“A bigger bunch of villains than the ones they write about!” That’s how UNION JACK Editor H. W. Twyman described the authors who enthralled the public with their tales of the world’s finest consulting detective, Sexton Blake.
Approximately two hundred writers penned the yarns over a seventy-year period. Most remained obscure. Some became famous: John Creasey, Jack Trevor Story, Michael Moorcock. By no means all of them were the scurrilous rogues that Twyman suggests. Certainly, though, they were a colourful lot.
Cecil Hayter, for example, who was best known for sending Blake into the depths of unexplored Africa, was extremely well-travelled and had been bear shooting with Teddy Roosevelt. Rex Hardinge, who took up the baton as African yarn spinner after Hayter’s demise, had actually trekked solo across that continent. He was then recruited into the Secret Service, parachuted into China, and got blacklisted by German agents. Later in life, he captured a convict who’d escaped from Dartmoor.
- H. Clifford Gibbons used the money earned from writing to build racing cars, which he raced himself; Stanley Gordon Shaw had been a trapper and lumberjack in Canada, and had lived with a native American tribe; Donald Stuart wrote his first Blake while living rough on the Embankment; and John W. Bobin penned his debut on scraps of paper while working as a laundry-man.
Gwyn Evans was a tall Welshman who was brilliant, eccentric, and very, very unreliable. He once delivered a new Blake story to Twyman and departed with his payment, which was promptly spent, as usual, in a nearby bar. Twyman soon discovered that only the first few pages of the manuscript were new; the bulk of it was an old, already published tale!
- Howard Baker, who edited THE SEXTON BLAKE LIBRARY during the Swinging Sixties, was guilty of similar sharp practices. He had a policy that authors would be paid less if their work required any editorial interventions. Unsurprisingly, practically every submission did … even when it didn’t! He employed Michael Moorcock as a sub-editor, and Moorcock’s first novel was a Sexton Blake case. Baker, however, didn’t like the yarn’s lefty politics, so altered them in the other direction. Moorcock was so infuriated, he threw his typewriter out of the window.
By far the most salacious gossip, though, concerns George Hamilton Teed, who is widely considered to be the best of all the Blake writers. A Canadian, Teed travelled twice around the world during his teens, then set up business as a sheep farmer in Australia. After a draught caused his financial ruin, he sailed for England, and aboard ship met Mrs Storm, whose husband, Michael (real name Ernest Semphill) was a Blake author, the creator of the detective’s first superstar villain, George Marsden Plummer. Michael Storm had, apparently, recently died, though no record of his death has ever been found. Teed and Mrs Storm came to an arrangement: he would write new Plummer cases and she would submit them as being by her husband. They would then split the payment. This they did. Teed continued ghost writing as Storm until finally establishing himself as a Blake author in his own right … which happened at around about the same time that Mrs Storm mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again. For years afterwards, rumours persisted that Teed was somehow responsible for Michael Storm’s disappearance, and perhaps for his widow’s, too. It didn’t help that the title of the first tale officially credited to Teed was: DEAD MEN’S SHOES.
Many of the Bake authors remain mysterious figures about whom little is known. What seems certain, though, is that quite a few of them lived lives as every bit as interesting as Blake’s most extraordinary cases!
BIO: Mark Hodder is the Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of the Burton & Swinburne series of SF novels, beginning with THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING HEELED JACK. He’s been reading and collecting Sexton Blake stories for twenty-five years, and is the creator and curator of the BLAKIANA website (http://www.mark-hodder.com/blakiana/). His novel THE SILENT THUNDER CAPER (2013) was the first officially sanctioned Sexton Blake novel to be published in 35 years. He currently has a couple of SF novels in development and is compiling Rebellion Publishing’s new Blake anthologies. Mark lives in Valencia, Spain, with his Spanish partner and their 6-year-old twins.
