1888
Sherlock Holmes, the iconic detective from 221b Baker Street, in Victorian London, lies behind the whole genre of modern detective fiction. He was not the first imaginary character to outdo the police in the solving of crimes, but he was by far the best known and the most influential. A Study in Scarlet was the first of four full-length novels and fifty-six short stories written about Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing him both to the public and to his long-serving assistant, Dr Watson.
Much of A Study in Scarlet is supposedly taken from the diaries of John Watson, an army surgeon invalided out of the forces after being wounded in Afghanistan. It first appeared as one of three full-length stories in the magazine Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. Conan Doyle, had been working on it for two years or more, under the title A Tangled Skein, and had suffered a series of rejections from other publications. The story received little attention at the time, but the magazine, which appeared in November and was sold out by Christmas, is now one of the most sought-after in the world, with only thirty-one copies known to survive. The following summer, the 44,000-word story was published as a standalone book and, along with the other Sherlock Holmes stories, it has never been out of print since.
Conan Doyle, was a late-Victorian polymath, who in some ways embodied the age in the breadth of his industry and endeavours. By the end of his life he had been a successful doctor, had saved soldiers’ lives in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), had stood as a parliamentary candidate on several occasions, had written and campaigned on a raft of issues from divorce-law reform to imperialism in Africa, had become one of the leading advocates of the power of spiritualism, and had become a knight of the realm. He had also tried to make his literary mark as a writer of historical romances. But posterity ignored almost all of that, in favour of one enduring creation: Sherlock Holmes. And A Study in Scarlet began it all.
The book starts with Dr Watson searching for cheap lodgings in London and being introduced to his roommate, the mysterious Sherlock Holmes, who is working in the chemical laboratory of a nearby hospital. Holmes is said to have beaten the bodies in the morgue with a stick to find out how much bruising takes place after death; he has an immensely detailed and wide-ranging knowledge of crime, poisons and chemistry, and an astonishing ability to deduce facts about strangers from observing their appearance. It is only after Watson has puzzled for days about his new roommate that Holmes casually tells him, ‘I have a profession of my own. I suppose I am the only one in the world. I’m a consulting detective.’
Holmes is called in when a body is discovered in a deserted London house. He uses his techniques of observation and deduction, and eventually contrives to arrest the guilty man in the presence of Watson and Scotland Yard detectives. Holmes promises to explain how he has solved the case – but at that point, halfway through the book, the scene suddenly shifts.
Most of the second half of A Study in Scarlet takes place in the Mormon settlement in Utah, United States. Conan Doyle had no direct personal knowledge of the Mormons, but he depicts the community they established in Utah as one of repression, intolerance and violence. A settler is murdered when he tries to take his daughter away in order to protect her from a forced polygamous marriage. The girl dies shortly after her wedding, and the story describes the obsessive quest for revenge mounted by the man she had wanted to marry. He follows the two men responsible when they leave Utah, and finally tracks them down and kills them in London.
The culprit dies of natural causes before he can be brought to trial. Holmes explains how he solved the case, and shrugs resignedly when all the credit for the success goes to the detectives rather than to him.
The importance of A Study in Scarlet does not lie in any influence it may have had on the handling of criminal investigations. There was little revolutionary or new in Holmes’s belief in the importance of close observation, and his use of deductive reasoning is frequently flawed; many of the supposedly brilliant deductions, here and throughout the stories, are capable of alternative explanations. It would be hard to argue that forensic science would not have developed without the prompting of Conan Doyle. In any case, Holmes’s cavalier treatment of evidence would have got him sacked from the most junior role in any police force: in A Study in Scarlet he demonstrates the potency of a poison pill left at the scene of a crime by feeding it to a dog.
The significance of the Sherlock Holmes stories is, of course, literary, not forensic. When the stories began serial publication in 1891, in Strand Magazine, a complete story in each monthly issue, the public’s voracious appetite for the detective was truly awakened – and it has never died.
In Holmes, Conan Doyle created something of a literary archetype. Here was the gentleman detective, socially and intellectually superior to the plodding, lower-class, almost comically rendered policemen. (‘I am afraid, Rance, that you will never rise in the force,’ he condescends to one.) Here too is the solver of crimes as a type of remote clinician, whose ability to perceive motives, extract evidence and assess behavioural traits is ill-matched by any wider sense of empathy with his fellow human beings. It is Dr Watson, the ‘everyman’ and reader’s representative in the stories, to whom we look for ordinary human feelings.
For Conan Doyle, the popular success of Holmes was a mixed blessing. His real literary ambition was to be lauded as a writer of historical novels, such as Micah Clarke (1889), The White Company (1891) and The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896), but the fame of Holmes was pushing his other work into the shadows. Conan Doyle was provoked to kill off his hero in the 1893 story ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’, but, appropriately enough for this believer in the spirit life, the author could not prevent Holmes beckoning from beyond the grave. In the 1903 ‘Adventure of the Empty House’ Conan Doyle appeased the reading public, explaining how Holmes had, in fact, survived. Another 32 Holmes stories and one full-length novel followed.
The 20th century would see over 200 film versions, and an explosion in ‘detective fiction’ as one of the world’s most popular forms of literary escapism. In no small part, this was due to the eccentric sleuth first revealed in A Study in Scarlet.