I love me a good Sherlock Holmes adaptation. But something that always bugs me about film and television Sherlockiana (especially the more modern, more big-budget adaptations) is how quickly they go from zero to Moriarty. And of course the Napoleon of Crime is an iconic part of the canon, especially the later canon which increasingly referenced the professor, and developed a habit of pitting the great detective against ever vaster and more elaborate conspiracies (culminating in His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Homes where he goes up against an actual German spy ring). But early on in his life, one of the most striking features of Holmes’s stories is that they have a surprisingly grounded view of crime, and one that arguably fits better into the hardboiled tradition of Hammett and Chandler than the cozy tradition of Christie.
People tend to categorize Holmes (naturally enough) as part of the “English” tradition of detective fiction—the sort that’s all stately homes and improbable coincidences, that revolves around, as Chandler puts it, “how somebody stabbed Mrs Pottington Postlethwaite with the solid platinum poniard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lame in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests”. Indeed in the same essay Chandler himself dismisses Holmes as “mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue.” And of course there are elements of the solid platinum poniard in even the earliest stories; in The Adventure of the Speckled Band the twin murder weapons are a fake bellpull and a fictional viper, and in A Case of Identity the twist turns out to be that a woman’s vanished fiancé is actually her stepfather in disguise. But even in these outlandish tales the crimes themselves are grounded in a level of grubby psychological realism that we often allow ourselves to be distracted from by the violin, the deerstalker, and the briar pipe.
One can make a strong case that the Sherlock Holmes stories represent, in their Victorian way, a sincere effort to portray the reality of crime in all of its cruelty, caprice and banality.
The formula of the traditional mystery is straightforward. A crime (usually a murder) occurs, and then the detective assembles an array of clues, all of which are laid out in front of the reader, who is then given ample time to have a crack at solving the problem themselves before the detective lays out the solution in the final chapter, rather like the answer to a crossword puzzle. Not so Holmes, who frequently presents his conclusions before he ever shares his observations with the reader. Doyle, we must remember, was writing before the detective genre was established, and would (in his early writing at least) have been quite unaware that there were readers who wanted to play along at home. And while it can sometimes be hard to see behind the imagery and more than a century of adaptation and interpretation, one can make a strong case that the Sherlock Holmes stories represent, in their Victorian way, a sincere effort to portray the reality of crime in all of its cruelty, caprice and banality.
When Doyle began writing the Holmes stories the Metropolitan Police force was shy of sixty years old, the concept of the police detective younger still. Holmes’s “methods” might superficially resemble the erratic genius of Poirot’s “little grey cells” but in many ways they’re better understood as the forebears of the techniques used in modern police procedurals. In A Study in Scarlet Holmes astounds Lestrade and Watson alike by providing a detailed description of the murderer of Enoch Drebber, but the methods he uses bear far more resemblance to modern forensic techniques than to the intricate puzzles of the country-house mystery. He estimates the man’s height from the length of his stride, identifies a hansom cab by its tracks and determines the make of the suspect’s cigar by closely examining the ash (the magnifying glass is such an iconic part of Holmes’s image that it’s easy to forget that he uses it much the same way a modern forensic scientist would use a microscope). When we first meet him he is even making a methodical study of post-mortem bruising. Holmes himself constantly denies that his methods are remarkable, and in a sense he’s telling the truth. He isn’t supposed to be a genius, he’s supposed to be a skilled and methodical detective who uses techniques that can be learned. And when you think about it, a century or so later, people really do learn those techniques. It’s just that these days we call it police work.
Chandler says of Hammett that he “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse” but you can make a good case that reasons are at the heart of Doyle’s stories, and those reasons are often as sordid as anything in hardboiled fiction. The sensibility is more Victorian, of course, so there’s a lot more emphasis on marriages and inheritances, but the stories hinge far more on people’s motivations than on the outré mechanics of a baffling crime. There are some very straightforward examples of this—A Study in Scarlet is the story of a simple revenge killing solved by means of a routine background check, and The Boscombe Valley Mystery is about a man who bludgeons a blackmailer who pushes him too far. There are no platinum poniards here. But perhaps more interesting is looking at those crimes which do seem to have more of a “country house” flavour and seeing how they differ from the template that would be established over the following century.
The Adventure of the Speckled Band is, superficially, exactly the kind of silly story that Chandler was complaining about—it’s the outlandish tale of an innocent girl who is killed in a locked room because her wicked stepfather trained a poisonous snake to respond to a whistle. And … well … I’m not going to completely defend it on that level except to point out that it was 1892 and herpetology wasn’t as advanced as it is today (and it’s nowhere near as weird as The Adventure of the Creeping Man where the solution is genuinely “taking monkey glands was turning him into a monkey”). But there’s a single detail of The Adventure of the Speckled Band that for me changes its whole character and puts it in quite a different category to later country house mysteries. That detail comes in the following line:
“He would put it through this ventilator at the hour that he thought best, with the certainty that it would crawl down the rope and land on the bed. It might or might not bite the occupant, perhaps she might escape every night for a week, but sooner or later she must fall a victim.”
One of the very fair criticisms Chandler makes of the English style of mystery is that the means of the murder often rely too much on coincidence or happenstance, as he puts it “This is what is vulgarly known as having God sit in your lap; a murderer who needs that much help from Providence must be in the wrong business.”
Superficially, the murder of Julia Stonor by Grimesby Roylott seems to rely on just such providence. The serpent may not bite, the intended victim may wake, the whole business with the flute and the milk might not work. But the key difference here is that Grimesby Roylott can try as often as he likes, because the girl he is trying to kill (in order to prevent his annuity being diminished by her marriage—again it’s a very sordid crime) is entirely within his control and theoretically under his protection. When you realise that the story, shorn of all the mystery, is just the tale of a brutally violent man trying to murder his stepdaughter in a needlessly cruel fashion, and probably getting away with it because they live miles from anywhere and it’s 1891 so she really has very few rights and very little power of her own, the whole story goes from being a piece of campy fluff about a poisonous snake to a hard-hitting drama about domestic abuse in the Victorian countryside.
Chandler says that the realist in murder writes of a world “where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising”. That was the way he saw urban life in America in 1950 and he may well have been right. Doyle was writing about a different country in a different time, but the world he saw was strangely similar. Holmes says this about the English countryside in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.
“But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. And in 1891, that man’s name was Sherlock Holmes.
