Getting the Bird, Part 2: Lead and Modernism

In the Sherlock Holmes stories “The Blue Carbuncle” and “The Six Napoleons”, Holmes searches for something valuable lost or hidden in something mundane. In “Carbuncle,” it's the eponymous gem ingested by a turkey after being stolen (the gem, not the turkey), and for “Napoleons”, it's, again, a stolen precious stone, the Pearl of the Borgias, hidden in a bust of Napoleon after being stolen. Both stories require Holmes and Watson to traipse around London to trace the mysterious appearance of the Carbuncle and why busts of Napoleon were being stolen and destroyed. In both situations, the missing gem is recovered and returned.

The Falcon falls into a similar situation: something seemingly mundane hides something of greater worth, but, rather than precious gems, the falcon is just black enamel over a lead statue. In this regard, the Falcon is less like the the Blue Carbuncle or the Black Pearl of the Borgias and more like Jay Gatsby: a facade hiding something less desirable.

Not all modernist fiction is about misdirection, but a major facet of it is writing designed to obfuscate the reader's own ability to read. Without going into too much detail, modern fiction forces us to realize things aren't always as clear and easy as they seem. Perhaps Hemingway and his bleaker narratives about war typified this the most: the world isn't so easy to categorize or understand and the happy endings we want aren't what we get. This wasn't a time for the beauty of romanticism or the idealism of enlightenment thinking, and the jingoism of colonialism that marked so much of Holmes. It was a time for the harsh realities of life and reevaluating what we had believed. A fine beginning for the century to follow, filled with overturned idealisms and the exposure of the failures and brutalities of life and history.

There isn't always a Sherlock Holmes to right all the wrongs we face. They can hide or don't even understand the oppressive systems their reinforce.

We don't all end up well off like Philip “Pip” Pirrip or Oliver Twist or Jane Eyre. It's harder to move up the social ladder, and harder still to have someone else pay for it.

We don't all get to marry our Mr. Darcys. Sometimes their mansions are funded by bootlegging.

And what better way to represent that than with the Maltese Falcon? An item centuries old made of gems and gold, stemming from royalty, but available to whoever is able to get their hands on it? European aristocratic notions of wealth and superiority and status mixed with American opportunism, the desire to rise to power and eminence: to rival the old families who oversaw their ancestors. And once it's in our possession, the years of toil and effort we've invested in it suddenly seem worth it, right up until we scratch at the surface to go beyond the glossy enamel to the dull lead of reality. No shine, no glimmer.

This is where Spade, again, sets himself apart from Gutman, Cairo, and O'Shaugnessey, and, ironically, aligns him with the violent Wilmer Cook. Gutman and Cairo think they can continue their search for the Falcon and O'Shaugnessey thinks she'll be safe with Spade. Spade even confesses he may love her. Their optimism, their preconceived notions of a better tomorrow makes them romantics, not realists. Spade is a realist and Wilmer, certainly when he's made the fall guy, has realism thrust on him.

Spade, like Modernism, has his suspicion that things aren't as pure and as simple as they seem. Not every ending has a silver lining. Instead, they have the dead weight of lead.

Modernism and the Moral Mystery of the Mind: Sam Spade

Returning to the paragon of crime fiction, Sherlock Holmes, we see it’s common for readers to be shut out of the detective's mind. Whatever is there is privileged information, and no matter who is narrating – whether it's a Watson, the detective, or some omniscient narrator, the closer we get to the solution of the case, the more closed off the detective's mind is. For Sherlock Holmes, this is accomplished by having Watson narrate, replete with well-documented and studied instances of Watson's inability to understand what is going on in Holmes' mind.

An interesting result of this is to what extent we can trust the detective to be a moral individual. As discussed in the last post, it isn't much of a stretch for a detective to go the way of his antagonists, especially in the cynical time dubbed modernism. Spade becomes less like Holmes and more like Gatsby: inhabiting a kind of moral no-man's land where they can bend and break the laws and manipulate the information they share with others to suit their own ends: not the law, not the civil or social good, but their own selfish interests.

Holmes we can guarantee is a moral, upstanding fellow because of Watson's own social position and Holmes' interest in mystery and righting wrongs. For Holmes to suddenly turn criminal would be contrary to his character. Even if he has dalliances with criminality, Holmes laughs them off, justifies them for the sake of the case, all while reassuring us of his stalwart nature.

We don't have that same confidence with Sam Spade, in part because the mystery he's investigating is an odd mix of personal and professional (his partner was murdered – there's a sense of professional pride even if nobody cared for Archer) and potentially lucrative: he appears willing to go along and be part of Gutman’s scheme until the end of the novel, only after they discover the falcon was a fake.

We must spend the novel wondering just where Spade falls morally. Of course, come the end, he makes the right decision so everyone will be arrested for their involvement in the crimes: arson, murder, smuggling, etc, and Spade is careful to remain unattached, suggesting his moral dubiousness was for the sake of the case.

Spade is therefore an unsolved mystery in his own right. We receive no resolution as to Iva Archer, and there's always the possibility Spade could have been bought out. As the saying goes, everyone has their price and it's possible Gutman just wasn't willing to pay Spade enough. After all, before Cairo joined Gutman's side, Gutman had offered more to Spade. Without access to Spade's thoughts or a confession on his part, it's possible his scenario about a “fall-guy” was a last minute concoction to get Gutman who had reneged on a previous deal.

So is Spade a man you shouldn't cross, or a man you shouldn't try to buy? Is he moral, or cautious? Does he have a price, or is he too upstanding? If he has principles, then why the affair with Iva Archer? Did Spade do what was right, or did he do what's right merely because it was the safest thing to do?

We like to consider protagonists to be like Holmes: characters of high moral standing who always do right regardless of consequence, and, even better, their right choices yield the best outcome for them. However, as discussed before, Hammett was writing at a particular time in the history of English Literature: modernism. Such a positive ending and depiction of a protagonist doesn't fit with the era and the novel as a whole. There's just too much going on for a Sherlock Holmes style resolution to easily fit. Just as the writing is cynical, we need to approach it cynically: doubting and wondering whether or not we really know just what’s going on in Spade’s mind, if it’s moral clarity or dubious desires. All we can say is Spade, like the enamel lacquer of the Maltese Falcon itself, is hiding whatever is inside.

Socially Distinct: The Underlying influence of Noblesse Oblige

In my last post, introducing Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett and the evolution of the hard boiled detective, I compared the professions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dashiell Hammett and how these professions influenced the development of their fictional detectives.

In this post, I want to discuss the cultural climate that surrounded these two writers.

Yeah. Get ready for some serious oversimplification. These are the kinds of things people write books about, and I have 600 words. To help, I’m using a rather simple concept at the center of these distinctions: noblesse oblige.

Noblesse oblige literally means “nobility obliges” and is the concept that the nobility and aristocratic classes have, by virtue of their position and (inherited) wealth, an obligation to help the lower classes. This was generally put into practice by hiring servants and farmers, while the nobility was able to live off of interest, inheritances, and revenue so they could live a life of leisure. The result was a rigid social hierarchy without much social mobility: you died in the station you were born into.

It's kind of like Feudalism with fewer serfs and more servants.

I want to use this concept because it's a principle that gives us a glimpse at broad social and cultural structures. It's an interesting way to look at some of the main differences that crop up in Doyle and Hammett's world building because both lived in societies governed primarily by money: who had, who didn’t, who earned it, who wanted it and what they’d do to get it.

First, Doyle. At the end of the Victorian Era and the beginning of the modern era, when Holmes was gunning the letters VR (Victoria Regina, or Queen Victoria) into the wall of his Baker Street room, there was a rising middle class, but still an aristocratic hierarchy. Doyle, a conservative physician, wasn't interested in strong critiques of this hierarchy: he was interested in maintaining it. In short, noblesse oblige, while not addressed outright in Holmes stories, has left its mark on Doyle and his writing, evidenced in Doyle's tendency to maintain the status quo: people who inherited money and position on top, tradesmen and businessmen in the middle, and unskilled laborers on the bottom, and the less “English” someone was, the lower they sat. As a result, the people Holmes encounters tend to be satisfied with their position and finances. There may be some interest in earning a bit more here and there, but many of the villains Holmes encounters, like Milverton, have or are trying to earn enough money so they could change their social standing. In short, a Holmes villain is usually one who wants more: more money, more prestige, more power.

Then there's Hammett, coming from an American tradition devoid of the noblesse oblige. Hammett’s America was a culture where people earned their money. Industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst, and Andrew Carnegie loomed large, men who came from very little, and became extremely powerful and wealthy. I'm not saying Hammett aspired to their levels of success (Hammett actually quit the Pinkertons because he disagreed with their strikebreaking practices), but he came from a culture where money was earned, not inherited, and where there was not a sense of superiority based on inherited titles and wealth. The result is Hammett and those that would follow him, (Raymond Chandler in particular) would be more critical of social establishments, the wealthy, and inheritances, with greed becoming a more universal vice and more characters who lie, complicating the detective's task.

The result is Hammett gave himself much more leeway, many more shades of gray to explore than Doyle explored. Characters become much more mobile socially, ethically, and even geographically, while station, lineage, and money, either don't mean anything, or do more harm than good. It's harder to pin anything down or identify where it belongs. It's easier to lie and just as easy to doubt. Holmes usually only had to doubt the honesty of the villains. Spade has to doubt everyone's honesty.

In short, Doyle adhered to the concept of noblesse oblige. Noblesse oblige and a rigid social hierarchy kept people in place, and people were satisfied with their social situation because there was little social mobility. Hammett and his hard boiled compatriots dealt with a world without that rigidity, and if honesty and hard work didn't get you a better position, some lies and crime might: people got where they are not through noble virtue and blood, but through questionable and illegal practices.

If you want to see justice meted out and feel like the world is a safe, stable place, read Holmes stories. If you want a world that's more cynical, mistrusting, but arguably more realistic, read a good hard boiled detective novel.

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.

A class of their own: Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett, and the the Hard-Boiled Detective

Two years after the last Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place” (1927) was published, an interesting new literary detective appeared: Sam Spade, protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. While Sherlock Holmes would remain the quintessential fictional detective, the newcomer Sam Spade would represent a paradigm shift in the genre, turning the literary detective from the unique, virtuous consulting Holmes, to the shady private investigator.

Holmes boasted he's the only one of his kind. He is not a police investigator; he’s a consulting detective: a private individual to whom government and police officials go when their own skills are insufficient. Similarly, Holmes possess a certain classlessness: he is socially mobile, working for the wealthy, the noble, and the poor, demonstrating at varying times gentlemanly and bohemian traits: immaculate in attention to his appearance and yet Baker Street is a perpetual mess (from the few indications we receive); he enjoys attending concerts and, when bored, will generously partake of opium or cocaine, habits Watson openly detests. Holmes is therefore both rarefied and reified: unique, beyond the scope of normal people and minds, yet has Watson and other traits to ground him in reality. With no disrespect, Holmes is almost a cartoon character: the stories represent him in a believable way, until we really start thinking about it.

This is not Sam Spade. The only major similarities that emerge between Sam Spade, the man who looks “rather pleasantly like a blond Satan,” and Sherlock Holmes are their shared profession, and even there, it gets fuzzy. There's little resemblance between the two, and the same could be said for the other hard-boiled detectives who follow in Spade's wake: Spade and his hard-boiled fellows form a class of their own.

The hard-boiled literary private investigators are not the generous gentlemen of Holmes and Watson, liminal figures free to move almost with impunity. They belong in their own social sphere: Spade and his business partner, Archer, formed a partnership presumably not to split the rent but because they both share the same profession, and neither can claim to be its sole practitioner. They’re not anomalous like Holmes, existing beyond and between the societal norms: they’re just representatives of a certain class of individuals, a subculture that pokes its way through other subcultures and those who inhabit them.

Spade, Archer, and others of their ilk inhabit a class of snoops and sneaks, working for their clients and not necessarily for the social good. They’re frequently violent men who carry guns not in case they encounter something dangerous (as Holmes infrequently asks Watson to bring his revolver) but because they will encounter something dangerous. They drink and smoke habitually and are near constant loners. They generally live alone and work alone, a pest to the official forces rather than an aid. Social outsiders rather than social maintainers.

It can be said Spade and his literary compatriots take what Holmes represents and turn it down a dark, cynical, violent path. However, this is not simply an inversion of style or character, but is the result of social changes that set apart the rigid but precarious Victorian world with the more cynical and experimental post war era of Modernism. We can then turn to three different contributing factors that created very different worlds for the 1887 A Study in Scarlet and 1929's The Maltese Falcon to appear in.

• First of all, Dashiell Hammett was himself a Pinkerton detective, as opposed to Doyle's professional life as a physician and occasional police consultant.
• Second, Spade and Hammett are Americans, not British, meaning many of the philosophies about social hierarchy and class distinction that undercut much of Doyle's work are absent.
• Third, the The Maltese Falcon was published in 1929 – after the first World War, and after the Stock Market Crash.

All of these factors, which I'll address in more detail in the coming posts, all converge on the creation of a different kind of detective, and while Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade may never eclipse Doyle and Holmes in popularity, they nevertheless form a progression in the development and solidifying of a significant literary genre.

Detective Fiction and Social Spheres: Sherlock Holmes and “A Jury of Her Peers”

Detective Fiction has an interesting social potential, something I alluded to in the posts about Sherlock Holmes, but is more pertinent with Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers.” Detective Fiction gives us a way to look at the different fears, concerns, and anxieties not just in general, but of specific social groups, and even how different social groups are anxious about one another. The juxtaposition of “A Jury of Her Peers” and Sherlock Holmes gives an interesting comparison.

Sherlock Holmes stories typically deal with a range of nationalities, racial issues, gender, and social classes. It has been strongly argued Holmes himself relies on these different social spheres to make his deductions, and it's his dependence on these that lets Irene Adler get away. Sherlock Holmes is almost always working to get people back where they belong, ultimately reinforcing Victorian standards.

“A Jury of Her Peers” works similarly: relying on social norms and expectations to identify where there's deviance, but to a different end than Sherlock Holmes. Rather than reinforce the social norms, “A Jury of Her Peers” works to criticize the social norms in the way it presents gender, marriage, and household dynamics. The gender dynamic is the main one here because gender determines social roles: men are farmers, attorneys, and sheriffs. Women are housewives. Men work outside the home in the serious business world. Women work in the home and kitchen, surrounded by, to use the men's term, “trifles.”

Bad men in Sherlock Holmes stories fail in their prescribed social roles: they are bad husbands, brothers, and lovers, and Holmes comes to remove the bad masculinity and replace it with Victorian normativity. “A Jury of Her Peers” features a bad husband but the other male characters make no suggestion they see him as a bad husband. If anything, they criticize the way Minnie has run her house, where Martha and Mrs. Peters are able to see how Mr. Wright made Minnie’s life miserable by being a bad husband. “A Jury of Her Peers” doesn't say “Here's an example of a man failing at his social role” but rather, “Here's a woman who suffered because she was caught in a bad situation with a bad husband.”

When we read “A Jury of Her Peers” as not about a murder but about the way women are treated and the bad situations women have, we stop looking just at Minnie Foster and look at how the other women in the story are represented. Martha Hale and Mrs. Peters may not suffer to the same extent Minnie Foster did, but they are more victims of social normativity than benefactors: Martha Hale is clearly more mature and rational than her husband, but she does as he says because he's her husband, and Mrs. Peters, “married to the law” is tacit and nervous, overshadowed by her husband. Martha Hale and Mrs. peters situation is most exemplified by the silence: rather than defend Minnie Foster, they hide the incriminating bird. To a modern reader, this can seem odd, but women in 1917 wouldn't have been listened to.

“A Jury of Her Peers” gives us a unique look of a woman's perspective on social situations from a century ago. Fiction’s ability to transport us to different lives is hardly a secret. Detective Fiction, though, does interesting things with this social dynamic. Specifically, by placing the detective in new, often unfamiliar situations. Doing so requires the detective have an outsider's perspective while still having to understand the culture if they're to solve the mystery. In doing so a detective may have to go from social sphere to social sphere getting a better understanding of customs and anxieties as they see how people behave appropriately and inappropriately in these various subcultures to solve the mystery.

Too Much Information: Charles Augustus Milverton

“The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” is a popular story. I think it's popular because it's fun to read about the heroes having to outright break the law. I'm not talking about bending the law or keeping something back from the police on behalf of someone innocent or repentant: I'm talking about burglary, theft, and arson. Oh, and there's a murder.

Milverton deals in information, specifically, scandalous information that he can use to blackmail people. In the story, Holmes is hired by an heiress to negotiate with Milverton on her behalf. Milverton has secured some scandalous letters and he threatens to reveal them just before her wedding. After their interview with Milverton ends without success, Holmes straight up decides to use his own mastery of disguise and people to burgle Milverton's estate and steal only the articles that will be used for criminal purposes. Things don't go quite as planned though, hence the murder and arson.

When people discuss “Milverton,” it's usually about how entertaining it is to see Holmes and Watson on the wrong side of the law, even if they have noble intentions. In this regard, it's a story about how far good people will go to stop evil. Though Holmes and Watson may take the legal system upon themselves on more than one occasion, they are never quite as in the wrong as they are here. 

This, following the spirit rather than the letter of the law, tells us more about the good guys, not the social anxiety the heroes fight against. So what threat does Milverton pose? He threatens personal and private lives with exposure. Accidents or poor decisions, serious or minor, can suddenly be paraded before the world, much to our horror. We like our private lives to remain private and Milverton publicizes all.

So, is Milverton the same as fellow blackmailer Irene Adler, just without the sex?

Hardly.

Adler blackmails, but she is, by profession, an opera singer. Milverton's a professional blackmailer. His position and wealth rely on his ability to blackmail, whereas Adler's was a combination of talent and cunning. Where Adler blackmailed because it was in her interest and typical for her tendency to cross boundaries, Milverton just outright blackmails for his own benefit.

So what kind of a crime and anxiety stem from blackmail itself? As addressed above, it's the threat of the scandal that comes from our secret lives being made public. But there's something more to Milverton, and the fact that he is able to move freely despite his crimes and Holmes and Watson must turn to crime to defeat him only brings the detective and blackmailer closer together, because their work relies on the same commodity: information.

Holmes is a successful detective because of his wealth of knowledge and information and his ability to make significant conclusions from mere trifles. At a glance he can tell significant things about who someone is and where they've been. For the sake of his detective work, this proves useful (especially because it is the gimmick on which the stories hinge). Holmes uses this to discover what remains unknown to everyone else. He deals in hidden secrets: the lives and actions of criminals so he can unravel their schemes and bring their secrets to light for retribution.

Milverton also deals in information and brings secrets to light, but rather than criminals, Milverton punishes the wealthy for their social transgressions. If the victim pays, Milverton returns the evidence. If the victim refuses or can’t, the information is made public and the victim is scandalized. Holmes surprises people with his deductions, but he never uses them to scandalize someone or for personal gain. Both represent the careful use of information but in different spheres and to different ends. Milverton not only shows the power of blackmail, but he shows us the kind of villain Holmes himself could be.

Playing with the rules, not by them: Irene Adler

Where Moriarty's interesting trait was his absence, Irene Adler is interesting because she’s too present. She’s on Serpentine avenue, turning men's heads; singing on the operatic stage; haunting Ormstein's past, present, and future; in the church getting married; in a young man's ulster coat; and, finally, in the infamous photographs (one as a tool for blackmail, the other as a memento). By being present in so many ways and so many places, Adler strains against and breaks the social codes that governed Victorian society.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,”Adler has a photograph, evidence of an affair between Adler and King Ormstein of Bohemia, which she threatens to reveal shortly before his wedding to a Scandanavian princess. Ormstein gives no details of the tryst, but his association with someone who isn't nobility like himself is scandalous enough. This is more than an illicit love affair. It crosses social class and nationality as well. The social anxieties introduced in “Bohemia” deal with sexual, social, and international borders. If there's a line to be crossed, Adler crosses it.

This was, of course, at a simpler (and I say that with sarcasm, not nostalgia) time, when women were seen in one of two lights: the housewife or the harlot. It's easy to classify Adler as the harlot because of her illicit relationship with a king, whether or not it was sexual. However, there's more to it than that. The housewife, also called the “angel in the home”, was supposed to stay and keep the house in order while men went out into the world. The border-crossing Adler leaves the domestic sphere for the professional one, putting her femininity on display, “turning the heads” of the men on Serpentine Avenue and in the opera house as a professional contralto. Adler's threat is to social structure and hierarchy. Rather than adhere to the rules that maintain order, she toys with and passes right over them, just as she crosses the Atlantic Ocean from New Jersey to Europe or social boundaries by romancing a king.

So why not cross even more boundaries? While Holmes is trailing her, he witnesses Adler's church marriage to Mr. Norton, a lawyer. In doing so, Adler, technically, goes from the scandalous harlot to the domesticated housewife in the eyes of civil law, divine law, and, much to his chagrin, Holmes himself. Holmes changes the way he reads her and judges her behavior. Holmes relies on people to fit in rigid social codes and uses these codes to deduce where people came from and how they'll behave.

While most of the people Holmes encounters adhere to these expectations, Adler doesn’t. So, because she was married in a church, Holmes expects her to be a dutiful Victorian bride and so uses maternal instincts to justify his conclusion for where the photograph is. What Holmes does not anticipate is her crossing the gender barrier to confirm her suspicions she's being tailed by Holmes, Adler disguises herself as a young man by donning an ulster coat to follow Holmes and Watson to Baker Street, and, even though she wishes Holmes good evening, he doesn’t recognize her, allowing Adler and her husband to escape with the photograph.

Adler is pervasive. She appears on many different layers, crossing the finely defined social borders that governed Victorian society (and we're still dealing with today). She's like Moriarty in that people can be more, and even something quite contrary, to what they appear to be, but where we can take Moriarty and decide conclusively that he is a villain, Adler is harder to identify. Her pervasiveness makes her elusive because it is difficult, even impossible to assign labels to her, labels she is perfectly comfortable switching around to suit her needs.

Lurking in Respectability: Professor Moriarty

It's hard to talk about Moriarty or “The Final Problem” without mentioning that Doyle really wanted to retire Sherlock Holmes. Doyle had grown tired of the character: it was all he was associated with. A popular magazine at the time, Punch, actually printed a picture of Doyle fettered to Holmes (pictured below). But Doyle knew merely retiring Holmes wouldn't be enough: he needed to kill Holmes by pitting him against a villain so nefarious, that Holmes would give own life to beat him. The result is both men, locked in mortal combat, plummet to their deaths.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fettered to Sherlock Holmes, from Punch.

From this, you'd expect there to be a wealth of possibilities for study and interpretation, but the stories are a little sparse. Professor Moriarty isn't all that interesting. He plays a role in three stories: “The Final Problem”, “The Empty House”, and The Valley of Fear (he is mentioned in “The Illustrious Client” and “His Last Bow”, but has no bearing on these stories), but in each, his appearances are minimal. In The Valley of Fear, the fourth Holmes Novel, Moriarty is a topic of discussion in the opening chapters and is mentioned at the end, but never appears in the main narrative even though Holmes claims Moriarty was behind the crimes he investigates. In “The Empty House”, which is Holmes' return, Moriarty's dead and the story is about capturing Moriarty's lieutenant, Sebastian Moran. Moran actually has more influence on the narrative than Moriarty did in House, Valley, and even his own story, “The Final Problem”, where Moriarty is, at most, spotted from a distance or unrecognized. Moriarty's primary characteristic is not his resemblance to Holmes, but rather his absence.

By being absent, Moriarty represents what we don't see or understand, and while Moriarty's appearances may be brief, this idea of unseen evil is common in Holmes stories.

In “The Bruce Partington Plans”, Holmes mentions “the thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, ” and in “A Case of Identity”, he states,

If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outr ́e results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

And, of course, it's Holmes' job to seek out these chains of events and bring the crimes and evils of his society to light as he preserves Victorian respectability. Or as he says in “Copper Beeches” after Watson remarks on the beauty of country homes,

You [Watson] look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there...It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

And it's here Moriarty becomes interesting. He doesn’t threaten our property or our bodies, but our very sense of having a secure society, like the picturesque houses that by their beauty hide the evils lurking within. He’s an educated and deeply intelligent man who turned to crime while still maintaining a positive image. Moriarty doesn't correlate with a specific kind of social anxiety, but all social anxieties and crime. Rather than outright committing crimes, he facilitates whatever crime is necessary or requested of him. He represents the idea that crime and evil could be anywhere, especially where it is least expected.

The Social Anxieties of Crime and Detective Fiction

As discussed elsewhere in this blog, fiction is thematic. This is particularly true when dealing with detective and crime fiction because it deals with physical, emotional, and social anxieties. We'd rather see the world, our homes, and our lives as safe, and place the dangers of the modern world at a distance. News does this for us: all the bad things happen somewhere else and to someone else. Detective and crime fiction is a safe way to invite these ideas into our homes and see a safe resolution.

The expectation in crime and detective fiction is simple: something has gone wrong and must be set right. Whether it be theft, violence, scandal, blackmail, or murder, the truth is sought, the wrong party brought to justice and amends made to the victims to return the world to a pre-crisis balance. Each possible crime represents more than itself: murder is a threat to the sanctity of life, theft to property, blackmail to privacy. When we see these crimes in fiction it’s an opportunity to explore the significance of these social ills. Even if it is just a little bit, we get to feel anxious about our own life, property, privacy, etc. Thankfully, the detective represents the social order, through their efforts to discover the evil and set it right.

Take the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” This story focuses on a young woman, Helen Stoner, who fears her life is being threatened by her stepfather, Sir Grimsby Roylott, because her sister died shortly before the sister’s marriage. Roylott is a violent man who keeps a menagerie of exotic animals, and keeps his stepdaughter's bed mounted in a room, so it cannot be moved. Holmes and Watson hide in Helen's room and discover a poisonous snake let into her room. They beat it back, and the snake attacks and kills Roylott himself, giving the story some poetic justice.

Roylott represents a threat to Victorian standards with his violent temper and exotic menagerie: hardly a respectable British gentleman. His step-daughter, not of his historically hot-tempered aristocracy, represents Victorian ideals of womanhood: she is innocent and needs protection, which appears in the form of Holmes. The violent, exotic Roylott not only poses a threat to his daughter but to Victorian decorum, womanhood, and fatherhood, in the name of claiming her inheritance. Holmes comes and fulfills the role of paternal protector, performing the social roles Roylott has abandoned. So this is not simply a crime story about violent men, damsels in distress, and exotic animals, but it's a story about foreign threats and influences, and familial duty, with Holmes to fill the gaps.

The villain represents threats to the social order while the victims represent what is good and wholesome and the detective returns the world to a positive situation.

This means when looking at crime and detective fiction, it is important to consider what the crime and villain represent thematically. To explore this idea, I'm going to take a few blog posts looking at how the classic, archetypal detective Sherlock Holmes deals with some of the major crimes and villains he faces, and, perhaps a few other pieces of crime fiction.

To begin, I will look at the three most famous of Holmes villains: Irene Adler, Professor Moriarty, and Charles Augustus Milverton. Adler is famous because she is the woman who beat him, Moriarty because he is “the Napoleon of crime” Holmes' arch-nemesis, and Milverton with the use of information for personal gain.