by Josef Steiff
Sometimes criminals even disguise other people. Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle of the “Copper Beeches” make their governess (without her knowledge) appear to be their daughter. The goal is to convince the daughter’s fiancé that she’s no longer interested in him. In fact, criminals sometimes disguise animals. Silas Brown dyed the distinctive white forehead of “Silver Blaze” so that he would blend in with the other horses at Mapleton.
And as we all know, Holmes himself is a master of disguise. He often pretends to be a member of the working class so that he can conduct his investigations with greater anonymity. He appears as a “rakish young workman” (“The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”), a “mariner who had fallen into years and poverty” (The Sign of the Four), a “drunken-looking groom” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”), an “ill-dressed vagabond” (“The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”), and a “doddering, loose-lipped” opium fiend (“The Man with the Twisted Lip”). And he has set up various locations around London where he can change into these disguises (“The Adventure of Black Peter”). Unlike Clark Kent, Holmes cannot just hop into the nearest phone booth to change his identity.
According to Sherlock Holmes in “The Great Game” (from the first season of Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch), “the art of disguise is knowing how to hide in plain sight.” But hiding the truth is not the only possible goal of putting on a disguise. Disguises can also be used to show the false in several different ways. In addition, there are actually several different ways to hide the truth with a disguise.
Hiding in Plain Sight
One way that disguises can hide the truth is called masking (or camouflage). This is when the person or the thing disguised is not intended to be seen at all. A prime example is a chameleon changing its color to blend in with the surrounding environment. Similarly, a criminal might use the thick London fog to hide himself. As Holmes explains to Watson, “See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the cloudbank. The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim” (“The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”).
Holmes himself is really good at this technique. In “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” when Holmes tells Dr. Leon Sterndale that he was followed, Sterndale says, “I saw no one,” to which Holmes replies, “That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.” As Holmes explains in the Jeremy Brett adaptation of “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” the goal is to “merge with the surroundings.” The murderer in A Study in Scarlet is quite good at it too. When he’s finally caught, he says to Holmes (in the Benedict Cumberbatch adaptation), “See, no one ever thinks about the cabbie. It’s like you’re invisible. Just the back of a head. Proper advantage for a serial killer.”
Another way that disguises can hide the truth is called repackaging. This is when the person or the thing disguised is made to look like something else. For instance, several species of insects have evolved to look like sticks or leaves. In a similar vein, “Silver Blaze” is made to look like just any other horse. Unlike with masking, this is not an attempt to keep people from seeing the disguised item, but just to keep them from recognizing it for what it is.
The most famous example of this technique from detective fiction is The Purloined Letter. The stolen letter was made to look like a different letter and then hidden by the thief in plain sight. While the ruse fools the Parisian police, the letter is discovered by Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. I’m somewhat hesitant to bring up this example as Holmes thought that “Dupin was a very inferior fellow” (A Study in Scarlet). Dupin had a confederate create a commotion to distract the villain, so that he could recover the purloined letter. Despite Holmes’s disdain for his French counterpart, this event may have inspired Holmes’s attempt to trick Irene Adler.
Disguises are often a combination of these two techniques. Frequently, something (or someone) is disguised with the hope that no one will even notice it (masking). However, the disguise is such that, if someone does notice it, she will not recognize it for what it really is (repackaging). This is probably what the murderous cabbie really had in mind. Similarly, in “The Final Problem” and “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes disguises himself as an Italian priest and as an “elderly deformed” book collector so that the Moriarty gang will not notice him at all. But if they do notice him, as they probably do when Watson bumps into him and upsets his books, they are unlikely to recognize him as the famous consulting detective.
Finally, dazzling is yet another way to hide the truth. When pursuers know that a particular person or thing is in a particular location, masking and repackaging are not going to be effective techniques. However, it’s still possible to confound the pursuers. An octopus might shoot out ink to confuse a predator and escape. Similarly, law firms sometimes provide boxes and boxes of documents so that the opposition will not be able to find the one incriminating document in the “haystack.”
Since we don’t know “the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant” (“The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger”) or the “story for which the world is not yet prepared” about “the giant rat of Sumatra” (“The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”), I cannot say for sure whether or not Holmes ever faced dazzling. But the readers of the Holmes stories certainly have. Doyle himself was engaged in dazzling when he pointed to multiple false explanations of the crime as he did in The Hound of the Baskervilles. With several possible suspects in each of her mysteries, Agatha Christie is the queen of this technique.
Creating a False Impression
In addition to hiding the true, disguises can also be used to show the false. One way that disguises can do this is called mimicking. This is when the person or the thing disguised is made to look like something else, not just to remain hidden, but to gain some other advantage. For instance, several species of cuckoo lay their eggs in the nests of other birds so that these other birds will raise them (believing them to be their own offspring). Similarly, when Mr. Windibank pretends to be his stepdaughter’s young suitor, he certainly wants to hide his true identity, but it is equally important that he display his false identity to her.
It’s possible to mimic a type of person, as when Neville St. Clair disguises himself as a beggar. And it is also possible to mimic a particular person as when the Rucastles’ governess is made to appear to be their daughter. In addition, mimicry does not always involve a disguise per se. For instance, the bloody thumbprint that Oldacre created “mimicked” an actual bloody thumbprint left by McFarlane.
Another way that disguises can show the false is called inventing. This is just like mimicking except that something (or someone) is disguised as something else that never existed before. In other words, a new reality is created. A good example of this is The Hound of the Baskervilles itself. As Watson describes it,
A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.
However, Jack Stapleton had simply painted a large hound with phosphorus to make it appear to be a “hound of hell.”
Finally, decoying is yet another way to show the false. A bird will sometimes lure predators away from its nest by pretending that it has a broken wing. In A Study in Scarlet, when the murderer (who was an American and not a German) wrote the German word for revenge in blood on the wall, “it was simply a ruse to divert inquiry into a wrong channel.” And in “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter,” Dr. Leslie Armstrong literally leaves a false trail for Holmes. He leaves home in his brougham in the opposite direction from his true destination and then he doubles back. In other words,
he “disguises” his destination.
Decoying can certainly involve showing the false. Pretending to have a broken wing is actually a type of mimicking. Also, decoying can be carried out by inventing. But despite the fact that Bell and Whaley classify decoying as a type of showing the false, the ultimate goal is to hide the truth. Moreover, it can be carried out without showing the false at all. For example, if the bird actually does have a broken wing, it can still lure predators away from its nest.
By the way, according to Holmes, Stapleton used his wife, who was pretending to be his sister, as a “decoy” in The Hound of the Baskervilles. But this was not decoying in the sense that Bell and Whaley have in mind. Stapleton “hoped that his wife might lure Sir Charles to his ruin” rather than away from anything. In other words, he was using her in the way that a hunter uses a decoy duck. So, this is just another case of mimicking.
Deceived by Words
The principal distinction drawn by philosophers is between lying and other forms of deception. For instance, in The Valley of Fear, Cecil Barker told “a great, big, thumping, obtrusive, uncompromising lie” about the shooting at Birlstone. By contrast, Jonas Oldacre merely planted false evidence to frame John Hector McFarlane. He did not actually say anything false. Of course, prevaricators typically engage in both verbal and nonverbal deception. For instance, Barker also planted a “smudge of blood like the mark of a boot-sole upon the wooden sill.” And when he is finally caught, Oldacre does lie about his motivations. He claims that “it was only my practical joke.”
This distinction is important, as several philosophers have argued, because all other things being equal, lying is worse than other forms of deception. Most notably, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that, while it is always wrong to lie, it is sometimes okay to deceive in other ways.3 But this distinction is also important for the epistemological questions of how people are deceived and how deception can be detected.
If it becomes known that a piece of evidence has been placed somewhere intentionally, it is immediately suspect. Since it was not there the first time that he searched Oldacre’s house, Holmes knew that the bloody thumbprint must have been put there on purpose by someone other than John Hector McFarlane. In other cases, he is able to rule out the possibility that a clue has been left intentionally. For instance, in “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” the note from the governess is clutched so tightly in Mrs. Gibson’s hand that “it excludes the idea that anyone could have placed the note there after death in order to furnish a false clue.”
As Harvard philosopher Richard (a.k.a. “The Colonel”) Moran points out, “ordinarily, if I confront something as evidence (the telltale footprint, the cigarette butt left in the ashtray) and then learn that it was left there deliberately, even with the intention of bringing me to a particular belief, this will only discredit it as evidence in my eyes. It won’t seem better evidence, or even just as good, but instead like something fraudulent, or tainted evidence.”
However, things work differently when someone deceives us by telling us something false. When someone tells us something, it’s always clear that she’s doing so on purpose. In fact, we believe what someone tells us precisely because she explicitly offers her assurance that what she says is true. So, some indication other than the intentionality of the act is needed to cast doubt on the veracity of testimony.
Infernal Lies
What exactly is a lie? According to most philosophers, a lie is a false statement that is intended to deceive someone. But a false statement is still a lie even if it does not succeed in deceiving that someone. In particular, Holmes is rarely taken in by the lies that he’s told. For instance, he can tell immediately that what Barker says to the police “is a clumsy fabrication which simply could not be true.” In “The Final Problem,” Holmes saw that “the letter from Meiringen was a hoax.” And in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” after a visit from the conman John Garrideb (a.k.a. James Winter), Holmes asks, “I was wondering, Watson, what on earth could be the object of this man in telling us such a rigmarole of lies.”
But it must be conceded that even Holmes is occasionally fooled by deceivers. For instance, in “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” Inspector Baynes arrests Mr. Aloysius Garcia’s cook for his murder. Although the inspector’s real suspect is Mr. Henderson of High Gable (a.k.a. Don Murillo, the Tiger of San Pedro), he “arrested the wrong man to make him believe that our eyes were off him.” And his ruse fools Holmes as well as his suspect.
In addition to showing that Holmes is fallible, this case illustrates an interesting fact about lying. In most cases, a liar intends to deceive his audience about what he is saying. For instance, Barker intends the police to believe that the shooting at Birlstone occurred just as he describes it. But as James Mahon points out in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a liar may intend to deceive about his believing what he is saying rather than about what he is saying. Baynes does not expect or intend Holmes or Don Murillo to believe that the cook is the murderer. After all, both Holmes and Don Murillo know full well that the cook is innocent. But Baynes does convince them that he thinks that the cook is the murderer. In fact, Holmes used this sort of technique himself. For instance, he is tempted to confront John Garrideb about his lies because “there are times when a brutal frontal attack is the best policy—but I judged it better to let him think he had fooled us.”
But a few philosophers, such as Thomas Carson and Roy Sorensen, claim that some lies are not intended to deceive at all. In fact, bald-faced lies are told with complete seriousness even though everyone knows that the speaker is insincere. When Dr. Armstrong catches Holmes following him on a bicycle, he walks back and says that “he hoped his carriage did not impede the passage of my bicycle” on the narrow road. Both of them know quite well that Holmes was not trying to pass the carriage and that Armstrong would not have cared if he were in the way. Although Holmes is not at all misled, the comment serves its purpose. Since he is not willing to admit that he was following Armstrong, Holmes has to continue along past the carriage and he loses Armstrong that day. As Indiana University philosopher Marcia Baron points out, lies can manipulate even when they do not deceive.
But in order to lie, one does have to intentionally say something false. In his search for the “Bruce-Partington Plans,” Holmes interviews the clerk at Woolwich Station. And in the Jeremy Brett adaptation, the clerk says, “I was saying to the wife only on Sunday night. No, I’m a liar. It was Saturday. I said, there is no safer railway than the London Metropolitan.” However, the clerk was not lying, strictly speaking. He was only misspeaking because he did not intend to say something false.
I Didn’t Say So, Mr. Holmes
Lying is not the only form of verbal deception that is intended to deceive. Philosophers agree that, in order to lie, you have to say something false (or at least something that you believe to be false). But as Adler points out in “Lying, Deceiving, or Falsely Implicating,” you can also deceive by saying something true. Strictly speaking, Inspector Baynes’s deception was a false implicature rather than a lie. When Holmes asks him if he thinks that he has evidence that the cook is guilty, Baynes replies, “I didn’t say so, Mr. Holmes; I didn’t say so.”
In “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter,” Holmes tells Lord Mount-James that “it is entirely possible that a gang of thieves have secured your nephew in order to gain from him some information as to your house, your habits, and your treasure.” Now, it was certainly possible that the nephew was kidnapped. However, as Holmes admits to Watson, that theory “does not appeal to me as a very probable explanation. It struck me, however, as being the one which was most likely to interest that exceedingly unpleasant old person.”
Of course, there are also many occasions on which Holmes tells outright lies. In addition to lying to Secretary Hope, he lies to a telegraph clerk about having sent a telegram so that he can get a look at the telegram that the “Missing Three-Quarter,” Godfrey Staunton, sent b
efore he disappeared. In fact, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, he even lies to Watson about having to stay in London to work on a case of blackmailing. Thus, even if Kant is right that simply deceiving is not as bad as actually lying, it does not get Holmes off the hook.
You can also deceive simply by failing to say something. After solving “A Case of Identity,” Holmes does not tell his client Miss Mary Sutherland that her missing suitor was really her stepfather in disguise. His silence helps to ensure that she continues to believe falsely that he has not solved the mystery. It is what the great epistemologist Roderick Chisholm and his student Thomas Feehan call “deception by omission.” As Tom Carson explains, “withholding information can constitute deception if there is a clear expectation, promise, and/or professional obligation that such information will be provided.” But since he does not actually say something that he believes to be false, such a “lie of omission” is not a lie, strictly speaking.
It’s a Conspiracy
As well as illustrating how we might be deceived, Holmes’s cases can teach us something about who might deceive us. Sometimes criminals work alone. For instance, Dr. Roylott kills his stepdaughter, and attempts to kill his other stepdaughter, all by himself. (That is, unless you count his swamp adder as a co-conspirator.) But more often than not, a small group of people carries out a crime, and then works to keep its nefarious activities secret. For instance, as Holmes notes, “Mrs. Douglas and Barker are both in a conspiracy to conceal something.” Also, Mr. Windibank tries to keep hold of his stepdaughter’s money “with the connivance and assistance of his wife.”