His ‘bairns’ are described in vivid cameos as they slink around the Grassmarket and the Lawnmarket, looking for mischief to be up to. Who will soon forget the frightful Bell, wife of the spineless and criminous Jem in the ‘The Pedlar’s Revenge’? She has served time for ‘child stripping’ , or rather ‘manslaughter, the poor child having died from stripping and exposure.’ McGovan is much tried by the vagaries of a law which turns this creature, ‘remorseless as the grave,’, loose upon the unsuspecting public, but he engages in no diatribes, merely sighs wearily and gets on with trying to bring to her door a brutal robbery. It proves impossible to do so legally, but the victim, the Pedlar of the title, egged on by McGovan, achieves a nice revenge which relieves Jem of the wife ‘possession of whom was not an unmixed blessing.’ He has a dry humour, our McGovan, which is one of the chief delights of these tales.

Lawyer Bellamy , encountered in the case of ‘The Diamond-Ringed Apprentice’ is another target of McGovan’s wry humour. He has defended a female counterfeiter and by pathetic pleading, got her off with a caution and discharge. He also prevents McGovan from serving another warrant on her through some legal hairsplitting. In common with the criminal fraternity, he underestimates and patronises McGovan, but Bellamy is soon humbled. Counterfeit guineas are issuing from his Chambers and he comes under suspicion at the bank because,‘from constantly appearing for the defence of the criminals, he had not the best reputation in the eyes of these gentlemen.’ McGovan, an entirely human creation, relishes having to come to the rescue of the superior Bellamy. At his best, McGovan’s ‘bairns’ are as well and vividly drawn as R. L. Stevenson’s – he has the same gift of showing the whole character in a few strokes of the pen, and of writing a rich and lively dialogue.

The world of Old Edinburgh is beautifully evoked in this book. In the tale of ‘The Mysterious Human Leg’, an amputated limb crushed and studded with carpet tacks is discovered. McGovan discounts a medical student as a suspect because ‘it seemed unlikely that a student would throw away a good leg undissected’ (waste not, want not is perhaps the one old Scottish tradition which has not survived!) In this world, servants sleep in kitchens, and wealthy men have white silk panelled walls in their dining rooms; a languid young society man may appear ‘utterly exhausted with the trouble of displaying his own wealth and beauty.’; the solving of a crime may depend on a dent in the gold case of a pocket watch. And yet there is something entirely modern in McGovan’s portrayal of criminals and the law. The law is often recklessly lenient and fails to protect good citizens. Criminals are treacherous, brutish and fundamentally stupid. For example, Benjie Blunt fancies himself a clever and cunning criminal and plans ingenious crimes which leave McGovan drily unimpressed. ‘I did not find that Benji’s cleverness produced any marked diminution in the number of his convictions’ ; the ‘bairns’ all swear to the underworld code of not betraying one of their own, but what that really means is that they won’t if there’s nothing in it for them. Actually, they actually distrust one another to the point of death, literally as in the revenge tale ‘The Self Executioners’.

All this is familiar to the modern reader of crime. All sorts of things may change, but not those die-hard traditionalists, the criminal fraternity. The domestic criminal has not altered his habits either in the hundred years or so since these stories were written. In ‘Checkmating A Monster’ , a strangely modern Victorian story, McGovan narrates the tale of Mrs. Hendon, victim of a wife beater and child torturer, who wishes to extort her property from her. As the law stood then, she can have him arrested but he will only be bailed and sent home to take it out on her and their son again (plus ça change, plus c’est la męme chose?); if she divorces, she loses her child and she knows he will be killed. McGovan at first expects to hear a familiar story (familiar then and now) of ‘love and devotion in spite of brutal ill-treatment’, but Mrs. Hendon is made of sterner stuff: ‘ all your laws have been made by men and, of course, they gave men the best end of the whip’. In the end, she is extricated from her trouble, but McGovan makes it very clear that it is no thanks to the law that she is.

In an afterword to the book, Mary Anne Alburger convincingly traces the influence of McGovan’s memoirs on the later writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who is known to have read them. The two authors are perhaps archetypes of the detectives present in crime novels today: Holmes a genius, full of abstruse knowledge, solving crime from his armchair: McGovan a man of the streets, shrewd and hard-headed; Holmes a super detective held in awe by one and all: McGovan underestimated and patronised by just about everyone he encounters ; Holmes aloof and humourless; McGovan warm and lively, possessed of a pawky Scottish wit; Holmes, ever victorious; McGovan sometimes defeated.; Holmes, dealing with fiendishly clever supercriminals; McGovan working with the sweepings of the street; Holmes solving crimes while he puffs at his pipe; McGovan by careful questioning and letting criminals rabbit on until they betray themselves.

One story in the casebook perhaps illustrates their differences more than any other. Honeyman, the creator of McGovan, was a violinist. Holmes, of course, was a virtuoso player. In the tale ‘The Romance of A Real Cremona’, the uncultured McGovan has to investigate the theft of a Cremona violin. He is outraged at being dragged form his bed on account of an ‘old fiddle’. It is difficult to avoid considering what Holmes’s reaction would have been! However, in this story, McGovan does manage to impose a rough justice and at the same time have the last laugh.

These stories are written with the precision and conciseness which were the hallmark of the Scottish writers of that period. They are a delight to read and it’s a pity there are only 13 reprinted here. McGovan’s output was prodigious, and I’m wondering if Mercat Press might consider another little volume. Pretty please?

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.