E. M. Wrong, in 1924, suggested that the dearth of detective stories was due to a faulty law of evidence, “for detectives cannot flourish until the public has an idea of what constitutes proof.” If a common criminal procedure consists of arrest, torture, confession, and death, there is little sympathy with the forces of law, and there was little for the detective to do. As late as 1651, Thomas Hobbes was describing the life of man as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes proposed a social contract — in effect, a strong, central government governed by just laws — as the means of changing this way of life. In 1667, Louis XIV created the policier to safeguard Paris, but of course in 17th and 18th century France, until the Revolution, this meant safeguarding the property of the nobility.
Hobbes’s social contract, and its logical outgrowth, the professional police force, spread slowly, with the English among the slowest. While England’s Magna Carta was in many ways a precursor of Hobbes’s social contract, the English preoccupation with personal freedom meant that the idea of private watchmen, thief-takers, and volunteer constables held sway until 1829, when the London Metropolitan Police came into being. The detective bureau was added to Scotland Yard in 1842, with two detectives, remarkably non-uniformed. By 1868, this had increased to fifteen detectives. In 1878, the detective and the constable were separated, and the Detective Department was renamed the Criminal Investigation Department. In England, as contrasted with America, the rule of law was intimately connected with the constabulary, and guns and violence were the domain of the criminal, not the police.
It is no surprise, then, that stories of detection did not flourish until the 19th century, with the rise of the professional criminal investigator. There were a few important tales of detection in this very early period. The Danish crime story “The Rector of Veilbye” by Steen Steensen Blicher (1829) and the Norwegian crime novel “Mordet på Maskinbygger Rolfsen” (“The Murder of Engine Maker Rolfsen”) by Maurits Hansen (1839) have been remarked. “Das Fräulein von Scuderi,” by E. T . A. Hoffmann (1819) is a short story about an elderly woman who investigates several crimes revolving around stolen jewels. Hoffmann’s work was well-known to Edgar Allan Poe, who may have been influenced by the tale. The story is often hailed as the first detective fiction, but this claim seems weak, not only because of earlier examples but because the detection is a minor element in the tale.
The first great writer of tales of criminal detection was Eugène Vidocq (1775-1857), whose memoirs and novels found a ready audience. Vidocq, a reformed criminal, was appointed in 1813 to be the first head of the Sûreté Nationale, the outgrowth of an informal detective force created by Vidocq and adopted by Napoleon as a supplement to the police. His memoirs (1828) recounted his adventures in the detection and capture of criminals, often involving disguises and wild flights. Later books told of his criminal career, and sensational novels published under his name (probably written by others) capitalized on his reputation as a bold detective.
While Vidocq’s stories captivated the public, they were hardly original tales of detective fiction. The first great purveyor of fictional stories about a detective was of course Edgar Allan Poe, whose Chevalier Auguste Dupin set the standard for a generation to come. The cerebral Dupin first appeared in Poe’s short story “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). At the same time, Poe introduced another staple of detective fiction, the partner and chronicler (nameless in Poe’s tales) who is less intelligent than the detective but serves as a sounding-board for the detective’s brilliant deductions. In each of the three Dupin stories (“The Mystery of Marie Roget” in 1842-43, “The Purloined Letter” appeared in 1844) the detective outwits the police and shows them to be ineffective crime-fighters and problem-solvers. Yet Poe apparently lost interest in the notion, and his detective “series” ended in 1845.
Another Frenchman, Emile Gaboriau, created the detective known as Monsieur Lecoq, drawing heavily on Vidocq as his model. First appearing in L’Affaire Lerouge (1866), Lecoq was a minor police detective who rose to fame in six cases, appearing between 1866 and 1880. Although Sherlock Holmes describes Lecoq as a “miserable bungler,” Gaboriau’s works were immensely popular, and Fergus Hume, English author of the best-selling detective novel of the 19th century The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), which sold over 500,000 copies worldwide, explained that Gaboriau’s financial success inspired his own work.
In England, criminals and detectives peopled Charles Dickens’s tales as well. While certainly not regarded as an author of detective fiction, Dickens created Inspector Bucket, the first significant detective in English literature. When Bucket appeared in Bleak House (1852-53), he became the prototype of the official representative of the police department: honest, diligent, stolid, and confident, albeit not very colorful, dramatic, or exciting. Wilkie Collins, author of two of the greatest novels of suspense of the 19th century, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), contributed a similar character, Cuff, who appears in The Moonstone. Cuff is known as the finest police detective in England, who solves his cases with perseverance and energy, rather than genius. Sadly, after The Moonstone, he is not heard from again. In each case, however, the detective is too late to help any of the affected persons.
As tales of horror and mystery began to achieve popularity, revolution seethed in America and Europe. The American Revolution and the French Revolution shocked Europe. The mass mayhem and destruction of families and homes that accompanied the Napoleonic wars — the wars that produced the highest percentages of military casualties in history — infected every mind. The Crimean War butchered Russians, French, English, and Turks. Warfare became truly efficient, as weapons of mass destruction — the musket, the rifle, the muzzle-loading cannon, the machine gun — together with the scourge of all wars, disease, brought record death tolls. Boers and the English slaughtered each other by the thousands at the turn of the 19th century, and in the course of the conflict, the English invented the concentration camp. In the half-century between the end of the American Civil War and the start of World War I, there were six military conflicts involving one or more of the major powers and almost twenty colonial wars, all highly useful laboratories for the development of killing machines.
Of course, other forces were rising as well. Science and invention began to bring tangible benefits to whole populations. The steam engine, the mechanized printing press, the railroads, the telegraph, the gas lamp (and later the electric light), advances in medicine, all changed the lives of nations irrevocably. Education and reading began to spread beyond the boundaries of the upper classes. Industrialization dramatically raised the standards of living of populace, and a great middle class rose in many countries.
Even so, the notion that science and invention had an important role to play in combating evil — whether to detect and prevent crime or to defeat creatures like Ruthven or Varney — was slow to develop. As reports of the 1860 Rode Hill House murder (as recounted in The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale) make clear, even in the third quarter of the 19th century, the detective force of Scotland Yard relied largely on the practical training of detectives in criminal methods and techniques, personal recognition of criminals, and apprehension of criminals in the act of committing the crime. “Bertillonage,” the French system of anthropometry, which would prove so useful in bringing criminals to justice, was not adopted until 1883; and although Francis Galton and others had recognized the usefulness of fingerprinting much earlier, it was not a serious aid in the apprehension of criminals until the 20th century. The role of reason in the war against darkness would not be fully acknowledged in literature until the final act of the century’s dramas.
By the end of the 19th century, however, the citizenry of England embraced the notion that science and reason were keys to solving the problems of the world. They had grown accustomed to the police and its official detectives, but, like Sherlock Holmes, regarded them as a “bad lot,” unlikely to solve complex crimes without help or luck. Holmes
was the embodiment of the deep-rooted English conviction that the official police were meddlesome and ineffective, and the detection and prevention of crime was best conducted privately by an unofficial person. Holmes, it appeared, could supply the deficiencies of the police, by using his powers of reason and the latest methods of science and invention. Thus, his popularity was founded upon the earnest belief that not only should and would matters be made right by the individual Englishman but that science and invention would help make it so. Of course, a similar theme is immediately evident in the exactly-contemporary narrative of Dracula, in which a 400-year-old horror is defeated by men of science and a woman whose powers of logic rival Holmes’s. Ultimately, just as the stories of Holmes’s adventures, Dracula is a tale of evil defeated by telegrams, railway timetables, and an exact knowledge of the habits of wrongdoers.
It is understandable that some have suggested that the Dutch professor of medicine who features so prominently in Dracula was in fact a fictionalized version of the role played by a certain tall, hawk-nosed Englishman. Certainly the very fact that Holmes maintained entries in his commonplace book on vampirism suggests a personal interest in the subject. In “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” he remarks to Watson, “What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts?” This may be the most important evidence of Holmes’s personal involvement in the Dracula affair, for the events of “The Sussex Vampire” surely took place no later than 1896, and Stoker’s narrative of Dracula was not published until 1897. Only if Holmes had been consulted in the matter (or a similar case, such as the “Bloofer Lady” victims) would he have compiled and retained research on vampires.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, it now seems inevitable that the embodiment of English civilization, the pillar of Victorian reason and intellect, Sherlock Holmes, would have been called upon to confront the forces of darkness in every form. Accounts of some of those activities follow….
Introduction
The Horror of It All
by Charles V. Prepolec
“It was a very tall man, if, indeed, it might be called a man, for the gaunt bones were protruding through the corroding flesh, and the features were of a leaden hue. A winding-sheet was wrapped round the figure, and formed a hood over the head, from under the shadow of which two fiendish eyes, deep set in their grisly sockets, blazed and sparkled like red-hot coals. The lower jaw had fallen upon the breast, disclosing a withered, shrilled tongue and two lines of black and jagged fangs. I shuddered and drew back as this fearful apparition advanced to the edge of the circle.”
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Selecting a Ghost’ (1883)
For readers who think of Arthur Conan Doyle merely as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, it may come as something of a surprise to discover that the ghastly passage quoted above came from the same author’s pen in 1883, some four years prior to the great detective’s first appearance in the pages of A Study in Scarlet. It may further surprise the same readers to learn that Conan Doyle’s earliest known work of fiction was also a ghost story (‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe’), written when he was probably just eighteen years old (1877) and that he continued to write horror, weird or supernatural fiction, sometimes rather sporadically, throughout the term of his life. What should not surprise those readers, since he applied the same economy of language and clarity of vision utilized to such great effect in the short Holmes tales, Arthur Conan Doyle’s horror fiction is pretty damn impressive in its own right and in some instances just as forward thinking and innovative as his tales featuring the great detective. While Conan Doyle idolized Sir Walter Scott, strongly modelling his historical fiction on Scott’s style, almost to the point of pastiche at times, he was also clearly an aficionado of Edgar Allan Poe and his achievements in the parallel short story fields of mystery and imagination. The basic model for Holmes and Watson, as well as the occasional inspiration for a few macabre stories can be traced straight back to Poe. Amongst Conan Doyle’s stories in the horror genre you can find tales of mummies, ghosts, a psychic vampire, science gone wrong, a prehistoric Yeti-like monster, sexual revenge, a giant man-eating Venus Flytrap, a lost catacomb, psychological terror, séances, a hint of cannibalism and various other odd and atmospheric nightmare tales. The tone and specific subject matter varies from story to story. Some are light-hearted, others pulpy adventure, some are science fiction, some fantasy, but most are straightforward in their delivery of gripping nightmare tales. Frequently they carry an undertone that revolves around the moralistic position of not carelessly messing about with ‘forces beyond our control,’ such as science or the supernatural. In later stories this would appear to reflect his strong Spiritualist leanings. Strong and strange stuff, indeed, and most importantly, Conan Doyle being Conan Doyle, written in a clean and modern style that often reads as well today as when the individual stories were first published.
Of course, the Sherlock Holmes canon is not without its share of horror. While Sherlockian readers will quickly point out that Conan Doyle never injected his supernatural interests directly into his Sherlock Holmes material, however tempting the notion must have been to him, they will appreciate that stories such as ‘The Speckled Band’ and The Hound of the Baskerville, to name but two, certainly rely entirely on trappings lifted directly from the horror genre for their effectiveness. While these two stories, in particular, lean heavily on the gothic tradition for their success, Arthur Conan Doyle’s penchant for grotesque characters and horrific situations is evident throughout the canon. A quick glance at story titles alone gives us the likes of ‘The Creeping Man’, ‘The Veiled Lodger’, ‘The Blanched Soldier’, ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’, ‘The Crooked Man’, ‘The Yellow Face’, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ and the wonderfully misleading ‘Sussex Vampire’, the last of which relies on the reader’s familiarity with vampire lore for its very setup and is a good indication of just how popular vampire fiction was at the time of publication (1924). There is also the untold tale of ‘The Matilda Briggs’ which features ‘…the giant rat of Sumatra’ and has the rather suggestive kicker of being described as ‘…a story for which the world is not yet prepared.’ If we look a bit further we’ll find as grotesque an assortment of characters as in any horror or fantasy story. Conan Doyle’s character descriptions lean towards the bizarre practically from the get-go. In The Sign of Four, the second story to feature Holmes, we are presented not only with a peg-legged sympathetic villain in the form of Jonathan Small, but also his nightmare-inducing blow-dart toting pygmy sidekick, Tonga. Throw in the extremely odd Sholto brothers, the dug up grounds of Pondicherry Lodge, and a trip to Sherman’s animal emporium and SIGN serves up a veritable smorgasbord of grotesques. Of course Conan Doyle delivers a steady stream of oddity, throughout the canon, that includes the likes of the sticking-plaster covered Paul Kratides in ‘The Greek Interpreter’, Neville St. Clair’s disguise as High Boon in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, Professor Presbury’s monkey-serum induced gibbering in ‘The Creeping Man’, the disturbing description of the demented Tregennis family in ‘The Devil’s Foot’, Moriarty’s reptilian oscillating head in ‘The Final Problem’, Eugenia Ronder’s scarred features under her veil in ‘The Veiled Lodger’, and even though they border on gross racial stereotyping, Steve Dixie in ‘The Three Gables’ and the mulatto in ‘Wisteria Lodge’ to highlight just a few examples. Conan Doyle wasn’t writing horror stories per se, but he certainly knew the effect that grotesques add to a narrative when used for effect, and unlike Dickens he didn’t allow them to drift into caricature. A rather neat achievement that makes it all the more regrettable that he didn’t pen any stories that firmly place Holmes in the horror field. Happily, this omission leaves the door open for others to take up the challenge.
If you’ve read my introduction to our previous volume Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes you’ll know that I have no qualms about thrusting Holmes into more outré
or fantastic situations. This time out we are taking Sherlock Holmes down a much darker path. Having grown up with a love of horror literature and films, particularly classic Universal monster movies and the great gothic colour horrors of Hammer Films, I am thrilled to be able to blend that lifelong love with my enduring affection for Sherlock Holmes. Who better than Sherlock Holmes, master of the rational facing off against the irrational, to bring light in to a dark and horrifying world of monsters? And, oh yes, in the pages ahead you will certainly find a few monsters, both human and inhuman alike.
In much the same way that Arthur Conan Doyle, in his writings, honoured Scott and Poe, the talented writers gathered together in Gaslight Grotesque all pay homage, in varying and unique styles, to the genius of Conan Doyle’s creations. In our first frightening story, screenwriter Stephen Volk, taking inspiration from The Hound of the Baskervilles and Conan Doyle’s 1900 short story ‘Playing with Fire’, sends a lonely and aging Watson to a séance where he comes face to face with the sins of the past in a story that could only be called ‘Hounded.’ In ‘The Death Lantern’ by Lawrence C. Connolly, the desensitizing horror of technology rears its head when the mystifying death of an illusionist is caught on film. William Meikle takes our heroes on a trip to ghostly Edinburgh to help Watson’s old army comrade deal with the spectre of a lost lover in ‘The Quality of Mercy.’ In James A. Moore’s monstrous tale ‘Emily’s Kiss,’ there is a decidedly Lovecraftian tone of degenerative family corruption when an explorer’s family is inexplicably kidnapped and it is up to Holmes and Watson to uncover the horrific truth behind their disappearance. William Patrick Maynard, who recently revived Fu Manchu for a new generation in his excellent novel The Terror of Fu Manchu (Black Coat Press 2009), delivers a two-fisted pulp tale when Holmes and Watson are called-in by a youthful violin virtuoso to free his Mother from the clutches of an evil cult in ‘The Tragic Case of the Child Prodigy.’ When Mycroft sends Holmes and Watson to Canada on a mission in Her Majesty’s Service, they unexpectedly find themselves facing a creature from Native American folklore in Hayden Trenholm’s ‘The Last Windigo.’ Evoking the X-Files, William Hope Hodgson’s ghostly sea stories and Conan Doyle’s own 1884 story ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’ a noble request finds Holmes and Watson in a small fishing village to investigate one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the sea in Neil Jackson’s ‘Celeste.’ How did Moriarty escape the mass arrests outlined in ‘The Final Problem?’ Find out, as Inspector Lestrade takes centre stage and uncovers a madness-inducing underworld, in Robert Lauderdale’s ‘The Best Laid Plans.’ In Leigh Blackmore’s ‘Exalted Are the Forces of Darkness’ a body is found horribly burned and inexplicably crushed, so Holmes must turn to an unwelcome and unexpected ally — the Great Beast himself; Aleister Crowley. When a grisly package arrives as a warning, or possibly a trap, Holmes and Watson find themselves faced with solving an impossible murder in Mark Morris’ paradoxical puzzler ‘The Affair of the Heart.’ Simon K. Unsworth provides a cold tale of monumental revenge, while perhaps evoking the shade of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in ‘The Hand Delivered Letter.’ Although The Hound of the Baskervilles can be considered a fully rationalized ghost story, what are we to make of the document that describes the legend of the hound itself? Barbara Roden answers that question and proves that a bark is not always worse than a bite in ‘Of the
Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes Page 2