Hypercrime

Arthur Conan Doyle

With the release of the new Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes film there is once again a renewed interest in the great detective. The active hype in popular media over the new film presents interested readers with a great opportunity to rediscover the true Holmes, or take a look at some of the newer written incarnations of the character. With that in mind, here are some thoughts on the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, a fairly detailed bibliography, and some reading recommendations, concluding with a thought or two on the recent popular film treatment starring Robert Downey, Jr., Jude Law and Rachel McAdams.

Arthur Conan Doyle is widely considered one of the most important figures in Crime Fiction. He was born May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh. His father was not particularly well remembered in his personality or profession, but was known to have been an accomplished drinker. Doyle recalled in later life that his mother Mary Doyle was an avid reader and story-teller and that while he did not have many recollections of his youth, he did recall fondly the “vivid stories she would tell me”. He studied medicine under Joseph Bell (1837-1911), a surgeon and President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh who is considered by many to be the father of forensic pathology.

Conan Doyle’s relationship to Bell is significant in his development of the Sherlock Holmes character both in more scholarly biography as well as popular treatment. An exploration of this relationship, as stated by Julian Symons in his 1979 biography, Portrait of an Artist reads, “Doyle always said the model for these deductive skills was Dr. Joseph Bell, surgeon at Edinburgh Infirmary, and one of the professors at Edinburgh University when Conan Doyle was a medical student, In appearance Bell was thin and dark, with piercing gray eyes and a narrow aquiline nose, so that he had some resemblance to the imaged Sherlock Holmes. [Doyle] used the Bell deductive approach when he began to write the stories. Dr. Bell modestly said that Conan Doyle had exaggerated his powers” The BBC produced in 2000 a television program called “Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes” starring Ian Richardson as Bell and Robin Laing as Conan Doyle. The show exaggerated the relationship significantly, and presented the relationship in the light of Bell as Holmes and Conan Doyle as Watson.

Beeton's Christmas Annual 1887

Doyle began writing while going through the failure of a business venture. His first published Holmes story was the novel A Study in Scarlet which he sold for £25 to Ward Lock & Co. and published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. The story was originally titled “A Tangled Skein“ and was sold only after numerous rejections. The title was changed to A Study in Scarlet, as a reference to a conversation between Holmes and Watson in the novel in which Holmes describes his craft:

“There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

The full novel was published in a single volume in July 1888 by Ward Lock & Co. with illustrations by Charles Doyle, Arthur’s father (replacing the illustrations by D. H. Friston which appeared in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual).

There is a great deal in the Biography of Arthur Conan Doyle which the casual reader will find surprising, not the least of which is his interest in Spiritualism. I’ve found that a good biography of Doyle (see Teller of Tales, for a good one) is a great next step after reading the Holmes stories.

The appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in the literary record forever solidified the character of the detective. Crime writing had most certainly existed before the appearance of Sherlock Holmes, most notably with Edgar Allan Poe and writers like Thomas De Quincey, who is mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes short story ”The Man with the Twisted Lip”.

But for the modern reader there is a far greater, more pointed debt, which includes the popularity of the Victorian era (including this same time period outside the British Empire) in Crime Fiction, as well as the enduring complexity of the rough-edged, substance-abusing super-sleuth. This character type has been successfully redrawn in endless variety ever since.

In the new film, the character of Irene Adler is played by Rachel McAdams and is a central character. Adler is thought of as the most significant female character in the Holmes stories even though she only appeared in a single story, ”A Scandal in Bohemia“ but is mentioned (usually as ”the late Irene Adler“ in several other stories, including ”A Case of Identity“, ”The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle“, ”His Last Bow“ and again cryptically in ”The Five Orange Pips“ when Holmes states “I have been beaten four times – three times by men, and once by a woman.”

Overall, the film comes across as one would expect: purists who have read extensively in the Holmes Cannon will find it lacking, but the majority will find it entertaining. While many feel Robert Downey, Jr. is a poor choice for Sherlock, it must be said that he brings an interesting dimension to the character never before seen in film of television. The role of Dr. Watson is well played by Jude Law, and in fact, there are details about Watson’s character that are given more emphasis in this film than in any previous version.

Any attentive book-shopper will realize that the interest and box office success of this film has publishers hopeful for a renewed interest in reading Doyle and others. So in closing, we offer a bibliography (by no means exhaustive, but sufficient to get any reader started) and a few recommendations on titles associated with the Sherlock Holmes tradition. Finally, we offer a few suggestions on some terrific recent works set in the Victorian period but in no real way connected to the Holmes characters. Enjoy.

TextLinks:

Joseph Bell, A Manual of the Operations of Surgery, complete text on Google Books or Project Gutenberg.

Bibliography of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes:

Novels

1. A Study in Scarlet (1887)
2. The Sign of the Four (1890)
3. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
4. The Valley of Fear (1915)

Story Collections

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
12 Stories

1. A Scandal in Bohemia
2. The Red-Headed League
3. A Case of Identity
4. The Boscombe Valley Mystery
5. The Five Orange Pips (Orig. published in The Strand magazine in November 1891.)
6. The Man with the Twisted Lip
7. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
8. The Adventure of the Speckled Band
9. The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
10. The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
11. The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
12. The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)
12 Stories (1894 UK Edition) 11 Stories (1894 US Edition)

1. Silver Blaze
2. *The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (UK Edition only. Appeared in the 1917 American version of His Last Bow)
3. The Adventure of the Yellow Face
4. The Stockbroker’s Clerk
5. The Gloria Scott
6. The Musgrave Ritual
7. The Adventure of the Reigate Squire
8. The Adventure of the Crooked Man
9. The Resident Patient
10. The Greek Interpreter
11. The Naval Treaty
12. The Final Problem

The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905)

1. The Adventure of the Empty House” (the return of Holmes)
2. The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
3. The Adventure of the Dancing Men
4. The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
5. The Adventure of the Priory School
6. The Adventure of Black Peter
7. The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
8. The Adventure of the Six Napoleons
9. The Adventure of the Three Students
10. The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
11. The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
12. The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
13. The Adventure of the Second Stain

His Last Bow (1917)

1. The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge
2. The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
3. The Adventure of the Red Circle
4. The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
5. The Adventure of the Dying Detective
6. The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
7. The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot
8. His Last Bow

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)

1. The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone
2. The Problem of Thor Bridge
3. The Adventure of the Creeping Man
4. The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire
5. The Adventure of the Three Garridebs
6. The Adventure of the Illustrious Client
7. The Adventure of the Three Gables
8. The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier
9. The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane
10. The Adventure of the Retired Colourman
11. The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger
12. The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place

Book recommendations:

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories (2 Vol. Set) — Indiebound | Amazon
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Novels– Indiebound | Amazon
The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 4 Novels and 56 Short Stories Indiebound | Amazon
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Indiebound | Amazon The Complete Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes Indiebound | Amazon

There are a near endless number of more modern Holmes pastiches from such writers as Laurie R. King, John R. King, Caleb Carr, Lyndsay Faye, John S. Fitzpatrick, Michael Chabon, and the list goes on and on. (A search on Google for “Sherlock Holmes Pastiche” turns up several years worth of Holmes reading.) In closing, I would like to say that there are many wonderful short stories in the tradition that are most worth reading. A couple of my favorites are Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald” which is in the collection Fragile Things, and Cara Black’s Irene Adler story ‘Cabaret aux Assasins‘ in the anthology My Sherlock Holmes: Untold Stories of the Great Detective edited by Michael Kurland.