Two recent books each focus on a relatively narrow timeframe and specific types of imaginative writing to remind us again of the sheer variety of kinds of literature produced at the end of the nineteenth century in Britain. Danny Laurie-Fletcher’s timely new study, British Invasion and Spy Literature, 1871–1918, explores dynamics at the end of the nineteenth century through World War I to show how print – both journalism and fiction – interacted with the creation and organisation of intelligence agencies in Britain. British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes by Clare Clarke is, as its title suggests, densely specific and concrete. Clarke emphasises the time between Holmes’s death at Reichenbach Falls in ‘The Final Solution’ (1893) and his reappearance in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2). The virtue of these two volumes is their sharply defined focus; each treats the fiction it examines, sometimes through the sheer fact that it exists, as a form of evidence in support of their arguments. In what follows, I chart the argument and structure of each book, discuss its handling of the social, political, and cultural contexts it engages, and conclude by examining how each author treats the powers and limitations of fiction; in doing so I highlight the remarkable range of literary territory each covers, even as I point out that the discussion of the relationship between the world outside the written world and worlds made by words could be more richly realised.

Laurie-Fletcher’s book is chockfull of references to fiction from the era he covers. Familiar titles such as Kim (1901), The Secret Agent (1907), and novels by Graham Greene make appearances, but it is books such as John Buchan’s The 39 Steps (1915), Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), and novels by William Le Queux and Angela Brazil that really preoccupy him. Laurie-Fletcher’s work is not meant as a comprehensive or authoritative study of the origins and early evolution of the secret services; instead, the introduction and first three chapters focus on a few distinct historical moments – including two chapters on literature about defence and spying prior to World War I, followed by one on British fears about espionage during the war itself – to show the close-knit relationship between print media about spies, imaginative literature about espionage, and developments in British intelligence before turning to the final three chapters, which are oriented around gender and sexuality in the discourses of spying and invasion. Laurie-Fletcher says that he wants to identify the politics of the literature, which he treats narrowly by focusing a lot on party affiliation, but not on larger theoretical or empirical issues of how the discourses and realities of spying, waging war, and building and maintaining empire are in and of themselves political.

Clarke, too, works within a tightly defined span of time. She writes, ‘this book is concerned with the years when Sherlock Holmes was dead. With the successors who took his place’ (2). The decade she covers was a space for new kinds of detective stories, the kinds that the popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s both fostered and stifled. She explains that she does not ‘seek to make any claims about this group of stories as an ideologically or formally coherent body of work’, but, instead, she is ‘interested in examining how they showcase the ways in which writers, the magazine market, and the detective genre responded to Sherlock’s death’ (6). These dynamics are identified and explored in Clarke’s six main chapters, each of which focuses on an author and their detective (or detectives); she zeroes in on C. L. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke in one chapter and on Norman Head and Clifford Halifax by L. T. Meade in another. Clarke’s book is concrete not only because of its clearly defined timeframe and its setting between two landmark events in late nineteenth-century fiction, but also because she organises her monograph’s structure around specific detectives; she describes her aim as follows: ‘Each chapter details the publication history and contemporary reception of one or more collections of detective short stories, published in periodical or newspaper form, during the years that Holmes was dead’ (6).

Within these discrete historical bands of time (the era of Holmes’s decease, in one instance, and World War I, in the other), each author engages with aspects of the political, social, and cultural contexts of their literature. Laurie-Fletcher chronicles several critical moments in the development of the British secret service agencies. These include the passage of the Official Secrets Act in 1889 and again in 1911, the establishment of government committees and sub-committees, and ultimately the creation of MI5, for domestic security purposes, and MI6, for foreign intelligence purposes. The creation of the Irish Special Branch, a domestic intelligence arm within the Metropolitan Police that focused on counterterrorism and counterespionage in Ireland, and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, the successor to the Irish Special Branch, that focused on domestic counterterrorism and counterespionage, are also important to British Invasion and Spy Literature. With that in mind, however, I should note that Laurie-Fletcher does not rely on declassified government documents as some studies by historians of intelligence, most notably Christopher Andrew, do. Rather, Laurie-Fletcher conducts his analysis by moving back and forth between the depiction of spies in print, British fears of invasion in the popular press and imaginative fiction, and the workings of the British government that were known through public statements at the time. Laurie-Fletcher works both synchronically and diachronically. He is as likely to point out how British fears about German waiters conducting espionage ricocheted between the press, fiction, and the government in a single moment in time as he is to show how the depiction of possible naval invasions of Britain morphed over the years. It is worth noting, however, that Laurie-Fletcher’s discussions of gender and sexuality in the last three chapters do not break new ground in terms of work in these arenas – he largely sidesteps a long-standing, robust, and growing body of scholarship on theories and histories of sexuality.

The historical specificity of Laurie-Fletcher’s study, the nature of the content he engages with, and the long duration of time he examines invites thinking about whether and how the issues he depicts persist. Today, concerns of invasion also fill the news; a now-iconic poster from the British far-right, anti-immigrant United Kingdom Independence Party showing a long line of migrants with the words ‘Breaking Point’ was released just prior to the Brexit referendum vote in June 2016, and the perpetrators of mass shootings leave behind screeds using the word. COVID-19, too, shapes the impact of the book because the global pandemic is an era of lockdown and restricted travel and a time when the origins of the virus are framed in racialised terms as a biological invasion. Laurie-Fletcher’s work is not overtly strategically presentist, but his book does work closely on specific moments in the past that loudly chime with realities today. One cannot read Laurie-Fletcher’s work on late-Victorian and Edwardian paranoia about German spies on English soil without thinking of our own early twenty-first century contexts of mass migration, counterterrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence policies and practices.

Clarke typically discusses the author’s professional background, class, and national identity, and gives a thorough and readable rundown of their publishing history. Individual chapters are chockfull of specifics about each detective and its author. She describes Arthur Morrison, best known in his day and our own as the author of A Child of the Jago (1896), as, ‘[t]he son of dockland engine-fitter and a haberdasher, born in the poverty-stricken area of Poplar’(63) and as a man who ‘was in no way a left-leaning or “socialist” writer’ but as someone who ‘harboured eugenicist views on how to deal with the problem of London’s slum dwellers’(65). Clarke also situates a detective or story within trends or events in the wider world of publishing beyond the specific author. Snippets of her discussion of Fergus Hume’s The Mysteries of a Hansom Cab (1886) are representative:

As important as the imaginative, governmental, and journalistic texts that fill the pages of his book is the way that Laurie-Fletcher treats them to support his arguments; the powers of the literary or of fiction or of the imagination do not concern him, but his book uses textual evidence and texts as evidence in compelling ways. He is as apt to quote a long passage from a novel as he is to sum it up in its entirety for his own purposes. When approaching fiction especially, Laurie-Fletcher tends to use it as a historical artifact, as proof of the attitude and politics – or of an attitude and politics – of the period. There is not a meaningful distinction between how he treats a novel, a newspaper article, or comments by a high-powered public figure; the nature of fiction and the imaginative act of making a world made of words resemble the world of the author are not central concerns of his. So, while the issues he draws out of the literature rhyme with issues in government, he does not claim that fiction drove the creation of the secret services or that the secret services responded to fiction; he treats them as phenomena that occurred at the same time and in the same place and that saw things roughly the same way. This means that the structure of stories, the shape of narrative, and the dynamic relationship between books and lived experience that might be implied in an investigation of fiction do not preoccupy Laurie-Fletcher. His concerns in creating a record of different kinds of writing that speak about similar sets of issues, even when they take different political views of those issues. And I would not want to read his book without thinking about how print about spying and invasion that came after World War I impacts reading Laurie-Fletcher. Perhaps it is the legacy of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and others, but today a safe assumption about espionage and invasion fiction is that the novels are set within the secret services and focus on characters who work for the secret services. Laurie-Fletcher made me rethink that. The inner workings of the secret services with their distinctive institutional cultures, inter-service rivalries, and insular language (no one does this better or more maddeningly than le Carré) are now the staple of spy fiction, but the literature he explores shows that it did not have to be that way.

Clarke’s focus on the internal characteristics and workings of the fiction she examines is detailed and specific. She zeroes in on the salient features of a detective. These include class, gender, and racial dynamics. An excerpt of Clarke’s description of Loveday Brooke provides a sense of this: ‘Unlike her “lady detective” contemporaries Lois Cayley, Lady Molly, Clarence Van Snoop, or Dora Myrl, Loveday Brooke is a middle-aged spinster who performs her professional duties to earn a living for herself’ (46). As part of this work, Clarke also draws out the relationships between characters in stories; as she does so, she often focuses on the intersection of the social and professional, sometimes by shining light on issues of race, class, and gender. Her description of the relationship between the characters Katherine Koluchy and Norman Head by L. T. Meade is instructive here as she draws out how Koluchy’s profession, gender, and travel back to London from the colonies are figured as threats that causes Head to turn detective (23). Clarke is also a keen observer of plot. She writes about individual moments in a story with as much facility as she does the arc of the narrative.

Clarke’s approach produces a dense, richly textured, felt sense of the range of possibilities for detective fiction that emerged during a very short historical moment in time. Yet Holmes’s dominance hangs over the book. The characters, plots, and popularity of the fiction Clarke discusses are incessantly weighed against Holmes. This is true even as Clarke’s unwavering focus on detective stories that do not feature him makes him strangely irrelevant, and I welcome how she side-lines Holmes. The push and pull, though, between the centrality of Holmes and his peripheral status makes it a little hard to discern the nature of the relationship between Holmes and his successors. His impact on them is apparent, but not always clear – for instance – in how Clarke thinks that they impact Holmes when he reappears in 1901. Beyond that, the stories are not explored for their ability to shape the time out of which they emerge. And the power of other kinds of writing, whether imaginative or not, to feed these stories, and that the stories might help to feed, is not considered. Holmes’s absence could have opened space for this, but the knowledge of his reappearance exerts force. Holmes is a relatively static figure in Clarke’s hands. His defining characteristics, cultural significance, and literary prominence do not shift even though it would be interesting to know whether the sheer fact of these non-Holmes stories reframes or should reframe how we consider him and the stories that feature him.

The specificity of each book is its strength; the focused timeframe, delimited set of texts and clearly articulated thematic and conceptual concerns are powerful spotlights on texts that are not as widely known as many of their contemporaries. For these reasons, both books should appeal to wide audiences. Spy fiction and detective fiction are extremely popular; today’s syllabi often feature a text from one of the genres and either of these books is helpful for deepening an instructor’s understanding of the origins of the genre or for suggesting new texts for the syllabus. Scholars of periodical culture will find a lot to engage them in both volumes. Writers and activists interested in issues of gender and sexuality will not find novel theories or fresh insights here, but by highlighting lesser-known texts from the period both Laurie Fletcher and Clarke provide valuable information about dates, authors, and fictional characters. Writers on war, civil violence, inter-state violence, imperialism, colonialism, and post-colonialism will not find new theories or methods in Laurie-Fletcher’s book, but his text is worth knowing because spy and invasion fiction is so intimately tied to these issues. In the future, I would welcome developments that focus more not just on how real world events in spying, war, and detective fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make it into imaginative literature, but also on how imaginative literature shaped these experiences.