Lest he seem impossibly superior, Holmes is given some counterbalancing weaknesses. He is wrong from time to time, though usually about something trifling. He is inclined to be critical of the people around him, including Watson, when they haven’t met what seems like some impossibly high standard. Some could see this trait as one of his strengths, though, since he holds himself to the same standard. More important, he is what we would call today a manic-depressive. He comes alive only when on the trail of crime, but not just any crime. It must have some special feature that baffles ordinary mortals. When no crime worthy of his skills is currently afoot, he lapses into listlessness, requiring cocaine for stimulation. Cocaine was not illegal at the time; these were the 1880s and 1890s, the time of bohemians in the European capitals, the absinthe drinkers of Degas, and the drug-induced estheticism of the fin-de-siècle. Though not illicit, this dependency is clearly a character flaw.
The sum of all his qualities makes Sherlock Holmes seem like a real person. This sense of his reality sets these stories apart from other literature, and from the very beginning the illusion of his existence was powerful. On October 29, 1892, an article called “The Real Sherlock Holmes” by “Our Special Correspondent” appeared in the National Observer. It quoted Sherlock Holmes complaining about the way Conan Doyle had plagiarized Dr. Watson. Holmes also expressed indignation at Conan Doyle’s misrepresentations of some of his cases. He didn’t make any of those little mistakes Conan Doyle ascribes to him. The Strand Magazine, which published all the short stories, received letters wanting to know if Holmes were a real person. The magazine cagily replied that it had not made his personal acquaintance but would certainly call upon him if ever it needed a mystery investigated.
Even after it was well known that Holmes was a fictional creation, a curious phenomenon developed that has no other parallel in literature. It has become a good-humored convention for Holmes scholars to treat the stories as historical events and the protagonists as real figures. Conan Doyle is often referred to as the literary agent for Dr. John H. Watson. Several biographies have been written about Holmes, and the current residents of Baker Street still get mail addressed to him. In October 2002 the Royal Society of Chemistry in Britain awarded an Honorary Fellowship to Sherlock Holmes, its first fictional inductee, on the hundredth anniversary of his coming out of retirement to solve the case of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
In addition to his own characteristics, Holmes is popular for other reasons. The plots and the atmospheres of the stories deserve no small credit for creating the Holmes appeal. Conan Doyle’s skill in vividly describing London has made countless readers feel they know the city. The inclusion of so many accurate details from daily life in the city—from train stations and schedules, concert series, real-life performers, streets and buildings they passed every day—gave contemporaneous readers a sense they might be reading an account from the newspapers. The inclusion of many real historical characters strengthens the sense that we are reading a personal memoir. The stories were also initially popular because of the novelty of the scientific method used by Holmes in solving his mysteries, something we can’t help but take for granted now.
Holmes profits enormously by having his exploits narrated by an admirer. Nearly as well known but much less appreciated, the good Dr. Watson provides not only a contrast as the Everyman to Holmes’s Superman, he also perfectly embodies the British man in the street. Conan Doyle himself has often been thought the model for Holmes’s friend and chronicler. Like Watson, Conan Doyle was a doctor. Also like Watson, who we learn was a rugby player in his youth, Conan Doyle was an avid footballer. He was also a boxer, cricket player, and golfer. He was an all-round sportsman, and like other sportsmen, then and now, he had an uncomplicated attitude toward the world. Conan Doyle was like Watson in another way that’s scarcely believable except for the testimony of people who knew him. According to Hesketh Pearson he was apparently as little likely to deduce something about you as Watson was. (Conan Doyle: His Life and Art, pp. 183-184). The obvious difference between Conan Doyle and Watson is that Watson did not have the capacity to invent a character like Sherlock Holmes. Generations of readers have been grateful that Arthur Conan Doyle did, and that he used that capacity to enrich our imaginations by creating a hero who reassures us that even the most baffling mysteries can be solved by reason, and who challenges us to use our powers of observation.
If you are reading these stories for the first time or renewing your acquaintance with them after decades of fond but faded memories, I urge you, as other editors of these stories have urged their readers before me, to proceed directly to the sitting room at 221B Baker Street, where you may test your detective powers against the Master’s. Come back to the following essay after you’ve finished. We’ll have much to talk about.
Kyle Freeman
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I
Arthur Conan Doyle began writing A Study in Scarlet in 1886 while waiting for patients in his newly furnished doctor’s office in Southsea, Portsmouth. He sent it to what seemed like every publisher in England before it was finally accepted by a small firm called Ward, Lock & Co. He was paid a one-time sum of £25, relinquishing all other rights to the publisher. The company thought it would be most effective in one of its big holiday issues, Beeton’s Christmas Annual, so Conan Doyle had to wait nearly a year before seeing it in print in December 1887. Thus after this long and uncertain gestation the world finally saw the birth of the resplendent career of the character who would become the greatest literary detective, Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle got the idea for a detective story from the acknowledged creators of the genre. Edgar Allan Poe had written three short stories featuring Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin: “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and “The Purloined Letter.” Conan Doyle lifted so much detail from Poe that he seemed a plagiarist to some. He took several key components from Dupin. Holmes, like Dupin, is a prodigious pipe smoker. He also places ads in the newspaper to lure the perpetrator of the crime to his apartment. He goes to the scene of the crime to find clues the police had overlooked. Yet another component borrowed from Dupin was his trick of breaking in on his companion’s thought process by guessing the links in his train of thought. Ironically, Holmes complains in this first story that this habit of Dupin annoys him, but apparently not as much as he claims, as he adopts it himself in two later stories. Most important, like Poe, Conan Doyle decided to give his detective a companion to narrate the case.
Such a narrator provides several advantages. He can frame the story more dramatically than the detective could because the companion is in the dark about the outcome. He therefore can sustain suspense and share his surprise with us when the mystery is solved. The narrator also has the freedom to glorify his friend, something the detective as narrator couldn’t do for himself without suffering the inevitable backlash from readers who don’t usually take kindly to braggarts.
Conan Doyle also borrowed from the work of Émile Gaboriau, a Frenchman who wrote the first police novels. His Inspector Lecoq uses scientific methods to build a solid case against the criminal piece by piece. Holmes’s scientific method owes the most to this source. Gaboriau also divides his novels into two equal parts, with flashbacks to prior action, a device Conan Doyle copied in the first two Holmes novels. Conan Doyle based Holmes’s deductive process—lightning quick and seemingly intuitive, though informed by careful observation of detail and mountains of precise knowledge—on Conan Doyle’s teacher at the medical school at Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell.
Once embarked on the process of stirring all these ingredients together, Conan Doyle had to choose a name for his detective. The first he chose was J. Sherrinford Holmes, then Sherrington Hope, and finally the one we know today. We don’t know where he got the name Sherlock, but we can be sure that the last name was a tribute to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American physician and author, father of the great U.S. Supreme Court justice of the same name. Conan Doyle had r
ead and greatly admired his work, saying of him, “Never have I so known and loved a man whom I had never seen.” On his first trip to America Conan Doyle made a reverential visit to the author’s grave.
A Study in Scarlet introduces the formula that almost all the other Holmes stories will follow. Someone seeks out the detective at his Baker Street rooms to solve an unusual mystery. Holmes and Watson then set out to explore the scene of the mystery. The police are often involved, but of course they never have a clue. After an adventure or two that builds suspense, Holmes solves the case in the most dramatic way. The two investigators end up back at Baker Street, where Holmes explains any point in his chain of reasoning that might have escaped Watson’s understanding, and all’s once again right with the world. Doyle varies this formula in minor ways in a few of the stories in this first volume, but not often. (He will cleverly foil our expectations of this pattern in later stories.) This plot repetition, which might seem a weakness, turns out to be a strength. It contributes to that sense of solidness we get from this world in which logic triumphs over superstition, and where justice in one form or another is meted out to violators of the social order. The sense of order that runs through this world is one of the great satisfactions of these stories. No matter how bizarre the circumstances, Holmes will tender a rational explanation for everything. Criminals are caught not because they make a fatal error, but because all human actions, good and bad, leave traces behind. If you pay close enough attention to the causative chain of events in everyday life, and you’ve trained yourself to think logically, you’ll be able to follow that chain when someone has committed a crime.
The first story attends to some matters that by their nature appear only once. It must introduce both Holmes and Watson, which of course can happen only once. After that, it also contains a feature that appears only in the longer stories. It divides the action into two parts, introducing a flashback having nothing to do with Holmes and Watson to describe the genesis of the crime. Conan Doyle repeated this structure with modifications in The Sign of Four and The Valley of Fear. In A Study in Scarlet the flashback comes as a sudden jolt, a third-person narrative far away in time and place from the story’s beginning. Despite the interest of the plot of the flashback, today we tend to mark time until we get back to Holmes and Watson. At the time the story was published, the American interlude was the most interesting part for British readers.
Conan Doyle had read a treatment of the Mormons in a chapter of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter entitled “The Story of the Destroying Angel.” He took its most sensationalized elements, then fashioned a brave, fearless hero along with a pitiful orphan who grows up to be a brave, fearless woman who is loved by another brave, fearless man, and sets them at the mercy of intolerant zealots. The story emphasizes the most pathetic aspects of the lives of John and Lucy Ferrier and lacks any psychological subtlety. Lucy and Jefferson Hope are always courageous and noble, while the Mormons who haggle over her are petty and dishonorable.
This is soap-opera fiction. But it bears noting that Conan Doyle handles the action and the development of dramatic tension quite skillfully. The story is never dull. It moves without any padding to a dramatically exciting conclusion. It also establishes some sympathy for a man who, we discover, has committed the two murders at the beginning of the story. This kind of sympathy recurs in The Sign of Four, but rarely in the short stories. In most of them the perpetrators of the crimes, if there are crimes, act from base motives that are only briefly sketched, and they get what’s coming to them.
Note here the use of names for the bad guys: Drebber and especially Stangerson are names with a slightly nasty ring to them. On the other hand, the man who kills them is given a name that in itself goes some way toward redeeming him. Jefferson, of course, is a name that was golden in America. Thomas Jefferson, well known in France and England during his life, had died but sixty years before this story. And the last name Hope speaks for itself. This rather obvious allegorical use of names is repeated in The Sign of Four, with Jonathan Small, an insignificant cog in the British imperial machine in India, but not afterward. Like Dickens, Conan Doyle learned how to use less obvious names to suggest personal qualities.
It’s worth noting the ironic wrinkle in the beginning of the story—Holmes calls Dupin “a very inferior fellow” and Lecoq “a miserable bungler.” He means of course inferior and miserable when compared to him. This judgment could be taken as a boast on Conan Doyle’s part that his detective is superior to those of the men who created the genre and, by further implication, that his stories are superior to theirs. Everything we know about Conan Doyle refutes such an interpretation. When this story was written, he was only twenty-seven, had published next to nothing, and was much in awe of both men, Poe especially. If confronted directly with this passage in his work, he would surely have denied any such claim to preeminence. He was merely expressing his character’s supreme self-confidence, perhaps even characterizing Holmes as a bit too conceited. Yet whatever the explanation, Holmes’s claim has indisputably come true.
A Study in Scarlet was modestly successful. Conan Doyle did not consider writing a sequel until the American agent for Lippincott’s Magazine invited him and Oscar Wilde to a dinner in London. That proved to be an auspicious night for British letters. The agent proposed that both men write books for Lippincott’s. As a result of this proposal, Conan Doyle wrote the second Holmes story, The Sign of Four, in 1889, while Wilde’s contribution to the magazine turned out to be The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The story was first published in February 1890 as The Sign of the Four, but the title was later shortened to the one Conan Doyle preferred, The Sign of Four. Conan Doyle once again split the story into two parts, but the structure of this division is more subtle than the one used in A Study in Scarlet. First, the history that led up to this crime is broken into two shorter parts instead of one long one, but more important, Conan Doyle allows Thaddeus Sholto and Jonathan Small, rather than a third-person omniscient narrator, to relate these flashbacks. This not only keeps a tighter focus on the action of the story, but also avoids the clearly artificial quality a third-person narrator introduces. After all, these stories are said to be the reminiscences of John H. Watson. In order to seem real, they can’t start recounting things that Watson couldn’t possibly have heard. In this respect, The Sign of Four is an improvement on A Study in Scarlet.
The way this story treats its murderer is also more subtle. In A Study in Scarlet Jefferson Hope had been driven to his acts of vengeance by what amounted to the rape and murder of his sweetheart and the murder of her guardian. Because we get to witness the coldheartedness of the men who commit these crimes, their deaths are not near our consciences. As famed Texas trial lawyer Richard “Racehorse” Haines once said in a television interview, he was able to win acquittals for clients who had committed murder by convincing juries that “some folks just need killin’.” Hope is not made to suffer any punishment for his crimes; he dies “with a placid smile upon his face, as though he had been able in his dying moments to look back upon a useful life, and on work well done” (p. 93). This is clearly an authorial reward for following the dictates of his heart.
Jonathan Small is more problematic. Although his story makes us feel more sympathy for him than for his victims, the circumstances of the killings in which he was involved don’t grant him the same kind of easy absolution Conan Doyle gives to Jefferson Hope. Our response to Small is more complex, because his case has more of the tangled web of good and evil that characterizes most human enterprises than does the revenge of Jefferson Hope.
While each of the murders Small commits contains some mitigating factor, each also contains a damning one as well. His first killing is forced upon him when his Indian companions make him an offer he can’t refuse. He must either kill or be killed. Yet when the time comes to fulfill this devil’s bargain, he takes some relish in it. When he sees the merchant Achmet escaping from his three cohorts, Small says, “
My heart softened to him, but again the thought of his treasure turned me hard and bitter” (p. 175). Later when he escapes from prison, Small kills one of the prison guards. That man “had never missed a chance of insulting and injuring” Small, but killing him was petty vindication. Small plays no part in the deaths of Captain Morstan or Major Sholto, the two men who betrayed him, but he says he would willingly have shown them the door to eternity, if he had only had the chance. Small also played no direct part in the death of Bartholomew Sholto, but because Sholto died during the assault on his stronghold planned and executed by Small, he bears some responsibility for that death, too. In short, Small is neither completely vindicated for his crimes nor completely damned. While he’s a man more sinned against than sinning, he isn’t given any sort of pardon. Watson’s reaction to him is our surest guide to what Conan Doyle felt was Small’s moral standing: “For myself, I confess that I had now conceived the utmost horror of the man not only for this cold-blooded business in which he had been concerned but even more for the somewhat flippant and careless way in which he narrated it” (p. 175). The last we hear of him, he’s off to jail.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 3
