page_title: Literature of Birmingham
section_title: Crime fiction, science fiction and other genre fiction
hierarchical_section_title: Literature of Birmingham / Regency and Victorian literature / Crime fiction, science fiction and other genre fiction
caption_attribution_description: English: Caricature of Max Pemberton. Caption read “A Puritan’s Wife”.
context_page_description: The literary tradition of Birmingham originally grew out of the culture of religious puritanism that developed in the town in the 16th and 17th centuries. Birmingham's location away from established centres of power, its dynamic merchant-based economy and its weak aristocracy gave it a reputation as a place where loyalty to the established power structures of church and feudal state were weak, and saw it emerge as a haven for free-thinkers and radicals, encouraging the birth of a vibrant culture of writing, printing and publishing.
  The 18th century saw the town's radicalism widen to encompass other literary areas, and while Birmingham's tradition of vigorous literary debate on theological issues was to survive into the Victorian era, the writers of the Midlands Enlightenment brought new thinking to areas as diverse as poetry, philosophy, history, fiction and children's literature. By the Victorian era Birmingham was one of the largest towns in England and at the forefront of the emergence of modern industrial society, a fact reflected in its role as both a subject and a source for the newly dominant literary form of the novel.
context_section_description: The Victorian period also saw authors with a Birmingham background produce fiction in a far broader range of genres. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, started his career as a writer in Birmingham. His first story "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley" was written and published in 1879 while he was working as a medical assistant in Aston, as was his second "The American's Tale", whose success led his editor to advise him to give up medicine and pursue a full-time literary career. Birmingham appears in Conan Doyle's early stories as Birchespool, and several of Conan Doyle's later Sherlock Holmes stories, including "The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk" and "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs", have explicit Birmingham settings.
   
  Edwin Abbott Abbott, who worked for a period as a schoolmaster at Birmingham's King Edward's School, was the author of a wide range of writings dominated by his highly imaginative theological works. He is best known, however, for the classic early science fiction work Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which combined a satirical treatment of contemporary social class structures and gender roles, a deep expression of his own religious principles, and a speculative exploration of geometrical dimensions that anticipates Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Louisa Baldwin wrote poetry, two collections of children's stories and four novels for adults; but is most highly regarded for her gothic ghost stories, which were originally published in literary magazines but were collected together and published as The Shadow on the Blind by John Lane in 1895.
  The imaginative adventure novels of Max Pemberton, the Edgbaston-born son of a Birmingham brass foundry owner, sold vastly well, from The Iron Pirate of 1893, a seafaring tale of ironclad buccaneers, to The Garden of Swords, an 1899 story of the Franco-Prussian War. This swashbuckling genre was also represented by the highly successful 1884 novel The Adventures of Maurice Drummore (Royal Marines) by Land and Sea, which claimed to be written by Linden Meadows and illustrated by F. Abell, though both in fact were pseudonyms of the Birmingham-born Charles Butler Greatrex.
  The literary output of the Canadian-born author Grant Allen, who was brought up in Birmingham from the age of 13 and attended King Edward's School, was prodigious and varied even by Victorian standards. The Scottish critic Andrew Lang called him "the most versatile, beyond comparison, of any man in our age". Allen is best known for his best-selling but controversial 1895 novel The Woman Who Did, whose tragic plot combined support for free love with opposition to the institution of marriage, and whose success scandalised Victorian society. He is also noted for innovations in detective fiction, creating independent-minded female detectives modelled on the feminist ideal of the New Woman in Miss Cayley's Adventures; and for playing with the conventions of the crime genre in An African Millionaire, where the criminal is the hero, and the short story "The Great Ruby Robbery", where the culprit turns out to be the detective investigating the crime. Allen's incorporation of his own scientific preoccupations into novels such as the time travel-based The British Barbarians also made him an important early pioneer of science fiction. H. G. Wells later wrote to him, acknowledging that "this field of scientific romance with a philosophical element that I am trying to cultivate, properly belongs to you."
caption: The adventure novelist Max Pemberton caricatured in Vanity Fair in 1897
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