In the shadow of Holmes

Through the 1890s and up to the 19-teens nearly all detection stories lived in the shadow of Holmes and Baker Street. Nearly everyone used a "Watson" character as a sidekick and narrator, such as Arthur Morrison's "Martin Hewitt" who had a newspaper reporter tell of his exploits.

While there were variations, including female detectives to recapture the female reading public and occult detectives (ghost stories being a close cousin to the genre, valuing 'mystery' yet de-valuing reason), writers stuck to Doyle's formulas.

Perhaps the only distinctive character to rival Holmes was "Raffles." the gentleman-burglar created by Doyle's brother-in-law Ed Hornung. He intended Raffles as a reverse Holmes, having spent years writing about the convict culture of Australia. Doyle urged him not to make a criminal a hero, but Vidocq still cast a long shadow, and Raffles was born.

To Holmes, success meant solving a crime contrived by others, but for Raffles, success meant carrying off a perfect crime. Beginning with "Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman," in 1898, Hornung produced three story collections about his wealthy adventurer before getting himself killed in the Boer War in 1905, the war that Doyle championed and got knighted for.

Meanwhile, the French were busy producing detectives.

Maurice LeBlanc, a journalist, developed "Arsene Lupin," a flamboyant thief (a la Raffles), daring and witty, with a flair for disguising himself as a prince or a duke. In one story, he captures an English detective and poses as him in Scotland Yard.

Gaston LeRoux, also a journalist, wrote about sensational trials. When he turned to fiction, he employed surprises, such as having the detective in the case turn out to be the sought-after criminal in disguise unmasked by -- who else -- the reporter covering the story.

Back in England, a French detective created by Englishman Robert Barr also became popular. In "The Trials of Eugene Valmont," we meet a natty little Frenchman with sublime self-assurance, a quick wit, and a poor opinion of the police. He is sometimes a comic figure, and perhaps an inspiration for Christie's Hercule Poirot.

While it may appear that all fiction in this period was derivative by imitating Doyle, Dupin or Vidocq, the period saw three developments in the genre:

a. the scientific detective (Futrelle, for example)

b. the intuitive detective (such as Chesterton and Bentley)

c. the master criminal (Sax Rohmer). 

I'll consider a. and b. in the next postings; c. pulls us toward 'superhero' and 'spy' tales.

I really don't know if anyone is reading this short course in Detective Fiction. I'm certainly not as complex or complete as a site such as Crimereads.com, but, hey, it's free, and I hope this little overview increases your appreciation of the genre. 

 

Gaboriau and Lecoq

 Arthur Conan Doyle, commenting on his own reading, once remarked, "I have read Gaboriau's 'Lecoq the Detective', 'The Gilded Clique', and a story concerning the murder of an old woman, the name of which I forget [it was 'The Widow LeRouge']. All very good. Wilkie Collins, but more so."

So before we leave the 19th Century for good, I'd like to reflect briefly on Emile Gaboriau (pictured below).

Police memoirs became popular reading from the 1820s onwards. I previously discussed Vidocq's self-congratulatory and embellished (well, fictionalized) memoirs. These had a strong influence on the fictional work of Gaboriau.

Gaboriau began by serializing 'sensation' fiction for daily newspapers. Each episode was written to a specified length, and calculated to end in a way to lure the reader into buying the next day's paper. His most famous character is Monsieur Lecoq, a convict-turned-Surete-agent (in imitation of Vidocq), who first appeared in a serial story in 1865. Lecoq works with an amateur investigator named Pere Tabaret, "who has taken up the business of the police, as others do painting or music, for entertainment." An older mentor, Tabaret offers advice from his bed and does not get directly involved, which brings to mind Nero Wolfe and his man-of-action Archie Goodwin. 

In keeping with an Industrial Age mentality, detective Lecoq's power of reason is likened to a machine: if one can vacuum up the right evidence, logic alone will produce the criminal. But Gaboriau also humanizes his detective in a couple of ways. He makes him comically absent-minded, and when his relentless reason exposes as a criminal a man he loved as a son, he becomes depressed. And he holds conversations with the picture of a woman on his snuff box.

Lecoq--who has a proud rooster as a symbol--is a dashing master of disguise like Vidocq (and as Holmes would be). He rises to a prominent position with the Paris police force (again, like Vidocq) and Gaboriau spends much time describing the routines of honest, hardworking policemen in stations, partly to calm public fears of the police. It is because of these descriptions, along with his hero's methodical and scientific approach, that he is often called the father of the police procedural.

Whereas Dickens showed proper Victorian outrage in presenting his villains, with the heavens exacting revenge and the offender repenting in anguish, Gaboriau's villains do not struggle with their conscience. That's because Gaboriau, a Frenchman, presents his bad guys as aristocrats gone wrong, full of self importance and arrogance and greed, committing their crimes without regret against the weak, often geniuses who nearly outwit the brilliant detective. This is the beginning of the "Master Criminal" motif (something Doyle might be imitating with his use of Professor Moriarty?).

Whereas Dickens embedded a crime story within a larger family saga, Gaboriau did the opposite: he began with the discovery of the crime and the detection (Part 1: The Inquiry) and lengthened it by inventing conspiracies to obstruct the detective. Then he connected it to a long and labored tale (Part 2: The Honor of the Name) that exposed the extensive backstory of the youthful indiscretions of an aristocrat that lead up to the crime. So, despite surprises and dangers at the end, the belabored and sentimental Part 2 makes his work slow and boring (this, too, might be something Doyle imitates in "A Study in Scarlet" with that long Mormon section. Incidentally, in "Scarlet", Holmes calls Lecoq 'a miserable bungler'). Even so, Gaboriau's structure in his 4 police novels proved that "the detective story" could become a book-length form, just as the "sensation novel" was dying out.

Holmes: To conclude...

One other thought about Holmes and science: If Holmes studied footprints so carefully, it is odd that he did not study fingerprints at all. Sir Francis Galton published articles in England on the importance of fingerprints as a means of identification between 1892 and 1895, the years of Holmes greatest popularity. In 1896, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, meeting in Chicago, set up a Bureau of Investigation to study the possible use of fingerprinting as a way to augment or to replace the "Bertillon" method of bodily measurement as a way to identify criminals. But Holmes has no use for fingerprinting. In one case where prints are an issue, "The Norwood Builder," he shows it is a planted false clue. He had no use for Bertillon either, as he says at the end of "The Empty House." It was America's Mark Twain who first used fingerprints in a story to solve a mystery, in "Puddnhead Wilson."

Speaking of cops: While the English police value Holmes' advice, he snootily treats them like bunglers lacking in imagination, as Dupin did. Still, we should remember that Inspector Lestrade found the wedding band and other clues in "Scarlet," not Holmes.

The police begin by distrusting his far-fetched theories but come to value his cooperation. He never identifies a criminal without also supplying enough evidence for conviction. Sometimes he sets things up so that it looks like the police solved the crime and he leaves it up to Watson to set the record straight later in a story. Sometimes he withholds info until he can solve it himself. But he never misleads or hampers the police. And he never stays around for the trial. Earlier detective fiction loved courtroom scenes, but Holmes never testifies in court.

To conclude: Holmes embodied the characteristics of his predecessors and became the ancestor of so many detectives to follow: Father Brown with his intuition, the fussy Belgian Hercule Poirot and his dim sidekick Hastings, Lord Peter Wimsey and his sidekick Bunter, and others. The middle-class police detectives of Dickens and Collins were replaced by private, consulting amateurs of independent means (obviously, middle-class cops make a comeback much later, around the 1950s, with the arrival of the police procedural).

Doyle only flirted with the 'fair play' idea. When Holmes says, "The game's afoot," it is not a game with the reader. That is left to S.S. Van Dine, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers, who begin to write just as Doyle is ending his last series in the mid 1920s and turning his energy and devotion to--of all things--seances, spiritualism, and the defense of the existence of Faeries. 

Holmes part 4: a scientific hero?

What made Holmes the perfect hero for his times?

He exemplified all that the British admired. He was mentally brilliant, but pragmatically so. He had good taste, a good social and cultural background, the status of a scientist, with a love for good music--especially the violin--and fine tobacco (he can easily identify dozens of types of ashes). He has family connections in Europe, but is completely English, whereas most other detectives of the previous 50 years, such as Dupin, Tabaret, Lecoq and Vidocq, had been French.

In keeping with the European fascination with James Fennimore Cooper's Indian trackers, Holmes was a fine reader of footprints, hoof marks, and wheel tracks. Tracking constitutes a great deal of his stories, hence the deerstalker cap. Holmes has little use for modern criminology and often whines about a trail being ruined. In one case, he uses plaster to preserve footprints. He is often compared to a dog such as a foxhound or retriever. Watson has a bull pup (who we never see), and some suggest it is a figure of speech for a bad temper or an illegitimate son. Anyway -- like Cooper's Indians, Holmes goes tracking without food or water for days, and enters a trance-like concentration when working out a case.

Like Vidocq, he is a master of disguise and an actor, fooling Watson into believing he is an old man or an Italian priest. Also like Vidocq, he has remarkable physical strength and endurance, though he never works out. He prefers to lounge about in his famous robe, and he tends to smoke heavily: cigarettes, cigars, and his trademark calabash pipe.

Like Dupin, he has encyclopedic knowledge of criminal history. He is full of technical information, regards detection as a science, uses newspaper ads to bring suspects out into the open, breaks into people's thoughts, and believes that the more grotesque a mystery appears, the simpler the answer is. They both smoke, take long walks in the city at night, avoid women, and have eccentric interests.

For example, Holmes plays the violin while he's thinking. He studies philology, ancient manuscripts, and music of the Middle Ages. In "Scarlet", he says he has no use for the humanities and other impractical intellectual pursuits, and in "Hound" Watson recalls he is even uninterested in astronomy. But in later stories he quotes Shakespeare and Carlyle, and retires to bee-keeping and the study of Buddhism. He is a fine boxer, but we never see him exercise or practice. Instead, we see him struggle with a cocaine habit in "Sign of Four" and Watson, the good doctor, persuades him later in the canon to give it up. This would not strike Victorian readers as harshly as us, since cocaine at the time was openly marketed as a painkiller and was even advertised as a nerve-calming ingredient in Coca-Cola.

Poe has a Romantic notion of the bi-part soul, which Doyle adapted for Holmes. He is a rational drug addict, a lazy athlete, and he works with sloppy precision. He does not practice Japanese judo, yet he is an expert. He embodies men's fantasies of being an expert in things without working on it.

Both Dupin and Holmes have admiring, faithful chroniclers. Dupin's narrator reveals little about himself, but over 4 novels and 56 stories we learn much about Watson. Contrary to the bumbling Oliver Hardy image given to him in earlier movies, he is a handsome and strong (though injured) man, not as quick-minded as Holmes but not as dim-witted as some presume. He is always ready for an adventure (he went to Afghanistan, after all), and shows good humor and an eye for the ladies. Watson is perhaps Doyle's most pleasing innovation. 

The contrasts to Poe are dramatic, too. Poe uses the tales to illustrate a point about the power of pure analysis, using a near mathematical approach with little narrative detail or action. The characters are lightly drawn, and they do not converse or act normally. Dupin is never wrong, never misled. But Doyle's stories are full of movement. People of all classes bring their problems to Holmes. Much of the action takes place before our eyes: chasing hansom cabs in the streets, running over fields, inspecting rooms. Holmes is, on occasion, baffled. In one story he is wrong.

Poe was unfamiliar with Paris and it is used merely as a backdrop. But Doyle knew Victorian London and made it part of his plots, with its fog, cabs, gaslights, docks and train stations, cathedrals and opium dens (hmmm--shades of Dickens).

Doyle managed to restrain sensation to acceptable limits and explain Holmes' deductions in an entertaining way. By doing this, he appealed to two kinds of mystery readers: the uncritical public interested in crime stories for their own sensational sake to forget about their miserable factory jobs for a while, and intellectual readers who found satisfaction in the closely reasoned puzzles.

At first, it appears that Doyle, himself a doctor, is creating the first 'scientific' detective in an age enamored with scientific progress. We meet him in a chemistry lab at Bart's Hospital, elated about a test for detecting hemoglobin in stains. However, he does not reason as a scientist or use scientific experiments to solve cases (one one occasion he uses test tubes and litmus paper). Yet readers of the 1890s were not ready for Quincy M.E. or Scarpetta or CSI or NCIS and all the shows that have forensic labs. In "Scarlet", Holmes believes Drebber was poisoned but he does not analyze the pills. He gives them to the landlady's dog, and the terrier's instant death proves the drug is lethal. In "The Devil's Foot" he suspects a burning brown powder has killed Brenda Tregennis and driven her brothers insane, but does he send it to a lab? Nope. He tests it on himself and Watson with nearly fatal results!

Early on, we see Holmes beating corpses to test for bruises, but he never uses post-mortem tests in a case. The public was not ready for a detective with a scalpel. They could understand one with a magnifying glass.

So, Holmes' use of 'science' is a veneer pasted over romanticized plots that exalt Watson's common sense and Holmes' intuitive genius. Like his heroes in the historical novels that flopped, Holmes is a chivalrous man who is fearless before the strong and humble to the weak, Victorian qualities found most often in schoolboy stories of the period. Doyle successfully applied the morality of schoolboy stories like "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and "Boy's Own Paper" that show a strong upperclassman and an awestruck tag-along underclassman. It is no wonder that Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, found Holmes to be a perfect role model of self-reliance, loyalty, and moral fitness for English boys responsible for the future of an empire. In these schoolboy stories we learn that public schools are for the moral training and character-building of 'gentlemen' who will 'quit themselves like men', 'do their duty', and influence generations yet unborn by a deportment that will 'strike out if necessary for whatever is true and manly'. Boys were taught to oppose bullies and take one's licks with a proper stiff upper lip when he feels he is in the right.

So Holmes stories are not innocent entertainment. They are, like other schoolboy stories of the period, filled with an imperial ideology meant to uphold and justify the values of Victoria's Empire. Like other detective stories in general, they declare that good wins over evil and order over chaos, but more than that, these declare that British order and efficiency will win over the chaos of the world. Not even World War I shattered this artifice.

Holmes, part 3

His friend's mention of a legend about a demonic hound in the misty bogs of Dartmoor prompted Doyle to explore the moor. The story that came to him at first was not a Holmes story. But the plot began to demand a prominent figure, and Holmes stepped forward. Thus, Doyle wrote "The Hound of the Baskervilles" starring Holmes and Watson, set in a time earlier than The Final Problem.

The story appeared in serial form in The Strand in late 1901 through Spring 1902. Then in 1903 Doyle gave in and agreed to resurrect Holmes. The newspapers went wild with joy, and printed stories about Doyle possibly going to New York to write about Holmes in American cases (a premise for the CBS show "Elementary" that ran 2012-19, a contemporary treatment with a disgraced Holmes going to New York following drug rehab and under the supervision of a surgeon, Joan Watson, played by Lucy Liu).

But Doyle never did this. The cesspool of London held plenty of possibilities.

When "The Adventure of the Empty House" appeared in the October 1903 Strand, the company could not print copies fast enough. Long lines of people waited for them, not at newsstands, but at the printer's.

Doyle produced 33 more stories and another novel, "The Valley of Fear." The last story appeared in 1927, just three years before his death in 1930. Holmes' career lasted 40 years, from the height of British power in the gaslight era to the age of the automobile. Curiously, Doyle gave Holmes little interest in the scientific progress of the period. The Russian Revolution, World War I, flight, movies, radio, and so on, never happened in Holmes' world. He stayed in the 1890s, and detective fiction for a long while remained in this idealized, make-believe world of country estates, compliant servants, elegant trains and foggy streets. The time had been right in the 1890s for a British hero who exemplified all that the British admired. More on that next time.