The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories

by Michael Sims

  “What ineffable twaddle!” exclaims Watson. In reply, Holmes explains that he himself wrote the article, that he has “a turn both for observation and for deduction,” one of his rare understatements. Later Holmes explicitly compares himself to an eminent naturalist. “As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone,” Holmes pontificates, “so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to.”

  Holmes’s comparison between detective work and natural science was even more relevant than it seems. A man of science inspired the very creation of Sherlock Holmes. As a young Scottish medical student, Arthur Conan Doyle studied in Edinburgh under Dr. Joseph Bell and later worked as Bell’s outpatient clerk at the Royal Infirmary. A colorful teacher with a quick eye for diagnosis, Bell taught classes that were as memorable as plays. Once a sunburned man walked into the examining room and Bell remarked confidently, “You are a soldier, a non-commissioned officer, and you have served in Bermuda.” Then Bell explained his reasoning to the students around them: “He came into our room without taking his hat off, as he would go into an orderly room.” Therefore he was a recently discharged soldier who had not yet learned civilian ways. “A slight authoritative air, combined with his age, shows he was an NCO. A slight rash on the forehead tells me he was in Bermuda, and subject to a certain rash known only there.”

  Decades later, Conan Doyle would recount anecdotes about Bell and add simply, “So I got the idea for Sherlock Holmes.”

  When Holmes and Watson first meet, Holmes says casually, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” Later, after Watson challenges his confident assertions about observation, Holmes explains: “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. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. 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.’ The whole train of thought did not occupy a second.”

  As you will see in the pages ahead, in comparing the debuts of Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle clearly borrowed a great many ideas from Poe—a brilliant but eccentric mastermind who mocks the official police, a narrator who serves as dogsbody and admiring sidekick, even the use of newspapers to lure suspects. Conan Doyle admired Poe, but he made Holmes dismissive of his literary predecessor when Watson remarks, “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin.”

  “No doubt you think you are complimenting me,” replies Holmes, lighting his pipe thoughtfully. “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”

  Soon Watson is thinking, “This fellow may be very clever, but he is certainly very conceited.”

  Not all early detective stories featured a brilliant eccentric. Many protagonists were not only not geniuses but not even real detectives—perhaps an innocent victim of a conspiracy or someone otherwise caught up in a crime. This was the approach taken, for example, by English radical William Godwin (now remembered as much for being the husband of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the father of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein), in his 1794 novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. Edward Bulwer-Lytton took the same approach in his 1828 novel Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman. Legal shenanigans, atmospheric settings, menacing strangers, obscure clues, misleading circumstantial evidence—all the elements were there, minus only the unifying presence of a series detective as protagonist. Often, however, the stories were wrapped in a Gothic fog that distracted from the case and kept the books from reading like what we would think of as a detective story. Other writers came near the detective story—the German fabulist E. T. A. Hoffmann, for example, in “Mademoiselle de Scudéri”—but never quite crossed the Rubicon.

  Other stories purported to be the memoirs of real-life investigators. In 1811 Frenchman Eugène François Vidocq, a criminal turned policeman, founded the Brigade de la Sûreté, a civil police and detective bureau, and two years later Napoléon Bonaparte turned it into a national police force. Vidocq’s legendary adventures—going undercover in various colorful disguises, pursuing miscreants through slums, training agents who had also risen from criminal origins—appeared in his ghostwritten memoirs in 1828. Vidocq’s secret-police activities and sometimes violent methods resulted in scandal, a reorganization of the Sûreté, and ultimately his own resignation. In 1833 he founded the first known private detective agency, which also provided security officers. Meanwhile the books about him had inspired authors such as Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, both of whom wrote often about criminal activities, and would later serve as models for Émile Gaboriau in France and Anna Katharine Green in the United States.

  While the notion of the detective as a kind of Romantic-era scientist was evolving in the popular press, real-life detective work—which originally bore little resemblance to its fictional representation—was progressing as well. In 1829, eight years before Victoria became queen, Sir Robert Peel succeeded in getting parliamentary approval for his proposed Metropolitan Police Act. He argued that a guarantee of arrest was a stronger crime preventive than severity of punishment should arrest ever actually occur. The new law created a metropolitan police force to supplant the corrupt and inefficient network of parish constables, watchmen, thief-takers, and Bow Street Runners.1 The new officers were nicknamed bobbies in England and peelers in Ireland, where Peel had been secretary and had founded the Royal Irish Constabulary.

  In the 1830s, when the uniformed bobbies hit the street, a new word appeared—detective. The English word detect, meaning to catch or discover someone in the act of committing a crime, dates from the first half of the fifteenth century in English, derived from the Latin detectus, the past participle of detegere, “to uncover.” The new meaning described a new job. A centralized police force, charged with preventing and responding to crime, required a division assigned to solve crimes and hunt down their perpetrators—a detective bureau, including plainclothes detectives who could operate incognito. In 1842, after the public outcry over a scandalous case in London helped create a welcoming political atmosphere for it, Scotland Yard created the Criminal Investigation Department, comprising two inspectors and six sergeants.

  The first officers to sign up for detective work included an enterprising young man named Charles Field, who soon rose to inspector. As you will discover herein, in my introduction to Charles Dickens’s article “On Duty with Inspector Field,” Dickens met and admired Field and soon wrote articles about him for his periodical Household Words, articles that helped promote in the public imagination the concept of vigilant police detectives. The word detective was still unfamiliar enough in 1850 for Dickens to wrap it in quotation marks in the title of the first article, but soon the term flourished in the thriving daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals. The Dead Witness includes other nonfictional glimpses of criminal investigation in the Victorian era. You will find one of the first newspaper accounts of, and a transcript from the coroner’s inquest about, Jack the Ripper’s first murder in 1888—before anyone had heard that chilling moniker, before anyone knew that this was only the first atrocity by a serial killer. The article and transcript reveal how familiar the Victorian public had become with real-
life crime-solving. No wonder detective stories were becoming ever more sophisticated.

  In another cross-pollination between fact and fiction, Inspector Field helped inspire the first important detective in a literary novel—Inspector Bucket, “a detective officer,” in Dickens’s 1852 novel Bleak House. Bucket materializes in a room without even a creak in the floorboards and seems to have an omniscient gaze: “he looks at Mr. Snagsby as if he were going to take his portrait.” Some years later, Dickens’s friend and colleague Wilkie Collins made a detective, Sergeant Cuff, one of the major characters in his popular 1868 novel The Moonstone. Following the style of the day, he indicated his detective’s perception with a scientific gaze. His eyes, “of a steely light gray, had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected more from you than you were aware of yourself.”

  Collins was considered the king of the “sensation” writers. These authors included Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whose best-known book was the scandalous Lady Audley’s Secret, and Ellen Wood (known then as Mrs. Henry Wood), the prolific author of East Lynne and the Johnny Ludlow stories. They were important contributors to the flourishing genre and helped establish themes that persist to this day, especially the mistakenly accused innocent and the labyrinths of family secrets. Such tales helped inspire what would come to be known in the early-twentieth century as the Had I But Known school of crime fiction—portentous retrospective tales by female narrators who had no interest in becoming detectives but were forced by circumstance to defend themselves. The narrator of Wilkie Collins’s story “The Diary of Anne Rodway,” which appears herein, is a pioneer example of this kind of story at its best.

  Women were playing an important role beyond the sensation writers. The first significant female writer in the detective-story genre seems to have been a young Irishwoman named Mary Fortune. While living in Australia, in 1866, she published there her first story, “The Dead Witness; or, The Bush Waterhole.” Narrated by a young policeman, it is a vivid and surprising adventure that reads like a hybrid between the Gothic dramas of the past and the rational detective stories that were soon to dominate the genre. Its pioneer position nominated it to play the title role in this anthology.

  About the same time, an important innovator appeared across the Channel. Inspired by real-life policeman Vidocq, and by Balzac and Hugo, Frenchman Émile Gaboriau made his debut with L’Affaire Lerouge, usually referred to in English as The Widow Lerouge or The Lerouge Case. It introduced Monsieur Lecoq, who would appear in several subsequent novels. Lecoq was a detective who saw through crimes because, like his real-life inspiration, he had been a criminal himself. You will find Gaboriau represented in this anthology by a vivid, innovative story called “The Little Old Man of Batignolles,” from his collection with the wonderful title Other People’s Money. Another countryman influenced by Vidocq, Alexandre Dumas père, couldn’t resist turning his famous musketeer d’Artagnan into a detective, in the last volume of his outings. This chapter is reproduced herein with a phrase from the text as title: “You Are Not Human, Monsieur d’Artagnan.”

  When a young American woman named Anna Katharine Green published her first novel in 1878, The Leavenworth Case, she deliberately violated expectations by making her detective, sardonic New York policeman Ebenezer Gryce, seem anything but energetic and observant. “Mr. Gryce, the detective, was not the thin, wiry individual with a shrewd eye that seems to plunge into the core of your being and pounce at once upon its hidden secret.” His gaze never seems to rest on a person. “If it rested anywhere, it was always on some insignificant object in your vicinity, some vase, inkstand, book or button.” Naturally, however, Gryce proves astute and indomitable.

  Green was the first woman to write a full-fledged detective novel.2 The Leavenworth Case became a runaway bestseller in 1878 and was soon required reading at Yale’s school of law because of its fascinating interpretation of circumstantial evidence. Green went on to write many more novels and dozens of stories. In 1897 she created her first female detective in the novel That Affair Next Door, introducing Amelia Butterworth, an upper-middle-class New Yorker who became the prototype of the aging spinster whose nosiness leads her to stumble across a crime. She was a direct influence on Agatha Christie and clearly the inspiration for Miss Marple, although Butterworth is a more convincing and nuanced creation. She appears in three novels that also feature Ebenezer Gryce. Green also created Violet Strange, a young New York socialite who secretly works as a detective; she can easily gain access to mansions and dinner parties to which no outsider could. Strange appears in the last story in this anthology, “An Intangible Clue.”

  Amelia Butterworth and Violet Strange had many female colleagues in the business whose contribution to the genre has been forgotten or undervalued. These smart and courageous women include full-time professionals such as Loveday Brooke and Dorcas Dene, whom you will find herein. Unlike their male counterparts, many of the female detectives were provided with an excuse for their unladylike profession. Violet Strange is supporting a disinherited sister, and Dorcas Dene, a former actress, must work as a private detective because her artist husband has, in fine Victorian fashion, gone blind. Loveday Brooke, however, the unflappable protagonist that you will meet in C. L. Pirkis’s 1897 story “The Murder at Troyte’s Hill,” is not presented as beautiful or supernaturally feminine, and she, unlike many of her colleagues, does not marry in the last installment. She remains a paid and respected private detective, the first female private investigator in fiction, and a character of Sherlockian insight and commitment to social justice.

  When I get together with members of the Baker Street Irregulars or other fans of Victorian detective stories, many of us recall the pleasure we first experienced in the heroic teamwork of detectives such as Holmes and Watson or Dorcas Dene and Mr. Saxon. We talk about the narrative satisfactions in the genre, the opportunity to accompany characters who are intelligent and resourceful, even heroic. Conversation comes back to the triumph of rationality and virtue in a dark and violent world—the excitement and insight drawn from close observation, inferences from a cabman’s boots and cigar ash, revelations from textures and artifacts and status symbols. In the pages ahead, Loveday Brooke infers her first glimmer of a theory from the arrangement of furniture in a room; November Joe reads stream currents and balsam boughs; blind Max Carrados listens and remembers. Dumas’s swashbuckling D’Artagnan deciphers footprints and drops of blood, while Mark Twain’s small-town lawyer Pudd’nhead Wilson becomes the first detective in literature to employ fingerprints to identify a villain.

  We return to a favorite genre not only to revisit old friends but to renew a mood that we have found satisfying. Most genres are identified by the emotion they hope to evoke: mystery, love, horror, suspense. Detective stories, on the other hand, are about a certain kind of character. Paying such close attention to the physical world, the many detectives mentioned in this introduction remind us of cause and effect in this messy society, of the ripples that extend outward from our actions. I think that’s why I sometimes find myself reading detective stories in the same mood in which I read natural history and science books. I know that if I climb the seventeen steps at 221B Baker Street on a cold night, I will find that Mrs. Hudson has built a roaring fire that glows like the light of reason to guard us from dangers that lurk in the fog. And nearby I will find Sherlock Holmes at his desk, peering with his scientist’s eye into a magnifying glass as if it were a crystal ball—acting, as Thomas Huxley said, like a prophet looking not forward into the future but backward into the past.

  The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-post
s as old and natural as the trees. Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious the detective story is certainly the “Iliad.”

  —G. K. Chesterton,

  “A Defence of Detective Stories,” 1904

  Footnotes

  1 The Runners had been founded in 1749 by novelist Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones. Fielding, who was also chief magistrate of London, directed the Runners out of his Bow Street office. Paid from allocated government funding, the Runners (only eight, originally) stood out from their predecessors and prepared the public for the idea of an organized metropolitan police.

  2 Some commentators credit an industrious hack named Seeley Regester, whose real name was Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, with the first detective novel by a woman, but Regester’s 1867 novel The Dead Letter depends upon the psychic visions of the detective’s young daughter—thus rejecting the underlying rational basis of detection—and is also poorly written in comparison with Green’s work.

  William E. Burton

  (1804–1860)

  Prior to its publication in The Dead Witness, the following story has never been reprinted since its first appearance in 1837. “The Secret Cell” is wrapped in minor coincidences relevant to this anthology. It was published in the year that Victoria became queen; thus it perfectly opens a collection of Victorian detective stories. The narrator describes this case as having occurred eight years prior to publication of the story, which would have been 1829, the year that Sir Robert Peel established the metropolitan police in London. Its author, William E. Burton, was born in England but rose to fame in the newly minted United States, thus merging the two nations that would dominate the rise of the detective story as a nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon.