The Search for Sherlock
The Search for Sherlock is an article written by Owen Dudley Edwards published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 2, No. 1) in spring 1991.
Owen Dudley Edwards reflects on the pleasures of book-hunting while exploring the origins, craftsmanship, and enduring power of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle's early writings. Blending literary criticism with bibliophilic anecdote, he argues that Holmes endures not as mere detective fiction but through narrative skill, moral courage, atmosphere, and the profound friendship between Holmes and Watson.
The Search for Sherlock
Owen Dudley Edwards goes in search of book bargains... and more besides
Book-buying on holiday is an occupation with all the charms of poaching. You can normally only justify one morning at it: otherwise you neglect family and friends, and your journey home is to a chorus of reproach for both truancy and extra luggage. Your territory is unknown to you. For the best fun, do not proceed with book-buying guides: what you want is a local establishment with no particular knowledge of your interests.
This year I picked up for £2 a Chambers's Journal for 1879. It needed only the briefest of glances: it was in perfectly good condition and there, on pp. 568-72 was sitting, unsigned The Mystery of Sasassa Valley: A South African Story. Hence on my return to my loved ones I was able to announce, smugly, that I would not take £100 for it (which diverted attention from some two dozen other titles also purchased). The bookseller was asking a reasonable price for selling the entertaining privilege of rummaging in odd volumes of an Edinburgh Victorian magazine. My own evaluation derived from the story's being the first printed publication of any work by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Richard Lancelyn Green, co-author of the admirable Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle, gives Sasassa Valley slightly more importance than I do, as he takes it to be the oldest surviving prose composition. I give this palm to the National Library of Scotland manuscript in the Blackwood collection The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe (a wholly different work from a later published A.C.D. story of similar title). The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe remains unpublished, as the Conan Doyle estate is still in litigation; its value must be immense, it is much the more interesting of the two works having, as it does, discernable, if very crude, versions of a Holmes-type and a Watson-type. There is some (very) elementary detection in Sasassa Valley, but there is little to its characters beyond credit to the Irish imagination of one of them, and the plot owes much to Poe's The Gold Bug. But while I would back Richard's opinion against mine on most A.C.D. problems, my verdict on this arises from my occupation. I have corrected so many second-year and third-year essays that I have an instinctive sense of the order of composition when confronted by two examples of the work of a twenty-year-old. There are stylistic immaturities in The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe of a kind which, once gone, are never found again. Sometimes, originality can also vanish with them and, in this case, A.C.D. took a little time to recover the power of his first literary child. The second-year essay may be much better than its third-year successor, just as a child beginning to walk may have none of the speed and grace it brought to crawling. Still, it is walking and not crawling; and Sasassa Valley was publishable and The Haunted Grange was not.
I am fairly cautious about collecting Conan Doyle: too much is known for many real bargains (though a little work on the Bibliography elicits several unsigned items in magazines in the 1880s.) The short stories which made Holmes' reputation, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, can still be bought for a few pounds in The Strand Magazine, volumes 2-6 (and Vol. 1 contains a rather weak non-Holmes A.C.D. story The Voice of Science. Faithful reproductions of The Strand publications of Holmes have been assembled by several publishers, and frequently remaindered too. All the same, there is nothing to equal the pleasure of discovering the original works among their fellow-contributors as they originally met the eyes of the readers and conquered as they were read.
Assuming that you are not one of the manic breed who insist that Holmes and Watson really existed, why bother? I certainly have no part in that simple faith, and (were it not for the fact that many of its votaries I have met are very sweet people) should be anathema to it. My interest is in Conan Doyle as a creative writer, not in trying to deny him his most famous creations. Worse, it is my opinion that very little of London went into the making of Holmes, and that what seems to be London is often Edinburgh, Stonyhurst, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Birmingham and other places where he had made his home before making his Holmes. (London he had known only in fleeting visits. Holmes' Baker Street has points in common with Sciennes Hill Place, Argyle Park Terrace, George Square, Lonsdale Terrace and other Edinburgh locations familiar to A.C.D. from his youth.)
Yet, the cult contains its own clue. It was Conan Doyle's gift to establish two characters in an imaginary background, whatever its (and their) non-London real life origins, with such force and charm that the reader is possessed by them as by few others in all fiction. He was a splendid craftsman; his scientific training as a doctor gave him the ability to set out a problem, its possible false solutions, and its real solution, in clear and logical terms, and his sensitivity to great literature helped him to draw on similar partnerships for inspiration — Socrates and his disciples, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Johnson and Boswell. Another clue is provided by Edmund Wilson, with his hatred of detective stories and his love of Sherlock Holmes: the Holmes cycle is one of detective stories, but it is the story which is pre-eminent. Dorothy Sayers complained that "Conan Doyle does not invariably follow Poe's stern example of laying all the clues before the reader: over and over again, Holmes presents his deductions first and his observations after." She cites (in her introduction to the Everyman's Library Tales of Deduction) the passage of the deduction of the character of the unknown client who has left his pipe behind, the discussion of revealing points about the pipe. "Fair play" would have described the pipe and its repairs first and given the detective's conclusions only after the reader had had the opportunity of drawing them for himself. Like Lestrade in The Noble Bachelor, she has the clue and is firmly looking at its wrong side. To have itemised the tell-tale features of the pipe would have wrecked the narrative flow of the story. Conan Doyle is not playing with the reader; a sensible doctor does not play with his patient. In this case, the lessons from the pipe are all anterior to the action of the story. It is desirable to convey the character of the client, which will be important to the story, and Holmes' deductions provide an intriguing way of doing it. The Yellow Face ends with the client, having just made the startling discovery that he has a black stepdaughter, showing the moral strength underlying the physical which Holmes has deduced:
- "It was a long two minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence, and when his answer came it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife. 'I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.'"
The defence of an inter-racial marriage on which the story turns shows an exceptional courage and decency for the 1890s. The courage and humanity of the stories (in part due to Watson's contribution) help give them their powers of endurance. So do the humour, ingenuity, irony and affection. Sayers argues that Holmes and Watson are "static figures: after forty years they have not aged or developed in any essential manner." In fact, they develop very strongly in their appreciation of one another and, what begins as an association of financial convenience, grows into one of real love. We are no better than our ancestors at describing men's love for one another without getting either mawkish or messy: A.C.D. knew how to do it, and has a lot to teach about the nature and strains of friendship.
The genius of Conan Doyle in conveying atmosphere, psychology, mystery and logic, as well as his literary economics in charting the ideal framework of the short story, merit thoughtful examination. The charm remains, where almost any other detective story strains the tolerance of a reader who knows what is coming. It is well to go farther afield than Sherlock to see how Conan Doyle can hold his audience without the assistance of Holmes and Watson: the Brigadier Gerard stories blend history, comedy and excitement with the authority of Scott or Dumas, and with a brevity they lacked. There is a capacity for arousing pity and terror: my involvement with Holmes began with my sickening fear as a child at the horrible domestic simplicity of the murder in The Musgrave Ritual where the maid starves the butler to death in an underground cellar. The snake sliding down to the bed to kill the occupant in The Speckled Band should have been less frightening: but I had rigged up a cord to turn on my light from bed. The worst thing about the stories was their plausibility: in this sense Holmes' logic brought vulnerability rather than protection. Medicine brings eternal revelations of fear in what may seem the most mundane of surroundings. Still, Holmes is protective; some of the stories without his presence have a particular terror of their own.
Perhaps the final stress to be laid is that the trick is not one of imagining yourself a Holmes. Our identification is with Watson, a person so like ourselves, through whose eyes we may try to learn more of our remarkable friend. And with that great second hand book buyer, Arthur Conan Doyle, for further particulars of whose bibliophily see his excellent volume of critical appreciation Through The Magic Door.
This article was first published in Scottish Book Collector, No. 2, and permission to reproduce is gratefully acknowledged.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
