Harry Dickson

Harry Dickson is a fictional pulp detective, born in America, educated in London, and was called The American Sherlock Holmes.

The original pulp dime-novel series that later became Harry Dickson began in Germany in January 1907 under the title of Detektiv Sherlock Holmes und seine weltberühmten Abenteuer (Sherlock Holmes' Most Famous Cases), published by Verlagshaus für Volksliteratur und Kunst, and comprised 230 issues in total, published until June 1911.

After some concern about the rights of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the series was retitled Aus den Geheimakten des Weltdetektivs (The Secret Files of the King of Detectives) with No.

In it, Dickson's young assistant was renamed Tom Wills In 1928, Belgian publisher Hip Janssens asked writer Jean Ray to translate the Dutch series into French, for distribution in Belgium and France.

Using the titles and the covers from the original pre-World War I German edition (by artist Alfred Roloff, a member of the Berlin Academy) as starting points, he began to write his own stories.

The best and most fondly remembered Harry Dickson stories are those that pit the Great Detective against some supervillains such as Professor Flax, the mad scientist known as the Human Monster, and, later, his daughter, the equally deadly Georgette Cuvelier, a.k.a.

The Spider (with whom Dickson had a love-hate relationship); Euryale Ellis, a beautiful woman who had the power to turn her victims into stone and who may be a reincarnation of the legendary gorgon Medusa; Gurrhu, a living Aztec god who hid in the Temple of Iron, an underground temple located beneath the very heart of London, filled with scientifically advanced devices; the last, living Babylonian mummies who found refuge under a Scottish lake; a nefarious blood-drinking serial killer dubbed the Vampire with Red Eyes; the enigmatic, tuxedo-suited avenger known as Cric-Croc, the Walking Dead; the supervillain Mysteras, who relies on elaborate and deadly illusions; the bloodthirsty Hindu god Hanuman, etc.

At age 15, Dickson was a student in England at the Pertwee Private School and solved a case involving a diamond smuggling ring.

At age 20 or about, Dickson enrolled as a student at the University of South Kensington in London and became acquainted with Jean Ray’s armchair detective Mister Triggs.

The script has been published in a book title "Les aventures de Harry Dickson, scénario pour un film (non-réalisé) par Alain Resnais de Frédéric Towarnicki" - Capricci Editions - Paris décembre 2007 The first Harry Dickson novel translated into English