Malcolm Sage, Detective

Malcolm Sage, Detective is a detective fiction collection by Herbert George Jenkins, the English novelist and publisher who lived from 1876 to 1923 and who is best known as the author of the popular Patricia Brent, Spinster of 1918 and as the founder of the Herbert Jenkins publishing house. The Malcolm Sage stories were published as a collection in 1921 and gathered together a series of detective tales that Jenkins had been producing for various magazines in the years immediately after the First World War.

Malcolm Sage himself is a detective in the broad tradition that Conan Doyle had established with Sherlock Holmes. He is a private consulting detective with an office in London, equipped with various intellectual peculiarities that distinguish him from ordinary investigators, and supported by a small staff including the secretary Miss Norton who serves as the equivalent of the Holmesian Watson figure. The collection follows Sage through a series of independent cases involving various kinds of crime and mystery that come to his office for investigation.

The stories belong to the substantial body of English detective fiction that flourished in the years between the establishment of the Sherlock Holmes formula by Conan Doyle in the 1890s and the development of the classic golden age detective fiction of Christie, Sayers, and Allingham in the 1920s and 1930s. Jenkins was working within the formula that Doyle had established, with his Malcolm Sage as a competent if not first rank addition to the substantial roster of consulting detectives that English magazine fiction produced during the period.

The individual stories follow the standard pattern. A client arrives with a mystery that the ordinary police have been unable to solve. Sage and his assistants gather the relevant evidence through a combination of physical investigation and intellectual analysis. The solution is presented in a final scene that ties up the various clues into a coherent explanation. The stories generally play fair with the reader in the sense that the major clues are presented before the solution is revealed, allowing alert readers to attempt to solve the cases for themselves.

The collection runs to about three hundred pages and works well as a series of evening reads. For readers who enjoy classic English detective fiction from the period between Conan Doyle and Christie, this is a pleasant if minor example. It pairs naturally with the various other early twentieth century English detective story collections.