Tom Keating and Sexton Blake

It started with my fascination with art forgery.  I suppose it reveals a little of my own nature that as soon as I started studying art history, I became fixated on the forgers.  I would explain this by saying that these are the artists who are still producing the types of art that I like—but it has more to do with my slightly larcenous nature, I suspect.

I’ve read everything I could find on Elmyr de Hory, Han van Meegeren, Robert Driessen, Wolfgang Beltracchi, Yves Chaudron, Ely Sakhai, John Myatt and the rest of the great forgers.  It didn’t take me long to discover the autobiography of Tom Keating, the British author who flooded the market with fake Samuel Palmer paintings.  Titled The Fake’s Progress, Keating describes in detail his long career.

Keating would usually buy an old, but worthless, painting, cover the original artwork with a coat of glycerin, then put his version of a masterpiece on top of the dried glycerin.  This would insure that the first time the oil painting was cleaned, the entire fake painting on top would vanish.  Occasionally, Keating would paint “You’ve Been Had” in lead-based paint under his work, so that if the painting was X-rayed by an expert, the message would clearly show up.

The book was fascinating, but I was a little confused as to why Keating referred to his…. copies...as ‘Sexton Blakes’.  Who was Sexton Blake?

As it turns out, Sexton Blake is a fictional character, a detective living on Baker Street in the upper story of a townhouse that is run by a widowed housekeeper.  When not solving bloodthirsty murders with his constant sidekick, Blake lounges around in a chemical-stained housecoat while smoking massive quantities of tobacco.  If all this sounds a little familiar, Blake is obviously intended to be a copy—without royalties—of Sherlock Holmes.

Keating referred to his forgeries as “Sexton Blakes” in part because they were knockoffs of the real thing.  The fact that Sexton Blake is also Cockney rhyming slang for ‘fake’ was simply serendipity.

Naturally, as soon as I learned all this, I just had to read some of stories.  And there are far more of them than you would believe.  Sexton Blake has figured in short stories, feature length books, radio shows, a comic strip, stage plays, movies, and a British television show that ran for five years.

The stories aren’t hard to find:  Amazon sold me several for my Kindle, but reading them requires a little work to decipher some of the dated references and obscure terminology.  Unless you know that “taking a dekko through the scugs in the local for a Peterman” translates out as “looking for a safecracker among the crooks in a bar”, you’re going to spend a little time googling some of the references.

Blake is the result of several things happening in England simultaneously.  An increase in a more literate and urban populace created a market for cheap mass-produced literature that was made possible by technological improvements in printing.  As a result, the “Penny Dreadfuls” were created—cheap magazines printed with tiny print on even cheaper paper featuring bloodthirsty tales, poorly written by underpaid authors.  Collectively, the Penny Dreadfuls really suck and although they were financially successful, their only literary merit is in their incredibly apt name.

Occasionally, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn.  There were a few good stories that got their start in these cheap magazines.  Sweeney Todd first started in a story called A String of Pearls.  And who could forget the story of Varney the Vampire?   (Well, you probably never heard of it, but trust me, it was the inspiration of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)

In time, the Penny Dreadfuls (sometimes called Penny Bloods), drew their own competition, a magazine called the Halfpenny Marvel.  This weekly magazine was not only cheaper, but the stories were a little more wholesome, if not still incredibly badly written.  The pages may have still featured gore and blood, but the ‘good’ side always won.  It is not a coincidence that the week in 1893 when Sherlock Holmes died in an issue of Strand Magazine, was also the very week when Sexton Blake appeared in Halfpenny Marvel.  

By 1915, the Sexton Blake Magazine was featuring a new story every month—a run that has lasted more than fifty years.  

Like “the author” of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and other popular pulp fiction, there was not a single author, though several authors contributed more than once.  The result is that the stories vary in tone, style, and quality.  One constant is that the stories abound with errors in spelling and grammar, and reflect an era when people routinely accepted the kind of terminology that today would be termed horribly racist.  Occasionally, the stories end abruptly—the result of some poor editor’s taking a hatchet to cut down a story so it would fit into a limited space.

If you read enough of the stories, you can get a general sense of contemporary history.  German spies come and go, to be replaced by war profiteering industrialists, followed by Nazis and, eventually, Communists—Blake and his youthful sidekick, Tinker, vanquish all of them.  Over time, Blake slowly morphs into a crime-fighting James Bond-like hero with a bullet-proof Rolls Royce and an airplane that he designed himself.  Think Batman...but with a top hat instead of a cape.  

By the Seventies, perhaps Blake had become an overused commodity or, maybe, he simply lost out to the competition from action movies and superheroes, but for whatever reason, the stories just stopped selling.  After an eighty-year run, no new stories of Sexton Black fighting crime were being published, no new movies were being made, and his British television show was never available in the United States (though you can watch the first episode here).

There hasn’t been a new Sexton Blake book published in decades, though it wouldn’t surprise me to see a revival.  I would think a movie starring Blake, set sometime in the mid-Twentieth Century would be interesting today.  It would a refreshing change from the usual movie recycling that I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen the last of Sexton Blake.

After all, there is already a revival of Tom Keating.  Though the artist passed away in 1984 after producing by his estimate some 2000 Sextons as well as an uncounted number of his own works.  Today, his paintings sell for as much as $30,000 each, occasionally worth more than the works he was counterfeiting.  I wonder what Keating would call that?