The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Read Free Page B

Five Orange Pips’ when he remarks that ‘As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understoodone link in a series of incidents, should be able accurately to state all the other ones, both before and after.’
    As the Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg has noted, perhaps the most precise parallel with the Holmesian method comes with Sigmund Freud and the development of psychoanalysis. The parallel even extends to the literary form, for while Holmes is at his best in the short story, so Freud reaches his height through lectures and above all the celebrated case studies which, in narrative drive and economy of expression (and perhaps, in imaginative invention), rank as literary masterpieces in their own right. The similarities are indeed extraordinary: detective and analyst are required to set aside their own characters and become almost disembodied intellects to pursue the truth, preserving a distance from their clients; they both maintain consulting-rooms to which clients with troubles come in search of relief; while Freud insists on medical confidentiality, Holmes maintains that ‘I extend to the affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to you in yours’ (‘The Noble Bachelor’). Moreover, both all but break that assurance in order to publicize their method, Freud by writing up his cases, Holmes by allowing Watson to do so.
    Above all, both see the significance of the insignificant, and use it to pioneer a new method of investigation which has since had many imitators but few superiors. For while Holmes pursues ‘the little things’ in pursuit of the truth, so Freud considers previously overlooked trifles – such as facial tics, jokes and dreams – to delve into the unconscious and reconstruct a past which is otherwise completely obscured. The classic Freudian case study begins with a neurosis and works back through details to its point of origin; the best Holmes stories begin with a crime (‘Silver Blaze’, ‘The Naval Treaty’), or a piece of inexplicable behaviour (‘The Red-Headed League’), or a disappearing fiancé or wife (‘A Case of Identity’, ‘The Noble Bachelor’), or a mysterious death (‘The Five Orange Pips’, ‘The Speckled Band’), and again works back to the source of the disturbance. In both cases, the truth lies underneath the surface; the narrative of the client hides the deeper narrative which detective and analyst alone can perceive.
    The faith in reason which Sherlock Holmes embodies was, perhaps, appealing because it was already waning as the stories first appearedand had all but vanished under the impact of war when the last adventures appeared in the 1920s. The fierce secularism of the earliest stories is self-evident throughout. It is notable, for example, that while the occasional member of the nobility is grudgingly allowed an appearance – if at the cost of being generally presented in a bad light – that other staple of nineteenth-century fiction, the clergyman, is notable by his absence. There are scarcely any references to religion in any of the stories presented here, almost no vicars, priests, curates, bishops, of any sort. Even the account of the wedding in ‘The Noble Bachelor’ mentions almost the entire congregation except for the officiating priest. Holmes’s excursions to the country, such as in ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, take him to a society quite unlike that visited by his fellows, for he goes to no villages with churches in them, and when he makes inquiries the last place he ever thinks of going is the vicarage, which so many other detectives have regarded as their first port of call. Almost the only mention of anything ecclesiastical is a far-off glimpse of the steeples of Tavistock in ‘Silver Blaze’ – distant, decorative and