Tales of ‘Mean Streets’: The Criminal-Detective in Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897)

Abstract

In this chapter I focus on Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897), a collection of six short stories published in the wake of Sherlock Holmes’s ‘death’, which push the burgeoning Victorian crime genre’s transgressive potential to its furthest extreme. After Holmes disappeared over the Reichenbach Falls in December 1893, apparently never to return, many magazines were desperate to poach the readers who had developed a voracious appetite for Arthur Conan Doyle’s crime fiction. A vast number of Holmes ‘clones’ and inversions sprang up in the pages of family magazines such as The Windsor, The Idler, Pearson’s and in The Strand itself (Greenfield 18). Indeed Morrison’s tubby, affable — and somewhat dull — detective Martin Hewitt was the Strand Magazine’s own swift replacement for Holmes, appearing in March 1894. The Hewitt stories were the first foray into the detective genre by Morrison, a fledgling writer, who would later become known for his grim slum novels. Early reviews of the Hewitt collection were reasonably favourable, yet tended to emphasise Morrison’s indebtedness to Doyle’s detective stories and the similarities between Holmes and Hewitt. The Leeds Mercury, for instance, generously suggested that Morrison’s Hewitt tales were ‘the only stories worthy to succeed Dr Conan Doyle’s “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”’ (‘Magazines and Reviews’ 3).