Introduction

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Sabina Fazli
plot of inheritance highlights objects. It also proposes a specific model for detective
fiction as a temporal trajectory into the past is opened up, and previous events
have to be discovered to explain their influence on the present.
The subject of inheritance turns up most prominently in The Moonstone and The
Eustace Diamonds, but also in The Sign of Four and “The Rajah’s Diamond” in which
colonial riches are juxtaposed with native English inheritances. Yet, the inheritances
are treated before the foil of the crimes surrounding the diamonds so that a
comparison between the two modes of gaining wealth seems to be implied: The
inheritance of land and money in England and the inheritance of colonial wealth
from India.
I will first turn to the English inheritances. In the earliest novel, The Moonstone,
Franklin Blake is called back from his travels “in the East […] camped on the
borders of a desert” (Collins, Moonstone 292) when he is informed that his father
has died and that he has inherited “his great fortune” (292). This English inheritance
naturally draws him home, back from a place almost at the edge of civilisation
where the diamond, Rachel’s Indian inheritance, has lured him. This solves
the debts he had run up on the continent and for which the Moonstone loomed as
a possible solution. It also again calls to attention that Franklin, too, is denied an
inheritance (Dolin 76):
Hearing what I [Betteredge] now tell you, you will naturally ask how it was
that Mr Franklin should have past all the years, from the time when he was
a boy to the time when he was a man, out of his own country. I answer, because
his father had the misfortune to be next heir to a Dukedom, and not
to be able to prove it. (Collins, Moonstone 24)
Betteredge here points to the connection between the disinheritance of Franklin’s
father and his vagabonding life which has given him, in Betteredge’s view, several
un-English identities. Franklin’s internationalism is thus only cured through the
marriage to Rachel and his acquisition of landed property, a rightful English inheritance.
In “The Rajah’s Diamond”, Harry Hartley loses the diamonds he was entrusted
with, but is compensated for the loss by an inheritance from “a maiden
aunt in Worcestershire” (89). In The Sign of Four, the chapter entitled “The Science
of Deduction” contains a number of minute facts which foreshadow the following
story and lay the foundation of Holmes’ deductions later on. Holmes is shown to
have completed studies on different subjects from which he will conclude the
solution of the one to come. The “lunkah smoker” and the “diamond polisher”
are already mentioned (Doyle, Sign 126), and at the beginning of the story, Holmes
is presented as a user of Oriental drugs. Similarly, the subject of inheritance is
touched upon (128-130) which will also become prominent through Mary Morstan’s
appeal for help. In the context of the other items foreshadowing the case to
follow, the mention of an heirloom, too, has to be regarded as a prolepsis. Watson