Brought to Bay; or, Experience of a City Detective was written by “James M'Govan,” the pseudonym of William C. Honeyman (1845-1919), a Scottish professional violinist and author of fiction and non-fiction. Brought to Bay and its four sequels are casebook mysteries, and particularly good examples of the genre.

James M'Govan is a police detective on the mean streets of Edinburgh. He is a local product, the son of a poor, hard-working widow. As a boy a local policeman enlisted M'Govan to help him catch a teenage purse-snatcher. Young M'Govan was so impressed by the policeman and so proud of the praise he received from the policeman for helping to catch the purse-snatcher that he decided there and then to become a policeman when he grew up. As M'Govan grew up he helped the policeman with various jobs, and although this made him socially unpopular he remained proud of what he did. Unfortunately, the policeman M'Govan idolized was mugged by the forces of local crime kingpin James Maclusky, and the injuries sustained during the mugging were so bad that the policeman eventually died of them. M'Govan set his sites on Maclusky, swearing that he would one day bring him down, and continued to watch Maclusky once James joined the force. (In Brought to Bay James tries and fails to capture Maclusky).

M'Govan is a street cop. As a child of the Edinburgh streets, he knows them well, and that helps him do his job. He knows the local criminals, he knows where they hang out, and he knows where to find them. He also has a “nice soft wheedlin' way”¹ when talking to people and to criminals, which helps him get information. M'Govan is relatively smart, and does well at following clues, but he is not a brilliant deductive Great Detective. He questions suspects and picks up on the obvious clues, such as a missing footprint where one should be, but he has no leaps of genius. He does not need any, however. Paying attention to the “trifles” of crimes usually points him in the direction of the guilty, and his superior ability to track criminals through the streets of Edinburgh helps him catch them. M'Govan is a good cop, but he also makes an effort to be merciful. When he discovers that the murderer of a young girl was her father, who was temporarily insane during the murder, M'Govan does not charge the man, figuring that he is suffering enough with the knowledge of what he did.

The street-level of focus of Brought to Bay and the other four books in the James M’Govan series, Hunted Down, or, Recollections of a City Detective (1879), Strange Clues; or Chronicles of a City Detective (1880), Solved Mysteries, or, Revelations of a City Detective (1882), and Traced and Tracked; or Memoirs of a City Detective (1884), is a welcome change from the more rarified air of many of the other Victorian detectives. The M’Govan stories are always conscious of the victims of crime, both those victimized by the crime and the children of the criminals, who have to suffer once the criminal goes to jail. Like the other casebook detectives M'Govan shows a particular awareness of poverty as a cause of crime, especially for those teenagers who live on the streets and can afford no other way to eat except by committing crimes. M'Govan does not soft-peddle crime or criminals, although he is constrained by the mores of the day and does not write about sex crimes, but he is aware that much crime is ultimately caused by social conditions such as poverty. M'Govan also has a cynical view of law enforcement. Many of the crime lords escape justice, leaving their human tools to suffer and go to jail. M'Govan's criminals are street criminals–pickpockets, muggers, murderers, body-snatchers, flim-flam men, and the like–and his focus as an author is on what they are and how they came to be that way.

The M’Govan books were not the first casebook novels, but they were undoubtedly the most popular of them, selling over thirty thousand copies by 1885 and having been translated into French and German. The inspiration for them likely came from a combination of the earlier casebook mysteries and Edinburgh detective James McLevy’s memoirs and novels, published in the 1860s to great acclaim. William Honeyman took inspiration and ideas from these works and turned them into bestsellers. (Honeyman himself wrote that he decided to write Brought to Bay when “the Detective works of ‘Waters’ [see: The Waters Mysteries] and of my old friend M’Levy were all but forgotten.”²) It can reasonably be argued that Arthur Conan Doyle, in his Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, had the M’Govan stories in mind during Holmes’ creation and stories: the M’Govan stories were very popular in the late 1870s and early- and mid-1880s in Edinburgh, where Doyle studied medicine from 1876 to 1881.

The M'Govan stories are entertaining, told in a straightforward, vigorous fashion with a minimum of Scottish dialect. M'Govan even shows a sentimental side in the story of the dog Peep, who is faithful to his criminal master. After Peep's master dies, Peep hangs around his grave and dies of a broken heart.

Readers interested in late Victorian versions of hard-boiled detective fiction should seek Brought to Bay and the other M’Govan stories out.

Print: James M’Govan, The McGovan Casebook: Experiences of a Detective in Victorian Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd., 2003.

Haia Shpayer-Makov, The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

¹ James M’Govan, “M’Sweeny Among Body-Snatchers,” Brought to Bay; or, Experiences of a City Detective (Edinburgh: John Menzies, 1884), 29.

² James McGovan, Preface, Solved Mysteries, qtd. in Haia Shpayer-Makov, The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 237.