“The Detective” (original: “Der Detektiv”) was written by Maximilian Böttcher and first appeared in Willkommen! 10 (1899). Böttcher (1872-1950) was a writer and editor of various literary magazines who was enthusiastic about crime fiction but not particularly talented or skilled at creating it.

“The Detective” is an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League” (1891), and its protagonist Victor is functionally a lift of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (see: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries), set in Cologne in the 1890s and using practically every Holmes trope that Böttcher could find. “The Detective” has the Watson-like narrator who is dumbfounded by Victor's acts of deduction and erudition. The story has Victor's Holmes-like deductions and conclusions about his visitors and clients, all of which are based on aspects of their appearance. The story shows Victor's contempt for the local police, who are simply not up to his intellectual level. But Böttcher’s copying of Conan Doyle is weak; Victor is an exaggerated form of Holmes, but not so extreme that any satirical points are scored off of Holmes or Conan Doyle. Victor ends up appearing not as a parody of Holmes but rather a copy of him, and a not-particularly-interesting copy at that. Victor’s sole interest to modern readers is as a German Great Detective, but even at that he is not as interesting as Adalbert Goldscheider’s Dagobert Trostler (see: The Detective Dagobert Mysteries).

Victor’s one interesting quality is that he stands as a sound example of the global influence of Sherlock Holmes. The first translations of Conan Doyle’s mysteries took place in the 1890s: Swedish in 1891, German in 1894, Italian in 1895, French in 1896.¹ Through the 1890s and well into the 1900s translations of Holmes spread around the world, so that when the international dime novel craze began in 1905 (see: The Buffalo Bill Adventures), the dime novels already had an archetypal detective character to imitate: Sherlock Holmes. From 1891 to 1912, when the dime novel craze ended, Sherlock Holmes was the most imitated and copied character in the world. This changed after World War One ended, when a resurgent global dime novel industry sought a new kind of detective to adapt and imitate, one who was Holmesian but more action-oriented. The industry found this character in Sexton Blake (see: The Sexton Blake Adventures), so that for the next twenty years, until the beginning of the Second World War, it was Blake rather than Holmes who was the most imitated and copied character in the world.²

Victor can be counted as one of these Holmes imitators. Interestingly, however, despite Böttcher’s enthusiasm for writing a Holmesian detective story, and despite the German appetite for Holmesian stories by 1899, there were no further Victor stories, and Holmes imitations in German dime novels did not appear until 1908, although thereafter there were a number of them.³

Print: Mary W. Tannert and Henry Kratz, eds., Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction. An Anthology. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.

¹ Christopher Redmond, Sherlock Holmes Handbook: Second Edition (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2012), 91-92.

² A statistical breakdown of the Holmes imitators and Blake imitators in Jess Nevins, The Encyclopedia of Pulp Detectives (Tomball, TX; self-published, 2017), supports this position.

³ The curious are directed to Sterk and Conkright, The Continental Dime Novel, and Nevins, The Encyclopedia of Pulp Detectives, for more information on the German Holmes imitators.