#sexton blake

[e--q]

Sexton Blake

(Handmade Soft Toy Stag inspired by Laurence Payne in his role as Sexton Blake in the now lost television series of the same name)

~ Remembering Laurence Payne ~

[mariocki]

Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (1938)

"Well! Bombs exploding, men falling dead, drugged cigars - what kind of place is this, I'd like to know? A gentleman's house or the chamber of horrors?"

[browsethestacksofficial]

Deadly Persuasion by Desmond Reid (1960)

Sexton Blake Library (No.476)

Original Art / Published Paperback

Art by James E. McConnell

Fleetway Publications

"With hate in their hearts and fear in their minds they started a violent and savage vendetta!"

[obsidian-sphere]

Detective Weekly: The Case of the Grey Envelope by George Norman Philips. Story features Zenith the Albino.

Apr 1940, reprint from a 1928 Union Jack story.

Art by Eric Parker

[kekwcomics]

THE RAIDERS OF ROBOT CITY (Amalgamated Press, 1937)

Murray Roberts was an alias of Robert Murray Graydon who also wrote a large number of Sexton Blake stories.

[all-action-all-picture]

Victor Drago and the Horror of the Mummy's Curse from Tornado. Art by Mike Dorey.

Rebellion.

[strictlyfavorites]

(STRFKR)

[maxwell-grant]

May I please ask if the Sexton Blake is a 20th Century heir to Sherlock Holmes? (I recall reading about him once, but am not quite clear on the details); ALSO - Might I please ask if you have any thoughts on G.E. Challenger, Conan Doyle's other Great Adventurer?

He very much was the other Great Detective following Holmes. Calling him a 20th Century heir is not entirely accurate because he debuted in 1893, but interestingly, Blake debuted in pretty much the exact same year as the publication of The Final Problem, the famous story where Arthur Conan Doyle tried destroying his arch-enemy Sherlock Holmes once and for all. The timelines line up almost exactly: Holmes gets “killed off” in 1893, Sexton Blake debuts the very same year, and Holmes only comes back in publication in 1901. 

Thing is though, while today he looks basically indistinguishable from Holmes, Blake was both Holmes’s successor as well as Holmes’s competition, the more popular counterpart in his time who didn’t get to endure as an icon in the long term. Like Nick Carter, Blake is one of those characters who kept changing over the years according to the changing audience tastes, and was extremely successful for a long time, but nowadays lacks much of a consistent identity because of it. For the first 20 or so years of his publication, he was mostly an imitation of 19th century detective characters, particularly Jules Gervaise in the early years, and Holmes. 

During this time period, Nick Carter and Sherlock Holmes were the most imitated detectives worldwide. I’ve read conflicting reports on which exactly was “The” most imitated, so I can’t state for certain, but I’d guess Nick Carter, because after Street & Smith canned Nick Carter Weekly, and WW1 put a stop to everyone’s schedules, the Great Detective who became most prominent worldwide after the war was Sexton Blake, because they turned him into the British Nick Carter. Intelligent and taciturn and detective-y enough to be like Holmes, but less misanthropic, less depressive and less professor-y, and much, much more defined by action and adventure and his varied fistcuffs with a rogues gallery of over-the-top supervillains. In fact, much like Dick Tracy, it’s those supervillains who seemed to have ultimately had the longer-lasting presence in pop culture.

Blake stayed the most imitated detective worldwide throughout the post-WW1 years, although nowadays it seems that the only place he retains anything resembling his former popularity is in Britain. Compared to Holmes’s 60 or so stories, Blake had 4,000 stories, written by about 200 authors. In the 1930s particularly, he was The Baker Street Detective. Although The Sexton Blake Library ran from 1915 to 1968, fans usually point to the 1919-1945 period as the Golden Age. 

His popularity died off in WW2 and they tried to keep him relevant in the following years by reverting to what the character was doing before, imitating others. They tried making him a Bond type in the 60s, and apparently some of the latest stories to feature the character compare him to Jack Reacher. But of course none of this panned out and nowadays the character stays completely obscure, mostly remembered nowadays because of the pop culture splash of Michael Moorecock's medieval Zenith fanfic. Fiction takes the strangest turns sometimes. 

Oh I LOVE Professor Challenger. I actually like him a lot more than Holmes, both in terms of the adventures he gets up to as well as his personality. The Lost World was one of the first books I read, dinosaur-maniac I was, and since I only read it for the dinosaurs I didn’t think much of Challenger other than he was an asshole, a big dumb brutish jerk who should stop bothering the dinosaurs I empathized with more. Nowadays when I read it, upon further consideration...he still is a big, dumb, smelly brute who should really stop poking his nose where it doesn’t belong, and I still want the dinosaurs to eat him most of the time, but man, what an asshole he is:

His appearance made me gasp. I was prepared for something strange, but not for so overpowering a personality as this. It was his size which took one’s breath away—his size and his imposing presence. His head was enormous, the largest I have ever seen upon a human being. I am sure that his top-hat, had I ever ventured to don it, would have slipped over me entirely and rested on my shoulders. He had the face and beard which I associate with an Assyrian bull; the former florid, the latter so black as almost to have a suspicion of blue, spade-shaped and rippling down over his chest. The hair was peculiar, plastered down in front in a long, curving wisp over his massive forehead. 

The eyes were blue-gray under great black tufts, very clear, very critical, and very masterful. A huge spread of shoulders and a chest like a barrel were the other parts of him which appeared above the table, save for two enormous hands covered with long black hair. This and a bellowing, roaring, rumbling voice made up my first impression of the notorious Professor Challenger.

He is a primitive cave-man in a lounge suit. I can see him with a club in one hand and a jagged bit of flint in the other. Some people are born out of their proper century, but he is born out of his millennium. He belongs to the early neolithic or thereabouts... It's the greatest brain in Europe, with a driving force behind it that can turn all his dreams into facts. They do all they can to hold him back, for his colleagues hate him like poison, but a lot of trawlers might as well try to hold back the Berengaria. He simply ignores them and steams on his way.

This is absolutely not the kind of character you create to be the protagonist or hero of your adventure novel, or what usually comes to mind when you think of a paleonthologist character. This is the kind of over-the-top cartoon villain who decides he’s gonna hang King Kong’s head above his fireplace just because, or bulldoze a forest full of cute talking animals to build a golf course in it, so he can cackle at their misfortune with a big flaming cheroot in his mouth. He is conceited, brash, obnoxious, loud, condescending, more ape than man at points, and also just happens to be an incredible genius, scientist and adventurer and ultimately heroic man who you have no choice but to listen to when on an adventure with.

Also he hates journalists to the point of attacking them on sight and once stabbed Earth hard enough for it to wake up, and he repeteadly brushes off encounters with things that, on other stories, would be mind-breaking revelations of eldritch terror, that he just doesn’t give a shit about because he’s Professor Challenger and he’s too big and stupid and smart and bold to let anything get in the way of adventure. 

He’s a perfect character and a perfect example of what makes pulp heroes stand out, as as much as I like Bob Hoskins, it’s a great crime to this world that Brian Blessed never got to play the character on a major adaptation (then again, he loves the book and character so much that he all but became a real life Professor Challenger, which is the kind of devotion we can all aspire to).