Читать книгу Black Maria, M.A.: A Classic Crime Novel - John Russell Fearn - Страница 5

INTRODUCTION

JOHN RUSSELL FEARN’S BLACK MARIA, M.A.

BLACK MARIA, M.A. was the very first detective novel written by English writer John Russell Fearn. He had began his writing career as a science fiction writer in the early thirties, and by the end of that decade he was appearing regularly in the U.S. pulp magazines. But in January 1940, he confided in a letter to his friend William F. Temple (then a tyro sf author himself) that he was determined to break into the wider book market, and was engaged on the first draft of a detective novel:

“Title will be Black Maria, M.A. and it embodies the new idea of a Headmistress from Suffolk who goes to the U.S. to solve the riddle of her brother’s apparent suicide...to do this she follows out the ideas she has read in Yank film mags and seen in gangster films (on the q.t.) See the gag? The yarn will have equal chance on both sides of the water for a tryout.”

Later, he told Temple that he now felt that detective stories were his real forte, and he was “thinking of gradually chucking sf and turning entirely to detective mysteries, long and short. I love ’em!”

By March, 1940 he reported to Temple that he had completed his first draft of the novel, “but now I’m damned if I can find the time to type out the final copy! It just lies—and lies—while I churn out stuff in between for endless streams of ever-appearing American mags and try and get some order into things to give Carnell the best I can do.” This latter remark was a reference to a proposed new British sf magazine, New Worlds, to be edited by John Carnell. Carnell later told me that Fearn had submitted hundreds of thousands of words to him, from which he had selected several stories, only for the magazine to be aborted when the financial support for it collapsed.

1940 saw the peak of Fearn’s production for the American sf magazines, with more than two dozen of his stories appearing that year alone. The exigencies of the war (and the collapse of the proposed British sf market) dictated that he had to concentrate on his established U.S. markets. Then, in 1943, following difficulty in obtaining payment for his stories in the U.S., Fearn made a fresh effort to break out of the pulps. This time he made it.

He finished Black Maria, M.A. and succeeded in selling it to Rich and Cowan, an established hardcover imprint of the giant Hutchinson UK publishing chain. It was an immediate success, and Fearn was asked to write sequels, under the contractual pen name of “John Slate.” Within a couple of years, he had a second contract under his belt, writing a separate detective series for another Hutchinson imprint, Stanley Paul, as “Hugo Blayn.” He was also selling “one-off” detective mystery novels to the prestigious Toronto Star Weekly, in Canada, whose novels were also syndicated to several American newspapers. The late 1940s saw Fearn concentrating his creative powers almost exclusively in detective novels, although he continued to write sf as a sideline.

During his lifetime Fearn published five novels in England featuring ‘Black Maria’ and whilst several of the novels have been reprinted in the USA by Wildside Press, the very first ‘origin’ novel has never previously been published in an American edition—until now, as part of Borgo Press’s ambitious programme of publishing all of Fearn’s detective novels in new American editions.

Black Maria, M.A is undoubtedly a classic of the “locked room” genre. It was translated and published in France (along with its immediate sequel) and was optioned for French radio. In 1991, the French crime fiction expert Roland Lacourbe included it in his non-fiction 99 Chambres Closes, a book which celebrated and listed ninety-nine of the greatest “locked room” detective novels ever published in France, ranking “Black Maria” along with the finest creations of authors such as Gaston Leroux, S. S. Van Dine, C. Daly King, Fredric Brown, and Agatha Christie.

In 1949, Walter Gillings, the editor of Hutchinson’s Crime Book Magazine, asked Fearn to write an article in their featured series “Detectives of Fiction,” telling “how he invented the character of his school-ma’am sleuth.” I can do no better than let Fearn himself tell the inside story of his remarkable character....

—Philip Harbottle

2012