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The Other Baker Street Detective Sherlock Holmes was in active practice for 23 years and we have Watson's detailed accounts of 60 of his cases and mention of over 100 others, which are not related; while Holmes himself referred to his involvement in 500 of capital importance. In the twelve or so years between 1893 and his move to Baker Street, there are a trifle over 50 published accounts of Sexton Blake's cases in various journals, but after The Union Jack became devoted entirely to his adventures in 1905 (Sexton Blake's Own Paper, its by-line) and the change in his address, his practice burgeoned.  In the next 65 years over 3,500 accounts of his cases were published either in short story or in novel form in either The Union Jack or The Detective Weekly, or the various series of The Sexton Blake Library: a formidable workload. More than two hundred authors delved into his files and over 200,000,000 words were devoted to his adventures, probably more than has been written about any other single character; a literary phenomenon in fact.
While the earlier adventures were intended for the juvenile reader, leading to the early slur that he was the "office boy's Sherlock Holmes", by his heyday in the 'twenties and 'thirties stories of Sexton Blake were directed equally at the "boy who's half a man or the man who's half a boy". Many of the authors at this period were also producers of popular hardback thriller fiction. Many of them indeed "de-Blaked" their stories of the great man and published them with renamed heroes through such firms as Wright and Brown, principally for the private circulating library trade so prevalent before the Second World War. A few even managed later to re-Blake such a book and sell it, with a change of title, all over again to the Amalgamated Press... Mr Blake's change of address was no doubt inspired by a profound admiration for his senior colleague and the distinction which he had lent to Baker Street. Besides, it was once common for different trades and professions to congregate in certain streets of the capital: eminent doctors in Harley Street; fashionable tailors in Savile Row; furniture shops in the Tottenham Court Road. It was appropriate, too, for him to move thither as he was surely now the doyen of his profession in London, as Sherlock Holmes had been before him. There was no one else of comparable stature then practising. Martin Hewitt was simply not in the same class; Dr Thorndyke had not yet taken chambers in King's Bench Walk; and that strange old man with the piece of string was not yet haunting the ABC tea-shop in Norfolk Street. It was true that Nelson Lee was at work in the Gray's Inn Road but he was not as active as Blake (neither had he yet adopted his other profession of schoolmaster). Sexton Blake and his household was the happy subject of a remarkably slow ageing process. In 1893 he was apparently in his middle twenties. In 1907 he was about thirty and for much of the time when he was at the height of his powers, in the 1920s and '30s, he appeared only a few years older, and possibly had attained the early forties by 1970 when he retired. His loyal assistant and later partner, Tinker, aged about ten years between 1904 and 1970, while Mrs Bardell and Pedro remained outwardly the same throughout. Perhaps only the Man in Half Moon Street glimpsed his secret (He was, after all, created by a chronicler of Blake).  One of the unfortunate features of the saga of Sexton Blake is the lack for many years of a definitive likeness of the man. He was sadly not blessed with a counterpart of Sidney Paget or Frederick Dorr Steele until the middle 'twenties when Eric Parker became his principal illustrator. In 1893 Blake was a sturdy, side-whiskered young man in a billycock and an ulster carrying an ashplant. Over the years, particularly once he had moved to Baker Street, he fined down, becoming much leaner. By 1913 he had a faintly Napoleonic air but his later, Parker, portraits reveal a more ascetic face altogether. At the same time he took more and more to a pipe (smoking is said to be an aid to slimming isn't it?), was known to try his hand at a violin and to prefer a dressing gown when sitting and pondering. Unlike his predecessor, he never wittingly took drugs, though occasionally opponents administered them by artifice.
He was undoubtedly blessed with an exceptionally strong constitution and a high degree of physical fitness - very necessary when one considers the perils he encountered throughout his long career. The occasions when Sherlock Holmes actually encountered physical violence in the accounts we possess are few, but with Sexton Blake it was an almost routine occurrence in every investigation. One can only stand in awe of a man who could take so much punishment without his faculties becoming impaired: a legion of prizefighters would not have withstood it.
Once comfortably ensconced in Baker Street, Sexton Blake devoted himself single-mindedly to his fight against crime. It took him to all quarters of the globe, for his practice was far more extensive than Holmes's. Many of his historians were men who had travelled widely and had extensive knowledge of Africa, India, the Americas and the Far East. He was loyally assisted by Tinker who also maintained the multi-volumed index of newspaper cuttings, which both in scope and size far exceeded Holmes's similar commonplace book; while that admirable woman, Mrs Bardell, kept house, cooked superbly, and maltreated English majestically. For example," Mr Blake", she would say, "is a master sluice who Scotland Yard defectives, Indian rajas and other Eastern potatoes constantly insult". Sexton Blake's relations with Scotland Yard were mainly cordial except for those trying times in 1907 and 1933 when first his elder brother Henry and then his younger brother Nigel, were revealed to be dangerous criminals. Henry eventually committed suicide, sacrificing himself to save his brother's reputation, but Nigel had to be committed to a private asylum where, by one account, he presently died of pneumonia: according to another, later version, however, he recovered, was recruited to the secret service and was murdered by traitors in Calcutta in 1942. Such are the confusions of many hands at work upon a saga. It was in the course of the narrative of Sexton Blake's struggle with his brother Nigel (in 1933, in the first issues of The Detective Weekly, the successor paper to The Union Jack) that we learned that Sexton Blake was the son of the distinguished Harley Street surgeon, Sir Berkeley Blake, had attended both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, had qualified as both a doctor of medicine and as a barrister, and was the author of several criminological monographs.  At the outset of the Birlstone case, Sherlock Holmes recommended to Inspector MacDonald the advisability of studying criminal history since "Everything comes in circles...The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up. It's all been done before and will be again..."
There were certainly times when Sexton Blake encountered problems reminiscent of his illustrious predecessor. In 1908, for example, he prevented Detective Sergeant George Marsden Plummer from murdering his way to the earldom of Sevenoaks in a rather more forthright manner than that adopted to satisfy a similar ambition by Rodger Baskerville, alias Vandeleur, alias Stapleton. Plummer escaped from the gallows and prison to become an inveterate enemy of Blake, returning to plague him more than a hundred times over the next thirty years. The Scotland Yard renegade was a most versatile villain, at one stage even becoming the right hand man of Abdel Krim, the leader of the Riffs in the great Moroccan rebellion in the 'twenties. In 1915, when in pursuit of the American criminal turned Austrian spy, Ezra Q Maitland, Blake found himself called upon amongst other matters to solve the Ritual of the Normanvilles (a family catechism beginning "Whose is it?/ His who was slain/ Why must ye seek?... ” which, when unravelled, led to a buried treasure (it is strange, is it not, how ancient families so often share similar traditions?). Again, in 1932 Sexton Blake, in investigating a mysterious death had cause to note, as Holmes did "in the dreadful business of the Abernetty family", the depth to which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a summer's day. The old wheel indeed turned with a vengeance upon occasion. Like many another popular hero, Sexton Blake was soon impersonated on the stage and a little later in the cinema; and he had the distinction of appearing in a serial on the BBC radio in 1938 - five years before Mr Holmes ever graced the British air waves. A television series set in the 'thirties followed in 1968 and '69. Progressively from 1910, ten or more plays or dramatic sketches were performed in theatres or music halls around the country. Many of these continued in provincial repertories into the post-1918 period. None of them reached the West End, but a play, Sexton Blake, by Gerald Verner did have a substantial run there in 1930. The title role was played by Arthur Wontner and his success in it led to his being cast as Sherlock Holmes in a series of films in which he was acclaimed as one of the great interpreters of the senior man in Baker Street. Wontner also starred as Blake in a gramophone record playlet, Murder on The Portsmouth Road. |