Tuesday
I share today an Alexis Hall essay I encountered in CrimeReads arguing that Sherlock Holmes is a hard-boiled detective. (Thanks to Literary Hub for the alert.) For those who study detective fiction, the thesis is startling because Holmes is generally grouped with the soft-boiled or puzzle-solving detectives, more like Dupin, Poirot, Miss Marple, Nero Wolfe or Peter Wimsey than Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, or Nick Hammer.
It has been said, in Agatha Christie novels, that murder is little more than a social faux pas, disrupting the elegant balance of country life until the detective arrives to restore the status quo. Raymond Chandler summed up the genre as
how somebody stabbed Mrs Pottington Postlethwaite with the solid platinum poniard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lame in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests.
Hall, however, makes the case that Holmes is grappling with the mean streets of London no less than Spade and Marlowe are grappling with California’s. As he puts it,
one can make a strong case that the Sherlock Holmes stories represent, in their Victorian way, a sincere effort to portray the reality of crime in all of its cruelty, caprice and banality.
Indeed, one doesn’t see Holmes sensitively engaging with upper-class protocol, as occurs with Christie’s and Sayers’s detectives. Rather, he’s pioneering what we now regard as standard crime-solving practice:
Holmes’s “methods” might superficially resemble the erratic genius of Poirot’s “little grey cells” but in many ways they’re better understood as the forebears of the techniques used in modern police procedurals. In A Study in Scarlet Holmes astounds Lestrade and Watson alike by providing a detailed description of the murderer of Enoch Drebber, but the methods he uses bear far more resemblance to modern forensic techniques than to the intricate puzzles of the country-house mystery. He estimates the man’s height from the length of his stride, identifies a hansom cab by its tracks and determines the make of the suspect’s cigar by closely examining the ash (the magnifying glass is such an iconic part of Holmes’s image that it’s easy to forget that he uses it much the same way a modern forensic scientist would use a microscope). When we first meet him he is even making a methodical study of post-mortem bruising. Holmes himself constantly denies that his methods are remarkable, and in a sense he’s telling the truth. He isn’t supposed to be a genius, he’s supposed to be a skilled and methodical detective who uses techniques that can be learned. And when you think about it, a century or so later, people really do learn those techniques. It’s just that these days we call it police work.
To reenforce his point, Hall quotes a Holmes observation in “Adventure of the Copper Beeches” that could appear in a Hammett or Chandler novel:
“But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”
We shouldn’t throw Holmes out of the soft-boiled club too quickly, however. His famous dictum that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” is akin to what Dupin calls ratiocination and Poirot “little gray cells.” Contrast his approach to crime with Spade’s, which one critic has said involves throwing a spanner into the works and reacting to whatever kicks out. Holmes never gets beaten up by bad guys whereas hardboiled detectives are worked over regularly.
I agree with Hall that Holmes’s milieu is not the elegant country house. Christie and Sayers longed for the Downton Abbey England that was destroyed by World War I while Doyle, an urban writer, was grappling with how to makes sense of London’s criminality, its explosive growth, and its anonymity.
Doyle, however, provides us with a reassurance that is not found in Hammett and Chandler. While the clues he examines at first appear unrelated—think of this as a stand-in for urban confusion—in the end he finds a satisfying pattern connecting them all. In other words, the world isn’t as alien and random as it seems.
This pattern-finding is most dramatic when it comes to Moritarty. Anarchy may appear to reign on London streets, but Holmes shows that there is actually a pattern behind them all if we only look closely enough. Every crime traces back to “the Napoleon of crime,” and if there’s a pattern, then the forces of the law can intervene effectively and restore order.
The way that Doyle frames his stories is also reassuringly British. Each story begins in the cozy confines of 221B Baker Street where the crime is presented, often in conjunction with the morning paper. Holmes descends into the crime-ridden depths, but by the end of the mystery, the hearth fires are once again burning as Holmes explains the mystery to Watson. Justice prevails and all is right with the world. While a few stories are darker, they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
America’s hardboiled detective stories, by contrast, lend themselves to existential readings. The world has no higher meaning, and we all fit the description that villain Jules Amthor applies to Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely: “a dirty little man in a dirty little world.” If the universe is absurd, then the only meaning we can find is the meaning we assert ourselves. For Hammett, his ultimate code involves his work:
When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around – bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere.
Love, in this world, isn’t a higher principle but just something that turns you into a sap.
Holmes is a soft-boiled detective because he appears to rise above the world and find order underlying the chaos. We turn to the hardboiled classics when we want to experience 20th century angst.
