Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 2, July 1973

Detectives by Gaslight Sam Moskowitz Introduces The Vanished Billionaire by B. Fletcher Robinson

One of the least known and most underrated practitioners in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes was Bertram Fletcher Robinson. He contributed so much to the creation of The Hound of the Baskervilles that Sir Arthur Conan Coyle offered to add his name as a collaborator! Robinson, the editor of England’s famed magazine VANITY FAIR, was one of Doyle’s closest friends. They had met in South Africa covering the Boer War as correspondents and had sailed back to England on the steamship Briton.

On Conan Doyle’s return he went for a rest to Devon, accompanied by his friend Robinson. On April 2, 1901 he wrote from Rowe’s Dutch Hotel, Princetown, Dartmoor, Devon: “Here I am in the highest town in England. Robinson and I are exploring the Moor over our Sherlock Holmes book. I think it will work out splendidly; indeed, I have already done nearly half of it. Holmes is at his very best, and it is a highly dramatic idea — which I owe to Robinson.”

Robinson knew the legends of the area, and among those he told was one of a fearful ghostly hound. The concept of the hound as the center of the story and with Sherlock Holmes involved in its solving fascinated Doyle. Robinson helped him outline the situations of the story and took him on guided tours of the Moors to absorb atmosphere. He refused any offer of collaboration for his assistance in the construction of the crime masterpiece.

Robinson went on to write many fine detective stories himself, the best known The Chronicles of Addington Peace which appeared in 1905 from Harper’s. A very remarkable series he wrote was The Trail of the Dead written in collaboration with J. Malcolm Fraser, six connected stories which ran in Great Britain’s THE WINDSOR MAGAZINE, December, 1902 to May, 1903, only shortly after he had assisted A. Conan Doyle on The Hound of The Baskervilles. This series contains a full mosaic of background horror which Robinson managed to inject into those stories and introduced Sir Henry Graden, famous explorer and scientist cast in the detective’s role. His nemesis was Rudolf Marnac, an arch criminal that almost made Professor Moriarty seem like a gentle, reasonable sort of soul.

Those stories, like others of Robinson’s were not published in the United States. However, he achieved a popular reception in America with his Inspector Hartley stories which ran in PEARSON’S MAGAZINE. The waspish little inspector from Scotland Yard proved a brilliant diagnostician of the most confounding clues. The Vanished Billionaire is an excellent example of the indomitable Inspector Hartley in action. The story was originally printed in the February, 1905 issue of the American edition of PEARSON’S MAGAZINE.

Perhaps the major mistake Fletcher Robinson made was when he did not permit his name to be used as a collaborator on The Hound of the Baskervilles. Had he shared the credits for the endless reprinting of that mystery masterpiece, it surely would have ensured more careful evaluation of the fiction he did write under his own name and in collaboration with others. His works are well worth reviving.