The New Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes (19 page)

The Sign of Four
followed three years later, again enjoying modest success. Doyle was still learning his craft. A strong influence was Edgar Allan Poe, who inaugurated the detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. The relationship between Poe’s detective, Dupin, and the unnamed narrator of the three tales about him, was the model for the Holmes-Watson pairing. Doyle’s masterstroke was to humanise his Jekyll and Hyde duo in a way that Poe did not, and perhaps could not.

Doyle’s breakthrough came when he wrote a series of short Holmes-Watson stories for the recently established monthly magazine
The Strand
. In an astonishing burst of creative energy, he dashed off half a dozen, which proved immensely popular. Like the cricketing bowler he was, he had found his length. Whereas Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Le Fanu had published successful crime novels, such as
The Woman in White
and
Uncle Silas
, in the mid-nineteenth century, Doyle’s talents and methods, like Poe’s, were better suited to the short form.

Doyle had a knack of dreaming up strange and mysterious scenarios, but resolving the puzzles through Holmes’ rational detective work presented a challenge in terms of narrative structure. He struggled to rise to the challenge in longer stories.
A Study in Scarlet
and
The Sign of Four
are burdened by lengthy flashbacks which militated against suspense, and frustrated readers by keeping Holmes off-stage for long stretches. The same structural flaw damages the final Holmes novel,
The Valley of Fear
. Even
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, with its dazzling premise, that a sinister spectral hound is responsible for a savage murder on fog-bound Dartmoor, is uneven, with Holmes out of the picture for too long.

Doyle hit his stride with his first short story about Holmes. “A Scandal in Bohemia” opens with one of the most quoted lines in detective fiction: “To Sherlock Holmes, she is always
the
woman.” Although the woman in question, the opera singer Irene Adler, never reappeared in the canon, she made a lasting impression, and has figured in countless Sherlockian spin-offs. Watson plays a more active part than in the first two novels, and this story stands alone as the solitary account of Holmes experiencing defeat. All that “A Scandal in Bohemia” lacked was a strong puzzle about crime.

Doyle remedied this at once with “The Red-Headed League”. Holmes says to Watson, “you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life”, and Doyle knew his readers shared it too, especially when they experienced it a safe distance, through fiction. Holmes introduces Watson to his latest client, Jabez Wilson, a pawnbroker whose only extraordinary feature is his head of fiery red hair. A seemingly trivial aspect of Doyle’s gift for creating character was his flair for coming up with odd names that stick in the mind: Sherlock Holmes, of course, Enoch Drebber in the first novel, Thaddeus Sholto in the second, Jabez Wilson and countless others. 

Wilson affords Holmes an opportunity to indulge in a wonderful example of bravura deduction: “Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.” Such showmanship delighted readers. It might not be central to the story, but it was the icing on the cake.

Doyle takes care, however, to ensure that Holmes’ deductions are not all superfluous to the plot. The reference to Wilson’s writing is highly relevant. Wilson’s obliging and under-paid assistant Vincent Spaulding has directed the pawnbroker’s attention to a newspaper advertisement on behalf of “The Red-Headed League”, offering a well-paid sinecure (funded by the estate of an eccentric millionaire) to a Londoner with red hair. The role involves being confined to the League’s office and copying out
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Wilson’s story conjures up a wonderful picture of those who have responded to the League’s advertisement: “Fleet Street was choked with red-headed folk, and Pope’s Court looked like a coster’s orange barrow” (that last image is especially pleasing: a reminder of the freshness of Conan Doyle’s best prose). But after eight weeks, the League is dissolved suddenly and without explanation, and the man who hired him vanishes without trace.

Watson is bewildered, and Holmes settles down to reflect on the puzzle – it is “a three-pipe problem”. This throwaway line is another example of Doyle’s genius for the telling phrase. (Mark Haddon’s
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
, for instance, takes its title and inspiration from a classic exchange in “Silver Blaze”.) Having mulled things over, Holmes inspects the pawnbroker’s premises, and beats the pavement outside with his stick. He speaks to Spaulding, and when Watson questions him outside, explains that he wished to see the knees of the young man’s trousers. Holmes declines to explain himself, so ensuring that suspense builds until the forces of justice contrive an underground encounter with a suave villain, grandson of a Royal Duke, and a product of Eton and Oxford.

This drawing-out of the mystery is commonly found in traditional detective stories, in order to keep a surprise back to the end, but runs the risk of alienating readers. The technique is more convincing with Holmes than his successors (other than, perhaps, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, whose methods were influenced by Holmes’) because Holmes’ fondness for mystification and uttering enigmatic remarks is so plainly in keeping with his idiosyncratic personality.

The solution to Jabez Wilson’s puzzle is not excessively complex, but that does not matter. A short story affords little scope for elaborate explanations. Doyle pre-empts any sense of anti-climax by having Holmes note that “the more bizarre a thing is, the less mysterious it proves to be.” As a result, he achieves a level of storytelling perfection that he (let alone other detective story writers) seldom matched in the rest of a crime writing career that continued for more than three decades.

The set-up of this story is so dazzling that several crime writers have made use of a similar idea, and Conan Doyle himself wrote another Holmes mystery in a similar vein: “The Three Garridebs” is great fun, but not quite as breathtaking as the earlier tale. “The Cat’s Paw” by that gifted American writer Stanley Ellin features the same device. And when I decided to write a Harry Devlin short story for the first time, I took my own cue from Holmes’ throwaway line: “Had there been women in the house, I should have suspected a mere vulgar intrigue”. The result was “The Boxer”, a tale set in contemporary Liverpool – yet specifically, albeit distantly, inspired by a Sherlock Holmes tale which never disappoints, however many times one re-reads it.

Doyle’s knack of coming up with distinctive titles is illustrated by “The Five Orange Pips”, a story notable for an intriguing problem, and a device that has spawned innumerable Holmesian pastiches. Watson begins his narrative by describing his extensive records of his friend’s cases, and says that the year 1887 alone furnished “the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant Society, which held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse” and several others, alluded to in such tantalising fashion that generations of readers have yearned to find out more.

Baroque adornments of this kind, together with the unmistakable character names, and the astounding feats of deduction, enrich the stories, and their pungent flavour is complemented by evocative prose, as with Watson’s vivid account of the storm lashing “great, hand-made London” when John Openshaw turns up at Baker Street, on the recommendation of Major Prendargast, whom Holmes saved in the Tankerville Club Scandal. Openshaw explains that both his uncle and his father were found dead in separate incidents, shortly after receiving envelopes each containing five orange pips and marked “K.K.K.” Now Openshaw himself has received a similar inexplicable communication, instructing him to “put the papers on the sundial.” Holmes advises Openshaw to obey the command without delay, but shortly afterwards the young man is found drowned near Waterloo Bridge. Holmes solves the mystery of the orange pips, but justice is finally meted out to the killers not by Holmes or the legal establishment, but by an act of God.

The outcome is contrived, but the story’s other elements are compelling. Conan Doyle was not writing elaborate whodunit puzzles of the type for which Christie later became renowned. There is never a gathering of suspects in a library before an unlikely culprit is revealed, a method that became familiar in detective novels published during the “Golden Age” of detective fiction between the two world wars. Conan Doyle’s aim was not so much to play a game with his readers, as to intrigue and enthrall them.

“The Speckled Band” is a “locked room mystery”, in the tradition of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Holmes and Watson are visited by a shivering, terrified young woman called Helen Stoner. She is an heiress who lives with her brutal stepfather, the last surviving member of the Roylott family of Stoke Moran. Her sister Julia died at Stoke Moran in a state of terror, her last words, “Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band! The speckled band!” This is the most effective example in nineteenth century detective fiction of “the dying message clue”, a device which became popular during the Golden Age, and was a trade mark of the American cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, who wrote together as Ellery Queen.

Julia met her end in a locked room, and an inquest failed to establish the cause of death. Did she die of fear, and why does Doctor Grimesby Roylott (another marvellously evocative name) insist that Helen sleep in the same room that Julia occupied? Helen presents Holmes with a baffling confection of clues to dark deeds at Stoke Moran: mysterious whistles at night, an inexplicable metallic clang, possibly made by a bar from the room’s shutters, a redundant bell-pull, the presence of a band of gypsies befriended by Roylott, and Roylott’s passion for Indian animals, including a baboon and cheetah which roam his estate.

“When a doctor does go wrong,” Holmes remarks, “he is the first of criminals.” This was long before Crippen, Buck Ruxton and Shipman, but Doyle knew his own profession, and equally acute insights are scattered throughout his writings. Roylott is among the most memorable villains in detective fiction, immensely strong, repellent in appearance, and utterly ruthless. But he finds, as Holmes says with grim satisfaction once the mystery is solved, that “violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.” Holmes acknowledges he is indirectly responsible for Roylott’s death, but “I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience.” Here he is setting a pattern for fictional detectives who took it upon themselves to do justice, above all when the machinery of the legal system failed to do so. Again, this is a notion which became popular in the Golden Age – even Hercule Poirot commits a murder in one novel – underlining the extent and enduring nature of Doyle’s influence upon the genre.  

Doyle’s mastery of the short story was not confined to the Holmes canon. “The Lost Special” and “The Man With the Watches” boast conspicuous Holmesian touches, while Doyle was able to give free rein to his near-obsession with unspeakable acts in his tales of terror such as “The Leather Funnel”, “Lot No.249”, and “The Case of Lady Sannox”, a story of revenge as
explicitly
gruesome as anything he wrote, even though not a single human being dies. But we remember Doyle, above all, because of Holmes, and the popularity of Holmes pastiches with writers as well as readers show the enduring appeal of fiction’s greatest detective, as well as amounting to a unique and continuing tribute to a supreme storyteller.  

Writing Sherlock Holmes Stories by Martin Edwards

The character of Sherlock Holmes, and the literary voice of Dr Watson, are so entrancing that it is easy to understand why writers love to borrow them. From Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Holmes’ friend J.M. Barrie in the past to Anthony Horowitz, Stephen Fry, and the writers of
Sherlock
in the twenty-first century, hundreds of authors, ranging from distinguished men and women of letters to novices have been eager to jump on to the band-wagon.

Just as the best Holmes stories that Conan Doyle wrote are nearly all short, rather than novel length, so the majority of the best pastiches are short stories. Of course, there are exceptions, like Nicholas Meyer’s
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
, and Horowitz’s
The House of Silk
, and a few writers have cleverly introduced Holmesian pastiches into full-length novels of their own: excellent examples are Robert Richardson’s
The Book of the Dead
, and Gilbert Adair’s quite astonishing
And Then There Was No One
, which includes for good measure a final scene at the Reichenbach Falls. But the Holmes pastiches that I’ve written have all had central ideas that seemed to suit the short form. 

There are plenty of collections of Holmesian pastiches, and one of my favourites is
The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes
, compiled by Ellery Queen (the famous pseudonym concealed the identities of cousins Manfred Lee and Fred Dannay.) Queen was not only – arguably - the finest American writer of Golden Age detective fiction, but also a notable anthologist, and this particular book was especially impressive. Contributors included Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, Stephen Leacock and many others, but the Conan Doyle estate objected to the book, and it was quickly withdrawn. In the finest traditions of suppressed books, however, a number of copies escaped into circulation, and I’m glad to possess one of them, number 31 of 125 copies signed by Fred Dannay as Ellery Queen for presentation to friends and admirers of Holmes at the Sherlock Holmes Dinner held on 31 March 1944 at the Murray Hill Hotel in New York City.

My own interest in writing Sherlock Holmes pastiches was fired at the age of twelve when an English homework essay project resulted in my take on the mysterious case of “the Orange and Purple Worm”, one of those tantalising puzzles to which Doyle alludes in the canon. I did not return to Holmesian pastiche, however, until 1997. At that time Mike Ashley (an anthologist as indefatigable as Ellery Queen) was putting together a new collection, and commissioned “The Case of the Suicidal Lawyer” for
The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures
, a book which enjoyed a good deal of success, earning more reprints and translations than any other anthology with which I’ve been associated.