by Michael Sims
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Prophets Looking Backward
by Michael Sims
The Secret Cell
by William E. Burton
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
by Edgar Allan Poe
On Duty with Inspector Field
by Charles Dickens
The Diary of Anne Rodway
by Wilkie Collins
You Are Not Human, Monsieur d’Artagnan
by Alexandre Dumas, père
Arrested on Suspicion
by Andrew Forrester Jr.
The Dead Witness; or, The Bush Waterhole
by W. W. (Mary Fortune)
The Mysterious Human Leg
by James McGovan (William Crawford Honeyman)
The Little Old Man of Batignolles
by Émile Gaboriau
The Science of Deduction
by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Whitechapel Mystery
by Anonymous
The Assassin’s Natal Autograph
by Mark Twain
The Murder at Troyte’s Hill
by C. L. Pirkis
The Haverstock Hill Murder
by George R. Sims
The Stolen Cigar-Case
by Bret Harte
The Absent-Minded Coterie
by Robert Barr
The Hammer of God
by G. K. Chesterton
The Angel of the Lord
by Melville Davisson Post
The Crime at Big Tree Portage
by Hesketh Prichard
The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage
by Ernest Bramah
The Case of Padages Palmer
by Harvey O’Higgins
An Intangible Clue
by Anna Katharine Green
Acknowledgments
Bibliography and Suggested Further Reading
By the Same Author
Imprint
To the other four of the Five Investigators (circa 1970):
my brother, David Sims
and my cousins J. R. Yow, Greg Norris, and Ken Norris
Here is my lens. You know my methods.
—Sherlock Holmes
Introduction: Prophets Looking Backward
by Michael Sims
When I unwrapped the books, I found a whole new world. I was fifteen at Christmas 1973, when I received as a gift from my mother a book I had specially requested—had, in fact, insisted upon. It was William S. Baring-Gould’s two fat, beautiful volumes of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. When the oversize books arrived in the mail, the postman had to honk his car horn because he couldn’t fit the package into our big mailbox out by the gravel road. The mailbox was my connection to the world. We lived in rural eastern Tennessee, without a car or a telephone, but somewhere I had learned about mail-order book clubs and read about these books—and decided that I must have them.
That Christmas night I sat up almost until dawn, savoring details about hansom cabs and dark lanterns and why Dr. Roylott’s snake in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” could not have been a snake. These volumes taught me that in every work of literature you can find an entire cosmos of history and biography. Victorian England unfolded out of Baring-Gould’s pages like a pop-up book and later blossomed into my love for crime writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, and Catherine Louisa Pirkis, as well as their colleagues in the larger world of literature—Lewis Carroll and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. I found a window into history, which formerly I had considered opaque. I found escape from the confusions of adolescence. And I reveled in the kind of writing that William Dean Howells once disparaged as “a complicated plot, spiced with perils, surprises, and suspenses.”
I kept exploring the field of Victorian detective stories, and the result, almost four decades after I opened The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, is The Dead Witness. Aiming to represent the vigor and charm of the Victorian detective story at its best, this anthology features works that were originally published between 1837 and 1915: numerous short stories, a couple of novel excerpts, a magazine profile, a newspaper article, and the transcript of a coroner’s inquest. Investigators hail from England, Scotland, Australia, Canada, France, and the United States. You will find female and male detectives, police officers and private investigators, a Canadian half-native backwoods detective, a blind man, and a teenage boy—characters ranging the moral spectrum from Father Brown to Jack the Ripper.
In the long view of history, detectives are a recent phenomenon. Crime is not. As archaeologists often demonstrate, deception, theft, and violence haunted society even before we left caves or invented agriculture. Consequently, because our imagination is as natural as our penchant for brutality, crime has flourished as a cultural theme from Antigone to Law & Order.
Many people think that Sherlock Holmes was among the earliest detectives in literature. In The Dead Witness, however, he doesn’t appear chronologically until about halfway through, because he had numerous ancestors. Among the legion of villains and heroes in world literature are a handful of fascinating proto-detectives who waxed Sherlockian long before Loveday Brooke and November Joe and the other characters you will meet in this book. These figures insist upon the importance of justice and evidence in criminal cases—rather than accusation and torture—or demonstrate a rational approach to problem solving. They pay attention and theorize about what they observe. While the stories in this volume are adventurous, suspenseful, and sometimes amusing, the detectives in them behave in many ways like scientists, luxuriating in the act of reasoning while benefiting from its practical results.
The biblical Daniel seems to have been the first fictional detective. Aside from his roles as interpreter of dreams, tamer of lions, killer of dragons, and spouter of visions and prophecies, Daniel participates in a couple of thorny criminal cases. First he solves the earliest locked-room mystery on record, which is also an exposé of the follies of idol worship. King Cyrus the Persian asks Daniel, “Why do you not worship Bel?” and Daniel replies cheekily that he worships a living god, not an idol. Cyrus points out that every night Bel consumes a vast amount of wine and food, not to mention forty sheep, and must therefore be quite authentic. Daniel laughs and says, “Do not be deceived, O King; for this is but clay inside and brass outside, and it never ate or drank anything.” Furious, Cyrus orders his priests to prove Bel’s reality or die. They depart, telling the king to lay out the usual daily god food himself. The next morning it’s gone, and Cyrus prepares to execute Daniel for blasphemy.
In the kind of scene that would later become standard in detective stories, Daniel stands among suspects and accusers and unravels the true story. In doing so he provides the reconfiguring of the narrative—the reshuffling of what the reader thought had happened into what actually happened—that is one of the great aesthetic pleasures of detective stories. The night before, Daniel had secretly covered the stone floor with a fine layer of ash. As the king and priests stand before him, he points down at the floor and explains. His ploy has recorded the nocturnal scurries of the villains, the footprints of the priests and their families, who have entered the sanctum through a secret entrance under a table. Cyrus executes them instead and applauds Daniel.
Another Daniel story, the sad, apocryphal tale of Susanna and the Elders, opens with the miscreants and their victim, like an episode of Columbo. Two judges lust after Susanna, the beautiful, young wife of a
prominent elder named Joakim. Each hides in the palace garden, hoping to meet the nubile maiden secretly. Right on cue, Susanna decides to bathe in the pool—a scene that later provided endless opportunities for artists to portray female nudity with an ecclesiastical stamp of approval. The voyeuristic judges rush out and threaten to accuse her of adultery with another if she doesn’t secretly commit it with them. “I am completely trapped,” Susanna moans. “If I yield, it will be my death; if I refuse, I cannot escape your power.” Yet she bravely refuses to submit. Instead she screams. But the men shout as well and run to open the garden gates, and as people rush in, the judges begin their glib lies, claiming to have witnessed Susanna fornicating. Predictably, she is condemned to die.
Daniel now provides the first courtroom reversal. He interviews the two alleged witnesses separately, finding that one claims Susanna was fornicating under a mastic tree, while the other says it was a holm tree. Clearly one is lying, because the mastic (pistachio) is much smaller, a mere shrub overshadowed by the evergreen holm. One tree could not be mistaken for the other. Thus Daniel is the first known literary figure to use physical evidence in a criminal case and also the first to cross-examine witnesses for discrepancies in their testimony.
More than two millennia passed before the next major proto-detective appeared in literature. In the 1740s, the French satirist and philosopher Voltaire published Zadig, or, The Book of Fate, a volume that was to prove influential in the history of literature, science, and fictional detectives. The title character is a Babylonian philosopher, but the vanity and injustice mocked by Voltaire are derived mostly from the author’s daily life in eighteenth-century Europe. Like Candide, poor Zadig suffers a roller coaster of misfortunes, in a wildly adventurous story replete with love, war, politics, and philosophy. At one point even his devotion to science and observation gets him into trouble.
Zadig is walking outdoors when a royal eunuch runs up and demands, “Young man, have you seen the queen’s dog?”
“A bitch, I think, not a dog,” replies Zadig with the smugness of many detectives to come. “A very small spaniel who has lately had puppies; she limps with the left foreleg, and has very long ears.”
Of course the eunuch wants to know which way the dog has gone, but Zadig insists he hasn’t seen it and goes on his way. Then a horseman runs up and asks Zadig if he has seen the king’s missing horse. Zadig replies, “A first-rate galloper, small-hoofed, five feet high; tail three feet and a half long; cheek pieces of the bit of twenty-three-karat gold; shoes silver?” The huntsman naturally exclaims, “Which way did he go?” but again Zadig explains that he hasn’t even glimpsed the animal. Not surprisingly, he is hauled before the royal court and condemned to a labor camp. Then the dog and the horse are found. The court reluctantly nullifies its verdict but fines Zadig for lying.
Only then does Zadig explain himself. With the encyclopedic gaze of a textbook detective, he had seen a small dog’s paw prints in the sand, showing faint streaks between them wherever the sand rose, indicating that it was a female with the pendant teats of a bitch with pups. Other brushings of the sand alongside the front-paw prints hinted that she had long ears, and a fainter imprint of one paw suggested lameness. Zadig also noticed the equidistant horseshoe tracks of a trained galloper and marks upon stone that told him its shoes were silver. He could discern where its tail had brushed to three and a half feet on each side in a narrow alley, and leaves had been knocked down from a height of five feet. The horse’s gold bit had left marks on a stone. Like his descendant writers in the detective story genre, Voltaire did not hesitate to stack the deck on behalf of his protagonist.
Nine years before voltaire died in 1778, Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier was born in France. He would become one of the great zoologists, remembered now as Baron Cuvier. Surprisingly, he demonstrated that extinction had occurred—contrary to the static perfection of ecclesiastical nature—yet actively opposed the evolutionary ideas of Lamarck and others. Nowadays we honor him mostly for his pioneer work in comparative anatomy. Especially relevant to detective stories is Cuvier’s theory of the correlation between various parts of animals—his realization that, because of their predictable interrelation, a single bone can tell an experienced scientist a great deal about the structure and behavior of the animal that once possessed it. This idea became the cornerstone of paleontology, and such similarities were part of what Darwin later reinterpreted as evidence of kinship.
“Today,” wrote Cuvier in the early 1800s, “someone who sees the print of a cloven hoof can conclude that the animal which left the print was a ruminative one, and this conclusion is as certain as any that can be made in physics or moral philosophy.” Then he evokes Voltaire’s contribution to his thinking about scientific detective work: “This single track therefore tells the observer about the kind of teeth, the kind of jaws, the haunches, the shoulder, and the pelvis of the animal which has passed: it is more certain evidence than all of Zadig’s clues.” He was not speaking only of what would evolve into forensics. He was demonstrating that scientific work of this kind is a detecting process—observation, research, the pursuit of clues, the rejection of false clues, the weighing of evidence, its presentation before a critical group of peers—and by implication that detective work is a kind of science.
In 1841, inspired by Cuvier, Edgar Allan Poe had C. Auguste Dupin, his detective in the first full-fledged detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” seek enlightenment in a work of science. From this genesis story in the field, the detective is presented as a genius with a gift—not a professional, not really trained, but somehow far more astute than anyone else who might be looking into this mystery. Poe created the melancholy, erudite, nighttime-loving, eccentric Dupin out of Romantic Byronic types. In some ways Dupin is first cousin to Victor Frankenstein, but Poe added various interesting traits that would later show up in Conan Doyle. In the story, he hands a science volume to the narrator and says, “Read now this passage from Cuvier.” (The story appears in this anthology; telling more about it would be unfair, in case you have the good fortune to have never read it before.) Dupin consults the great zoologist in part because they have similar methods—the construction of a full scene from a few pieces.
Most scholars proclaim “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to be the first official detective story in the genre—the first account built around the investigative technique employed in deciphering clues and solving a crime. Yet, although it fully deserves its fame, it was preceded by an earlier tale, “The Secret Cell,” published by William E. Burton in 1837, the year that Victoria became queen. In this action-packed story, the adventures of a detective identified only as L— include investigative legwork, disguises, and the trailing of suspects, all told with a lively sense of adventure and a good ear for dialogue. Prior to its inclusion in The Dead Witness, Burton’s story has never been reprinted since its first appearance.
Curiously, a scientist gave a poetic name to what detectives such as Dupin do. In 1880, renowned biologist and educator Thomas H. Huxley (famously nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his willingness to tackle any opponent of evolutionary science) carefully analyzed Voltaire’s hero in an essay entitled “On the Method of Zadig,” which bore the intriguing subtitle “Retrospective Prophecy as a Function of Science.” Huxley argued that “the term prophecy as much applies to outspeaking as to foretelling.” He went on to make parallels relevant to detective stories: “The foreteller 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 ‘back-teller’!) affirms that, so many hours or years ago, such and such things were to be seen.” Huxley elegantly explained why such evidence-based observation was a threat to authoritarian regimes, in Voltaire’s imaginary Babylon as well as in Huxley’s everyday Victorian England.
Seven years later, arthur
Conan Doyle published his first novel about Sherlock Holmes. A Study in Scarlet is a detective story wrapped around an adventure story; Holmes and Watson disappear for the central half of the book. But first we witness their initial meeting and their moving in together as roommates. It is a legendary moment in crime fiction. In the setting that has become even more a part of popular culture than Huck Finn’s raft or Ahab’s ship, the sitting room at Baker Street provided a stage for exhibitions of brainpower. Sherlock Holmes is a Romantic figure but also a modern one—the hero as thinker and observer, the man of action as man of science. “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground,” he declares later, “and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.” Conan Doyle himself never quite committed to this extent, and the loss of his son and other loved ones lured him permanently into the darkened parlors of quack spiritualists. But his most famous creation remained adamant. Sherlock Holmes was interested in evidence and would find it through his own hybrid of observation and reasoning. Like scientists, who require experience in the field as well as familiarity with their specialized literature, Holmes is both a noticing machine and a walking archive of criminology. “It reminds me of the circumstances attendant upon the death of Van Jansen, in Utrecht, in the year ’34,” he says as he examines a corpse. When Inspector Gregson admits that he doesn’t know the case, Holmes says, “There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.”
One morning early on, Watson mocks an anonymous magazine article entitled “The Book of Life,” the author of which makes grand claims for the value of inferences from minute observation in deciphering the lives of others:
From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other … Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study … By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.