Olden Life: Who was Sexton Blake?
Thumped, coshed, manacled. Shot and stabbed. Flung from a rocketing car, booted out of a plane and locked in a cellar squirming with poisonous snakes.
Sexton Blake endured many indignities over the course of his capers, but being quietly forgotten must be the most bruising of all. Surely he was every bit as immortal, as much of a British icon, as Sherlock Holmes, his grand rival and fellow resident of Baker Street?
With one bound he was born, introduced in the pages of the Halfpenny Marvel in December 1893. Billed as ‘a daring detective’, Blake was the creation of Harry Blyth (1852-1898), writing under the pen name Hal Meredeth. Blyth was paid a nine-guinea fee, surrendered all rights and died of typhoid five years later.
Blake, in rude contrast, became a phenomenon, thrilling Edwardian readers as he fought fiends, blackguards and everyday foes of Empire. In 1905, he leapt onto the pages of the Union Jack and then in 1915 earned his own title, the Sexton Blake Library.
Joined by Tinker, a bright-eyed, street-smart sidekick, Blake puzzled and punched his way through more than 4,000 adventures, said to be the work of some 200 writers, among them erstwhile lumberjacks and gold prospectors, one pseudonymous nobleman and at least two former members of British Intelligence. There were stage plays, radio serials and suitably square-jawed films.
Blake’s star would fade, eclipsed by tougher, randier post-war heroes such as James Bond (the 25th Bond movie, No Time to Die, is due out later this year).
The year 1957 brought a desperate, Chandleresque makeover, complete with swish new offices in Berkeley Square and leg-flashing dames on the covers. The Sexton Blake Library shuttered in 1963.
Once a household name with a wider readership than Sherlock Holmes, Sexton had survived steel spikes and boa constrictors but now faced the chillingly slow deathtrap of obscurity.
It’s rather a shame. There’s a rattling, breathless charm to these yarns, typed in haste by a tribe of hacks for no higher purpose than entertainment. With his hawk-like profile, ubiquitous pipe and doting landlady there’s no doubt he was only ever a writ away from Conan Doyle’s creation, but Blake was altogether more thrilling. Propelled by his Rolls-royce Silver Ghost or Moth monoplane, he raced from shadowy Limehouse alleyways to crumbling rural abbeys, the Alps to the Gobi, ever prepared to roll up his sleeves and punch wickedness in the chops.
And yes, Blake was, at heart, a bit of a blank, but his enemies were a gloriously rum bunch. There was Zenith the Albino, with his opium-dipped cigarettes and penchant for carving his initials into people’s faces with the business end of a sword-stick. Or the quite unkillable Waldo the Wonder Man, bulletproof and impervious to pain. And Dr Cagliostro, staging torture shows in an underground colosseum for millionaire sensationseekers. These rogues gave a distinctive spice to Blake’s adventures.
Unlike for Holmes, there would be no statue on Baker Street, no Hollywood blockbuster with a showboating performance by Robert Downey Jr.
But all is not lost. This April sees a series of reprints from Rebellion Publishing. As dear old Sexton himself once observed, ‘There is a nostalgia conjured from faraway places and moments which have long since ticked into the infinite fog.’