Sexton Blake

Ring the bell at Baker Street and a lean, unflappable man looks up from the evening papers: Sexton Blake, consulting detective, the street-sharp boy Tinker at his elbow, the bloodhound Pedro at the hearth, and a bulletproof Rolls-Royce he calls the Grey Panther idling at the kerb. He was minted in 1893 as a rival to a more famous tenant of the same street, and outran him. Across some eighty years and four thousand cases he became the people's detective, a hero assembled not by one author but by a whole guild of them. This is a shared world built at the speed of the weekly deadline. Blake ran through the story papers, the Union Jack, the Sexton Blake Library, Detective Weekly, written by roughly two hundred hands who passed the character down like a trade. The catalogue here holds the threads worth pulling: Anthony Skene's Zenith the Albino, the languid, Byronic master-thief who is the finest thing the saga ever produced; Edwy Searles Brooks's Waldo the Wonder Man; and the later revivals of Michael Moorcock and Mark Hodder, who carried Blake into new hands without embalming him. Behind them stands a full rogues' gallery, the renegade Yard man Plummer, the globe-spanning Criminals' Confederation, forever slipping the cuffs to scheme again. Expect velocity over depth: tight, vivid, disposable adventures that turned out to be anything but, a London sliding from gaslight to motorcar amid disguises, cyphers, and last-minute rescues. The peculiar pleasure is that the villains outshine the detective, and the seams between authors show like grain in old wood. There is no ordained sequence here; it is a story-paper world, best entered anywhere. Start with Skene's Zenith tales for the series at its most stylish, or Hodder's modern revival for the cleanest doorway in.