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The Other Baker Street Detective
 So vivid were these adventures that some readers believed firmly in the existence of Sexton Blake and Tinker:
"Len Berry, the editor of DETECTIVE WEEKLY, quotes this wonderful story from the early ‘30s when a lady reader who’d written many times to the office said that she was coming up to London and would like to meet Sexton Blake and Tinker. The editor said “Oh dear. We’ve got to do something about this!” So he turned to Len Berry, who at the time was only 23 and a sub-editor. “You’ll be Tinker!” he said. So Len, with a copy of DETECTIVE WEEKLY tucked under his arm, went along to Trafalgar Square to meet this lady… took her to a Lyons Corner House where he gave her tea and cakes and then walked with her back to the station. He told her she couldn’t go to Baker Street because they were redecorating. When they got to the station, she pulled out from under her arm this packet she’d been holding all afternoon. “This is for you and your guv’nor!” she said and pulled out two scarves. “It’s to keep the London fog at bay!” Then she pulled out a third garment, a most peculiar looking object: “And this is for Pedro, to keep him warm as well!”" The writers of the Blake stories were sometimes as exotic as their creations: "G.H. Teed is an author whose name always crops up when the Sexton Blake canon is being discussed. He was a Canadian who travelled the world and all the wealth of experience that he gained on his travels he put into his stories. He was a great ladies man. When he was in funds, it was a weekend at the Savoy with his latest lady where there’d be roses in the room, rose petals on the bed. But when he was hard up, he’d be begging the editor for an advance. Len Berry tells me how he was caught once: Teed came in with a wodge of typescript, put it down, got his chit to collect his money, and when poor old Len looked through, the first three pages were typed and the rest were blank sheets! He wasn’t caught like that any more. 
"Another writer who was larger than life was Gwyn Evans, a Welshman. Gwyn Evans had a flair for publicity. One of his stunts was to boil an egg for his breakfast on the steps of the Albert Memorial opposite Hyde Park one Sunday morning. He’d tipped off the Sunday papers, of course, in advance.
"Pierre Quiroule, whose real name was W. W. Sayers, was a bank clerk in Fleet Street. He saw the writers coming in, depositing their pay cheques, realised that they were earning far more than he was and decided to have a go himself." |