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 In 1904 Blake and Tinker "retired to the country." But he could not for long stay away from a fascinating underworld where the criminal cream (Mr. Mist, the Invisible Man, Dr. Satira and the Black Trinity) were operating opposed only by the talentless hacks of Scotland Yard. By 1915 he was back with his own platform - the Sexton Blake Library. In the first issue the enemy was The Yellow Tiger. In the last issue, 1,652 issues later in June of this year, the title was, ironically, The Last Tiger.During those years Blake went through as many facelifts as a movie queen. It was always a problem to stop him from looking dated as times and fashions changed. The egg-shaped sleuth in patent-leather boots and curly-brimmed bowler so suitable for 1905 could hardly compete with the hard-boiled, pistol-packing private eyes of the Sam Spade era. Blake was given periodic alterations - and new clothes - but his philosophy didn't change much and his heroines remained unkissed. But in the last twenty years he faced his biggest tests - tests unconnected with the cases he could still solve so effortlessly. Readers who had just survived a shocking war knew realism when they saw it and villains like Waldo the Wonder Man or the executive of the Criminals Confederation were emphatically unreal. So Blake worked on the Case of the Conscript Miner or the Yank Who Came Back. There was even one featuring a Missing G.I. Bride. Blake's diction changed, too. He stopped saying "hist" or "pray" and began to talk like a human being - something he had rarely been guilty of in those early years. They managed to drag the detective into the post-war world and they were able to blend him, physically, anyway, with it. But they could never take the big step, the step which would have given Blake the morals of the world he found himself inhabiting. It became hard to believe in a detective incapable of kicking a black marketeer in the groin or a beautiful girl in the teeth. In Blake's profession the outlook that had once jerked office boys to attention was not, any longer, a qualification. Sales sagged. The suave Bond, the brutal Hammer, the men for whom the end justified any means, were easier to relate to for the public. 
The last great facelift came in 1957. Although Blake was allowed to retain his overpowering erudition - he knew everything - he didn't stress it too much. Oh, a quick identification of a little-known Asiatic poison could be approved, but the Blake who once wasted his time writing monographs on Finger Print Forgery by the Chromicized Gelatine Method or Speculations on Ballistic Stigmata in Fire-Arms took a back seat. Instead, in 1957, a Blake to rival Bond in all but sex-appetite was created.Smooth, sophisticated: that was Blake. And Tinker the office boy was given those Bond attributes which it wouldn't have been wise to graft on to Blake. Tinker became a lady-killer and a figure much easier to accept in a society where fifteen-year-old office boys could spend in a week what their Blake-reading grandfathers had earned in three months. A gorgeous secretary appeared and old faithfuls longing for Mrs. Bardell, erstwhile housekeeper who spoke like Sary Gamp and kept the muffins coming, shuddered. Paula Dane was blonde and liked art and music. Another hobby that doubtless helped her land the job was small arms shooting. Everyone but Blake realized that Paula loved her boss. But in this respect alone the hawk-like eyes were dim. This major change in Blake's personality and habits was of sufficient interest in 1957 for London's newspapers to describe it to their readers, most of whom, presumably, were familiar with the detective. The Daily Mail described W. Howard Baker, a thirty-year-old Irishman, as the "re-decorator" behind Blake's new look. Mr. Baker explained that "this last survivor of the gentlemanly school of Victorian clubland sleuths" had to be overhauled to compete and boost the sale of the forty-thousand word Blake novelettes that appeared every two weeks. "The whole setup in Baker Street on cosy afternoons with rain pattering against the windows, Blake in his dressing gown, Tinker curled up on the rug and Mrs. Bardell serving up the crumpets belonged to the past," said Mr. Baker and added that while such scenes still put a spell on the tradition-lovers they wouldn't bring in any new customers. A new image was needed.  Blake was given a leaner, more handsome face and despite his 60-odd years of crime-fighting, put "just the right side of 40." He traded his Rolls for a Jaguar or Bentley and the rooms on Baker Street were vacated in favour of a plush office suite in Berkeley Square.But there was one tradition which even the energetic Mr. Baker couldn't shatter. In the course of a long career the detective had fascinated, as the early biographies said, many women. Yet he had never gone beyond gallantly brushing the backs of their hands with his lips. (Once Blake did kiss a villainess called Roxanne but, as she had gassed him with a cunning little pistol, that episode can be discounted.) So it was no romance for Sexton Blake in 1957. It was, said Mr. Baker, the one thing that couldn't change. Blake had to have "complete control and integrity." The covers of the books following that change revealed that Blake did, indeed, possess remarkable control. Blondes, brunettes and red-heads, not one of them able to control a shoulder strap, began to appear on the increasingly lurid covers. Only the old readers knew that Blake's control and integrity could hold out. The later readers attracted by the new look would have said that no man could. They were disappointed. For Blake was no ordinary man. He kept his integrity intact despite his writers' unfortunate habit of throwing him into contact with females beside whom the early adventuresses looked like Tinker. He successfully survived Death and the Little Girl Blue, Requiem for Red-heads and a Dangerous Playmate. He always returned to his office in that implacably virtuous state and Paula Dane waited with love in her eyes that only the ace detective was too full of integrity to miss. During the last years Blake went to Moscow, Budapest - for the 1956 uprising - and to the Congo at the time of Independence. (And that was an adventure to make Blake blush.) He stalked through post-war London, surviving the rock-and-roll onslaught as neatly as any other danger, and he practised his craft in an atmosphere familiar to his readers. Country housees and moated granges were fine: but how many readers had been to any? Coffee bars, strip joints and pubs were the places to go - and Blake went. It couldn't last though, and in 1962 the end began its remorseless approach. A minor change in format made the novelettes "pocket-book size" but in spite of a plea to all Blake followers to recruit at least one new reader, the sales slumped alarmingly. Bright little plugs began to appear on the covers beneath the bosoms. Leslie Charteris hoped that his Saint would still be as full of life as Blake "when he had reached the same staggeringly successful total of concluded cases." Agatha Christie was delighted to see Blake still going strong, "and with such aplomb." Retired detectives were encouraged to tell the world how much Blake had meant to their careers. Rupert Davies, who played Maigret for television, stoutly maintained that Blake had been one of his earliest heroes. Letters continued to reach publishers from all over the world showing that interest, even in countries where the 1900 Blake would be regarded as an Imperialist, was still high. But it wasn't high enough. Blake could not compete in a world where the criminals were the Peter Rachmans, kings of slum empires - although Blake had once, long ago, fought such a man. Not even cases involving astronauts or possible government scandals could jerk Blake completely into the sixties.  Everyone knew there was a real-life scandal brewing. And it wasn't the sort that Sexton Blake, unsurpassed at recovering stolen cabinet secrets, would like to deal with. There had been facelifts and changes but in 1963 it was clear that Blake, essentially, had not changed at all. Instead the world around him had changed and he could never be part of it. So in June, 1963, he retired, following his last battle against a Japanese army ready, after twenty years on a Pacific island, to conquer the world with a "force field." Only an attempted rape stopped the last adventure from being as naively noble as the first. That was the end.
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