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by Dan O'Neill (This article first appeared in SATURDAY NIGHT, December 1963)  For those who remember the old Union Jack or Marvel or Jester, it was, of course, no surprise that the abrupt retirement of John Profumo from public life this year followed so closely the rather more leisurely farewells of Sexton Blake, the world's oldest active detective.Blake aficionados know that their hero is - or, alas, was - the one man in the world who could possibly have prevented a cabinet scandal of the proportions that brought joy to Fleet Street in June. They knew that Sexton Blake had gone: they knew that for the first time in seventy years the Prime Minister could not hiss to his assembled colleagues "There is only one man who can help us. Send for Sexton Blake." Maybe the Cabinet crisis arose because Blake was no longer around to prevent it. More likely though, Blake retired because of the crisis he knew was about to erupt this summer. The England he had known for so long had disappeared. He could not put his noble talents to work for what he would consider an ignoble cause. In his long and omnipotent career he had walloped Kaiser Wilhelm and saved the Crown Jewels; he had worked for what he had insisted on calling "the Grand Old Flag" in Russia, China and the remoter peaks of the Himalayas. But no longer. There was no place for Sexton Blake in the neon-lit, espresso-flooded England of tawdry clubs, Teddy Boys and Keeler-dealers of the 1960's. So he slid away with the silent, practiced ease that had, over the years, marked his passing from dacoit's dens, scorpion-crammed cellars and those moor-surrounded mansions where the Family Curse strikes with monotonous regularity. It was a sad farewell, suitably toasted in a Fleet Street tavern by the writers who had chronicled his later adventures. While they reminisced over their half-pints other writers were translating the memoirs of Christine for public and wide-eyed consumption in the pages of that great family journal, the News of the World.  So far, so good - for readers of the old Union Jack or Marvel or, perhaps, the Jester. But it occurs to me that some of you might be wondering who the devil Sexton Blake was.Imagine a fanfare of police hand trumpets blown by all the others from Holmes to Hammer and I'll tell you. Sexton Blake was, for millions, the greatest detective the world has ever known. He was also the detective who lasted longest. He began in the gas-lit London of Oscar Wilde's Yellow Nineties and ended, reluctantly, in what we might call the guilt-lit London of the Scarlet Sixties. Between the first Blake epic (The Missing Millionaire: the story of a daring detective) and the last (The Last Tiger, in which no one had to be told Blake was a daring detective) he solved approximately ten thousand crimes and had more than three hundred million words written about him by a variety of authors which included Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charteris, Peter Cheyney, John Creasey and Dorothy L. Sayers. His seldom-routine adventures were translated into a dozen languages ranging from Urdu to Arabic. (God knows what inferiority complexes were inflicted on some of those who spoke those languages.) Sexton Blake was the hero of a batch of movies and it's claimed that the first films to be made under the British Films Quota Act were based on his adventures, beginning as early as 1914. David Farrar is probably the most familiar screen Blake but there were at least two earlier ones, George Curzon and Langhorne Burton. The last cinema-Blake was a steel-eyed hawk called Geoffrey Toone, a name more likely to belong to a villain in one of the vintage adventures. In any case, for a large number of Britons Blake will always be as real a sleuth as, say, ex-Superintendent Cherrill of the Yard. That very same Cherrill, incidentally, was quoted on the cover of a Blake novelette earlier this year as saying that it was Sexton Blake, "this intrepid hero, who first fired my imagination to become a detective."  Fervent admirers of Blake resent the libel that their hero began life as "the office boys' Sherlock Holmes." Holmes had only been sleuthing for six years himself when Sexton Blake appeared on December 20, 1893, in the Christmas edition of the Halfpenny Marvel.In that one he solved the mystery of The Missing Millionaire, and it was written up by Harry Blythe under the more imposing pseudonym Hal Meredeth. The detective spoke in a style that wouldn't have disgraced a house-master at Dr. Arnold's Rugby, and even Holmes himself must have been impressed by what sounded like his own echo. Holmes, however, always looked like Basil Rathbone; Blake appeared as a plump Victorian complete with high-domed bowler and heavy cane. And he scorned Baker Street, preferring to work from New Inn Chambers. Like Holmes, Sexton Blake was "one of the new order of detectives." Fascinated butcher boys, gulping over the Marvel, learned that he possessed a highly-cultivated mind which helped support his active courage. His refined, clean-shaven face lent itself readily to any disguise and his mobile features assisted to clinch any facial illusion he wished to produce. That cane, though it might have looked like something Oscar Wilde had left behind at the club, could deal a smart rap across criminal knuckles, too. On the day of his first case Blake's refined, clean-shaven face looked thoughtful. The client who began Blake's career in print, a Mr. Frank Ellaby, entered the detective's drawing room and, apparently without drawing a breath, took the whole of the Marvel's front page to deliver an enormous monologue aimed at giving the detective and readers what would be known, years later, as "just the facts." Well of course, the case was solved with such verve that it could only be the beginning. Sexton Blake stalked through the pages of boys' magazines from then on, graduating from such unimposing matters as missing millionaires to the point where pallid prime ministers were constantly tying up the telephone exchanges in their efforts to get "the one man who can help." And in those gloriously jingoistic days Blake knew how to behave. There is, for example, Blake's marvellous oration to a naval man seeking his help: "I would rather work for nothing for a naval man like yourself, one of the best protectors of our precious flag, the pride of England, then I would take banknotes from those who are careless of the honour of old Britain."  It's an illustration of the country's mood at the time that Blake could say this without a trace of self-consciousness and that the naval man could listen without a blush. That was the stuff to make an office boy's heart swell...Gradually he built around him a group that featured, therefore, an office boy with whom the readers could identify. For almost seventy years the boy Tinker stayed with his master, progressing, in the end, to assistant and near-partner. Three office boys preceded Tinker but only the first could be remembered. He was a Chinese boy called We-wee. For obvious reasons Blake had to let him go... |