Sexton Blake: The Answers Casebook

Synopsis:
“If you approached the problem in the same spirit as you would tackle a sum in arithmetic, the answer would suggest itself at once. You have only to exclude all those factors which fail to satisfy the conditions, and what remains, however improbable it may sound, is bound to be the true solution.” ~Sexton Blake, The Black Cat

Who is British fiction’s greatest-ever consulting detective? By fame alone many would probably answer Sherlock Holmes. By number of cases solved: Sexton Blake.

“The prince of the penny dreadfuls”, “the office boys’ Sherlock Holmes,” “the Edwardian James Bond”. For most of the 20th century, his name was known the length and breadth of Great Britain, the British Empire and around the world. Blake was a publishing phenomenon. He appeared in penny dreadfuls, story papers, dime novels, novels, comic books, plays, radio shows, television shows and movies.

Over his long career, Sexton Blake went through several distinct phases. He began his career partnered with an older, wiser French detective named Jules Gervaise. The pair solved a couple of cases together, then Gervaise retired and Blake began to work on his own. In the early 1890s Blake was modelled on the typical detective characters of the 19th century Victorian era. Then, for the next fifteen years or so, he was heavily influenced by Sherlock Holmes, though much more action-oriented and well-travelled. From 1919 to 1945, Blake’s Golden Age, the action intensified and Blake went through his ‘Indiana Jones meets Batman phase.’ In the post-war era, Blake was revamped for the nuclear age and became more like James Bond with dashes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler thrown in for good measure.

This Sexton Blake anthology is a collection of 75 tales from Blake’s ‘Sherlock Holmes phase’, originally published in Answers Weekly. The run of short stories began in 1908 with A Confidential Report and came to an end in 1911 with After Business Hours, comprising 154 tales in total. In each, Blake works alone to solve a singular mystery. The first 32 tales in the series, published in 1908 and 1909, were written by Maxwell Scott, the creator of the detective Nelson Lee. The others were written by various popular Blake authors of the era including Andrew Murray, Michael Storm, Norman Goddard and others. About half of the tales in this collection have been made available for Kindle for the very first time. The collection includes:

1908
A Confidential Report
The Silver Candlestick
My Lord the Baby
Who Stole the Cup? (First Kindle Edition)
The Diamond Star (First Kindle Edition)
The Midnight Operation
The Man from York (First Kindle Edition)
O.H.M.S (On His Majesty’s Service)
The Tattooed Eye
The Mummer’s Wife (First Kindle Edition)
A Knotty Problem
Mrs. Lambert’s Lodger
A Slip of the Pen

1909
A Modern Alchemist
An Artificial Clue
The King’s Diamond
The Morehampton Mystery First Kindle Edition)
The House on the Cliff
The Ancient Monk
The Black Cat
An Old Man’s Darling
The Blue Line
The Plaster Saint
The Tiger’s Eye
The Amateur Burglar
The Empty Tin
“Py Ponk”
The Silver Lock (First Kindle Edition)
The Golden One
The Young Earl
The White Mouse
No Robbery
The Case of Mr. Seymour
A Holiday Task
The Marked Hand (First Kindle Edition)
For Safe Deposit
The Man in the Blue Blouse (First Kindle Edition)
The Barton Tunnel Mystery
The Adventure of the Coffee-Pot
Mystery of the Empty Nutshells (First Kindle Edition)
The Black Pearl of Bahrein
The Black Diamond
The Sloane Street Affair (First Kindle Edition)
The Leather-Handled Parasol (First Kindle Edition)
The Tortoiseshell Comb (First Kindle Edition)
The Grosvenor Square Mystery
The Broken Wicket-Gate
The Old Print Mystery (First Kindle Edition)
The Missing Will

1910
The Strange Case of the Millionaire (First Kindle Edition)
The Broken Type Key (First Kindle Edition)
A Back-Room Mystery
The Chilworth Emerald
The Great Auk’s Egg Affair (First Kindle Edition)
The Lucky Pig Case (First Kindle Edition)
The Recipe for Rubber (First Kindle Edition)
The Gold Tooth (First Kindle Edition)
The Incubator (First Kindle Edition)
The Parrot and the Pearls (First Kindle Edition)
The Rug Box Mystery (First Kindle Edition)
In Gaolbirds’ Feathers (First Kindle Edition)
Poker Work
The Stain on the Sill (First Kindle Edition)
The Mallingworth Mystery

1911
The Cigarette (First Kindle Edition)
The Clue of the Ash (First Kindle Edition)
The Junior Partner’s Deal(First Kindle Edition)
The Tower of Diamonds (First Kindle Edition)
Contraband of War (First Kindle Edition)
The Mystery of the Sandalwood Box (First Kindle Edition)
The Three Detectives (First Kindle Edition)
The Poisoned Peer (First Kindle Edition)
The Greenhouse at Hampstead (First Kindle Edition)
The Case of Miss Clayford (First Kindle Edition)
After Business Hours