Abstract
The scene that greets Watson on his return to Baker Street at the start of ‘The Naval Treaty’ (1893) captures the essence of the emerging detective story in the fin de siècle:
Holmes was seated at his side-table clad in his dressing-gown and working hard over a chemical investigation. A large curved retort was boiling furiously in the bluish flame of a Bunsen burner, and the distilled drops were condensing into a two-litre measure...He dipped into this bottle or that, drawing out a few drops of each with his glass pipette, and finally brought a test-tube containing a solution over to the table. In his right hand he had a slip of litmus-paper.
‘You come at a crisis, Watson,’ said he. ‘If this paper remains blue, all is well. If it turns red, it means a man’s life.’ He dipped it into the test-tube, and it flushed at once into a dull dirty crimson. ‘Hum! I thought as much!’ he cried.1
We must never assume that which is incapable of proof. (G. H. Lewes (1817–78), The Physiology of Common Life (1859))
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Notes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Naval Treaty’ in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories (London: John Murray, 1956), pp. 500–1.
Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, ‘Introduction’ in Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology ed. by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. xviii.
Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Prologue to The Familiar’ in In a Glass Darkly ed. by Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 41.
Anthea Trodd, A Reader’s Guide to Edwardian Literature (Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 1991), p. 6.
E. and H. Heron, Ghost Stories (London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd., 1917), p. 3.
Sarah Crofton, ‘CSΨ: Occult Detectives of the Fin de Siècle and the Interpretation of Evidence’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 30.2 (2013), 29–39
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories (London: John Murray, 1954), p. 20.
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in Tales, Poems, Essays (London: Collins, 1952), p. 346.
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Instinct vs. Reason — A Black Cat’ in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), II, p. 682.
David Punter, ‘Formalism and Meaning in the Ghost Story’ in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day 2 vols (Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited, 1996), II, p. 86.
Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 63.
Algernon Blackwood, ‘A Psychical Invasion’ in John Silence (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), pp. 2–3.
Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 84.
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), p. 526.
Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1–18.
M. R. James, ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’ in Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, ed. by Michael Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 348.
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© 2014 Michael Cook
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Cook, M. (2014). Detecting the Ghost. In: Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294890_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294890_2
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