cambridge-crime-fiction

martin a. kayman
lecture and demonstration in science which is, at the same time, the solution
to the crime.
Kennedy’s use of science and technology is both sensationalist and based
in fact (it is also, like many others of the time, frequently racist). Many of the
devices he relies on for his solutions may sound made-up, but instruments
like the ‘sphymomanometer’, the ‘plethysmograph’, the ‘detectaphone’ and
the ‘optophone’ were all contemporary medical or electrical technologies,
as actual as other early twentieth-century inventions like blood typing, the
silencer, the microphone and the oxyacetylene torch, all of which Kennedy
uses – along, as we have seen, with Freudian dream analysis. Most discoveries
and inventions are credited to their originators, although Reeve does
sometimes push contemporary technology beyond its real capacities at the
time (including a fancifully simple lie-detector, electrico-cardiac resuscitation,
and X-ray movies). On the other hand, the milieu in which the crimes
take place, featuring financiers and industrialists, society ladies undergoing
scientific beauty treatments, inventors (of synthetic rubber, airplanes that can
hover or remote-controlled torpedoes), and Latin American revolutionary
gun-runners, connect this fascinating new technology to the contemporary
industrial and political world.
Why, then, was Sherlock Holmes so much more successful than other scientific
detectives? There are certainly literary reasons. Conventional literary
history, which views earlier detective fiction as a series of anticipations of
Doyle, can be turned on its head to argue that the elements of the Sherlock
Holmes character and stories are skilfully selected from tried and tested elements
in earlier sensational novelists and story writers. But that is far from
accounting for the verve of Doyle’s writing, the ingenuity of the stories and
the skill and economy of their construction. The problem-setting and solving
structure provides fundamental narrative satisfactions, but, as Stephen
Knight has shown, at least in the two principal collections, The Adventures
of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), Doyle
plays enough variation on the pattern to keep it constantly fresh. 23
Doyle expertly achieved the right balance of elements to provide the male
middle-classes with relaxing reading which flattered them by providing an intellectual
adventure, while assuaging their anxieties about the modern world.
The stories celebrate the materialism of the age, showing that the ordinary
small objects of everyday existence, if observed properly, have stories, create
atmospheres, point directions. 24 At the same time, they celebrate the capacity
of rationalism to organise the material of existence meaningfully, and
the power of the rational individual to protect us from semiotic and moral
chaos. Yet the crimes are rarely excessively troubling (and, although we do
find murders, on the other hand in many stories there is no crime at all).
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