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The Other Baker Street Detective by Derek Hinrich  In the autumn of 1903 Mr Sherlock Holmes, now rising fifty, retired from a practice which had become wearisome to him and settled in a cottage on the South Downs, five miles from Eastbourne and in sight of the sea, to keep bees and, no doubt - as the humour took him - to begin to draft that promised magnum opus of his declining years, The Whole Art of Detection.
At about the same time, by one of those strange coincidences which were so often to characterise their careers, that other celebrated detective, Mr Sexton Blake, exhausted by prolonged overwork in rounding up The Brotherhood of Silence and other malefactors, dismissed all his staff except for his new page-boy (a cheery urchin known as Tinker whom he had recently rescued from a life on the streets), closed his office and, under the name of Henry Park, retired to a cottage in the secluded village of Brampton Stoke. There he, too, contemplated life as an apiarist. After some months, however, his idyll was shattered by a sudden charge of theft levelled against him by Sir George Clinton, the squire of Brampton Stoke (I have been unable to find this village in any gazetteer but as its neighbourhood was served by trains from Euston, it is probably somewhere in the West Midlands). Poor Mr Park evaded arrest but Sir George Clinton then sought Sexton Blake's help in tracking him down. Blake, moved by the irony of this novel commission, determined to use it to clear his alter ego and find the real culprit. With Tinker's help, he was successful and returned, reinvigorated, to his practice, which he was to continue to pursue for another 66 years to the confusion of the criminal classes world-wide. Lest it be thought that this adventure of Mr Blake's was in part an exercise in plagiarism, let me point out that the account of his temporary retirement was published in The Union Jack of 15th October 1904 (in the story "Cunning Against Skill"), nearly two months before Mr Holmes's was announced in The Strand Magazine in "The Adventure of The Second Stain". It is strange that the name of Sexton Blake is so lightly regarded now. There was a time - in the 'twenties and 'thirties - when to many he was the Baker Street Detective. As E S Turner points out in his chapter on Sexton Blake in his seminal study of boys' stories, Boys Will Be Boys, "There was once a radio quiz in which a girl was asked to name a famous detective who lived in Baker Street. Her reply 'Sexton Blake' did not satisfy the BBC quizmaster, though in thousands of homes it was doubtless accepted as the right answer. Even when the quizmaster resorted to transparent prompting - 'No, I mean some detective or detectives who had homes in Baker Street,' the girl obstinately clung to her original reply." I remember hearing this myself: it was in one of the radio shows for the Forces in 1944 or '45. Sexton Blake did not live or work in Baker Street when his first recorded case appeared in Mr Alfred Harmsworth's new story paper, The Halfpenny Marvel, in December 1893 - the very same month that readers of The Strand Magazine were devastated by the news of the apparent death of Sherlock Holmes at the hands of Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Blake, The Marvel's readers were told, “Belonged to the new order of detectives. He possessed a highly cultivated mind, which helped to support his active courage. His refined clean-shaven face readily lent itself to any disguise, and his mobile features assisted to clinch any facial illusion he desired to produce". His office was at first in New Inn Chambers but he subsequently shared another in Wych Street, off the Strand, with a French partner, Jules Gervaise. In these early cases Blake and Gervaise encountered several notable villains: they were instrumental, for instance, in breaking up three criminal confederacies known respectively as "The Red Lights of London", "The Assassins of the Seine", and "The Terrible Three". These early adventures, though each only of some 25,000 words, are as full of incident as any three volume "sensation" novel by Miss Braddon and the villains all came to suitably sticky ends (literally so in one case of Gervaise's where the culprit fell into a barrel of boiling pitch). The first stories were written by a young journalist, Harry Blyth, some of whose work in The People had been noticed by Harmsworth. Not only did Harmsworth commission the stories but he also bought with them the copyright of the name of Sexton Blake, all for nine guineas. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might lament the sale of the copyright of A Study In Scarlet for £25 - how much more might Blyth have regretted selling his rights to Sexton Blake if he had had any inkling of what was to come, but he sadly died of typhoid not long after. Mark you, it is said that Blake's christian name was originally to have been "Frank" and "Sexton" was the inspired choice of an editorial conference: a rather better example of committee work than the old canard that a committee briefed to design a horse would produce a camel.  Gervaise apparently soon retired but not before Blake had defined the principles governing the conduct of the partnership: "If you look for any dishonourable work at our hands you may spare your own words and our time. We do not interfere in disputes between man and wife, nor do we pursue defaulting clerks. But if there is a wrong to be righted, an evil to be redressed, or a rescue of the weak and the suffering from the powerful, our hearty assistance can be readily obtained. We do nothing for hire here; we would cheerfully undertake to perform without fee or reward. But when our clients are wealthy we are not so unjust to ourselves as to make a gratuitous offer of our services."
Or, as Sherlock Holmes told "The Gold King", J. Neil Gibson, "My professional fees are upon a fixed scale. I do not vary them, save when I remit them altogether." Philip Marlowe was more prosaic, "Twenty five dollars a day plus expenses, mostly gasoline and whisky." No detective, however, can operate successfully for long in single harness and Sexton Blake over the next ten years, before Tinker came on the scene, had several fleeting assistants. One of these was a pidgin-speaking Chinese lad who provided light relief in what would now be deemed a highly politically incorrect fashion. He did not last long, though. His name, Wee-we, probably did not help. Then there was a waif named Griff and someone called Wallace Lorrimer, but none of these survived the purge of 1903-4. When Sexton Blake first came to London he is said to have taken lodgings in Islington near the Angel. I have little knowledge of this period of his career but from "The Mystery of Hilton Royal", published in the Christmas 1904 issue of The Union Jack, it appears that he moved to Baker Street shortly before October 1903, that is to say on his return to practice following the affair at Brampton Stoke. His residence in Baker Street can thus have only briefly overlapped with that of Mr Holmes. At that time, however, Blake only occupied rooms and had a (nameless) landlady. It was not until 1905 that he began to enjoy the services of his splendidly malapropish housekeeper, Mrs Bardell, a motherly soul with a bun and a penchant for black bombazine. The presumption must be that his practice then was such as to enable him to acquire either the freehold or the lease of other premises in Baker Street for his sole occupation. By that time, too, an admirer with the picturesque sobriquet of Nemo (no relation, apparently, of the captain of the Nautilus) had given him the bloodhound, Pedro. With these additions his household and team became complete for the next 51 years. It was a much cosier and more domestic ménage than that at 221B with Blake and Mrs Bardell, in effect, acting as the surrogate parents of Tinker (indeed in "The Mystery of Hilton Royal" it is said that Blake had adopted the seventeen years old Tinker as his son, but no other chronicler appears to have noticed this!) while that youth himself provided a character that the then juvenile readership might identify with. Its exact location has been well protected. The address was 252 Upper Baker Street, which should put it on the other side of the road from 221B and slightly to its north, but the even numbers in Baker Street do not, I believe, exceed 240. |