The Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories
The Best
MARTIN HEWITT
Detective Stories
Copyright
Copyright © 1976, 2002 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
The Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 1976 and reissued in 2017, is a new collection of stories by Arthur Morrison, selected and with an Introduction by E. F. Bleiler. The original source for each story can be found in the Note on Sources on page 249.
International Standard Book Number
ISBN-13: 978-0-486-81484-1
ISBN-10: 0-486-81484-X
Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications
81484X01 2017
www.doverpublications.com
Contents
Introduction
The Lenton Croft Robberies
The Case of the Dixon Torpedo
The Stanway Cameo Mystery
The Nicobar Bullion Case
The Holford Will Case
The Case of the Missing Hand
The Case of Mr. Geldard’s Elopement
The Case of the “Flitterbat Lancers”
The Case of the Ward Lane Tabernacle
Note on Sources
Introduction
I
In detective stories the last decade of the nineteenth century was dominated by Sherlock Holmes. “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first story of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, appeared in the July 1891 issue of The Strand Magazine, and was followed by a succession of stories that continued for some three years. But unfortunately for the publishers of The Strand Magazine, Holmes and A. Conan Doyle had to rest occasionally, and substitutions had to be made.
During the interregnum between the first and second series of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the editors of Strand ran as a stopgap a collection of cases by Dick Donovan, one of the hacks of the day. But recognizing that Donovan’s work was not what the readership was clamoring for, the editors placed at the bottom of Donovan’s last case the following frosty notice: “Next month will appear the first of the new series of ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.’ ”
Over the next few years the editors of The Strand Magazine and its rival variety periodicals used other authors in an attempt to match popularity with Doyle: Guy Boothby, Fred White, L. T. Meade, B. Fletcher Robinson, Baroness Orczy and others. The most successful of these authors, it is generally agreed, was Arthur Morrison, the chronicler of London slum life, whose sleuth Martin Hewitt is probably the second-best detective from the period 1891–1905, or the Age of Sherlock Holmes.
To many of his contemporaries, Arthur Morrison must have seemed unlikely as the creator of Martin Hewitt, since he was much in the public eye for a different sort of writing: painstakingly accurate, unsentimental, naturalistic studies of the seamy side of London’s slums. The stories, which were later gathered together as Tales of Mean Streets, had been appearing in Macmillan’s Magazine and The National Observer, where they had attracted much favorable attention. Morrison’s shift from original, perceptive naturalism to what amounted to a classical pastoral was unexpected and, it must be admitted, sometimes severely criticized by his contemporaries.
Morrison’s contemporaries knew very little about Morrison the man, and we, today, know only a little more. He was a very shy, retiring man who avoided publicity as much as he could. He was more respected than known by his greater contemporaries. He was very sensitive about his family, which had been quite low on the British social scale, and he seemed to have found it painful to talk about his early life. He either evaded questions or deliberately offered misleading information, and his wife, who apparently shared his feelings, at his death burned all his private papers.
Morrison was born in 1863 in a slum district of London known as Poplar, a little to the north of the Isle of Dogs, and he grew up there and in other similar slums in East London. His father was a steamfitter, and the inference is reasonable that there was a persistent milieu of temporary unemployment, poverty, moving and relocation, and domestic unhappiness. All of these themes—plus the dominant central concept of the boy who tries to escape the slums—occur throughout his serious fiction, and are probably based on his own life pattern.
Almost no details are known of this earlier life. We do not know the exact locations where he lived; we do not know where he received his education; nor do we know how he spent the years after he must have left the local schools. He is first found working as a clerk at the People’s Palace in East London in 1887, when he was twenty-three or twenty-four years old. This People’s Palace was an organization much like our modern community houses, where free lectures, exhibitions, concerts and vocational training were offered to slumdwellers, with the intention of fitting them better for life. It was here that Morrison probably received his true education, gaining the momentum that carried him on up to the fulfillment he wished. He worked on accounts and correspondence, and eventually became a subeditor of the Palace Journal.
By 1890 or so the People’s Palace was undergoing internal difficulties, and Morrison, taking advice from Walter Besant, decided that he was now capable of making a living at journalism. He moved to West London—a symbolic gesture in those days—and took a position on a local newspaper, also working at freelance writing. Much of this early work is probably now lost, since anonymous publication in periodicals was still very common, but his first book publication came in 1891 with a collection of rather weak ghost stories entitled Shadows Around Us.
ARTHUR MORRISON
The same year, 1891, however, saw in Macmillan’s Magazine the first appearance of “The Street,” one of the components of Tales of Mean Streets. “The Street” caught the eye of W. E. Henley, one of the leading editors of the day, who accepted further stories for The National Observer. When Tales of Mean Streets was published in 1894, it became a manifesto for the New Writing.
Naturalistic themes and treatment had occurred previously in English literature, but Morrison portrayed depths of brutality and squalor that had never before been described. Although his contemporaries did not know it, and saw his work as a tour de force, Morrison was writing about things that he knew from his own witness. Possibly because of his own implication, he did not sentimentalize, glorify or preach. Dispassionately, with complete detachment, Morrison described the lives of broken charwomen, pimping parasites and shattered workers who drifted down to destruction; he showed shabby attempts to retain respectability and the perpetual edging or slipping into crime.
The horror-filled slums of London again served as literary material in Morrison’s second classic of degradation, A Child of the Jago. After Tales of Mean Streets had been published, Morrison received a letter from Rev. A. Osborne Jay, a missionary to the slums and author of books on the East End. Father Jay asked Morrison to investigate the Old Nichol, then one of the worst areas in London. Morrison responded by devoting eighteen months to the project. Aided by Father Jay he became acquainted with the denizens. He interviewed them with a persistence and precision worthy of a modern anthropologist, recorded their utterance and even took part in the events of their daily life. His knowledge of boxing, which he had picked up at the People’s Palace, is said to have stood him in good stead on several occasions when he was mugged by natives of the Old Nichol. (All this, of course, is in great contrast with Jack London, who spent a couple of desultory weeks in London before writing People of the Abyss, his study of a slum.) Carefully selecting incidents that had taken place, Morrison, his eighteen months passed, wrote his best-known work, A Child of the Jago. It is the story of a good-hearted boy who grows
up among pickpockets, muggers, prostitutes, sneak thieves, fences and burglars, and is destroyed by his environment. A Child of the Jago was immediately recognized as a work of stature, and by 1912 had been translated into several Continental languages. It went through seven British printings.
Six years after A Child of the Jago, Morrison wrote his third important book. This was The Hole in the Wall (1902), which I consider his finest work. As V. S. Pritchett put it, it is a minor classic of the twentieth century, still as vivid, as gripping, as inevitable in development as when it was first written. It is set in the mid-nineteenth century, not too far away in time from the years when Morrison himself was growing up in an East End slum. Told by varying narrators, it is the story of a small boy in the incredibly foul waterfront area near the Ratcliffe Highway. The boy’s grandfather, whose hands are not unstained with murder and theft, operates a low dive, The Hole in the Wall. Both boy and grandfather are caught up in a complex intertwining of crimes, plotted and committed.
After The Hole in the Wall Arthur Morrison, writer of European stature, disappeared from the new book lists. For two or three years he continued to write light fiction, then even this ceased. Why he stopped writing fiction we can only speculate. Perhaps his newspaper work took up too much of his time. Perhaps with easy financial circumstances he no longer had to write. Or perhaps as P. J. Keating in his fine introduction to the MacGibbon and Kee edition of A Child of the Jago has suggested, there were psychological reasons. His serious fiction obviously recapitulates themes from his own life, and these psychological configurations may eventually have lost their power. With The Hole in the Wall, which is deeply felt, in contrast to the dispassionate earlier works, Morrison may finally have gotten something out of his system. If so, pace Morrison’s own feelings, the world lost a good writer.
Around 1902 a new facet of Arthur Morrison, however, had become public. This was Arthur Morrison, art historian and critic. He had become a most enthusiastic collector of Japanese prints, and he haunted the waterfront shops and shipping in the harbor area, looking for Oriental art work brought home by sailors. He often completed his purchases in low taverns in the small hours of the night, and would hasten back to the West End, routing his friends out of bed, to show what he had acquired.
Morrison was not a dilettante, and his knowledge of Japanese art soon became exhaustive. It culminated in a two-volume work, The Painters of Japan (1911), which was published in both England and America, and is still highly regarded. In 1913 he sold his collection to the British Museum for the rumored price of £4,000 (perhaps $80,000 in present value) and retired.
Arthur Morrison lived until 1945, but little is known of his life during his last thirty years. He was elected to the Royal Literary Society and in the 1920’s served on its council. When he died in 1945 the world was more astonished to learn that he had been still living than that he was dead.
In this brief biographical sketch only Morrison’s more important work has been considered. Morrison wrote a fair amount of ephemeral journalism as well as several other books. His relatively unknown work Zig-Zags at the Zoo (1895) popularized natural history, sometimes a little fancifully, while The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897) is a series of connected short stories about a rogue who also does occasional detective work for his own benefit. To London Town (1899), the experiences of a young man in lower-class London, is much less vivid than the books about the slums, and is not regarded very highly. Journalistic expertise, but little else, is to be found in Cunning Morrell (1899), a sentimental historical romance set in early nineteenth-century Essex. The title character is a historical white witch, about whom Morrison wrote more satisfyingly in a periodical article. The Green Eye of Goona (known in America as The Green Eye) (1904) is a detective adventure in quest of a stolen gem secreted in a magnum of Imperial Tokay. Anticipatory of The Twelve Chairs, it has some ingenious touches and is amusing. Divers Vanities (1905) and Green Ginger (1909) are collections of earlier work. An occasional story in them has crime elements, but the general mode is that of W. W. Jacobs, and does not fit Morrison well. This is all quite far from Morrison’s true detective stories.
II
Martin Hewitt first met the reader’s eye in “The Lenton Croft Robberies” in the March 1894 issue of The Strand Magazine. This was the first of six stories which were thereupon issued in book form under the title Martin Hewitt, Investigator. The second and third series of Hewitt’s adventures, however, appeared in The Windsor Magazine in 1895 and 1896; these were later published as (The) Chronicles of Martin Hewitt and (The) Adventures of Martin Hewitt. All in all there are eighteen of these short stories. An episode-serial, The Red Triangle, is also concerned with Hewitt; it appeared in The London Magazine in 1903, and described Hewitt’s campaign against a master criminal from the West Indies who uses hypnotism to control his servitors. It is much inferior to the short stories.
The short stories about Martin Hewitt seem to have been quite popular in both England and America. They were novel and imaginative in subject matter; plotted with greater meticulousness than most of their contemporary counterparts; and they were intelligent and pleasantly written, without the crude sensationalism of L. T. Meade or Fred White, or the blatant, aggressive vulgarity of C. Cutcliffe Hyne’s or Guy Boothby’s lesser work.
Seen in retrospect Hewitt is obviously based on Sherlock Holmes via the identity of opposites. Whereas Holmes is tall and gaunt, Hewitt is of medium stature and plump; whereas Holmes is egotistical and arrogant, Hewitt is pleasant and unctuously affable; whereas Holmes scorns Scotland Yard, Hewitt is grateful for cooperation, reflecting that the Metropolitan Police can perform operations he cannot.
LETTER FROM ARTHUR MORRISON, SHOWING HIS HANDWRITING.
JANUARY 15, 1927.
Holmes’s adventures are set at high key; Hewitt is deliberately low key. All in all, the Holmes-Hewitt relationship reminds one of the motion pictures in the 1910’s and 1920’s: a comedian anxious to appear distinct from Charles Chaplin would wear clothes that were too small rather than too large, would sport a large moustache rather than a small one, and might walk pigeon-toed rather than duckfooted. It all came to the same thing.
If part of Hewitt is Sherlock Holmes facing in the opposite direction, the remainder is probably an emergence of Arthur Morrison’s financial situation. Morrison wrote the stories for the large fees paid by the rival variety magazines, and did not consider them as important as his naturalistic work. As far as can be determined—apart from the negative criterion of avoiding the lower-class crime that might have memory links—the Martin Hewitt stories had no personal meaning for Morrison. Nor did he desire to experiment, as he had done in his serious work. He consciously wrote in a tradition that had suddenly become frozen into a classical form: the bourgeois detective story of the Doyle sort, where the roles of detective and supplicant are fixed, the emergence of story is close and circular, and the resolution is clear. The subject matter is genteel, the crimes are passionate or commercial, and the mores of society are fulfilled.
This adherence to traditional pattern is something of a pity, since Morrison should have been the New Writer in the detective story. Alone among his writing contemporaries he knew true crime: he had lived among it as a child and young man, and had studied it intensively as an adult. In his later work, like The Hole in the Wall, he had mastered a literary technique at least the equal of any of his contemporaries, and he showed the capability of breaking form. Morrison should have taken the detective story out of 221B Baker Street.
This development took place a generation later in America, when a group of writers, most notably Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, came to recognize that a broad spectrum of choices surrounded the detective, and that a detective story need not be limited to a single secant of experience. This is not to say that the classical British drawing-room story is aesthetically immoral, as some theorists of the hard-boiled school imply, but simply to say that there are many modes of detection, all equally valid, and
that Morrison was in a unique position to enhance the form and did not.
But to consider Arthur Morrison simply as a lost horizon and Hewitt as a Pathfinder who went around a single tree is probably too negative, and ultimately unfair. One should not judge criminals by crimes they did not commit, writers by stories they did not write, nor detectives by cases or experiences that did not befall them. One cannot weigh negatives.
Morrison’s Martin Hewitt remains the second-best detective of the period of Doyle, before the emergence of G. K. Chesterton and R. A. Freeman. Original crime motifs, ingenious plotting and good characterizations keep the best of Hewitt’s adventures fresh and appealing.
A selection of Hewitt’s most interesting cases follows. This selection has been difficult to make, for Morrison’s stories are very even in quality. To bring the reader a little closer to Morrison’s epoch, we have reproduced the original magazine pages in photographic facsimile.
E. F. BLEILER
The Best
MARTIN HEWITT
Detective Stories
The Lenton Croft Robberies
HOSE who retain any memory of the great law cases of fifteen or twenty years back will remember, at least, the title of that extraordinary will case, “Bartley v. Bartley and others,” which occupied the Probate Court for some weeks on end, and caused an amount of public interest rarely accorded to any but the cases considered in the other division of the same court. The case itself was noted for the large quantity of remarkable and unusual evidence presented by the plaintiff’s side—evidence that took the other party completely by surprise, and overthrew their case like a house of cards. The affair will, perhaps, be more readily recalled as the occasion of the sudden rise to eminence, in their profession, of Messrs. Crellan, Hunt, and Crellan, solicitors for the plaintiff— a result due entirely to the wonderful ability shown in this case of building up, apparently out of nothing, a smashing weight of irresistible evidence. That the firm has since maintained—indeed, enhanced—the position it then won for itself, need scarcely be said here; its name is familiar to everybody. But there are not many of the outside public who know that the credit of the whole performance was primarily due to a young clerk in the employ of Messrs. Crellan, who had been given charge of the seemingly desperate task of collecting evidence in the case.