posted on 23 Mar 2022

Detective Stories from the Strand Magazine selected by Jack Adrian

The name of The Strand Magazine is destined to be forever associated with bringing us the character who is perhaps the most famous ever detective in literature, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The Strand was a monthly magazine that sold in huge numbers from its inception in 1891 until it finally folded in 1950 – by which time reading habits had changed completely. The Strand owed much of its popularity to the age of steam rail travel with copies selling on station forecourts as commuters found the short story format a congenial way of passing the time. As private car travel increased after the Second World War, the natural audience for the magazine declined dramatically.

Overall there were 711 issues produced and alongside the famous Holmes stories, it published a host of other authors whose names are now almost as familiar as Conan Doyle’s creation. This collection of stories taken from across the Strand output has been collated by Jack Adrian who has also written a brief but valuable introduction – one which supplements a foreword by Julian Symons, who is himself a detective author and scholar of the genre. What Adrian tells us is just how, almost single-handedly, the Homes stories set the model for what was submitted to The Strand for consideration and how the trajectory of Conan Doyle’s hero was mirrored by changes in the writing of others. When Doyle died in 1930:

“Almost at once the Bright Young Hopes began crowding in. The 1930s, under The Strand’s second editor, Reeves Shaw……..is the decade of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers….This final decade before the Second World War, far more than the 1920s, may be considered a genuine ‘Golden Age’, rich in ingenuous nuggets, psychological twists, fast cars, literary allusions, brain-wracking complexities, corpses in conservatories.”

By contrast, the 1940s turned out to be a decade of slow death ‘notable for the virtual absence of detective stories in the classic, or indeed any, tradition’  and this collection chronologically reflects this pattern of decline.

The stories are presented here in an almost academically ordered fashion. Adrian has split the selections into grouped units with specific identities. So we get 6 ‘chapters’ – The Great Detectives, Legal Niceties, The Twist, Rogues Knaves and Fortune-Hunters, Mostly Murder, The Master – and each section has a short introduction about each story and its author. The review of the book in Publisher’s Weekly (undated but likely to be from the publication date of 1991) usefully scans the roster of stories:

“….Holmes (is) represented by three adventures and Ronald Knox's famed pastiche ``The Adventure of the First Class Carriage.'' Nor are the bits of Sherlockiana standard stuff, including ``The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,'' in which the Great Detective not only allows a murderer to escape punishment but commits a crime of his own, and the controversial ``The Adventure of the Lion's Mane,'' told by Holmes himself rather than by Dr. Watson. Other famous sleuths appeared in the pages of the Strand as well, and editor Adrian includes Agatha Christie's ``The Dream,'' a Hercule Poirot story (rather more obvious than most, unfortunately), and the only Father Brown tale to appear there, G. K. Chesteron's ``The Vampire of the Village.'' Nineteen additional stories, by authors famous (Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, Edgar Wallace) and mostly forgotten (sic Seamark, Richard Keverne, Loel Yeo) round out an anthology of material not generally available elsewhere and thus of significant appeal to aficionados.”

This is very much a book to dip into, to graze over and something of a godsend when you want to be entertained but you simply don’t have the oomph to take on something more substantial. Perhaps the best way to enjoy this book is to give a nod to the great days of The Strand Magazine and take it with you on your next train journey.

I’m not sure if the book is still in print but you can get hard and paperback editions on the second hand market for under £10.

 

Terry Potter

March 2022