Martin Hewitt, Investigator: A Magic Lamp Classic Detective Story

When Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his meal-ticket, Sherlock Holmes in December of 1893, several thousand people cancelled their subscriptions to the Strand Magazine which left a gaping hole that the readers and the magazine desperately wanted to be filled. The story vacuum caused by Holmes' misadventure with Professor Moriarty stayed in effect for ten years, a period of time that gave birth to a number of new fictional detectives, one of which was Martin Hewitt, created by Arthur Morrison in 1894. Hewitt and a group of other crime-solvers had a monopoly on the detective business until Doyle finally relented and brought Sherlock back to life. This book chronicles seven of Hewitt's cases, and gave rise to his reputation as England's 'second-best-detective.' Like the Holmes stories, Morrison did not want the detective to talk about his own cases in the first person, so he created a sidekick who does the writing.

Author: Arthur Morrison
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 05/19/2008
Pages: 284
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.62lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781438222813

About the Author
Morrison was born in 1863 in a slum district of London known as Poplar, a little to the north of the Isle of Dogs, and he grew up there and in other similar slums in East London. He began working as a clerk at the People's Palace in East London in 1887 when he was 23 years old. He worked on accounts and correspondence, and eventually became a subeditor of the Palace Journal. In 1890, taking the advice from Walter Besant, Morrison decided that he was capable of making a living at journalism. He moved to West London and took a position on a local newspaper, also working at freelance writing. Around this time Morrison was also producing detective short stories which emulated those of Conan Doyle about Sherlock Holmes. Three volumes of Detective Martin Hewitt stories were published. Morrison lived until 1945 but little is known of his life during his last 30 years. He was elected to the Royal Literary Society and in the 1920's served on its council. When he died in 1945 the world was more astonished to learn that he had been still living than that he was dead.

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