Doyle
invented the idea of a series of related, short detective stories based
around a central character
|
...wrong!
|
In fact, this had
been common in detective fiction since the 1860s, including James M'Levy's
(factual) memoirs and Honeyman's James McGovan stories of the 1870s -
both set in Edinburgh and which Conan Doyle would certainly have read - and,
of course, Dick Donovan.
|
|
Sherlock Holmes
first appeared in the Strand
 |
...wrong!
|
The first Sherlock
Holmes short story in the Strand (A Scandal in Bohemia, July
1891) was neither Conan Doyle’s first piece for the magazine – that was an
anonymous and strangely anti-feminist tale entitled The Voice of Science
– nor was it the first published Holmes yarn. There had already been two
full-length Holmes stories: A Study in Scarlet in Beeton's
1887 Christmas Annual; and The Sign of Four in Lippincott's
Monthly Magazine of February 1890. Neither achieved anything like the
success his short stories were to have.
|
|
Conan Doyle wrote the first
detective stories for Strand magazine |
...wrong!
|
That was Grant
Allen's short story Jerry Stokes, which appeared in the third issue
of Strand.
|
What's more, J E P Muddock was writing well-know, widely-read
and hugely popular detective fiction as "Dick Donovan" before Holmes was ever in
magazine print. The first Strand Holmes story A Scandal in Bohemia was printed in July
1891 and two earlier stories had come out elsewhere in December 1887 and
February 1890. But
the earliest Dick Donovan stories were published in The Dundee Weekly News
from January 1888 before
being collected in The Man-Hunter later that year.
Donovan and Strand magazine
Donovan's first appearance in Strand was in July 1892, just
after the end of Conan Doyle's first series of Sherlock Holmes stories. But Dick
Donovan predated Holmes, and was already a popular detective character, whose
escapades had appeared in various publications before the first fifteen were
collected in the definitive Chatto & Windus edition The Man-Hunter: Stories from
the Note-Book of a Detective (1888).
The Donovan tales which appeared in the Strand in 1892
were different from the regular Donovan canon. Three of them are rather
formulaic and sensational. The first, in July*, was The Jewelled Skull, a
lurid piece concerning the theft of an exotic Eastern artefact, ostensibly the
cranium of a long-dead Indian Rajah which had been turned into a bejewelled
drinking goblet valued at £12,000. There is, of course, a mysterious secret
society dedicated to smoking opium and taking a narcotic “made from a
combination of Indian herbs". Donovan solves the case and the perpetrator dies
of a well-deserved drug overdose some days later.
The August offering, The Story of the Great Cat's Eye,
concerns the theft of an exotic Eastern jewel worth £50,000 (Muddock always
specified the value!) and involved Donovan travelling to Sri Lanka and Morocco
to recover the diadem and displaying his mastery of languages and disguise.
In the September story, The Secret of the Black Brotherhood,
Donovan takes on a young woman falsely accused of stealing an exotic artefact
(not Eastern this time; a diamond bracelet worth £1,000) but the real
culprits are the members of a secret society (surprise, surprise), who have
hypnotic powers.
The fourth Strand story, in November, was The Chamber
of Shadows which, for a change, involves neither a jewel theft nor a secret
society, nor yet exotic travel. The case concerns a business fraud, but Muddock
manages to wring a good deal of sensationalism out of it: gambling debts, love
unrequited, obsession and a macabre exhumation. (The October issue detective
story was Grant Allen's The Great Ruby Robbery).
It's true that the Strand used Donovan as a fill-in for
Conan Doyle after the first series of Holmes stories had appeared in 1891-92. A
note at the end of the first Strand Donovan story (July 1892) said:
"It will be observed that this month there is no detective story
by Mr Conan Doyle relating the adventures of the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
We are glad to be able to announce that there is to be only a temporary interval
in the publication of these stories. Mr Conan Doyle is now engaged upon writing
a second series, which will be commenced in an early number. During the short
interval powerful detective stories by other eminent writers will be published."
The editors clearly realised the popular appetite for a monthly
detective story. A footnote to the final Donovan adventure assured Gentle
Readers that:
"Next month will appear the first of the new series of The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes".
The story collections
The 1888 collection by Chatto & Windus entitled The Man-Hunter was undeniably popular and appeared the
following year in America, though what the readers there made of the Glasgow and
London settings is a mystery in itself. Possibly for reasons of recognition of
and by a wider audience, Muddock “de-localised” many of the later stories and
they could as well be set in Chicago as Cowcaddens. A further 13 short story
collections appeared as sequels to The Man-Hunter between 1889 and 1896
(plus collections of True Crime and horror stories), which
means he was writing the stories at the rate of about one a week, on top of his
other work, including a full-time journalist’s position with D C Thomson in
Dundee. There may yet be other uncollected Dick Donovan stories out there.
The
implication of this is that the craze for short detective fiction was well
established by the time Holmes first appeared and E. F. Bleiler’s observation that
Donovan "was as well-known on the lower reading levels as Sherlock Holmes later
became on the higher levels" is not far short of the mark. Donovan's reputation
as the dogged detective lasted long after his disappearance from print and
Muddock’s death. In a study of the murder mystery genre in 1942, Haycraft makes
an impertinent reference to "demi-detection of the Dick Donovan school" but
it is noteworthy that this was given without any explanation of who Donovan was,
clearly expecting his readers would know; and “Inspector Donovan” crops up in
Alan Moore’s glorious amalgam of Victorian sensational fiction, The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen.
The "real" Dick Donovan?
Dick Donovan, like Sherlock Holmes, was often thought to be real,
and received many letters soliciting his detective skills, including one from a
Brighton woman who asked him to follow her husband. certainly, that great
newspaper The Scotsman was taken in. Reviewing The Man-Hunter in
1888, it said "The stories are not the less enthralling in their interest
because they are the record of actual experience, and not, like so many of the
detective stories of the moment, the creation of ingenuity and. imagination
working in fiction. . . . The stories are narrated with a forcible simplicity
which makes them more effective than would any subtleties of style.” And of
Caught At Last! - ” Mr. Donovan’s stories are true. They are genuine leaves
from the note-book of a detective. . . . The book shows a clever detective at
his work, and it throws much real light on the ways of. criminals and the lives
they lead in the haunts of vice.”
Lists of story collections and novels are here
|
