The Dorrington Deed-Box
by Arthur Morrison
308 pages, 6x9, Trade Paper or Trade Cloth
From our Yellowback Mystery
Series
Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) was born and raised in London. As a young man he was clerk for the Charity Trust of the East End of London and then worked as a journalist. In later life he had a successful career as an art dealer. He is best remembered in the mystery field for his casebook stories (à la Conan Doyle) of the detective "Martin Hewitt" (1896). Outside the genre he is known for his realistic short stories depicting the slums of London, Tales of the Mean Streets (1895). Morrison grew up in the slums and chronicled his experiences in the novel, A Child of the Jago (1896).
Less well-known than his Martin Hewitt tales, but far more
ground-breaking, was Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed-Box, in which he
chronicles the exploits of Horace Dorrington, a raconteur and scoundrel who
hails from a very different social strata than the typical Victorian detective.
In this collection of short stories, Dorrington is introduced in a recounting
of his arrest for the attempted murder of one of his clients. Dorrington, an
anti-hero before his time, is not the upholder of law and order that normally
graced the pages of The Strand. Dorrington is as likely to pre-empt a
criminal plot as he is to solve it. He is more a precursor of Donald Westlake’s
hit-man protagonist "Parker" than he is the model for any other modern genre
figure, however "hard boiled." Many Victorian mystery buffs just weren’t ready
for this type of iconoclastic realism in their detective fiction. In creating this unconventional protagonist, Morrison took a
path that few writers in the genre have trod in the century since this book
first appeared—and fewer still genre detectives have relished their lack of
scruples with the angst-free abandon exhibited by the disreputable Horace
Dorrington.