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Morrison, Arthur

Page history last edited by Jon 14 years ago

Arthur Morrison Arthur George Morrison (1863-1945) was an English author and journalist, known for his realistic novels about London's East End and for his detective stories.

Morrison was born in the East End of London, on November 1, 1863. His childhood and education is unknown, though he was probably educated in the East End. By 1886 he was working as a clerk at the People's Palace, in Mile End. In 1890 he left this job and joined the editorial staff of the Evening Globe newspaper. The following year he published a story entitled A Street which was subsequently published in book form in Tales of Mean Streets. The volume was a critical success, but a number of reviewers objected to the violence portrayed in one story - "Lizerunt". He married Elizabeth Adelaide Thatcher in 1892.

Around this time Morrison was also producing detective short stories which emulated those of Conan Doyle about Sherlock Holmes. Morrison's Martin Hewitt was a poor counterfeit, but some of these stories hold up today. Three volumes of Hewitt stories were published before the publication of the novel for which Morrison is most famous: A Child of the Jago (1896). The novel described in graphic detail living conditions in East End including the permeation of violence into everyday life. Other less well-received novels and stories followed, until Morrison effectively retired from writing fiction around 1913. Between then and his death, he seems to have concentrated on building his collection of Chinese and Japanese prints and paintings.

Some of Morrison's detective stories are available from Gutenberg Australia and Project Gutenberg.

Source: Wikipedia

Mike Grost on Arthur Morrison

Arthur Morrison's fiction seems to have only a little in common with Doyle's, despite his often being cited as Doyle's chief imitator. Admittedly, Martin Hewitt is a consulting detective who appeared in a series of short stories in middle class magazines, just like Sherlock Holmes. So Morrison's commercial publication was entirely due to an appetite for Doyle imitations. But the actual content of Morrison's fiction seems quite different from Doyle's. In many ways, Morrison seems closer to the soon to emerge Rogue school. Many of his Hewitt tales focus on some ingenious criminal scheme, often involving robbery of some sort. These tales can also involve impersonation of respectable people by members of the criminal classes. Morrison would go on to make his own direct contribution to the Rogue school with his Dorrington tales.

If Morrison's writings look ahead to the Rogue school in their crimes, their detective work seems rooted in the British casebook fiction of thirty years before, of Waters, Forrester and the rest. In "The Case of Laker, Absconded", Hewitt uses disguise to infiltrate a crooks' den, does lots of legwork querying suspects, and finally leads a police raid of a crime scene: all behavior one associates with the casebook school. Financial considerations loom large in his behavior: another traditional casebook element. The casebook detectives were business people. By contrast, although Holmes is hired by his clients, once he is on the job he seems largely motivated by loyalty to the innocent, and the need to search for truth. Another casebook feature in Morrison: the use of codes and ciphers, both in "Laker" and "The Flitterbat Lancers". This use of codes was introduced by Poe, and was taken up by Forrester into casebook literature. Morrison, like the casebook writer Charles Martel, also wrote his own variation on Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue": Morrison's is "The Case of Mr. Foggatt".

There is perhaps something suggestive about Morrison and Doyle's use of titles. Morrison's stories begin with "The Case of", and Morrison is faithful to the traditions of casebook fiction. The far more innovative Doyle called his tales "The Adventure Of". Doyle's fictions are structured as complex melodramas in which many groups of people, the villain, Holmes, and various innocent suspects, are all struggling in complex, interactive ways. Holmes is far more deeply embedded in the action of the story, than in the casebook tradition. Holmes is indeed having an adventure. He is experiencing something in the first person. Doyle's fictions have elaborate puzzle plots as well, and Holmes' detective attempts to solve these also serve to immerse him far more into the story than is traditional in the more standoffish casebook fiction. In casebook tales, the crook is up to his crimes, the detective is busy detecting him through standard detectival techniques, and the two stay firmly in separate spheres.

The way such pioneers of Rogue fiction as Morrison and Max Pemberton seem rooted in the detective techniques of casebook literature suggests that there is some continuity between the two schools. Just as the early American school of Rinehart and Reeve seems to lay the groundwork for both the pulp and the general American magazine fiction of the 1920's, so does casebook fiction stand in some ancestry to the Rogue school.

None of the above mentions how satisfying "The Case of Laker, Absconded" is, as a work of storytelling.

Many of Morrison's stories deal with elaborate man made "landscapes". These include the under sea world of "The Nicobar Bullion Case", the empty house of "The Case of Laker, Absconded", the trail and camp in "The Case of the Missing Hand", and best of all, the setting of "The Case of Mr. Geldard's Elopement", my favorite Morrison story. In all cases, Morrison's landscapes are full of imaginative detail. They are always set in what might be called "real space": everything in them is precisely located in relation to everything else. The landscapes could be built as movie sets, or as theme part attractions, and allow visitors to walk around in them. One envisions a tourist attraction called "Morrison World". Although the landscapes sometimes take up a lot of space - the trail in "The Case of the Missing Hand" extends across the countryside - each meter of them is precisely described by Morrison, and form a connected landscape without any gaps. They have a connectivity of one, in graph theory terms. The landscapes are perhaps a bit ancestral to the countryside and seaside landscapes later used by realist school writers such as Freeman, Crofts and John Rhode, although Morrison's work tends to stress the man-made aspects of these landscapes more than these Golden Age writers will. There is always something constructed about Morrison's landscapes, an architectural or engineering emphasis. There is also often an element of eccentricity to them, as well. They are something unique to Morrison's story, whereas the realist school writers set their works in "typical" landscapes of the countryside. Elaborate floor plans and buildings will recur in Mary Roberts Rinehart, and her followers, and in S.S. Van Dine and his followers, such as Ellery Queen. These buildings are some of the most imaginative aspects of Golden Age fiction.

Morrison's mainstream writings often use this sort of man made landscape, as well. Morrison wrote a story called "The Street", which imagines a single long street as the metaphorical setting of all of London's poor. His most famous mainstream book is The Hole in the Wall, also an architectural/landscape idea.