Arthur and Sherlock

by Michael Sims

  On the other hand, the Detective Force organised since the establishment of the existing Police, is so well chosen and trained, proceeds so systematically and quietly, does its business in such a workmanlike manner, and is always so calmly and steadily engaged in the service of the public, that the public really do not know enough of it, to know a tithe of its usefulness. . .

  Such are the curious coincidences and such is the peculiar ability, always sharpening and being improved by practice, and always adapting itself to every variety of circumstances, and opposing itself to every new device that perverted ingenuity can invent, for which this important social branch of the public service is remarkable! For ever on the watch, with their wits stretched to the utmost, these officers have, from day to day and year to year, to set themselves against every novelty of trickery and dexterity that the combined imaginations of all the lawless rascals in England can devise, and to keep pace with every such invention that comes out. . .

  A frequent writer for Household Words, George Augustus Sala, remembered in his autobiography that Dickens was seldom heard discussing higher literature or indeed intellectually ambitious art of any kind. “What he liked to talk about was the latest new piece at the theatres, the latest exciting trial or police case, the latest social craze or social swindle, and especially the latest murder and the newest thing in ghosts.” Dickens’s worshipful applause for detectives did not escape Sala’s notice. “Dickens had a curious and almost morbid partiality for communing with and entertaining police officers,” he wrote. This public approbation may have also had a pleasing incidental effect. “Any of the Detective men will do anything for me,” Dickens wrote to Bulwer Lytton in 1851.

  One of Charles Field’s colleagues, Inspector Jonathan “Jack” Whicher, became even better known. (Dickens disguised him as Witchem in some admiring articles, in which he referred to Field as Wield.) Among the first eight members of the new Detective Branch that Scotland Yard formed in 1842, Whicher soon earned the respect of his colleagues, one of whom later dubbed him “the prince of detectives.” Like most successful detectives, he strove for near invisibility. His smallpox scars did not make him stand out because many people wore such a visible medical history.

  Whicher achieved renown, and helped the public begin to accept the notion of professional investigators making their way through the populace without uniforms. Although he was criticized at times, he was applauded, and steadily promoted, for his successes—from capturing the valet who stole Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin and Child and other paintings in 1856 to the scandalous murder at Road Hill House in 1860. The always bloodthirsty national press kept hounding the police to solve the brutal killing of a small boy, Francis Saville Kent, whose corpse was found in a privy just outside his family home with his throat slashed. Against public opinion and departmental doubts—both of which helped to damage his reputation for some time—Whicher persisted in his conclusion that the boy had been murdered by his sixteen-year-old half sister, Constance Kent. Eventually she confessed and Whicher was vindicated, leading to a growing conviction that he was all but infallible.

  Apparently Dickens’s assistant editor on the monthly periodical Household Words, Henry Wills, wrote the first public description of an actual police detective. In an article entitled “The Modern Science of Thief-Taking,” Wills described Whicher—in his first appearance under the alias Witchem—as he first met him on the stairs at a public gathering, during which the detective witnessed dismay on the faces of those miscreants who recognized their official nemesis despite his undistinguished face.

  “On the mat at the stair-foot there stands a plain, honest-looking fellow, with nothing formidable in his appearance, or dreadful in his countenance; but the effect of this apparition . . . is remarkable . . . You never saw such a change as he causes, when he places his knuckles on the edge of the table, and looks at the diners seriatim.” With cautious mutual respect, Whicher and the thieves recognized each other.

  Whicher calmly ordered a Frenchmen and three others to leave London. They agreed immediately to do so, and he accompanied them to the train station. Afterward, as Wills walked on the platform with him, Whicher explained that the criminals were members of “a crack school of swell-mobsmen,” meaning a gang of petty thieves—pickpockets and burglars.

  From its title to its closing, Wills’s article furthered detectives’ growing reputation as heroic figures who acquired power over criminals through detailed knowledge of them. Reinvented as modern and scientific, thief-taking was presented as a combination of observation, evidence, and courage—an idealized image of science in the pursuit of justice.

  Dickens and Wills were quick to praise the virtues of these new public servants, and then quick to exploit their encounters with them. As a consequence of his acquaintance with Dickens, Inspector Field helped inspire the first detective in a literary novel—Inspector Bucket, “a detective officer,” in Dickens’s 1852 novel Bleak House. Built around a long-running legal battle over discrepancies in conflicting wills—the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce progressing with glacial slowness through the Courts of Chancery—the novel is saturated with images of fog and muck. Within the depraved cosmos of Bleak House, the kindhearted Inspector Bucket serves as a moral figure, almost heroic, as he searches for a murderer and then for the missing Lady Dedlock. Dickens also employed his detective as a narrative wild card—a man who may reenter the story at any point, and who will materialize in a room without even a creak in the floorboards. Omniscient as well as omnipresent, he has Dickens’s own legendary photographic gaze: “He looks at Mr. Snagsby as if he were going to take his portrait.”

  Some years after Dickens invented Inspector Bucket, his friend and colleague Wilkie Collins made a detective one of the major characters in his 1868 novel The Moonstone. Ever since his 1859 success The Woman in White, Collins had been almost as famous as Dickens. Other popular books had followed—No Name, Armadale, and then The Moonstone. Many more works came from his busy pen. Collins also wrote a memorable story that served as a transition between earlier forms of fiction and detective stories. Usually republished as “Anne Rodway’s Diary,” but originally published in 1856 under a different title as part of a series, it featured a smart and resourceful young woman who must investigate injustice.

  Collins’s writing demonstrated unusual sympathy for female characters and also for the poor, even the drug-addicted poor. His account in The Moonstone of the delusory effects of opium grew out of his personal experience. He became addicted to laudanum to lessen the pain of his “rheumatic gout,” a form of arthritis, and even wrote of his own paranoid hallucinations, including the existence of a “ghost Wilkie” who at times shadowed his every move.

  The Moonstone, however, was more than a sensation novel. Intelligent, witty, complexly plotted, narrated by several different characters with varying perceptions of the events they had witnessed, it proved hugely successful. The plot revolves around the titular gem, a diamond stolen in India—long before the story opens—from the head of a sacred statue of Chandra, the Hindu god of the moon. In a supernatural story, the god would have exacted revenge upon the heathens. In a story of suspense and detection, however, the guilty human beings torment themselves and others without divine intervention.

  Like Dickens, Collins indicated his detective’s perception with a scientific gaze. He made Sergeant Cuff a less intimidating character overall than Inspector Bucket, although one who had a distinctly forbidding demeanor when meeting strangers:

  When the time came for the Sergeant’s arrival, I went down to the gate to look out for him.

  A fly from the railway drove up as I reached the lodge; and out got a grizzled, elderly man, so miserably lean that he looked as if he had not got an ounce of flesh on his bones in any part of him. He was dressed all in decent black, with a white cravat round his neck. His face was as sharp as a hatchet, and the skin of it was as yellow and dry and withered as an autumn leaf. His eyes, of a steely light grey, had a very disco
ncerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself. His walk was soft; his voice was melancholy; his long lanky fingers were hooked like claws. He might have been a parson, or an undertaker—or anything else you like, except what he really was. A . . . less comforting officer to look at, for a family in distress, I defy you to discover, search where you may.

  Inspired by actual police officers they had known, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins used the factual to help them conjure the fictional. Eccentric and observant men themselves, they showered quirks and insight upon their imaginary detectives, and in doing so made them memorable beyond the boundaries of Bleak House and The Moonstone. But they did not assign either Inspector Bucket or Sergeant Cuff central roles in their respective novels. The first novelist to make a logical, attentive detective into his central character was a Frenchman who had been inspired in part by a fictional Frenchman created by an American writer. As Arthur liked to point out, many roads in the development of crime fiction lead back to Edgar Allan Poe.

  Poe’s expeditions into fantasy and the macabre drew more attention than his detective puzzles, perhaps in part because supernatural stories were the oldest form of fiction and detective stories the newest. For a quarter century after “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” appeared in 1841, in fact, what Poe called his “tales of ratiocination” seems to have inspired few disciples in the crime genre. But eventually one writer responded enthusiastically to Poe’s stories about an eagle-eyed amateur detective: the Frenchman Émile Gaboriau. Inspired also by the real-life policeman Vidocq, as well as by the novels of his countrymen Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo—which often dealt with crime and criminals—Gaboriau introduced a policeman referred to by his colleagues as Monsieur Lecoq, who appeared in several subsequent novels. In his modest debut in 1866, when Arthur was seven, Lecoq appeared as a relatively minor character in L’Affaire Lerouge (usually translated into English as The Widow Lerouge or The Lerouge Case), which featured an amateur detective named Père Tabaret. Lecoq rose to the starring role six years later with a novel named after him. Promoted all over Paris with mysterious posters bearing only the title to build up advance interest, Monsieur Lecoq was an immediate sensation, and soon Gaboriau was a household name. Gaboriau knew how to keep readers turning pages, and he knew how to promote his work. Arthur greatly enjoyed the adventures of Monsieur Lecoq, noting later, “Gaboriau had rather attracted me by the neat dovetailing of his plots.”

  After years in the French cavalry, Gaboriau began the best possible training for a thriller writer. He served as secretary to the dramatist and novelist Paul Féval, who wrote everything from swashbucklers to vampire stories. Féval kept Gaboriau researching forensic details in morgues and among the offices of the Sûreté. In an odd tribute, Gaboriau later swiped the nickname of the villain in one of Féval’s novels, Lecoq (the Rooster), and gave it to his own protagonist—himself a criminal turned policeman, like Eugène François Vidocq.

  Although he was one of many writers influenced by the “memoirs” of Vidocq, Gaboriau was too good a writer to merely imitate Vidocq, Poe, or anyone else. His stylish and entertaining novels helped create the police procedural and influenced many later writers such as Anna Katharine Green. Gaboriau excelled at planting clues and strewing red herrings, but he was just as interested in the investigative routine employed by his police detectives. He admired patient legwork and careful interrogation. He also spent more time than many of his later colleagues in bringing his characters to life, fleshing them out as individuals—rich in quirks and contradictions—and in conjuring the boulevards and countryside of France through which they make their cautious way. His dialogue was lively and his descriptions sparkled. He conjured rural fields and police stations, backstreet pubs and palaces.

  Gaboriau tended to bifurcate his novels into detective story and Gothic family drama. In the first part a crime is discovered, an investigation carried out, and a culprit revealed; in the second part, the detective tends to vanish for a time while the author reveals the tangled history of mistakes and cruelties that led to the murder. At times they read like two related books joined together, not always the most compelling of structures. Anna Katharine Green, whose books clearly show Gaboriau’s influence, sometimes used this approach. Arthur enjoyed this kind of two-part story and absorbed it as a standard approach to writing thrillers.

  All around Arthur, in medical school and in his wide-ranging extracurricular reading, in newspapers and magazines and books, he saw evidence that scientists were a kind of detective. Detective-minded Joe Bell was a scientist to the core. But only Gaboriau had demonstrated that a detective—busily noting and analyzing details, as well as building a mental and physical library of criminal cases—needs to be a kind of scientist.

  Part 3

  Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson

  No writer is ever absolutely original. He always joins at some point on to that old tree of which he is a branch.

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES

  CHAPTER 18

  Dr. Sacker and Mr. Hope

  His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE, “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE”

  “A tangled skein,” Arthur scribbled in one of his cheap red marbled notebooks. He was considering possible titles and images for the detective novel that had begun to grow in his imagination. For this note he may have been recalling a prominent image in Émile Gaboriau’s 1867 novel The Mystery of Orcival, featuring Monsieur Lecoq. In one passage Gaboriau describes an investigator’s thoughts: “The difficulty is to seize at the beginning, in the entangled skein, the main thread, which must lead to the truth through all the mazes, the ruses, silence, falsehoods of the guilty.” It had been translated into English in 1871, only two years before Gaboriau’s death; Arthur was twelve at the time.

  Later Arthur crossed out A Tangled Skein and replaced it with the title A Study in Scarlet, which he explained in Chapter 4. “I must thank you for it all,” says Holmes to Watson, who persuaded him to look into the mystery. “I might not have gone but for you, and so have missed the finest study I ever came across: a study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn’t we use a little art jargon. There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

  Holmes’s remark still echoed Gaboriau. In setting this new title above his melodrama, however, Arthur seemed to be aiming for a more artistic tone than the usual blood and thunder of the thriller field. A study was an artist’s preliminary sketch, or in literature a thoughtful survey. In using the term in a finished work, united with a particular color, Arthur aligned himself with the Aesthetic movement—with writers and critics such as Walter Pater and the young Oscar Wilde. Pater’s 1873 Studies in the History of the Renaissance was considered a sacred text of Aestheticism, and the notoriously decadent Algernon Charles Swinburne had published in 1880 a book entitled Studies in Song. L’art pour l’art was the unofficial group’s motto, “art for art’s sake,” implying that art was divorced from the burden of moral education that had bowed its back through centuries. One of the best-known painters among the Aesthetics was James Abbott McNeill Whistler, American-born but long settled in London, who was famous for works such as his 1862 painting “Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl,” and his 1871 portrait of his mother titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1.” Thus the title A Study in Scarlet lent Arthur’s novel an artsy frisson of vice.

  From the very first, Arthur thought in scenes. Under the title he wrote in his notes,

  The terrified woman rushing up to the cabman. The two going in search of a policeman. John Reeves had been 7 years in the force, John Reeves went back with them.

  Soon memories of Joe Bell at Edinburgh played like a stage drama across Arthur’s imagination. He remembered hi
s aquiline face, his sharp, perceptive gaze. He imagined that if a keen observer à la Dr. Bell applied himself to crime instead of to medicine, he would represent an almost invincible combination of perception and knowledge—at least in the stage-managed world of popular fiction.

  Real-world crime detection was more haphazard and erratic. Forensics encountered resistance from tradition, like the rest of science. One of the most dramatic advances in criminal investigation—the detection of previously overlooked fingerprints and their value as a form of identification—had been initiated in India in the 1850s. But a systematic approach for it had been proposed only as recently as 1880, by a Scottish surgeon named Henry Faulds. In 1886, the year that Arthur wrote A Study in Scarlet, Faulds presented his idea to London’s police department—which dismissed it as far-fetched and impractical.

  But as yet Arthur had little interest in actual criminal investigation. Instead he began to envision his detective as a kind of awe-inspiring genius who dazzled a befuddled world with his insight. Such an omniscient character would sound insufferably smug narrating his own triumphs, however, and with access to his thoughts a reader might too soon perceive the puzzle pieces coming together. Thus, like Poe’s Dupin, he would need a Boswell. Arthur was transforming the doctor who inspired him into a detective, and he made this assistant into a physician. The scientific training and humanitarian outlook of medicine shaped Arthur’s outlook on many topics.

  On another page he wrote at the top, Study in Scarlet. Below this new title he listed his main characters, beginning with a name for the physician who would narrate: Ormond Sacker [or Secker]—from Sudan. The given name Ormond probably occurred to Arthur because of the Great Ormond Street Hospital, near the British Museum in Bloomsbury. Founded in the early 1850s as the Hospital for Sick Children—the first such institution in England—it had grown from a mere ten beds to a major center well-known to physicians and medical students across the nation. Charles Dickens was an important early promoter.