Arthur Morrison wrote some 24 stories featuring his charming, affable and calmly logical detective, Martin Hewitt, and his sometime assistant and confidant, the journalist Brett (I don’t think we ever learn his first name). Morrison collected the stories into four book-length volumes. This is the first volume, containing the first seven stories.
They solve at a flash the question I raised in my review of Tales of Mean Streets, which was whether Morrison’s use of elaborate facetiousness, garnished with Biblical locutions and ironically high-falutin’ turns of phrase, was unique to him or part of the wider style of the time.
Because it is completely absent from these detective stories, which are written in a much plainer, simpler, to-the-point style. So the answer appears to be that Morrison used his heavily jocose voice to deal only with his tales from the underworld. The over-elaborate phraseology was part of a strategy of irony – ranging from sarcasm to satire – which controlled and shaped his anger and disgust at his subject matter.
Here is an example of Morrison in underworld mode in an excerpt from his most notorious short story, Lizerunt. I’ve italicised the phrases which I’m talking about, which are facetious in their unnecessary grandiosity.
When Billy Chope married Lizerunt there was a small rejoicing. There was no wedding-party; because it was considered that what there might be to drink would be better in the family. Lizerunt’s father was not, and her mother felt no interest in the affair; not having seen her daughter for a year, and happening, at the time, to have a month’s engagement in respect of a drunk and disorderly. So that there were but three of them; and Billy Chope got exceedingly tipsy early in the day; and in the evening his bride bawled a continual chorus, while his mother, influenced by the unwonted quartern of gin the occasion sanctioned, wept dismally over her boy, who was much too far gone to resent it.
It’s the juxtaposition of would-be posh phraseology such as ‘a month’s engagement’ or ‘the occasion sanctioned’, with the chaotic reality of the drunken, shouting underclass, which creates the effect.
Whereas in the Martin Hewitt stories of decent chaps solving crimes among, on the whole, more decent chaps, the prose is… well, pretty clean and decent, thus:
Those who retain any memory of the great law cases of fifteen or twenty years back will remember, at least, the title of that extraordinary will case, ‘Bartley v. Bartley and others,’ which occupied the Probate Court for some weeks on end, and caused an amount of public interest rarely accorded to any but the cases considered in the other division of the same court. The case itself was noted for the large quantity of remarkable and unusual evidence presented by the plaintiff’s side – evidence that took the other party completely by surprise, and overthrew their case like a house of cards.
Clear and considered, isn’t it? More than that, it is suave and confident. It is upper-class English, the confidently long, well-balanced and well-arranged periods of the urbane professional class. The case ‘was noted for’, generated an interest ‘rarely accorded to…’ – this is the tone of a doctor or lawyer or scholar.
The narrator’s address to ‘those who retain any memory… etc’ evokes his imagined audience, a community of leisured professional men, readers of quality newspapers, followers of public affairs, and mature enough to have been following these affairs for fifteen or twenty years.
These are the opening two sentences of the very first Martin Hewitt story and they conjure up the entire moneyed, professional class within which the fictional detective operates, and for whom the stories are written. If ‘officialese’ is used to counterpoint and mock the grim affairs of the slum-dwellers in Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago, here it is used to stroke the rich, and accentuate their finer feelings and pukka decency.
For the clients and locations are (in general) posh, notably Sir James Norris (baronet) whose country house is the setting for The Lenton Croft Robberies, Sir Valentine Quinton, owner of ‘an old country establishment’, Radcot Hall, and a wealthy wife whose jewels are stolen in The Quinton Jewel Affair, Lord Stanways is the wronged owner of The Stanway Cameo, and so on.
And another quality they share with the Holmes stories is that the subject matter – the jewels or things stolen – are often the best in the world – the world-famous x, the renowned y, the famous affair of the z. They are eminent, which a) makes them shine out against the vast majority of police detective work which is, after all, usually among the poor and wretched – and b) has the flattering effect of making the reader feel eminent, too. As if we are all used to hob-nobbing with lords and ladies and top jewellers and art collectors and so on.
The stories offer the pleasure of flattering both the reader’s intelligence (if we can spot the culprit before Hewitt, and certainly before the slow and obtuse Brett) and social standing.
Martin Hewitt and Brett (Hewitt is clean shaven, on the left) illustrated by Sidney Paget
This volume contains:
- The Lenton Croft Robberies (published March 1894 in The Strand magazine)
- The Loss of Sammy Crockett (April 1894, The Strand)
- The Case of Mr Foggatt (May 1894, The Strand)
- The Case of the Dixon Torpedo (June 1894, The Strand)
- The Quinton Jewel Affair (July 1894, The Strand)
- The Stanway Cameo Mystery (July 1894, The Strand)
- The Affair of the Tortoise (September 1894, The Strand)
The stories
1. The Lenton Croft Robberies
Lenton Croft is the country seat (near Twyford) of Sir James Norris. Meeting Hewitt at the train station, Sir James outlines the case: three times in the last year, female guests have had valuable jewellery stolen from them. Each time the windows to the room in question were only slightly opened or closed altogether, or people were in a nearby room. Each time a spent match was found just where the jewellery went missing.
Martin is shown around the house in great detail, receives a precise account of each theft, asks questions about all the staff. He stops at the stables to chat to a servant with a dog, rather to Sir James’s impatience, then asks to see the rooms of the servants.
And solves the case. Sir James’s faithful secretary, Vernon Lloyd, keeps a pet parrot. He has trained it to keep quiet by keeping a spent match gripped in its mouth but, once introduced into a room – either through an only slightly-open window or, as on one occasion, hidden in the room when both windows and doors are closed – to find the nearest shiny thing, drop the match, nab the shiny, and wait for his master.
they confront Lloyd and he confesses.
2. The Loss of Sammy Crockett
The key to an important case is held by one ‘Gaffer’ Kentish, owner of the Hare and Hounds pub in the northern town of Padfield, where he is a trainer of athletes who run in the local competitive races. Hewitt travels there and puts up in the pub to get to know Kentish and try to get the facts he needs from him.
The task is made simpler when Kentish’s star runner, Sammy Crockett, goes missing, just before a championship race in which Kentish has bet lots of money. Some mystery is created by the discovery of scraps of paper near the place Crockett was last seen, and the fact that the trail left by his spiked running shoes stops dead yards from a fence, as if the man had flown up into the air – but Hewitt sees beyond these distractions to the heart of the matter, which is that Crockett has been kidnapped by a bookmaker rival of Kentish’s, named Danby, who also happens to be a property developer and has locked Crockett up in one of a little parade of shops he’s building in a new estate.
Hewitt and Kentish’s tough son break into the shop, punch the local tough guarding Crockett, take him back to Kentish’s pub where he is fed, rested, massaged and – proceeds to win the ‘Padfield Annual 135 Yards Handicap’. With the result that Kentish willingly gives Hewitt the information he needed to solve the other, more important case with which the story began.
3. The Case of Mr Foggatt
Brent explains Hewitt’s theory of ‘accumulative probabilities’ i.e. facts which are in themselves trivial can, if rare enough, gain importance as they increase in number. One odd circumstance means nothing: life is full of oddities. Two odd circumstances, combined, begin to suggest things. Three odd things begin to narrow down the range of possibilities, and so on. Thus the accumulation of evidence points you to the solution.
‘Trivialities, pointing in the same direction, became important considerations.’
‘A fat, middle-aged man, named Foggatt’ who has rooms in the same building off the Strand where Hewitt has his offices and Brett his apartment, is found shot dead. Hewitt and Brett had dined at the latter’s club and were enjoying a cigar in his rooms when – bang! They run upstairs and pry open the locked door with a poker. The body is there, by a gun with one shot fired, all the windows closed.
Seven or so weeks after the inquest, Hewitt invites Brett to dinner at Luzatti’s, off Coventry Street. He insists they sit at a particular table, in chairs opposite
a rather fine-looking fellow, with a dark, though very clear skin, but had a hard, angry look of eye, a prominence of cheek-bone, and a squareness of jaw that gave him a rather uninviting aspect.
Hewitt starts talking about bicycle racing and the young fellow can’t help being interested then joining in. When the young man calls for coffee, to Brett’s amazement, Hewitt reaches out and pinches the half-eaten apple off his plate. The man notices but says nothing and, moments later, makes his excuses and leaves.
Hewitt asks the amazed Brett if he can recall the contents of the dead man’s apartment when they broke in? Did he, for example, notice the half-eaten apple on the table? At the time Hewitt took a plaster cast of the teeth marks in the apple. Now he goes home and does the same to this apple. They are identical.
A few days later Hewitt receives a long letter from the young man who signs himself Sidney Mason, explaining that Foggatt ruined his family. A financial genius, he used Mason’s weak father as a front man for all his deals, until they went sour, at which point Mason’s father was sent to prison which he endured for three years, before killing himself. Thereafter Mason was brought up by his mother who struggled with poverty and shame and social stigma, but he never knew the name of the man who had ruined his family.
His father’s old colleagues and good luck helped him to a clerkship in a legal firm, where he more than once bumped into Foggatt without a clue who he was, each time the fat man betraying inexplicable signs of nerves. Finally Mason bumped into Foggatt in that very house, on an errand to someone else, but Foggatt was sweating and turned white. He invited young Mason to his rooms that evening and there, after offers of brandy and cigars, Foggatt offered him £500 to emigrate and start again, say, in South Africa and then began apologising about his father.
At which point the scales dropped from Mason’s eyes and he realised Foggatt was the wretch who blighted his family. So he grabbed the revolver off the mantelpiece and shot the man dead. Hearing steps on the stairs he locked the door on the inside, made for the window, stepped out onto the ledge and closed it, then reached out to a metal gutter just about within reach, pulled himself up and onto the roof and made his escape.
At his first inspection of the room Hewitt had instantly realised the only way of escape was by reaching over to the gutter and pulling yourself up – therefore he was looking for a tall, and very fit man. Several times he had seen Mason around in legal offices and that night at the restaurant, seeing him at a table, had taken a gamble, based on intuition, at engaging him in conversation.
This summary shows you how a Hewitt story follows the detective template – violent crime, apparently unsolveable because of lack of evidence, the canny detective sees evidence and links where nobody else does (the apple), revelation of the culprit’s motivation in a long and sentimental backstory.
But… It still has a big hole, namely the accident that Mason happened to work in the Law trade so that Hewitt saw him around legal offices – and the whopping coincidence that Mason happened to be in the restaurant the night Hewitt and Brett dine there.
4. The Case of the Dixon Torpedo
Morrison starts many of the stories with exactly the kind of general thoughts and reflections upon the nature of crime and detection with which the Holmes stories often begin. Here, there are a couple of paragraphs about the importance of accident and coincidence before we get on with the plot.
One fine day at 1.30, Hewitt has a visitor in his office.
A gaunt, worn-looking man of fifty or so, well, although rather carelessly, dressed, and carrying in his strong, though drawn, face and dullish eyes the look that characterizes the life-long strenuous brain-worker.
It is the inventor and engineer F. Graham Dixon comes to visit Hewitt on a matter of national importance. Dixon has designed a new, much more effective torpedo. Detailed plans of it were stolen from his office this morning. They were there in the drawer of his desk at 10am this morning. His office is locked. He has two assistants, Worsfold and Ritter, who he trusts. Only the postman came to deliver some letters. It is the usual fol-de-rol of highly detailed circumstances which make the theft, on the face of it, impossible and which are in fact designed to highlight the uncanny brilliance of the detective.
I suppose nobody ever did so much devastation in a photographic studio in ten minutes as I managed.
While they’re puzzling over it a ‘Mr Hunter’ arrives asking to meet with Dixon. It is the second time he’s called today, to discuss new technical innovations. His assistant puts the man off, who stalks off in a huff. Suddenly Hewitt is galvanised. To cut a long story short, he had seen ‘Hunter’ place his walking stick in the walking stick and umbrella stand, an odd thing for a casual visitor to do. Hewitt has Dixon get his men out of the way, and retrieves the stick. It turns out to be a hollow tube with a crew top. Inside are the missing plans.
Hewitt tells Dixon to call the more junior of his two assistants in. When faced with a direct accusation of guilt, the man breaks and confesses. Hewitt tells him to write a note to his confederate, ‘Mr Hunter’, telling him to meet him here at the offices, which will be empty, at 6pm.
This is a blind: Hewitt just wants the address, which is a shabby street in Westminster. He goes there, finds from the concierge that Mr Hunter is more generally known as ‘Mirsky’, goes up to his room, inveigles the man into the hall, then jumps into his room, slams and locks the door. Now he investigates at leisure and discovers a dark room set up in a corner and negatives drying of the famous torpedo plans. He exposes all the plates and gathers up all the negatives.
But he discovers something more which is photos of Russian bank notes. Mr Mirsky has been forging Russian roubles and Hewitt links this with recent police reports of forged roubles flooding Russia, allegedly from London. Here is the source. Through a window Mirsky sees Hewitt rummaging through his things and holding the fake rouble prints, a look of terror on his face. He scarpers.
Hewitt returns to Dixon’s office, hands over the negatives, and says it’s up to Dixon what he wants to do with the wretched assistant.
The plan had been simple. After bribing the assistant, Ritter, to take part, Mirsky had observed his walking stick and had a facsimile made with a hollow tube. Ritter had come to work with the fake stick. He had taken the first opportunity to screw the plans up tight and slip them into the fake stick and place it in the stand. Hunter had arrived, placed his stick in the stand, made a fuss about an appointment, then retrieved the hollow stick containing the plans, gone back to his rooms and made the photographs. Then replaced the plans in the hollow stick, returned to Dixon’s offices, made another fuss and switched the sticks again, leaving the hollow one, for Ritter to find a moment to extract the plans from, replace where they should be, all good. They thought the plans would be absent for just a few hours and no-one would notice.
Dixon foiled the plan by asking to see the plans first thing.
Hewitt’s detective work really boils down to noticing Mr ‘Hunter’ put his stick in the stand. The rest follows from that.
The addition of the fact that Hunter-Mirsky was mass producing faked roubles doesn’t really contribute to the solution of the torpedo blueprints. It happens side by side but doesn’t affect the case or its solution. It appears to be clever but (I may be being rather dim about this) I don’t think makes any material contribution to the case.
I’m probably drawing too big a conclusion on the basis of slender evidence, but it seems that it’s a characteristic Hewitt moment in that it gives the appearance of complexity and cleverness, without the substance.
5. The Quinton Jewel Affair
As usual a few preliminary remarks, this time to the effect that Hewitt keeps surprisingly up to date with the ever-changing slang of the criminal underworld, and especially Romany language of gypsies.
Sir Valentine Quinton lives in Radcot Hall with his wealthy wife, who owns a collection of rare jewellery including the famous ruby sent to this country to be sold by the King of Burma, set in gold and bought by Lady Quinton. One fine evening it is all stolen by a true professional.
A week later Hewitt and Brett are just stepping into his offices near the Strand, when they are accosted by an irate Irishman. He’s just been pointed towards Hewitt by a passing copper. The Irishman proceeds to let loose a long, complex tale in a transcription of Irish dialect.
‘Well, I got along to me room, sick an’ sorry enough, an’ doubtsome whether I might get in wid no key. But there was the key in the open door, an’, by this an’ that, all the shtuff in the room – chair, table, bed, an’ all – was shtandin’ on their heads twisty-ways, an’ the bedclothes an’ every thin’ else; such a disgraceful stramash av conglomerated thruck as ye niver dhreamt av. The chist av drawers was lyin’ on uts face, wid all the dhrawers out an’ emptied on the flure. ‘Twas as though an arrmy had been lootin’, sor!’
Whereas I was fairly confident that Morrison caught the accent of working class Londoners in his slum stories, I’ve no idea how much his transcription of Irish peasant speech is accurate or not, but it certainly dominates the first half of the tale.
The gist of the story is that he was on the train from the West, where he’d just arrived from rural Ireland. When the train didn’t stop at a particular station the stranger sitting opposite him said, ‘Drat’, he’d wanted to get out at that stop, and asked Leamy to take the heavy sealed bag he gave him to a certain address in London while he, the speaker, got the first train back to the missed stop.
Leamy dutifully takes the bag to the requested address and hands it over to a fellow named Mr Hollams, was paid for his troubles, then set off to find some lodgings in the big, bad city. And what’s happened since is that he’s been accosted and assaulted every day since – mugged in the street, drugged in a pub, pushed under an underground train (which he survived unscathed) only to find the doctor who attends him going through his pockets and, finally, having his apartment comprehensively turned over.
Now, this reader confidently deduces that the man who gave Leamy the bag was the thief who stole Lady Quinton’s jewellery. And the man Leamy gave the bag to, was the head of the gang. And the fact that he’s been mugged and searched every day since suggests something was missing – the famous ruby! And if it was not in the bag then the original thief must have kept it.
Hewitt and Brett stroll round to the address of this Mr Hollams only to come upon a fight. A figure with a half-torn coat is struggling up the steps from the area, with two others hanging on to him, one brandishing a revolver. As soon as they’re in the street the two antagonists desist and Mr Torn-Coat makes off.
Hewitt recognises him as Sim Wilks, a well-known burglar. They follow him along Buckingham Palace Road where Hewitt amazes Brett by suddenly adopting the posture and speech of a successful rowdy. He claps Sim on the back, insists he knows him, drags him into a pub for a few beers and insists on lending him a few quid since he’s just carried off a good job and is rolling in swag.
It is this scene which justifies Brett’s opening paragraph about Hewitt’s familiarity with thieves’ slang, because he liberally uses it in buttering up a very suspicious Wilks and the text has copious footnotes telling us that ‘cady’ means hat, ‘touch’ means robbery and ‘cannon’ means drunk. During this swaggering drunken piece of acting, Hewitt tips Wilks the nod that the gang at 8 Gold Street (where we’ve just observed Wilks being manhandled by his boss, Hollam) is about to be raided by the coppers. Is that so? says Wilks musingly. Then pleads another engagement and leaves.
The general idea is that Hewitt has planted the notion that Hollam is about to be arrested, so that it’ll be safe to go and get the ruby from the hiding place where he put it after the robbery. There then follows a sort of tense sequence where Hewitt and Brett follow Wilks to Euston, catch the same train as him, get off at the same station, follow him along winding country lanes at a distance and then catch him red-handed in a church graveyard, removing the ruby from its hiding place behind the brick of a table tomb.
Wilks is arrested for theft, Hollam for receiving stolen goods, Lady Quinton has her jewellery restored, and Michael Leamy gets a respectable job as a doorman ‘guarding the door of a well-known London restaurant’.
Reviewing the logical content of the story you see that the crime was virtually solved as soon as Leamy was pointed towards Hewitt and told his story, particularly once he’d named Hollam as the fence. The solution entirely depended, then, on the Irishman happening to have come across Hewitt’s name and deciding to contact him.
The flim-flam about Hewitt’s competence with criminal slang bears some relation to his ability to speak to Wilks in his own argot, but our heroes could quite simply have followed Wilks to the ruby’s hiding place with much the same result. It feels more as if the idea of dialects – Leamy’s Irish and Wilk’s criminal – colours the story, rather than drives or explains it.
6. The Stanway Cameo Mystery
The ‘famous’ Stanway cameo is discovered by one of the fleet of travelling agents who scour Italy for precious relics, and sold on to the eminent art dealer, Mr. Claridge of St. James Street. He sells it to the Marquis of Stanway for five thousand pounds, the Marquis intending to donate such a rare piece to the British Museum. The piece is kept at Claridge’s for cleaning.
One morning Claridge goes into his office to find it gone. The trapdoor to the roof has been forced and the door into his inner room also forced open by a jemmy or crowbar. A few rooftops away the luxury bag which contained it is discovered by the police. Claridge immediately reimburses Lord Stanway the £5,000 he paid for the piece.
Puzzled, Lord Stanway strolls round to Hewitt’s chambers and hires him to solve the crime. Hewitt goes through the motions, studies the layout of Claridge’s offices, interviews his staff, gets Claridge to describe his precise movements the evening before the crime, and so on. A great deal is made of a Mr Woollett, a jealous rival collector, who has rooms whose windows overlook Claridge’s offices. This seems too obviously a red herring, even to a non-detective story reader, like myself.
Long story short, Hewitt has almost immediately realised that Claridge destroyed the cameo himself and faked the burglary. Every detail of the way the trap door and office door were forced rings fake. Crucially there are spots of rain on a dusty old hat on a peg beneath the trapdoor. It had spitted a bit when Claridge was in the office at the end of the day, but was otherwise a fine clear night. Ergo, whoever ‘forced’ the trapdoor did it during the early evening when Claridge was still there. Ergo Claridge did it himself.
Confronted point blank by Hewitt Claridge breaks down and confesses. His motive was that, upon cleaning the cameo, he realised it was one of the best fakes ever made. But if this fact ever got out his reputation as a dealer would be ruined, the value of all his existing stock plummet, he would lose all his clients. He’d spent a long afternoon pondering all the possible consequences (which he explains in detail to Hewitt and the reader) before opting to fake a burglary and dispose of the cameo.
This option, although expensive, got him off the hook and preserved his reputation. Hewitt sits back, points out the flaws in his procedure and lets things stand. No crime has been committed. Nobody is out of pocket except Claridge himself. He’ll let the police do their best and if they find nothing further – so be it.
7. The Affair of the Tortoise
Two characters live in a row of new buildings near the National Gallery. One, a Mr Rameau, is a big, loud, colourful black man, often drunk and argumentative. He drinks, shouts, parties, slides down the bannisters and intimidates the other inhabitants. The other is a small Frenchman Victor Goujon, once a skilled watchmaker who hurt his hand and has fallen on bad times. Rameau intimidates and taunts Goujon. Goujon has a pet tortoise. Rameau plays with it and one day throws it against a wall so hard he cracks the shell. Goujon goes mad with anger and vows to kill the big man.
Goujon gets a job back in France, packs his bags and leaves. Later the same day Rameau is found dead by the maid, with a hatchet wound in his head and a piece of paper on his chest on which is scrawled puni par un vengeur de la tortue – ‘Punished by an avenger of the tortoise.’
The maid goes to fetch the landlord but when they return – the body has gone!!!!
Everyone assumes the culprit was angry little Goujon but Hewitt sets about dismantling this hypothesis, not least by comparing the ragged scrawl the death note is written in with an example of Goujon’s small precise handwriting which has been found by the police. Also, Goujon is too slight to have carried a big dead man anywhere.
Long story short, they’ve all misunderstood the note. La Tortue is the French name of an island off the north coast of Haiti. Rameau is a member of the brutal, corrupt family which ruled Haiti under the psychotic President Domingue. Domingue’s political opponents took shelter on La Tortue where Domingue’s forces tracked them down and all but exterminated them. Then there was a revolution in which Domingue was overthrown. Our victim, César Rameau, was brother to Domingue’s nephew and Chief Minister, Septimus Rameau.
After the coup, he fled to England where he took rooms in a modest house but carried on the brutish behaviour of a member of a corrupt ruling family. One day he was attacked by one of his enemies who, from the message, had survived the La Tortue massacre and devoted his life to tracking him down.
Where did the body go? Hewitt laughs as he presents Inspector Netting with the murderer and remover of the body of César Rameau – César Rameau himself! Yes, he was never killed but stunned!! He awoke after the maid had gone to fetch the landlord, and made his escape down one of the dumb waiters which served the tall narrow house, hid out in a nearby empty house, then, wrapped in a dark coat, got a cabman to drive him to a safe house.
Hewitt had gone out and chatted to the cabmen waiting outside the house, discovered one who had given a ride the night before to a big man wrapped in a dark coat and nursing his arm, and followed the route to discover Rameau terrified and in hiding.
The police never find the attacker. Rameau is now keen to get out of England. Little Goujon who the police had arrested on his way to the coast sues for wrongful arrest. All is settled.
N.B. Racism
This story is a gold mine for researchers investigating the myths and stereotypes surrounding black people in 1890s England, and it would be easy to get worked up by Morrison’s ‘racism’ and use of ‘racist stereotypes’, such as that this black man is loud, aggressive and likes wearing colourful clothing. To be precise:
He got uproariously drunk, and screamed and howled in unknown tongues. He fell asleep on the staircase, and ladies were afraid to pass. He bawled rough chaff down the stairs and along the corridors at butcher-boys and messengers, and played on errand-boys brutal practical jokes that ended in police-court summonses. He once had a way of sliding down the balusters, shouting: ‘Ho! ho! ho! yah!’ as he went, but as he was a big, heavy man, and the balusters had been built for different treatment, he had very soon and very firmly been requested to stop it. He had plenty of money, and spent it freely; but it was generally felt that there was too much of the light-hearted savage about him to fit him to live among quiet people.
Well, there’s a whole world of outrage to be mined from the story, if that’s what you like, and anybody who objects to use of the n-word will have a nervous breakdown and might throw away the book in disgust, especially when the inspector and Hewitt agree that black people have abnormally thick skulls – which explains why Rameau survived a blow to the head with an axe!
But what struck me was that, despite the negative characterisation of Rameau, both the police, inspector Netting, Hewitt and the narrator, Brett, all take it for granted that the case is worth investigating. That Rameau’s life was worth the life of any other person in the UK. In fact, his life is worth more than the lives of the poverty-stricken babies and children of the Jago who Morrison was writing about at the same time. They die like rats and no-one laments them. Rameau is given more importance than them.
And then, as the case unfolds, your initial outrage is tempered as you realise that it isn’t a generic description of black men – it is a description of a very particular type, namely the spoilt, violent, untouchable member of the ruling family of a black dictatorship, used to throwing his weight around and intimidating everyone around him, with no consequences. He is the forebear of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier who exerted a reign of terror over Haiti enforced by the terrifying Tontons Macoutes from 1957 to 1986.
It isn’t a generic racist stereotype. It is a specific portrait of a particular kind of person.
It’s fascinating to learn that Haiti had enough of a reputation for violence and corruption as far back as 1894 to be thought a suitable location for the backstory to a popular detective story. This is Hewitt explaining Haiti to Inspector Netting (and the reader):
‘The biggest island of the lot on this map, barring Cuba, is Hayti. You know as well as I do that the western part of that island is peopled by the black republic of Hayti, and that the country is in a degenerate state of almost unexampled savagery, with a ridiculous show of civilization. There are revolutions all the time; the South American republics are peaceful and prosperous compared to Hayti. The state of the country is simply awful – read Sir Spenser St. John’s book on it. President after president of the vilest sort forces his way to power and commits the most horrible and bloodthirsty excesses, murdering his opponents by the hundred and seizing their property for himself and his satellites, who are usually as bad, if not worse, than the president himself. Whole families – men, women, and children – are murdered at the instance of these ruffians, and, as a consequence, the most deadly feuds spring up, and the presidents and their followers are always themselves in danger of reprisals from others.
Compare the continuity of the country’s terrible political culture through to nearly a century later.
Thousands of Haitians were killed or tortured, and hundreds of thousands fled the country during [Baby Doc’s] presidency. He maintained a notoriously lavish lifestyle (including a state-sponsored US$ 3 million wedding in 1980) while poverty among his people remained the most widespread of any country in the Western Hemisphere. (Wikipedia article about Jean-Claude Duvalier)
Thoughts about Martin Hewitt
Well, the obvious result of reading these seven stories is to make you appreciate the style and panache of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Morrison has come up with plausible enough crimes and obfuscates and confuses them enough to give his detective (and the reader) pleasurable mazes of puzzles and red herrings to work through in trying to solve the crimes.
From Conan Doyle, Morrison has copied:
- the idea of the dim sidekick and amanuensis
- the idea that each story begins with a preliminary explanation of this or that other aspect of Hewitt’s character and technique
- the idea that the ordinary detectives from Scotland Yard (named in the stories as Inspector Netting and Inspector Plummer) are decent chaps who just lack Hewitt’s brilliant insight (‘Well, Mr. Hewitt,’ Nettings said, ‘this case has certainly been a shocking beating for me. I must have been as blind as a bat when I started on it.’)
- the rhetorical tricks which Conan Doyle’s uses to boost his fictional character, repeating phrases like ‘this case was the most famous of the eminent detectives many successes’ or, in the case of the Stanway Cameo, that it was always held against the great detective that no culprit was ever found (although we, the readers, know the real reason for this)
- the notion that there is a vast casebook of stories which Brett could be telling, and that he selects this or that case an example of this or that quality in Hewitt’s character or working practice
In other words, he copies Sherlock Holmes to death.
But all this copying tends to highlight the way that the Holmes stories are, in a sense, only the backdrop against which is set the world-straddling character of the detective himself – lean and aquiline, unexpectedly violent when he needs to be, otherwise playing his out-of-tune violin while a little high on cocaine and complaining that crime these days is so boring, there’s nothing to challenge his great intellect – in every way Holmes is a complex and compelling character.
Compared to this colourful creation, Martin Hewitt (even the name is bland and boring) is made of cardboard, and the narrator of the stories, Brett, is little more than a cipher.
Books & Boots 