ALTHOUGH ONE OF THE most successful authors of Victorian and Edwardian detective stories and a regular contributor to the same Strand magazine in which Sherlock Holmes found fame, the pseudonymous Dick Donovan’s mysteries are seldom read today. His melodramatic, sensational plots featured physically active detectives—the most popular being Dick Donovan in first-person narratives—taking on secret societies, master villains, and innocent people coerced into crime while hypnotized or under the influence of sinister drugs. The lack of texture in his prose, the sparseness of background context, and the stick-figure characters all contributed to the diminishment of his reputation. Although he wrote more than fifty volumes of detective stories and novels, James Edward Preston Muddock (later changed to Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock) (1842–1934) claimed in his autobiography, Pages from an Adventurous Life (1907), to be disappointed in their popularity, preferring his historical and nongenre fiction (much as Arthur Conan Doyle lamented the adulation given his Sherlock Holmes stories).
Born in Southampton, Muddock traveled extensively throughout Asia, the Pacific, and Europe as a special correspondent to The London Daily News and the Hour and as a regular contributor to other periodicals. When he turned to writing mystery stories, he named his Glasgow detective Dick Donovan after a famous eighteenth-century Bow Street Runner. The stories became so popular that he took it for his pseudonym.
The town of Flin Flon, Manitoba, takes its name from a character in Donovan’s lost race novel, The Sunless City (1905), in which Flintabbatey Flonatin discovers a world through an underwater gold-lined cavern. When a copper-lined cavern was discovered in Canada, the subsequent mine was named for the protagonist in a (blessedly) shortened form.
“A Night of Horror” was first published in Tales of Terror (London, Chatto & Windus, 1899).