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The Dark Heart of the Golden Age
 There's a clue in the dates. It's no coincidence that the super-villains ushered in Sexton Blake's Golden Age at almost exactly the same time as the First World War ended. The moment you look at the social conditions of the time, it immediately becomes apparent that the likes of Plummer, Zenith, Kestrel and Rymer were metaphors for the psychological experiences of a whole generation of men.Troops returning from the front line found themselves in a changed world. The old order had been overturned; social distinctions had blurred; the concept of 'honour', so important to a soldier in previous conflicts, had been battered to extinction by the inhumanity of modern warfare. Veterans, hailed as heroes when they left for the front, now felt shunned. The comradeship they shared under fire was gone. They found it difficult to get work and to re-integrate into the society they had fought to protect; a society now altered beyond recognition by the experience. It is this sense of alienation and injustice that formed the basis for the Blakeian super-villain. Ex-soldiers were forced to rely on their own resources - and the super-villains did the same. So there is a sense of sadness and exile about these characters. Zenith the Albino is the most obvious example… but it applies to all the others too. Their exclusion from society is contrasted with Sexton Blake's inclusion. Essentially, they are very similar to the detective; possessing (in various degrees depending which villain you examine) great strength, finely-tuned skills, scientific knowledge, mental superiority and/or an unusual ability. But while Blake's talents are used in defence of the status quo, the super-villains use theirs to try to destabilise it. Why? Because they're trying to create a chink through which they can climb back in. These men are estranged and have turned to crime as the only option left to them. Few of them can be called evil. In many cases, they had a streak of goodness which promised some sort of redemption if only it could be allowed to develop. Take George Marsden Plummer, for example. He was born a noble; the son of the Earl of Sevenoaks. This marks him as a man of the old pre-war order when British culture was divided into stable classes. People knew their 'place'. But through a quirk of fate, Plummer was born too late to be permitted the annual £60,000 that went with the title. Thus he was forced out of his class and into another; one that had to work for a living.  As an Earl, Plummer would have been looked upon by the lower classes as a man with power. He seeks to emulate that which has been denied him by working his way up through the ranks of Scotland Yard. As a Detective Sergeant, he has the authority to enforce the law - a sort of working class equivalent of an Earl. But he also has access to information about the noble and the wealthy - and this gives him the means for blackmail; the means to get that which should have been rightfully his from the very beginning. Thus we see that Plummer only ever tries to return to what, for him, should have been the natural order of things.Yes, it's true that Plummer appeared six years before the war began. But the social conditions were already in place. Modernisation and the pressures of a new industrialised age were already breaking down the old order. The war may well have been inevitable. The alienation of whole swathes of society certainly was. |