Holmes Stories Research Articles

Interrogating The Politics Of Anonymity Among The Writers Of Detective Fiction : A Study

If we go through the Bengali detective fictions which are greatly inspired by Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes's stories, we can notice an interesting fact. Stories like ''HarimotirHatyakando'', ''OdbhutHatyakari'', ''Sindhuker lash'', ''Jal Raja'' etc. have been published anonymously (SekalerGoyendaGolpo, ed. by Arindam Dasgupta) There is a possibility that these stories are written by women writers and like many women writers and artists they could not expose their name, which was a common picture of Victorian age in our country and also in Europe. The Bronte Sisters, Mary Anne Evans and many of the women novelists had to use pen names to pursue their creative genius. This problem has been addressed by Gilbert and Gubar in their work The Mad woman in the Attic" as "Anxiety of Authorship". I think the anonymity of the above mentioned detective fictions calls for a thorough research. Who are these anonymous writers? Can this identification open a new room or Bengali women writers? This paper would try to address these questions.

‘Magnificent Intellect’: Character, Intelligence, and Genius in Sherlock Holmes

Since his first appearances in print, Sherlock Holmes has served as literature’s resident genius. But what does ‘genius’ mean in a world that increasingly conceptualises intelligence as a quantifiable and measurable phenomenon? This essay considers the characterisation of Holmes’s intelligence in the context of a revolution in the way human intelligence is understood – a revolution instigated by Francis Galton’s 1869 Hereditary Genius and emblematised by the invention of the IQ test in 1905. This historical context situates Holmes’s character at the crux of a shift in the conception of intelligence, as encapsulating a moment of cultural wavering between ‘genius’ as a mysterious quality or gift, and ‘genius’ as a higher-than-average number on a scale. Ultimately, this essay suggests that these competing models of the characterisation of intelligence in the Holmes stories illuminate a fundamental clash between the novelistic ideal of portraying incommensurable individuality on the one hand, and the de-individualising trend of the IQ model of intelligence on the other.

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method, by Brian McCuskey

Reviewed by: How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method by Brian McCuskey Jonathan Cranfield (bio) How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method, by Brian McCuskey; pp. 195. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021, $34.95. Academics who have worked on Arthur Conan Doyle will recognize two types of articles that they are frequently asked to review: the first identifies an obscure topic from the Sherlock Holmes stories and pursues it in excruciating detail (imagine an article titled “Alpinestocks vs Alpine-Stocks: The Case of the Vanishing Hyphen”); the second operates in an entirely different discipline but uses the figure of Holmes to structure its argument (perhaps “‘Some Ecstatic Dream’: Sherlock Holmes and REM Sleep Cycles”). The former usually totters along the ill-defined border between Holmesiana (the half-satirical, half-earnest pursuit of canonical truths within the Holmes stories) and conventional literary criticism. The latter, an easy desk reject for scientific journals without the Holmesian framing, can be sanguinely passed on to a humanities scholar to fire the necessary bolt to the temple. The proliferation of both types illustrates the wide variety of truth-claims for which Holmes’s testimony can be summoned. Brian McCuskey’s How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method identifies and analyzes a series of public debates and controversies (political, religious, and academic) where Sherlock Holmes or the vaunted Holmesian method was generally invoked by all sides as a guarantor of their correctness. The examples are mostly drawn from the career and afterlife of Conan Doyle himself. McCuskey explores Holmes’s method in some detail, mostly offering a useful summary of work on the subject by the likes of Stephen Knight, Ronald R. Thomas, Thomas Sebeok, and Michael Saler. He argues, in broad terms, that the central “paradox” identified in Conan Doyle’s life by many writers and biographers—how could he create the great rationalist detective and also believe in spiritualism and fairies?—is a false dichotomy (46). While Holmes avowedly excluded the supernatural from his worldview, his mode of reasoning was entirely specious, unfalsifiable, and purposefully riddled with gaps that could be supplemented with leaps of faith, so-called common sense, nonsense, errata, confirmation bias, or ordinary prejudice. In short: you can find a Holmes quote to support any imaginable proposition whether profound, trivial, or unhinged. [End Page 687] Yet, since Holmes’s first appearance in A Study in Scarlet (1887), he has been deployed in a bewildering array of debates. McCuskey’s chapters, though they do add up to an overarching argument, read more naturally as a series of smaller case studies. Chapter 1 examines a snapshot of religious debates around eyewitness testimony, textual reliability, and the limits of infallibility in 1887. Did the Reverend Malcolm MacColl really see the corpse of an impaled Christian martyr on the banks of the Sava River or was it a “large bundle of drying haricot beans” (15)? The terms of this debate, christened “What the Canons Saw” in The Times (1788–present), “seemed almost to summon” Holmes into being according to McCuskey (16, 17). This tendentious phraseology captures the book’s limitations but also some of its self-aware charm. McCuskey has written a book-length deconstruction of a purely fictional mode of reasoning that was never intended to be externally consistent. He occasionally chastises himself for this foolishness, belatedly and playfully pulling his own methodology into his critique. Other chapters examine the genesis and epistemic structure of Conan Doyle’s spiritualist beliefs, his career as a proselytizer and public debater, the growth of Sherlock Holmes fandom, the constructivist theory wars of the 1980s, and the character’s role in online conspiracy theories pertaining to 9/11 and post-Trump American politics. So how did Sherlock pull the trick and convince generations of readers that his method of crime solving was replicable in their everyday lives? How could the same character’s words be used in self-justification by 9/11 truthers and newspaper fact-checkers, QAnon devotees and august professors, evolutionary biologists and the Intelligent Design movement? The answer, of course, is that there is no Holmesian method, just a series of pleasingly-phrased, quotable...

Review: How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method, by Brian McCuskey

Review: <i>How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method</i>, by Brian McCuskey

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction, by Andrew Glazzard

Reviewed by: The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction by Andrew Glazzard Penny Fielding (bio) The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction, by Andrew Glazzard; pp. xii + 152. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, £75.00, $110.00. The title of Andrew Glazzard’s book, The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction, immediately invites us into Holmesian detective mode. “You see, but you do not observe,” Holmes tells Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891), before filling in what Watson ought to have taken in (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Richard Lancelyn Green [Oxford University Press, 1993], 8). In like fashion, Glazzard draws our attention to a host of details that we may regularly perceive while reading, but do not often pause to consider. A fine early chapter on “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892) directs our attention away from the more usual consideration of Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s murderous colonial background, and onto the apparently mundane details of the family’s economic condition. Glazzard looks at the sums mentioned in Mrs. Stoner’s will and spins them into a detailed consideration of Roylott’s status as an inefficient member of the rentier class. He draws on records of the agricultural depression of the later nineteenth century and the history of rural depopulation, then expands outward into other condition of England fictions to contextualize Roylott’s attempts to secure his stepdaughter’s inheritance. Holmes, Glazzard argues, is a master of his own elaborate fictions, which may betray an underlying social motive that outweighs the nominal investigation and solution of a case. He acts to protect not only his clients but also the reputation of their social class in order that “the public have a satisfactory explanation for disturbing events” (3). The book identifies this public sphere in twenty short chapters, each covering a story or a cluster of stories, grouped into seven sections that address different aspects of social and, in the later chapters, political history: finance, class, family, sex, race, war, and secrecy. The short case studies are intriguing. One of the pleasures of reading the book is that it offers the kind of information that a scholarly edition aspires to include; at the same time, in 200 pages of expanded context, cross-referencing, and comparison it finds room for much more detail than an edition could contain. It is an ideal companion to the Holmes stories. Glazzard’s prose is crisp, elegant, and to the point, and he manages to pack in a great deal of information. Glazzard’s approach enables some useful cross-referencing between stories: in a taxonomy of exotic femininity, he notes how many of Doyle’s eroticized women come from South and Central America. We are also made aware of how often Doyle is thinking about Ireland, or the ways in which the Second Boer War recurs. The overall effect is one of reading not so much for the plot as for a story’s incidental details. Apparent plot devices spring to historical life. The sham marriage of the late story “The Adventure of the Solitary [End Page 704] Cyclist” (1903) leads to a discussion of marriage law. Minor characters are moved to center stage to good effect. Holmes’s dim view of Inspector Lestrade is passed through the lens of social class. Metropolitan Police detectives were generally working class (in contradistinction to the military officer class), recipients of a disdain that was often manifest in the newspapers. Glazzard brings in the notorious case of the Road Hill House murder, in which middle-class Constance Kent was released without charge following the accusations of the ungentlemanly Inspector Jack Whicher. A section on scandals, in Bohemia and elsewhere, covers late Victorian and Edwardian improprieties, including those of the Prince of Wales himself, and inserts Professor Moriarty’s principal henchman, Colonel Sebastian Moran, into them. Here, as Glazzard points out, Doyle’s contemporaries would have been much more attuned than today’s readers to reports of an aristocratic world “where they often encounter[ed] folly and . . . rampant criminality” (5). Pulling the focus wider...

Visualising the Unseen: Supernatural Stories and Illustration in the Strand

Visualising the Unseen:Supernatural Stories and Illustration in the Strand Emma Liggins "The Strand has always made a point of taking good stories," claimed a retrospective editorial in 1911 celebrating twenty-one years of a successful magazine.1 As Kate Jackson suggests in her important work on the Strand Magazine's publisher and first editor George Newnes, the ambitious project of "revolutionis[ing] the market for magazines" owed much to Newnes's enthusiastic promotion of the art of short story writing.2 By cramming the new magazine with illustrated short fiction, which opened most issues and dominated the contents pages, Newnes catered for a mass audience who could hardly wait for the next instalment of Sherlock Holmes's detective prowess or another thrilling tale of imperial adventure. Quickly becoming renowned for its short stories, the Strand Magazine has now become synonymous with the popularity of fin de siécle detective fiction. Some critical attention has also been paid to its generous inclusion of children's stories by regular contributors such as E. Nesbit, which helped to consolidate its mass appeal. Yet its embracing of other subgenres of the short story has been neglected. Ghost stories and other supernatural tales featuring fantastic creatures such as vampires, fairies, and monsters remained popular from the 1890s into the twentieth century. The Strand's juxtaposition of these stories with non-fictional articles on spiritualism, science, and technology as well as the illustrations created by the magazine's expert team of artists are worthy of more critical interest. In this article I argue that paying attention to the illustrations and captions printed alongside ghostly and uncanny stories in the Strand between 1891 and 1917 can transform our interpretations of how the supernatural was represented during this period. The complex interaction between supernatural story and illustration in the fin de siécle periodical press reveals cultural anxieties and curiosities about new technologies, the afterlife, and the medical profession. Art editors, whose roles were enhanced by [End Page 365] the end of the century, actively shaped the layout of illustrated magazines that experimented with new forms of visuality. In his excellent reading of Sidney Paget's illustrations for the Holmes stories, Christopher Pittard has claimed that "the role of illustration is crucial to an understanding of how the Strand policed its reading community."3 Pittard considers how images of the detective helped frame potentially progressive ideologies within a conservative aesthetic, but how was the reading community positioned in relation to its consumption of illustrations of the ghostly and the uncanny? If, according to Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, "the image/text/reader dialogue will always … be a product of its cultural milieu," then fin de siécle readers of illustrated monthlies decoded images of the supernatural in relation to what they knew about science and scepticism.4 Drawing on debates about illustration in periodical studies, I consider what is left in or out of the frame in illustrations of the supernatural and what this might tell us about editorial policy on ghosts and the sceptical reader. Pittard argues that Paget's images obscured detail because Newnes "didn't want his readers to be peering too closely at corpses" for fear of compromising the "cheap, healthful literature" he intended to promote, but this claim does not adequately account for ghost stories and their images.5 The phantoms, spirits, and terrified witnesses featured in illustrations of ghostly encounters must be interpreted in relation to the climate of uncertainty about spiritualism and the supernatural. Illustration and the Borders of Acceptability The illustrated monthly became one of the bestselling magazine formats of the 1890s. The successful formula of short fiction, serialised novels or novellas, illustrations, interviews, and glossy photographs catered to new audiences who were receptive to the visual allure of New Journalism. In an early editorial in the Idler Magazine, editor Robert Barr considers the need for an illustrated monthly in an age of mass literacy: "Time had come when a new monthly magazine ought really to be published. Here is a great reading population crying out for printed matter, and yet nobody seems to pay much attention to the appeal."6 When Newnes was interviewed for the "Lions in their Dens...

Performative Sherlock Holmes: Male Direction and Female Digression in “A Scandal in Bohemia”

Embodying archetypical Victorian masculinity, Sherlock Holmes is an unrivaled man in his intellectual capacity. Through this character, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories attempt to consolidate ge...

“Reason Run Riot”: Holmes and the Ripper in A Study in Terror and Murder by Decree

:Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print just months before the “Jack the Ripper” murders began. Both the fictional detective and the real-life killer were firmly established in popular imagination by the early 1890s. Arthur Conan Doyle himself took considerable interest in the case, visiting the crime scenes and looking at some of the police evidence. Elements from the crimes found their way into his Holmes stories. An imagined confrontation between Holmes and the Ripper was almost inevitable. This article looks at two films A Study in Terror (Dir. James Hill, 1965) and Murder by Decree(Dir. Bob Clark, 1979) and their markedly different approaches to the contest between sleuth and murderer. It examines the parallel celebrity of Holmes and the Ripper, considers both films in the contexts of their respective periods, contrasts the decisions taken over characters who appear in both projects, and examines how different theories of the murders influenced both scripts. This article concludes by investigating how the films' interpretations of Holmes, Watson, Mycroft, and Lestrade influenced later portrayals.

Re-imagining the Literary Brand

This paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Analysing Spielberg's film, The Adventures of Tintin (2011), and Andrew Motion's fictional continuation of Stevenson's Treasure Island, it argues that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture.

The Public, the Press, and Celebrities in The Return of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle and his consulting detective had been famous for more than ten years when Doyle came to write The Return of Sherlock Holmes. In the following essay, I argue that this experience of fame shaped the composition of the third series of Holmes stories, in which the detective is resurrected a decade after going over the Reichenbach Falls. The essay approaches celebrity as a competitive interaction in which the public, the press, and the celebrity vie for control. It is argued that the stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes work to empower the various celebrities that they portray – including not just Holmes but also well-known aristocrats, statesmen, scholars, and female ‘beauties’ – and to disempower their rival co-participants in the celebrity dynamic: the public and the press.

The Case of the Case History: Detecting the Medical Report in Sherlock Holmes

Critics have examined both the influence of the medical case model and the newer laboratory sciences on Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales, but they have often overlooked key aspects of the stories' turn-of-the-century historical context. I argue that in response to the indefinite rewards offered by the up-and-coming laboratory sciences and the grandiose claims of many of those practicing these sciences, Conan Doyle chose to circle back to an earlier clinical method and to echo a type of case narrative that provides both closure and disclosure via post-mortem exam. Thus, Conan Doyle's stories, with their breakdown into Watsonian history and Holmesian summation, register the value of clinical procedures by using the established medical case study that ends in autopsy as a template. In his fictional echoing of the case culminating in post-mortem exam, Conan Doyle's Holmes stories draw attention to the accuracy of knowledge that only such cases can provide, and in doing so, Conan Doyle highlights the...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes y las enfermedades infecciosas

Besides a pleasant author of best sellers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a medical doctor, writing excellent short stories about the exercise of his profession in England. However, even he mentions The British Medical Journal and The Lancet in the Sherlock Holmes's stories, when in the plot introduces infectious diseases, Conan Doyle ignores important discoveries in the field of tetanus. Anyway, the appearing of infectious diseases in the adventures of the detective are rare: one mention of tetanus, another of leprosy and- the most analyzed in medical literature a case of murder by inoculation of bacteria, probably the agent of melioidosis. Also he makes his hero discovers the toxic actions of a medusa and a transplant of solid organ. Little for a physician and less for an author who also wrote science fiction: it seems that the history of the great medical discoveries at the end of nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth has passed by his side.., and he just couldn't see it.

Sherlock Holmes in Australian Reasons for Judgment or Decision

The paper deals with references to Sherlock Holmes in six sets of Australian reasons for judgment or decision. The references occur in the following three contexts: Holmes’s occupational performance of or philosophising about the fact-finding function; tools used by Holmes while detecting; and whether it would be necessary for others in certain contexts to match Holmes’s detective skills. In dealing with those references, almost all of the Holmes stories and all of the Holmes novels are mentioned. Images of illustrations from three of the stories and three of the novels are also included. One of those illustrations was the first ever to depict Holmes wearing a deerstalker cap and seems not to have reproduced before now since its publication in 1890. The paper contains a dozen appendices, whose topics are: the extent of awareness of Holmes in the non-English-speaking world; Holmes and headgear; words formed from the names, “Sherlock”, “Holmes”, “Sherlock Holmes” and “Watson”; Holmes’s actual or intended writings; Holmes’s views on circumstantial evidence; references in the Sherlock Holmes canon to motorised road transport and other technological innovations; Oscar Wilde’s knowledge of Holmes; references in the Sherlock Holmes canon to train journeys involving Victoria, Paddington, Charing Cross and Euston stations; Holmes’s foreign travels, with particular reference to Italy and an unusual Italian connection of Conan Doyle, and Holmes's attitude to domestic and foreign State honours and tangible gifts; Holmes’s works of reference; and a discussion of certain aspects, particularly legal, of “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”.

Nation, identity and the fascination with forensic science in Sherlock Holmes and CSI

Although the popular television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation presents cutting-edge images and laboratory techniques, it reiterates the reassuring ideological message and the glorification of the man of science that typify Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. While the Holmes stories use reassuring, formulaic narratives to consolidate a normative national identity and counter increasing disenchantment with empire, CSI replays a similar sort of procedural detective story to reassure viewers with the fantasy that the United States can be secured amidst threats of violence and terrorism, that individual identity, as well as national identity, can be fixed and scientifically assured.

Foreword: Perspectives on Arthur Conan Doyle and Evidence

Julian Barnes' novel Arthur &amp; George is based on the true story of Arthur Conan Doyle's involvement in the case of George Edalji, an English solicitor wrongfully convicted of horse maiming in 1903. Conan Doyle successfully employed the methods of his literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, to clear Edalji. That episode raised questions about the adequacy of remedies for wrongful conviction, and was one of the reasons for creation of the English Court of Criminal Appeal. Given the impact that Conan Doyle's Holmes stories had on the development and understanding of scientific evidence, and fact-finding in general, Arthur &amp; George invites us to think about those topics, as well as wrongful convictions and the impact of fiction on the way that we understand evidence. The fascinating contributions presented here result from an invitation to their authors to write on whichever of these themes they pleased.

Ritual and the Liminality of Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles

Ritual and the Liminality of Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four ana The Hound of the Baskervilles Jesse Oak Taylor-Ide University of Wisconsin, Madison THE LATE-VICTORIAN PERIOD presented the need to confront an increasing dissolution of boundaries that had once been more concretely defined. In 1859 (the year Conan Doyle was born) Darwin published The Origin of Species, removing the concept of a solid divide between humans and animals. Similarly, the increasing flow of people to and from the far reaches of the globe turned London, the seat of British power, culture, and identity, into what Watson called a "cesspool in which the loungers and idlers of empire are inevitably dredged."1 Many of these "loungers and idlers" were British, many were foreign, and many seemed to blur the line between these two categories, either being of mixed blood, or having acquired foreign tendencies through sojourns in Marlow's "dark places of the earth."2 Within this "cesspool" of ontological uncertainty, Sherlock Holmes is generally understood, and indeed presents himself, as the ultimate rational being—the champion of the solid, masculine, British mind in the face of foreign mysticism and irrationality .3 He is in fact more complicated, serving as a mediator between late-Victorian British society and the irrational, supernatural, and foreign elements threatening it. This mediating role is mirrored within the liminality of his own character as he attempts to reconcile his often intuitive and meditative methods with his (and society's) espousal of the purely rational mind. Sherlock Holmes represents a marriage of distinctly oppositional epistemological frameworks—the reason and science associated with the British masculinity on the one hand, and the intuitive, the irrational associated with the foreign and feminine on the 55 ELT 48 : 1 2005 other. This essay explores the role of ritual transformation in Holmes's ability to integrate these apparent contradictions in two emblematic texts, The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles. ♦ ♦ ♦ One of the most powerful oppositions running throughout the Holmes stories is that between humanity and nature. Tennyson's lines, "Move upward, working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die,"4 express the widely held desire to assert the clear distinction between the human and the animal. The fear that this line was not firm—that people have animal instincts that could erupt through fissures in the rigid structure of society, causing them to "revert to the animal"5—is played out in many of the Holmes stories, as well as other popular literature of the time, such as Stoker's Dracula and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Victorian social theorists from Marx to Mill equated foreign lands with prior stages of evolution.6 Thus, it is not surprising that in many of Holmes's cases, and every one that deals with the apparently supernatural , this struggle between the human and animal is directly connected to foreign lands.7 Often, as in The Sign of Four, these cases bring to light dark secrets lying behind apparently legitimate fortunes that were brought home from abroad, where the crime under investigation is in fact retribution for wrongs committed overseas.8 In others, such as The Hound of the Baskervilles, characters are transformed through time spent abroad and endowed with "other-worldly" knowledge that can be put to nefarious purposes. Holmes's ability to bring the apparently mystical and supernatural threats stemming from these places of "darkness " into the "light" of rational explanation, then, serves to affirm the humanity of civilization, and is connected to the "civilizing mission" of colonialism. Unlike many of the criminals he pursues, Holmes rarely leaves Britain .9 Instead he highlights the degree to which "Britain" was becoming an increasingly hybridized entity through the influx of foreign influences . In order to counter these threats, Holmes goes through transformations similar to those associated with sojourns abroad through the use of ritual process. Social theorist Victor Turner describes such ritual processes as symbolic dissolutions of the self, departures from the societal structure. This leads to a period of liminality, or anti-structure, where the individual is "betwixt and between" worlds. Eventually, a reintegration into structured society follows, with the individual...

The private eye as urbane

It is in such a city, of the derelict and the displaced, that film-goers once encountered the private eye. And while we recognise the private eye as naturally urban, the ‘hard-boiled’ guys of Chandler, David Goodis and their imitators rarely appeal as urbane. Dictionary advice offers a neatly-plotted resolution to such a puzzle, informing us that ‘urbane’ is dependent on ‘urban’ in the manner that ‘humane’ is connected unavoidably to ‘human’. As with much of the information scattered across a mystery narrative, such deduction may be too neat. The varying linkages of ‘urban’ and ‘urbane’ can be queried in that classic tale of the twentieth-century city, the detective story. In what sense is the detective, as urbane male hero, dependent on the urban world in which he moves?; ;

Sherlock's Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural History (review)

Reviewed by: Sherlock’s Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural History Rosemary Jann (bio) Sherlock’s Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural History, by Joseph A. Kestner; pp. viii + 250. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997, £45.00, $72.95. This contribution to the voluminous critical literature on Sherlock Holmes takes as its subject the ways in which the entire Holmes canon “served to model male gender behavior” (7), as social pressures upon male identity became particularly acute in the fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth century. Readers of Joseph Kestner’s Masculinities in Victorian Painting (1995) will recognize a number of the same critical moves and concerns that were there applied to the representation of gender in visual art. In this study he attempts to chart Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s shifting concerns about turn-of-the-century masculinity by analyzing the detective stories in chronological groupings to produce a Victorian, an Edwardian, and a “Georgian” Holmes. Although Kestner acknowledges that “stabilizing bourgeois, hegemonic masculinity” was Doyle’s general project, he sees such definitions as always being “inwardly conflicted” (13) and does an able job of revealing the many strains and contradictions contained within the illusion of a monolithic masculine identity during this period. By exhaustively inventorying instances of male behavior in the Holmes tales, he seeks to demonstrate that these detective fictions were inspired primarily [End Page 314] by Doyle’s efforts to query, construct, negotiate, and contest contemporary masculine ideals. His study offers a useful overview of gender issues throughout the canon and a number of fruitful insights: on Baden-Powell’s use of Holmes’s methods to model Boy Scout conduct, for instance, on Doyle’s own function as a male paradigm in the eyes of his contemporaries, on the alignment of reason and science with ideals of masculinity, on the symbolic possibilities of wounding in undermining male power, and on a recurring pattern of (failed) father-son relationships. The ambitious reach of the study and its eclectic theorizing are ultimately a source more of weakness than of strength, however. The catalogue of “issues concerning the formation of masculinity” that Kestner sets out to inventory covers virtually everything of cultural concern at the turn of the century: school, sports, army, and empire; concepts of heroism and chivalry; class insecurities; the prestige of science; national and ethnic stereotyping; international unrest; anxieties about racial degeneration, terrorism, and economic competition; law, punishment, and criminality; changing attitudes toward women (39). While signaling an admirable attempt to view gender roles as inextricable from larger networks of social power and ideology, this encyclopedic approach often blunts the study’s ability to contribute specific and original insights to the theorizing of masculinity. A great deal of the analysis here consists of citing (often at considerable length) what other critics have had to say about class, race, gender, imperialism, and family relationships in the Holmes stories, and simply recasting these as insights about the construction of masculinity, or of quoting historical generalizations about the Victorian or Edwardian turn of mind in order to map the Holmes stories point-by-point upon them. What results is more a compendium than a synthesis of previous theorizing. The study’s efforts to organize and classify the treatment of masculinity in the canon are not always convincing: attempts to differentiate between the homosocial and heterosexual emphases in The Return of Sherlock Holmes stories seem artificial, for instance, given that women appear to be no more or less instrumental in several mysteries in the first group (“The Dancing Men” and “The Golden Pince-Nez”) than they are in those from the second (“Solitary Cyclist,” “Charles Augustus Milverton”). Holmes’s Georgian period, plagued by “ambiguity, uncertainty and indeterminacy” (160), seems little different from his Edwardian one, characterized by “uncertainty, anxiety and disorientation” (126). The New Historical language in which much of the study is cast—interrogating the script of masculinity, policing transgressive behaviors, and so forth—also assorts oddly with its occasionally conventional assumptions about authorial intentionality and literature as a mirror of contemporary concerns. While it is certainly plausible—indeed common—to see a text unconsciously serving conflicting ideological impulses, it is more difficult to make the case...

The secret marriage of Sherlock Holmes and other eccentric readings

The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes is about reading, a process that we take for granted. But Sherlock Holmes, the cultural icon to whose exploits Michael Atkinson gives new readings, became famous by taking nothing for granted. Holmes's adventures can be read in new ways, including ways that he himself would have found startling, but which can give contemporary readers satisfaction. In clear, accessible prose that will engage specialists and lay readers alike, Atkinson engages in a series of flirtations with nine of Arthur Conan Doyle's favorite detective fictions, using the tools of modern literary theory, from depth psychology to deconstruction. Bluebeard, the kundalini serpent, and Conan Doyle's mother pop up alongside Jung, Nietzsche, and Derrida as guides to new understandings of these classic stories. Just as Holmes uses treatises on tobacco ash and tattoos to give fresh readings to puzzling facts, Atkinson employs widely different critical strategies to unravel the mysteries of reading itself. What a delightful book! This is surely the most interesting writing you will ever read about Sherlock Holmes, but it is much more. Michael Atkinson gives us literary criticism at its best: the sheer fun of watching a bold and imaginative reader breathe into well-loved, but well-worn, fictions new and enchanting life. Atkinson's mind races as nimbly as Holmes's own, and he makes the stories our hansom cab through human nature itself. A tour de force! ---Norman N. Holland, author of Murder in a Dephi Seminar A book that speaks directly to readers. . . Atkinson sees far beneath the surface of the Sherlock stories to provide fascinating commentary. ---Cincinnati Post Atkinson demonstrates a love and knowledge of the Holmes stories. . . I would recommend The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes enthusiastically to any lover of the Canon who is prepared to have their perceptions widened. ---Mystery Writers of America Michael Atkinson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Cincinnati.