Called Back. Martin Edwards

       INTRODUCTION

      CALLED BACK, Hugh Conway’s most famous novel, was first published in 1883 as a ‘Christmas annual’ by a small Bristol publishing firm. The story rapidly earned such popular acclaim that ‘many prophesied the displacement of Wilkie Collins by the new star’, according to one of Collins’ obituaries. Certainly, the book caused much more of a sensation than the first detective novel of a young Scottish writer four years later, A Study in Scarlet. Yet today, Conway’s name is much less well-known than Wilkie Collins’, let alone Arthur Conan Doyle’s. So it is easy to forget that his reputation endured long after his premature death in 1885. Called Back entertained a later generation of readers when it was republished in the Detective Story Club series in 1929, and was also filmed twice, in 1914 and 1933.

      John Sutherland, an academic expert on Victorian fiction, has neatly summarised Called Back as a ‘sensational novel of murder, amnesia, Siberian-exile, political assassination and detection’. Who could possibly resist such a confection? The main events of the story take place in the 1860s; they are recalled later by the narrator, Gilbert Vaughan, a respectable Englishman with a hatred of mysteries ‘who has a romance hidden away beneath an outwardly prosaic life’.

      At the age of 25, Vaughan is struck blind. Leaving his house in London one night, he becomes lost, and witnesses a mysterious killing. Confident that they cannot be recognised, the perpetrators allow him to escape with his life. Vaughan later recovers his sight and, on a trip to Italy, encounters a beautiful girl with whom he promptly falls in love. Their romance fails to progress, but he soon comes across her again in London, where he also meets Dr Manuel Ceneri, who claims to be her uncle. Gradually, a dastardly scheme unfolds. Vaughan is not a wholly likeable man, but his persistence in his quest for the truth makes him a worthy protagonist. The long arm of coincidence reaches out time and again during the course of the narrative, prompting Vaughan’s occasional exclamation: ‘It was Fate!’ But the book is written with Victorian verve.

      The book rapidly sold more than a quarter of a million copies, making a fortune for its publisher, J. W. Arrowsmith. A paper-covered edition costing one shilling became the most renowned of the so-called ‘shilling shockers’ popular at the time. The story was also widely translated. Together with Joseph Comyns Carr, a prominent drama critic, theatre manager and playwright, Conway adapted the book for the stage, and long runs in both London and the provinces followed. There was even a burlesque version called The Scalded