The Remedy by Thomas Goetz

Author:Thomas Goetz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

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IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE THE WORLD TODAY WITHOUT SHERLOCK Holmes. Holmes has transcended literature to become perhaps the most popular character in Anglo-American culture. In films and television, he remains omnipresent on the scene of contemporary culture, as conspicuous a character as Luke Skywalker or Mickey Mouse. So if we’re to appreciate the full breadth of what Conan Doyle created, we must try to push out of our minds everything we think of when we think of Sherlock Holmes and instead consider the vast vacuum of that empty sheet of paper when Conan Doyle sat down at his desk in Southsea and began to sketch out a tale. Originally titled “A Tangled Skein,” the story focused on an unlikely duo: this eccentric man with a knack for investigating crime and his newfound acquaintance, a hobbled physician needing a place to live.

It’s tempting to slot Conan Doyle into the myth of the lone genius here, just as it was to consider Koch as such. But just as Koch’s work owed much, in fact, to Henle, Pasteur, and others, so Conan Doyle’s creation can be traced quite clearly to specific influences that broached even distant Southsea. This first Sherlock Holmes novel resourcefully cobbled together a range of influences and sources. In terms of the detective himself, the most obvious predecessor is Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in 1841, is considered the first modern detective story. Conan Doyle devoured the tale as a child and admired it as an adult. Like Holmes, Dupin relies on logic and intellect more than happenstance. And like Holmes, Dupin doesn’t have an official position as a detective (a word that hadn’t, in any event, been invented in 1841). He is simply motivated by an urge to put his wits to work, to wield his powers of reasoning and analysis to do something useful.

Though Conan Doyle clearly drew on Poe, he was also tapping into a popular enthusiasm for tales of crime and intrigue. By the time Sherlock Holmes came around, mysteries had been a staple of English fiction for more than a century. The cascade of periodicals created a new demand for adventure stories tinged with a bit of criminality. The novels of Wilkie Collins—first serialized in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round in the 1850s and ’60s—invented many of the classic touchstones of the genre, such as a local police investigator in over his head, a handful of false suspects, and the surprise twist.

But Conan Doyle turned out something that, even in the first appearance in A Study in Scarlet, went far beyond his influences. (For instance, though today many consider his London a definitive portrait of the city, in fact, Conan Doyle had little firsthand experience in London and, as he later confessed, had leaned heavily on a post office map to describe the city in his early Holmes stories.) Sherlock Holmes wasn’t a stock character but had a singular personality and appeal and a wholly modern approach to his task of criminal detection.

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