Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  Hans Gross, as Austrian criminal jurist, magistrate, lawyer, professor of law, and the man responsible for establishing the Institute of Criminology in Graz, Switzerland, compiled years of work as a “professional crime fighter” into one of the most comprehensive investigative handbooks ever written.24 Criminal Investigation: A Practical Handbook published first in 1893—some seven years after Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. As an investigating officer, Gross readily saw the failures of police attempts to read or reconstruct a scene of crime. They were far too ready to insert their own narrative, to miss corruption of crime scene data, or to corrupt the scene themselves. They also missed the evidence available right beneath their (clumsy, defacing) feet: trace evidence. Like Sherlock decrying Scotland Yard for walking all over crime scene evidence, Gross insisted that a new protocol must be followed. Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton describe the salient features: first, the investigators must somehow “suspend” the crime scene in time and space, undisturbed and frozen; second, they must systematically “excavate” all trace evidence; third, they must do all with “absolute integrity,” meaning no game of telephone that distorts facts as they are passed from hand to hand.25 Practical, yes, but by no means simple. The first English edition ran to over nine hundred pages culminating in a “selected list of authorities” of more than one thousand entries.26 The complexity comes from the very minutiae the detection ought to be cataloguing—how could the investigator keep from erring, from inaccuracies and his own bias? Like Sherlock, he is never to think forward in the absence of evidence, not even to guess at motive. To arrive at “incorruptible, disinterested, and enduring testimony,” the detective must not only be “heroic” and in possession of youth, energy, health, liveliness, and vigilance, he must also learn “to solve problems relating to every conceivable branch of human knowledge,” which might include everything from accountancy to knowing why a boiler might explode.27 In other words, this new type of detective must be scientist, chemist, and engineer all in one. He must be Sherlock Holmes—and though the handbook and Holmes emerge almost simultaneously, there have been suggestions that while Joseph Bell provided the personality for the erstwhile detective, Gross provided his famous “method.”28 As in every history, however, personality counts for quite a lot. Grossian analysis would win the day, but criminologists who followed him found a more useful salesman for their science. Edmond Locard, French police scientist and the “Sherlock” of Paris, instructed his students to “read over such stories as ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and ‘The Sign of Four’” to understand the new type of detective methods.29 The bumbling doctor’s accidental creation, like the semi-fictional stories of ocean-bound explorers, fired the imagination of a new generation.

  Locard founded the Lyon forensics laboratory in 1912, and competes with other greats for the title of forensics’ founding father. His great contribution lies in his reconstruction of crimes not from corpses, not even from murder weapons, but from dust.30 Locard directed the Laboratory of Technical Police of the Prefecture of the Rhône, and this laboratory became an international center for study and research worldwide. But he was Sherlock’s biggest fan. Locard literally fashioned his own working life upon the fictional character. He studied ink and handwriting, because Holmes uses it in “The Norwood Builder.” He studied ciphers because they appeared in “The Dancing Men,” “Gloria Scott,” and “Valley of Fear.” And Locard wrote a monograph on tobacco ash, principally because Sherlock had done so first.31 In his 1929 paper “The Analysis of Dust Traces,” Locard wrote: “I hold that a police expert, or an examining magistrate, would not find it a waste of his time to read Doyle’s novels. For, in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the detective is repeatedly asked to diagnose the origin of a speck of mud [. . . and] The presence of a spot on a shoe or pair of trousers immediately made known to Holmes the particular quarter of London from which his visitor had come, or the road he had traveled in the suburbs.”32 Locard goes on to remind the studious criminologist that a spot of clay and chalk would originate in Horsham; reddish mud in Wigmore Street. The air around us swirls with our own past selves, skin and cellular material, grit from a shoe, sap from a tree, the waste and detritus of everyday: what, Locard asked, might we learn from it? “Sherlock Holmes was the first to realize the importance of dust,” Locard wrote. “I merely copied his methods.”33

  Val McDermid’s Forensics covers the history of pathology from Alfred Swaine Taylor through to Locard and on to another “Sherlock,” London’s Bernard Spilsbury. Swaine wrote A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence in 1831, but he was skewered by the press after condemning an innocent man through a bungled arsenic test.34 The Lancet and the Times took Swaine to task and dubbed his practice “the Beastly Science,” far from auspicious beginnings.35 The latter-day Spilsbury, at work after Sherlock made detectives famous, had far more luck. The papers frequently compared Spilsbury, with his top hat and charm, to Mr. Holmes: no mere policeman, but a toxicologist, a lab scientists, pathologist, detective, and crime scene specialist. Media used readers’ familiarity with Holmes as a way of calming panic in the face of often horrible crimes. In the Crumbles case (the murder of a pregnant woman by her lover), Spilsbury appears with unemotional elegance at the site of the dismembered corpse, “Cigarette in mouth, he was scrutinizing the sheets, clothing, and other articles,36 and projecting an air of “cool indifference.”

  The crime may not compare to the infamous Haigh and his acid baths in terms of body count, but it had all the same gory details. Patrick Mahon murdered his girlfriend Emily Kaye. But he also dismembered her, attempted to boil away evidence, and left a trail of blood-spattered clothing and fat-clotted saucepans at his cottage in the Crumbles, a stretch of coastline near Eastbourne. Officers found parcels containing bits of her body, breasts and pelvis in brown paper, internal organs in a biscuit tin, bits of muscle and skin in a hatbox.37 Investigators used Hans Gross’s methods, painstakingly removing items from the foul-smelling cottage, and Chief Inspector Savage called the affair “gruesome and sickening [. . .] appalling.”38 On questioning, Mahon claims the two had quarreled, and Kaye struck her head on a cauldron. This, too, had to be taken in for analysis—and the next day, Bernard Spilsbury arrived at the scene. It would be the turning point of his career. Already known for his Sherlockian ability to “single-handedly assemble” the story of murder from a mortuary corpse (and make it stick in court), Spilsbury attracted media attention. Burney and Pemberton remark that the crime scene itself was not his natural habitat, however; a forensic pathologist, Spilsbury preferred the lab and mortuary—now, largely due to the horrendous condition of the body and its scattershot appearance all over the murder scene, he found himself in a makeshift tent and under prying eyes. The press arrived on the scene even before he did, and they stayed throughout. And despite Gross’s warning that the investigator should avoid interpreting data to fit a story, the journalists had no such compunction. By “dramatizing” the forensic expert, say Burney and Pemberton, newspapers “provided ample material for storytelling and fantasy” and along the way, they “blur[red] the boundary between journalistic fact and crime fiction.”39 They created a story, in other words—as linear and decipherable as Spilsbury’s polished courtroom delivery, and having just as little to do with the messy, tangled, chaos of the actual crime scene. Doyle’s work also gave readers the story after its close, tactfully written by Watson and read before the fireplace in the comfort of the drawing room, a space of comfort and the illusion of control “over the chaos and horrors” of everyday life.40 Doyle based Sherlock’s methods on the reality of Joseph Bell; up-and-coming detectives (and perhaps more importantly, journalists and fans) based their personae on the unreality of Sherlock Holmes. “Without Joseph Bell, there would be no Sherlock Holmes,” writes Bell biographer Ely Liebow, but without Sherlock Holmes, “few indeed would ever have heard of Joseph Bell.”41 Medical jurisprudence, the very seed of forensics as we now know it, flourished at the intersection of fact and fiction, because the chaoti
c world threatened disintegration, murder, death . . . and it would take a hero to order it again. The “pioneering hero of CSI,” say Burney and Pemberton, the celebrity pathologist, formidable, knowledgeable, and (we hope) always in the right. It’s little wonder the media dubbed him “the real Sherlock Holmes.” But Sherlock still came first. And then, as now, he just as often steps out of fiction to supplant and replace his creator, and to compete in the public’s estimation with the “real-life” detectives.

  So who is Sherlock Holmes? Why does he appear here, in the dark channel between men and machines, steampunk and science, death and immortality? James Cabot and Brian David Johnson’s steampunk history calls him the “CSI of his day, obsessed with cutting edge technology.”42 But in fact, Sherlock was the very dawn of CSI. Like Marcellin Berthelot, he is a chemist. Like Tesla, he has a laboratory to try out his inventions. Like Lister, he relied on the microscope, like Mathieu Orfila, he understood the human body and its anatomy—and like Hans Gross, he understood the trace. Technology guides Sherlock, and not only in chemistry; he relied on the electric telegraph, on fingerprints, ballistics, and handwriting analysis; he knew psychology and facial recognition and popular culture. He did not know much about the stars above him, but of the earth and its devices, poisons, pistons, technologies, and men, Sherlock Holmes was master. He may not have built a difference engine, but only because he didn’t need one to solve a crime; he didn’t invent the Nautilus, but only because he had no reason to travel under the waves. Of the once-living inventors, only Tesla comes close to matching his popularity in books, stage, and screen—but not even the wizard of electricity managed to have an original US TV series (Elementary) and a BBC series (Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s Sherlock) plus two blockbuster movies (Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal in Sherlock Holmes and A Game of Shadows) at the same time, each with an eager, even rabid, audience. It is more significant still that Mr. Holmes and his beleaguered Watson float between time periods with no trouble; Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock even hopped over decades to have the hero thwarting Nazis and no one batted an eye—while Elementary and Sherlock reimagine the duo as modern figures with remarkably little difficulty. I said at the beginning that we did not invent steampunk and retrofit it to the history of science; Victorian science has always been steampunk. When Sherlock invents a test for hemoglobin in A Study in Scarlet, few of his readers would doubt that it had in fact been done; Sherlock speaks into the future, and so in looking back at him in context, we are always somehow meeting out of time. He never dies. He never goes out of fashion. And even when his active presence is nowhere to be found, he is there all the same.

  A Most Extraordinary Gentleman

  “I gripped him by the sleeve and felt the thin, sinewy arm beneath it. ‘Well, you’re not a spirit, anyhow,’ said I. ‘My dear chap, I am overjoyed to see you. Sit down and tell me how you came alive out of that dreadful chasm.’”

  —Arthur Conan Doyle, “Adventure of the Empty House”

  In Alan Moore’s graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (considered a steampunk masterpiece of art and story), a collection of fictional characters join forces as a sort of literary Justice League. Mina Murray, the heroine of Stoker’s Dracula acts as the brains of this unit of “gentlemen,” the tie that binds Jekyll/Hyde, the Invisible Man, adventurer Allan Quatermain, and Captain Nemo. Each of them has been plucked from the pages of Victorian fiction to serve a mysterious “M” on a mission for England, but Sherlock Holmes never officially appears in the story. Though Mycroft, Moriarty, Sebastian Moran, and Watson form the backbone of this tale, the great detective has already met his (supposed) fate at Reichenbach Falls. But his very absence has a presence. Moore’s greatest magic trick isn’t in bringing supernatural and pseudoscientific forces together as a team, it’s in fooling the reader into thinking that the fictions have been imported into a “reality” that belongs, not to Arthur Conan Doyle (or Telsa, Edison, and Crookes), but to Sherlock Holmes. Meanwhile, the world in which Doyle lived was full of ghosts, fairies, mediums, levitation, and voices from beyond the grave. In the end, the author—the man behind the fiction—vanishes into the fearful dread of Victorian spirituality, while Sherlock Holmes stands aloof, scoffing at superstition and wielding science and logic against all the murderous intent awaiting in the unknown dark.

  Despite creating the famously logical Sherlock, Doyle himself devoted over forty years to the study of spiritualism, séances, and after-death experience. “There has [. . .] been no time in the recorded history of the world when we do not find traces of preternatural interference,” Doyle wrote in The History of Spiritualism, but “the rising sun of spiritual knowledge” would fall first upon “the greatest and highest human mind.”43 The origin of spiritualism, he claims, lies with Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist and mystic. A follower of Newton and contemporary with Sir Joseph Banks and Hans Sloane, Swedenborg saw visions and published his nine-volume Secrets of Heaven between 1749 and 1756. Doyle goes on to give his own accounts of spirits, hauntings, prophetic vision, the afterlife, and even the existence of fairies. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas keeps a collection of Doyle’s “spirit photography,” eerie images and transfers that supposedly capture ectoplasmic shadows of the dead; the center also houses Doyle’s personal Ouija board.44

  Let’s return to the Victorian séance. A modern observer transported back in time (says Alison Winter) would see in the performance something both trivial and peculiar. There are no sparks here, none of the whirling phantasm that the electric magicians would employ by the 1890s. Instead, they would find a subject, seated or reclining, and a mesmerist waving his hands about his or her features in “magnetic passes.” Most mesmerists were men, many “patients” women, and a vein of scandal palpated at the idea that one might control the other as a living puppet, an automaton. However, the real attraction had to do with something deeper, a hope that through mesmerism, the subject would attain a kind of heightened awareness: “A new sense would open to her shut eyes,” and the patient might “claim to see events occurring in the future, inside the body, in distant lands, and even in the heavens.”45 In other words, the mesmerist’s trance allowed the average patient to experience something Nikola Tesla experienced anyway, all the time. But the real power of the spiritualist movement isn’t only in expanded senses. It’s in the uncanny ability to reach across a wider gulf than even the one that separates past and present: the one that separates life and death.

  The movement began in the early hours of April 1, 1848, in New York (rather than in London). Margaret and Kate Fox, the same mediums investigated at length by William Crookes, claimed to communicate with ghosts. Knocks, rendered alphabetic, reveal a tale of murder and woe, and of burial under the Fox home. The story appeared in the New York Tribune, and soon, the entire nation was alight with powers first described by Mr. Swedenborg. The light that first glanced so brilliantly on the “greatest mind” had trickled down to the masses. Within seven years of the Fox bombshell, there were two million spiritualists in the United States alone.46 It is hard to conceive of the power of so many voices, so many claiming to have heard from loved ones or seen a shade, to feel the nearness of something thought forever lost. Mesmerism, we remember, made claims of healing living bodies, too, like the electric fluid or even the imagined vril power. William Crookes thought it a branch of physics, ill understood and waiting to be illuminated by science—and he came close to convincing Tesla, the materialist, of the same. Crookes compared their separate innovative ideas. Could electricity purify water? Could it travel through solid a substance? Could they set up multiple wavelengths and still ensure secrecy between two wireless operators? Could they control the weather?47 Then, twirling the famous mustache (long and waxed into Crookes hooks), he added, “and what of mental transmission through ether between human receivers?”—communication with the living, and even with the dead. Crookes described his own experience of clairvoyance and levitation, and Tesla’s materiality
shook under the strain of these new ideas. As his biographer describes it, “the Old World swarmed through his brain like a hive of bumblebees,”48 and all the superstition and dread, all those “unholy monsters,” returned to darken his door. It was also at this dark time that Tesla received news of his mother’s failing health. It is here, at the edge of death, that spiritualism most appealed; it offered a chance to blunt the sting.

  Death. Always, it seems to us the closing of a door—we can draw near it, we may put out fingers to the handle. But once through, there is no returning. The immortal dream of Victor Frankenstein always crawls away, monstrous; even Victor’s imagination stumbles over rot and worms, the disintegrating face of his mother and later his newly betrothed. The mid and late Victorians gained industrial power, but they moved further and further from the comfortable rituals of religious experience. Charles Dickens’s works, always imbued with high morals, nevertheless give us human decency without the church, and even ghosts of Christmas strangely divorced from the actual dogma of Anglican faith. Urbanites were adrift in a sea of machines and smog-choked alleys—pollution so thick that Watson complained, “it was [impossible] from our windows in Baker Street to see the loom of the opposite houses.”† Children died of lung complaints as often as from poor working conditions, mine collapses, or factory accidents. Signs of death, from mourning clothes to black armbands, mingled in streets—and a penchant for mourning jewelry and memento mori peppered the commutes with lingering relics of the dead. Facing his mother’s death, Tesla suffered bouts of amnesia, and oblivion, and at last was carried away to a separate building in a swoon. He lay there, helpless, but still under the deep influence of all Crookes had told him. “During the whole night every fiber in my brain was strained in expectancy,” Tesla wrote in his autobiography; then, in the early hours, he “saw a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty, one of whom gazed upon me lovingly and gradually assumed the features of my mother. The appearance slowly floated across the room and vanished, and I was awakened by an indescribably sweet song of many voices.”49 Weak and enervated, Tesla prepared to accept the otherworldly—to throw his old worldview away and, like the young Frankenstein, turn to other visions that offered something both more grand and more terrifying than the material world. There must be some reason for it all, some way to organize the chaos of loss. It’s this hope that motivates Doyle too. Could you get “some account of my boy Kingsley?” he used to ask of spiritualists; he lost his only son in 1919, and would give his remaining career not to Sherlock, but to any comfort séance and mesmerism could give.50