When Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, he opened up a gap in the market (at least until the great detective's resuscitation...).

It was Stephen Knight who introduced me to one of the writers who attempted to fill this vacuum. He's called Arthur Morrison (1863-1945), and his detective is Martin Hewitt.

This first collection of seven stories appeared in 1894 -- the self-same year that the epic struggle at the Reichenbach Falls plunged Holmes and Moriarty to their end (or so we thought...).

The stories were even published in the same magazine as Conan Doyle's (The Strand), and illustrated by the same artist (Sidney Paget).


Our detective

In contrast to the flamboyant, hyperactive, eccentric Holmes, Morrison's tec is unassuming and low-key. For Knight, "Hewitt is a memorable, admirable critique of the pomposity of Sherlock Holmes. The latter’s romantic heroism remains less credible than the observant achievements of Martin Hewitt, Arthur Morrison’s plain-man detective." Kevin Burton Smith agrees that Hewitt was "one of the few to actually give Holmes a run for his money".

For Martin Edwards, on the other hand (quoted here), Hewitt was "too ordinary to outshine the sage of 221b Baker Street, dead or alive". And Krawczyk-Laskarzewska has him down as essentially derivative, "a character crafted, to some extent, to be the opposite of Conan Doyle’s far more entertaining protagonist".

I quite liked Hewitt. He's not above the odd jibe at his chronicler (Brett, a journalist), but he has none of the self-aggrandizing smart-arsery of Sherlock. We're told in this opening collection that he started out as a solicitor's clerk, but having distinguished himself in a particular case, he set up in business as a private detective. He has since achieved "brilliant professional successes". Stoutish, round-faced, and of middle height (qualities that don't always come through in Paget's drawings), he's a bit of a loner, but genial and companionable. His cheeriness and lack of obvious detective qualities are often mentioned: "Nobody could appear more cordial or less observant in manner." But quiet observation is the name of his game. He gets on well with animals, and makes it his business "to be thoroughly at home among any and every class of people". Thus we see him successfully passing himself off as a cabman, and he has the smarts to insinuate himself into "the regular criminal class" when he needs to.

He claims to have no "system". It's all down to common sense and a sharp pair of eyes, he says. That's me out, then... He warns against "starting with a set of fixed notions". Fair enough. And he's always on the lookout for what he calls "accumulative probabilities". Brett comments: "Often when I have remarked upon the apparently trivial nature of the clews by which he allowed himself to be guided -- sometimes, to all seeming, in the very face of all likelihood -- he has replied that two trivialities, pointing in the same direction, became at once, by their mere agreement, no trivialities at all, but enormously important considerations."


The cover of a 1971 reprint

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The stories are enjoyable enough. In fact, Martin Hewitt, Investigator makes it into Queen's Quorum (that's Queen as in Ellery Queen).

My favourite was The Case of Mr Foggatt, which leaves you with interesting questions about guilt, innocence, and punishment. My least favourite, by quite a long way, was The Affair of the Tortoise, which is uncomfortably racist. (This is always a hazard with fiction from this era, and I try not to over-react, but the language of this one would definitely set most people's tolerance-meter pinging. This post correctly points out that the story is not intended to be a generic description of black people, but rather a portrait of a specific person who has blood on his hands. Even so...)

As always, vintage detective stories are as interesting for their period detail as they are for their puzzles. Here I learnt about:

-- Trained birds. One of our wrongdoers is aided and abetted by an avian (I guessed that one, actually), and we're assured: "There was no improbability. Consider how many hundreds of examples of infinitely higher degrees of bird-training are exhibited in the London streets every week for coppers."

-- Professional pedestrianism. The antecedent of today's racewalking, this was a 19th-century competitive sport, popular with spectators and gamblers. Races are conducted in somewhat murky circumstances, and Hewitt concludes: "This professional pedestrian business doesn't seem a pretty one at all."

-- New suburbs. This description could fit any number of developments I know: "It was a melancholy example of baffled enterprise. A row of a dozen or more shops had been built before any population had arrived to demand goods. Would-be tradesmen had taken many of these shops, and failure and disappointment stared from the windows."


Hewitt, busy listening

-- The disruptive technology of the day: "These tracings [of a new torpedo design] have been photographed, Mr. Dixon, and our task is one of every possible difficulty. If they had been copied in the ordinary way, one might hope to get hold of the copy. But photography upsets everything. Copies can be multiplied with such amazing facility that, once the thief gets a decent start, it is almost hopeless to checkmate him."

-- The politics of the day. The story of the torpedo also includes the perfidious Russians, indispensable in the era of the Great Game. Another story focuses on a ruby sent to the UK by the Burmese king before his country was annexed by the British.

-- The propaganda of the day. The Affair of the Tortoise, which features a Haitian grandee living incognito, explicitly draws its picture of Caribbean politics from a book called Hayti or the Black Republic, written by Spenser St John, a former British consul to Haiti, and published in 1884. According to Jack Daniel Webb, its influence "was far reaching and pervasive... St John's work... disseminated the image of Haiti in a condition of Vodou-steeped decadence." This is certainly what emerges here...


This portrait of Vasily Mathe by Boris Kustodiev was used for the cover of a set of Martin Hewitt stories

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Morrison continued to write Hewitt stories until 1903 (by way of context, The Hound of the Baskervilles was published in 1902, and Holmes "returned" in 1905).

I think he's an author to follow up on. According to Knight, the later Hewitt stories involve espionage, anarchism, even hypnotism... And Morrison also created another detective, the unscrupulous Horace Dorrington, who paved the way for characters such as Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley.

Some of his non-Hewitt work includes gritty accounts of working-class life. Here he was drawing on his own early experience. Edwards (again as quoted here) explains: "Arthur Morrison, son of an engine fitter, exploited his literary gifts to escape London’s slum... Morrison depicted the East End with an insider’s expertise, but became embarrassed by his humble origins. He even falsified data on the national census to conceal his date and place of birth. It is a pity he was so sensitive, since the strength of his writing lies in an understanding of working class life that Berkeley, Sayers and Christie could never match."


Arthur Morrison at a home that's a long way from the slums

We'll probably meet again, Mr Morrison...