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Donovan, Dick

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 1 month ago

Dick Donovan was a pseudonym used by (Mr) Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock (1842-1934). Muddock was also a journalist and wrote many other books. He was born near Southampton, England, but travelled to India and the Far East as a boy. His series characters included not only Dick Donovan, the Glasgow Detective, but also Russian Secret Service agent Michael Danevitch, Vincent Trill of the Detective Service, private detective Tyler Tatlock and early forensic criminologist Fabian Field among others. Muddock's technique of using his character's name as a pseudonym was also used by 'Nick Carter' and later adopted by his American counterparts such as Ellery Queen and Hank Jansen.

Who was Dick Donovan? by Bruce Durie

'Dick Donovan' was the pseudonym used by Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock (28 May 1843-23 Jan 1934) for almost 300 detective and mystery stories and 28 novels written between 1889 and 1922. Muddock also had a long but financially disastrous career as a journalist and wrote: novels; historical fact and fiction; guide books and a rather self-aggrandising autobiography. Far from being an imitator of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, Muddock’s fictional detective predated the Baker Street sleuth in the public’s ken and was, for a time, equally or more popular. Some of his tales ran in the Strand between the first two series of early Holmes stories. Interestingly, the editor of Strand, Herbert Greenhough Smith, married Muddock’s second daughter Dorothy in 1900. Although critics consider his Donovan of great importance to the genre of detective stories, his work is extremely hard to find and almost forgotten.

Intriguingly, “Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock” was itself a pseudonym. Muddock was named at birth, much more prosaically, “James Edward Muddock”. Muddock was in every way as colourful a character as his creations, with a wealth of real-life experience which informed his fiction. Born near Southampton, England to James Muddock and Elizabeth Preston, he went to India before his 14th birthday to be with his father, an ex-seaman who ran a boarding-house in Calcutta. Muddock was there to learn civil engineering and worked for the East India Company in the ammunition factory at Dum Dum. Muddock got caught up in the Indian Mutiny; says he sailed the China Seas and had dinner with cannibals; mined for gold in Australia, visited America; lived in France and Switzerland; held various journalistic posts (including foreign correspondent) and started and/or edited a number of publications; all of which drove him to various bankruptcies. He was married three times, first at 17 in 1861, again in 1871 and finally in 1880. He had two children by his first two wives and 10, including three sets of twins (eight children survived) by his third. He became a Special Constable when the First World War broke out (he was over 70 at the time) and lost his three sons during the conflict. Muddock ended up in penury, kept by his five daughters (all of whom had unconventional personal lives), and died aged 91 after taking a too-hot bath against medical orders.

His characters included not only Dick Donovan, the Glasgow Detective, but also Russian Secret Service agent Michael Danevitch, Vincent Trill of the Detective Service, private detective Tyler Tatlock and early forensic criminologist Fabian Field among others. Today, his horror tales are better known than his detective fiction, thanks to frequent reprints, and what he considered his “serious” fiction and historical writings have been completely consigned to the remainder bin of literary history. One of his historical novels, “Young Lochinvar” was an early silent film, made by Stoll and starring Owen Nares.

Muddock wrote over 180 stories involving Dick Donovan, collected as 14 or so books (plus foreign editions), but also used the same pen name for other, unrelated works, presumably as the name “Dick Donovan” had greater commercial cachet than his own, although Muddock himself regarded them as separate from and inferior to his “real” writing, just as Conan Doyle felt that Sherlock Holmes overshadowed his more serious writings.

Muddock did not start the tradition of using a pen name the same as that of the detective - Honeyman’s “James McGovan” stories did likewise, and everyone was cashing in on the earlier publishing success of the real-life James M’Levy, The Edinburgh Detective - but Muddock may well have embedded it as a technique for the genre. It was later adopted by his American counterparts such as Ellery Queen and Hank Jansen. He may also be responsible for the term “Dick” as applied to a private detective in America, where his works were hugely popular.

Muddock's output was, frankly, staggering:

184 "Dick Donovan" detective stories
57 "non-Donovan" detective stories (but with "Dick Donovan" as author)
12 true crime stories (not including "Pritchard the Poisoner" in Caught at Last!)
37 horror tales
28 novels written as "Dick Donovan" (by no means all crime or detective stories)

...and as J E P Muddock:

19 novels
3 story collections
12 historical fictions
4 history books
7 guidebooks
an autobiography
at least one polemic against the French
The Savage Club papers (edited)
plus a raft of journalistic pieces and serialised fiction, of which he was an early pioneer.

His satirical SciFi/Lost Race classic “The Sunless City” provided the name for the mining town of Flin Flon in Manitoba, Canada.

There is a bibliographical list at [www.dickdonovan.com|the Dick Donovan website].

This one-man industry makes Conan Doyle's 60 Sherlock Holmes stories look thin by comparison. Muddock was writing well-known, widely-read and hugely popular detective fiction as "Dick Donovan" before Holmes was ever in print. The first Strand Holmes story "A Scandal in Bohemia" was printed in July 1891 and two earlier stories had come out elsewhere in December 1887 and 1890. But the earliest Dick Donovan stories were published in various periodicals before being collected in The Man-Hunter in 1888 and his 1875 novel “A Wingless Angel” features a particularly cunning poisoning and its solution. The first Dick Donovan story – “The Saltmarket Murder Case” (Jan 1888) – is one of the earliest locked-room mysteries.

Donovan and the Strand Magazine

Donovan's first appearance in the Strand was in July 1892, just after the end of Conan Doyle's first series of Sherlock Holmes stories. Dick Donovan was already a popular detective character, whose escapades had appeared in various publications before the first fifteen were collected in the definitive Chatto & Windus edition The Man-Hunter: Stories from the Note-Book of a Detective (1888). The Man-Hunter was undeniably popular and appeared the following year in America, though what the readers there made of the Glasgow and London settings is a mystery in itself. Possibly for reasons of recognition of and by a wider audience, Muddock “de-localised” many of the later stories and they could as well be set in Chicago as Cowcaddens. A further 13 short story collections appeared as sequels to The Man-Hunter between 1889 and 1896 (plus collections of True Crime and horror stories), which means he was writing the stories at the rate of about one a week, on top of his other work, including a full-time journalist’s position with D C Thomson in Dundee. The implication of this is that the craze for short detective fiction was well established by the time Holmes first appeared.

Dick Donovan, like Sherlock Holmes, was often thought to be real, and received many letters soliciting his detective skills, including one from a Brighton woman who asked him to follow her husband.

The editor of Strand (Herbert G Smith, who later married Muddock’s eldest daughter, Dorothy, despite being some 26 years her senior) used Donovan as a fill-in for Conan Doyle after the first series of Holmes stories had appeared in 1891-92. The Donovan tales which appeared in the Strand in 1892 were different from the regular Donovan canon - three of them are rather formulaic and sensational. The first, in July, was "The Jewelled Skull", the August offering was "The Story of the Great Cat's Eye"; the September story was "The Secret of the Black Brotherhood"; and the fourth Strand story, in November, was "The Chamber of Shadows". (The October issue detective story was Grant Allen's "The Great Ruby Robbery").

A note at the end of the first Strand Donovan story said:

"It will be observed that this month there is no detective story by Mr. Conan Doyle relating the adventures of the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes. We are glad to be able to announce that there is to be only a temporary interval in the publication of these stories. Mr Conan Doyle is now engaged upon writing a second series, which will be commenced in an early number. During the short interval powerful detective stories by other eminent writers will be published."

The editors clearly realised the popular appetite for a monthly detective story. A footnote to the October Donovan adventure assured Gentle Readers that:

"Next month will appear the first of the new series of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes".

Dick Donovan the man

We know little of Donovan the man from the stories and books. Muddock took the name from that of an eighteenth century Bow Street Runner, but we have very little idea of his character or background.

Frankly, Donovan appears a touch characterless, but this could be put down to Muddock’s interest, and the point of the tales, being in the plot and the cleverness of the detection rather than in the personality of the lead character. Dick Donovan was an apparatus to tell a parable in the first person, rather than the reason for it, as was more the case with Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, Alan Quatermain or Batman. Also, there was not the same taste in the 1880s to examine forensically the innermost demons that drive a detective, as we see explored in the Rebus or Alex Cross novels of today’s writers. The story was enough.

On the other hand, we do know that Donovan started working as a policeman in London (beginning in the East End Division) but spent the most important part of his career in Glasgow; that he was fluent in at least five languages; was (like many another fictional crime-buster) a master of disguise and a skilled undercover worker; not shy of taking on private detective work for a fee; physically strong and well up to fight. There are contradictory clues as to whether he is English, Scots or Irish, as he adopts any of these origins, and others besides, with ease. Of course, these are all plot devices, introduced by Muddock without back-up or explanation, to further a particular storyline. It is unclear how or why Donovan knows so many languages with sufficient fluency to convince native speakers. And just where he picked up his facility for disguise is a mystery – the same is true for Sherlock Holmes, although we do sort of expect and accept that his mysterious but presumably colourful past could well have embraced such expertise, along with the knowledge of German, chemistry and cigars he displayed as early as A Study in Scarlet).

In the first two Strand stories ("The Jewelled Skull", July 1892, and "The Story of the Great Cat's Eye" in August) Donovan passes himself off as a plumber, a cleric, a French artisan and a Moroccan. In Caught At Last! he easily adopts the persona of an escaped murderer’s friend, the relative of a distressed gentlewoman, a particularly dense department store employee from the Isle of Skye and a moderately fraudulent German merchant. If Donovan had needed to be an expert mountaineer and conversant with Pushtu, astronavigation or Meissen porcelain, Muddock would have made it so, without bothering to render it plausible.

Muddock evidently had a taste for such elements, as one of his other creations, Calvin Sugg, speaks even more languages more fluently than Donovan and is regularly decorated by foreign governments.

Donovan the Detective

Muddock, like Doyle, gave his detective an ability for logical reasoning but logic or reason was rarely a feature in the more highly sensational plots. As a detective, Donovan is more painstaking than inspired, and draws conclusions based on the evidence at crime scenes or from interrogation, rather than great leaps of imagination. All too often, though, Donovan has made up his mind who the culprit is early on and proceeds to vindicate his judgement, usually to the embarrassment of his superiors, other policemen, the victims of crime and other dramatis personae. This “I told you so” attitude would have made him something of a boastful prig to deal with, the reader often feels. But this may have been Muddock knowing his market - lower-class and lower-brow readers than Doyle’s, who would revel in Authority Upset and Stuffed Shirts Confounded. Donovan is not shy of telling the directors of the railway or bank officials or even senior police officers that he knows better than they do, but usually lets them think what they like at first, keeping his powder dry until a vindication in the denouement, at which point it’s Collapse of Stout Party. Like Holmes, a later century might have considered Dick Donovan borderline autistic.

While the stories (and Donovan himself) are dogged rather than brilliant, they did set a number of trends for later police-procedurals. Donovan makes intelligent use of what evidence Muddock has him find; and keeps up with the latest methods in forensic criminology. In one story he compares the hair fibres under a murder victim’s fingernails to the hair of a suspect’s beard. Use of deductive logic and gritty persistence are Donovan’s method - dedicating a whole week to working undercover in a department store to discover the theft of some items ("All For Love’s Sake") or camping out for days and nights on Plumstead Marshes ("A Hunt for a Murderer"), although the author does throw him the occasional coincidence or piece of sheer luck. Those familiar with the works of Ian Rankin, P D James and Douglas Jardine may find the Donovan stories lacking in character information and light on scene-setting, and Donovan seems lightly-drawn compared with Dalgleish, Rebus, Morse, Skinner and friends.

The stories also contrast sharply in tone with the wealth of locational detail in the (real) M’Levy and (fictional) James McGovan tales, where Edinburgh figures almost as a character in its own right. Donovan’s Glasgow setting is most colourful in The Man Hunter. Later, the locale is less specific and largely irrelevant. Possibly, Muddock realised he was restricting his market, especially with the sophisticated Strand readers, and invented a London “past” for Donovan, in order to tell stories of the Capital plus adventurings abroad.

In the more day-to-day “notebook of a detective” type of stories, Donovan is usually the protagonist, but sometimes acts, Hitchcock-like, as the narrator, to tell us of crime and criminals. The variety of unlawful acts and their perpetrators is wide and varied, and the stories range in tone from realistic policeman-on-the-beat procedurals and casebook accounts to out-and-out melodramas involving black magic, mysterious Eastern villains of a Fu Manchu cast, menacing secret societies (again!), sinister master criminals and suchlike. In the beginning, Donovan’s work is street-level and mundane, just a Glasgow or London detective. His quarry, at the start of his career, were much the same as those of other crime story policemen: petty thieves, murderers on the run, child exploiters, sharpers and “resetters” (fences), con-artists, foreign counterfeiters, mail-train robbers, forgers, pitiless murderesses, Fagin-like characters and their criminal gangs, long-lost heirs to fortunes, swindlers and so forth. But even in the earliest stories and collections (The Man-Hunter and Caught At Last!) there is an occasional hint at the more far-fetched aspects of the later Donovan yarns - ghostly goings-on; a thief called “The Knave of Spades”; the notorious real-life villain Charles Peace. Muddock also lost no opportunity to tap into the sensations of the day and to offer us his wisdom on such causes célèbres as Pritchard the Poisoner.

This was both literary opportunism and ex cathedra pronouncement - for why would the great detective Dick Donovan not have an informed insight on one of the most notorious murders of the day? - but also it’s Muddock just plain showing off, albeit after feeling the pulse of the sensation-reading public and spotting an easy coin. He later did much the same in the case of Pigott the Irish forger, and other rogues.. As for literary merit: while Dick Donovan stories always entertain, not all of them read as brilliant, and they can seem vaguely dated in a way that, say, the Leslie Charteris Saint stories or even Raffles tales do not. But this may be the familiarity of the once-original. Marx Brothers movies and James Bond books seem corny now because they were first, and everyone else copied them slavishly. They are also firmly of their time.

So, fill your pipe, put on your tarboosh and smoking-jacket, light the gas-lamp and revel in the first, the greatest...the Glasgow Detective, Dick Donovan - The Man-Hunter!

Detective short story collections written as Dick Donovan

The Man-Hunter. Stories from the note-book of a detective (CW 1888)
Caught at Last! Leaves from the Notebook of a Detective (CW 1889)
Tracked and Taken: Detective Sketches (CW 1890) (US Title: Stories from the Note-Book of a Detective)
Who Poisoned Hetty Duncan? and other detective stories (1890)
A Detective's Triumphs (CW 1891)
From Information Received: Detective Stories (CW 1892)
In the Grip of the Law (CW 1892)
Wanted! A Detective's Strange Adventures (CW 1892, 1904)
Link by Link: Detective Stories (CW 1893)
From Clue to Capture: A Series of Thrilling Detective Stories (Hu 1893)
Suspicion Aroused (CW 1893)
Found and Fettered: A Series of Thrilling Detective Stories (CW 1894)
Dark Deeds (CW 1895)
Riddles Read (CW 1896)

Other characters written as by Dick Donovan

The Chronicles of Michael Danevitch of the Russian Secret Service (1897)
The Records of Vincent Trill of the Detective Service (1899)
The Adventures of Tyler Tatlock, Private Detective (1900)
The Triumphs of Fabian Field: Criminologist (1910)

Horror short stories written as J E P Muddock

Stories Weird and Wonderful (CW 1889) - This was reprinted as The Shining Hand and Other Tales of Terror. J. E. Muddock, Midnight House, 2004, including an introduction, “Hauntings from an Adventurous Life”, by John Pelan, plus a novella “The Prophecy” (as Dick Donovan) from Chambers’ Journal, 1926.

Horror short stories written as Dick Donovan

Tales of Terror (CW 1899)

True crime stories written as Dick Donovan

Startling Crimes and Notorious Criminals (1908)
The Great Turf Fraud, and Other Notorious Crimes (1909)

Novels and books written as Dick Donovan

The Man from Manchester (CW 1890)
Tracked to Doom: the story of a mystery and its unravelling (CW 1892)
Eugene Vidocq: Soldier, Thief, Spy, Detective (1895)
The Mystery of Jamaica Terrace (CW 1896)
Deacon Brodie; or, Behind the Mask (CW 1901)
Jim the Penman: The Life Story of One of the Most Astounding Criminals That Have Ever Lived (1901)
The Scarlet Seal: A Tale of the Borgias (1902)
The Crime of the Century: Being the Life Story of Richard Piggott (JL 1904)
The Fatal Ring (1905)
A Knight of Evil (1905)
The Knutsford Mystery (GB 1906)
Thurtell's Crime (1906)
The Gold-Spinner (GB 1907)
In the Queen's Service (1907)
The Shadow of Evil (1907)
A Gilded Serpent (1908)
In the Face of Night (1908)
The Sin of Preaching Jim (a.k.a. Preaching Jim) (1908)
Tangled Destinies (1908)
A Wild Beauty (1908)
Lil of the Slums (1909)
For Honour or Death (WL 1910)
The Naughty Maid of Mitcham (1910)
The Fatal Woman (1911)
The Trap (1911)
The Rich Man's Wife (with E.W. Elkington) (1912)
The Turning Wheel: A Story of the Charn Hall Inheritance (1912)
Out There: A Romance of Australia (1922)

Books written as J E P Muddock

Novels

False heart: a novel (1873) TB?
Wingless angel: a novel (1875) TB?
As the shadows fall: a novel (1876)
John Jellaby's housekeeper: a drawing from life (1878)
From the bosom of the deep (1886)
Shadow hunter. A tragic story of a haunted home (1887)
Dead man's secret; or, The valley of gold, etc. A tale (1889), (1911)
Stripped of the tinsel. A story of Bohemia (1896)
Without faith or fear. The story of a soul (1896)
The Lost laird (GB 1898)
The Golden idol. A story of adventure by sea and land (C&W 1899)
Whose was the hand? A novel (GB 1901)
Fair Rosalind: a novel (JL 1902)
Woman's checkmate (1902)
Liz (1904)
In the red dawn. A Manchester tale (JL 1904)
Sunless city From the papers and diaries of the late Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, Esq. A tale (1905)
Alluring flame (1906)
Fair Rosalind: a novel (1909)

Historical fiction

Stormlight: a story of love and nihilism in Switzerland and Russia (WL 1888), (1892)
Maid Marian and Robin Hood. A romance of old Sherwood Forest. With illustrations by Stanley L. Wood (CW 1892)
Star of fortune. A story of the Indian mutiny (1894)
For God and the Czar (1895)
Basile the jester. A romance of the days of Mary, Queen of Scots (C&W 1896)
Great white hand; or, The tiger of Cawnpore. A story of the Indian mutiny (1896)
Young Lochinvar. A tale of the Border country (1896)
In the king's favour. A romance of Flodden Field (DL 1899)
Kate Cameron of Brux, or, The Feud: : a story of wild doing. A story based upon legends and traditions, etc (GB 1900)
"Sweet "Doll" of Haddon Hall: a tale (JL 1903)
Jane Shore. A romance of history, etc. With a portrait (1905)
For the white cockade (1906)

Story collections

Stories, weird and wonderful (1889) (see above)
For love of Lucille, and other stories (1905)
From the clutch of the sea. A story of some real lives (1905)

History

"Doll": a dream of Haddon Hall. Being the story of Dorothy Vernon's wooing and flight. With a portrait (1886)
Did Dorothy Vernon elope? A rejoinder to G. Le Blanc-Smith. With a portrait of the author (1907)
"For valour": the "V.C." A record of the. deeds for which Her Majesty has bestowed the Victoria Cross, compiled and edited from the state papers by J.E. Muddock. With illustrations by G.H. Edwards (1895)
"All clear." A brief record of the work of the London Special Constabulary, 1914-1919, etc. With a portrait and maps (1920)

Guidebooks

Davos-Platz, as an alpine winter station for consumptive patients with analytical notes on the food by Philip Holland. With a map (WS 1881)
J.E.M. Guide to Davos-Platz edited by J E Muddock With notes by Philip Holland (WS 1882)
J.E.M. Guide to Switzerland. The Alps and how to see them. Edited by J E Muddock. With plates, illustrations, maps and plans (WS 1882), (1882), (1883), (1884), (1887)
Muddock's pocket guide for Geneva and Chamounix edited by J E Muddock. With a map (1886)
Night at the Grand Chartreuse (1891)
Story of Mont Blanc. With illustrations, including a portrait (1892)
Romance and history of the Crystal Palace. Illustrated (1911)

Polemics

John Bull’s Neighbour in her True Light by “a Brutal Saxon” Anonymously (WS 1884)

Autobiography

Pages From an Adventurous Life. With thirty one illustrations by "Dick Donovan" (J E Preston Muddock) (TWL1907)

Edited

The Savage Club Papers (Hu 1897)

Abbreviations of publishers:

C&W - Chatto & Windus, London

TWL T Werner Laurie, London

TB Tinsley Brothers, London

WS Wyman & Sons, London

JL - John Long, London

DL - Digby, Long, London

GB - George Bell London

Hu - Hutchinson and Co., London

WL - Ward, Lock, London

There is a complete listing, with story collection contents, (with publishers and dates) at http://www.dickdonovan/chrono-list.htm

Bruce Durie is an author living in Scotland. His collection “Dick Donovan – The Glasgow Detective” is available from Mercat Press, Edinburgh. His own Victorian crime novels set in St Andrews include The Murder of Young Tom Morris.