Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  So the matter narrows down to what Lovecraft carried away from his youthful Sherlock Holmes enthusiasm. Things we do or read in childhood do go on to shape the adults we become, even if we “outgrow” them. Scholar Peter Cannon has written about the Holmesean influence on Lovecraft at some length. There are the motifs and the parallel passages, as to be expected, and one easily recognizes the source of the spectral, baying creature in Lovecraft’s story “The Hound.”

  But it’s more than that. What would have appealed most to Lovecraft, and remained consistent with his philosophical outlook throughout his life, was Holmes’s rationality, as summed up by the Great Detective’s famous statement (in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”) that “This Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground…. No ghosts need apply.” Holmes is making an explicit rejection of the supernatural, or at least of his interest in it. “The world”—meaning the material plane—is “large enough” for him.

  Lovecraft, too, completely rejected the supernatural in any “spiritual” sense. There are no ghosts in his fictions. Human beings, who are bio-chemical phenomena of random Nature, have no “souls.” Even in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” which deals with the resurrection of the dead, this resurrection is achieved by material means, a matter of “essential salts” collected from the dust of the grave and processed through arcane alchemy. His monsters, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, et al., are immensely powerful cosmic beings, the products of a broader universe of which mankind knows virtually nothing, but they are not “gods” in the traditional sense.

  Lovecraft, as quite a small child, was sent home from Sunday school when he started asking embarrassing questions about how, if Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are imaginary, the Judeo-Christian deity is not likewise imaginary. He was entirely unable to accept the “Semitic mythology” in which he was expected to believe. This was an attitude which stayed with him for his entire life. To him, nothing was more absurd than the sentimental notion that any sort of cosmic creator would notice or care in the slightest about the doings of creatures on our particular planetary flyspeck.

  * * * *

  You will notice how many Lovecraft stories resemble detective stories in their structure. “The Call of Cthulhu” details a methodical, inexorable investigation which assembles clues and leads the protagonist to a terrible conclusion. The other key Holmes observation which must have impressed Lovecraft is the one repeated several times throughout the Canon, that once all other possibilities have been eliminated, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.5

  Try as they may to avoid doing so, Lovecraftian characters inevitably work out that, yes, a gigantic squid-faced being has indeed been sleeping for millions of years under the Pacific and waits to claim the Earth again, or that there are indeed winged Fungi from Yuggoth in the Vermont hills, or that one Joseph Curwen of Providence, Rhode Island (died, 1771) has actually managed to return to life after more than a century in the grave and impersonate his hapless descendant, Charles Dexter Ward, or that the rural disturbances collectively known as “The Dunwich Horror” are caused by the appalling interbreeding between Yog Sothoth and a human disciple, and this threatens to end the world as we know it.

  * * * *

  Lovecraft did not go in much for continuing investigator characters, but subsequent writers quickly picked up on the obvious implications. He was certainly familiar with such “psychic detectives” as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki or Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence. Dr. Willett in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” or Professor Armitage in “The Dunwich Horror” and most especially Police Inspector Legrasse, who figures in “The Call of Cthulhu” very easily could have, having concluded one “case” that averted cosmic menace, gone on to devote the rest of their careers to such activities.

  August Derleth quickly produced one Laban Shrewsbury, who stars in a whole series of Lovecraftian adventures (The Trail of Cthulhu et al.) and the contemporary writer C.J. Henderson has written an entire volume of subsequent investigations of Legrasse (The Tales of Inspector Legrasse). Surely more writers will continue in this mode in the future. Even Peter Cannon, scholar, humorist, and pastichist, has produced a tale, Pulptime, in which Lovecraft, his friend Frank Belknap Long, and an aged Sherlock Holmes actually meet in the 1920s and share an adventure together.

  What Lovecraft was doing, then, was applying the Holmesean method to the universe at large. He had dispensed with the small stuff—human crime—and taken on a larger subject—the frightful position of mankind in a vast and uncaring cosmos over which we have no control, but his characters proceed with the same logical, step-by-step deduction that Holmes used for mundane matters, until they arrive, not unflinchingly, we will admit, but still arrive, at the same thing that Holmes was after: the truth, however mind-blasting it might be.

  That’s what the grown-up H.P. Lovecraft, late of the Providence Detective Agency, was after all along.

  He knew Holmes’s methods, and applied them, not to human crime, but to the haunted-house gulfs of cosmic infinity.

  Sources

  Cannon, Peter. “Parallel Passages in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ and ‘The Picture in the House.’” Lovecraft Stories, Vol. 1 No. 1 (Fall 1979), pp. 3-6.

  ____________. “You Have Been in Providence, I Perceive.” Nyctalops #14 (March 1978), pp. 45-46.

  Joshi, S.T. I Am Providence, The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. (2 vols). New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010.

  Lovecraft, H.P. Letters to Alfred Galpin. Edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. New York, Hippocampus Press, 2003.

  Lovecraft, H.P. and August Derleth. Essential Solitude, The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (2 vols.) edited by David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008.

  1 H.P. Lovecraft. Letters to Alfred Galpin, p. 19.

  2 H.P. Lovecraft. Essential Solitude, p. 323.

  3 H.P. Lovecraft. Essential Solitude, p. 203-204.

  4 H.P. Lovecraft. Essential Solitude, p. 322.

  5 For instance, “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth,” from The Sign of the Four. In The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, p. 613. Note 26, p. 614, lists numerous further expressions of the same sentiment in other stories.

  SHERLOCK HOLMES AND SCIENCE FICTION, by Amy H. Sturgis

  Detective fiction and science fiction are siblings of a sort. Both are descended from the Enlightenment’s faith in a systematic, comprehensible universe. They even share a parent. Edgar Allan Poe not only created fiction’s first detective of note, C. August Dupin, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1841), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844), but he also served as a key voice in early science fiction. A quick glance at the table of contents of Harold Beaver’s edited collection The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976) reveals stories dealing with mesmerism, galvanism, resurrection, and even time travel, among other concepts, following the trail blazed by Mary Shelley and anticipating Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and other stars in the science fiction constellation. These authors posed the question of “what if?” and extrapolated from contemporary scientific knowledge to offer imaginative answers spiced with the flavor of plausibility.

  Despite the close relationship of the genres, it’s a rare character who moves back and forth comfortably between the two. Sherlock Holmes, however, has made a lasting home in both the detective and science fiction literary worlds. Understanding why Holmes has appealed to science fiction audiences and how he has been incorporated into the science fiction canon yields useful insights into the Great Detective’s lasting popularity.

  Conan Doyle, Holmes, and the Science Fiction Sensibility

  During his forty-five years as a writer, Arthur Conan Doyle published works in a wide variety of genres, non-fiction and fiction, from historical romance to contemporary politics. It is worth noting that before, while, and after achieving fame with the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, Conan Doyle also wrote
science fiction. There is no one “science fiction moment” in his career; on the contrary, he maintained a life-long involvement with the genre.

  For example, the publication of his “The Great Keinplatz Experiment” (1885), a tale about personality exchange, predated the introduction of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet by two years. After A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, and in the same year as the debut of the first collection of Holmesian short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), Conan Doyle published both “The Los Amigos Fiasco” and The Doings of Raffles Haw. The former tells the story of how a condemned criminal gains superpowers when subjected to an experimental electric chair; the latter explores a chemist’s transformation into an alchemist who discovers the secret of transmuting lead into gold.

  Two years later, his novel of telepathic vampirism, The Parasite, followed. In 1910, well into the phenomenal success of his Sherlock Holmes works, Conan Doyle published “The Terror of Blue John Gap,” a short story about a monstrous creature who lives underground. Two years after the release of the final Sherlock Holmes stories came The Maracot Deep (1929), Conan Doyle’s novel of the discovery of Atlantis by a deep-sea scientific expedition. This list is hardly exhaustive. Over the decades Conan Doyle also produced a number of other stories that could be considered to have science fiction elements, as well.

  * * * *

  Perhaps his greatest achievement in the genre remains his works centered on the scientific jack-of-all-trades known as Professor Challenger. Just as Conan Doyle drew on his own real-life mentor Joseph Bell to create Sherlock Holmes, he modeled George Edward Challenger on another figure he knew from the University of Edinburgh: Professor of Physiology William Rutherford. Between 1912 and 1929, Conan Doyle published three novels (The Lost World, The Poison Belt, and The Land of Mist) and two short stories (“When the World Screamed” and “The Disintegration Machine”) in the series, pitting the larger-than-life Challenger against such forces as dinosaurs surviving on a remote plateau in South America, a poisonous band of ether fated to intercept the Earth, and a brilliant technological invention with the potential to become a most dangerous weapon. The Challenger stories remain popular—and the inspiration for various pastiches—today.

  Sherlock Holmes and the Science Fiction Sensibility

  Given Conan Doyle’s relationship to the genre, it should come as little surprise that the four novels and fifty-six short stories that comprise his Sherlock Holmes canon are infused with a “science fiction sensibility.” Consider, for example, how John Watson initially hears of Sherlock Holmes from Stamford in the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. Stamford describes Holmes as “a little too scientific for my tastes—it approaches to cold-bloodedness.” Stamford goes on to characterize the man as the sort who might, “out of a spirit of inquiry,” use his friend—or, for that matter, himself—as a test subject for experimentation, due to his “passion for definite and exact knowledge.”

  When Watson first encounters Holmes in person, in the chemical laboratory of St. Bart’s Hospital, he describes the scene in this way:

  Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames. There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. “I’ve found it! I’ve found it,” he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. “I have found a reagent which is precipitated by hæomoglobin, and by nothing else.” Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shone upon his features.

  In short, the reader’s introductions to Holmes represent him with the single-minded zeal of a scientist in the familiar setting of a scientist. He is portrayed as a cerebral hero, one whose goal is not to conquer a land, win a girl, or defeat a villain, but rather to know. And, as the reader discovers along with Watson, Holmes employs his own disciplined method with exact precision in order to achieve this goal. His drive to understand, to solve the mysteries of the universe through methodical rationality, reveals Holmes as a distinctly science fictional protagonist.

  Others agree. For instance, E.J. Wagner, whose book The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective’s Greatest Cases recounts how Holmes influenced generations of forensic scientists in the same way that Star Trek later influenced physicists and engineers, says, “Sherlock Holmes may have been fictional, but what we learn from him is very real. He tells us that science provides not simplistic answers but a rigorous method of formulating questions that may lead to answers. The figure of Holmes stands for human reason, tempered with a gift for friendship.”

  Ryan Britt, in “Sherlock Holmes and the Science Fiction of Deduction,” published in the science fiction publication Clarkesworld Magazine, seems to concur: “Essentially, Holmes believes any mystery can be approached, and a solution deduced, scientifically, by gathering necessary data, and drawing conclusions based on logic and reason. In the Doyle stories, the science of deduction usually always works, and serves as the basic premise for every single Holmes adventure. Like a science fiction writer, Doyle seemed to start with the premise of ‘what if?’.”

  If the Holmes canon as a whole represents a science fiction sensibility, specific stories within the series qualify as science fiction proper. The most obvious, perhaps, is the 1923 short story “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.” In this tale, an aging professor attempts to rejuvenate himself for his young bride by taking a drug derived from the langur monkeys of the Himalayas. Of course he does not realize that this concoction will alter both his body and mind, devolving him into a sinister, threatening figure. The flavor of the tale invites comparisons with other classic science fiction works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).

  Arguably an even better example from the Holmes canon is 1910’s “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.” Holmes hypothesizes that the victims went mad and/or died from inhaling the powdered root of an African plant that, once heated, vaporizes and carries on the air. He tests the hypothesis on himself—so successfully that Watson must save him, in what is one of the duo’s most harrowing moments. Conan Doyle created the fictional plant at the heart of the mystery, but he presents it as plausible fact, going so far as to offer its scientific name (radix pedis diabolic, or “devil’s-foot root” in Latin) for the sake of realism. Holmes builds and tests his theory of the crime like a proper scientist. As the genre legend Isaac Asimov admits in his introduction to Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, “The Devil’s Foot” is not merely a compelling mystery, it is also “very good science fiction.”

  Since the Sherlock Holmes canon as a whole displays a science fiction sensibility, and some Holmes stories in particular are clearly works of science fiction, it is unsurprising that science fiction authors who came after Conan Doyle have chosen to use Sherlock Holmes in their own genre writings.

  Sherlock Holmes in Science Fiction Literature

  During his lifetime, Conan Doyle opened Sherlock Holmes’s universe to other creative minds. In an often-quoted telegram to U.S. actor and playwright William Gillette, he said this of his most famous character: “You may marry him or murder him or do whatever you like with him.” Friends such as J.M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame) wrote Holmesian stories for Conan Doyle’s amusement. In the decades following Conan Doyle’s death, the Holmes pastiche has become a popular phenomenon of its own. Within this tradition, a number of subgenres have developed, from Sherlock Holmes-meets-Jack the Ripper tales to romance stories in which Holmes finds true love.

  One of the more popular of these subgenres often walks the borderline of science fiction. Stories in which Holmes encounters vampires may lean toward fantasy or science fiction, depending on how the vampirism itself is explained. What is certain is that some
of those who have contributed to this Holmes-vampire subgenre are writers who have made their professional names in science fiction. For example, Fred Saberhagen, most famous among science fiction readers for his Berserker saga, also penned a series about Dracula comprised of ten novels and two short stories; The Holmes-Dracula File (1978) and Séance for a Vampire (1994), in particular, are noteworthy as Holmes pastiches. Best known for his Chronicles of Amber novels, Robert Zelazny combined Sherlock Holmes with Count Dracula and a host of other Victorian heroes and villains for A Night in the Lonesome October (1993), which was nominated for science fiction’s prestigious Nebula Award.

  A host of other writers have devised strategies for drawing Holmes into works that are undeniably science fiction. These may be divided into three loose categories: tales that fold Holmes into preexisting science fiction stories; tales that pair Holmes with various science fiction-related individuals, either fictional or historical; and tales that allow Holmes to travel in time or have other science fictional adventures. Discussing all such publications thoroughly would require a book-length study, but a few representative works may illustrate each of these approaches.

  Pairing Holmes with Science Fiction-Related Characters Including Holmes in Preexisting Science Fiction Stories

  One trend in Holmes pastiches is that of retelling a well-known science fiction story, or offering a sequel to one, and including Holmes as a central character. For instance, the father-son writing team of Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman published Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds in 1975. This novel—a collection of several short stories, more accurately, beginning with “The Adventure of the Martian Client,” which first appeared in The Magazine Of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1969—serves as a sequel to H.G. Wells’s 1898 science fiction classic The War of the Worlds. It follows Holmes and Watson (as well as Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger) as they experience the Martian invasion of London. Titan Books released a new version in 2009 as The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The War of the Worlds.