Kings and Queens of Crime

Essays on major Crime Writers

Alison Joseph on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It might seem odd, at first glance, this choice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as my influence. After all, what does he have to offer us now, this late-nineteenth century physician with a passion for spiritualism; this man who created the arch-rationalist Holmes, and yet who believed there were fairies at the bottom of his garden?

But in naming an influence, one must own up to envy. I envy him the ease of his story-telling, the consistency of the world he creates, with the shared rooms in Baker Street at its centre. I envy him the sharp gender divide of the Victorian era out of which he could forge the bond between Holmes and Watson, a buddy-friendship to rival any in Hollywood. With Watson as the human face of the duo, Holmes is freed to be utterly rational, totally objective, almost dislikeable, certainly dysfunctional - Mr. Spock to Watson's Captain Kirk, with all the enjoyable status-play that that provides.

I envy him, too, the incompetence of the nineteenth-century police force. How easy it is for Holmes to shine when competing with a bumbling company of constables of limited intelligence. Today's amateur detectives find themselves up against a modern police force, efficient and trained, with an armoury of scientific detection equipment.  Thinking about it, it's beyond me why any amateur sleuth discovering a body doesn't just pick up the phone and dial 999 like a sensible person, and then go home and pour a large G and T.

Sherlock Holmes, you see, is so wonderfully Of His Time. He inhabits an England on the brink, an Empire in fissure, where past crimes come back to haunt the individual in the form of Indian snakes and African poisons, where the consequences of wrong-doing return from far-flung outposts of the colonies like a collective anxiety erupting through the imperial fault lines. And so we have sightings of monkey-like creatures in the Home Counties, of pale wraith-like men haunting respectable English houses, of betrayed South African diamond miners or Australian ne'er-do-wells returning to England to exact their revenge. Guilt in Holmes's pre-Freudian world is something external: the stuff of murder, not nightmares.

Through it all, Holmes moves with grace, fluidity and brilliance, making order out of chaos, finding an objective, scientific certainty at the heart of even the most terrible and apparently random acts of evil. He makes forays into the darkness, somehow immune, protected by the demons that inhabit his own soul - and emerges victorious, if not unscathed.

And it is in this that he becomes timeless, as he reflects the human yearning that it might all make sense after all.
             '"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" ' Holmes asks, in His Last Bow. '"What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever."'

And there is the great standing perennial problem which makes even today's sleuths hang up before they've dialled the last '9', postpone the G and T, and set out to discover just what the hell is going on.

Alison Joseph

Alison Joseph is author of the Sister Agnes books