Arthur and Sherlock

by Michael Sims

  The first of these rousing adventure novels set in sixteenth-century France, The Three Musketeers, appeared in 1844, and a sequel, Twenty Years After, was published the following year. Then, a century after Voltaire put the observant Zadig through his adventures in observation and deduction, Dumas assigned the same role to d’Artagnan. A mammoth, 268-chapter third installment, titled The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, appeared in installments between 1847 and 1850. The sprawling narrative included the entire adventure later entitled The Man in the Iron Mask. And it featured memorable scenes of d’Artagnan working as a detective.

  For the creation of his most famous Musketeer, Dumas had been inspired by the adventures of the real-life Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, the actual Comte d’Artagnan—or rather by the version of d’Artagnan who swaggered through a semi-fictional memoir published in 1700. Although Dumas was interested in the real-life crime and intrigue surrounding him in mid-nineteenth-century France, in writing some scenes of The Vicomte of Bragelonne he was clearly paying tribute to his revered Voltaire. Zadig’s example hovers over d’Artagnan’s every move.

  In his scenes of d’Artagnan as detective, moreover, Dumas may have been influenced by Auguste Dupin. In 1846, the year before The Vicomte began monthly serialization, a French translation of Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” was published in three installments in the Paris newspaper La Quotidienne. “Un meurtre sans exemple dans les fastes de la justice” (“A murder unprecedented in the records of justice”) appeared anonymously, with not only a new title but both place and character names altered—and with Auguste Dupin transformed into Henry Bernier. But substantially the story was the same. There were no international copyright laws, so translating an American story without crediting its original author was not illegal.

  Indeed, four months later a rival newspaper, Le Commerce, ran a separate anonymous translation, much shorter than the first, entitled “Une sanglante énigma” (“A bloody mystery”). When the author of the latter story was accused of plagiarizing the former, he replied, “It is not in La Quotidienne but in the stories of E. Poe, an American scholar, that I took . . . the central idea of the story.” One result of this piracy was a great deal more notice for Poe than would have been the case otherwise. Following this flurry of attention, however, Poe did not become truly well-known in France until after the poet Charles Baudelaire began translating stories and a few poems in 1848, with the majority following after 1852.

  In the later pages of Dumas’s Vicomte de Bragelonne, the arrogant swordsman d’Artagnan performs his detective work when sent by Louis XIV to confirm or refute a minister’s account of an alleged hunting accident. “You will, therefore, go there, and will examine the locality very carefully,” commands the king. “A man has been wounded there, and you will find a horse lying dead. You will tell me what your opinion is upon the whole affair.”

  When d’Artagnan reports to the king after his investigation, he resurrects the participants’ actions in preternatural detail. “The weather was very well adapted for investigations of the character I have just made,” he reports, “it has been raining this evening, and the roads were wet and muddy—”

  “Well, the result, M. d’Artagnan?”

  The specifics d’Artagnan reveals naturally impress the king with his perception: “One of the riders was more impatient than the other, for the footprints of the one were invariably in advance of the other about half a horse’s length . . . His horse pawed the ground, which proves that his attention was so taken up by listening that he let the bridle fall from his hand . . . The one who had remained stationary traversed the Rond-point at a gallop, about two-thirds of its length, thinking that by this means he would gain upon his opponent; but the latter had followed the circumference of the wood.”

  Some particulars Dumas drew straight from Voltaire.

  “He who followed the circumference of the wood was mounted on a black horse.”

  “How do you know that?” demands the king.

  “I found a few hairs of his tail among the brambles which bordered the sides of the ditch . . . The horse of the cavalier who rode at full speed was killed on the spot.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The cavalier had not time even to throw himself off his horse, and so fell with it. I observed the impression of his leg, which, with a great effort, he was enabled to extricate from under the horse. The spur, pressed down by the weight of the animal, had plowed up the ground . . . Sire, while the dismounted rider was extricating himself from his horse, the other was reloading his pistol. Only, he was much agitated while he was loading it, and his hand trembled greatly.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Half the charge fell to the ground, and he threw the ramrod aside, not having time to replace it in the pistol.”

  “Monsieur d’Artagnan, this is marvellous you tell me.”

  “It is only close observation, sire, and the commonest highwayman could tell as much.”

  During Arthur’s youth, Daniel, Zadig, and d’Artagnan were well-known figures in the popular imagination. The Bible was still the primary source of European society’s accepted myths; Voltaire was read by most literate Europeans; and Dumas was one of the most popular novelists of the nineteenth century. Thus, in 1880, when Arthur was nearing the end of medical school and adventuring aboard the Hope, the August issue of Popular Science Monthly ran a thoughtful essay by Thomas Huxley entitled “On the Method of Zadig: Retrospective Prophecy as a Function of Science,” and expected that its readers would understand the analogy and the reason for it.

  Arthur admired Huxley. A renowned natural scientist and educator who had earned the nickname of “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his eloquent defense of his friend Charles Darwin’s ideas about natural selection and nature’s slow change over time, Huxley explored in this essay the idea that scientists were, in a sense, prophets looking into the past rather than the future. Their methods might at first make their deductions look as mysterious as soothsaying—but only until those methods were explained and the evidence examined. “The foreteller,” Huxley argued,

  asserts that, at some future time, a properly situated observer will witness certain events; the clairvoyant declares that, at this present time, certain things are to be witnessed a thousand miles away; the retrospective prophet (would that there were such a word as “backteller”!) affirms that, so many hours or years ago, such and such things were to be seen. In all these cases it is only the relation to time which alters—the process of divination beyond the limits of possible direct knowledge remains the same.

  Born in 1859, the year that finally saw publication of Charles Darwin’s long-gestated masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, Arthur had grown up amid the nineteenth century’s revolutionary scientific thinking about the interpretation of nature—that the earth itself hoarded hard evidence that defied and ultimately might supplant written revelation. At the University of Edinburgh he had been surrounded by respectful discussion of such evidence-based thinking. Although Joseph Bell was a devout Christian, his teaching of diagnostics had relied entirely upon the interpretation of factual clues.

  In Arthur’s imagination, Bell’s legacy fit in well with such figures as Zadig, d’Artagnan, and Dupin. But Bell possessed a trait that the others did not. He was dramatic, theatrical proof that seeming clairvoyance beyond the limits of direct knowledge was possible in the real world. It was not fantasy. And unlike Daniel and Zadig, Dr. Bell had practiced his wizardry not on kings but on ordinary human beings—soldiers, fishwives, street urchins—and, like the retrospective prophets of science, he had divined their past, their recent actions, even their character. Arthur had witnessed it with his own eyes.

  CHAPTER 17

  Games of Chess, Played with Live Pieces

  These games of chess, played with live pieces, are played before small audiences, and are chronicled nowhere. The interest of the game supports the player. Its results are enough for justice.

>   —CHARLES DICKENS, “THE DETECTIVE POLICE”

  Although Poe wrote detective stories as logical fantasies, he was conjuring his detective in a new era. Unlike ancient biblical prophets and fictional Babylonian philosophers, Dupin deciphered clues amid an established network of metropolitan police. During the century prior to Arthur’s birth, the complex task of keeping the civil peace may have evolved more slowly than some other aspects of the social contract, but it did see a halting progression forward. The royal promise of relative security that had once been known in England as the “king’s peace” had long since failed to meet the needs of a burgeoning society. Efficient policing required that both officers and detectives earn the trust of the public. Partnership between police and citizenry could evolve only through familiarity and some measure of respect.

  Before the mid-eighteenth century, victims of misdeeds in England had recourse to few methods of justice or recompense. People accused of a crime might find themselves pursued by a bounty hunter, a fierce professional perhaps paid by bail bondsmen. Inhabiting the shadow of the law alongside bounty hunters were characters called thief-takers, who were usually in the employ of those few victims who could afford to pay for pursuit or retribution. Naturally such an arrangement lent itself to chicanery. Some thief-takers, for example, acted clandestinely as go-betweens, returning to their owner goods that had been stolen by the thief-taker’s own secret partner.

  In 1749, real-life crime detection and literature began the collaboration whose fruits surrounded Arthur as he turned his hand to detective fiction. In that year, almost a century before Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Englishman Henry Fielding saw publication of his picaresque novel Tom Jones. An ambitious and industrious man who worked from a Bow Street office rather than an ivory tower, Fielding was also chief magistrate of London. In the same year he launched an organization soon called the Bow Street Runners.

  Although in some respects the Runners were more like private detectives than like police officers, they were in many ways the first modern police force. They were paid out of allocated government funds, for example, a kind of salary that divided them from their juridical ancestors. Originally there were only eight. Dashing about with official backing, they arrested offenders, served subpoenas and other writs, tracked bail jumpers. Attracting both favorable and critical attention in the press, the Runners helped prepare the English public for the idea of an organized metropolitan police.

  What was needed was an official police department—despite such an institution’s own fertile ground for corruption—to respond to crimes and to capture criminals. Not until a third of the way through the next century, however, did a new law create a metropolitan police force. In 1829, eight years before Victoria became queen and thirty years before the birth of Arthur Conan Doyle, the popular Home Secretary Robert Peel succeeded in getting Parliamentary approval for his proposed Metropolitan Police Act. He insisted that if Parliament wanted him to prevent crime rather than to merely track perpetrators, they must support this innovation. A guarantee of arrest, he argued, was a stronger crime preventive than severity of punishment—on, he might have added, those rare occasions when arrest actually followed. The police act replaced the antique plexus of watchmen, parish constables, thief-takers, and Bow Street Runners with a reasonably organized force.

  Robert Peel’s new police officers were nicknamed “bobbies” in England and “peelers” in Ireland. Peel had earned his reputation while launching the Royal Irish Constabulary during his tenure as Chief Secretary for Ireland, in which his job was to maintain “order”—as defined by the English occupying force. Within a decade of the bobbies’ founding, the Bow Street Runners were gone.

  Another factor nudging fiction writers toward detective stories were the popular tales and books claiming to be memoirs of real-life investigators. In 1811 Eugène François Vidocq, a French criminal turned policeman, founded the Brigade de la Sûreté, a civil police and detective bureau. Soon Napoleon Bonaparte turned the Sûreté into a national police force. A tireless self-promoter, Vidocq starred in ghosted memoirs detailing his adventures, beginning in 1828, then in openly fictionalized accounts capitalizing upon his notoriety. The public thrilled to his pursuit of criminals, his undercover operations in disguise, and his accounts of training other agents who, like himself, wanted to leave behind a life of crime and embrace law enforcement.

  But Vidocq’s secret-police activities and sometimes violent methods resulted in scandal, a reorganization of the Sûreté, and ultimately his own resignation. In 1833 he founded the first known private inquiry agency, which also provided bodyguards and other security officers. Meanwhile, the books about him had inspired authors such as Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, both of whom wrote often about criminal activities, and would later serve as models for Émile Gaboriau in France and Anna Katharine Green in the United States.

  Soon London saw a bold new figure striding down the street. These officers were a tough-looking lot—tall, sturdy, dressed in blue top hat and tailcoat. This modest uniform was intended to make them look as different as possible from the red-coated and metal-helmeted soldiers who had often served as military police on the streets. Bobbies were armed with only a wooden truncheon and a pair of handcuffs. At first they carried a wooden rattle to summon other officers, but it turned out to be too cumbersome and not loud enough. A whistle replaced it.

  But bobbies were there to prevent crimes or to respond to them immediately, not to decipher clues and investigate the crimes discovered or interrupted by uniformed officers. Not until the 1830s, after uniformed bobbies began patrolling streets, did the word detective even appear. The English word detect, meaning to catch or discover someone in the act of committing a crime, dates from the first half of the fifteenth century in English, and derived from the Latin detegere, meaning “to uncover.” The new meaning described a new job. A centralized police force, charged with preventing and responding to crime, required a division assigned to solve crimes and hunt down their perpetrators—a detective bureau, including plainclothes detectives who could operate in disguise or at least without uniforms announcing their identity before they could even strike up a conversation with a wary publican.

  The department’s need to work incognito at times inspired fears that in reality this new creation, the detective, was merely a government spy authorized to mingle with and entrap respectable citizens. Vidocq’s reputation for secret-police activity had accompanied his reputation for crime-solving across the Channel, and English newspaper readers were quite familiar with the genuine risks of government spying. Not until 1842, following the public outcry over a scandalous case in London that helped create a more welcoming political atmosphere for it, did Scotland Yard create the Criminal Investigation Department. At first it comprised only two inspectors and six sergeants.

  Not surprisingly, intelligence of the logical, deductive, fictional kind was not the most eagerly sought trait for detectives in the real world. When police administrators surveyed the uniformed ranks for potential detectives, they first looked for courage, strength, and fortitude. They demanded familiarity with the dark city streets and their teeming crowds—from the hardworking ironmongers, haberdashers, and other shop owners to the “swell mob” of dandified pickpockets, the skilled cracksmen, the bludgers, the squealers and finks, the opportunistic mutcher lifting tuppence from a drunk. Arthur knew enough about the world, and had read enough real-life accounts of crime, to know that his intellectual detective would need extensive experience of the criminal underworld.

  The first officers to sign up for detective work included an enterprising young man named Charles Field, who soon rose through the ranks to become inspector at the Woolwich Dockyards and finally chief of the Detective Branch before he retired in 1852. The English journalist George Augustus Sala described Field as “clean-shaven, farmer-like.” His ordinariness in dress and mien were calculated professional attributes.

  Charles Dickens, at the height of his fa
me and influence, met and admired Field and soon wrote articles about him for his periodical Household Words—articles that helped promote the concept of vigilant police detectives in the public imagination, including a vivid and atmospheric tribute entitled “On Duty with Inspector Field.” The word detective was still unfamiliar enough in 1850 for Dickens to wrap it in quotation marks in the title of his first article on these innovators, “Three ‘Detective’ Anecdotes.” But soon the term flourished in the thriving daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals.

  In an essay, “The Detective Police,” Dickens, with typical enthusiasm and impatience for change, apostrophized the new detectives by contrasting his vision of them with his memory of their predecessors. “We are not by any means devout believers in the old Bow Street Police,” he wrote, despite his comical but rather admiring portrait of them in his second novel, Oliver Twist.

  To say the truth, we think there was a vast amount of humbug about those worthies. Apart from many of them being men of very indifferent character, and far too much in the habit of consorting with thieves and the like, they never lost a public occasion of jobbing and trading in mystery and making the most of themselves. Continually puffed besides by incompetent magistrates anxious to conceal their own deficiencies, and hand-in-glove with the penny-a-liners of that time, they became a sort of superstition. Although as a Preventive Police they were utterly ineffective, and as a Detective Police were very loose and uncertain in their operations, they remain with some people a superstition to the present day.