Arthur and Sherlock

by Michael Sims

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  Before the evolution of detective stories into a genre that would draw Arthur’s attention and ambition in the 1880s, fictional detectives first had to appear in other literary landscapes. Originally most such protagonists were not actual detectives, either official or private. An investigating amateur of the time was likely an innocent victim of a conspiracy or someone otherwise caught in a crime, one who pursued justice or revenge without recourse to official law and its enforcers.

  This was the approach taken, for example, by English radical William Godwin in his scandalous 1794 novel Things as They Are, or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. In Godwin’s tangled philosophical novel—a dramatization of some of the ideas he had expressed a year earlier in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness—he intended to show the ways in which innocent victims suffer from the byzantine mazes of an unjust society. With a talent for mishap worthy of Zadig, whose adventures had appeared half a century earlier, Caleb Williams works with all the resolve of a detective, but primarily to save himself from the threat of violence and undeserved prosecution. He does not decipher clues à la Poe’s later detective Auguste Dupin.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton moved further along the road toward an actual detective story in his 1828 novel Pelham: or, The Adventures of a Gentleman. Henry Pelham, however, is a snobbish young dandy who strives to liberate a friend unjustly arrested for murder. Legal shenanigans, atmospheric settings, menacing strangers, obscure clues, misleading circumstantial evidence—all the elements were there. Rising above his disdainful upbringing, Pelham collaborates with felons, masks himself as a priest, and ultimately triumphs. But he remains an avenging friend, a devoted amateur, not a detective.

  Often such stories were also shrouded in Gothic trappings that distracted from the case and distinguished them from what Arthur came to think of as a detective story. Other writers approached the genre—including the German fabulist E. T. A. Hoffmann, for example, in his story “Mademoiselle Scuderi.” The bloody Inquisition brings death to Mademoiselle Scuderi’s door, and she responds courageously and intelligently. However, she is not an investigator—not a trained professional such as Inspector Bucket, not a miraculously gifted amateur such as Auguste Dupin. Her methods could not be described as an organized investigation. For a long time, few talented writers crossed the Rubicon into constructing their narratives around the solving of a crime.

  Born in Boston in 1809 to itinerant actors who died during his early childhood, Edgar Poe was adopted by the Allan family of Richmond, Virginia. They sent him to boarding schools in England, but he was back home by the age of eleven. In 1826 he enrolled in the University of Virginia and soon built up gambling debts that prompted him to leave college and join the army. Every move in his life was accompanied by trouble with demons such as alcohol and gambling. At the age of twenty-seven he married his thirteen-year-old first cousin, Virginia Clemm, with whom he adopted the kind of life his parents had lived, following work from city to city, first to Philadelphia, then Baltimore and New York City.

  Poe was still in his teens when his first book was published—Tamerlane and Other Poems. Although he was a writer of great individuality, Poe—born only a few years after the close of the eighteenth century—was rooted in Gothic melodrama. Upon his death in 1849 at the age of forty, he bequeathed literature a legacy that haunted the following decades with its seductive reek of depravity. Readers found it hard to forget the plague of the Red Death or William Wilson facing his doppelgänger. After closing a volume of Poe, the horrible crimes in the stories remained all too vivid—Montresor walling up Fortunato in a dank vault, a dead man’s heart that beats on in the ears of his murderer, the vengeful shriek of a black cat entombed with its murdered mistress. In stories about the glories and dangers of balloon travel, mesmerism, and voyages to the moon, Poe explored the possibilities of scientific (and pseudoscientific) discovery, joining a tradition that dated back to tales such as Icaromenippus, Lucian’s satirical second-century account of a flight to the moon. In Arthur’s youth this tradition had been rejuvenated by his favorite French adventure novelist, Jules Verne. His knowledge of science was apparent in his essay “Eureka: A Prose Poem,” which lyrically explored astronomers’ puzzlement over the question of why the night sky is black if space boasts an infinite number of stars. Other essays ranged from “The Philosophy of Furniture” to “The Rationale of Verse.”

  Aside from Poe’s tales of fantasy and the macabre, crime fiction was also never the same after he contributed a few stories to the genre. Arthur particularly enjoyed Poe’s detective stories about an eccentric Frenchman named Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, who showed off his ratiocinative skills in three cases. Poe’s offhand innovations included bringing back his detective protagonist for further adventures.

  Two months after Poe became editor of the flourishing young Philadelphia periodical Graham’s, readers of the April 1, 1841, issue turned to page 165 and found, filling the lower half of the page, a poem entitled “Comparisons” by Charles West Thomson. An ordinary, safe poem of its time, it sprinkled a few obvious analogies between human life and that of ephemeral natural phenomena, opening with

  A leaf upon the stream,

  When the brook is rushing by

  In its glorious summer dream,—

  Such am I.—

  Then, turning the page, unsuspecting readers encountered a story different from the usual magazine fare represented by Thomson’s poem—a story so different, in fact, that it would soon be acclaimed as founding a new genre. There, in capitals near the top of page 166, appeared

  THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE.

  BY EDGAR A. POE.

  Its opening read like a philosophical essay: “It is not improbable that a few farther steps in phrenological science will lead to a belief in the existence, if not to the actual discovery and location of an organ of analysis.” For later editions, Poe removed the opening reference to phrenology, with its vision of a corporeal seat for analytical thought. But he retained his overall theme of the sensual delight in deciphering puzzles:

  The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects.. . . As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations that bring his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics, exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural.

  Readers who kept going soon found themselves not in a philosophical discussion but in the presence of a new kind of story: the account of an investigation, an unraveling of a puzzle by means of reason and observation. The criminal as folk hero fighting an unjust society and royal whim—a staple of popular literature from the ballads of Robin Hood to Henry Fielding’s 1743 fictionalized account of the real-life criminal Jonathan Wild and beyond—had suddenly been joined by the intellectual crime-fighter as hero. And soon Poe’s readers were wandering in the dark alleyways of the penny newspapers, illuminated by a brilliant mind and a vivid writing style. Originally Poe had titled the story “The Murders in the Rue Trianon.” The change to “Rue Morgue” was a wise decision, adding a chilling whiff of death from the first page.

  Poe’s surprised readers did not know how to think of this curious character Dupin. With London’s metropolitan police force having been founded as recently as 1829, only twelve years before Poe’s story, the notion of a detective—professional or amateur, official or private—was unknown to most readers. In the story Poe did not even use the word detective, which had not yet been employed in this context.

  Thus reviewers turned to other analogies to describe Dupin’s talent. “The reader is disposed to believe that this must be the actual observation of some experienced criminal lawyer,”
wrote a commentator in the Pennsylvania Inquirer, in response to Dupin’s debut, “the chain of evidence is so wonderfully maintained through so many intricacies, and the connexion of cause and effect so irresistibly demonstrated.” The Ladies’ National Magazine said flatly, “Mr. Poe is a man of genius . . . ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is one of the most intensely interesting tales that has appeared for years.”

  None of Poe’s work was more influential than this clever and revolutionary tale that, however outrageous its premise of murder by ape, eschews the supernatural in deciphering the mystery at its core. Poe brought Dupin back for two further adventures. He appeared next in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” published in Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion in installments that appeared in late 1842 and early 1843. It was inspired by the real-life murder in New York of an American woman named Mary Cecelia Rogers, but Poe moved the story to Dupin’s Paris and Gallicized the victim’s name. Many other details he borrowed with little change from newspaper accounts. While pretending to show how Dupin “unravelled the mystery of Marie’s assassination,” Poe later bragged, “I, in fact, enter into a very vigorous analysis of the real tragedy in New York.” Such long-winded analysis weakened the story. With little action or dialogue, it was more of an essay, analyzing the popular evidence regarding a brutal crime that had obsessed the popular press in both Europe and the United States.

  In December 1844, a third and final Dupin case appeared in a publication called The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1845. “The Purloined Letter” was decidedly a detective story, and one that emphasized Dupin’s skill as an armchair puzzle solver. In the 1840s Poe wrote other stories that addressed investigative techniques and the unraveling of tangled clues, launching a number of ideas that soon became characteristic of the genre. He wrote the first story in which a detective springs a surprise on a murderer to elicit a confession (“Thou Art the Man”), and the first in which a detective shadows a suspect through urban throngs (“The Man of the Crowd”). “The Gold-Bug” featured a Dupin-like logician named William Legrand—another impoverished aristocrat, but this time in New Orleans rather than Paris—and centered on a treasure hunt and the deciphering of a coded message.

  Planning “Rue Morgue” so carefully—later he described it as “written backwards”—Poe was taking to its limit his notion of the need for unity of effect in fiction. He well understood that, knowing his solution before setting pen to paper, he wrote like a magician whose first job was to misdirect the viewer’s eye. “These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key,” Poe wrote to the American poet Phillip Pendleton Cook. “I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious—but people think them more ingenious than they are. In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling?”

  Poe was writing only a few decades after Baron Cuvier explained his discoveries regarding the correlation of body parts in animals. In “Rue Morgue,” the detective hands a volume of scientific writings to the narrator and says, “Read now this passage from Cuvier.” Dupin consults the great zoologist in part because they have similar methods—the reconstruction of a full scene from a few pieces of evidence.

  In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the bodies of a young woman and her mother, Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye and Madame L’Espanaye, are found inside a locked apartment on the fourth floor of a house in the Rue Morgue in the Quartier St. Roch in Paris. They have been the victims of a brutal murder. Wild cries in the night draw a crowd and gendarmes. They find the daughter’s still-warm body stuffed inside the fireplace’s chimney, and the mother’s sprawled in a paved courtyard behind the building—her throat slashed so viciously that, when the gendarmes try to raise the body, her head falls off.

  Dupin informs the narrator that he knows G——, the prefect of police, who will grant permission for the amateur puzzle lover to examine the scene of the crime. Dupin resembles a Gothic protagonist in taste and mannerisms, but he strolls through Poe’s bloody story like the embodiment of reason. The narrator of “Rue Morgue” serves primarily as audience for a disquisition, and—despite the bloodshed—the case remains for Dupin an intellectual exercise.

  In time Dupin unravels the mystery and reveals that the murderer was an orangutan who had escaped from his owner, an irresponsible mariner. Frightened by the women’s response to him, the ape acted blindly and killed Madame L’Espanaye—readers eventually learn—by holding the razor and mimicking gestures he had seen his master perform at a shaving mirror. Dupin places an advertisement in Le Monde, a paper known for its shipping news, claiming to have captured on the morning of the murder “a very large, tawny Ourang-Outang of the Bornese species.” The sailor snaps at the bait—and, captured by Dupin and his Boswell, he confesses all in a manner that became a common denouement in detective stories.

  Naturally Poe was himself drawing upon much that he had read. Just as his 1839 doppelgänger story “William Wilson” had been inspired in part by a similar idea in Washington Irving’s little-known story “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron,” so did his detective story have roots in many sources. Even his villain was not conjured purely out of his own arabesque imagination. The American poet and soldier David Humphreys was known for his late eighteenth-century satirical poem “The Monkey Who Shaved Himself and His Friends.” The titular primate, Jacko, imitates his barber master’s gestures with a razor. After wounding a dog and cat, Jacko tries to carry out an action he has often watched his master perform—shaving himself. But of course the monkey doesn’t understand the danger. In the end he “drew razor swift as he could pull it, / And cut, from ear to ear, his gullet.”

  Mischievous simians had cavorted in European fiction since before Voltaire’s Candide mistook two women’s monkey paramours for attackers. Poe’s choice of a particular animal villain—an orangutan—had a more direct ancestor in the work of another writer close to Arthur’s heart. Walter Scott’s 1832 novel Count Robert of Paris, the master’s penultimate book and one of which Arthur was quite fond, featured a homicidal “Ourang Outang.” Scott described it as having “a strange chuckling hoarse voice,” and later it emits “a deep wailing and melancholy cry, having in it something human, which excited compassion.”

  Poe’s murderer also emits terrifying cries. In the first newspaper account of the murders, Dupin reads that “the inhabitants of the Quartier St. Roch were aroused from sleep by a succession of terrific shrieks.” The gendarme reports loud and drawn-out screams. He hears a gruff Frenchman and also a shrill voice, “that of a foreigner.” Poe had fun with the witnesses. A Frenchman thinks the shrill voice is that of an Italian; a Dutchman is certain it was French; possibly German, says an Englishman; undoubtedly English, insists a Spaniard. But of course it is an orangutan, screaming like Walter Scott’s orangutan but waving a razor like David Humphreys’s monkey.

  Poe imitated other aspects of Scott’s orangutan’s behavior. “Something then, of very great size, in the form of a human being,” wrote Scott, “jumped down from the trap-door, though that height must be above fourteen feet.” Eventually the ape kills a man who is in the midst of a speech professing his lack of belief in God. Poe’s orangutan enters and departs through a high window, then murders the two women—the mother by cutting her throat: “With one determined sweep of its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body.”

  For Poe, as for many of his contemporaries, apes represented the dark side of humanity—not fallen angels so much as the devils of our lesser nature. In his later story “Hop-Frog” (originally subtitled “The Eight Chained Ourangoutangs”), he brought back this alarming creature—that is, he has the titular dwarf persuade the vicious king and his companions to dress as orangutans before he sets them on fire in revenge for their torment of him and the innocent Trippetta. The villains’ dressing as apes was equivalent to confessing their low character.
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  The kind of horrific story represented by “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was not uncommon in the penny press of Poe’s day. Sensational “true” accounts of crimes sold newspapers and magazines. What Poe brought to the field was a new character and a new approach—a story centered not on the brutality of the crime itself, although he provided buckets of blood, but on the discovery of its perpetrator, which required a focus upon the intelligence and methods of the investigator. This was not a species of fiction that could have existed prior to notions of the value of evidence instead of divination, investigation instead of accusation, trial instead of torture—all working within a justice system that at least made gestures toward fairness. The fictional detective was a modern character for a busily changing era, a kind of scientist relying upon reason as a guide through the age-old battles of violence and crime.

  CHAPTER 16

  How Do You Know That?

  As to work which is unconsciously imitative, it is not to be expected that a man’s style and mode of treatment should spring fully formed from his own brain.

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “PREFACE,” THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  Between “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Arthur’s decision to write a detective story, other writers followed Poe in the footsteps of the prophet Daniel and the philosopher Zadig. Some followed Poe’s lead into a new kind of crime story. But one, like Voltaire and the unnamed author of the biblical saga, wrote a similarly observant character into a different kind of tale.

  Alexandre Dumas père did not write detective stories. After beginning his career as a dramatist, he wrote a series of novels about Marie Antoinette, many other novels, essays and articles on contemporary topics, an encyclopedia of gastronomy, and volumes recounting his travels to Florence, Switzerland, and elsewhere. By Arthur’s time, however, his most renowned contribution to literature was the trilogy nicknamed the d’Artagnan Romances.