Dick Donovan would have worked out of "The Central", the old Central Police Office in South Albion Street. Opened in 1825, it shut on 23 March 1906 after 79 years.

Old Scotland Yard, before 1890

London days and languages

On the other hand, we do know that Donovan started working as a policeman in London (beginning in the East End Division) but spent the most important part of his career in Glasgow; that he was fluent in at least five languages; was (like many another fictional crime-buster) a master of disguise and a skilled undercover worker; not shy of taking on private detective work for a fee; physically strong and well up to fight.

Donovan can swim well ("Amongst the few accomplishments that I really excelled in at school was that of swimming" -  A Hunt for a Murderer in Caught At Last!, 1889). On the other hand, he can't dance (The Gentleman Smasher in The Man-Hunter, 1888).

There are contradictory clues as to whether he is English, Scots or Irish, as he adopts any of these origins, and others besides, with ease.

It is unclear how or why Donovan knows so many languages with sufficient fluency to convince native speakers. The knowledge of French, at least, is explained thus:

"It happened that I knew Paris very well, as in the days of my youth I had spent between three and four years in the gay capital; for an uncle and aunt of mine and their family resided there, and, as I was left an orphan early, my relatives took charge of rue, and I was sent to school in Paris".

(The Devil's Dozen, collected in The Man-Hunter, 1888)

Dick Donovan's nose!

As for Donovan's appearance, he looks vaguely Jewish, and although he is ever ready to adopt the disguise of a 'sheeny' (one of the many now-distasteful nicknames for Jews common in late Victorian times), he is also careful to let us know that he has none of the Hebrew in him. We have his own assertion that:

 "...nature has endowed me with a very prominent organ of smell, although I have not a trace of lsraelitish strain in my composition. An olive complexion, deep set eyes with shaggy eyebrows, and dark hair, are likewise my physical characteristics, so I am enabled to play the role of the Jew with considerable success"

(from The Pearl Necklace in The Man-Hunter, 1888). And again, he tells us there is

"a certain physical resemblance I myself bear to the Jewish type", although he is also quick to remind us that "I haven't a drop of Jewish blood in my veins"

(quoted from How I Caught a Land Shark, in Tracked and Taken, 1890).

We also have Paul Hardy's illustrations as a guide (right, and more here), which we must assume Muddock saw and at least approved of, even if he had no hand in their conception.

Master of disguise

As early as the first collection (e.g. The Pearl Necklace in The Man-Hunter, 1888), Donovan adopts disguises, including a Jewish pedlar, complete with mock-Yiddish accent (‘Goot-evening, shentlemens’) and Muddock would have us believe that his detective's most cherished possession is a false beard which once belonged to Lecoq:

"In the instance with which I am dealing I wore a long beard which I prized highly, for it was presented to me many years ago with an assurance that it had proved part of one of the many disguises assumed as occasion required by the world-renowned French detective, Lecoq, in whose footsteps I have humbly endeavoured to follow."

In the first two Strand stories (The Jewelled Skull, July 1892, and The Story of the Great Cat's Eye in August) Donovan passes himself off as a plumber, a cleric, a French artisan and a Moroccan. In Caught At Last! (1889) he easily adopts the persona of an escaped murderer’s friend, the relative of a distressed gentlewoman, a particularly dense department store employee from the Isle of Skye and a moderately fraudulent German merchant. Of course, these are all plot devices, introduced by Muddock without back-up or explanation, to further a particular storyline. And just where he picked up his facility for disguise is a mystery. His command of criminal slang and various codes is more understandable.

Muddock evidently had a taste for such elements, as one of his other creations, Calvin Sugg, speaks even more languages more fluently than Donovan and is regularly decorated by foreign governments. If Dick Donovan had needed to be an expert mountaineer and conversant with Pushtu, astronavigation or Meissen porcelain, Muddock would have made it so, without bothering to render it plausible.

The same is true for Sherlock Holmes, although we do sort of expect and accept that his mysterious but presumably colourful past could well have embraced such expertise, along with the knowledge of German, Chemistry and cigars he displayed as early as A Study in Scarlet).
 

Donovan the Detective

Muddock, like Doyle, gave his detective a near-photographic memory for faces and an ability for logical reasoning. But logic or reason rarely feature in the more highly sensational plots. As a detective, Donovan is more painstaking than inspired, and draws conclusions based on the evidence at crime scenes or from interrogation, rather than great leaps of imagination. All too often, though, Donovan has made up his mind who the culprit is early on and proceeds to vindicate his judgement, usually to the embarrassment of his superiors, other policemen, the victims of the crime and so on. This “I told you so” attitude would have made him something of a boastful prig to deal with, the reader often feels. But this may have been Muddock knowing his market – lower-class and lower-brow readers than Doyle’s, who would revel in Authority Upset and Stuffed Shirts Confounded. Donovan is not shy of telling the directors of the railway or bank officials or even senior police officers that he knows better than they do, but usually lets them think what they like at first, keeping his powder dry until a vindication in the denouement, at which point it’s Collapse of Stout Party. Like Holmes, a later century might have considered Dick Donovan borderline autistic.

While the stories (and Donovan himself) are dogged rather than gifted, they did set a number of trends for later police-procedurals. Donovan makes intelligent use of what evidence Muddock has him find; and keeps up with the latest methods in forensic criminology - comparing hair fibres, for instance, and other techniques which Muddock later built into his tales collected as The Triumphs of Fabian Field: Criminologist (1910).

Use of deductive logic and gritty persistence are Donovan’s method – dedicating a whole week to working undercover in a department store to discover the theft of some items (All For Love’s Sake) or camping out for days and nights on Plumstead Marshes (A Hunt for a Murderer), although the author does throw him the occasional coincidence or piece of sheer luck. Those familiar with the works of Ian Rankin, P D James and Douglas Jardine may find the Donovan stories lacking in character information and light on scene-setting and Donovan seems lightly-drawn compared with Dalgleish, Rebus, Morse, Skinner and friends.

The stories also contrast sharply in tone with the wealth of locational detail in the (real) M’Levy and (fictional) James McGovan tales, where Edinburgh figures almost as a character in its own right. Donovan’s Glasgow setting is most colourful in The Man Hunter. Later, the locale is less specific and largely irrelevant. Possibly, Muddock realised he was restricting his market, especially with the sophisticated Strand readers, and invented a London “past” for Donovan, in order to tell stories of the Capital plus adventurings abroad.
 

Jamaica Street, Glasgow, in the 1890s

A Paul Hardy illustration from The Secrets of the Black Brotherhood collected in From Clue to Capture (1893)
Courtesy of Rick at Bookman's World
There are others here