During the heyday of the dime novel, crime fiction gradually gained popularity in more upmarket fiction. Many of these new crime novels, appearing under the imprint of publishers who would have turned their noses up at the likes of Nick Carter and ‘Old Sleuth’, were by women writers. The Leavenworth Case, for example, was the work of Anna Katharine Green, a Brooklyn-born author who turned to fiction after failing to make much of a mark as a poet. First published in 1878, this introduced a detective from the New York Metropolitan Police Force named Ebenezer Gryce who went on to feature in a number of Green’s later novels. Although The Leavenworth Case is very much a novel of its time, it continued to have an influence well into the twentieth century. Agatha Christie later cited the book as an inspiration for her when she was just setting out on her career. (Green herself was still writing in the 1920s and created other recurring characters, including nosy spinster Amelia Butterworth, a prototype Miss Marple, and Violet Strange, a wealthy young New Yorker moonlighting as a detective, who features in one of the stories in this anthology.)
The Leavenworth Case was a bestseller and other crime novels of the 1870s and 1880s made their mark. By the early 1890s the figure of the fictional detective was firmly established with readers of both ‘downmarket’ and ‘upmarket’ literature. However, one character was about to change the ways in which they all imagined that figure. His name, of course, was Sherlock Holmes. His impact was to be felt almost as profoundly in the USA as it was in Britain. Although the first Holmes tale, the novel A Study in Scarlet, had to wait more than two years for an American edition, the stories after that appeared almost simultaneously in the UK and across the Atlantic. Indeed, in some instances, Americans could enjoy Holmes’s latest adventure before his home readership. Some of the stories later collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, for example, were published in the US Collier’s magazine a week or two prior to their appearances in the UK Strand Magazine.
The Sherlock Holmes effect was soon evident. Just as in Britain, scores upon scores of rivals made their bow in books and magazines in the years between 1880 and 1920. Of the characters who feature in the stories in this anthology, it is difficult to believe that Bromley Barnes, LeDroit Conners, Craig Kennedy and others would have been created in quite the same way without the influence of Doyle’s great detective. They all carry echoes of the man from Baker Street’s genius and personality. And Ellis Parker Butler’s Philo Gubb, the inept ‘hero’ of a series of comic crime stories, may be the polar opposite of Doyle’s hero in terms of intellectual prowess but even he was an avowed admirer of Holmes.
A host of other American fictional detectives, not included in this anthology, largely for reasons of space, also operate in the shadow of Sherlock. ‘Average’ Jones, the creation of the muckraking journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams, may seem something of an original in that he comes across all his cases through the classified ads of the daily newspapers but even that idiosyncrasy is an echo of Holmes’s abiding interest in the agony column of The Times. Luther Trant, the so-called ‘psychological detective’ who was the invention of William MacHarg and Edwin Balmer, was hailed in the magazine that published their first story in 1909 as propounding a ‘new detective theory… as important as Poe’s deductive theory of ratiocination’. Yet readers of Conan Doyle could have pointed to the pages of The Strand Magazine and justifiably disputed its novelty.
All these detectives, whether included in this anthology or not, had distinctly American attributes but equally they all owed something to the man from Baker Street. Only a handful of characters escaped the influence of Conan Doyle almost entirely. Perhaps the most original of all the American detectives of this period was Uncle Abner, the creation of the lawyer and author Melville Davisson Post. Post turned to the past as the setting for the 22 stories which feature his God-fearing hero, dispensing wisdom and justice as he rides through the backwoods of West Virginia in the years before the American Civil War, under the admiring gaze of the narrator, his young nephew Martin. Although largely forgotten today, the Uncle Abner stories have had many admirers over the years since their first publication. In 1941, Howard Haycraft, one of the first literary critics to take crime fiction seriously, called Post’s character ‘the greatest American contribution’ to the cast list of detective fiction since Poe’s C Auguste Dupin. The opening story in American Sherlocks, I hope, will introduce Uncle Abner to new readers.
Even readers with a wide-ranging knowledge of the genre have a tendency to assume that little American crime fiction of any interest appeared in the eighty or so years between Poe’s stories and 1920s novels by such writers as SS Van Dine, creator of Philo Vance, and Dashiell Hammett, whose first book, Red Harvest, was published as that decade came to an end. One aim of my anthology is to show how wrong that assumption is. There are many crime stories from the period between 1880 and 1920 which are well worth discovering. Stories of women detectives like Hugh Cosgro Weir’s Madelyn Mack and Anna Katharine Green’s Violet Strange. Stories of hyper-cerebral geniuses like Jacques Futrelle’s ‘Thinking Machine’, Professor Augustus SFX Van Dusen. Stories of pioneering scientific criminologists like Arthur Reeve’s Craig Kennedy. From the blind detective Thornley Colton to the retired Secret Service agent Bromley Barnes, the pages of American magazines were filled with intriguing characters whose exploits remain very enjoyable. Here are fifteen of them.
UNCLE ABNER
Created by Melville Davisson Post (1869-1930)
Melville Davisson Post was born in West Virginia, the son of a wealthy landowner. He practised law for some
