I'm sure I originally posted this under the title "Rare Rex Hardinge Blakealike - Full Scan Inside!", but at some point it became the post you see below. Also it announced a new book called When the Comics Went to War, but I'll break that off into a seperate page for the repost.
I recently bought several issues of “Boys Magazine” from 1933 on Ebay (not an entirely consecutive run, but they’d make a nicely sized book if I could perhaps find any of the intervening issues for sale anywhere...). The seller kindly chucked in two issues of a late 40’s story-paper called Scramble. Well actually he sent three, but two were copies of issue 15. Still the cover of this particular issue immediatley caught my eye – a very Sexon Blake lookalike detective coupled with the name Rex Hardinge!
Rex Hardinge was born in 1904, in India, and later made expeditions in Africa. He came to England in 1929 to become a full-time writer for story-papers. And as the editor of “Sexton Blake Wins” puts it, he could “Hammer out fiction by the yard“. His contribution to that particular book (originally published in Detective Weekly issue 20) “The Man I Killed” is very memorable.
Over the years, many ‘imitators’ of Sexton Blake appeared (Sexton Blake himself starting out as an imitator of Sherlock Holmes, of course!), from nigh-indistinguishable copies (Colwyn Dane, Victor Drago) to ones more significantly altered (Nelson Lee*), none of them reached the stellar status of Blake. Martin Speed, as seen here, is clearly another – joined by Sam Spry, the boyish cockney assistant, and differentiated from Blake by Susie Spry, sam’s sister. It would be another 9 years before Sexton Blake was joined by a female assistant “full time” (and one rather more grown up!**).
xdzf - 2024 Mikenote: No idea what "xdzf" was meant to mean!
Scramble itself first appeared in 1947, and folded in 1951, running for 57 issues, according to the Magazine Data File. This site also lists it as “weekly / monthly / irregular”. Paper shortages would still have been acute after the war, so it’s not hard to beleive. This particular issue, for instance, is listed as monthly but is a mere 16 pages long – the length of a weekly halfpenny paper in the 1890’s. For that, though, all the stories appear to be complete (or at least if they are serials there’s no recap sections I could see), and all the illustrations are in “colour”. If the format stayed the same up until this paper’s end, though, it is easy to see how it would have been blown to the winds by publications such as Eagle (launched 1950).
* - admittedly not the best example as Nelson Lee also began in the 1890’s, before Blake became hugely sucessful. However Lee eventually moved into a school and became a teacher, before then his adventures had been similar to Blake ones. It was perhaps felt a way of differentiating them was needed in case readers thought one was a copy of the other?
** - Back when I was still a wrong 'un, I wanted to imitate the Sarah Jane Adventures (see how much of a wrong 'un?) by creating the Paula Dane Adventures. It would have been set in the 80's, and had some kids helping a middle-aged Paula Dane and her hi-tech gadgets solve crimes. Also she'd have had a hot mk1 Ford Fiesta with those "telephone dial" wheels. OK, maybe I wasn't too much of a wrong 'un.