"And Of Course Detective Stories"

READING HABITS in wartime seem to defy expectations. You'd think with all that carnage that the average Joe or Jane would shy away from crime fiction, but experience says otherwise:

"What Our Soldiers Read."

By Beatrice Harraden (Wikipedia HERE) with Elizabeth Robins (Wikipedia HERE).

The Cornhill Magazine, November 1916.

Online at Project Gutenberg (HERE; scroll to text page 607).

Excerpts (we've added the emphasis):

  "About eighteen months ago Miss Elizabeth Robins and myself entered on our duties as Honorary Librarians to the Military Hospital, Endell Street, the only Military Hospital in England officered entirely by women.

  "We were asked to collect a number of suitable books and magazines, and by personal intercourse with the soldiers, to encourage reading amongst the men, and to do our best to help them through the long hours of illness and inaction by offering them books which would amuse and interest them.

  "We soon learnt that we had to invest in a large number of detective books, and any amount of Nat Gould’s sporting stories.

  "It was quite possible that one man in a ward would be reading, say, Nat Gould’s ‘Jockey Jack’—a great favourite—and the man in the next bed would be reading Shakespeare, or ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ or Shelley, or Meredith, Conrad, or the Encyclopædia. We found, in fact, so many different kinds of minds and upbringings, that we could never have remembered without the aid of a note-book what each man wanted.

  "The following are items from two or three of our order books. The order books have been chosen at random, but the items are consecutive; and the list will give some idea of the nature of our pilgrimages from one bedside to another bedside, and from one ward to another:

  "One of Nat Gould’s novels; Regiments at the Front; Burns’s Poems; A book on bird life; ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’; Strand Magazine; Strand Magazine; Wide World Magazine; The Spectator; A scientific book; Review of Reviews; ‘By the Wish of a Woman’ (Marchmont); one of Rider Haggard’s; Marie Corelli; Nat Gould; Rider Haggard; Nat Gould; Nat Gould; Nat Gould; Good detective story; Something to make you laugh; Strand Magazine; Adventure story; ‘Tale of Two Cities’; ‘Gil Blas’; Browning’s Poems; Tolstoy’s ‘Resurrection’; Sexton Blake; ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’; Nat Gould; Wide World Magazine; Pearson’s Magazine; ‘Arabian Nights’; Jack London; Shakespeare; Nat Gould; ‘The Encyclopædia’; Rex Beach; Wm. Le Queux; Strand Magazine; Nat Gould; Something in the murder line; Country Life; The Story Teller Magazine; one of Oppenheim’s novels; ‘The Crown of Wild Olive’; ‘Kidnapped’; Nat Gould; Shakespeare; Nat Gould; Silas Hocking; Oppenheim; Le Queux; Nat Gould; Nat Gould; Jack London; ‘Handy Andy’; ‘Kidnapped’; ‘Treasure Island’; Book about rose growing; ‘Montezuma’s Daughter’ (Rider Haggard); ‘Prisoner of Zenda’; Macaulay’s Essays; ‘The Magnetic North’ (Elizabeth Robins); Nat Gould; Sexton Blake; Modern High Explosives; ‘Dawn’ (Rider Haggard); ‘Wild Animals’; Book on horse-breaking; ‘Radiography’; ‘Freckles’ (by Gene Stratton-Porter); ‘The Blue Lagoon’; ‘Caged Birds’; ‘The Corsican Brothers’; ‘Sherlock Holmes’; French Dictionary; Kipling; ‘Mysticism’; Nat Gould; ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’; ‘Mystery of Cloomber’ (Conan Doyle); and so on.

  "These are, of course, only a few items. I should say that on the whole, and leaving out entirely books on technical and special subjects, the authors most frequently asked for by the average soldier are: Nat Gould, Charles Garvice, Wm. Le Queux, Rider Haggard, Guy Boothby, Oppenheim, Rex Beach, Conan Doyle, Marie Corelli, Joseph and Silas Hocking, Jack London, Dickens, Mrs. Henry Wood, Kipling (whose ‘Barrack Room Ballads’ they learnt by heart), Dumas, Ian Hay, Baroness Orczy, and Hornung’s ‘Raffles.’

  "And very favourite books are those dealing with wild animals and their habits, with ferrets, rats, and birds, and all stories of adventure and travel, and of course detective stories."

As you can see, the wounded soldiers often chose detective fiction. Why that is we'll leave to the people who tell us they know how the mind works.

References and resources:

- Nat Gould gets mentioned a lot; according to Wikipedia (HERE) he was "a best selling author while alive."

- Apart from the predictable Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle mentions, here are a few others from The ONTOS Files:

  ~ Sexton Blake (ONTOS HERE and HERE)

  ~ William Le Queux (ONTOS HERE)

  ~ E. Phillips Oppenheim (ONTOS HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE)

  ~ E. W. Hornung's Raffles (ONTOS HERE and HERE)

  ~ Baroness Orczy (ONTOS HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE)

  ~ Guy Boothby (ONTOS HERE).

- We posted about this very subject nearly ten years ago; see ONTOS (HERE).

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