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

I have several editions of A Study in Scarlet lying around. I particularly like the one with illustrations by Gris Grimly, where the distortions favoured by that artist give a grotesque flavour to Victorian caricature. But for this most recent re-read I was using the Penguin Classics version. In the Introduction, Iain Sinclair makes something out of the idea that Holmes and Watson constitute “the division of a single being,” which I wasn’t all the way on board with. Nevertheless it did make me reflect on how this is a book representing a profound doubleness. In terms of its origins, it was both the launch of the most famous detective in the history of mystery fiction and very nearly stillborn, with the manuscript being rejected several times before finding a home in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. Where it was well enough received for there to be calls for a sequel, though there was nothing to indicate the sensation Holmes would later become.

The most obvious split that defines the novel though is the one that happens right at the mid-point, as the “reminiscences of John H. Watson MD” are pitched and we’re sent back in time and  transported to another continent to get filled in on all the Utah back story. This gives the narrative a strange feel that I can’t relate to many other works of the period. The book literally breaks in two.

A couple of things stand out about this. In the first place, the ballad of Lucy Ferrier and her lover Jefferson Hope seems to have been something Doyle only came up with to pad the story enough to make is salable. Most of it could have been lost without damaging the story in any way, which might have suggested to readers at the time that the proper vehicle for a Holmes tale going forward would be the short story.

Cuts would have helped here because the other thing you can’t really miss is the sharp drop in the quality of the writing. The first part of the book, introducing us to Holmes and Watson and their London “cesspool” environment, crackles with life. Compare that to the dull travelogue we’re yanked away to, a land of “snowcapped and lofty mountains, and dark and gloomy valleys. There are enormous plains, which in winter are white with snow, and in summer are grey with the saline alkali dust.” Among the wildlife “The coyote skulks among the scrub, the buzzard flaps heavily through the air, and the clumsy grizzly bear lumbers through the dark ravines, and picks up such sustenance as it can amongst the rocks.” Raised in such an inhospitable environment, Lucy grows up to be the flower of Utah: “The keen air of the mountains and the balsamic odour of the pine trees took the place of nurse and mother to the young girl. As year succeeded to year she grew taller and stronger, her cheeks more ruddy and her step more elastic.” And so on. I find almost all the Utah stuff to be unreadable. And indeed Holmes himself seems to have objected to it, later complaining in The Sign of the Four of the “romantic tinge” given the case by Watson in his write-up.

(As an aside, Mormons didn’t, and still don’t, appreciate how they were presented here and to some extent I can understand. But overall I thought that given the time and the place, Doyle didn’t go as hard on the Latter Day Saints as you might have expected him to. He actually presents the pioneer generation as heroic manly men, and it’s only later that he describes their community has having descended into a tyrannous theocratic police state.)

So that’s the kind of doubleness I mean. Pulp at its worst and pulp at its best, and at its best it’s great literature and doesn’t need to make any excuses. Once Doyle was free to lose the melodramatic Western ballast he was going to be off to the races. He wasn’t fully inventing the detective story, but further developing conventions already in place, like the eccentric detective, his equally odd companion (how strange that Watson is totally without family of friends anywhere in England), and his showing up the bumbling police investigators. All these elements were already there in Poe’s Dupin stories, and it’s maybe the anxiety of influence that has Holmes call Dupin “a very inferior fellow.”

I think Doyle was still finding his feet here and there are some missteps. For me, a few things stand out about the story that I’ll just mention quickly.

(1) How weird is the relationship between Drebber and Stangerson? Drebber beats his rival out for the hand of Lucy and then Stangerson becomes his personal secretary as they travel about together? That seems like another novel in itself right there.

(2) What’s with Hope’s obsession over Lucy’s wedding ring? After she dies he visits her body and takes the ring from her finger, snarling that “She shall not be buried in that.” One can understand his feeling this way, as the ring represents her marriage to Drebber, which is what kills her. But then Hope holds on to it even after showing it to Drebber before killing him (which was his express purpose for taking it in the first place) and goes so far as to place a special value on it as his sole memento of Lucy. I would have thought he’d want to destroy it. I am not the first person to wonder about this, and the only explanation I can come up with is that Doyle needed to use it as a clue later. As it turns out, Hope’s attachment to the ring turns out to be his undoing.

(3) I find it hard to credit that after years of pursuit (and I love how Hope has to keep taking time off to do odd jobs that will pay for his obsession), the avenging angel would let Drebber’s life come down to a coin flip. Indeed, when offering Drebber his choice of pill at the end (one pill is poison, the other harmless) he even volunteers his own death: “Let the high God judge between us. Choose and eat. There is death in one and life in the other. I shall take what you leave. Let us see if there is justice upon the earth, or if we are ruled by chance.”

The point, I think, was to paint Hope in a more sympathetic light. He isn’t a killer mad with vengeance but an instrument of the divine will. “There is no murder,” he insists to Drebber. And in the end Hope will be executed by that same “higher Judge” who has “taken the matter in hand”: summoning him “before a tribunal where strict justice would be meted out to him.” Which is another bad reflection on the police. You don’t want to leave such matters to the British justice system.

(4) The novel ends with Watson quoting some lines in Latin from Horace about a rich man not caring if people hate him as long as he has gold in his vault. This is meant as a response to Holmes’s chagrin that the police are getting the credit for catching the killer when Holmes did all the work. But it strikes me as inappropriate. When has the public hissed at Holmes? Where is the money in Holmes’s strongbox?

And so the game was afoot. And by the game I don’t mean Holmes as foxhound sniffing out impossible mysteries but Watson’s mission, declared even before he meets the great man, of solving the mystery that is Sherlock Holmes. That would end up taking quite a while.

Holmes index