Detective Sexton Blake Part 1 - Boiraag Publication

The reading habits of the British underwent profound changes during the late 19th century. The country was changing, education was being made available for everyone; the continuous transit of people from the countryside into the industrial towns, and the development of cheaper printing processes resulted in the publication of numerous new periodicals to cater to a growing market that had the money to indulge in the occasional magazine or paper.
For the well-off and well-read section of the society, there were publications such as The Strand Magazine, a trend-setting monthly of great influence, probably best remembered now for bringing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories to a wider audience. The success of Holmes resulted in an upsurge of interest in the genre of crime fiction. Many a great imitations made its way to the readers, most of them inferior to Doyle's definitive detective. Soon every periodical worth its salt had its own resident sleuth tracking miscreants through the notorious London fogs, deducting footprints using a large magnifying lens.
As the demand from the masses increased, cheap reading material that revelled in gruesome fiction also made its way into the market. With titles such as "The Wild Boys of London", "Varney the Vampire" and "Sweeney Todd" one also got to read the not-so-refined literary works that reeked of murder, mayhem and blood-letting.
The 'bloods', or 'penny dreadfuls' as they were sometimes called, lost ground eventually and the final nail in their coffin was brought about by Alfred Harmsworth who published The Halfpenny Marvel, designed not only to undercut 'penny bloods' as far as price was concerned but also to provide young readers with more wholesome reading material. The editorial of the first issue, published on 11th November 1893, made his intentions very clear- "The books of this library will contain nothing that is not pure and healthy nothing that has a tendency other than to elevate; and they will, furthermore, form a healthy contrast to the deleterious rubbish known as the penny dreadful."
The first few issues of "The Halfpenny Marvel" contained run-of-the-mill adventure stories, full of blood,thunder, and daring deeds, but lacking the gothic horror of the notorious bloods. It was in the fifth issue that the editor introduced Sexton Blake, announcing that the 'clever detective' would star in the following week's story. The first Sexton Blake story was "The Missing Millionaire", written by Harry Blyth (using the pseudonym Hal Meredeth).
As the years passed, Blake's character experienced various permutations. He was originally created to be similar to earlier the 19th-century detectives but during the late 1890s, Blake's authors consciously modeled him on Sherlock Holmes.
Sexton Blake adventures were featured in a wide variety of British and international publications (in many languages) from 1893 to 1978, comprising ofmore than 4,000 stories by some 200 different authors. Blake was also the hero of numerous silent and sound movies, radio serials, and a 1960s ITV television series.
This volume compiles 10 adventures of Sexton Blake, originally published between1908 and 1909, unfortunately it was not possible to get the names of the authors who might have written these stories with surety, so we are not able to add any writer names.
Hope you will like this book.

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