: Nick Rennison
: American Sherlocks Stories from the Golden Age of the American Detective
: No Exit Press
: 9780857304407
: 1
: CHF 6.20
:
: Krimis, Thriller, Spionage
: English
: 336
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Sherlock Holmes is the most famous of all fictional detectives but, across the Atlantic, he had plenty of rivals. Between 1890 and 1920, American writers created dozens and dozens of crime-solvers. In this thrilling, unusual anthology, editor Nick Rennison gathers together 15 often neglected tales to highlight American crime fiction's early years. The detectives that feature include Professor Augustus SFX Van Dusen,'The Thinking Machine', even more cerebral than Holmes; Craig Kennedy, the so-called'scientific detective'; Uncle Abner, a shrewd backwoodsman in pre-Civil War Virginia; Violet Strange, New York debutante turned criminologist; and Nick Carter, the original pulp private eye.

NICK RENNISON is a writer, editor and bookseller with a particular interest in the Victorian era and in crime fiction. He is the editor of six anthologies of short stories for No Exit Press: The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Rivals of Dracula, Supernatural Sherlocks, More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock's Sisters and American Sherlocks, plus A Short History of Polar Exploration, Peter Mark Roget: A Biography, Freud and Psychoanalysis, Robin Hood: Myth, History& Culture and Bohemian London, published by Oldcastle Books. He is also the author of The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction, 100 Must-Read Crime Novels and Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography. His crime novels, Carver's Quest and Carver's Truth, both set in nineteenth-century London, are published by Corvus. He is a regular reviewer for both The Sunday Times and BBC History Magazine.

INTRODUCTION

We all have a picture in our minds of the archetypal detective of American fiction. The hardboiled, wisecracking private eye, walking a city’s mean streets. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or one of the hundreds, probably thousands, of other gumshoes who have trodden in their footsteps. But that style of detective only came into being in the late 1920s and early 1930s, most influentially in Hammett’s novels and in the pages of the legendary magazineBlack Mask. American crime fiction has a much longer history.

It really begins with Edgar Allan Poe. (The history of most genre fiction in the USA really begins with Edgar Allan Poe.) Claims for precedence have been made on behalf of earlier works such as Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novelEdgar Huntly and some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter fiction. However, it was Poe who established many of the tropes of crime fiction which are still being used by writers today. In three short stories published in the 1840s – ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’ – he created the templates for much of what was to come. The locked-room mystery; the story based on a true crime; the clues, sometimes hidden in plain sight, which point towards a satisfying explanation of what initially seems inexplicable; the bumbling police outshone by the brilliant amateur. All of these derive ultimately from what Poe himself called his ‘tales of ratiocination’. His character C Auguste Dupin is the archetype of the detective hero with superior powers of deduction and his influence on later creations, most notably Sherlock Holmes, is clear.

Yet Poe’s impact was not markedly felt in his own country in the decades immediately following his death in 1849. There are stories and novels from the 1850s and 1860s which can be classed retrospectively as crime fiction.The Dead Letter of 1866 by Seeley Regester (the pseudonym of the woman writer Metta Victoria Fuller Victor), for instance, is the story of the narrator’s quest to track down a murderer. Another female author, Harriet Spofford, created what was arguably one of the first ‘series’ detectives in history in Mr Furbush who appeared in several stories published inHarper’s New MonthlyMagazine. However, the genre Poe had pioneered did not gain much more than a toehold in the traditional publishing houses and magazines of the American literary world.

It was in the more downmarket arena of the so-called ‘dime novel’ that the figure of the detective finally emerged from the wings and, often enough, took centre stage. The equivalent of the British ‘penny dreadful’, the dime novel began to flourish in the 1860s. The first example of the genre is usually said to beMalaeska, the Indian Wife of the Great Hunter, written by a prolific author and editor, Ann S Stephens, and published by the firm of Beadle& Adams in 1860. Thousands of titles followed in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the opening ones of the twentieth. Several factors fuelled this explosion in cheap genre fiction. Literacy levels began to increase around the time of the American Civil War and continued to do so in the years between 1870 and 1900. At the same time, new printing technologies meant that publishers could issue more books at cheaper prices.

As the title of Ann Stephens’s original dime novel indicates, tales of Native Americans and what was increasingly becoming known as the ‘Wild West’ were popular. The army scout and bison hunter William Cody was transformed into the national hero ‘Buffalo Bill’ by the adventures attributed to him in stories by writers such as Ned Buntline and Prentiss Ingraham. Other genres thrived as well. One of