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One Hundred Years of Sexton Blake
by Norman Wright This article originally appeared in Antiquarian Book Monthly, Nov. 1993 © Norman Wright. It is reproduced here with the author's kind permission. 
Sexton Blake - detective, is one of a handful of fictional characters to have achieved virtual immortality. He has been called the poor man's Sherlock Holmes and indeed he was created in the shadow of Doyle's super-sleuth. But as the decades passed he developed and, while still retaining many of Holmes' characteristics, became far more a man of action than his Baker Street rival. Holmes had sixty adventures; to date Blake has battled against crooks of all descriptions in over three thousand cases chronicled by almost two hundred different authors in a multitude of publications. Yet when his first adventures appeared, late in 1893, in a cheap weekly paper aimed at a working class audience with a half-penny to spare on light entertainment, his chances of survival looked decidedly slim. But survive he did and the magazines containing his adventures are now keenly sought by a growing number of collectors who realise that within the pages of those tuppeny and fourpenny publications is to be found a wealth of first rate detective fiction. His exploits have been transferred to stage, screen, radio, and comic strip and with the present vogue for period detective stories on television it looks as though he may be set to make a return to the small screen - this time in colour!
The reading habits of the nation underwent profound changes during the late 19th century. Education for all, the continuing population movement from the countryside to the industrial towns and the development of cheaper printing processes resulted in the publication of a profusion of new periodicals to cater for a growing market that had the money to indulge in the occasional magazine or paper. For the better off there were publications such as The Strand Magazine, a trend-setting monthly of great influence, probably best remembered now for bringing Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories to a wide audience. The success of Holmes resulted in an upsurge of interest in the genre of crime fiction and the appearance in print of a great many imitations, most of them inferior to Doyle's definitive detective. Soon every periodical worth its salt had its own resident sleuth tracking miscreants through the London fogs and studying footprints through a large lens. Earlier in the nineteenth century the only cheap reading matter available to the masses were 'penny bloods'; cheap part-works that revelled in gruesome fiction appealing to the lowest tastes. With such titles as "The Wild Boys of London", "Varney the Vampire" and "Sweeney Todd" they were invariably badly written and without exception full of murder, mayhem and blood-letting. With the advent of the publishing boom the 'bloods', or penny dreadfuls as they were sometimes called, lost ground and the final nail in their coffin was brought about by Alfred Harmsworth who published The Halfpenny Marvel, designed not only to undercut 'penny bloods' as far as price was concerned but also to provide young readers with more wholesome reading matter. The editorial of the first issue, published on 11th November 1893, made his intentions very clear... "The books of this library will contain nothing that is not pure and healthy - nothing that has a tendency other than to elevate; and they will, furthermore, form a healthy contrast to the deleterious rubbish known as the penny dreadful." The first few issues of "The Halfpenny Marvel" contained run of the mill adventure stories, full of blood and thunder and daring deeds, but lacking the gothic horror of the notorious bloods. It was in issue number five that the editor introduced Sexton Blake, announcing that the 'clever detective' would star in the following week’s story, entitled "The Missing Millionaire", a tale that no reader would be able to put down unfinished.  "The Missing Millionaire - The story of a Daring Detective" appeared in The Halfpenny Marvel for 15th December and was a quite unremarkable story upon which to build a legend. The portrayal of Blake was far removed from the hawk-faced fighter for justice that he became in the 1920s and 1930s. In his first adventure he was depicted as an avaricious character, rubbing his hands at the thought of the large fee he was going to receive from his rich client. Later in the story the Holmesian influence was apparent in an episode involving a street Arab, akin to the Baker Street Irregulars so beloved of Holmes, who helped Blake track down a kidnap victim. It is perhaps interesting to note that in the very week Blake was making his debut in the pages of the Halfpenny Marvel Sherlock Holmes was facing his Final Problem with Professor Moriarty at the edge of the Reichenback Falls in the pages of The Strand Magazine. The following weeks Halfpenny Marvel contained another Blake tale, "A Christmas Crime - The Mystery of Black Grange". As with the first tale it was an incredibly melodramatic story with dark villains, fair heroines and over the top dialogue worthy of Todd Slaughter. In the second chapter Blake fell in love and as the story came to a close he was on the point of asking the lady in question to marry him. But, detection and marriage did not seem to mix and fortunately for detection, and detective story enthusiasts, the lady in question slipped quietly into oblivion. |