For our visit to our previously listed stock this week, we turn to Sexton Blake. Often dubbed ‘the poor man Sherlock Holmes’, there’s still no doubting the popularity of Sexton Blake, who has probably had far more fiction written of him than the world’s greatest detective. In the Crime, Spies and Sleaze category of our Books section, we have more than twenty digests from the famous Sexton Blake Library. These are picture library sized, but mainly text. The series ran from 1915 to 1968, and our stock dates from the late 1950’s to the early 1960’s, following the 1956 revamp by W Howard Baker when the covers took on a more gangster/sleazy mode and were drawn by notable artists such as Reginald Heade (as on The Wicked Three shown right). Written by a ‘harem’ of notable writers including Wilfred McNeilly, W Howard Baker, Michael Moorcock (one of many moonlighting as house name Desmond Reid), Peter Saxon and Jack Trevor Story, the longevity of the series is testament to the quality of the plotting and writing. And a factoid: one of Sexton Blake’s arch-enemies, was Zenith the Albino – who is widely acknowledged to have inspired Moorcock’s morose hero Elric.