CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR NICK RENNISON
MORE RIVALS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
‘This collection, like its predecessor Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, is a delight for fans of the history of crime writing and lovers of the short story mystery format. I can’t think of a more pleasant afternoon’s reading than this. Fun and informative’ – Paul Burke, NB Magazine
‘Writer, editor and Victorian specialist Nick Rennison does and has produced another fascinating anthology of stories from “the golden age of gaslight crime”’ – Mike Ripley, Shots Mag
‘Rennison set out to demonstrate the range and variety of late Victorian and Edwardian detective fiction... I’d say that he has succeeded in this aim’ – Martin Edwards, Do You Write Under Your Own Name
Supernatural Sherlocks
‘An unsettling and entertaining read!’ – Lizzie Hayes , Promoting Crime Blogspot
‘The Sherlock boom of the late 19th century also sparked a craze for stories of the supernatural and these are celebrated in Nick Rennison’s new anthology Supernatural Sherlocks’ – Mike Ripley, ShotsMag
THE RIVALS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
‘An intriguing anthology’ – Mail on Sunday
‘A book which will delight fans of crime fiction’ – Verbal Magazine
‘It’s good to see that Mr Rennison has also selected some rarer pieces – and rarer detectives, such as November Joe, Sebastian Zambra, Cecil Thorold and Lois Cayley’ – Roger Johnson, The District Messenger (Newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London)
THE RIVALS OF DRACULA
‘These 15 sanguinary spine-tinglers… deliver delicious chills’ – Christopher Hirst, Independent
‘A gloriously Gothic collection of heroes fighting against maidens with bone-white skin, glittering eyes and blood-thirsty intentions’ – Lizzie Hayes, Promoting Crime Fiction
‘Nick Rennison’s The Rivals of Dracula shows that many Victorian and Edwardian novelists tried their hand at this staple of Gothic horror’ – Andrew Taylor, Spectator
‘The Rivals of Dracula is a fantastic collection of classic tales to chill the blood and tingle the spine. Grab a copy and curl up somewhere cosy for a night in’ – Citizen Homme Magazine
To Eve with love and thanks
INTRODUCTION
Female detectives make their first appearances surprisingly early in the history of crime fiction. The 1860s was not a decade in which women in real life had much scope to forge independent careers for themselves, particularly in the field of law enforcement, but, in the pages of novels and short stories, they were already busy solving crimes and bringing villains to justice. Andrew Forrester’s 1864 book The Female Detective (recently republished by the British Library) introduced readers to the mysterious ‘G’, a woman enquiry agent employed by the police who sometimes goes by the name of ‘Miss Gladden’. There had been women who turned detective in fiction before. Wilkie Collins’s short story entitled ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’, for example, was published in 1856 in Dickens’s magazine Household Words, and has a heroine who investigates the suspicious circumstances of a friend’s death. However, Forrester’s character seems to have been the first professional female detective in British fiction. Like ‘Miss Gladden’, ‘Andrew Forrester’ was a pseudonym. The author’s real name was James Redding Ware (1832-1909), a novelist, dramatist and writer for hire in Victorian London who produced books on a wide variety of subjects from card games and English slang to dreams of famous people and the lives of centenarians. The Female Detective consists of a number of ‘G’’s cases, narrated by herself, in which she deploys her deductive and logical skills to reveal the truth.
The Female Detective, and other titles such as WS Hayward’s Revelations of a Lady Detective which appeared at about the same time, were published as ‘yellowbacks’. These were cheaply produced books, so called because of their covers which often had bright yellow borders. They were sold mostly at the bookstalls which had recently sprung up at railway stations across the country, and were intended as easy, disposable reads for train journeys.
For nearly twenty-five years, Miss Gladden and Mrs Paschal, the heroine of Hayward’s book, had no real successors in English fiction. The third woman detective did not put in an appearance until 1888 when Leonard Merrick (1864-1939) made Miriam Lea, a former governess turned private investigator, into the central character of his short novel Mr Bazalgette’s Agent. Employed by Mr Bazalgette’s detective agency, Miriam pursues an embezzler halfway across Europe in what is a charming, skilfully written narrative. Unfortunately her creator, Leonard Merrick, who was in his early twenties when he wrote Mr Bazalgette’s Agent, came to hate it. He went on to become a well-respected novelist whose admirers included HG Wells, JM Barrie and GK Chesterton. George Orwell enjoyed his novels and wrote a foreword to a new edition of one of them. In later life Merrick clearly saw his detective story as an embarrassment – ‘the worst thing I wrote’, he called it – and made every effort to cover up its existence. He took to buying up copies of the book and destroying them which explains why only a handful now remains in existence. Luckily, the British Library republished it in their ‘Crime Classics’ series in 2013 so readers today can see that Merrick was unjustly severe on his own work.
By 1890 there had only been a very small number of pioneering women detectives in crime fiction but that was about to change. Two phenomena dictated that change. One was the astonishing increase in the number of magazines and periodicals in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Between 1875 and 1903, that number nearly quadrupled from just short of 700 to more than 2,500. Not all of them, of course, carried crime stories but a significant proportion did. The market for all kinds of what would later be called ‘genre’ fiction, but especially crime stories, grew exponentially.
The other factor was the advent of Sherlock Holmes. The great detective’s debut in A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887, did not immediately start the Holmes craze. It was only when The Strand Magazine began to publish the short stories featuring Holmes and Dr Watson four years later that the public took the characters to its collective
