Sheer Luck, Holmes? Clues Towards Canon Formation in Victorian Detective Fiction

Abstract

This chapter takes its rise from Franco Moretti’s claim that what gave Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories the edge over all rivals was the device of the fully functionalised clue. By way of part-homage to and part-critique of Moretti, the chapter develops an explanation for Conan Doyle’s success that shifts the accent away from the clue per se to the reader’s relationship to the detective figure. A narratological and characterological anatomy of a range of ‘rival’ Victorian detective fictions follows, with particular attention given to four pre-Holmes ‘near misses’ which adumbrate Conan Doyle’s breakthrough in intriguing ways: William E. Burton’s ‘The Secret Cell’ (1837), Dickens’s ‘Hunted Down’ (1859), Anna Katherine Green’s The Leavenworth Case (1878) and Metta Fuller Victor’s The Dead Letter (1865–6).