Reviewed by:

• Conrad’s Popular Fictions: Secret Histories and Sensational Novels by Andrew Glazzard
• David Mulry (bio)

Andrew Glazzard begins his original and thought-provoking study with a charming anecdote from Joseph Conrad’s younger son, John, who recalls how his Christmas reading, a Boy’s Own Paper annual, mysteriously disappeared and then surreptitiously reappeared, open at the same page but with telltale “spills of cigarette ash” between some pages, to make the case that Conrad was an enthusiastic, perhaps indiscriminate, and sometimes covert consumer of popular fiction (1). It is a fascinating story, and the perfect way to begin, since Glazzard identifies a broad range of genre fiction, which not only helps unravel the themes and preoccupations of some of Conrad’s major and less traveled works (he focuses on The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Chance, with discussion of short fiction like “The Informer” and “An Anarchist” and the joint effort with Ford Madox Ford “The Nature of a Crime”), but also informs the cultural and literary milieu to which they belong.

Glazzard starts with a discussion of the detective genre—a refreshing look at the contexts of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and an eye-opening glimpse of the economics of genre fiction in general. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes sets the bar both thematically in terms of establishing such a distinctive genre fiction type of the deductive detective, but also in terms of what Glazzard notes are astonishing sums for his fiction: “£100 per thousand words [for the Strand] as well as $5000 from the American magazine Collier’s Weekly. Financially, this put Conan Doyle in a different league from almost all other Edwardian writers, including his contemporary Conrad, whose £200 for Typhoon—hardly a paltry sum in 1902—was less than a thirtieth of what Conan Doyle could have expected for a similar word-count” (27). Those remarkable figures offer their own kind of ineluctable logic about the shift of Conrad’s themes in his middle fiction, notwithstanding Glazzard’s observation of Conrad’s counterclaims in an early letter from 1897: “I have never had the ambition to write for the all-powerful masses” (CL 1:390).

The commentary on detective fiction as a broader environment of public consumption of literature in which Conrad’s The Secret Agent emerges allows Glazzard to shift away from well-trodden commentary on the anarchist background to the text, and privilege instead a discussion of figures such as Heat (as a career policeman), the Assistant Commissioner (as a specialist detective), and Verloc (as a political agent and police informant) as they figure in what [End Page 94] is notionally a detective story of political intrigue. He moves the argument amongst texts that contribute to an understanding of genre from the contemporary scene, like “Amaroff the Pole” (1905), an Addington Peace mystery written by Bertram Fletcher Robinson, and Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men (which Glazzard has treated elsewhere). He notes that the work is far from comprehensive, and he’s right because the scale of the project he undertakes is potentially vast, and the nature of his material (much of it out of print and not much remarked upon any more) is difficult to locate. There are, of course, contemporary texts that could fit into spaces here as diverse as the mischievous comedy, The Search Party (1909), by George Birmingham, pen name of Rev. James Hannay, about bumbling Irish police searching for a missing doctor (and unbeknownst to them, dangerous anarchists) because of the insistence of a particularly angry and motivated young woman, or J. E. Preston Mud-dock’s episodes in the life of a consulting detective, Found and Fettered (1894), written under the pen name of his character, Dick Donovan, which recounts the detective’s careful pursuit and eventual regret at capturing his man, Egór Treskin (a Polish Jew) for an assassination in Russia (Muddock’s novel For God and the Czar is featured later). Importantly, however, Glazzard builds his argument and harnesses his resources so well that his study is representative and feels comprehensive...

审核人：

• 康拉德的通俗小说：安德鲁·格拉扎德的秘密历史和耸人听闻的小说
• 大卫·穆里（生物）

安德鲁Glazzard开始他原来和发人深省的研究与约瑟夫·康拉德的小儿子，约翰，谁回忆一个迷人的故事怎么他的圣诞读书，一个男孩的自己的论文年度，神秘消失了，然后悄悄地又出现了，开在同一页面，但与告密者在几页之间插入“烟灰溢出”，以证明康拉德是一个狂热的，也许是不加区分的，有时是秘密的大众小说消费者（1）。这是一个有趣的故事，也是开始的完美方式，因为Glazzard确定了种类繁多的体裁小说，这不仅有助于弄清康拉德一些主要且人迹罕至的作品的主题和关注点（他专注于《秘密特工》，《西方的眼睛，和机会，讨论了诸如“告密者”和“无政府主义者”之类的短篇小说，以及与福特·马多克斯·福特共同创作的“犯罪的性质”，但也为他们所属于的文化和文学环境提供了信息。

格拉扎德从对侦探小说的讨论开始-对康拉德的《秘密特工》的背景进行了令人耳目一新的研究，并对一般类型小说的经济学大开眼界。柯南·道尔（Conan Doyle）的《福尔摩斯探案集》在主题上树立了标准，既确立了演绎侦探的独特流派小说类型，又根据格拉扎德的注释为他的小说带来了惊人的收益：“每千字100英镑（对Strand而言）以及《美国杂志》《科利尔周刊》的$ 5000。从经济上讲，这使柯南道尔与几乎所有爱德华七世时代的作家都处于不同的联盟，包括他的当代康拉德，他为台风花了200英镑（在1902年还算是微不足道的一笔），比柯南道尔对类似作品的期望值低了三十倍。字数统计”（27）。尽管格拉扎德在1897年的一封早期信中对康拉德的反诉进行了观察，但这些杰出的人物对于康拉德的主题在小说中的转变提供了自己不可避免的逻辑：“我从来没有野心要为无所不能的群众写作” （CL 1：390）。

康拉德（Conrad）的“秘密特工”（The Secret Agent）的出现将侦探小说作为一种广泛的公共消费文学环境的评论使格拉扎德从对无政府主义者背景的备受推崇的评论转移到了文本，并取而代之的是讨论诸如Heat（作为职业警察），助理专员（作为专业侦探）和Verloc（作为政治代理人和警察线人），他们认为[End Page 94]在概念上是政治阴谋的侦探故事。他将论点转移到有助于理解当代场景体裁的文本中，例如“ Amaroff the Pole”（1905年），Bertram Fletcher Robinson撰写的《 Addington Peace神秘》和Edgar Wallace的《四个正义的人》。（Glazzard在其他地方对此进行了处理）。他指出工作远非全面，他是对的，因为他承担的项目规模可能很大，而且材料的性质（其中很多已经绝版，也没有太多评论）很难找到。当然，当代文本可能适合这里的各种空间，例如调皮的喜剧《搜寻派对》（1909），作者乔治·伯明翰（George Bannamingham），詹姆士·汉内牧师（Rev.却不知道他们是危险的无政府主义者），是因为特别生气和上进的年轻女士坚持不懈，或者是JE Preston Mud-dock在咨询侦探“发现与羁押”侦探的生活中发生的事件（1894），以迪克·多诺万（Dick Donovan）的笔名书写，讲述了侦探的谨慎追求和最终遗憾，因为他俘虏了他的男人EgórTreskin（波兰犹太人）在俄罗斯被暗杀（默多克的小说《上帝与沙皇》）稍后介绍）。然而重要的是，格拉扎德建立了自己的论据，并充分利用了他的资源，以使他的研究具有代表性并感到全面...