The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Read Free

frequency with which the crimes narrated in the stories are generated abroad and then brought back to play out their consequences in England; much of Holmes’s work is to preserve the country from the corruption of foreign places, and that of the Empire in particular: one almost thinks that without this foreign contamination even London would be a remarkably peaceful, law-abiding place.
    Aside from that, Conan Doyle specializes in the struggling middle and lower-middle classes, alone in the office waiting for customers and struggling to maintain a position – Holmes himself, as he mentions in‘The Musgrave Ritual’, a doctor in ‘The Resident Patient’, an engineer in ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’; or in people forced to extreme measures to preserve appearances – hence the deception in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’. The desire to hold on to sums of money which later writers would consider almost derisory provides the motives at the heart of ‘A Case of Identity’, ‘The Speckled Band’ and ‘The Copper Beeches’, all of which are powered by questions of inheritance and give a more or less orthodox Victorian air to tales which, generally, are remarkably free of such period devices.
    Distinctly in the minority in the stories, however, are criminals; even though Conan Doyle refers several times to London as being full of such people, true criminals in fact make only rare appearances. The towering exception, of course, is Professor Moriarty. It may be that I am almost alone in having no time for Moriarty, and regard him as little more than a desperate device by an author exceptionally keen to kill off his hero and bring his enslavement to an end. Conan Doyle’s haste, I feel, made him careless in his depiction of the character and Moriarty as a result is a largely unsatisfying invention. Presumably Conan Doyle wanted to kill Holmes off by having this final showdown with his equal but opposite, in a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, dark and light, in which each cancelled out the other. The trouble is that Moriarty is so unconvincing that the contrast does not work. The idea of the master criminal, the ‘Napoleon of crime’, to use Conan Doyle’s memorable phrase, has been returned to again and again and never with any success except in espionage stories which are structurally capable of sustaining such figures. In inventing Moriarty, Conan Doyle abandoned almost all of the characteristics that made the earlier stories so successful. Holmes works because he is an outsider who controls nothing, and because the crimes he investigates have an individual, realistic tinge to them that makes them believable and enthralling. In ‘The Final Problem’ there is no particular crime or event at the centre: we are told of Moriarty’s great evil and intelligence, but are never shown these qualities in operation. With Moriarty, Conan Doyle steps from detective story into thriller, drama into melodrama. In earlier tales there are references to Holmes’s great cases, saving Scandinavian kings or confounding international swindlers,but Conan Doyle had too much sense to turn them into stories in their own right: for these he concentrates on the small-scale, almost the domestic incident. Holmes’s methods are simply not suited for grand conspiracy, and it is notable that in ‘The Final Problem’ there is no detection at all.
    For in the stories detection is essential, even if it is not always central to the resolution of the tale. What Conan Doyle created was the perfect positivist, the embodiment of Victorian faith in rationality and science, convinced that the right combination of method and reason could overcome all obstacles. Even though our own trust in science is not what it was, and our faith in human rationality has taken a battering since the middle of the twentieth century, Sherlock Holmes still presents an attractive