Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories

by Arthur Morrison, E.F. Bleiler (Editor)

Modeled on Sherlock Holmes and taking place during the same period. Martin Hewitt was second in popularity only to Holmes himself. This collection includes the famous "Lenton Croft Robberies".

Genres: Mystery

138 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1976

About the author

Arthur George Morrison (1863-1945) was an English author and journalist, known for his realistic novels about London's East End and for his detective stories. In 1890, he left his job as a clerk at the People's Palace and joined the editorial staff of the Evening Globe newspaper. The following year, he published a story titled "A Street", which was subsequently published in book form in Tales of Mean Streets (1894). Around this time, Morrison was also producing detective short stories which emulated those of Conan Doyle about Sherlock Holmes. Three volumes of Martin Hewitt stories were published before the publication of the novel for which Morrison is most famous: A Child of the Jago (1896). Other less well-received novels and stories followed, until Morrison effectively retired from writing fiction around 1913. Between then and his death, he seems to have concentrated on building his collection of Japanese prints and paintings.

Amongst his other works are Martin Hewitt: Investigator (1894), Zig-Zags at the Zoo (1894), Chronicles of Martin Hewett (1895), Adventures of Martin Hewett (1896), and The Hole in the Wall (1902).

Reviews

[Dfordoom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in the 1890s the most serious rival to Sherlock Holmes, as far as popularity with reading public was concerned, was probably Martin Hewitt. He was the creation of Arthur Morrison, a writer who achieved considerable acclaim also for his stories of life among the poor of London. The Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories gathers together nine stories, all written in the mid-1890s. They’re very similar in style to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, very cleverly plotted and extremely entertaining. Martin Hewitt himself is a likeable detective although rather less colourful than Holmes. He’s also rather less arrogant, and is even inclined to be polite to policemen! The stories are remarkably consistent in quality. If I had to pick a favourite it would The Case of the "Flitterbat Lancers" although The Case of the Ward Lane Tabernacle is also a very strong story, dealing with religious fanatics in Victorian England. In their own way these stories are every bit as good as the Sherlock Holmes stories and deserve to be much better known.

[John Yeoman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Morrison at his best can write like an angel. The Hole in the Wall is, in its mature use of craft techniques, worthy of Dickens. However, the Martin Hewitt stories are a disappointment. They are not 'detective stories' in the rigorous mode of Conan Doyle. Hewitt frequently plucks the solution out of thin air, having given the reader few if any clues to work on. (In this, he is gifted with implausible insights worthy of Father Brown.) Sometimes, Hewitt disappears for cryptic investigations which, however, he does does not share with the reader until the denouement. Too often, the plots hinge upon absurd coincidences.

But the stories do contain some nifty plot ideas that, I feel, Austin Freeman - a better detective writer - could have worked up into tours de force of 'ratiocinative' detection. The Hewitt stories make a long plane journey go faster but they should not (unlike Freeman's) be taken on a world cruise.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sherlock Holmes was undoubtedly the most famous of the Victorian/Edwardian detectives, but he wasn't the only ones. There was Dr Thorndyke (Richard Austin Freeman), Max Carrados (Ernest Bramah), the Old Man in the Corner (Baroness Orczy), the Thinking Machine (Jacques Fuitrelle), and Martin Hewitt (Arthur Morrison).

Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories is a collection of Hewitt stories publishes by Dover. It illustrates the weakness of the Hewitt tales compared to Doyle's Holmes. For one thing, Martin Hewitt is several shades more bland than the Baker Street maestro -- no Irene Adler, no stinky experiments, no violin, no cocaine -- and his narrator, Brett, is totally a tabula rasa.

Still, the stories are generally well told, except when the plot hinges on hypnotism or Gypsy superstitions. My favorite story was probably the last -- "Thew Case of the Ward Lane Tabernacle" -- probably because Hewitt's client, Mrs. Mallett, is more on the ball than Hewitt and Brett combined..

[Jay Maxfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book consists of 9 Martin Hewitt stories (listed below) along with their original illustrations that appeared alongside the stories in their magazine editions. All the stories appeared either in the The Strand or The Windsor Magazine sometime between 1894 - 1896. This book has a short introduction by E F Bleiler which covers Arthur Morrison's literary achievements. Bleiler says Martin Hewitt is the second best detective of the late Victorian period - I am unable to clarify this as I haven't read enough detective fiction of this period to decide if this statement is true.
Crime fiction short stories were needed by magazines trying to compete with The Strand's Sherlock Holmes and also by The Strand Magazine itself when Conan Doyle hadn't a story to offer them. However like most people (even avid fans of Classic Crime Fiction) no detective of this period comes readily to mind - which in itself says a lot about the quality and memorability of stories and characters of this time. After reading the 9 stories of Martin Hewitt I understand the reason why. If the Martin Hewitt stories are the second best detective stories of the time then the rest must surely be of a very inferior quality, as it is, these stories although having very good plots - are written in a style that is very flat and unexciting. Morrison it seems spent all his energy on getting the plot right and coming up with scenarios and in some stories very modern scenes (men in diving equipment under the sea) that he totally neglected to make the stories enjoyable to read - they read like someone is speaking in monotone. We never learn much about Martin Hewitt himself and so he appears somewhat wooden with nothing to differentiate him from anyone else (unlike Holmes being a drug taker for instance) and therefore not a memorable character. The narrator who is a journalist called Brett (it is unknown if this is his first name or surname) is also of a bland personality and even his name is only given twice in these 9 stories. So I recommend reading these stories if you are interested in victorian crime fiction, the development of crime fiction and if you want a comparison to Arthur Conan Doyle's writing style - however in the main I wouldn't recommend reading them for enjoyment as the flatness of the prose style quickly becomes irritating. The most disappointing factor about these stories is that all of them could quite easily have been made enjoyable and memorable had a different writing style been applied and Martin given some personality - perhaps Morrison only wrote them because he needed the money and that their success wasn't of much concern to him as crime fiction wasn't his usual line of literature. I would give this book 5 out of 10 (mostly for the plots).
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

[Googoogjoob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good overall. These are detective stories produced from 1894 to 1896- during Sherlock Holmes's "Great Hiatus"- and very similar in tenor, tone, and indeed quality to Doyle's stories. These are very good stories- more or less on par with the middle-tier Holmes stories of Doyle's prime. They are also quite even in quality- none stick out as especially brilliant, or as especially weak. The detection is consistent, and the writing is lucid and tight. In his introduction, the editor, E. F. Bleiler, makes the case that Arthur Morrison- from a lower-class background, with a track record of radically naturalistic depictions of slum life- could have revolutionized the detective story via the incorporation of more authentic detail, a la Hammett- but didn't; he wrote these as potboilers. So they're merely the best non-Holmes stories of the period- hardly the worst thing to be- rather than pointing the way forward.

There are two main things, I think, that hold these stories back from being all-timers, and have likely contributed to their relative obscurity. The first, and more important, is that Martin Hewitt himself is such a nonentity. In clear reaction to the popularity of Sherlock Holmes, Hewitt is a plain man of no known eccentricities; he's a robust man of average height; he's friendly, professional, and competent (he neatly goes out of his way to allay the fears or discomforts of his clients); he gets along with the police, and works with them regularly; we learn vanishingly little of his private life or personal inclinations. His sidekick (and the narrator of the stories), a journalist named Brett, is even less of a character, who isn't even present for the action in most of the stories. Against the likes of a Holmes, or a Dupin, or even an Uncle Abner, he's simply forgettable

The second, lesser issue is that Morrison doesn't uniformly play fair with the reader. In "The Lenton Croft Robberies" and "The Case of the Dixon Torpedo," important pieces of evidence, and bits of Hewitt's dialogue and action, are elided in the text, and only become evident in Hewitt's denouements. While this sort of elision is less-evident in the later-written stories (the two noted above are among the earliest), "The Holford Will Case," "The Case of the Missing Hand," and "The Case of the Ward Lane Tabernacle" feature elements that- while not supernatural- are far enough out of the ordinary that the average reader could not possibly have a hope of guessing their solutions. These things are basically forgivable; Morrison was writing at a time, pre-Golden Age, when these aspects of the detective story weren't yet codified, and they wouldn't necessarily have been considered lapses at the time; certainly Doyle made similar decisions in some of his stories. But, in retrospect, as these are essentially puzzle-stories, with very little literary value otherwise, anything that interferes with the reader's ability to "play along" in solving the puzzle is a problem, and the entertainment value of the stories is diminished accordingly.

This volume includes three stories apiece from each of the first three Hewitt collections; this is about half of the original run of Hewitt stories (9/19), though it omits material from the later serial-pseudo-novel The Red Triangle, which has a much weaker reputation. The volume is enlivened by reproductions of the original illustrations that accompanied these stories in the magazines they originally appeared in, with the first three stories, having been published in The Strand, illustrated by Sidney Paget.

[Ronald · Rating 3 out of 5]

read some time in 1989

[Jan Moens · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10