Write what you know: The Physician and the Detective

A common adage among writers is "write what you know"; doing so lends credibility to your work because you're able to write authentically. This is not to say it's impossible for writers to make up stuff or write about professions or lives beyond their own, but a story written by someone who personally knows and understands the subject matter is much more likely to be believed. I write about composition and literature because it's what I study and teach. If I were to try blogging about, say chemistry, I'd need to do loads of research and even then what I'd write would be inferior.

This brings us to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physician. Doyle had a humble medical practice before becoming an author, with his fiction, Sherlock Holmes in particular, becoming so successful he began writing full time. Extrapolating from his medical training, it's safe to assume Doyle understood the value of symptoms. A doctor's job is to heal the sick, but they first have to identify the condition, with their symptoms: in the same way a physician would look at the type of rash or hear the tenor of a cough, Sherlock Holmes reads people: external signs indicate deeper meaning only to those with the right understanding. In this regard, medical treatment and detective work are both professions that deal with external ailments where the sufferer lacks the skills and knowledge to properly diagnose and treat the symptoms.

This symptomatological approach to detective work is not exclusive to Holmes: the detective's job is, after all, to detect, but where Doyle drew on his medical training to create a detective, Dashiell Hammett drew on his experience as a detective to create a detective. Dashiell Hammett worked for a time as a Pinkerton detective. 

This contrast shows itself in these authors’ approaches to their genres and their characters. Doyle created a romanticized, idealized detective, and not just in literature: within Holmes stories themselves, Holmes is the best of the best, solving cases others are unable to solve, and far more interested in the mystery than any financial gain. Hammett's detectives, Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and the Continental Op, were run of the mill detectives. Sure, they had impressive success rates, but, within the story world, they're just regular, albeit talented, detectives doing a gritty, unpopular, shady job, trying to keep their work private. To ironically quote Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes, “I'm a private detective; the last thing I need is a public image” (Sherlock “A Scandal in Belgravia”, 2012).

This variation in style leads to variations in how the authors morally approach issues. Holmes worked to maintain social normativity: to return everything to a pre-crisis equilibrium. This leads to a morally black and white, romanticized story world: there are bad people doing bad things, so Holmes is brought in not just to rectify the wrongs in the case, but to set right social situations.

The worlds of Hammett's fiction are not that stark, and people are not simply good or bad: some are better than others and some are worse, but there are many more shades of gray, many of them rather dark, particularly on the part of the detectives themselves. Sam Spade is as stoic as he is devious: his motivations aren't clear until they absolutely have to be revealed, so it isn't clear whose benefit he's looking out for: his own, the common good, or the client’s. This ambiguity is only accented by the range of fraudulent, devious characters Spade has to deal with.

In short, the original professions of these authors shows itself in their writing, resulting in very different detectives. The physician, a man whose goal was to heal the sick gave us the nigh unstoppable detective who healed social wounds. The real-life detective, a man whose job was to snoop and sneak, to investigate where he might not be wanted in places others might not want to go, introduced us to a more cynical detective.

And what’s a cynical detective without a cynical world? Dashiell Hammett gave Spade a much more nuanced, but also much bleaker, darker, world to have to deal with than Doyle gave Holmes; story worlds born not only of the detectives’ or authors’ world views, but of the cultural climates both authors inhabited.

More of that in the next post.