Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock
Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock, de son vrai nom James Edward Muddock, également connu sous le pseudonyme de Dick Donovan ( - ), était un journaliste britannique prolifique et auteur de romans policiers et d'horreur. Ses romans policiers étaient publiés dans The Strand Magazine prenant la suite de ceux d'Arthur Conan Doyle, et partageant sa popularité. Entre 1889 et 1922, il publie près de 300 romans policiers et mystères[1].
| Naissance | |
|---|---|
| Décès |
(à 90 ans) |
| Nom de naissance |
James Edward Preston Muddock |
| Pseudonyme |
Dick Donovan |
| Nationalité | |
| Activités | |
| Enfants |
The Sunless City (d) |
Biographie
Né près de Southampton, en Angleterre, de James Muddock et d'Elizabeth Preston, James Edward Muddock a beaucoup voyagé. Tout d'abord pour rejoindre son père en Inde, en pleine révolte des cipayes, puis sur la mer de Chine, a été prospecteur en Australie et a visité l’Amérique avant de s'installer en France et en Suisse[2]. Tour à tour journaliste (correspondant à l'étranger), écrivain et agent spécial (durant la Première Guerre mondiale) ; James Edward Muddock se sert de ses diverses expériences pour l'écriture de ses nombreux ouvrages policiers et d'horreur[3].
Muddock a été marié trois fois, en 1861, en 1871 et en 1880, et a eu de nombreux enfants[3].
Une de ses filles était la patineuse artistique Dorothy Greenhough-Smith. Une autre fille, Evangeline Hope Muddock (1883-1953), a changé de nom et s'appelle désormais Eva Mudocci. Elle était violoniste et devint maîtresse et amie du peintre expressionniste Edvard Munch.
Romans et nouvelles
Ouvrages policiers
Son personnage le plus réputé est le détective Dick Donovan de Glasgow (c'est d'ailleurs la réussite des aventures de ce détective qui a poussé James Edward Muddock à utiliser le pseudonyme de Dick Donovan pour certains de ses écrits[4]), celui-ci partageait les pages de The Strand Magazine avec Sherlock Holmes[5], et tout comme Sherlock Holmes, Dick Donovan possédait un don pour les raisonnements logiques et utilisait des techniques de criminologie très en avance sur son époque[3]. Le nom de ce détective a été emprunté à un coureur de Bow Street du XVIIIe siècle, première force de police londonienne[6] - [7]. James Edward Muddock écrivit également les aventures de Michael Danevitch, agent des services secrets russes dans The Chronique of Michael Danevitch[7]. Mais également le détective Vincent Trill, le détective privé Tyler Tatlock et le criminaliste légiste Fabian Field[8].
Ouvrages d'horreur
Les récits d'horreur et de terreur les plus appréciés de James Edward Muddock ont été réunis dans deux volumes. Le premier est publié sous le nom de J. E. Muddock : Stories Weird and Wonderful (1899) ; le second sous celui de Dick Donovan : Tales of Terreur (1899)[9]. Ce second ouvrage contient deux récits notables avec l'un des vampires les plus effrayants de la littérature : la femme aux yeux huileux (The Woman with the "Oily Eyes")[9] - [10].
Anecdote
La ville de Flin Flon, au Manitoba, tient son nom du personnage Flintabbatey Flonatin de la nouvelle The Sunless City: From the Papers and Diaries of the Late Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin (1905)[2].
Notes et références
- (en) Leslie S. Klinger, In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe : Classic Tales of Horror, 1816-1914, Pegasus Books, , 336 p. (ISBN 978-1-60598-876-4 et 1-60598-876-6, lire en ligne), "James Edward Preston Muddock (also known as Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock) (1843-1934), wrote almost 300 stories of detection and mystery under the pseudonym of "Dick Donovan" between 1889 and 1922. His tough-guy detective tales, told in the first person and collected in volumes with dime-novel titles like The Man-Hunter (1888), Found and Fettered (1894), The Adventures of Tyler Tatlock: Private Detective (1900), and The Triumphs of Fabian Field: Criminologist (1912), were immensely popular, rivaling Conan Doyle. In the collection titled Tales of Terror (1899) Muddock ventured into the realms of the weird and horrific, and A Night of Horror first appeared there."
- (en) Otto Penzler, The Big Book of Ghost Stories, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, , 848 p. (ISBN 978-0-345-80600-0, lire en ligne), "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 Dono van's lost race novel. The Sunless City (1905), in which Flintabbatey Flonatin dis covers a world through an underwater gold-lined cavern. When a copper lined cavern was discovered in Canada, the subsequent mine was named for the p . tagonist in a (blessedly) shortened form A Night of Horror" was first published in Tales of Terrar (London, Chatto Windus, 1899)"
- (en) « Donovan, Dick », sur http://gadetection.pbworks.com, (consulté le )
- (en) Hugh Lamb, A Bottomless Grave : And Other Victorian Tales Of Terreur, Courier Corporation, , 224 p., « The pen name Dick Donovan concealed the identity one of the last century's most prolific authors. J. E. Preston Muddock wrote over 140 books in nearly forty years and to help publish this enormous output he adopted Dick Donovan as his nom de plume. His first book as muddock, the novel A False Heart, appeared in 1873, and his first Donovan titled, The Man Hunter, was published in 1888. »
- (en) N. W. Erickson, Drop Dead Damsels, , 250 p., "Even as Dick Donovan (the character) was sharing the pages of the strand magazine with Sherlock Holmes, Dick Donovan (the author) was not only generating those adventures of "the Glasgow Detective", but unleasing supernatural horrors upon his readership with the suitably-titled Tales of Terror (1899)"
- (en) Adrian Room, Dictionary of Pseudonyms : 13,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins, 5th ed., McFarland, , 536 p. (ISBN 978-0-7864-5763-2 et 0-7864-5763-5, lire en ligne), Dick Donovan : Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock (1843-1934), Eng. Journalist, detective fiction writer. The writer took his name from one of the 18th-century Bow Street runners (a precursor of London Metropolitan Police). p. 150
- (en) NA NA, Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers, Springer, , 1568 p. (ISBN 978-1-349-81366-7 et 1-349-81366-4, lire en ligne), "The name Donovan, according to Muddock's memoirs, was that of an 18th-century Bow Street Runner; the stories themselves, however, were all modern in setting. Dick Donovan remained the central figure in succeeding short story collections until The Chronicles of Michael Danevitch, in which Muddock wrote about a Czarist police official and Peter Brodie, an English detective." p.499
- (en) NA NA, Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers, Springer, , 1568 p. (ISBN 978-1-349-81366-7 et 1-349-81366-4, lire en ligne), "Later volumes are concerned with private detectives Fabian Field, Tyler Tatlock, and Vincent Trill." p. 499
- (en) Robert Eighteen-Bisang et Richard Dalby, Vintage Vampire Stories, Simon and Schuster, , 320 p. (ISBN 978-1-62636-880-4 et 1-62636-880-5), Muddock's best horror stories were presented in two volumes: Stories Weird and Wonderful (1899; by J. E. Muddock) and Tales of Terror (1899; by Dick Donovan). Both books were published by Chatto & Windus. The latter collection contains two tales about one of the most frightening female vampires in literature. The sub-title of the second story suggests that it is a "sequel," but most modern readers would call it a "prequel."
- (en) N. W. Erickson, Drop Dead Damsels, , 250 p., "Dick Donovan (the author) was not only generating those adventures of "the Glasgow Detective", but unleasing supernatural horrors upon his readership with the suitably-titled Tales of Terror (1899), from which comes our next narrative. Even as Bram Stoker's full-blooded Dracula (1897) was inspiring anaemic imitators elsewhere, Donovan, in this enthusiastically overwrought style, reasserted the "vamp" in the vampire, giving us that femme fatale know as The Woman with the "Oily Eyes"."