cambridge-crime-fiction

The short story from Poe to Chesterton
Holmes deals largely with family irregularities and the consequences of selfishness,
rather than dangers endemic to the system. 25
It is generally agreed that, for all the talk of detecting, it is not the plotting
or the intellectual work which are the key to the success of these stories, but
the very special ‘character’ of Sherlock Holmes. 26 In this sense, notwithstanding
his remarkable abilities, Holmes is a considerably more reassuring figure
than his competitors or imitators. In relation to any Dupin-like ‘decadence’,
the anti-social Bohemianism and cocaine-taking of the first two novellas are
rapidly attenuated. Although an intellectual, he has no cultural pretensions,
and is always eager for action. He remains intimidating, frequently brusque,
arrogant and aloof, but he is never morally repulsive. Furthermore, Holmes
frequently displays a sympathetic concern about the outcome, particularly
in family matters, and lets his own mask slip often enough to persuade us of
the, albeit eccentric, humanity within.
But most importantly, we are cushioned from potentially alienating characteristics
by Watson, who mediates our attitudes to the hero. It is reassuring
to find, for example, that, although we may not be as bright as Holmes, we
are at least smarter than his colleague. Himself a professional man, Watson
lets us know that we are not supposed to feel challenged by Holmes’s intelligence,
but to trust it. Embodying the sturdy middle-class virtues that
Holmes affects to despise just as he protects them, the good doctor strikes
us as an eminently reliable narrator –amatter of equal importance to our
belief in the detective’s genius (no cheating) as it is in our identification with
the narrator’s moral assessment of his friend. Mind you, Holmes himself
is critical of his friend’s reliability as a writer, complaining that ‘You have
degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales’. 27
But for the reader it is of course a blessing to have the rigour of logic and the
demands of science filtered through the informed admiration of our friendly
intermediary.
This is just as well in another sense: as Knight again points out, Doyle’s
misnaming of Holmes’s methodology as ‘deduction’ is far from incidental. 28
Ousby likewise recognises that ‘The stories’ relation to the details of contemporary
science is tenuous’, while Michael Shepherd calls Holmes’s method ‘a
counterfeit, a simulacrum of the real thing’. 29 This is not to deny the obvious:
that Holmes convinces and amuses with his identification and articulation of
clues and his felicitous erudition; the reader accedes with the same satisfied
wonder as Watson to his claims for his powers of observation and reasoning.
However, unlike Thorndyke’s scrupulous detail or Reeve’s technology, this
is not concerned with scientific accuracy or actuality but, as Knight puts it,
with ‘the aura of science’. 30 The reader is impressed, made to feel part of a
modern scientific world which, although he can never master it, neither bores
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