by Michael Sims
“Beating the subjects!”
“Yes, to verify how far bruises may be produced after death.”
In a high-ceilinged chemical laboratory, amid the flickering blue flames of Bunsen lamps and worktables glittering with test tubes and retorts, Stamford introduces them: “Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”
The tall young man offers a surprisingly firm handshake and remarks casually, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
As they depart later, Watson asks Stamford, “How the deuce did he know that I had come from Afghanistan?”
“That’s just his little peculiarity,” replies Stamford with a smile. “A good many people have wanted to know how he finds things out.”
After devoting much of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to a reprint of the newspaper account of the tragedy, Poe later has Dupin hold forth at great length about what he deduced from the contradictory statements of witnesses quoted therein and from what he himself observed in his examination of the crime scene. But Poe actually devotes only a small paragraph to the examination itself, and only a single sentence to how his detective behaved: “Dupin scrutinized everything—not excepting the bodies of the victims.”
In contrast to Poe’s omission of Dupin’s actual methods, in Gaboriau’s 1867 Lecoq novel The Mystery of Orcival, the French author described the young policeman’s ardor for the overlooked physical evidence of a crime scene:
They ascended to the room in question, and M. Lecoq, forgetting his part of a haberdasher, and regardless of his clothes, went down flat on his stomach, alternately scrutinizing the hatchet—which was a heavy, terrible weapon—and the slippery and well-waxed oaken floor.. . .
“When the assassin threw the hatchet, it first fell on the edge—hence this sharp cut; then it fell over on one side and the flat, or hammer end left this mark here, under my finger. Therefore, it was thrown with such violence that it turned over itself and that its edge a second time cut the floor, where you see it now.”. . .
He knelt down and studied the sand on the path, the stagnant water, and the reeds and water-plants. Then going along a little distance, he threw a stone, approaching again to see the effect produced on the mud. He next returned to the house, and came back again under the willows, crossing the lawn, where were still clearly visible traces of a heavy burden having been dragged over it. Without the least respect for his pantaloons, he crossed the lawn on all-fours, scrutinizing the smallest blades of grass, pulling away the thick tufts to see the earth better, and minutely observing the direction of the broken stems.
Following in the muddy footsteps of Lecoq rather than Dupin, bloodhound Sherlock Holmes trusts to the value of his prey’s spoor—the traces, all but invisible to untrained and less gifted eyes, that enable him to reconstruct the tragedy.
As he spoke, he whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face . . . For twenty minutes or more he continued his researches, measuring with the most exact care the distance between marks which were entirely invisible to me, and occasionally applying his tape to the walls in an equally incomprehensible manner.. . .
“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,” he remarked with a smile. “It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”
In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Auguste Dupin and his narrator stroll Parisian streets—always at night, because at dawn they close the shutters and read and sleep by “the ghastliest and feeblest of rays” from candles. During one of these nocturnal rambles, Dupin reveals how he appears to have read the thoughts of his companion—one of the moments that Sherlock Holmes later mocks. When Dupin explains, his train of observation and reasoning is painfully unconvincing. “He boasted to me, with a low chuckling laugh,” remarks the narrator, “that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms, and was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling proofs of his intimate knowledge of my own.”
Yet Poe did not substantiate this claim by providing the reader with examples of Dupin’s insight into the narrator’s character. Instead he described a behavior that strikes an almost ridiculous Gothic note: “His manner at these moments was frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his voice, usually a rich tenor, rose into a treble which would have sounded petulantly but for the deliberateness and entire distinctness of the enunciation.”
Arthur, in contrast, felt that his hero ought to demonstrate his genius, not merely proclaim it. When reading detective stories, he found it annoying that the hero often triumphed through luck or through methods that were never explained to the reader. Thus, after he has examined the crime scene in Chapter 3, Holmes explains to skeptical police inspectors, “There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore leg. In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the finger-nails of his right hand were remarkably long. These are only a few indications, but they may assist you.”
Holmes’s approach is evidence-based. For example, in one instance he remarks, “There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps. Happily, I have always laid great stress upon it, and much practice has made it second nature to me.” Holmes not only discerns that two men had been present before the horde of constables merged to investigate the crime, he even estimates the height of one from his stride, and imagines the fashionable dress of the other from impressions of his elegant boots.
Readers could overcome their skepticism about Holmes’s extraordinary abilities because Watson was there first—wondering aloud, demanding explanations. This narrative point of view also permitted the detective to hold forth.
“You appeared to be surprised,” remarks Holmes, “when I told you, on our first meeting, that you had come from Afghanistan.”
“You were told, no doubt,” replies Watson.
At this point, sitting at his desk in Bush Villas only six years after completing his studies in Edinburgh, Arthur again conjured specific demonstrations of Joseph Bell’s insight that he himself had witnessed. The memories were still fresh.
“I knew you came from Afghanistan,” insists Holmes. “From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair.’” (Indeed, Stamford told Watson that he looked “as thin as a lath and as brown as a nut.”) “He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly,” Holmes continues. “His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.”
CHAPTER 21
The Book of Life
I began to think of turning scientific methods, as it were, onto the work of detection . . . I thought to myself, “If a scientific man like Bell was to come into the detective business, he wouldn’t do these things by chance. He’d get the thing by building it up scientifically.” So, having once conceived that line of thought, you can well imagine that I had, as it were, a new idea of the detective—and one which it interested me to work out.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, IN AN INTERVIEW
Early in the process of planning his detective novel, scribbling in his notebook and drawing upon his memories of Dr. Bell, Arthur imagined Holmes havin
g written an article about his scientific method of detection—and foresaw Watson’s impatient response to it:
“What rot this is” I cried—throwing the volume petulantly aside “I must say that I have no patience with people who build up fine theories in their own armchairs which can never be reduced to practice—”
Arthur kept this idea in the final version. In the second chapter of the published book, after they settle into their rooms at 221B Baker Street, Watson runs across an unsigned article, “The Book of Life,” in a magazine. Its author claims that, through the systematic observation of seemingly minor details, one could deduce a great deal of personal information about a stranger.
From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it. Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the enquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems. Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for. By a man’s finger nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed. That all united should fail to enlighten the competent enquirer in any case is almost inconceivable.
“What ineffable twaddle!” exclaims Watson in this version. “I never read such rubbish in my life.”
Holmes reveals that he wrote the article himself. “I have a turn both for observation and for deduction,” he says with rare understatement. “The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical are really extremely practical—so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.”
Soon comes Holmes’s revelation that will subvert Watson’s goal of a relaxed convalescence after his wounding at Maiwand: “I am a consulting detective, if you can understand what that is. Here in London we have lots of Government detectives and lots of private ones. When these fellows are at fault they come to me, and I manage to put them on the right scent. They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able, by the help of my knowledge of the history of crime, to set them straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first.”
Always Holmes demonstrates that his experience is informed by extensive reading. For example, “the forcible administration of poison,” he tells Watson, “is by no means a new thing in criminal annals. The cases of Dolsky in Odessa, and of Leturier in Montpellier, will occur at once to any toxicologist.”
In the essay that Watson derides, Holmes uses the term deduction instead of induction in the way that many English speakers commonly did during the nineteenth century—as almost a synonym for inference. He even refers to his own “rules of deduction.” Technically, as well-educated Arthur probably knew, deduction means reasoning from the general to the particular, as in “All human beings are mortal. Queen Victoria is a human being. Therefore Queen Victoria is mortal.” Certainly Holmes employs this kind of thinking as well. He propounds a theory and then sets out to test it, like any good scientific thinker—often disproving his original theory through discovery of new information. But most of his method was based upon induction. He reasoned from the particular to the general, as in “This man’s footprints are very far apart. Only tall men can manage such a stride. Therefore this man is tall.” Deduction, however, had also been one of Joseph Bell’s favorite words, so naturally Arthur placed it in the mouth of his Bell-inspired detective.
In conjuring Holmes’s scientific approach, Arthur was not only echoing Zadig and Dupin; he was also exploring the concepts of Francis Bacon, who by Arthur’s time had come to be considered the patron saint of rational inquiry. At times he invoked Bacon explicitly. “One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,” remarks Holmes to Dr. Watson. Even the phrase to interpret nature was associated, in the minds of the nineteenth-century educated class, with Bacon. His 1620 magnum opus, Novum Organum, had been subtitled True Suggestions for the Interpretation of Nature. Originally titled Novum Organum Scientiarum (“New instrument of science”), it was Bacon’s manifesto on the foundations of what would later be called the scientific method.
Bacon argued against excessive respect for traditional text-revering approaches and in favor of evidence-based research. In doing so, he embodied, clarified, and furthered the philosophical yearning of his age—for greater knowledge and understanding of those matters that might reasonably be expected to fall within the human ken. In fact, Bacon explicitly defined “inductive history” as “historical matters consequentially deduced from phenomena, facts, observations, experiments, arts, and the active sciences.”
Arthur almost certainly read the long biographical and critical essay on Bacon by Thomas Babington Macaulay, one of his favorite writers. Macaulay (who employed the term induction correctly) misrepresented Bacon’s primary method as one in which the observer gathers details without a preconceived theory with which to unite them—the idea that induction can only follow informed observation. Macaulay summarized what he considered Bacon’s tiresome obviousness with his notorious pie analogy: “‘I ate minced pies on Monday and Wednesday, and I was kept awake by indigestion all night . . . I did not eat any on Tuesday and Friday, and I was quite well.’”
Arthur portrayed Bacon’s theme of the everyday demonstration of observation by turning Dr. Bell into Mr. Holmes. And even the confidence that Holmes’s prescience inspires in others was echoed in one of Bell’s later remarks: “The patient, too, is likely to be impressed by your ability to cure him in the future if he sees you, at a glance, know much of the past. And the whole trick is much easier than it appears at first.”
One of Watson’s first compliments to his roommate proved how much he has been won over by Holmes’s demonstrations of his technique: “You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.”
And Arthur placed in Watson’s observation a telling glimpse of Holmes’s human side: “My companion flushed up with pleasure at my words, and the earnest way in which I uttered them. I had already observed that he was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty.”
CHAPTER 22
A Basilisk in the Desert
I had written in A Study in Scarlet a rather sensational and overcoloured picture of the Danite episodes which formed a passing stain in the early history of Utah.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, OUR SECOND AMERICAN ADVENTURE
Not all of Émile Gaboriau’s books featured the police detective Monsieur Lecoq. He was prominent, however, in the 1867 novel The Mystery of Orcival, which was translated into English in 1871, when Arthur was twelve. Gaboriau divided this tale into two parts. The first recounted the detective’s brilliant investigation of a violent murder and the second included a flashback tracing events leading to the murder and to the perpetrator’s flight.
Arthur employed this structure, which was not unique to Gaboriau, in writing A Study in Scarlet. After only seven lively and amusing chapters, he left Holmes and Watson in London and whisked readers across the Atlantic to North America—and back in time to 1847. Arthur had never visited the New World, but like adventure writers from Homer to Robert Louis Stevenson, he instinctively turned toward underexplored regions as exotic settings. As early as “The American’s Tale,” an awkwardly slangy story published i
n London Society in 1880, he had employed the violent U.S. frontier in this way. That he would inevitably get many details wrong didn’t worry him. He was quick to subordinate facts to story.
He ended Part 1 with Holmes capturing Jefferson Hope, the killer of Enoch Drebber at 3, Lauriston Gardens. Then came Part 2, “The Country of the Saints,” which provided the history of the incidents that led to the murder. Arthur wrote Hope’s story in the third person.
In seeking appropriate villains for his melodrama, Arthur settled upon a group often excoriated in the English press at this time: Mormons. It was a canny ploy. Adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had been controversial ever since Mormonism’s founding in the late 1820s in upstate New York by convicted confidence artist Joseph Smith. In 1830 Smith published the Book of Mormon, written in awkward imitation of the style of the King James Bible. Smith claimed that he had translated ancient golden plates written in the “Reformed Egyptian Alphabet,” and that their buried location—and translation key—had been revealed to him by an angel named Moroni. Amid religious and civil controversy, including violent clashes with locals and eventually with the federal government, Mormon groups gradually migrated from New York to Ohio, then to Illinois and Missouri—ever westward, toward the less-governed, less-observed frontier.
Joseph Smith became embroiled in many contentious relationships within his own church, and in 1844 he was killed by a mob that attacked the jail where he was being held for trial. A new leader, Brigham Young, rose to prominence and led the migration farther westward. The Mormons finally settled in the Salt Lake Valley region of Alta California, Mexico, which in 1850 became what it still was when Arthur wrote A Study in Scarlet: the U.S. territory of Utah.
