A Study in Scarlet

BOYS WILL BE BOYS (269 pp.)--E. S. Turner--Michael Joseph (10/6).

"Literature," said G. K. Chesterton, "is a luxury; fiction is a necessity . . . The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important."

Last month, Britons had a chance to browse nostalgically through a loo-year history of such an "ideal world." E. S. Turner's Boys Will Be Boys is a thorough, witty and succulent investigation of the blood & thunder fiction on which most Britons and many Americans were raised--the fiction of Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, of Galloping Gloria the Lady Turpin, of Zenith the Albino, and the whole glorious host of heroes and villains whose activities, says Dorothy Sayers, are Britain's "nearest approach to a national folklore." Reviled by a century of reformers, drawing sustenance equally from the malformed monster and the deadly ray gun, the blood & thunder story has chilled the spines and quickened the hearts of millions of Anglo-Saxons.

Fair Trade. Who wrote these "penny-dreadfuls"? "Not as a rule very distinguished members of the Republic of Letters," the Quarterly Review once stated coldly, citing a renegade clergyman, a translator of "dubious French novels," and a certain cook whose punctuality in serving meals depended entirely on how far along she was with her next installment.

Almost from the first, it was a hands-across-the-sea affair. Yankee "pirates" robbed London of its finest vampires and molls, adapting them easily and profitably to the American way. When inspiration failed, the hacks of London merely scanned the latest American "bloods," and spent "their working day, not disagreeably ... changing Saratoga to Brighton, Senator to Duke, and 'brownstone mansion on Fifth Avenue' to 'stately edifice in Belgravia.' " No Anglo-American treaty will ever forge links as strong as those of Captain Midnight, Deadwood Dick, and a score of rapscallions whose origins are now long lost.

As for Buffalo Bill, generations of little cockneys have struggled with all the ardor of youth to grasp the basic English behind sentences such as "I want ye to understand that I'm Lion Lije, the vigilant chief of this burg, and I'm bizness. Thet corpus going ter whoop out who war the Capting's Tribunal of Ten only he were shet off, and bein's he couldn't let us know no other way his sperit helped ter pint ye out."

Penny-a-Liner. Dirty, ragged, hideously misprinted, sometimes illustrated with pictures that had nothing to do with the text, the penny-dreadfuls had many of the virtues of naked imagination, all the vices of standardized hack work. Their authors, paid by the line (less than a penny), took care that each scream, each gush of blood, even each sentence, received a line all to itself--and thereby laid the foundation of the clipped, brusque speech of the contemporary thriller. Their immediate fascination and influence were enormous. Charles Dickens' low-life reflected their high-spots, Wilkie Collins refined their eeriness. The young J. M. Barrie struggled unsuccessfully to write penny-dreadfuls long before he took refuge in the arms of Peter Pan. Robert Louis Stevenson made the grade with his story, The Sea Cook, which was published as a juvenile thriller under the more appealing title of Treasure Island.

I'll Teach You. Several publishers of bloods made fortunes on which they built more respectable empires. Young Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) founded the Daily Mail and bought the Times itself with the help of his bloody pennies. Harmsworth and others like him repeated the still popular yellow-press hypocrisy that the aim of a foul story was not to please, but to educate the public; thus, the reader was expected to find a sort of Sermon on the Mount in a discussion of the murder of prostitutes "by mutilation, dismemberment, garrotting, throat-slitting and clubbing." ("I have a small collection of moral remarks," confessed one hack merrily, "all nicely cut & dried, and when I am at a loss to fill my chapter, I stick one or two in.")

Indeed, the grosser the gore, the higher the moral standards. One sketch, showing a sprawling lady with her dripping throat slit from ear to ear, was indignantly rejected because her skirt was rucked up above one knee. And, from the start, profanity was simply not tolerated. When the eaters of Sweeney Todd's delicious pies were told that their mouths were full of human flesh, they delicately exclaimed: "Good gracious! . . . Confound it!"

Patriotic Savagery. As the century advanced, the bloods took on a deeper sheen of respectability. Savagery was given a patriotic purpose, and the pirate's victim rose out of the scuppers to become the pirate's relentless pursuer. Aimed now directly at the juvenile market, boys' magazines arose for every class, their authors ranging from Talbot Baines Reed, G. A. Henty and P. G. Wodehouse to a lesser-known host of "clergymen, headmasters, baronets, officers . . . titled ladies."

The most prolific was Charles Hamilton, whose works (under a score of bylines) are discussed today with an "affection verging on reverence." In 30 years Hamilton turned out a total of 45 million words of popular school stories, and made the name of his most famous character, Billy Bunter, the fat schoolboy, an Empire byword. Today, far into his 70s, Hamilton is still going strong, and his schoolboy stories are even read in Braille.

Contemporary man, awed by the beady eye of the child psychologist and the social worker, finds the most respectable Victorian blood far too bloody for his taste, concludes Author Turner. Dick Barton, the BBC detective to whom an estimated one in three of the British population listens nightly, is straitjacketed by all the restraints of a U.S. comic-strip hero. In his struggles, Dick may fight with nothing but his bare fists.

The glass of beer he was occasionally heard to drain in the program's early days has not been repeated. The Daily Worker has suggested that he may be a "crypto-Fascist," and his relations with girls have been limited to an occasional game of tennis. Dick Barton is, in fact, so much the repressed antitype of his Victorian forerunners that British Freudians expect him any day to "break out spectacularly, in a manner which will horrify Krafft-Ebing."

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