Abstract
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are, in themselves, a physical product of their time, stuffed full of Victorian materialities that lead to the successful completion of several cases by Sherlock Holmes. Recent revisions of the Sherlockian mythology in neo-Victorian texts and transmedia adaptations emulate the concrete nature of his detective investigations to walk us through the data required to solve the crime in a manner that can only be solved by reading the material context(s) of things. Maier investigates how various iterations of Holmes uses his microscopic views of things—be they tobacco, blood drops, footprints, telegrams, canes, cuffs or dirt, all constituting a kind of critical cultural archive—to reconstitute the safety of society from the aberrant source of criminality that disturbs conventional order, and how neo-Victorian re-visionings of Conan Doyle’s world, including Anthony Horowitz’s House of Silk, Lyndsay Faye’s The Art of Detection, Granada TV’s Sherlock Holmes, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and BBC Sherlock, represent things.
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Notes
- 1.
“The Finger,” Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, was the first detective in fiction according to Roseman Mill in Detectionary (1971, 6).
- 2.
Even the narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd admits his and Poirot’s ancestry with “I played Watson to his Sherlock” (155).
- 3.
Tzvetan Todorov argues there are two types of detective fiction; I would argue that Sherlock Holmes does both: “Two entirely different forms of [narrative] interest exist. The first can be called curiosity: it proceeds from effect to cause: starting from a certain effect (a corpse and certain clues) we must find its cause (the culprit and his motive). The second form is suspense, and here the move is from cause to effect: we are first shown the causes, the initial données (gangsters preparing a heist), and our interest is sustained by the expectation of what will happen, that is, certain effects (corpses, crimes, fights)” (1977, 47).
- 4.
The interdisciplinary means by which Holmes reaches his conclusions is another interesting aspect for future consideration; the “Art in the blood” is only one aptitude he may carry as it is immediately preceded by a reference to his grandmother, “who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist” (Doyle 2009 [September 1893c], 435) and followed by the revelation of a brother, Mycroft, whom Holmes declares possesses these ability/ies to an even greater extent than himself.
- 5.
For an excellent consideration of Holmes and the early development of the forensic investigative sciences, see O’Brien (2013).
- 6.
This is particularly evident in Elementary where, on occasion, Holmes’ drug addiction gets the better of him and Joan Watson steps in with compassion.
- 7.
In the new BBC Sherlock, even that point is made concrete in the whip with which the newly dominatrixed Irene Adler beats Holmes, physically and intellectually.
- 8.
Garside also makes the interesting point that “London then becomes the tapestry into which Sherlock is woven” (2017, 193), a move that sees the new BBC series thingified as a material object of contemporary culture and urban landscape.
- 9.
Note: The Conan Doyle Estate has approved of the narratives of both Anthony Horowitz and Lyndsay Faye.
- 10.
These women, considered the canonical five, were killed between August 31, 1888, and November 9, 1888.
- 11.
For an excellent exploration of the Victorian Freak Show, see Davies (2015).
- 12.
One need look no further than the last year for an animated film, Sherlock Gnomes (2018) and the comedy Holmes & Watson (2018).
- 13.
Two other things indicate the presence of Holmes for the cultural imagination: his meerschaum pipe and his caped coat, both of which are a product of the cultural imagination as represented in the illustrations by Sydney Paget.
- 14.
It is not to say many important issues that need reconsideration are not revisited in the films; for example, the much-maligned gypsies of the nineteenth century play a central role in helping Holmes and Watson, while modern, mechanized warfare that presages the coming World Wars is exposed for its inherent lack of fair play (fists and fleeing vs. automatic weaponry) and with gentlemen’s agreements for rules of engagement of the Victorian age.
- 15.
A similar move is also found in Elementary (2012–2019) where ex-pat British Holmes’ (Jonny Lee Miller) recovery from his heroin addiction is the inciting incident to meeting his—here female, Chinese American, sober companion—Watson (Lucy Liu). I hope to demonstrate in a follow-up consideration that Thing Theory can be equally applied to the twenty-first-century update adaptations of Sherlock and Elementary.
- 16.
When Holmes later asks Watson, “For God’s sake, give her some lines. She’s perfectly capable of starving us” (8:34), he also enters the conversation regarding their dual personae as persons and characters. A new novel that is promising for a future discussion on this idea of Sherlockian characters recognizing their own fictionality is The Fifth Heart (2015) by Dan Simmons.
- 17.
The Granada series, the Ritchie film and the BBC series in both iterations all show the street sign as the camera moves towards the door where the pair reside.
- 18.
There has been a traveling museum “International Exhibition of Sherlock Holmes” that is “focused on the scientific method as used in historic research and the observable sciences” with “prized artifacts, including original Paget illustrations, first edition of A Study in Scarlet, and original manuscript pages from The Hound of the Baskervilles” (8) in a Conan Doyle Study, crime scene, newspaper kiosk, slaughterhouse and, of course, 221B. See https://exhibitsdevelopment.com/exhibitions/the-international-exhibition-of-sherlock-holmes/.
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Maier, S.E. (2022). Criminal Things: Sherlock Holmes’ Details of Detection and Their Neo-Victorian Revisions. In: Maier, S.E., Ayres, B., Dove, D.M. (eds) Neo-Victorian Things. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06201-8_9
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