Strand Magazine

The Strand Magazine

Richard Marsh

‘Richard Marsh’ (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) was a bestselling, versatile and prolific author of gothic, crime, adventure, romantic and comic fiction. This book, the first on Marsh, establishes his credentials as a significant agent within the fin de siècle gothic revival. Marsh’s work spans a range of gothic modes, including the canonical fin de siècle subgenres of urban and imperial gothic and gothic-inflected sensation and supernatural fiction, but also rarer hybrid genres such as the comic gothic and the occult romance. His greatest success came in 1897 when he published his bestselling invasion narrative The Beetle: A Mystery, a novel that articulated many of the key themes of fin de siècle urban gothic and outsold its close rival, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, well into the twentieth century. The present work extends studies of Marsh’s literary production beyond The Beetle, contending that, in addition to his undoubted interest in non-normative gender and ethnic identities, Marsh was a writer with an acute sense of spatiality, whose fiction can be read productively through the lens of spatial theory.

Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction

Concentrating on works by authors such as Fergus Hume, Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, L.T. Meade, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, Christopher Pittard explores the complex relation between the emergence of detective fictions in the 1880s and 1890s and the concept of purity. The centrality of material and moral purity as a theme of the genre, Pittard argues, both reflected and satirised a contemporary discourse of degeneration in which criminality was equated with dirt and disease and where national boundaries were guarded against the threat of the criminal foreigner. Situating his discussion within the ideologies underpinning George Newnes's Strand Magazine as well as a wide range of nonfiction texts, Pittard demonstrates that the genre was a response to the seductive and impure delights associated with sensation and gothic novels. Further, Pittard suggests that criticism of detective fiction has in turn become obsessed with the idea of purity, thus illustrating how a genre concerned with policing the impure itself became subject to the same fear of contamination. Contributing to the richness of Pittard's project are his discussions of the convergence of medical discourse and detective fiction in the 1890s, including the way social protest movements like the antivivisectionist campaigns and medical explorations of criminality raised questions related to moral purity.