Dick Donovan: The Glasgow Detective

by J.E. Preston Muddock (Editor), Bruce Durie (Editor)

Before Sherlock Holmes, there was Dick Donovan. The name struck terror into the hearts of thieves, murderers, embezzlers, swindlers and criminals of every class, and his exploits gave delight to millions of readers worldwide from the 1880s onwards. The first internationally popular Victorian police detective, Dick Donovan was Glasgow's very own protector of the peace. A master of disguise, dogged pursuer of the guilty, nemesis of all evildoers, Donovan was the detective sans pareil of his age. Dick Donovan was the lead character in a hugely successful series of over 200 stories and books written under that pen-name by James Emmerson Preston Muddock. The appearance of his cases in print predated Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story, and during Conan Doyle's lifetime tales of Donovan rivalled the stories of Holmes in popularity. Dick Donovan achieved an international reputation as the master sleuth, and is reputedly repsonsible for American detectives being known popularly as 'Dicks'. Now the stories are available again for the first time in decades, with a Foreword about the extraordinary life and works of J.EPreston Muddock by Bruce Drurie, the foremost world authority on Dick Donovan - The Glasgow Detective.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock (or James Edward Preston Muddock), sometimes writing as Dick Donovan and "Joyce Emmerson (Preston) Muddock."

Reviews

[Estott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting second rate work, certainly when compared to the best Holmes stories, but worth dipping into. Donovan, a no nonsense police detective, narrates the stories. They can be a bit repetitive: in most cases the crime is described, Donovan interviews the suspects, he forms his conclusions & nabs the culprit- and the story ends. They are readable because Muddock was a capable writer and could pull off a good description and on occasion a witty observation: in one story a suspect claims that he was walking the streets of Glasgow sightseeing at the time of the incident. Donovan doubts him because "The day in question was Sunday" and on Sunday morning in Glasgow there is nothing to do but go to church "And I would have laid odds that he was not a church going man."

Donovan is a bit vain of his knowledge and skill (with good reason) and rather dismissive of the "Scientific" school spawned by Doyle:

"Of course, if I had been the impossible detective of fiction, endowed with the absurd attributes of being able to tell the story of a man's life from the way the tip of his nose was formed, or the number of hairs on his head, or by the shape and size of his teeth, or by the way he held his pipe when smoking, or from the kind of liquor he consumed, or the hundred and one utterly ridiculous and burlesque signs which are so easily read by the detective prig of modern creation, I might have come to a different conclusion with reference to Job Panton. But my work had to be carried out on very different lines, and I had to be guided by certain deductive inferences, aided by an intimate knowledge of human nature, and of the laws which, more or less in every case of crime, govern the criminal. " (The Problem of Dead Wood Hall, 1896. Found online, not included in the above collection)

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: short stories. A police procedural. Detective Donovan is a straight-forward officer in Glasgow. He narrates. From 1892.