Sherlock Holmes’s second outing (that is, in terms of publication) takes a lot of the themes introduced in A Study in Scarlet and etches them into the standard model a little deeper. The police, here in the form of Mr. Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard, are even bigger bunglers. Holmes’s eccentricity is more developed, as he is presented as even more of a manic-depressive drug addict: either intensively engaged in the hunt or zonked out on his seven-per-cent solution. And finally the structure is much the same, with the criminal spilling his guts in a long-winded flashback after he’s been caught, filling the reader in with all the details of how and why he dun it. “The Strange Story of Jonathan Small” isn’t quite the anchor the Utah melodrama was in A Study in Scarlet (or even, possibly, as exotic to a British audience), but Doyle was on his way to cutting this part of what I’m calling the standard model down to a size that would fit better within a short story.

Sticking with this just a bit more, you could say the debt to Poe’s Dupin is also deepened, with the regrettably racist figure of Tonga cast in much the same role as the orangutan in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Tonga is at first mistaken as a Newfoundland dog, but when he stands upright he transforms into a “savage, distorted creature”: “Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with half animal fury.” Yes, this was a work of its time, but by 1890 such a caricature was in bad taste.

But back to Holmes’s eccentricity. He’s both more than human and less. Without a case to solve, pressed into inaction, he becomes an invalid. In today’s parlance he would be diagnosed as bipolar, switching from being in “excellent spirits” to “fits of the blackest depression.” He describes himself as having a “curious constitution”: “I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.” Though Watson himself feels the same black dogs, and when he gets depressed thinking of his own single status he has to banish such “dangerous thoughts” as come into his head by plunging furiously into the latest treatise upon pathology. That’s his seven-per-cent solution.

Holmes isn’t bothered by being single though, as he doesn’t trust women. This is his machine quality I mentioned, and it’s a point that Watson expands upon at the beginning of his next Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia.” There’s no romance about him, at least in so far as it relates to his association with other people. “Women are never to be entirely trusted – not the best of them,” he warns Watson. Who, in turn, bridles at this “atrocious sentiment.” But then Watson is just too good to be true. He even delights in Miss Morstan being denied the Agra treasure because he wouldn’t want to be thought a gold-digger. That’s nobility.

The wit and wisdom of Sherlock Holmes is cut down a bit, though we do get what is perhaps his most famous pronouncement or precept on his method. Unfortunately, it’s one I’ve always had a big problem with. “How often have I said to you,” he tells Watson, “that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” Emphasis in the original.

There are two complaints I’d make about this precept. First of all, how useful is it? Eliminating the impossible would be an endless task. Even narrowing down what finally is possible (however unlikely) as opposed to impossible would take a long time. But more than that, it just seems to me that the claim being made isn’t true. Does it not mean that everything that is possible, even if just in theory, must be true? Who believes that? And what practical application does it have? In the case presented in the book, it gives us the answer to the “locked room” mystery we’re presented with, but even there can we be sure that Holmes had exhausted every possibility? How could you ever be sure you had managed that?

A much better precept is one Holmes has drawn from his reading:

“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”

This is an observation that, in the age of Big Data, could be said to have become something of a sacred text. Though I don’t think there are many people alive today who can say they’ve read The Martyrdom of Man. Or anything else by Winwood Reade. If they had, they’d find that Doyle had tweaked Reade into something maybe a little different. What Reade actually said was this: “As a single atom, man is an enigma; as a whole, he is a mathematical problem. As an individual, he is a free agent; as a species, the offspring of necessity.”

There’s a nice historical aside that I don’t find gets a lot of attention, at least from the annotators. After they find the treasure is missing the police inspector is particularly disappointed. “There goes the reward!” he exclaims gloomily. “Where there is no money there is no pay.” This reminded me of the description of policing in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century given by Daniel Stashower in his book The Beautiful Cigar Girl. Back before NYC had a professional police force, private rewards made up a large part of the pay the police received. Was something like that still the case in the 1880s in London? What the inspector says seems to suggest so.

I don’t think there’s any question this is a better book than A Study in Scarlet. Doyle was still finding his way and learning to economize, but there are some great descriptive passages and the climactic chase down the Thames is thrilling. The natural home for Holmes though was going to be in the short story, which is where he would find himself next.

Holmes index