Sherlock Holmes In America

by Martin H. Greenberg

  For at the same time, he was dead set against Gladstone’s policy of Home Rule for the perennially fractious colony of Ireland. As Britain moved inexorably toward the twin crises of the Great War and the Easter Rising, Conan Doyle, at the peak of his literary fame, was essentially a collaborator with the enemy.

  It is my contention in this brief monograph that Conan Doyle’s distaste for his own Irishness, lightly and comically alluded to in the excerpts above, was in reality deep-rooted and far-reaching. It is largely masked in his letters, now available in Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters,1 but we need not trouble ourselves with mere mundane reality. The proof is precisely where it ought to be: in the Canon, which is a veritable feast of anti-Hibernian sentiment that would make the most bigoted Englishman blush. Do we want a villain? And not just any villain, but the Napoleon of Crime, the spider at the center of a vast web of criminality that affects all England? Very well, Conan Doyle—through the amanuensis of a sturdy Scotsman, Dr. John Hamish Watson—gives us a corker in Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime.

  Does Moriarty want a second? A man of ruthless cunning and one of the finest shots in the Empire? Very well, then—Colonel Sebastian Moran is just your man. Throughout the Canon, Irishmen are nearly always portrayed in an unflattering light, as men of either overt criminality or, at the very least, violence. In addition to Moriarty and Moran, consider McMurdo, the former prizefighter and servant to Bartholomew Sholto in The Sign of the Four who, tellingly, had once boxed with Holmes. “If instead of standin’ there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I’d ha’ known you without a question.”

  McMurdo—a name with deep significance for Conan Doyle, as we shall see—oft recurs (or perhaps “occurs,” given the sequencing of the stories) in the Sherlock Holmes novel that is itself a veritable symphony of anti-Hibernian sentiment; I refer, of course, to The Valley of Fear.

  In this novel, which no Irishman or Irish-American can read without shuddering, we find proof positive of not only Conan Doyle’s self-loathing, but his active support of the forces that would crush the brave Irish men and women of Vermissa Valley. Adumbrating Liam O’Flaherty’s classic about the Irish revolution, The Informer, Conan Doyle presents us with a “hero” who goes by a number of names, including Jack McMurdo, Birdy Edwards, and John Douglas. This traitor, working for the despised and brutal Pinkerton Agency, infiltrates the Scowrers in a Pennsylvania coal town, where they are fighting for justice, and eventually breaks them. Like Gypo Nolan, Edwards flees his treachery and heads for California, where he strikes gold. Later, in England as “Jack Douglas,” he is acquitted of murder, but is eventually lost overboard as he flees again, this time by sea. So, in a sense, the story does have a happy ending after all.

  What are we to make of this?

  These are very deep waters, indeed. And without resorting to armchair psychoanalysis, it seems clear that Conan Doyle, in a successful attempt to penetrate English society, masked himself à la Birdy Edwards—and later, most ominously, as Holmes himself—and yet felt such a sense of self-loathing that he was forced to confess his sins to his alter ego, Dr. Watson.

  And so it is in the pages of the Canon that we see the Conan Doyle psychodrama played out, where the Irishman battles the Englishman with the Scotsman as referee. And the Irishman—or in one particular case, the Irishwoman—always loses.

  There is no question that his Celtic heritage was a source of endless fascination for Conan Doyle. Edinburgh has, since the Irish exodus of Black ’47, hosted a large Irish minority, as do several other British cities, including most prominently Glasgow and Liverpool. Looked down upon, often despised, the Irish were to the English what the Africans and the Indians were to eighteenth- and ninetheenthcentury Americans: a dark and savage people, by turns childlike and murderous, given to song and dance but appallingly prone to sudden outbursts of the most appalling violence. Incapable of controlling their thirst for drink—“the Creature,” in Irish parlance—they were clearly second-class citizens (if indeed citizens at all).

  The Doyle family had been in Britain for generations, but the Foley family—Sir Arthur’s beloved mother was the Irish-born Mary Foley—brought him close to his origins. “My real love for letters, my instinct for storytelling, springs from my mother, who is of Anglo-Celtic stock, with the glamour and the romance of the Celt very strong marked.” (Even when discussing his own mother—“The Mam”—Conan Doyle felt compelled to resort to Irish stereotype.)

  But that was the happy face of the Celts. The dark side, the Creatureobsessed, was symbolized by none other than his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, whose powerful thirst damaged a promising career as an artist—the wreck of whom we have visible evidence in the six drawings he made for his son’s A Study in Scarlet, featuring a bearded Sherlock Holmes.

  So . . . Moriarty, Moran, McMurdo, even Morgan the poisoner. All Irish names, each one beginning with some variant of “mor,” the linguistic signifier of distress and death. The most powerful resonance of all, of course, is the Irish phrase An Gorta Mor—the Great Hunger—referring to the famine of the mid-nineteenth century, which changed, changed utterly, the fate of That Most Distressful Nation.

  Can you see the pattern emerging here?

  Mordred. Fata Morgana. Even Tolkien’s fictional Mordor—each of these Celtic formulations indicates danger and darkness. For Tolkien, “Mordor” was the Black Land, an etymological throwback to the roots of our common tongue and the source of our word “murder.” Clearly, in the works of Conan Doyle, the prefix “mor” immediately indicates that the person named is not to be trusted, is not only dangerous but murderous—someone with whom an interaction may well be fatal.

  So let us now consider three Canonical stories of the utmost significance to our discussion: The Final Problem, The Adventure of the Empty House, and His Last Bow. And then let us conclude with a fourth that may well feature the most surprising character in all the Canon. Someone who puts Moriarty and Moran in the shade—Sherlock’s most dangerous opponent, but one without whom he could never have survived the plunge over the Reichenbach Falls. Someone who is, in many respects, the most crucially overlooked figure in the Canon—which is exactly the way Conan Doyle wanted it.

  In many ways, The Final Problem is the most straightforward of the lot, and certainly makes an ideal curtain-raiser to this discussion of anti-Hibernianism. I need not recount the story here; suffice it to say that it not only introduces us, in person, to Professor James Moriarty, it also engenders a whole discussion of precisely how many Moriartys there actually are, and whether they are all named James. Certainly, the Professor is an unlovely physical specimen, devisor of a binomial theorem of genius or not. Physically, he resembles a reptile, and upon meeting Holmes he promptly insults him by expressing disappointment in the size of his frontal development. (Of course, we have only Holmes’s word for this, since Watson can only report the hearsay encounter from Sherlock’s testimony.)

  But the Professor is the primus inter pares of declared Sherlockian villains, and there can be no question of the mortal danger he poses to Holmes. Holmes, on the verge of rounding up Moriarty’s gang, convinces Watson to travel with him to the Continent, where Holmes has his final confrontation with his now-discomfited nemesis.

  And so Moriarty dies. But like his shape-shifting predecessor, Fata Morgana, he is almost immediately reincarnated in the form of his henchman, Sebastian Moran, who (we learn in The Empty House) bombards Holmes with boulders as the Great Detective scrambles away from the Reichenbach abyss. Holmes imagines he hears the late Professor’s voice screaming at him from the bottom of the falls, and then suddenly Moran appears, bent on malevolence, as if summoned from the depths of Hell. His subsequent attack on Holmes from the empty house in London is entirely to be expected, but Holmes outwits him and the “second most dangerous man in London” is captured and charged with the murder of the Hon. Ronald Adair.

  Then something entirely miraculous happ
ens. Holmes and Watson are restored to their old rooms in Baker Street, which despite fire and gunshots are found to be in essentially pristine condition, maintained by Mycroft Holmes and Mrs. Hudson, with “all the old landmarks in their places,” including the chemical corner, the acid-stained table, the scrapbooks, the violin, the pipe rack, and the Persian slipper.

  And Holmes’s encyclopedia of biographies, where in addition to Morgan the poisoner, Merridew of abominable memory, and Matthews, who knocked out one of Holmes’s teeth, we find Colonel Sebastian Moran, London-born son of Sir Augustus Moran, the former British Minister to—Persia.

  By now, it’s clear that the combination of murder and magic, so quintessentially Celtic, is powerfully at play here. Like Conan Doyle himself, Professor Moriarty and Colonel Moran have a patina of Britishness to overlay their Irishness, but Hibernianism in the blood can take the strangest forms, and in this case it took the form of two respectable “Englishmen” who were, of course, really disguised Irishmen. Exactly like Conan Doyle himself.

  And so we come to His Last Bow, that moody, mysterious and moving ave atque vale, written in the third person—as if by Conan Doyle himself—in which all of the Literary Agent’s obsessions can at last be viewed in full flower. Secret identities. Irishness as a marker of betrayal. A false identity, as false as that of “Birdy Edwards” during the Pinkerton man’s undercover work in Vermissa Valley. Holmes learned American gangland slang in Chicago, joined an Irish secret society in Buffalo, and got into trouble with the constabulary in Skibbereen as he polished his anti-English credentials. Then (in collusion with Martha, the ever-faithful Mrs. Hudson), he sprang the trap on the German spy, von Bork. And when the imperious kraut vows vengeance, how does Holmes respond? “The old sweet song. How often have I heard it in days gone by”—an allusion to the famous American popular chanson written by the Irish-American James L. Molloy in 1884, “Love’s Old Sweet Song.”

  Says Holmes: “It was a favorite ditty of the late lamented Professor Moriarty. Colonel Sebastian Moran has also been known to warble it. And yet I live and keep bees upon the South Downs.”

  And yet I live. Keep that in mind. We’ll come back to it in our final peroration. And what identity, of all possible identities, does the master of disguise, the man who could impersonate stable hand and wizened bookseller alike, employ? An Irishman. An Irish-American.

  An Irish-American named Altamont. As in Charles Altamont Doyle.

  Sir Arthur’s father.

  The pinnacle of Sherlock Holmes’s career—his greatest service to England—comes as an Irish-American named “Altamont.”

  In this valedictory, in which Holmes utters the memorable lines: “Stand with me here upon the terrace . . . .” Conan Doyle sums up all his ambivalence about his own nature and his own family, and seems to reconcile it at the very end. Holmes and Watson, together for the last time, with the proximate enemy, von Bork, vanquished, but an east wind coming, an east wind such as never blew on England yet. God’s own wind . . . And then, embarrassed by this most un-British display of sentiment, Holmes turns his attention to von Bork’s check for five hundred pounds and rushes off to the bank to cash it before the Kaiser can stop payment on it.

  Thus does Holmes’s quintessential Englishness assert itself.

  And yet I live. Why does Holmes say this, at this particular moment, and in this particular context? Why would he not live? After all, many years before, he had vanquished Professor Moriarty with his knowledge of baritsu, and dodged Colonel Moran’s rocks and avoided his exploding bullet. By the time of His Last Bow, on the very eve of World War I, Holmes had survived every attempt on his life, every battle, every boxing match, Dr. Roylott’s swamp adder in The Speckled Band, even Tonga’s poisoned dart in The Sign of the Four.

  On the eve of World War I . . . when just across the Irish Sea a storm was gathering that would culminate with the Harp flying, however briefly, above the G.P.O. in Dublin . . .

  When both the British Empire and Conan Doyle himself stood, however unknowingly, not on the terrace but upon the precipice, into which both would soon hurtle. As Britain would lose her Empire, Conan Doyle would lose his faith, and embrace spiritualism; the father of the ultra-rationalist, “no ghosts need apply” Sherlock Holmes, would not only reject the faith of his fathers, he would embrace a far older and more primal faith: the faith in the spirit world.

  The faith of the ancient Celts, who could cross over between the dark land of Mordor and the living.

  Who knew that Life and Death were and are two sides of the same coin, inevitably twinned, not to be feared but embraced as a necessary duality. Like sun and moon. And: Male and female.

  Which brings us to the last and most important story link in our chain: The Sign of the Four.

  In which Holmes and Watson meet another “mor” character. Who turns out to be Holmes’s deadliest enemy.

  Mary Morstan.

  Or, as she was briefly known, Mrs. John H. Watson.

  Whose pivotal, vital, and indispensable role in the Canon is not sufficiently understood or remarked upon. For if Sherlock as “Altamont” was a partial salvation of Conan Doyle’s father, can it not be said of Mary that she is nothing less than “the Mam”?

  Moriarty, Moran, Morstan. From Holmes’s point of view, the three greatest challenges of his career, each one inextricably linked by ethnicity and etymology. Moriarty and Moran we have already considered. Let us now turn our attention to the formidable Miss Morstan.

  The literary parallel between her and Colonel Moran should be obvious. He was an officer in the Indian Army; her father was an officer in the Indian Army. Their names are, in fact, nearly identical, and indeed “Morstan”—with its wonderful frisson of implicit death—is anagrammatical for “St. Moran.” Thus, Mary Morstan is the “good side” of Colonel Moran.

  Holmes, however, takes an instant dislike to her. When at the conclusion of The Sign of the Four Watson announces their engagement, Holmes coldly tells his Boswell that he cannot congratulate him. For Holmes has instantly sensed an enemy, however innocuous she might appear, and realizes, with the chill wind of death blowing past him in the shape of Tonga’s dart, that the world will not be able to contain both him and Miss Morstan.

  One of them will have to die.

  Now, it may be objected that Mary Morstan is not Irish. Apparently born in India, her mother dead, she is sent to school in Edinburgh (much like Watson himself, who was packed off to boarding school in the Scottish capital as a youth), and later comes down to London. But consider the evidence:

  Her Christian name is Mary, the most common Irish name for a girl. Conan Doyle’s own mother was named Mary.

  By her own admission, she has no relatives in England.

  She goes to school in Edinburgh, with its large Irish population.

  She earns her living as a governess, a standard occupation in England for an unmarried Irish girl.

  She is described by Watson—a man who boasts of great experience with women—as blonde with pale skin and large blue eyes: typical physiognomy of the west of Ireland, with its heavy Viking influence.

  While the name Morstan is unusual, there is a district in County Down, near Belfast, called Morstan Park.

  It’s very likely, therefore, that Captain Arthur Morstan—interesting choice of a first name—was born in Northern Ireland (there’s the Home Rule problem again), raised in Edinburgh, joined the Indian Army, not the regular Army (which might indicate that he was a Catholic, not a Protestant). In charge of a convict settlement in the Andaman Islands—a fit duty station for an Irishman, perhaps, but not an Englishman—he later dies of heart attack brought on by an attack of furious temper.

  When Watson marries Mary Morstan, Holmes’s world is shattered. Other than scorn, he has no way to fight back. With Dr. Roylott, he could unbend the poker; with Moriarty, he could jiu-jitsu him over the side of the Reichenbach Falls; with Col. Moran, he could outsmart him and deliver him into the hands of the police.

 
But against Mary, he could do nothing.

  And so Holmes “dies” at the conclusion of The Final Problem, the best and wisest man Watson had ever known.

  There follows the three years—note the symbolic number three—of the Great Hiatus, during which we read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, time in Tibet, a meeting with the Dalai Lama, a visit to—tellingly—Persia, Mecca, and Khartoum (just after the death of General Gordon, whose portrait hung upon the wall in Baker Street), and the coal-tar derivative research in Montpelier. Complete bunkum, of course, as Edgar W. Smith, the best and wisest member of the Baker Street Irregulars, pointed out. Holmes did nothing of the sort. Without the linguistic skills of Sir Richard Burton, the look-in at Mecca would very likely have ended at the business end of an Arabian scimitar.

  For the truth is, during the period of the Great Hiatus, Sherlock Holmes was, in fact, dead. As dead as Mordred and Mordor and Moriarty.

  And what recalls him to life? What brings him back to face the villain Moran (and thus the ghost of Moriarty) in The Empty House? Only one thing.

  The death of Mary Morstan. The shape-shifter, Fata Morgana’s sister. Without Watson’s sad bereavement, there can be no return of Sherlock Holmes.