Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Skill as a Detective Writer - Essay Example

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Skill as a Detective Writer The Victorian age is at once identified generally as a time of nostalgic perfection and rigid oppression. It is the age of change and social advances as well as the age of strict social structure and a severe regard for the customs of the past. During the later period, science had been seen to bring about numerous significant changes in the way people lived their lives, not always to the betterment of society and often creating situations in which the future effects were largely unknown. At the same time, there remained numerous unanswered questions regarding the role of the body and the functions it underwent, particularly as these concepts pertained to women, also considered the mysterious sex through no fault of their own. Crime in the cities was on the rise as more and more people came together in confined areas and yet little progress was made in the application of solving crime. Enter Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with his crime-solving protagonist Sherlock Holmes as he applies reason and intellect to the process of solving mysteries as can be seen in his characterizations, setting, plot and language in stories such as “The Man With the Twisted Lip,” “The Adventure of the Final Problem” and “The Adventure of the Empty House.” In bringing to life the character of Sherlock Holmes through 60 original stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced the scientific process to the process of solving crime. According to an article published in 1951, Doyle did not believe the contemporary process of solving crime through such processes as intuition or circumstantial evidence was sufficient for determining guilt or innocence (“Baker Street Reflections”, 1951). Trained as a physician himself, Doyle was intimately aware of the importance of the scientific process in deducing the causes of illness or the nature of injury as a means of helping his patients. According to his wife, “he was able, through his remarkable powers of deduction and inference, to locate missing people whose relatives had given them up as lost or murdered” (Lady Conan Doyle 1934, 29). This application of scientific method as a means of solving crimes was not Doyle’s only contribution to detective work, though. He also pioneered the use of fingerprint analysis, serology and weapons analysis in criminal investigation. His knowledge of geology also contributed to his genius in creating his characters and in revolutionizing the way in which the world investigated crime scenes. What was perhaps most remarkable was that Doyle instructed the world as to how forensic science could be used as a means of correctly deducing the nature of the crime and identity of the criminal through his entertaining short stories and novels featuring the now famous fictional Sherlock Holmes. Throughout his stories, Doyle allows his main character, Holmes, to change in accordance with the times even though he keeps Watson in an almost permanent state of shock and awe. Each story is told from Watson’s perspective and in many cases, Holmes first appears in the story in some kind of hiding. In “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, he is disguised as an old drug user hiding out in the basement of an opium den as he tries to figure out what happened to the missing Mr. St. Clair. By “The Final Problem”, he is in hiding and fearing for his life in anticipation of springing a trap to catch Moriarty and his entire string of criminals. His reappearance following his ‘death’ at the falls is also characterized by a disguise as he first appears to Watson as an old bookseller and uses a dummy cast of himself to lure the criminals to him. Holmes is seen to be very clever and enlightened as he works to take in all of the available evidence in a case. This is seen particularly in the “Twisted Lip” case as he carefully listens to what Mrs. St. Clair says of the letter she received from her husband. Although Holmes assures her that he believes that Mr. St. Clair is dead and had been murdered on the day she saw him at the opium house, he does not discount her assertion that her husband is alive or she would know it. He tells her, and Watson, “I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner” (Doyle, 90). Development of his character can be seen as one reads through these three stories as well. Holmes seems somewhat uncertain in the first case, “Twisted Lip”, as he struggles to understand the missing piece he knows is eluding him. He takes Holmes along with him to give Holmes a sounding board to bounce his ideas off as he tries to find the answer. In “Final Problem”, he knows what the issue is and is doing everything he can to stop the crime master but remains fearful that he will be unequal to the task. By the final case in this study, “Empty House”, Holmes is again confident in himself and spends the entire story sure of his conclusions. From the developing detective to the classic detective settings, Doyle knew how to develop a story in a way that would grab at the interest of the reader while still leaving a great deal of information in literal shadow. Many of his stories take place at night, in the dark or in only vaguely defined environments far away from the familiar streets of London. With “Twisted Lip”, the story starts in the very shadowed underworld of the opium den before moving into the dark night of the English countryside as Holmes and Watson make their way to the St. Clair household. For most of the story, Watson stays in the dark about just what is going on. He listens to Holmes tell him about what’s been going on in the case, goes to sleep for the night and then watches as Holmes brings Mr. St. Clair out of the beggar in the jail. The setting for “Final Problem” is filled with more daylight, but doesn’t seem to be so as it starts at night and the country that the two men travel through is glossed over: “We made our way to Brussels that night and spent two days there, moving on upon the third day as far as Strasburg” (Doyle 335). No details of what they do to pass the time are given and no description is offered of the things they see as is offered up in other areas such as the empty house in which the men take up watch in the third story. “Our feet creaked and crackled over the bare planking, and my outstretched hand touched a wall from which the paper was hanging in ribbons” (Doyle 456). In this way, the author is able to keep his reader’s attention focused on the darker elements of his story without allowing them to get distracted with extra details unnecessary to the central plot. The Holmes plots all seem to follow a similar pattern of Watson enjoying a quiet evening that is suddenly spoiled by an encounter with Holmes and the adventure begins with Watson playing the observer to Holmes’ brilliance. This allows the mystery to take shape as the narrator continues to wonder what will be the next step and the reader has the chance to try to guess the correct answer before it is revealed to Holmes. This seems entirely possible in stories such as “Twisted Lip” in which the answer to the puzzle is foreshadowed in Watson’s errand to the opium house and in Holmes’ disguise from a gentleman to a beggar within this same house. In spite of this, there are some details that remain difficult to ignore and thus keep the audience guessing, such as how a wife might not recognize her own husband or how the beggar has such a pitiful appearance as compared to the gentle features of Mr. St. Clair. Doyle does not stick to a single plot in his stories either as the plot is not so certain in stories such as “The Final Problem” when Holmes does not seem to be in complete control of the events taking shape. He is in hiding and on the run in the plot of this story, and he must rely upon the competence of others to keep himself safe. Although Watson attempts to piece together what happened on the narrow trail after he left Holmes alone, it is not Holmes solving the problem and so there are several rocks left unturned so to speak. The addition of Moriarty to the series gives Holmes a chance to push his mental abilities to the edge and its effects are seen in the less organized way in which he goes about business and in the less concrete ending to the tale. With the death of Moriarty, though, Holmes is able to move forward and perfect his skills in other areas as he remains in hiding from Moriarty’s old partners, only reinstating himself as these criminals come out of hiding on their own. By “The Empty House”, the plot is simple enough for Holmes to summarize near the end of the story: “I came over at once. I was seen by the sentinel, who would, I knew, direct the Colonel’s attention to my presence. He could not fail to connect my sudden return with his crime and to be terribly alarmed. I was sure that he would make an attempt to get me out of the way at once, and would bring round his murderous weapon for that purpose. I left him an excellent mark in the window, and, having warned the police that they might be needed … I took up what seemed to me to be a judicious point for observation, never dreaming that he would choose the same spot for his attack” (462). Again, Watson is reduced to observer as he was in the beginning, following Holmes and witnessing the unfolding of the solution just as the detective predicted. Throughout the Holmes mysteries, Doyle maintains a connection with the mainstream society who were his readers by keeping the language and interactions of his characters on a very high, polite level. This was in keeping with the values of his society and helps to establish the upstanding moral character of his main personalities. If they spoke with a coarse, street dialect, they would not have the training or the reputation necessary to convince the reader that they were capable of solving these crimes any better than the regular police force. When Holmes asks for access to the prisoner, for instance, in “Twisted Lip”, he instructs the jailor, “if you will have the great goodness to open that door very quietly, we will soon make him cut a much more respectable figure” (92). The stories are always narrated by Watson to preserve some sense of modesty of the detective in keeping with the standards of the times. The polite nature of the stories is even carried when mortal enemies meet. This is seen when Professor Moriarty confronts Holmes in his room in “The Final Problem.” Although Holmes is telling Watson about the encounter, the idea that manners were strongly at play in the encounter is clear. Moriarty tells Holmes with conviction “It has been an intellectual treat to me to see the way in which you have grappled with this affair, and I say, unaffectedly, that it would be a grief to me to be forced to take any extreme measure” (331). His appearance at Holmes’ home is an honest attempt to keep them from having to cross into mortal combat. Through his Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle emphasized first the importance of applying the scientific method to the business of solving crimes and then revealed the many innovative approaches that might be found as a means of solving the unanswerable questions of his time even as he stayed within the boundaries of his society’s expectations. Through all of his stories, it can be seen how Holmes quickly analyzes, compares and evaluates the information he is provided, using this ability to identify not only what is known, but also what is unknown and has yet to be discovered. Understanding where the gaps are enables him to discover innovative means of discovering the hiding place of a missing man or entrap a deadly enemy through disguise or decoy or some other means. While today’s methods may look somewhat different in that our disguises have become perhaps more believable and our means of deduction more automated, this same process of empirical scientific method continues to be the fundamental building block upon which modern crimes continue to be solved. Works Cited “Baker Street Reflections.” Justice of the Peach and Local Government Review. (September 1, 1951). Reprinted in Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook. Peter Haining (ed.). New York: Crescent Books, 1986. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes. New Jersey: Castle Publishing, 1987. Doyle, Lady Conan. “Conan Doyle was Sherlock Holmes.” Pearsons Magazine. (December, 1934). Reprinted in Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook. Peter Haining (ed.). New York: Crescent Books, 1986. Read More