|
|
|
The Dark Heart of the Golden Age
by Mark Hodder 
When Harold Twyman became Editor of UNION JACK in 1921, he immediately made an accurate assessment of the magazine's biggest strength: its tendency to take inspiration from actual events. For years, the UJ Sexton Blake writers had used current affairs as the background for their narratives. Anything from the sinking of the Titanic to a cricket test match was fair game. While, in the early days, these tales were often told within the conventions of late-Victorian popular fiction (there was nearly always a 'young couple's love at risk' scenario), they were nevertheless told from a 'ground level' perspective, as if the author had actually witnessed the events (which, in fact, was often the case). This gave the stories an air of 'truth', making it seem as if Sexton Blake was a living person; a part of the readers' world.Twyman demanded more of this and he got it. But something else happened too… something that, taken at face value, seemed to have very little to do with real life: an explosion of super-villains. Sexton Blake had been meeting extraordinary criminals since 1908 when George Marsden Plummer made his debut. They were few and far between back then but over the ensuing years their number increased. Plummer appeared more and more often; Count Carlac was introduced in 1912, followed by Dr. Huxton Rymer and Wu Ling; 1913 saw the arrival of Professor Kew; 1915, Leon Kestrel; 1916, Dirk Dolland, and so on. 
By 1919, all the big names were present and keeping the Baker Street detective very busy indeed. It would be fair to argue that these characters actually brought more dramatic value to the saga than Blake himself. Certainly, their personalities were better defined. Sexton Blake, in individual stories, often had a rather vague persona. It's only after reading a number of tales, taken from different periods in his history, that you begin to gain a full sense of the man. The super-villains, though, leaped fully-fledged from the page almost immediately.This seems rather strange because, as characters, they were far more complex than Blake, so you'd expect his more straightforward presence to have greater clarity. The super-villains had multifaceted psychological motivations; their behaviour was often confusing and irrational. They were extraordinary people doing extraordinary things… So where did they come from and why were they so successful? |