Talking About Detective Fiction Read Online Free Page A

was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off foreleg. In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the fingernails of his right hand were remarkably long. These are only a few indications but they may assist you.”
    Lestrade and Gregson glanced at each other with an incredulous smile.
    “If this man was murdered, how was it done?” asked the former.
    “Poison,” said Sherlock Holmes curtly, and strode off.
    Despite the amount of detailed information about Holmes and his habits provided by Watson in the short stories, the core of the man remains elusive. He is obviously clever with a practical, rational, non-threatening intelligence, patriotic, compassionate, resourceful and brave—qualities which mirror those of his creator. This is not surprising,since writers who create a serial character inevitably endow him or her with their own interests and preoccupations. Conan Doyle admitted that “a man cannot spin a character out of his own inner consciousness and make it really life-like unless he has some possibilities of that character within him.” Even so, I would have expected him to have been more attached to the valiant Dr. Watson, wounded hero of the second Afghan war, than to this unsentimental, neurotic and cocaine-injecting genius of deduction. Holmes is a violinist, so he is not without a cultural interest, but we are probably unwise to accept Watson’s partial view of the measure of his talent. Although the call to a new case provokes in Holmes a surge of enthusiasm and physical and mental energy, he has a doubting and pessimistic streak, and more than a touch of modern cynicism. “What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what you can make people believe you have done” (
A Study in Scarlet
). “We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow—misery” (“The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”). In this too Holmes could be reflecting a dichotomy in his own character, and indeed one aspect of Victorian sensibility. Heis of his age but, curiously, also of ours, and this too may be part of the secret of his lasting appeal. The inspiration for Sherlock Holmes was Dr. Joseph Bell, a consultant surgeon at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary whose reputation as a brilliant diagnostician was based on his ability to observe closely and interpret the apparently insignificant facts presented by the appearance and habits of his patients. Conan Doyle also acknowledged the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, who was born in 1809 and died in 1849, and whose detective, Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, was the first fictional investigator to rely primarily on deduction from observable facts. Many critics would argue that the main credit for inventing the detective story and influencing its development should be shared by Conan Doyle and Poe. Poe is chiefly remembered for his tales of the macabre, but in four short stories alone he introduced what were to become the stock plot devices of early detective stories. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) is a locked-room mystery. In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842) the detective solves the crime from newspaper cuttings and press reports, making this the first example of armchair detection. In “The Purloined Letter” (1844) we have an example of theperpetrator being the most unlikely suspect, a ploy which was to become common with Agatha Christie and in danger of becoming a cliché, so that readers whose main interest in the story was to correctly identify the murderer had only to fix on the least likely suspect to be sure of success. “The Gold-Bug” makes use of cryptography in solving the crime; so too did Dorothy L. Sayers, both in
Have His Carcase
and in
The Nine Tailors
. Poe did