On Conan Doyle

Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling

Michael Dirda

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780691164120, 9780691151359
• eBook ISBN: 9781400839490
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda, a delightful introduction to the creator of Sherlock Holmes

A passionate lifelong fan of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars—the most famous and romantic of all Sherlockian groups. Combining memoir and appreciation, On Conan Doyle is a highly engaging personal introduction to Holmes's creator, as well as a rare insider's account of the curiously delightful activities and playful scholarship of The Baker Street Irregulars.

On Conan Doyle is a much-needed celebration of Arthur Conan Doyle's genius for every kind of storytelling.

“I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere”

After I returned from the road trip to Mexico during which I’d read The Poison Belt, summer was virtually over. At the end of August I started my freshman year at nearby Oberlin College, having resolutely decided to put away childish things, like adventure stories and comics and science fiction and Sherlock Holmes. It was time to buckle down. Yet the Great Detective was not so easily forgotten, as Conan Doyle himself quickly realized after he had supposedly sent Holmes and Professor Moriarty tumbling to their deaths at the Reichenbach Falls.

While I resolutely determined to transform myself from a Wild Ginger Man into a studious grind, come Friday night I’d always spend an hour in the dorm lounge watching Star Trek. As others have remarked, Mr. Spock—that half-human, half-Vulcan calculating machine—is clearly derived from Holmes with, it seemed to me, a touch or two of the detective’s elder brother Mycroft. Mycroft only appears briefly in the canon (chiefly in “The Greek Interpreter” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans”), but is nonetheless quite unforgettable. Sherlock himself regards his brother as his superior in “observation and deduction.”

Sedentary and precise in his routines—“Mycroft has his rails and he runs on them”—this supposed minor bureaucrat actually functions as “the central exchange, the clearing-house” for all government intelligence. “In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed, and can be handed out in an instant.” In essence, Mycroft is a human computer like Spock. With his sharp analytic intelligence, impressive bulk, and insistence on a regular schedule, he also closely resembles Rex Stout’s gruff consulting detective Nero Wolfe. Years later, I would learn that some Sherlockian scholars believe that Wolfe’s mother was Irene Adler and his father either Sherlock or Mycroft.

One day late in the fall term of my freshman year, I discovered that one of my new friends, Roger Phelps, had stayed up all night rereading Sherlock Holmes stories. Being down in the dumps, he had burrowed back into them for comfort and renewal. When I stopped by his room in Burton Hall, we proceeded to share favorite passages from his worn Doubleday edition. On that typically bleak day in Oberlin, we naturally gravitated to those cases that evoked the cozy snugness of 221B—for instance, “The Five Orange Pips,” which opens this way:

It was in the latter days of September, and the equinoctial gales had set in with exceptional violence. All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows. . . . Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was deep in one of Clark Russell’s fine sea stories, until the howl of the gale from without seemed to blend with the text, and the splash of the rain to lengthen out into the long swash of sea waves. . . .

“Why,” said I, glancing up at my companion, “that was surely the bell. Who could come to-night?”

And soon the game is afoot.

Like all Sherlockians, Roger and I would speculate about those many unrecorded cases to which Watson regularly alludes and for which “the world is not yet prepared,” the most famous being that of the Giant Rat of Sumatra. In “The Five Orange Pips,” itself a strikingly evocative title, Watson is especially tantalizing:

The year ’87 furnished us with a long series of cases of greater or less interest, of which I retain the records. Among my headings under this one twelve months, I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British barque Sophy Anderson, of the singular adventures of the Grice Pattersons in the island of Uffa, and finally the Camber-well poisoning case. . . . But none of them present such singular features as the strange train of circumstances which I have now taken up my pen to describe.

See what I mean? As Holmes would say, the merest mention of those unpublished exploits sets the imagination afire. What were “the colossal schemes” of the Baron Maupertuis? What are the facts in “the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker”? Who wouldn’t wish to hear more of “Wilson, the notorious canary trainer” and “Huret, the boulevard assassin”? Most tantalizing of all is “the whole story of the politician, the lighthouse and the trained cormorant,” which Watson threatens to reveal to the public unless certain “outrages” and attempts to destroy his papers immediately cease.

As a potential English major, I was naturally enrolled in an array of literature classes, for which I produced essays and term papers based on the close-reading techniques of the New Criticism. Not that these techniques seemed particularly new to me. Weren’t they merely Holmes’s usual modus operandi applied to poems and stories? One simply needed to pay close attention to the words and look carefully at anything particularly odd or distinctive. “Singularity,” as the Master often observed, “is almost invariably a clue.” Holmes’s success, as he told Watson more than once, lay in “the observance of trifles.” I soon realized that Sherlock Holmes “read” a person or crime in the way a critic such as William Empson read poetry. Moreover, both these readers—Empson with his own brash self-confidence—liked to show off and amaze. As Holmes says, “the quick inference, the subtle trap, the clever forecast of coming events, the triumphant vindication of bold theories—are these not the pride and the justification of our life’s work?”

During my freshman year I also grew besotted with T. S. Eliot, and boldly decided to read everything from the early essays in The Sacred Wood to the later verse-dramas. At some point I discovered that Eliot revered the Sherlock Holmes stories. At a party one evening, some friends asked him to name his favorite passage of English prose, and the great poet answered by virtually performing the following exchange:

“Well,” cried Boss McGinty at last, “is he here? Is Birdy Edwards here?”

“Yes,” McMurdo answered slowly. “Birdy Edwards is here. I am Birdy Edwards.”

Was Eliot joking with his audience by choosing this climactic passage from The Valley of Fear? At least a little, I suspect. Nonetheless, Eliot reportedly reread the Holmes canon every couple of years, was an honorary member of the Trained Cormorants of Los Angeles, and looked—as Vincent Starrett observed—more like the Great Detective than many of the actors who played him.

Moreover, Eliot wrote at length about Holmes in the Criterion, modeled “Macavity, the Mystery Cat,” aka the Hidden Paw, after that other Napoleon of Crime, Professor James Moriarty, and in “East Coker” quite pointedly evoked the atmosphere of The Hound of the Baskervilles by alluding to the novel’s ominous Grimpen Mire: “in a dark wood, in a bramble / On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold.” While Eliot famously insisted that great poets steal, I was nonetheless taken aback when I first came across this striking exchange between Thomas Becket and a diabolical Tempter in Murder in the Cathedral:

THOMAS: Who shall have it?

TEMPTER: He who will come.

THOMAS: What shall be the month?

TEMPTER: The last from the first.

THOMAS: What shall we give for it?

TEMPTER: Pretence of priestly power.

THOMAS: Why should we give it?

TEMPTER: For the power and the glory.

In “The Musgrave Ritual”—one of Holmes’s earliest cases—an aristocratic family preserves for centuries a queer litany, which, of course, provides the key to a riddle and the solution to a strange disappearance:

“Whose was it?”

“His who is gone.”

“Who shall have it?”

“He who will come.”

(“What was the month?”

“The sixth from the first.”) . . . .

“What shall we give for it?”

“All that is ours.”

“Why should we give it?”

“For the sake of the trust.”

Wherever I turned, it seemed that I chanced upon Sherlockian allusions and echoes. When I spent part of a summer with Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson I recognized that the conversational interplay between the Great Cham and his biographer prefigured the back-and-forth at 221B Baker Street. (Lillian de la Torre ran with this idea in Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector.) During one Christmas break I picked up The Wind in the Willows and suddenly noticed that Rat clamps on a deerstalker before he goes searching for Mole in the Wild Wood. The two friends are then lost together in a snowstorm, when Mole trips over some unseen object:

“It’s a very clear cut,” said the Rat, examining it again attentively. “That was never done by a branch or a stump. Looks as if it was made by a sharp edge of something in metal. Funny!” He pondered awhile, and examined the humps and slopes that surrounded them.

The pair dig through the snow and uncover a doorscraper. Mole, like Watson, fails to perceive its significance. “But don’t you see what it means—you dull witted animal!” It means, of course, that there’s a door nearby, in this case, Badger’s door. At which point, Watson, I mean Mole, is finally impressed by his friend’s deductive reasoning: “I’ve read about that sort of thing in books, but I’ve never come across it before in real life.”

I spent most of my twenties in graduate school at Cornell University, taking courses in medieval studies and European romanticism, and gradually working toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Ambitious as only youth can be, I aspired to know everything about fiction and poetry, art, music, philosophy, and history. As Holmes once observed, “All knowledge comes useful to the detective”—and to the would-be teacher of literature as well. In the early days of their association, Watson had admittedly been appalled to hear that his flatmate was unaware that the earth revolves around the sun. However, most students of the canon now agree that Holmes was either playing games with Watson or simply being cautious about revealing too much about himself to his new associate.

Later on we discover that this violinist, forensic scientist, amateur boxer, and gifted actor can quote not only the details of every horrid crime of the century but also Hafiz, Petrarch, and Goethe. He’s not only written about the influence of various trades upon the shape of the hand, and distinguished among 140 different kinds of tobacco ash, but also contributed articles to scholarly journals on the dating of documents and the motets of Lassus. He’s a frequent concertgoer and something of a connoisseur of wine. When engaged on a case he will frequently work himself up to a state of “nervous exaltation,” but overall he views existence with considerable pessimism: “Is not all life pathetic and futile? . . . We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow—misery.”

Acquiring knowledge and exercising the intellect are ways of driving off the spleen. On one particularly brilliant evening, Watson tells us, he heard this polymath speak “on a quick succession of subjects—on miracle plays, on medieval pottery, on Stradivarius violins, on the Buddhism of Ceylon, and on the warships of the future, handling each as though he had made a special study of it.”

At Cornell, my reading and coursework in nineteenth-century fiction gradually uncovered some of the sources for that foggy gaslit London through which the Baker Street duo hurry when the game is afoot. Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, and Eugène Sue revealed that beneath the bustling modern city there existed dark criminal labyrinths, urban jungles, and even Arabian Nights–like realms of opulence and mystery. In Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, for instance, the poet Pierre Gringoire plunges into a nightmarish maze of alleyways that gradually lead downward into the hall of the Gypsy king, who rules, Moriarty-like, over the city’s underclass.

Conan Doyle always insisted that Holmes took shape from memories of the analytic Joseph Bell reinforced by the brilliant example of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, who solves “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” I suspect that Fenimore Cooper’s Mohican trackers also played a part: When examining the scene of a crime, Holmes—whose “countenance” is likened to that of a “Red Indian” in “The Naval Treaty”—frequently drops to the ground to search out unnoticed signs and clues, whether a bent twig or a heel print. Robert Louis Stevenson—in some ways Poe’s Scottish cousin—provides yet another partial inspiration. The first story in New Arabian Nights, “The Young Man with the Cream Tarts,” opens when the London fog rolls in, and out of the darkness emerge two figures. One is tall, eccentric in his habits, in search of mysteries and puzzles; the other is his brave and loyal companion, evidently a military man. Sound familiar?

In the course of their exploits Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine fearlessly penetrate the inner sanctum of the Suicide Club, confront more than one master criminal, and eventually solve the theft of the accursed Rajah’s Diamond. Like a set of matryoshka dolls, conspiracies turn out to be embedded within other conspiracies, while the various sinister characters and seemingly nonsensical incidents often recall those that were later to confront Holmes. Why, for instance, should a young man be forced to eat, or give strangers to eat, dozens of cream tarts? Why has a mysterious gentleman rented a grand house for one night and then paid hansom cabs to pick up casual passersby and bring them to his party? Why should a pretty girl suddenly say to her admirer, “Whatever happens, do not return to this house; hurry fast until you reach the lighted and populous quarters of the city; even there be upon your guard. You are in a greater danger than you fancy”? This, surely, is the same London as that of “The Red-Headed League,” The Sign of the Four, and “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” Little wonder that Stevenson’s executor hoped, unsuccessfully, that Conan Doyle would complete the unfinished St. Ives.

I moved to Washington, D.C., to finish my dissertation (on the French writer Stendhal). There I initially taught part-time at American University and George Mason University, and later picked up work as a translator, freelance editor, and, mirabile dictu, technical writer for a computer company. Only at the age of 29 did I begin to write about books for the Washington Post. After publishing a dozen reviews, I was offered a job as an assistant editor in Book World. I took it. After all, I could see that computers were going nowhere. Clearly my deductive skills more closely resembled those of Inspector Lestrade than those of Sherlock Holmes.

In Washington I soon began building a personal library. Over the years I had admired and envied the book collections of my various professors: leather-bound rows of classics, beautiful editions of modern firsts, expensive scholarly tomes, the complete works of favorite writers. Little did I know then that book collecting is less about acquiring books than about finding the shelf space to store ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface “You Know My Methods, Watson”
• “A Hound It Was”
• “Elementary”
• “A Most Dark and Sinister Business”
• “The Lost World”
• “Twilight Tales”
• “Steel True, Blade Straight”
• “I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere”
• “It Is the Unofficial Force”
• “I Play the Game for the Game’s Own Sake”
• “A Case for Langdale Pike”
• “A Series of Tales”
• “Good Night, Mister Sherlock Holmes”
• Appendix “Education Never Ends, Watson”
• Acknowledgments
• Biographical Note