Detection by Gaslight
DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS FICTION
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DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS
GENERAL EDITOR: PAUL NEGRI
EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: DOUGLAS G. GREENE
Copyright
Introduction, prefaces, and selection copyright © 1997 by Douglas G. Greene.
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 1997, is a new anthology of works reprinted from standard sources. A new introductory Note and prefaces to the stories have been specially prepared for this edition.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Detection by gaslight / edited by Douglas G. Greene.
p. cm.–(Dover thrift editions)
9780486114125
1. Detective and mystery stories, English. I. Greene, Douglas G. II. Series.
PR1309.D4D39 1997
823’.08720808—dc21
97-22681
CIP
Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
29928704
www.doverpublications.com
The First Golden Age of Detective Fiction
THE OPENING of the First Golden Age of the Detective Story can be precisely dated: It began when The Strand Magazine published in its July 1891 issue the first Sherlock Holmes short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The creation of a young doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes had already appeared in two short novels: A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890). Together the novels had given flesh and blood to the characters of Holmes and Watson, but as unified tales they were unsatisfactory. Both began with a fairly short detective adventure, but concluded with a lengthy and quite independent novel to explain the motives for the crime. And those motives had little to do with everyday life, associated as they were with the Andaman Islands and with Mormon conspiracies. (Mormons, like communists in more recent times, could always be trotted out to put a scare into late-century Victorians.)
It was only with the introduction of Holmes into the short-story form that the image of the Great Detective came to dominate mystery fiction. This genre had its roots in the short story, starting with the cases of Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, but Dupin was a reasoning machine rather than a personality. The detectives created by Wilkie Collins (Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone) and Anna Katharine Green (Mr. Gryce in The Leavenworth Case) were much more believable, but they both needed full novels to display their skills. Furthermore, for the short story to become the most popular way to present a mystery, the magazines in which these stories first appeared had to change from the stodgy products of mid-Victorian times with tiny type and clumsy illustrations.
When George Newnes founded The Strand in 1891, he looked for his readers among the burgeoning middle class. To draw them in, he included an illustration on every page, plenty of human-interest articles, and short fiction for both children and adults. The Strand was an immense success, especially after the Holmes stories began to appear.
The short form demanded by the magazine was ideal for Doyle’s talents. It forced him to concentrate on the unraveling of the mystery, rather than on the extraneous, exotic story of what had caused the crime. Doyle’s Great Detective, with his near infallibility, his eccentricity, and his humanity, was perfect in the short form. A problem was presented, a few deductions revealed to the admiring Watson, the pair dash to the scene of the crime, show the foolishness of the police, make a few more deductions, and solve the crime—all in around ten thousand words. It is remarkable that, until his final Holmes stories, Doyle was able to provide a great variety in the crimes and the details of the investigations, while placing everything into a wonderfully realized world of Hansom cabs, London fogs, gasogenes, railways, and many of the other elements of late-Victorian England.
The Strand was followed by many other magazines—Windsor, Royal, Ludgate, Harmsworth’s, Cassell’s, Pearson’s, and so on—which catered to the same market and which published the same sort of material. Sherlock Holmes likewise was followed by many other detectives. Sometimes the arrival of a new sleuth was directly associated with Holmes, as when The Strand published Arthur Morrison’s cases of Martin Hewitt to replace the Holmes stories after Doyle sent his detective over the falls at Reichenbach. More often, however, authors created detectives who were noticeably different from Holmes but who nonetheless could share the Great Detective aura.
Detection by Gaslight demonstrates how varied the short mystery (and especially its hero or heroine) could be. For example, Catherine L. Pirkis, George R. Sims, and others invented women detectives. Others introduced clerical sleuths, most notably Silas K. Hocking’s Latimer Field and G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. Writers of the highest talent—such as Rudyard Kipling—were attracted to the form, as were authors whose talents were minimal—for example Headon Hill, one of whose few notable tales is included in this book. The form could be stretched to include pure scientific detection, as with R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke, and to investigations into the paranormal—as with K. and H. Prichard’s Flaxman Low. An examination o
f the monthly magazines of the Victorian and Edwardian eras leaves the reader with the feeling that almost every profession could produce a detective—from the woman reporter created by the Baroness Orczy to the butterfly collector who investigates a crime in a story by Robert W. Chambers.
Detection by Gaslight is a tribute to those days when Sherlock Holmes and his contemporary sleuths dominated fictional crime: when, as the great bookman Vincent Starrett wrote, “it is always eighteen ninety-five.”
DOUGLAS GREENE
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
AUGUST 1996
Table of Contents
DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS FICTION
Title Page
Copyright Page
The First Golden Age of Detective Fiction
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - (1859–1930)
Arthur Morrison - (1863–1945)
Catherine L. Pirkis - (1839–1910)
Rudyard Kipling - (1865–1936)
Headon Hill - (1857–1924)
Baroness Orczy - (1865–1947)
George R. Sims - (1847–1922)
R. Austin Freeman - (1862–1943)
L. T. Meade(1854–1914) and Robert Eustace (1868–1943)
Silas K. Hocking - (1850–1935)
G. K. Chesterton - (1874–1936)
Robert W. Chambers - (1865–1933)
Jacques Futrelle - (1875–1912)
E. and H. Heron - (Kate Prichard, ca. 1851–?; Hesketh Prichard, 1876–1922)
DOVER · THRIFT · EDITIONS - FICTION
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859–1930)
THE CREATOR of Sherlock Holmes was a bluff, honorable physician who always thought that his most important work was in his historical novels (like The White Company and Sir Nigel), rather than in his detective stories. Almost no one has ever agreed with Doyle. Born in Edinburgh, he received a Master’s degree in Medicine in 1881 and a doctorate in 1885. From 1882 to 1890 he practiced in Southsea, and it was there—because having few patients meant empty hours—that he wrote his first stories, including the earliest case for Sherlock Holmes. He was knighted by King Edward VII in 1902 for his service during the Boer War, and he also became a Knight of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. In later life, probably because of the loss of his son during World War One, Doyle became a determined advocate of spiritualism. His biographer, John Dickson Carr, recalled that the author’s family believed that long after his death Sir Arthur still wandered about the estate, seeking his pipe and so on.
“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” was published in the June 1892 issue of The Strand, as the final story in the first series of Holmes adventures. It shows Holmes at his most testy, his most active, and his most contemplative. Doyle often depicted strong women in his stories, and Violet Hunter is one of the most resourceful.
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
TO THE MAN who loves art for its own sake,” remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, ”it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes célèbres and sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province.”
“And yet,” said I, smiling, “I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records.”
“You have erred, perhaps,” he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood—“you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.”
“It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,” I remarked with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more than once observed to be a strong factor in my friend’s singular character.
“No, it is not selfishness or conceit,” said he, answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. “If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing—a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.”
It was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after breakfast on either side of a cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit and shone on the white cloth and glimmer of china and metal, for the table had not been cleared yet. Sherlock Holmes had been silent all the morning, dipping continuously into the advertisement columns of a succession of papers until at last, having apparently given up his search, he had emerged in no very sweet temper to lecture me upon my literary shortcomings.
“At the same time,” he remarked after a pause, during which he had sat puffing at his long pipe and gazing down into the fire, “you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavoured to help the King of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the incident of the noble bachelor, were all matters which are outside the pale of the law. But in avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial.”
“The end may have been so,” I answered, “but the methods I hold to have been novel and of interest.”
“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think that I have touched bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks my zero-point, I fancy. Read it!” He tossed a crumpled letter across to me.
It was dated from Montague Place upon the preceding evening, and ran thus:
DEAR MR. HOLMES:
I am very anxious to consult you as to whether I should or should not accept a situation which has been offered to me as governess. I shall call at half-past ten to-morrow if I do not inconvenience you.
Yours faithfully,
VIOLET HUNTER.
“Do you know the young lady?” I asked.
“Not I.”
“It is half-past ten now.”
“Yes, and I have no doubt that is her ring.”
“It may turn out to be of more interest than you think. You remember that the affair of the blue carbuncle, which appeared to be a mere whim at first, developed into a serious investigation. It may be so in this case, also.”
“Well, let us hope so. But our doubts will very soon be solved, for here, unless I am much mistaken, is the person in question.”
As he spoke the door opened and a young lady entered the room. She was plainly but neatly dressed, with a bright, quick face, freckled like a plover’s egg, and with the brisk manner of a woman who has had her own way to make in the world.
“You will excuse my troubling you, I am sure,” sai
d she, as my companion rose to greet her, “but I have had a very strange experience, and as I have no parents or relations of any sort from whom I could ask advice, I thought that perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me what I should do.”
“Pray take a seat, Miss Hunter. I shall be happy to do anything that I can to serve you.”
I could see that Holmes was favourably impressed by the manner and speech of his new client. He looked her over in his searching fashion, and then composed himself, with his lids drooping and his fingertips together, to listen to her story.
“I have been a governess for five years,” said she, “in the family of Colonel Spence Munro, but two months ago the colonel received an appointment at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and took his children over to America with him, so that I found myself without a situation. I advertised, and I answered advertisements, but without success. At last the little money which I had saved began to run short, and I was at my wit’s end as to what I should do.
“There is a well-known agency for governesses in the West End called Westaway’s, and there I used to call about once a week in order to see whether anything had turned up which might suit me. Westaway was the name of the founder of the business, but it is really managed by Miss Stoper. She sits in her own little office, and the ladies who are seeking employment wait in an anteroom, and are then shown in one by one, when she consults her ledgers and sees whether she has anything which would suit them.
“Well, when I called last week I was shown into the little office as usual, but I found that Miss Stoper was not alone. A prodigiously stout man with a very smiling face and a great heavy chin which rolled down in fold upon fold over his throat sat at her elbow with a pair of glasses on his nose, looking very earnestly at the ladies who entered. As I came in he gave quite a jump in his chair and turned quickly to Miss Stoper.