About the Author
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ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE was born in Edinburgh, Scotland,
in 1859. A Study in let, his first novel and Sherlock Holmes
story, was published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. He was
the author of more than fifty novels, ranging in genre from
science fiction to historical fiction. He died in 1930.
ANDREW LYCETT is the author of critically accled biographies
of Muammar Qaddafi, Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, Dylan Thomas,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wilkie Collins.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Excerpted from the introduction
INTRODUCTION
Struck down by the flu, a friend of mine felt so awful that he
was forced to drag himself to bed for a couple of days. There was
nothing he wanted to do. Any movement was painful, any printed
word was a blur. Then he picked up an old copy of Sherlock Holmes
stories, and, as he began to focus, the pages seemed to turn as
if by magic, and his condition perceptibly improved. ‘They are
perfect comfort reading,’ he told me. ‘Well-written, ingenious
and full of fascinating detail. I simply couldn’t put them down.’
He was in fact reading the collected stories of Sherlock Holmes.
There are fifty-six, originally published in serial form in the
Strand Magazine and later gathered in five books – The Adventures
of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894),
The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), His Last Bow (1917), and
The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927). But there are also four
Sherlock Holmes novels which, despite their greater length, would
certainly have served the same therapeutic need, since they are
just as intriguing as the stories. They are A Study in let
(1887), The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles
(1901–02) and The Valley of Fear (1914–15) – the first three of
which are included here. Each has its special role in the
evolution of the Canon, as dedicated ‘Sherlockians’ call the
combined stories and novels. And it was in a novel – A Study in
let – that the detective made his first outing in print. His
character is subsequently ed out in another novel, The Sign
of Four. He only surfaces in story form as a running serial in
the new Strand Magazine in 1891. Then, after becoming a national
phenomenon over the next two and a half years, he was rudely
killed off by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, who wanted to do
other things – only to resurface eight years later in another
novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is often regarded as
the perfect Sherlock Holmes package, combining absorbing
detective work, astute social observation, and blood-tingling
horror.
The world’s most famous detective was conceived in turbulent
times in the mid-1880s, when, following the failure of the
expedition to rescue General Gordon from the Mahdi’s forces in
Khartoum, Britain was coming to terms with one of the first
obvious reverses in its steady colonial expansion. At the time
Conan Doyle was working as a general practitioner in South-sea, a
genteel suburb of Portsmouth. Despite the peacefulness of his
surroundings, he was experiencing his own internal upheavals. He
had trained as a doctor at Edinburgh University, where the
empirical tradition of the ‘Athens of the North’ had made a
strong impression on the Roman Catholicism of his birth. He had
be to see himself as a scientist and, to the horror of his
deeply religious family, to call himself agnostic. Nevertheless,
the struggle between scientific truth and his deep spiritual
yearning stayed with him. While a young doctor, the former strand
predominated, as he tried to maintain a properly objective
approach to all around him. But, as he grew older, his belief in
the afterlife could not be restrained and he became the world’s
leading advocate of spiritualism.
He retained a good sense of humour throughout, and he liked to
joke that his single-handed practice in Bush Villas, Southsea,
positioned between a pub and a Pentecostal chapel, acted as a
buffer between two very different kinds of opiates. While working
as a family doctor, he indulged his more speculative side by
writing stories for national magazines. Like many authors, his
output reflected the popular genres of his era, so, despite his
scientific bent, his tales tended to have fantastical or even
occult themes. One of the most successful, ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s
Statement’, was published in the influential Cornhill Magazine in
January 1884. Loosely based on the last voyage of the Mary
Celeste, this story was compared by critics with the work of
Edgar Allan Poe. It was followed over the next few months by
‘John Barrington Cowles’ and ‘The Great Kleinplatz Experiment’,
two more stories with plots involving mesmerism.
At the same time he was seeking a publisher for a more ambitious
novel, The Firm of Girdlestone, about the life and loves of an
Edinburgh medical graduate working for a corrupt London trading
concern. But he met with little success – to the extent that he
saw fit to note privately that he knew of no man in ‘so sad a
position as he who is gifted with some a of literary ability
which is just short of the market value. How he toils and slaves
to get into the magic circle and what dreary heart-breaking work
it is.’ Uncharacteristically for a generally positive and
good-natured man, he even speculated about writing ‘The
Autobiography of a Failure’.
In August 1885 his luck seemed to change when he married Louise
Hawkins, the sister of one of his patients. She brought a renewed
sense of purpose to his life. ‘After my marriage,’ he wrote in
his autobiography Memories and Adventures, ‘my brain seems to
have quickened and both my imagination and my range of expression
were greatly improved.’ And he was now more determined than ever
to get his name ‘on the back of a volume’. He decided to go about
this by writing a detective story, which was the latest genre to
capture the public imagination. The British public had long been
fascinated by crime, devouring the ‘true stories’ of criminals
which appeared in The Newgate from the 1770s. But its
interest in detectives was more recent, following the formation
of the Metropolitan in London in 1829, and its detective
branch thirteen years later. With his journalist’s eye for
topicality, Charles Dickens had been intrigued by the exploits of
this branch’s Inspector Jack Whicher and had written them up in
his magazine Household Words. One of his employees there was his
friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, author of The
Moonstone, published in 1868, and later described by T. S. Eliot
as ‘the first and greatest English detective novel’.
Actually there had been several forerunners. Edgar Allan Poe had
blazed the trail with a sleuth called C. Auguste Dupin in his
story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in 1841. Dupin was not a
fully paid-up detective, but his skill lay in deciphering clues
through a process of ‘ratiocination’. Although detectives
subsequently appeared in other books (one example is Clara
Vaughan in R. D. Blackmore’s eponymous novel in 1864), the genre
took a leap forward in 1866 when the French journalist Emile
Gaboriau invented a man detective called Monsieur Lecoq and
invited his readers to share in the process of solving various
crimes. Conan Doyle had been observing these developments, for he
later wrote, ‘Gaboriau had rather attracted me by the neat
dovetailing of his plots, and Poe’s masterful detective, M.
Dupin, had from boyhood been one of my heroes. But could I bring
an addition of my own?’
His solution was to cast his mind back to his student days and,
in particular, to his former professor of surgery, Joseph Bell,
who was known for his remarkable powers of observation and
deduction. Bell had a knack of being able to look at his patients
and determine not only their medical ailments, but also their
whole life story. As the professor himself put it, the basis of
‘all successful medical diagnosis’ was ‘the precise and
intelligent re and appreciation of minor differences’.
Thus his rationale for working out that one of his patients had
recently served as a non-commissioned officer in a Highland
regiment stationed in Barbados: ‘The man was a respectful man,
but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would
have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an
air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados,
his complaint is elephantitis, which is West Indian and not
British.’ Conan Doyle wondered to himself, ‘If he [Bell] were a
detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized
business to something nearer to an exact science. I would try if
I could get this effect.’
He was beginning to see how he could build on Dupin’s
‘ratiocination’ and create a detective who brought a real
scientific approach to his work. Another of his university
mentors had been Sir Robert Christison, who had pioneered the use
of forensics in criminal enquiries (notably in the trial of the
notorious ‘body-snatchers’ Burke and Hare in 1828, when his
experiments into the bruising of corpses helped secure Burke’s
conviction after Hare had turned King’s evidence). Christison was
also known for trying out on himself new drugs derived from
vegetable alkaloids – a practice Conan Doyle himself followed, as
would his fictional creation.
Conan Doyle was keen to show how the process of criminal
investigation was becoming more scientific. It was a quarter of a
century since Sir William Herschel, a magistrate in Bengal, had
noted that every person’s fingers had a configuration of ridges
and furrows which was unique to them and could be used to help
combat fraud. The fingerprinting techniques which he had trialed
in India were starting to be used in Britain. Meanwhile on the
continent the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon had invented
‘anthropometrics’, which tried to describe criminals and even
predict their behaviour on the basis of precise body
measurements. Conan Doyle would adopt such methodology for his
own sleuth who, in ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’, praises
‘the Bertillon system of measurements’ and expresses ‘his
enthusiastic admiration of the French savant’.
Having decided to give his detective a scientific approach,
Conan Doyle turned to his story and characters. His earliest name
for his work was A Tangled Skein, but his s show that he
soon replaced this with the more melodramatic A Study in let.
Before long he was contemplating a ‘consulting detective’ with
the unpromising name of Sherrinford Holmes, whose story would be
told by Ormond Sacker, his room-mate at 221B Upper Baker Street.
In some early notes, Conan Doyle sketched out some familiar
features for Holmes. He was a ‘y eyed young man’, a
‘philosopher’, and a collector of rare violins, who had access to
his own laboratory. Sacker was a less defined
personality: someone who had seen service abroad –
originally in Sudan, where General Gordon had recently met his
death at the hand of the Mahdists in Khartoum, though later, as
it turned out, for the internal chronology of the story, in
Afghanistan.
Within a short time these two main characters had evolved into
Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson. At the start of A Study in
let, Dr Watson is in London, having been invalided back from
Afghanistan following an injury at the battle of Maiwand. Needing
a place to live, he learns from Stamford, his old dresser at St
Bartholomew’s Hospital, of a man who is looking for someone to
share his rooms. Stamford warns that his friend, Sherlock Holmes,
is taciturn and ‘a little queer in his ideas’, with a ‘passion
for definite and exact knowledge’ that verges on
cold-bloodedness. When Holmes is later introduced to Watson, he
is working in a small laboratory in a corner of the hospital,
trying to find a new way of detecting blood stains which he says
will come to be known as the Sherlock Holmes test. His first
remark to Watson is straight out of the Joseph Bell textbook –
‘How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ – and he
later details the clues which have led him to this conclusion.
Watson discovers another side to this curious figure when he goes
to live with him in Baker Street. Holmes proves to be a neurotic
workaholic who can only relax when he plays his violin. At times
he falls into a stupor, staring at the world with such ‘a dreamy,
vacant expression’ that Watson thinks he must be addicted to some
drug, which indeed turns out to be true.
Conan Doyle started writing A Study in let on 8 March 1886
and finished by the end of April. He despatched his manuscript,
which ran to just over 43,000 words, or approximately 200 pages,
to the Cornhill Magazine, which had published ‘J.Habakuk
Jephson’s Statement’ and looked kindly on his work. By then the
story had been ed out. After two chapters setting the scene
at Baker Street, Conan Doyle developed a clunky, if always vivid,
tale about a gruesome murder in South London, where the victim,
Enoch Drebber, is found in a room smeared with blood spelling the
word RACHE (meaning ‘revenge’ in German). Using a magnifying
glass and a tape measure, Holmes gets a good idea of the man who
committed the murder. However, after Drebber’s secretary, Joseph
Strangerson, is also found dead, the story flashes back to Salt
Lake Valley in Utah and the early years of the Mormon religion,
which clearly fascinated Conan Doyle. Both murdered men had been
prominent members of the Mormon church, otherwise known as the
Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. They had tried
to use their seniority to prise a young girl from her fiancé,
Jefferson Hope. When she is forcibly married to Drebber, Hope
vows revenge which he is finally able to take, after tracking
Drebber and Strangerson to London, and himself taking a job as a
cabby.
Holmes works this out without too much trouble. However, the
story was rather crudely divided into two halves – the murder
investigation in London and the earlier historical saga set among
the Mormon community in Utah (a backdrop that borrowed heavily
from The Dynamiter written by Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife
Fanny only the previous year). As a result A Study in let did
not prove easy to place. By Conan Doyle’s own admission, it took
a ‘circular tour’ of several publishing houses, before Ward, Lock
and Company, which specialized in cheap, sensational fiction,
came up with an offer in September. This was only £25 which Conan
Doyle found insulting, particularly as they were demanding the
full copyright. But, not being in much of a bargaining position,
he was forced to accept. As he pointedly noted in his
autobiography, this was the only money he ever received for a
work which became an instant success when it finally saw the
light of day a year later in the publisher’s popular Beeton’s
Christmas Annual.
The book edition of the story followed in July 1888, after which
Conan Doyle started to gain more re as an author. He was
particularly delighted when, in February 1889, Micah Clarke, his
novel about the Monmouth rebellion, was published by Longmans. He
had always regarded historical novels as a particularly exalted
branch of literature (which explains why he spent so much time on
the early history of the Mormons in A Study in let). As a
result of this and other items in print, he found himself fêted
in literary circles in London. While dining with the critic
Andrew Lang, who rated him highly, at the Savile Club, he met the
novelist Walter Besant who had recently set up the Society of
Authors. In August 1889 he was unexpectedly invited to dinner by
Joseph Marshall Stoddart, managing editor of the influential
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in Philadelphia, who was in London
looking for talented new writers to promote in the American
market. The dinner was attended by two other guests – an Irish
MP, Thomas Patrick Gill, and another Irishman, the journalist
O Wilde. As a result Stoddart invited Wilde and Conan Doyle
(who was also Irish on both sides of his family) to write novels
for serialization in his magazine. Wilde’s offering was The
Picture of Dorian Gray, which was to be a classic of the emerging
decadent literature of the age. After a few false starts Conan
Doyle decided to give his detective Sherlock Holmes another
outing. ‘I notice that everyone who has read [A Study in let]
wants to know more of that young man,’ he told Stoddart.
After being accused of writing a ‘penny dreadful’ last time
round, he was determined to make this new book more identifiably
a proper novel. Doubtless influenced by meeting Wilde, whom he
liked, he decided also to dabble with some contemporary
aestheticism, and even decadence. Thus The Sign of Four
(originally The Sign of the Four) starts dramatically with
Sherlock Holmes confirming Watson’s suspicions about his drug
habit as he extracts a hypodermic syringe from a neat morocco
case and takes a bottle from his mantelpiece. ‘With his long,
white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and
rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes
rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted
and red with innumerable puncture-marks.’ He then plunges the
needle into his arm and sits back in a velvet-lined armchair,
letting out ‘a long sigh of satisfaction’.
One does not expect to find a leading consulting detective in a
state of stupefaction. When Dr Watson enquires as to his
flatmate’s drug of choice, Holmes replies that it is a seven per
cent solution of cocaine. The doctor declines an invitation to
partake, making clear that he considers it a risk.
However, Holmes tells him that he needs stimulants to stop him
getting bored when he is not working. In this way he reaffirms
that he is not merely a ‘calculating machine’. Despite his
scientific approach to his work, he also needs time to switch off
and to recharge his batteries. This duality has been an essential
part of Holmes’s enduring appeal. He may appear to be an
automaton, but he is much more than that. This ambivalence
surfaces in different forms, often as a running joke – as when
Holmes berates Dr Watson for producing in A Study in let an
account which is ‘tinge[d] with romanticism’. Detection, he
argues, should be ‘an exact science, and should be treated in the
same cold and unemotional manner’.
In fact Holmes is extraordinarily romantic. On one level he is a
successful consulting detective who operates according to strict
Victorian scientific principles; on another he is a fragile
personality whose unpredictable behaviour reflects something of
the fin de siècle anxiety that was beginning to emerge in British
culture. And this dichotomy was also mirrored in the attitudes of
Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, who, for all his scientific
training, could not help looking to other philosophies for his
understanding of the world.
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