Dene, Detective (1897) featured an early example of a female detective in crime fiction. One of the Dorcas Dene stories, 'The Haverstock Hill Murder', was dramatised for BBC Radio in 2008. At Arthur Lambton's Crimes Club, Sims took pleasure in discussing cases with Max Pemberton, Conan Doyle and Churton Collins. He was consumed with the murders of Jack the Ripper and even became a suspect. A modern edition of his poetry, Prepare to Shed Them Now: The Ballads of George R Sims, was published in 1968. Sims's sympathy and wit were not enough to spare him some criticism. To make fun of Sims the National Observer, in 1892, nominated him to succeed Tennyson as poet laureate. The members of the aesthetic movement were sometimes contemptuous of Sims, and in 1894 he was the butt of a spoof in The Green Carnation by Robert Hichens. In 1899, Charles Whibley wrote an acid profile of Sims. Sims later sacrificed some of his standing among progressives with his 1906 campaign in The Tribune, titled "Bitter cry of the middle classes", in which he criticised organised labour and argued that lower middle-class tradesmen and workers were over-taxed in the name of statism. Plays Sims wrote over thirty plays, but most of them were adapted from European pieces. His first hit play, Crutch and Toothpick, based on a French farce by Labiche, was produced at the Royalty Theatre in 1879 and enjoyed a run for 240 nights. In 1881, he wrote the even more successful melodrama, The Lights o' London, produced by Wilson Barrett at the Princess's Theatre, London. This ran for 286 nights and toured in the British provinces, as well as earning record ticket sales in America. It went on to tour continuously in Europe and elsewhere through World War I. His next play, Romany Rye, opened in 1882 at the Princess's and was a hit. On opening night at the Theatre Royal, Exeter, during its regional tour, scenery caught fire during the performance, causing the Exeter Theatre Royal fire, which remains the UK's deadliest building fire, and worst theatre disaster, killing 186 people. All of the cast and crew survived the fire, which mostly killed audience members in the pits and gallery, and the tour continued, although at the following performance, costumes and scenery had to improvised and borrowed as they had all been lost in the blaze. In the early 1880s,