On this day... March 10th 1894

​ 130 years ago today ‘The Raiders’ was published. It was Crockett’s first published novel, following on from the overwhelming success of his short story collection of March 1893 ‘The Stickit Minister and some common men’ which was now in multiple editions. At the time of The Raiders publication Crockett was preparing for an Illustrated edition of ‘Stickit’ as well as working with his publisher T. Fisher Unwin on three other manuscripts which which would be published in 1894. ‘The Lilac Sunbonnet’ was being serialised (to be published in novel form in the autumn of 1894 in Britain and America) while ‘The PlayActress’ and ‘Mad Sir Uchtred,’ both short novellas, were in production.


Crockett was making waves in the London literary scene. It was, as we say, a dog eat dog world. Without some knowledge of publishing history it’s hard to contextualise the legacy we’ve been given of Crockett – which is key to answering a question I’m asked a lot ‘why have I never heard of S.R.Crockett?’


Let’s start unpacking this bigger story by looking at the actual publication of ‘The Raiders’ Crockett’s breakthrough novel.


‘The Raiders’ was due to be published on March 1st. Publishing rules at the time meant that no one should review a book until it was actually in print. Publication slipped from March 1st to March 10th and somewhere during the confusion a review came out in The Scotsman on March 5th. This caused Crockett’s publisher (T.Fisher Unwin) some consternation and there are some testy letters between author and publisher. Remember that at this time it’s in Crockett’s best interest to keep his ‘new’ publisher on side. And that said publisher had some history of disagreements with both Crockett’s agent A.P.Watt and his ‘champion’ W. Robertson Nicoll. One cannot take personalities out of this picture.


It was finally released to the world on March 10th to great acclaim. Crockett went on to write over 60 other works which were usually published in serial magazine form before being released as novels. Ironically, ‘The Raiders’ is one of a few which were not serialised and now, 130 years on, it is about to be serialised on Radio 4 (June this year) for the first time. Let’s hope you wait 130 years for one radio serial of Crockett and then multiple turn up. There’s certainly a lot of mileage in Crockett’s work for both Radio and screen adaptations – that’s a drum I’ve been banging for decades. Not long to wait now…