Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of SherlockBy Clare ClarkePalgrave Macmillan, 2014
Fr. Ronald Knox’s sly “Ten Commandments for Detective Novelists” (1929) — honored as often in the breach as in the observance — reminds us why detective fiction has often been consigned to the trash heap of “mere” genre fiction. His “Decalogue,” filled with strictures such as “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable” and “The detective must not himself commit the crime,” prioritizes structural conventions over characterization or much of anything else, formal experimentation included. In practice, even in Knox’s own Golden Age this was never true, whether one thinks of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) or John Dickson Carr’s Nine Wrong Answers (1952). Clare Clarke’s Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock, however, reminds us that the genre conventions Knox partly codified and partly parodied were neither inevitable nor obvious. Instead, she reconstructs how the genre offered up multiple, contradictory possibilities at the end of the nineteenth century. Some of them are unrecognizable to the modern reader as detective fiction; others, by contrast, anticipate twentieth- and twenty-first century avant-garde appropriations of the form for experimental ends, (such as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers (1953).Clarke’s book does not try to be comprehensive, but instead closely analyzes six novels or short story collections published between 1886 and 1897. All of them were bestsellers at the time, but in all likelihood, non-specialists will not be familiar with any of them except Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the Holmes stories. Moreover, while some will recognize the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill’s name, they will primarily know him as the man who described the United States as a “Melting Pot,” not as a detective novelist. For many readers, then, this book will be appropriately mysterious territory.Clarke represents herself as something of a resurrection (wo)man, seeking to “disinter” lost novels and stories from the literary tomb. She directs our attention to work “first published in newspapers and periodicals such as The Star, The Windsor and Pearson’s or in the cheap paperback editions which filled railway bookstalls in the 1890s.” This strategy reminds us that genre formation happens not only in what we would now call middlebrow and highbrow publishing venues, but in the Victorian equivalent of the airport bookstore. Some of these works, like Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, enjoyed at best a Dan Brown-esque reputation at the time — read by thousands, but, as Clarke delicately puts it, “not well received by contemporary critics.” Even genre fiction has its own canon, after all. The corpus Clarke unearths displaces Sherlock Holmes from his regular literary-historical position as Alpha (the codifier of many later private detective tropes) and Omega (the climax of earlier nineteenth-century attempts at developing detective figures). Clarke analyzes the Sherlock Holmes stories in the middle of her argument, where Holmes is contemporaneous with Jekyll and Hyde and Hansom Cab; as a result, the genre neither appears to evolve into nor develop from him.Throughout, Clarke returns to the problem of messiness inherent in any work of literary history, especially one that rejects the currently received canon as an organizing principle. She argues early on that Victorian detective fiction frequently occupies the same generic territory as “the gothic, sensation fiction, the dynamite novel, and the imperial adventure story,” and her first chapter illuminates the “interchanges” by attending to Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the context of contemporary true crime narratives, especially the child sex-trafficking scandal of the crusading journalist W. T. Stead’s “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” In 1885, Stead published a series of shocking articles in the Pall Mall Gazette in which he detailed how young girls, usually in their early teens, were tricked into becoming prostitutes (frequently by recruiting them for servant positions that did not exist). Stead proved his point by buying a thirteen-year-old girl himself, for which he was later imprisoned. As Clarke notes, one of the most startling results of Stead’s muckraking was the flood of correspondence from men “openly admitting to and defending their liberty to partake in such practices.”For Clarke, Jekyll and Hyde simultaneously troubles our twenty-first century understanding of genre boundaries — it’s normally classed with the Gothic, not with detective fiction — and reveals the difficulties of separating the criminal from the cultivated classes. Thus, when the eminently respectable Mr. Enfield cheerfully “blackmails” Hyde at the novel’s beginning, he “emphatically blurs the boundaries” separating his supposedly proper self from the monstrous Hyde; moreover, Jekyll’s friend and executor, Utterson the lawyer, far from being an objective observer, is out to “protect his friend and the wider group.” Despite Utterson’s combination of charity and moral rigor, his goal as the punning “Mr. Seek,” out to unravel the mystery of Hyde’s relation to Jekyll, arguably violates both the emergent rules of detection (the detective must maintain his distance) and the long-established rules of the Gothic (a secret never remains concealed). Given the novel’s structure, which leaves Hyde with the last word, it’s not clear if Utterson succeeds in stuffing society’s secrets back into their grave.But in this clash between Gothic and emergent detective conventions, it is the professional men who wind up crushed by Gothic revelations: the “strange case” reaches its resolution only because Jekyll confesses, not because the doctors and lawyers on his path are capable of grasping the challenge he and his alter ego pose to their worldview. (Compare Arthur Conan Doyle’s own conjunction of Gothic and detective fiction, The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Watson’s own tendencies to slide into Gothic tropes ultimately get a pummeling from Holmes’ devotion to the empirical.) Just as importantly, Clarke finds that Utterson here anticipates the problematic noir or “hard-boiled” mystery in his attempt to conceal rather than reveal. This, in a nutshell, is the book’s major theme: that the key tropes of later detective fiction were not so much invented in the twentieth century as remembered there.In this way, by turning to unexpected or forgotten works, Clarke turns up both roads not taken and roads ignored for decades. In particular, she insists that far from “producing only a particularly reassuring and conservative incarnation of the genre,” Victorian detective fiction was awash with morally questionable (if not necessarily politically radical) figures who were sometimes as likely to commit crimes as to solve them. This is one of the book’s strongest themes and is most obviously the case in the last two chapters, which analyze Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed-box (1897) and Guy Boothby’s contemporary A Prince of Swindlers (1897). Morrison was and is best known for stories of working-class and slum life like A Child of the Jago (1896), as well as what we would now consider more conventional detective tales featuring investigator Martin Hewitt; the astonishingly fecund Boothby survives primarily on account of his fantastic mesmerist, Dr. Nikola.Both The Dorrington Deed-Box and A Prince of Swindlers dismantle the heroic detective model by elevating the criminal in his place, thereby anticipating E. W. Hornung’s more famous gentleman-thief, Raffles. Dorrington makes his profits from being simultaneously criminal and detective, offering up the “solutions to the crimes he himself commits or enables, as does Boothby’s Carne/Klimo. Unlike Raffles, however, whose criminal predilections are restricted to polite thefts, Dorrington cheerfully “attempts to outwit, cheat, steal from and occasionally kill the various clients and criminal with whom he deals along the way” — indeed, the very first story in which Dorrington appears, “The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby,” climaxes with Mr. Rigby making the unwelcome discovery that Dorrington has designs on the treasure he has hired him to find. (He makes that discovery when Dorrington arranges his drowning.) Whereas the genteel Sherlock Holmes adopts and then discard working-class identities as part of his professional repertoire, the slum-born Dorrington embodies what the “socially conservative” Morrison believes is “what happens when someone from the East End slums moves above his station.”Boothby’s Carne/Klimo represents an even more visceral, racist threat: his criminal adventures in India are related to what Boothby figures as combined “Oriental and Occidental characteristics,” which “immediately blu[r] the boundaries of Carne’s national identity and thus, from the collection’s outset, mar[k] him as a hybrid creature — English, but also Indian.” Dorrington’s anxiety-provoking ability to move seamlessly between classes here reappears as an equally anxiety-provoking ability to move between racial identities. Carne/Klimo is the detective as contagious figure of “moral decline,” ready to “travel to the imperial centre and to infect it with their criminality.” Both of these criminal-detective narratives may be ultimately conservative in their implications, but neither offers the reader much in the way of conservative consolation!Throughout, Clarke yokes formal and historical analysis: the figure of the “unsuccessful and unimaginative police detective” in The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, for example, is simultaneously a stock figure and an echo of very real debates about late-Victorian Australian policing. Similarly, Zangwill’s satirical The Big Bow Mystery (1891), with its eye-poppingly Dickensian character names (Drabdump?! Wimp?!) and its faux-Wildean paradoxes — “ When people really like each other, they make no concealment of their mutual contempt” — cocks a snook at the profitable and unholy marriage of “sensational crime reportage and detective memoirs” with actual policing. (In fact, Zangwill’s novel has virtually no detection in it whatsoever, and on reaching the end, the alert reader will suddenly realize that the murderer provides the “solution” very early on.) A novel like The Big Bow Mystery has more in common with, say, the film Gosford Park (2001), which parodically appropriates the detective form for its own ends, than it does with the work of the Golden Age novelists like Christie or, more recently, the noirish police procedurals of the Scottish novelist Ian Rankin, where detection remains in the foreground despite the importance of the Edinburgh setting and contemporary politics for the plots.So what about Holmes? Clarke follows a number of critics in pointing to the ambiguity of Holmes’ relationship to law and order. However, she takes an unusual route by linking the stories to late-Victorian anxieties about professions and professionalism. In the Holmes stories, professional men fall victim to get-rich-quick schemes, thereby calling into question the relationship between career and cash; thus, in “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” the poor engineer’s lost thumb signifies the “harsh lesson” he has to learn about “the importance of adhering to the usual moral codes concerning the links between money and labour.” Getting rich quick really means getting victimized quicker. In other words, the criminals succeed because the victims, far from being innocent, trash professionalism’s insistence on a proper relation between the work done and the amount earned. For Clarke, Doyle’s most complex take on this question occurs in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” which, she suggests, pivots on W. T. Stead’s worrisome proof that “the city was a domain in which appearances could not be trusted and where dual lives, especially amongst middle- and upper-class men, were common.” After all, this is one of those tales in which Holmes’ abilities short-circuit, as he spends most of the story unable to properly decode the beggar Hugh Boone’s body. Here, then, is something worse than the engineer’s foolishness: “St Clair set out consciously to deceive and defraud, thus once again blurring the story’s distinction between client and criminal, victim and victimiser.” Moreover, Holmes himself solves the case by, in effect, doing nothing but “sitting on his pillows and smoking.” What kind of labor is that?Holmes himself turns out to be a strange sort of professional, whom Clarke equates with the professional author — a “mental” labourer whose “work falls into a slippery category where it is often invisible or hard to see.” How does one value that sort of labor? And how does one value Holmes, whose work defies a time-sheet and takes him to the seediest parts of the metropolis? Even Doyle’s most famous illustrator, Sidney Paget, highlights “the passive nature of the detective’s labour.” If anything, Clarke insists, Holmes himself has more of a brief for criminal professionalism than for the professional lawmen. Holmes’ famous dislike of the professionals at Scotland Yard “represents an ironic reversal of the values one might expect from a representative of the law and signals his frequent lack of regard for the official disciplinary framework.”There is more room here, I think, to expand on the social discrepancy between Holmes—who may violate social norms, but is nevertheless, like Watson, a gentleman — and, as Clarke says, the "solidly working-class" Lestrade. The social difference between “private consulting detective” and “policeman” is interestingly reminiscent of the difference between “physician” and “surgeon,” which had largely crumbled by the end of the nineteenth century: a physician was a university-trained gentleman who did little in the way of manual work with patients, whereas a surgeon, who would have been apprenticed quite young, performed the more invasive procedures. Holmes, like the more genteel physician, scorns the on-the-job approach to police training. Again, in Clarke’s reading the Holmes stories do not simply reaffirm genteel social norms, but call their adequacy for maintaining order into question.One of the tests of a good scholarly monograph is that it prompts us to think of yet more directions for the argument to take. As Clarke herself concludes, “the need remains for further processes of re-evaluation, consolidation and recuperation which this story has begun, with potentially hundreds more valuable ‘Shadows of Sherlock’ languishing in the shade, as yet undetected.” For example, the rise of the nineteenth-century female detective, whom Joseph Kestner calls "Sherlock's Sisters" — some now back in print, like Andrew Forrester’s G. of The Female Detective and Leonard Merrick’s Miriam Lea of Mr. Bazalgette’s Agency — suggests how gender might further complicate questions of professionalism and the detective genre’s “conservative” form. Overall, Clarke’s work successfully reshapes our understanding of what the detective genre could be and still might be. Although targeted at academics, the book’s lucid prose will make it accessible to the general reader interested in the history of the form.____Miriam Elizabeth Burstein is Associate Professor of English at the College at Brockport, SUNY, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature. She blogs at The Little Professor.
