‘I may as well tell you that I’m a bit of a scoundrel myself, by way of profession. I don’t boast about it, but it’s well to be frank in making arrangements of this sort…’ (Horace Dorrington describing himself)

According to Wikipedia,

In contrast to Morrison’s earlier character Martin Hewitt, who one critic described as a ‘low-key, realistic, lower-class answer to Sherlock Holmes’, Dorrington was ‘a respected but deeply corrupt private detective,’ ‘a cheerfully unrepentant sociopath who is willing to stoop to theft, blackmail, fraud or cold-blooded murder to make a dishonest penny.’

Sounds like an interesting guy. Morrison wrote half a dozen short stories about his amoral detective and collected them into a volume titled The Dorrington Deed-Box. It contains:

1. The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby
2. The Case of Janissary
3. The Case of the ‘Mirror of Portugal’
4. The Affair of the ‘Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co., Limited’
5. The Case of Mr. Loftus Deacon
6. Old Cater’s Money

The stories

1. The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby

Gripping first-person memoir of James Rigby, born and raised in Australia who came on a visit to Europe with his mum and dad when he was young. They visited Italy where his dad hired a local guide who, once they were all up in the mountains, turned on him with a knife, planning to rob him. Rigby senior happened to have a gun on him which he pulled out and shot the brigand dead.

But over the next few days, as he deals with consuls and local police, several attempts are made on his life by the dead man’s relatives. Turns out the guide was a member of the infamous ‘Camorra’, who will stop at nothing to avenge him.

So Rigby’s family move on to London, where they stay in a posh, supposedly secure hotel. But they still have the feeling they’re being watched and one morning discover a little circle of paper with a logo of crossed knives attached to their door. Within days, Mr Rigby senior is stabbed to death in an alleyway. James and his mother return to Australia where he grows up, inheriting the land his father had shrewdly invested in. James wants to be an artist and, at length, realises he has to come back to Europe to study.

On the boat he gets chatting to a fantastically easy, charming, witty man, Horace Dorrington, who tells young James that he and his partner are private detectives who’ve had much experience with the Camorra and know how to handle them.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve no particular desire to have it known all over the ship, but I don’t mind telling you – you’d find it out probably before long if you settle in the old country – that we are what is called private inquiry agents – detectives – secret service men – whatever you like to call it.’

Dorrington persuades Rigby to skip docking at London and instead to travel directly from the ship’s first port of call, Plymouth, up to Scotland for the opening of the grouse season to be his guest. Rigby does this and is impressed by the man’s house and land and by Dorrington’s confident hosting of the young man. But one morning Dorrington is regrettably called back to London. He advises Rigby to go to London himself, but to take the opportunity to visit some old picturesque English towns along the way, that might inspire his art, such as Chester and Warwick.

Rigby does this but then, in each of the towns he visits, finds himself being followed. Shuffling footsteps follow him everywhere, in Chester, in Warwick, as he explores the old towns, no matter which way he turns, in sequences which begin to have some of the supernatural thrill of an Edgar Allen Poe story.

He is terrified when a dark face with a mop of black hair and ear-rings appears for a moment at his hotel window. Rigby’s conviction that he’s being followed crystallises when he finds a little paper circle with the crossed-knives logo of the Camorra pinned to his hotel door, packs his bags, and hastens to London.

Rigby turns and chases the source of the shuffling footsteps, but cannot find them

Here Rigby goes to Dorrington’s office, meets his rather withered assistant Hicks, tells Dorrington he’s being followed, and submits to Dorrington’s plan. Dorrington will take him to a safe house in Hampstead where he can lie low. Meanwhile Dorrington will assume Rigby’s identity and try to draw the assassins out into the open. Rigby gives Dorrington the letters from his London lawyer, Mowbray, as well as the deeds to his extensive landholdings in Australia, for safekeeping, and Dorrington bids goodbye.

(Incidentally, Dorrington’s offices are given as being in Bedford Street, Covent Garden – which still exists. They cannot, therefore, be very far from the offices of Morrison’s ‘good’ detective, Martin Hewitt, who has chambers ‘in a street by the Strand’. Chalk and cheese, living and working cheek by jowl.)

Once settled in at the ‘safe house’, Rigby is presented with a fine lunch prepared by the landlady, one Mrs Crofting. Next thing he knows he’s waking, awfully groggy, in the pitch-darkness, wet, lying in six inches of water! When he tries to stand up hits his head on a metal roof. He is inside a water cistern with water gushing in from two inlets in the top. He has been drugged, placed here and is going to drown!!!

Panic-stricken, Rigby tries to block up the inlets, then starts hammering at the metal sides and yelling his head off. This scene again reminded me of the genuine claustrophobia and horror generated by the best of Edgar Allen Poe’s horror stories. To Rigby’s immense relief the roof of the cistern suddenly slides off to reveal a grubby London workman looking down at him in amazement. He’d been working in the attic of the neighbouring house, heard all the commotion and come to investigate.

After receiving reviving spirits and reassurance with the neighbours, Rigby goes straight to the police who confirm that ‘Mrs Crofting’ has flown the coop, and so have Dorrington and Hicks. The entire thing appears to have been an elaborate hoax devised by Dorrington, as soon as Rigby let slip, in the middle of his story to him on the boat, that he owned land and money in Australia, a lot of land and money, worth millions.

Dorrington immediately conceived the plan to murder Rigby for the money. He wired to his assistant to rent a property in Scotland for the grouse shooting (designed to stop Rigby going to London and contacting his lawyer), then invented the excuse of having to dash back to London. It was Dorrington’s assistant who dressed up in Italian costume and followed Rigby in the shadows of Chester and Warwick. All the time Dorrington cannily preventing Rigby from meeting his London lawyer, Mowbray because he, Dorrington, intended to pass himself off as Rigby to the lawyer, to present all the letters and deeds, cash everything in as if he were Rigby, and walk away a multi-millionaire.

Wow! What a ripping yarn!

But as the story draws to a close, with Dorrington and all his accomplices disappeared – the police break into Dorrington’s offices and find – paperwork relating to numerous other criminal cases.

The business of Dorrington and Hicks had really been that of private inquiry agents, and they had done much bonâ fide business; but many of their operations had been of a more than questionable sort. And among their papers were found complete sets, neatly arranged in dockets, each containing in skeleton a complete history of a case. Many of these cases were of a most interesting character, and I have been enabled to piece together, out of the material thus supplied, the narratives which will follow this.

And these provide the basis for the rest of the stories in the volume. Hence the title of ‘Dorrington’s Deed Box’. These are the stories taken from ‘Dorrington’s Deed Box’.

2. The Case of Janissary

So this is the first of the ‘reconstructed’ Dorrington cases.

The extremely paranoid racehorse owner, Mr Telfer, contacts Dorrington because he suspects someone is trying to nobble his prize racehorse, Janissary, ahead of a big race, The Redfern Stakes. It might be his nephew, Richard, with whom he had a massive falling out a few weeks before, and has been seen around the stables slipping grooms sums of cash – or a big bloke with a red beard, also seen loitering.

Dorrington lodges in the nearby town of Redfern, at the local pub, During a riotous evening of drinking he befriends nephew Richard and also the leading horsetrainer stacked against Telfer, a Mr Bob Naylor.

Having identified Naylor’s room, Dorrington uses his nefarious skills to break into the room and rifle through a locked box. Here he finds a fake beard and a box containing powders and a syringe. Aha. So Naylor is up to something.

Dorrington returns to the boisterous bar where he befriends Naylor over a few more beers and tells him, casually, that he’s seen the favourite, Janissary, being walked every day at two pm, by a rather dim stable boy.

Dorrington goes back to Telfer, explains that the red-haired man is Naylor and his decoy story of the 2 o’clock walking. Now it just so happens that Telfer owns a horse which looks remarkably like Janissary but is a poor racer. So next day at 2 o’clock, Telfer and Dorrington hide in the stables with a view of the walking ground and watch a stable boy walking this inferior horse, well wrapped up in covers so as to be indistinguishable from the favourite.

Up comes the red-bearded man, chats a bit with the stable boy and goes to stroke the horse under the cover – which suddenly rears and whinnies. The red-bearded man backs off, apologises and walks on. So. Dorrington and Telfer both saw him inject something into the poor horse, which by the time it’s returned to its stall, is already shivering and weak.

The red-bearded man backs off after the horse he’s surreptitiously injected rears up

Overnight the betting against Janissary is big, which is why there are many appalled faces when Janissary finishes an easy first and Telfer cleans up on the betting. Telfer congratulates Dorrington, pays him his fee, and the latter returns to London.

The narrator explains that Naylor is pretty much cleaned out, but still owes the single biggest payout to Telfer’s nephew, Richard. We watch Naylor paying out his customers at his London club, then meeting Richard and telling him he’s temporarily out of cash, and to come round to his house in Gold Street, Chelsea that evening.

Outside the club Richard bumps into Dorrington, who he already knows as a fellow drinker from the Crown pub in Redbury, and who chaffs him about how heavy his pockets must be with winnings. ‘Not yet,’ replies Richard. ‘I’m meeting Bob Naylor tonight to collect them.’ ‘Really?’ thinks Dorrington. He vows to loiter around Naylor’s house and see what develops.

From the pub across the road, Dorrington sees a skinny lady setting up a step-ladder in the house’s top room. Suddenly the penny drops. Dorrington puts on some shoe-silencers, silently breaks into the house’s cellar, and sneaks up to that top room.

He hasn’t too long to wait before Richard arrives. He hears greetings and good fellowship on the ground floor, drinks and food and then the making of a cup of coffee (aha, the same kind of drugged coffee – the reader realises – as was used to drug Rigby in the opening story). Sure enough, we soon hear the bump of Richard falling off his chair and then the sound of two people manhandling an unconscious body upstairs.

They back into the top room to find … Dorrington waiting for them with a revolver! He explains that he understands their scam. They were going to drown Richard in the cistern then throw his body into the Thames. Except that now they aren’t. Now they are going to dump Richard anywhere, Dorrington doesn’t care where, because Naylor is going to pay up whatever he owes, because he is now going to retire from betting, and enter Dorrington’s employ as a full-time ‘disposer of bodies’.

Now we realise the significance of the newspaper cutting Rigby had quoted at the start of the story, an account of a dead man brought out of the Thames, with an empty pocket book and some bruising, suggesting manhandling.

Dorrington had read this, too, and, putting two and two together, had guessed the drowned man had been drowned by the Naylors using the cistern technique. He had caught them in the act preparing to do the same to another inconvenient creditor – Richard. And with that knowledge he blackmails them into becoming his assistants and disposers of bodies.

Having read the full ‘case’, Rigby is left to bleakly wonder how many others met a horrible watery death this way, before he was lucky enough to break out of the cistern (in the first story), sound the alarm, and break up the gang for good.

3. The Case of the ‘Mirror of Portugal’

The ‘Mirror of Portugal’ is, as so often in these 1890s detective stories, a jewel of unimaginable beauty, perfection and price. The narrator tells the traditional cock-and-bull story about its passage through the hands of the Portuguese royal family, into the English royal family, then onto the French royal family and then on into the hands of French revolutionaries of 1789, one of whom was the great-grandfather of the Léon Bouvier who keeps a little café in Soho, after his father was shot during the Franco-Prussian War.

Dorrington is approached by Léon’s cousin, Jacques Bouvier, who was working at a charcoal works in France until he came over to get a job with his cousin in his Soho café. Here he’s discovered Léon’s big secret. That he keeps a massive diamond in a small box under his armpit. Jacques thinks that, as a poor relation, he is entitled to a share of its value.

Dorrington dismisses Jacques, but then strolls round to the Soho café to poke around for himself. He arrives just after some kind of scuffle has taken place, and discovering someone running at top speed from the muddy alley where the café is located. Dorrington follows this runner who, a bit oddly from the reader’s point of view, runs all the way to Dorrington’s own offices in Covent Garden. Dorrington arrives soon after him to discover that it is none other than Léon – who has been mugged.

Léon now takes Dorrington back to the Soho alleyway, where Dorrington pokes around and easily finds shards of glass from a shattered bottle which, judging by the smell of the cork, once contained choloroform.

Someone must have crept up behind Léon, put a knee in his back and a chloroformed cloth over his face, waited till he passed out, cut the straps holding the box with the diamond in place under his armpit, then legged it. Léon is furiously certain that it is his jealous cousin, Jacques, but Dorrington is not so sure.

Because among the many complaints about his cousin that he made on his visit to Dorrington’s office, Jacques had mentioned that Léon had recently started frequenting Hatton Gardens and had been toying with the idea of buying and selling diamonds in a small way, trying to get to know the trade before cashing in his own monster diamond. He had got as far as renting some office or shop space off a certain Mr Ludwig Hamer. Aha.

Next morning Dorrington pays Mr Hamer a visit and, noticing the array of medicine bottles on the shelves of his office, calmly confronts Hamer with the accusation that it was he who mugged Bouvier the night before. Hamer denies it but Dorrington produces the bottle, identical to some on Hamer’s shelves, reveals that he saw the footprints of a woman’s narrow-heeled shoe, probably of Hamer’s wife, who kept watch while Hamer did the deed.

There’s a policeman outside. Dorrington sarcastically asks Hamer whether he should call the copper in and present him with all the evidence that Hamer is a crook? With bad grace Hamer admits it all, and says the jewel is at home with his wife who, he warns, has a furious temper.

Dorrington hails and cab and takes Hamer to the latter’s house in Pimlico. Here Dorrington confronts feisty little Mrs Hamer with the evidence. She is furious with her husband for not overcoming Dorrington. ‘But he had a gun’, Hamer whines. The redoubtable Mrs Hamer says the jewel is safe at another location, and sets off leading them across Vauxhall Bridge. Half way across the bridge she announces, ‘There’s your jewel, you crook, you thief’ and before Hamer or Dorrington can do anything, throws it into the Thames. Oh.

‘There’s your diamond, you dirty thief!’ (Dorrington on the right)

4. The Affair of the ‘Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co., Limited’

Remember the dot com bubble of 2001? Well, I bet you didn’t know about the Bicycle Bubble of the 1890s.

Cycle companies were in the market everywhere. Immense fortunes were being made in a few days and sometimes little fortunes were being lost to build them up. Mining shares were dull for a season, and any company with the word ‘cycle’ or ‘tyre’ in its title was certain to attract capital, no matter what its prospects were like in the eyes of the expert. All the old private cycle companies suddenly were offered to the public, and their proprietors, already rich men, built themselves houses on the Riviera, bought yachts, ran racehorses, and left business for ever. Sometimes the shareholders got their money’s worth, sometimes more, sometimes less – sometimes they got nothing but total loss; but still the game went on. One could never open a newspaper without finding, displayed at large, the prospectus of yet another cycle company with capital expressed in six figures at least, often in seven. Solemn old dailies, into whose editorial heads no new thing ever found its way till years after it had been forgotten elsewhere, suddenly exhibited the scandalous phenomenon of ‘broken columns’ in their advertising sections, and the universal prospectuses stretched outrageously across half or even all the page – a thing to cause apoplexy in the bodily system of any self-respecting manager of the old school.

Everyone’s investing in bicycle companies. Dorrington goes along to the time trials featuring an exciting new competitive bike rider, Gillett, at a purpose-built velodrome.

Gillett is representing the ‘Indestructible Bicycle Company.’ Dorrington chats up a representative of the IBC who introduces him to the paunchy owner, Paul Mallows. They explain that Gillett will be competing against Lant, who is representing the new and much-talked-about ‘Avalanche Bicycle Company’. The ABC is about to launch on the stock market and is likely to be hugely subscribed in this time of bicycle bubbles.

The sun sets and the velodrome becomes dark as the cyclists do their last couple of laps. Suddenly there is a tremendous accident, as Gillett crashes into two other bikes, breaking his arm. Mallows is hopping mad, swears it’s sabotage, and offers a hundred pound reward on the spot to whoever can find the culprits..

Dorrington takes him up and goes over the crash site very carefully. In the dark someone had placed an old rusty chair smack bang in the middle of the track, it being so dark the approaching cyclists couldn’t see it till too late. Dorrington picks up evidence that it was Mallows who planted the chair.

To confirm his suspicions he catches a train that night to Birmingham, where the prospectus for the Avalanche Bicycle Company claims to have its factory. In fact, he discovers that the ‘factory’ is a disused warehouse in the corner of which are piled a bunch of knackered second-hand bikes, with a nearby oven used for making enamel badges with the ABC’s logo. The company’s business plan is to buy up old bikes, pin the labels to them, and turn over business just long enough for the board of the company to do a bunk with the money raised when the company floats on the stock market.

His suspicions confirmed, Dorrington telegraphs Mallows, pretending to be an employee and saying something important is happening at the Birmingham factory. Now, before he had left London, Dorrington had hired a snoop to watch Mallows’ house. Within minutes of getting the telegram, this spy reports that Mallows leaves his house and goes to a disguise and wig shop, emerging looking a lot different, before getting a train to Birmingham.

The disguised Mallows makes his way to the bike factory where Dorrington is waiting.

Dorrington confronts him and taunts and teases Mallows, saying he easily sees through his disguise, saying he knows it was him who planted the chair which caused the Gillett crash.

Why? In order to remove him from the Big Race and ensure that Lant wins. Lant winning will enormously boost the share launch of ABC on Monday. Mallow features in the prospectus for ABC under a false name. He and partners will pocket the cash raised by the stock market flotation, then abscond, leaving the company to crash and a couple of titled aristocrats, who put their names down as directors without bothering to learn the details, to take the flak.

But Dorrington is not going to turn him into the police for fraud. No, Dorrington wants a cut, not just any old cut either, but 50% of Mallows’s takings,

During this edgy confrontation Mallows has been manoeuvring Dorrington closer and closer to the oven where the bikes are melted down. Now, in a sudden desperate move, Mallows pushes Dorrington into the oven, bolting the door, and turning on the gas.

Most of these stories are fairly languid in pace with, at most, a chase through streets being the most exciting it gets. But this is a genuinely tense, cinematic moment, with Dorrington beginning to lose consciousness from the gas, beating futilely at the door. Luckily, he discovers a loose spar of metal inside the oven which he uses as a lever to prise open the door a fraction, repositions the spar to prise it open some more, and so on until it eventually bursts open and Dorrington staggers out half-gassed.

Now Dorrington goes for Mallows like a murderer and is dragging him by the collar across the floor with a view to locking him in the oven when – the escaping gas reaches a naked candle and there’s a Big Explosion. Mallows is half buried in bricks and has a broken leg. Dorrington is thrown clear and makes an escape before locals and the police turn up.

Dorrington dragging Mallows

5. The Case of Mr. Loftus Deacon

Deacon is an elderly bachelor who collects Japanese objets d’art. (The descriptions of them have extra resonance because we know that Morrison was himself an expert on Japanese artefacts, which explains why the descriptions of Deacon’s works are long and informative.)

Deacon’s proudest object is a rare katana or longsword by the famous Japanese swordsmith, Masamuné. One day Deacon sets off for his club for lunch at a quarter to one, observed by the ever-vigilant hall porter. This same porter is surprised when, a few minutes later, Deacon reappears in a fluster at one o’clock. Turns out he’d forgotten something and lets himself into the flat. Moments later the porter hears ‘a shout followed in a breath by a loud cry of pain, and then silence.’

The door is locked from the inside so the porter has to call up to the housekeeper, who comes running with the spare keys, and they both find Deacon lying in a pool of blood with two fierce gashes to the head. He is dead. They search the room. It is locked, the windows closed from the inside etc.

Next morning Dorrington is hired to investigate the murder by Deacon’s only friend, Mr. Colson, ‘a thin, grizzled man of sixty or thereabout’. Colson takes Dorrington to survey the scene of the crime. It is only now that Colson realises that the famous Masamuné sword is missing.

There follows the usual fol-de-rol of distractions and false leads – for example, that the only window in Deacon’s apartment opened into a well, at the bottom of which a workman was doing some painting and repairs. Upon investigation, it turns out that this decorator had a criminal record and has now disappeared, just the kind of obvious lead the police like. But the reader, having read a few detective stories, suspects this is a red herring.

A much bigger red herring is the fact that for the past months Deacon has been besieged by a polite but determined Japanese man, Keigo Kanamaro. Kanamaro is the son of a Japanese warrior who had fallen on hard times and so was forced to sell the katana which Deacon prizes so much.

Colson gives a long, comprehensive explanation of the way that, for Japanese Samurai and other warriors, their weapons had a spiritual value. It was thought that when they were made by the swordsmith a guardian spirit entered the metal, and looked over its fate. There is no shame worse than being separated from your sword. A traditional Samurai would starve to death rather than barter it away. Nonetheless, that’s what Kanamaro’s father had been forced to do, and now his son – Kanamaro – is back to reclaim his father’s sword so that he can take it back to Japan and bury it with his father in his tomb, and his spirit can finally rest easy.

Deacon refuses but Kanamaro won’t give up, returning again and again, and slowly losing his impeccable Japanese manners.

It is only now that Colson notices – that the sword has gone!! So now Kanamaro is the obvious suspect, and when Colson goes to find him, all his suspicions are confirmed for Kanamaro has checked out of his London hotel in a hurry, and is returning to Japan.

When questioned, Kanamaro says that he has finally retrieved the sword but ‘at great cost’, shows no flicker of emotion upon hearing that Deacon is dead, and is generally cold and dismissive. It must be him! He must have recovered the kanata through violence.

But having read a dozen or so of these stories in quick succession, I recognised a number of the subtle contra-indications pointing towards the real culprit – most notably that Deacon’s body was found lying beneath an impressive statue of a Japanese god,

at the foot of a pedestal whereupon there squatted, with serenely fierce grin, the god Hachiman, gilt and painted, carrying in one of his four hands a snake, in another a mace, in a third a small human figure, and in the fourth a heavy, straight, guardless sword.

This is the kind of grotesque or Gothic detail which characterises the best Sherlock Holmes stories, and almost always turns out to be significant. And so it is here. And when, a lot later in the story, Colson tells Dorrington that the little god figure only arrived in the last few days my suspicions were aroused.

All these stories are divided into four or five logically discrete sections. In the final section of this one Dorrington reveals all: most of Deacon’s collection had been transhipped over the years at a huge warehouse full of all sorts of treasures down on the docks, owned by one Mr Copleston. Copleston employs all kinds of casual labour. One of the most notable employees is a short hunchback nicknamed Slackjaw. Dorrington speculates that the following is what took place.

The statue of the Japanese god arrived in Copleston’s warehouse and sat there for a week or more. During this time Slackjaw discovered that you can open it up and get inside. It was designed for a priest or someone to get inside back in Japan and breathe fire or make prophecies or whatnot from within.

But, having discovered that he could pop inside and lock it from the inside, Slackjaw did so one day, waited until everyone had left the warehouse, and then emerged to steal precious stuff then get a decent night’s kip in the warm.

This explains why Coplestone had told Colson that the men had begun to think the statue was cursed – because objects left near it overnight either disappeared or were found smashed in the morning. It was no ghost. This was just Slackjaw either nicking things, or being clumsy and knocking nearby objects over.

Anyway, when Slackjaw learned that the statue was to be shipped off to Deacon’s he reflected that it might be an opportunity for more plunder, so he stowed away inside and was carried into Deacon’s flat.

Here he waited a night, until Deacon left for work the next day, then crept out and was beginning to prise open a case holding precious gold objects, when Deacon unexpectedly returned. Panic-stricken Slackjaw bolted back to the statue but got there at the same moment as Deacon walked in the door. Slackjaw looked around him for a weapon and, unfortunately for both of them, his hand fell on the display of ornamental swords and he happened to grab the heaviest, sharpest one to whack Deacon with.

Hearing the porter rattling the door, Slackjaw quickly wiped the sword clean and climbed back into the statue. There he spent the rest of the day while the police crawled all over the place, but that night he finally climbed out of the statue, lightly opened the door and snuck away.

Slackjaw

Corroborating evidence is the fact that Dorrington found knife marks on the case of gold, as of someone who had only just started trying to open it when they were disturbed.

Most compelling of all, though, is the fact that Dorrington found a little bottle inside the statue, obviously there to refresh Slackjaw, which he forgot to take with him and on which was written the name of the publican of the pub where it was bought.

Going down to the docks Dorrington ascertains that the pub is the nearest one to Coplestone’s warehouse. So Dorrington had returned there with the police and spotted Slackjaw. The moment the hunchback saw Dorrington and the cops he had turned pale, put down his glass and nipped out the back of the pub.

There was then a brief chase: Slackjaw dropped onto a barge then went jumping from one barge to the next, but suddenly slipped and fell between two. The slow movement of the barges always creates perilous suction. By the time the police got there, the hunchback had disappeared under the murky Thames water and Dorrington had left them dragging the river for his body. Case solved.

6. Old Cater’s Money

Rigby (or Morrison) ends the volume by telling a story from Dorrington’s early career.

Old Jerry Cater lived in the crooked and decaying old house over his wharf by Bermondsey Wall, where his father had lived before him. It was a grim and strange old house, with long-shut loft-doors in upper floors, and hinged flaps in sundry rooms that, when lifted, gave startling glimpses of muddy water washing among rotten piles below.

Old Cater has been a miserly usurer all his life. He had bamboozled his long-suffering secretary Sinclair, by lending him £40 at 200% compound interest to get married with, thus throwing him into a life-long debt he could never repay. Now, broken-spirited Sinclair and his gaunt wife are Cater’s debt slaves. The shabby derelict household where they live also includes ‘Samuel Greer, a squinting man of grease and rags, within ten years of the age of old Jerry Cater himself’.

Old Cater is dying. He takes to his death-bed while Greer fusses about him, rummaging through cupboards for anything to steal. All this has the vibe of Morrison’s stories of Mean Streets and the Jago, i.e. describing people who have almost nothing, who live hand to mouth from day to day, for whom the discovery of one penny is a highlight of the day. This story is the most colourful, lively and interesting of the set.

Greer’s face, with its greasy features and its irresponsible squint, was as expressive as a brick.

Old Cater finally passes away, attended by a local poor doctor. Now just before he passed, Greer had been rummaging in the cupboard and found a jar containing the old man’s will. He spies a money opportunity and goes to see Cater’s nephew, Paul Cater in Pimlico. the two take a cab back to Bermondsey during which Greer slimily reveals that he has the old miser’s will – but will only part with it for £20. Cater has a tenner in his wallet. That’ll do, says Greer, and hands over the will, which Paul Cater sees, gives him ownership of all the old man’s belongings.

However, Cater had another nephew, a certain Jarvis Flint, and Greer had also found a codicil to the main will which is in Jarvis’s favour. So Greer now goes and parlays with Flint, demanding £50 for knowledge of the codicil’s whereabouts. Flint throws him out and – here we finally get to Dorrington – has the young Dorrington, who’s working for him as a general dogsbody, follow Greer and try to ascertain the codicil’s whereabouts.

Many of Morrison’s detective stories hinge on sheer luck and this might be the most egregious example of this trait. Dorrington follows Greer around the streets until the latter decides to pop into a barber’s for a penny shave. One of the other customers is a drunk docker. There’s much ribaldry among the customers as this docker finishes his shave, grabs his hat and staggers out into the street. It’s only when Greer has himself finished being shaved and gets up to leave, that he realises that the drunken docker has taken his hat – the hat in which he has hidden the precious codicil.

Greer runs out of the barber’s crying ‘Stop thief’, pursued by the barber who he hasn’t paid yet, and all the other customers for the fun of it.

Now Dorrington had been watching from across the street and saw which way the drunk docker went. While Greer and the mob run off in one direction, Dorrington runs to catch up with the docker. As he catches up with him, he sees the docker getting into a fight: leaning over a wharf his hat fell off and when a helpful sailor brought it up to him, the drunk docker protests that it’s not his hat (which is, of course, true) and accuses the helpful sailor of having stolen his hat. And they fall to fighting.

And while they’re doing so, Dorrington picks up Greer’s hat, which has rolled to one side and saunters off. And as he suspected, it contains the codicil to Old Cater’s will.

The drunk docker and the sailor fight while Dorrington (with moustache) takes the hat

Greer keeps returning to the barber’s but never sees the hat again. Reluctant to give up, he returns to Jarvis Flint to offer the next best thing, his sworn testimony as to the content of the codicil (which handed over all Old Cater’s property to Flint, valued at ten thousand pounds).

Meanwhile, Dorrington has a copy of the codicil made and legally witnessed. Then he calls on Paul Cater. He coolly demands £1,000 to hand it over. Cater is outraged. Dorrington points out that he will still make £9,000 on the deal and threatens to take a cab to Jarvis Flint to give him the codicil. Cater caves in, takes Dorrington to his bank in Pimlico, takes out £1,000 in gold and notes, and gives it to him in return for the codicil. Jarvis then takes a cab back to Old Cater’s house and promptly burns the codicil. He doesn’t know Dorrington has made a copy of it.

Now, Dorrington had intended to take the copy of the codicil over to Flint’s house and extract another thousand pounds from Jarvis in return for handing it over. But Dorrington leaves it for a day or two – which turns out to be a bad mistake.

For on the day of Old Cater’s funeral, Flint and his sleazy lawyer, Lugg, along with Greer as witness, all go to see Paul Cater and confront him with the fact that Greer – though he doesn’t have a physical copy of the codicil – will testify to its content i.e. that the entire estate goes to Flint.

So the scene is that Cater, Greer, Lugg and Flint are at old Cater’s place, making threats and counter-threats, when the lawyer Lugg reaches over to get the Bible which Old Cater had kept around him in his last days, with a view to then and there getting Greer to testify under oath to the contents of the codicil. But –

As he opens it, Lugg discovers writing scribbled onto its opening pages, and realises that on his very last day, Old Cater changed his will again. And left everything to… neither Jarvis nor Paul, but to Sinclair, the poor broken bondsman who has served him faithfully all this time.

The two nephews are thunderstruck and immediately start trying to bribe the lawyer. But Lugg sees that Greer has witnessed everything and would likely resort to blackmail him in the future, plus he sees the prospect of an extremely grateful new client (Sinclair) and so he promptly adopts a high tone of Pecksniffian morality, and insists that he must ‘perform his duty’ and report this new, final version of the will to authorities.

With the result that when Dorrington calls on Flint to carry out part two of his plan (to blackmail Flint) he, Dorrington, finds himself met with insults and abuse. When the new situation is explained to him, he doesn’t care. He’s already made £1,000 and it is with this money – the narrator tells us – that Dorrington is then able to set up, live and dress as a gentleman, and to begin his life as a detective and crook.

Indeed, when he hears about tCater’s final will scribbled in the Bible, Dorrington bursts out laughing.

The story ends with a comic flourish as a disgruntled Samuel Greer goes to the nearest pub for a wet, and bumps into the drunk docker who took Greer’s hat by mistake. Greer, failing to find the docker, had returned to the barber’s and taken the hat which the docker left behind. Now, finding Greer wearing his long-lost hat, the docker beats Greer up.

It is a very entertaining and comic story – but only if you accept that every single character in it is motivated by shameless greed, and is prepared to lie, cheat and betray everyone, in order to make money.

Thoughts

Being an anti-hero makes Dorrington much more appealing to modern tastes than Morrison’s squeaky clean ‘good’ detective, Martin Hewitt.

And whereas the Hewitt stories seemed to copy the basic Sherlock Holmes formula with slavish conformity, the fact that Dorrington doesn’t mind resorting to breaking and entering, theft and blackmail, and is prepared to do more or less anything when he sees private advantage, makes the stories much more unpredictable.

Sometimes he carries out his client’s wishes perfectly straight, but sometimes he spies an opening for skulduggery and goes over to the dark side – and sometimes he does both – as in the bicycle story where he both gains his reward from Mallows by good detective work, but then goes on to confront Mallows at the ABC factory, and nearly kills him.

And sometimes he does neither, as in the case of the Japanese sword, where he behaves like a perfectly straight and respectable detective.

But there is always the dark and Gothic threat that Dorrington might at any moment pull out his revolver and blackmail someone. And that makes the yarns from Dorrington’s Deed-Box immeasurably more entertaining than the Hewitt stories.

Information is power

Many of the stories bring out the fact that it’s not only always been important to have as much information as possible about your enemies (hence the long tradition of spies) – but also to gather information about people in general – who are neither friends nor enemies. Especially compromising information. You never know when it will come in useful. This is core to Dorrington’s modus operandi. Knowledge is power.

It was an important thing in Dorrington’s rascally trade to get hold of as much of other people’s private business as possible, and to know exactly in what cupboard to find every man’s skeleton. For there was no knowing but it might be turned into money sooner or later.

Knowledge of people’s foibles and secrets was as important then as it is now. The difference is that, in our time, several billion people have been happy to turn over their most intimate secrets to social media, email, phone and internet companies free and gratis, for them to use and exploit any way they see fit. Strange days.

Related links

• The Dorrington Deed-Box online

Reviews of other fiction of the 1880s and 1890s

Joseph Conrad

• Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (1895)
• An Outcast of The Islands (1896)
• The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897)
• Tales of Unrest (1898)
• Youth (1898)
• Heart of Darkness (1899)

Rudyard Kipling

• The Light That Failed (1891)
• Life’s Handicap (1891)
• Barrack Room Ballads (1892)
• Many Inventions (1893)
• The Jungle Books (1895, 1895)
• The Seven Seas (1896)
• The Absent-Minded Beggar (1899)
• Captains Courageous (1897)
• The Day’s Work (1898)
• Stalky and Co (1899)

Henry Rider Haggard

• King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
• She: A History of Adventure (1887)
• Allan Quatermain (1887)
• Maiwa’s revenge, or The War of The Little Hand (1888)
• Allan’s Wife and Other Tales (1889)
• Nada the Lily (1892)

Sherlock Holmes

• A Study in Scarlet (1887)
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1891–1892)
• The Sign of the Four (1890)
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1892–1893)

• The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes (detective stories influenced by Conan Doyle)

Arthur Morrison

• Tales of Mean Streets (1894)
• Martin Hewitt, Investigator (1894)
• A Child of the Jago (1896)
• The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897)
• The Hole in The Wall by Arthur Morrison (1902)

Robert Louis Stevenson

• New Arabian Nights (1882)
• Treasure Island (1883)
• The Silverado Squatters (1883)
• More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885)
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
• Kidnapped (1886)
• The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887)
• The Black Arrow (1888)
• The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
• South Sea Tales (1891-93)
• The Wrecker (1892)
• The Ebb-Tide (1894)
• The Amateur Emigrant (1895)
• Weir of Hermiston (1896)

Bram Stoker

• Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

H.G. Wells

• The Time Machine (1895)
• The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
• The Invisible Man (1897)
• A Story of the Days To Come (1899)

Oscar Wilde

• The Happy Prince and other stories (1888)
• The Decay of Lying: An Observation (1891)
• The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)