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One Hundred Years of Sexton Blake
Two further Sexton Blake stories, "A Golden Ghost", and "Sexton Blake's Peril", appeared in The Halfpenny Marvel. All four tales were written by Harry Blyth, three of them under the pen name Hal Meredeth and one under his own name. Little is known of Blyth but according to "The Men Behind Boys Fiction" (Lofts and Adley 1970) he was born in 1852 and worked mainly as a freelance journalist. It was as a result of a series of articles entitled "Third Class Crimes", written for the Sunday People, that he was commissioned to write a series of detective stories for the Halfpenny Marvel. As it turned out Harmsworth got an incredibly good bargain, for the nine guinea fee they paid Blyth for the first story included payment for the copyright of the character! In addition to the four Blake adventures for the Halfpenny Marvel Blyth also wrote two stories of the detective for the Union Jack, a companion paper to The Halfpenny Marvel, launched by Harmsworth in April 1894. It was in the pages of Union Jack that Sexton Blake was to thrive and prosper.
"Sexton Blake - Detective" appeared in Union Jack number 2 and for the next year or so his adventures appeared spasmodically throughout the run of the halfpenny series of the weekly. When Union Jack increased in size and its price rose to one penny, in October 1903, Blake's appearances became more frequent and from number 95 he became the paper’s resident 'tec featuring in every issue until its metamorphosis into Detective Weekly in 1933. In those early adventures, when Union Jack sported a pink cover and incredibly tiny print, Blake was very much the Edwardian gentleman. The plots were often quite complex and in retrospect the stories, characters and plots offer a fascinating insight into the period - the ghettos of London, the sinister riverside docklands of Limehouse and, at the other extreme, the customs and formalities of 'society' people. Blake's popularity grew steadily throughout the decade and soon his exploits began to appear in other publications including Answers, Boys’ Friend and Penny Pictorial. A good detective needs an assistant, someone to discuss the case with, send on errands and do all the donkey work. In the earliest stories Blake had a variety of helpers but with issue number 53, entitled "Cunning Against Skill", he found a permanant assistant. Tinker was a  bright-eyed ragamuffin with the capacity to take a lot of rough with the smooth. He was a wiry youngster with plenty of common sense and a strong right hook that often stood him in good stead when the going got tough - as it often did. He was also useful to add a spot of light relief to the stories. The Union Jack was aimed at a predominantly juvenile market and the editor saw Tinker as a strong character with whom his young readers could identify. As the years progressed Tinker aged slightly and he became more sophisticated. During the 1930s he would drive Blake's car and pilot his aeroplane as well as continuing with the more mundane jobs included pasting newspaper cuttings into the detective's scrap-books and shadowing unsavoury characters. Tinker’s real name was not revealed until 1960 in a story entitled "Dead Man's Destiny". |