“Holmes Into Challenger: the Dark Investigator” Douglas Kerr Sherlock

1 “Holmes into Challenger: The Dark Investigator” Douglas Kerr Sherlock Holmes, that confirmed bachelor famously immune to Cupid’s darts, has had many children. Polyphiloprogenerative, he must be suspected of fathering a good proportion of the population of modern crime fiction, as well as hundreds of instantiations of himself in many narrative, dramatic, and pictorial forms. And we can suppose that Holmeses yet unborn are already queuing up in some hyperfictional waiting room, like the apparitions of Banquo’s heirs vouchsafed by the witches to Macbeth. My subject in this essay is one of the earliest adaptors of Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Apart from Holmes and Dr Watson, Conan Doyle’s next best-known serial character is Professor George Edward Challenger, explorer of the Lost World and hero of four other tales. I intend here to explore the kinship between the two, and some of the ways that Challenger is both a continuation and a criticism of what was embodied in Holmes. To give away the plot in a way Conan Doyle would never have done, this essay will examine these two figures in their role as knowledge-men, researchers and discoverers, and I will argue that in them, and the popular fictional genres that contain them, we can find Conan Doyle’s complex and serious response to the Victorian knowledge revolution. There are many ways we might account for the popularity, productivity and fascination of Sherlock Holmes. One is these is his remarkable ability to function as a portmanteau of a number of the most compelling social themes of the Victorian imagination – not just to embody these things, but somehow to act as a sort of dialectical synthesis of what seem on the face of it to be irreconcilably antithetical ideals. In the popular imagination, as in the unconscious, there are no irreconcilable differences. Holmes is, for example, as he never tires of boasting to Watson, a scientific detective. He is a materialist in an uncompromising late-Victorian mould – proclaiming, in ‘The Sussex Vampire’: “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain” (Doyle, Case-Book 73) – with a rigorous methodology, determined to purge the personal and emotional element from his cases, frankly and often rude about Watson’s efforts to render his case histories in literary form, the results of Watson’s romanticism producing, Holmes complains, “much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid” (The Sign 5). And yet at the same time Holmes is an incorrigible dandy and an aesthete – the Baudelaire of Baker Street as I have called him elsewhere (Kerr 132) – a prince of subjectivity, prone to substance 2 abuse and lolling on the sofa for weeks on end, but practicing the art of detection for its own sake, indifferent to monetary reward, a virtuoso of style, devoted to his work as the only way of staving off the ennui of belatedness and his bourgeois surroundings. Holmes is also an instance of two very significant nineteenth-century inventions: in his detective work he is both an amateur and a professional. Again, he is uncannily intuitive, solving problems by those unaccountable flashes of superhuman brilliance which the Romantics imagined were the working methods of genius. But at the same time he is a positivist, a thoroughly materialistic and practical processor of data, unable to theorise in advance of the facts, and similar to those cybernetic inventions with which his contemporaries were starting the mechanization of intellectual work.1 Watson accuses him of being “an automaton, a calculating machine” (The Sign 15). Then, in token of the beginning of the long love affair between the public and the show business and its stars, Holmes is an exhibitionistic showman, parading his skills like a conjuror, master of the coup de théâtre, with a devoted fan club of at least one. Yet he is also anti-social and misanthropic, almost friendless, a depressive drop-out and a Tennysonian melancholic. All these myths – or you can call them stereotypes if you like – jostle within the person of Holmes, making him in an overdetermined way very much a man of his time. It is a repertoire that could take us in almost any direction. Here, however, I am interested in Holmes the scientifically principled investigator in single-minded pursuit of knowledge, avatar of the age of modern scientific research and expertise. It is this aspect of him that links him to Challenger: both are, in my terms, dark investigators. We know his methods, of course. Both the first two Holmes books have a chapter entitled “The Science of Deduction”, and he is quite happy to give a demonstration of his skills, inferring an entire career from Dr Watson’s pocket watch, for example, or from Dr Mortimer’s walking stick. In both these cases, as well as in his brilliant reading of crime scenes, Holmes produces a narrative from a relic – something left behind. He is participating in what T. H. Huxley was to call “backtelling” (Huxley 6). The backteller practiced a scientific discipline with a historical dimension – like geology, archaeology, historical linguistics or evolutionary biology – reconstructing the past from partial evidence, in confidence that the laws of nature were infallibly 1 For example, the adding machine patented by William Seward Burroughs in 1888, the year after the first appearance of Holmes in print. 3 uniform. Such scientists had reading and interpretative skills beyond the powers of common readers, skills that enabled them to construe a total narrative from fragmentary relics, as Darwin had famously described the geological record as an imperfect history, of which we possess only scattered lines from a few pages of randomly surviving chapters of a single volume, written in a 2 changing dialect (Darwin 315-16). The case of Watson’s watch, from the first chapter of The Sign of the Four, is not only a good example of Holmes’s working method of backtelling, but is offered as such, a pedagogic demonstration of the investigator’s powers. His brilliant analysis of the clues offered by this object unlocks the story of the life and death of Watson’s alcoholic brother, its former owner. But this hermeneutical virtuosity is a performance, a kind of party piece. After all, Watson does not need to be told his own brother’s story. Since in this case nothing is at stake epistemologically, it is not hard to see the darkness, as well as the brilliance, of the investigation. To demonstrate his intelligence is inevitably to show up the intellectual dullness of Watson, and everyone else, and Holmes almost never bothers to palliate this. His investigations are without exception stagings of competitive egotism, often enhanced by a childish enjoyment of keeping his companion or his fellow-professionals in the dark until the last flourish of revelation. In this way Holmes plays the mysteriously gifted shaman or magician, vested in a kind of awesome personal authority that Max Weber was to theorize as charisma operating within a structure of domination.3 Charisma, in an increasingly bureaucratizing age, is a bit of a throwback. But Holmes’s charisma is entirely modern, his methods bound by scientific protocols, as he always insists, and therefore properly detached, disinterested, having in theory no personal investment in the results of the investigation. The combination of intellectual detachment with competitive self-regard and charismatic egotism produces results that can sometimes be little short of monstrous. In the case of the watch, it is a matter of the crass and wounding disregard of Watson’s feelings for his unfortunate brother and the reputation of his family. Ignorance for Holmes cannot be an excuse: the identity of the watch’s former owner was the first thing he deduced. It simply does not occur to him that the watch had, as the cliché goes, a sentimental value, or that an exposition of its history would cause his friend 2 Holmes expounds his own theory of interpretative backtelling in his article “The Book of Life”, which speaks of inferring an Atlantic or a Niagara from a drop of water (A Study 18-19). 3 “Rationally regulated association within a structure of domination finds its typical expression in bureaucracy…. The charismatic structure of domination rests upon individual authority which is based neither upon rational rules nor upon tradition.” Weber ii 954. 4 distress. Brilliant in his reading of material symptoms, when it comes to affect Holmes can be a dangerous illiterate. Here we can begin to home in on the place of Holmes in the history of the Victorian knowledge revolution. The nineteenth century invented the expert, the knowledge-man specializing in a single domain of expertise, consulted in difficult and challenging cases beyond the powers of the generalist. Holmes is a consulting detective, and so far ahead of his time as to be probably the only one in the world. His highly specialized self-education has entailed a refusal to interest himself in domains of general knowledge – such as whether the sun goes round the earth or vice versa – which is of no use to him. This narrow and mechanical specialism belongs, clearly, to an age of industrial manufacture, but it was also being enshrined in the structure of the professions as these evolved in the nineteenth century, including that best known to Arthur Conan Doyle, the profession of medicine. Here, words like “consultant” and “specialist” had their own meanings.4 In nineteenth-century Britain, developments in the institutions of medicine had produced a professional structure consisting of a minority of specialist consultants, at the top of the pyramid, and a majority of general practitioners, the “subordinate grade” of family doctors, working in a locally-bound practice.

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