by David Marcum
Title page
Sherlock Holmes in Montague Street
Sherlock Holmes’s Early Investigations
Originally Published as
Martin Hewitt Adventures
Volume II
by
Arthur Morrison
Edited, Holmes-ed,
and with
Original Material
by
David Marcum
Publisher information
First Edition published in 2014
© Original Content Copyright 2014 David Marcum
2014 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of David Marcum to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious or used fictitiously. Except for certain historical personages, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not of MX Publishing.
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Introduction
I. About the Author
Arthur Morrison was born in 1863 in the East End of London. Growing up in a working-class family, he could not help but be well aware of the terrible poverty which surrounded him. Very little is known about Morrison’s early life, and his probable embarrassment concerning his own family’s poverty during this time meant that very few details ever became public knowledge. In later years, he would attempt to alter or hide his biography as a denial of his origins, thus making it difficult indeed to determine anything specific about his early life. The abominable conditions in the East End in the late 1800’s have become legendary over the years, and Morrison was there during the worst of those times.
When Morrison was about eight years old, his father, a steamfitter at the London Docks, died, leaving him, as well as his mother and two siblings, to make their way as best they could. Despite oppressive conditions, the family persevered, and when Morrison was in his mid-teens, he found employment with the London School Board as an office boy in the Architect Department. Some of these experiences were no doubt useful when he came to write the Martin Hewitt story, “The Dixon Torpedo” (June 1894), set in an engineer’s office. In 1880, his first published work, a poem, appeared in a magazine. He continued to publish small pieces over the next few years, although often anonymously, so that an accurate count of what was written during this span will never be known. In 1885, his first major journalistic piece was accepted and published by The Globe newspaper.
Morrison was mostly-self taught, and in 1886, he obtained employment as a secretary with a sizable East End charitable foundation, the People’s Palace. He remained in this position while continuing to write, and in a few years he became the editor of The Palace Journal. He eventually resigned in 1890 to join the editorial staff of The Globe on a full-time basis.
The amount of Morrison’s writing increased dramatically. In 1891, he published a collection of supernatural short fiction, Shadows Around Us, now nearly forgotten. At that point, he began to turn his attention toward writing pieces that reflected the conditions in the East End, a type of work that came to be known as slum fiction.
Morrison wrote pieces describing various aspects of poverty that he had observed during his childhood and young adult years. His books on the subject are frequently mentioned as leading examples of that type of work, and Morrison portrayed conditions in a realistic way that had not been done before in literature. These books are: Tales of the Mean Streets (1894), a collection of short stories, and two novels, A Child of the Jago (1896), and The Hole in the Wall (1902).
Unlike many of his contemporaries writing on these same subjects, Morrison’s works are decidedly pessimistic, implying that improvement of the condition of the poor is almost overwhelmingly difficult and unlikely to be successful, especially through benevolent intervention by wealthier members of society. In addition, Morrison took a pessimistic view of the poor themselves, and there were no sympathetic or admirable characters in his slum fiction.
During the 1890’s and early 1900’s, Morrison began developing an interest in Japanese art, and as a collector and writer on the subject, he became a recognized expert. As his interest and expertise grew, he would eventually transition away from both journalism and fiction, abandoning both completely by the early 1900’s, except for one short fiction collection, Fiddle o’ Dreams and More, published in 1933. In 1911, he published The Painters of Japan, which is still considered an important work in the field, and in 1913, he sold most of his collection of Japanese art, acquired over the previous decade or so, to the British Museum, receiving enough money to retire.
Very little is known about the last thirty years of Morrison’s life. He lived quietly until his death in 1945, and as E.F. Bleiler wrote in his introduction to Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories (1976), “When he died ... the world was more astonished to learn that he had been still living than that he was dead.”
II. About Martin Hewitt
Although Morrison was never forthcoming about his past, he was very accurate in using his experiences while growing up in order to vividly portray the conditions faced by London’s East End poor during the late nineteenth century. And yet, while he is usually remembered for his slum fiction and his thought-provoking criticisms of London poverty, Morrison had also inexplicably turned his attention to writing detective stories, which were all the rage in the mid-1890’s. It was then that he created and wrote the first and largest portion of his twenty-five Martin Hewitt short stories.
Following the publication of the final (at that time) Sherlock Holmes tale, “The Final Problem” in December 1893, The Strand Magazine was in desperate need for some type of serialized-character detective fiction in order to fill the void. Morrison’s Martin Hewitt somewhat fit the bill for a while, but not in the same spectacularly successful manner that Holmes had done.
Morrison seemed to have constructed Hewitt so that he would instantly be identified as the opposite of Holmes. Hewitt was first described as plump and of medium height, a genial and smiling man. He was a former law clerk who had decided to take his special investigative talents out on his own. He claims no special powers, but simply the good use of common sense. The stories are narrated by a journalist named Brett, who sometimes appears as Hewitt’s Watson, and sometimes remains completely off-stage, allowing Hewitt to investigate alone in third-person narrative.
Hewitt’s first case had been “fifteen or twenty years back”, when he had made a name for himself, as explained in the first story, “The Lenton Croft Robberies” (March 1894). This would thus indicate that he began his career in the mid-to-late-1870’s, based on the story’s publication date. After this first success, Hewitt had then set himself up with a clerk named Kerrett in an office near Charing Cross, off the Strand. Howeve
r, after the initial descriptions which serve to note the differences between Hewitt and Holmes are stated, the similarities between the two start to become very obvious. Hewitt makes use of disguises and knows many obscure facts. He solves cases logically, with close observation of clues missed by others, and he hides the process and explanation until the end. He has few friends, keeps extensive scrapbooks, and on occasions is heard to utter Holmes-like things, such as the following: “... all the other ways being impossible, this alone remains, difficult as the feat may seem.” (“The Case of Mr. Foggatt”, May 1894).
And then there is this exchange in “The Ivy Cottage Mystery” (January 1894), when Hewitt is asked about some clues in the form of scraps of wood.
“That puttied-up hole in the piece of wood seems to have influenced you. Is it an important link?” Brett asks him.
“Well-yes,” Hewitt replies, “it is. But all those other pieces are important, too.”
“But why?”
“Because there are no holes in them.”
That sounds like the same someone who would give a cryptic answer about the dog that did nothing in the nighttime.
The Strand published the first seven Hewitt stories between March and September 1894. These were immediately collected into book form as Martin Hewitt, Investigator (1894). After a break of a few months, the next set of six Hewitt tales were published, not in The Strand this time, but rather in The Windsor Magazine. This collection was advertised as “The Chronicles of Martin Hewitt: Being the Second Series of the Adventures of Martin Hewitt, Investigator.” These stories ran from January to June 1895, and were quickly published in book form as Chronicles of Martin Hewitt (1895). Another series of six followed in the same magazine the next year, from January to June 1896, and were billed as “The Adventures of Martin Hewitt: Third Series”. These, too, were immediately collected and released as a book entitled Adventures of Martin Hewitt (1896).
Through the rest of the 1890’s and into the early 1900’s, Morrison was slowly withdrawing from publishing fiction. In 1903, he completed one further set of six Hewitt stories, first published in The London Magazine, and collected in the same year in book form under the title The Red Triangle. These stories, like Agatha Christie’s The Big Four (1927), which features Hercule Poirot, were a series of separate but loosely-connected Hewitt stories, interconnected by a greater, overall plot, a search for a master criminal.
And then Martin Hewitt languished, except as remembered by aficionados of detective fiction. By the 1930’s, Hewitt was slowly being forgotten. In Challenge to the Reader (1938), Ellery Queen calls Hewitt “[t]he very famous, but today little-read detective ...” In 1941, Howard Haycraft published his important work, Murder For Pleasure, listing Martin Hewitt, Investigator as one of the cornerstones of detective fiction. Later, this book was still included when Haycraft’s list was augmented with additional works chosen by Ellery Queen, to become “The Haycraft-Queen Definitive Library of Detective, Crime, and Mystery Fiction ‘A Reader’s List of Detective Story Cornerstones’ ”
In Queen’s Quorum (1951), Ellery Queen wrote: “Of Doyle’s contemporary imitators, the most durable (indeed, the only important one to survive over the ages) is the private investigator, a man of awe-inspiring technical and statistical knowledge, in Martin Hewitt, Investigator.”
Today, however, when Martin Hewitt is recalled at all, he is lumped into the category of one of “The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes”, that group of characters who appeared in the mid-1890’s to fill the vacuum when Watson and Doyle decided to cease publication of The Master’s adventures. Morrison was just one of many authors of that period, including Grant Allen, Fletcher Robinson, L.T. Meade, Baroness Orczy, and others.
In 1971, three of the Hewitt stories were featured as episodes in a British television show, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, based on the book of the same name. Oddly, in the first of these, “The Case of the Dixon Torpedo” (November 8, 1971), Hewitt’s name was changed to Jonathan Pryde, who is presented as a friend of Hewitt’s. Hewitt doesn’t appear at all as himself in that episode, instead leaving the entire mystery to be solved by Pryde. It is in “The Affair of the Tortoise” (November 22, 1971), that Martin Hewitt first appears under his own name. In the third and last of the Hewitt stories to be dramatized for this series, “The Case of Laker, Absconded” (December 9, 1971), Pryde is introduced into the story to work with Hewitt, although the character of Pryde is not in the original published story at all.
The few Martin Hewitt cases that are currently available today are most likely to be the same repeated titles found in anthologies containing stories by a multitude of Morrison’s contemporaries from the same period.
III. About Hewitt, Holmes, and The Game
At different times over the years, awareness of Martin Hewitt has resurged, often within Sherlockian circles, in connection with a theory first proposed by J. Randolph Cox in his essay, “Mycroft Holmes: Private Detective” (The Baker Street Journal, October 1956). Cox, who admitted that he did not have access to the entire Hewitt Canon - he stated in a footnote that he has been unable to locate the Adventures of Martin Hewitt in any condition - postulated that Martin Hewitt, the plump investigator with the initials “M.H.”, is actually Mycroft Holmes, acting for some unknown reason as a detective in the 1870’s and 1880’s before beginning his more well-known career with the British Government.
Cox went on to explain his interpretation of the internal dating within the stories, deciding that Mycroft Holmes had worked as a private detective, and as a competitor of his brother Sherlock, until the late and highly unlikely date of 1885, before finally closing his office in the Strand and finding more rewarding and useful work in nearby Whitehall with the government. Some of his other use of dates seems even less likely.
I personally did not get around to reading the Martin Hewitt stories until I was in my early thirties, in the mid-1990’s, a little over one-hundred years after Hewitt’s first appearance in The Strand. After ignoring the stories for a long while, I approached them with the preconceived belief, based on reading Cox’s essay, that Hewitt was Mycroft. After all, whenever I had read anything at all about Martin Hewitt in various reference books, it was always hinted that his activities were really those of a young Mycroft.
Then, after I had completed reading the Hewitt Canon, two-dozen-plus-one narratives, I was amazed to walk away with the feeling that I hadn’t been reading about Mycroft at all. Rather, the stories seemed to be more about a younger Sherlock Holmes.
After that initial introduction to Hewitt, it has always been my theory that Hewitt’s adventures were actually Holmes’s early investigations while Holmes was living in Montague Street, circa 1876. These adventures were narrated by Brett, Holmes’s journalist neighbor. Later, from 1891-93, when Watson’s stories about Holmes were taking the world by storm in The Strand, Brett chose to write up his own experiences with the younger Consulting Detective. However, when he tried to publish them through his literary agent, Arthur Morrison, he was stopped for some reason, and forced to change Holmes’s name to Hewitt so that publication could proceed.
After reaching the point where I always think of Hewitt as Holmes, I decided to do something about it.
Therefore, the three volumes in this series change Martin Hewitt’s name to Sherlock Holmes.
Alteration of one character into another has been done before, sometimes by authors of their own works. August Derleth wrote a Sherlock Holmes story, (“The Circular Room”) and then changed it in a few years to a Solar Pons story. And in the non-Sherlockian world, it has been done as well. Raymond Chandler revised some of his early short stories so that the original characters’ names were changed to Philip Marlowe. Ross MacDonald (Kenneth Millar) rewrote some of his old stories as well, making them into Lew Archer cases instead.
Sometimes, of course, people other than the authors have changed a character’s name in
the original works after that author was gone. Maurice Leblanc’s various Arsene Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes stories from the early 1900’s have all been edited and re-released with the name “Herlock Sholmes” correctly replaced with “Sherlock Holmes”. In 2012, Alan Lance Andersen edited and produced The Affairs of Sherlock Holmes, wherein various non-series Sax Rohmer stories from nearly a hundred years ago were reworked as Holmes tales. Sometimes the original timeline (1920’s) was retained, which didn’t always work so well for a Holmes story, and the editor might have done better to make them Solar Pons stories, except that Pons is - sadly - a lot less familiar to the general public.
Recently, as of the time of this writing, someone has begun republishing the Dr. Thorndyke mysteries as e-books, but whoever the anonymous editor is, he or she is also rewriting the stories as Holmes stories. In these reworked Thorndyke cases, Thorndyke’s name is changed to Holmes, Jervis (Thorndyke’s Watson), has his name changed to Watson, and so on. Occasionally the editor makes mistakes, forgetting to consistently change a name, or mistakenly leaving references to Inspector Lestrade as “Superintendent”. Also, once-and-a-while the geography around Baker Street still suspiciously matches that of Thorndyke’s King’s Bench Walk.
Those mistakes aren’t too jarring. The worst part is that the anonymous editor insists on indicating that these new versions are by Arthur Conan Doyle and John Hamish Watson, with no mention at all of the fact that R. Austin Freeman actually wrote them. Personally, I’m enjoying reading them, even knowing that they used to be Thorndyke stories. Somehow, Thorndyke was always rather personality-less for me, and reading these stories within the context of the greater Holmes pastiche tradition fleshes them out.
Another example of changing one character to another is the British ITV series “Marple”, which has taken non-Miss Marple Agatha Christie stories and converted them into episodes featuring that character. And another fellow, (me, actually) took a non-Nero Wolfe Rex Stout story last year and re-wrote it for The Gazette (the Nero Wolfe “Wolfe Pack” official journal) as a Nero Wolfe tale - well, actually an Archie Goodwin tale, since Wolfe doesn’t appear in it at all. Several other people have made the same conversion with some of Stout’s other non-Wolfe works over the years.
