I kicked off my thoughts on A Study in Scarlet by talking about the duality that the Holmes stories have been taken as embodying, and how one critic saw Holmes and Watson as just such a doubling, not unlike the “duality of man” theme explored in the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I thought of that again reading this story, not only because Watson explicitly draws attention to Holmes’s “dual nature” and its bipolar swinging “from extreme languor to devouring energy,” but for the way the pawn shop faces two ways: onto a quiet square and then, just around the corner, onto a fashionable main traffic artery. The two streets present “as great a contrast . . . as the front of a picture does to the back.” “It was difficult to realize as we looked at the line of fine shops and stately business premises that they really abutted on the other side upon the faded and stagnant square we had just quitted.” This is not unlike the home of Dr. Jekyll, which presents “a great air of wealth and comfort” at the front, while the back door (which Mr. Hyde uses) is in a state of dirty disrepair.

It’s just another connection that leads you to think not that Doyle was systematically building up this kind of dualistic model but that this was just the way his mind worked. And to be sure it was an idea that psychology was beginning to explore in more depth at the same time.

Putting all that aside, this was a favourite story of Doyle’s and has been for many of his readers, in large part I think because it’s so silly and relatively easy to solve. Mr. Jabez Wilson is slow not to see through the transparent ruse to get him out of the house for a few hours a day: paying him a goodly salary just for having red hair and being able to copy out pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Then again, he needed the money so we have to excuse him. People always believe what they want or need to believe to get them through the day. As readers, however, it’s pretty clear what’s going on, and at the first mention of the bank’s location you should be locked in.

I wonder when this particular criminal plot was first seen. The story came out in 1891 and I have to think somebody had come up with the idea before that. It may have been something Doyle got from an actual heist. In 1828 Australia’s first bank robbery had a gang of men tunneling off a sewer drain into a bank vault. I don’t know if there’d been many fictional accounts of similar operations though. There was a robbery in London (on Baker Street, no less) in 1971 that was apparently based on “The Red-Headed League.” “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” (Oscar Wilde, 1889).That Baker Street robbery was in turn dramatized in a 2008 film called The Bank Job, and may have also provided the inspiration for the heist in Sexy Beast. There are only so many plots for criminals, or authors, to make use of.

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