by Michael Sims
Conservative and supported by the Lippincott publishing firm in Philadelphia, committed to quality and handsomely printed on good paper, Lippincott’s had grown steadily in reputation and influence since its debut in 1868—although it had never achieved financial independence. From the first issue, with its editorial guarantee of good pay for writers (“It is no part of the publishers’ plan to ask anyone to do something for nothing”), the magazine had been able to feature popular authors. Manuscripts arrived from all over the nation—from Frank R. Stockton in New England, from the pseudonymous Octave Thanet out west, from William Gilmore Simms in the South. The hugely popular mystery writer Anna Katharine Green, author of The Leavenworth Case, appeared in the pages of Lippincott’s. Novelist Henry James, in his literary journalism mode, helped the magazine maintain a reputation for featuring some of the era’s best travel writing.
Lippincott’s set out to follow The Atlantic’s policy of printing serials only by American authors, but soon broke its rule with an Anthony Trollope novel and followed by publishing whichever English-language writers appealed to the editors and the readers. Still, it could not catch up with the nation’s two great literary magazines, Harper’s and Century, both published in New York City. In 1886 Lippincott’s moved from the more common two-column page to a single column, simpler to set and print. In 1887, the year before Stoddart met with Arthur, Lippincott’s initiated a policy of publishing an entire novel in a single issue rather than serializing chapters. To squeeze between the covers of a single magazine issue, the novels had to be brief—“novelettes,” the editors called them.
J. M. Stoddart wined and dined his trio. By the end of the evening, Oscar Wilde had agreed to produce a novel, which became The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Arthur had committed to write a second novel about Sherlock Holmes.
It was a heady time. During September 1888, four weekly issues of The Pall Mall Gazette published Arthur’s brief novel The Mystery of Cloomber, an antic adventure built around the occult powers of Indian mystics. “In our opinion,” enthused The Portsmouth Evening News, “the construction of this story is an improvement upon that of ‘The Study in Scarlet,’ which, although deservedly popular, lacks dramatic sequence, and it will add materially to the growing reputation of Dr. Doyle.”
CHAPTER 26
Watson’s Brother’s Watch
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
—SHERLOCK HOLMES, IN “A CASE OF IDENTITY”
Steadied by his marriage and book contracts, Arthur was writing more than ever. Following the meeting with J. M. Stoddart, Arthur wrote a second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four. He even used the Langham Hotel as a setting for one scene. From the first page, the more experienced Arthur was in control of the story in ways that he did not manage with A Study in Scarlet. He opened the novel with a shocking and decadent image that confirmed his indications in the first Holmes novel that the masterful detective and his Boswell were bohemians. Holmes sprawls in a velvet armchair, injecting a cocaine solution into his arm. Afterward he sighs blissfully and picks up an antique book. It is a moment worthy of Poe, but Arthur wrote it with a modern sense of pacing and immediacy, raising the curtain on a new drama about his eccentrics.
“Which is it today, morphine or cocaine?” asks Watson.
“It is cocaine, a seven-percent solution. Would you care to try it?”
“No, indeed,” replies Watson, and begins to argue with Holmes’s nonchalant attitude toward the drugs. “Count the cost!” he exclaims. “Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?”
“My mind rebels at stagnation,” explains Holmes pompously. “Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants.”
Arthur gave this second Holmes novel greater emotional resonance than the first by sketching in more background for his characters—and by creating tension between them. Holmes demonstrates his methods by observing a particular reddish mud upon Watson’s boots, which he knows to be unique to the region around the Wigmore Street post office, and because he knows that Watson has not written a letter he deduces that he went to the post office to dispatch a telegram.
Impressed, Watson nonetheless demands a more severe test. He hands over a watch, which he says has only recently come into his possession, and asks Holmes to observe and deduce. Without thinking of the artifact’s possible emotional significance for Watson, Holmes delivers a shocking assessment. The initial W. suggests that it was from Watson’s family, and since he acquired it only recently although his father has been dead for many years, it must have been in the possession of his elder brother. Then Holmes casually adds, “He was a man of untidy habits,—very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died. That is all I can gather.”
Shaken, Watson accuses Holmes of charlatanry, and the detective must explain the clues—dents in the casing, pawnbrokers’ numbers scrawled inside. Once again Arthur lent a story emotional depth by bringing in alcoholism, with a description of a watch that may have been in his own possession:
“Finally, I ask you to look at the inner plate, which contains the key-hole. Look at the thousands of scratches all round the hole,—marks where the key has slipped. What sober man’s key could have scored those grooves? But you will never see a drunkard’s watch without them. He winds it at night, and he leaves these traces of his unsteady hand.”
Holmes reveals that he has written technical monographs on attending to what Watson calls his “extraordinary genius for minutiae”—on distinguishing between tobacco varieties, on tracing footprints. In fact, Arthur reveals in this second novel that both his protagonists are authors. He has made Watson into the detective’s biographer or memoirist, as he hinted in the closing pages of A Study in Scarlet. He even has Watson refer to his “little brochure” about the Jefferson Hope case, and Holmes says, “I glanced over it. Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it.” By presenting the stories as actual case records, and Watson as a reporting participant, Arthur added an exciting sense of immediacy and reader participation to the series.
“Detection is, or ought to be,” complains Holmes, “an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”
This was a sly setup, because Arthur saturated The Sign of Four with not only romanticism but actual romance. Watson is smitten with Holmes’s pretty young client, Miss Mary Morstan, from the moment she walks through the door at Baker Street.
She was a blonde young lady, small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed in the most perfect taste. There was, however, a plainness and simplicity about her costume which bore with it a suggestion of limited means. The dress was a sombre greyish beige, untrimmed and unbraided, and she wore a small turban of the same dull hue, relieved only by a suspicion of white feather in the side. Her face had neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion, but her expression was sweet and amiable, and her large blue eyes were singularly spiritual and sympathetic.
Oddly, Watson also refers to “the years that I had lived with him in Baker Street,” although A Study in Scarlet takes place only a few months after the two meet and clearly it is the only preceding case about which Watson writes. In The Sign of Four Arthur assigned Holmes a rather questionable motto that soon became famous. “How often have I said to you,” the detective asks Watson, “that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” Arthur had employed almost the same phrasing some years earlier, in his story “The Fate of the Evangeline.” Af
ter being rejected by such periodicals as Blackwood’s, the story had appeared in the Boy’s Own Paper in December 1885, only a couple of months before Arthur began writing the text of A Study in Scarlet and probably while he was plotting it. In the story, the narrator cites a fictional article from The Scotsman criticizing reckless opinions about the disappearance of the titular ship:
“It would be well,” the “Scotsman” concluded, “if those who express opinions upon such subjects would bear in mind those simple rules as to the analysis of evidence laid down by Auguste Dupin. ‘Exclude the impossible,’ he remarks in one of Poe’s immortal stories, ‘and what is left, however improbable, must be the truth.’”
Perhaps Arthur was deliberately satirizing such articles by introducing a spurious quotation, but probably he was merely following his usual practice of writing quickly without bothering to check facts. No such sentence, nor even one similar to it, appears in Poe’s Dupin stories. Whether or not during the intervening years a reader had pointed out this error to Arthur, in his second Sherlock Holmes novel he resurrected the concept and even its wording and gave it to his own creation.
Throughout The Sign of Four, Arthur wrote like a professional who was master of his melodramatic story and its colorful characters. “The Science of Deduction,” he called the first chapter, echoing Holmes’s phrase in his article “The Book of Life,” which Watson had mocked in the early pages of A Study in Scarlet. From the first, Arthur was proclaiming his new creation a scientific detective, and readers quickly learned that Holmes was a busy working professional.
Mary Morstan consults Holmes—and Watson, whom she invites to stay and listen to her statement of the case—to decipher the mystery of her father’s disappearance ten years earlier, in 1878. He left behind mostly “curiosities from the Andaman Islands.” For the last six years, Miss Morstan has been receiving once each year an anonymous package containing “a very large lustrous pearl.” She consults Holmes after receiving an anonymous letter that offers to explain her mysterious situation. Holmes and his eager sidekick agree to help. After Miss Morstan departs, Watson exclaims, “What a very attractive woman!” and Holmes replies, “Is she? . . . A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.”
In conjuring atmosphere for his story, Arthur wrote lyrically of London. After stating in the previous chapter that the story took place in July, he carelessly described a September evening—an error that he would write to J. M. Stoddart to correct only after he had submitted the novel to Lippincott’s, although it seems to have never been corrected in subsequent editions.
It was a September evening and not yet seven o’clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all humankind, they flitted from the gloom into the light and so back into the gloom once more.
Soon a four-wheeler cab carries them further into the mystery, to the home of Thaddeus Sholto, a bald young man so fearful he visibly trembles. He reveals that Miss Morstan’s father is dead. Then he recounts the story of his own father’s involvement with Captain Morstan. Major Sholto claimed that while they both served in the Thirty-fourth Bombay Infantry, he and Captain Morstan “came into possession of a considerable treasure,” and that when they disagreed over its division, back home in England, Morstan died of a sudden heart attack. Remorseful about not sharing the treasure with the young Miss Morstan after her father’s death, Major Sholto is in the act of telling his sons where the treasure is hidden when he dies while staring at a fearsome vision at the window: “It was a bearded, hairy face, with wild cruel eyes and an expression of concentrated malevolence.”
As he had turned earlier to the Mormons of exotic Utah, Arthur now employed myths and stereotypes about the aboriginal pygmies of the Andaman Islands, an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal between India and Burma. Although he worked with several Englishmen, the actual murderer of Morstan and Sholto turned out to be a pygmy whom Watson describes with fear and revulsion: “There was movement in the huddled bundle upon the deck. It straightened itself into a little black man—the smallest I have ever seen—with a great, misshapen head and a shock of tangled, dishevelled hair. Holmes had already drawn his revolver, and I whipped out mine at the sight of this savage, distorted creature.” The pygmy tries to fight Holmes and Watson with the blowgun that has been his silent murder weapon all along, and they shoot him.
Arthur conjured memorable and dramatic adventures for his duo, from tracking creosote-scented footprints across London with a dog named Toby—“an ugly, long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher”—to a rousing boat chase down the Thames at night. At the end of the exciting story, Arthur again turned to a flashback to reveal the saga prior to Holmes’s involvement, but in The Sign of Four he devoted only one long chapter to it, rather than a substantial section of the narrative, as he had done with A Study in Scarlet. At the end, Holmes, fearing boredom again, turns back to his seven percent solution of cocaine.
Before long, Arthur found his first Sherlock Holmes novel compared to those of Hugh Conway and Émile Gaboriau. In January 1889, Andrew Lang, literary editor of the relatively youthful Longman’s Magazine (the successor to Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country), wrote a candid assessment of Holmes’s debut in his “At the Sign of the Ship” column for that periodical. His phrase “the horrors of recent months” referred to the brutal murders of several women, only a few months earlier, by an unidentified killer dubbed Jack the Ripper.
For a railway story, to beguile the way, few things have been so good, of late, as Mr Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet. It is a shilling story about a murder, unluckily, for the horrors of recent months do not dispose one to take pleasure in the romance of assassinations. However, granting the subject, this is an extremely clever narrative, rich in surprises, indeed I never was more surprised by any story than when it came to the cabman. To say more would be “telling,” but one may admit that the weak place in the tale, as in most of Gaboriau’s, is the explanation, the part of the story which gives the “reason why” of the mystery. However, with this deduction, Mr Conan Doyle comes nearer to the true Hugh Conway than any writer since the regretted death of the author of Called Back.
Arthur and Touie had even more exciting news at home than in the review papers. In January, Arthur delivered at home their first child, a daughter. Afterward he wrote to his mother that Touie was doing well and that Mary Louise Conan Doyle had arrived without luggage, naked, and bald, which required immediate effort to address each problem.
The next month, on February 25, 1889, the book division of Longman published a one-thousand-copy first edition of Micah Clarke. Andrew Lang had encouraged purchase of the novel, and gratifying response from the press began on publication day. “It is a fullgrown book,” enthused the Evening News, “and contains some scenes and characters which will, we believe, be thought worthy of Scott.” A few days later the same periodical stated flatly, “Dr. A. Conan Doyle has gone at one stride into the front rank of novelists.” The reviewer insisted Micah Clarke was not only Arthur’s finest work to date but “the best historical novel that has been published for years.” The Scotsman said that it was a fine book for boys but much more. “Very interesting and very readable,” declared The Manchester Guardian, and the reviewer pronounced himself eager for Arthur’s next novel. One critic argued that Arthur had been too harsh in his treatment of the Puritans, another that he clearly had a bias in their favor. Soon the book appeared in the United States and throughout the Commonwealth, with reviewers from the Br
ooklyn Daily Eagle to the Otago (New Zealand) Daily Times praising it. Arthur wrote to many friends, asking them to order his new novel.
Andrew Lang was not the only person closely following Arthur’s career as a writer. Either a family member was sending copies of favorable reviews to Charles Doyle or he was finding them in the Sunnyside library. In early 1889, after Micah Clarke was published, he devoted half a sketchbook page to notes about some of them:
Arthur’s Novel “Micha [sic] Clarke”
Reviewed on Scotsman 4th March 1889
Highly favourable,
“Glasgow Herald” 19th March 1889
“Mystery of Cloomber” Literary World 11th January 1889, as follows—
He proceeded to summarize the latter review. Then, crowding his sketchbook pages as usual, Charles drew below his tribute to his son’s success a three-leaved sprig of clover, scribbled for it a skinny body in knickers and swallowtail coat, and wrote, “There is an Irish lilt in this shamrock.”
Although apparently happy for his son’s taste of success, Charles was not content to have his own talent wither in darkness. He also kept thinking of his failure to provide for Annette and Lottie, both of whom had worked as governesses and sent home money to help support their mother. In the summer of 1889, Charles complained at length to his diary:
I am certain if my many Vols of, well, I’ll say of not serious Work, were organised into some form submittable to the Public they would tickle the taste of innumerable men like myself—and be the Source of much Money which I should like to bestow on my Daughters, but Imprisoned under most depressing restrictions, what can I do?—
