Clues From a Detective’s Camera was written by “Headon Hill,” the pen name of Francis Edward Grainger (1857-1924), a freelance journalist for newspapers and magazines and a writer of mysteries. Clues From a Detective’s Camera was followed by two sequels in 1894 and 1924.

Sebastian Zambra is a consulting detective with offices at Charing Cross. He works in London but ranges across much of southern England when hired for a case. Like Sherlock Holmes (see: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries), Zambra solves crimes through close observation of people and crime scenes and deductions based on both. But unlike Holmes Zambra has no Watson. The stories are narrated by Zambra himself or, on a rare occasion, by someone involved in the crime. Zambra is consulted by the nobility and the upper classes, and has a good reputation, although he does not seem to be famous in the way that Holmes is. Zambra shares many of the same attitudes as his customers; he looks down on the lower classes and on Catholics, and he treats women with benign patronization. Zambra is on good terms with Scotland Yard detectives, who he views and treats with good-natured condescension. A typical statement from Zambra about the police is “I was smiling quietly to myself at the tenacity with which official detectivism clings to preconceived theories.”¹ Zambra is knowledgeable in his field and is familiar with the tricks of criminals on the Continent and the haunts of the criminal classes in London. He even knows Bohemian London and is friends with some of its natives, on the grounds that he never knows when he might have need of them.

Zambra is written in the Great Detective tradition, and the reader might be forgiven for seeing similarities between Sherlock Holmes and Zambra, including references to previous cases which never saw print and, unfortunately, some of the plots to Zambra’s stories, which bear a suspicious similarity to some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s plots. The Zambra stories are often described as parodies of the Holmes stories, “clearly modeled on the success of the Holmes stories in The Strand.”² Unfortunately for Grainger, Clues from a Detective’s Camera came out in 1893, before Conan Doyle had published “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” so that Clues from a Detective’s Camera and Zambra were in direct competition with Holmes and his stories. Had Grainger known, he might have published Clues from a Detective’s Camera the following year, when there was no more Holmes to stand as competition, and Clues might have been more successful financially. Or perhaps not; there was clearly a taste for something extra- or non-Holmesian (see: The Bernard Sutton Mysteries) during Holmes’ “Great Hiatus,”³ a taste partially fulfilled by women detectives and partially fulfilled by detectives who varied substantially from the Holmesian model. Zambra was neither; too close to Holmes to set himself apart from Holmes in 1893, in 1894 Zambra would have been too close to Holmes to appeal to audiences wanting something new.

The Zambra stories are standard late-Victorian mysteries in both style and content. They have an occasionally amusing line of narration or dialogue, but the individual style and originality of phrasing Grainger brought to the Kala Persad stories (see: The Divinations of Kala Persad) are mostly missing from the Zambra stories. Although Zambra’s customers are usually well-to-do, the crimes themselves are on the more violent side and include home invasion, kidnaping, and murder. Zambra himself is not violent, and he carries his revolver on only the rarest of occasions. The other characters in the Zambra stories are the usual cast of characters from late-Victorian mysteries, with the addition of stereotypes which may have reflected Grainger’s own prejudices: thieving Romany, puffed up New Money industrialists, and silly, short-sighted police inspectors. Of note is the occasional Gothic and penny dreadful touch in the stories: a hidden chamber with a skeleton chained to the wall, an Indian prince carrying out a grudge against the son of his father’s murderer, a man stabbed with a knife which has a woman’s severed hand clutching its handle, a theft of Spanish doubloons, and a “Suicide Club," a reference to Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights.

Clues from a Detective’s Camera is sub-Conan Doyle mystery fiction, done without the original’s charm.

Print: Headon Hill, Sebastian Zambra, Detective. Eugenia, Ont.: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2011.

¹ Headon Hill, Clues from a Detective’s Camera (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1893), 49.

² Douglas G. Greene, “Introduction,” in I Believe in Sherlock Holmes: Early Fan Fiction from the Very First Fandom (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2015), vi.

³ The “Great Hiatus” is the eight-year period between 1893 and 1901 in which Doyle published no new Holmes stories or novels and in which Holmes is presumed dead, although all Holmesians know that Holmes merely faked his death in “The Adventure of the Final Problem” and went abroad.