|
|
|
The Warm Heart of the Lean Years by Mark Hodder  Sexton Blake's Golden Age lasted from about 1920 to the early forties. The shine began to wear off after editorial disagreements caused a loss of direction at DETECTIVE WEEKLY. In 1936, Blake was reduced to a mere twelve-part series in the magazine. The following year, he only appeared in two issues. He was then given full-time residence again but, by 1940, paper shortages spelled the end for the magazine. From that point on the Sexton Blake Library, by then in its twenty-fifth year, became the main source of new stories.Its editor, Leonard H. Pratt, was in a difficult position. As well as the paper shortage, there were far fewer contributing authors; many were on war service and some of the best known writers had passed away. Nevertheless, Pratt was successful in keeping Blake on the bookshelves throughout the war years and up to his retirement in 1955. For many readers, though, despite Leonard Pratt's efforts, the forties (particularly the late forties) and early fifties are often regarded as a fairly lean period in Blake's long history. The detective spent far less time globetrotting and fighting exotic super-villains and, instead, seemed to be stuck in the parochial world of Little England, solving 'small' crimes and doing occasional work to aid the war effort. In THE SEXTON BLAKE FILE (published in THE SATURDAY BOOK, Hutchinson 1946), Reginald Cox quotes from a letter sent to him by an enthusiast: 'I expect you'll agree with me that the vintage years were 1922 (approximately) to 1933 - the days when the stories were being written by Gwyn Evans, G.H. Teed, Hylton Gregory, Robert Murray, Anthony Skene and Lewis Jackson at his best. Evans, Teed and Murray are dead, unfortunately, and in my opinion Jackson isn't as good as he was in the days when he created the Nigel Blake, Olga Nasmyth, and Leon Kestrel series: they were some of the best that ever appeared. The so-called realism of the present policy means that stories are about some good people living in a cottage - part of the swing to the Left, I suppose!...' Obviously it was felt that the Blake of the period was too far removed from the glories of the UNION JACK days; less rewarding and rather too pedestrian. Certainly, titles such as THE CAR-PARK MYSTERY and THE SCRAP METAL MYSTERY don't appear to promise much. But on closer inspection and from the perspective of the 21st century, there is much to admire about the so-called 'Lean Years'. For a start, they provide a fantastic insight into life in Britain during the bleak war and post-war era.  First, we should consider why there was a change of emphasis in the stories; why the focus shifted away from the extraordinary to the mundane. The authors were responding to a grim situation: the world had been permanently altered by the ambitions of Adolph Hitler and the idea of a powerful individual with villainous motivations didn't seem romantic any more. Sexton Blake writers now knew that, in reality, super-villains were the cause of immense suffering and destruction. Unsurprisingly, they lost their appetite for that particular type of enemy. The super-villains had symbolised a cultural shift that happened before and during the First World War. Industrialisation and conflict caused a whole swathe of society to become dispossessed. This sense of alienation gave rise to the likes of Zenith, Kestrel, Rymer and co. |