More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

The first person to compile an anthology of stories featuring rivals of Sherlock Holmes was Hugh Greene, brother of Graham, and at one time the Director-General of the BBC. I received his first anthology as a birthday present, and loved it. He came up with three more anthologies and some of the stories were televised - the episodes have reappeared recently on the Talking Pictures TV channel. There have been similar anthologies to Greene's in the intervening years, and Nick Rennison produced one back in 2015. He's now edited another collection, More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, which is published by the splendid No Exit Press.

I haven't read Rennison's earlier anthology, but a few years ago I greatly enjoyed his "unauthorised biography" of Sherlock Holmes. His evident knowledge of Victorian crime fiction means that he's well-qualified to put a book of stories of gaslight crime together. The first question is: do we need yet another book of this kind?  The second question is: given that the stories are out of copyright, is there enough fresh editorial material to justify the purchase?

My answer in principle to the first question is yes, provided it doesn't just round up the usual suspects, in terms of authors and stories. And here I think Rennison does a good job. Believe me, I've read a lot of stories from this era, but there are three authors featured here whom I can't remember having read: Herbert Kean, David Christie Murray, and Percy James Brebner. These are not the strongest stories in the book, admittedly, but I was glad to be introduced to them, as well as to meet again Arthur Morrison's unscrupulous Horace Dorrington (one of my favourite rivals) and Richard Marsh's Judith Lee, an accomplished lip reader.

As for the second test, again I think Rennison passes it. He doesn't deluge his readers with information, but certainly gives enough to put the stories and their authors in context. As he says, he set out to demonstrate the range and variety of late Victorian and Edwardian detective fiction. The title of this book may be less than original, but  that doesn't matter: the Greene books appeared a long time ago.  I'd say that he has succeeded in this aim.

Victorian Villainies

Another book I picked up at Hay-on-Wye was Victorian Villainies, a book I first read not long after it came out in 1984. It’s an omnibus volume of four books, selected by Graham Greene and his brother Hugh, and with an introduction by Hugh. The brothers were very keen collectors of Victorian mysteries, and produced a rather rare bibliography of key titles. This omnibus was the product of their desire to give new life to forgotten tales.

Hugh laments in his introduction the disappearance of so many second hand bookshops. The trend has, of course, continued in the past quarter of a century. On the credit side, Hay has developed into a wonderful booktown, and now there are booktowns across Europe. And the internet (notably Abebooks and eBay) has made life easier in many ways for those seeking obscure titles.

Of the four books in the omnibus, the most renowned is The Beetle by Richard Marsh, and this is the story I remember best from my original reading. But another good one is In the Fog, by Richard Harding Davis, an American war correspondent who wrote no other detective fiction. The other titles are The Great Tontine, by Hawley Smart, which concerns ‘the unforeseen dangers of trying to make money in a lottery’ and The Rome Express, by Arthur Griffith.

One of my partners with an interest in crime fiction delightedly informed me the other day that he’d been asked to draft a tontine agreement. He asked me what was my favourite crime novel featuring a tontine and I mentioned The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson. I’d forgotten Smart’s book all over again.