In the course of my reading, I’ve occasionally run across references to Sexton Blake, an English detective/spy hero whose popularity flourished from the 1890s up to the late 1960s. The character’s longevity can be attributed to the fact that, after his creator (Hal Meredith writing as Harry Blyth) stepped aside, other writers took up the pen. He was featured in a number of magazines over the years, always in the medium of pulp stories aimed at boys. For much of his career, Sexton Blake was a more energetic version of Sherlock Holmes (kind of like the Guy Ritchie movies).

I thought it would be amusing to try some Sexton Blake stories, and the collection Sexton Blake and the Great War was cheap, so I bought it for my Kindle.

Alas, immature as I admittedly am, I’m not immature enough for this stuff. I got through the first short novel, The Case of the Naval Manoeuvres, written in 1908 by Norman Goddard, and that was all I could handle.

In this story, our intrepid hero is sent by the Prime Minister to the Shetland Islands, where he’s standing on the shore one night with his two sidekicks and his faithful dog Pedro, when a dangling rope just happens to hit him in the face. Blake, of course, grabs onto it, and is carried out over the sea. He climbs the rope and discovers it’s attached to a huge German airship. Scrambling up into the cabin, he finds that the ship is under the command of no less a personage than Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, to whom Blake has been of personal service once or twice in the past. This saves his life, but he is taken prisoner nonetheless. Predictably, he manages to escape, but clings onto the vessel’s framework and tracks the crew to their secret lair, where they have prepared a mechanism to guide their fleet in an attack on Great Britain. It doesn’t take long for Blake to disguise himself perfectly as a German officer, sabotage their machine, and kidnap the Kaiser. The Kaiser, in turn, will escape from Blake… and so it goes. Plausibility has no place in this scenario.

Our hero, of course (much like the heroes of our current CGI action flicks), can absorb any amount of physical punishment with barely a wince. He can be lifted high into the sky under a balloon, and plunge 80 feet into the ocean, without noticing the cold or needing any more care than a fresh suit of clothes. Interestingly, he also fights hand-to-hand with the Kaiser – which is less impressive than it sounds when you remember that Wilhelm was born with a crippled left arm (either the author did not know this, or he ignored it).

If you’re interested in pure, unadulterated Ripping Yarns stuff, this is the real goods. I think it would be fun to be able to appreciate stories like this… but I can’t.