Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes Read online

  But what if we humans had developed along another line than that of primate? What if, instead of manipulative digits and opposing thumbs, we were given only arms, teeth, and wings? If in place of fist and weapon we were given a defence that required us to lay down our own lives? If we lacked the lungs and trachea that gave rise to speech, how would we preserve the intelligence of our own community?

  Humans convey meaning in a multitude of ways: the lift of a shoulder, the sideways slip of a gaze, the tensing of small muscles or the quantity of air passing through the vocal chords. How much more must this be so in a complex hive-mind that lacks the brute communication of words?

  One finds common sense and intelligence in the newest of hives and the rawest of virgin queens, a discernment that goes far past mere dumb survival. No beekeeper doubts that the creatures in his charge have their own language, as immediate and real as that which might be found in a village composed entirely of brothers and sisters. However, whether bees communicate by odour, by subtle emanations, by faint song, or by infinitesimal gestures we have yet to discover.

  The massacre of the males is a yearly occurrence in the hive—“Delivering over to executioners pale the lazy yawning drone,” When the days close and the last nectar ceases, the workers cast their gaze upon the drones, whom they have willingly fed and cosseted all the year long, but who are now only a burden on the food reserves, a threat to the future of the hive. So the females rise against the useless males and exterminate them every one, viciously ripping their former charges to pieces and driving any survivors out into the cold.

  The female is generally the more practical member of any species.

  What might we say of the intelligence of bees? On the one hand, it beggars the imagination that an entire species would permit itself to be enslaved, penned up, pushed about, and systematically pillaged for the hard-fought product of a year’s labours.

  Yet is this so remarkably different from the majority of human workers? Are they not enslaved to the coal face or the office desk, told where to go and what to do by forces outside their control? Do not the government and those who control prices in the market-place systematically rob human workers of all but a thin measure of the year’s earnings?

  Beekeeping would appear to be a hobby for the tinpot god, the man who seeks to keep an entire race under his control. In point of fact, a mere human has little control over bees: he shelters them, he takes their honey, he drives away pests, but in the end, he merely hopes for the best.

  A bee has no loyalty to the keeper, only to the hive; no commitment to the place, only to the community. A queen has no conversation for her human counterpart, and she or any other bee will attack the human protector if he makes a gesture that can be read as threat.

  Despite millennia of close history, in the end, the best a beekeeper can hope for is that he be ignored by his bees.

  Bees feel joy, and outrage, and contentment. Bees play, tossing themselves in flight with no point but for the pleasure of the thing. And bees despair, when hopelessness and loss have become their lot.

  A hive that loses its queen and has no other queen cells to raise up is dead, its future sterile. Workers may continue for a time, but soon listlessness and melancholy overcome them. Their sound changes, from the roar of energetic purpose to a note of anguish and loss. One of the workers may try to summon the energy of the hive and lay her own eggs, as if to conjure up the presence of royalty by enacting its rituals, but every member, drone to new-hatched worker, feels the end upon them.

  For the bee, unlike the human, the future is all: the next generation is the singular purpose of their every motion, their every decision. Not for apis mellifera the ethical struggles of individual versus community rights, the protest against oppression, the life-long dedication to perfecting an individual’s nature and desire. For the hive, there is no individual, merely the all; no present, only the call of the future; no personal contribution, only the accumulated essence of great numbers.

  In the hive, there can be but one ruler. The queen (Virgil, here, got it wrong, and imagined a bee king) is permitted a sole outing in her long life, one brief foray into the blue heights. She chooses a day of singular warmth and clarity, and sings her anticipation, stirring the hive into a state of excitement before she finally launches herself into the sky, pulling the males after her like the tail of a comet. Only the fastest can catch the queen, with her long wings and great strength, which ensures the strength of their future progeny.

  Then she returns to her hive where, if the beekeeper has his way, she spends the remainder of her days, never to fly, never to use her wings, never to see the sky again.

  When one watches that queen, dutifully planting her eggs in the cells prepared for them, surrounded at every moment by attentive workers, fed and cleaned and urged to ever greater production, one can only wonder: Does she remember? Does some part of that mind live forever in the soaring blue, inhabiting freedom in the way a prisoner will imagine a rich meal with such detail, his mouth waters? Or does the endless song of the hive fill her mind, compensating for the drudgery of her lot?

  Perhaps that freedom is why the queen is the hive’s one true warrior, jealously guarding her position against her unborn rivals until the regal powers wane, her production falters.

  But a queen does not die of old age. If she does not fall in royal battle, or of the cold, her daughters will eventually turn against her. They gather, hundreds of them, to surround her in a living mass, smothering her and crushing her. And when they have finished, they discard her lifeless body and begin the business of raising up another queen.

  The queen is dead, long live the queen.

  That is the way of the hive.

  V. “Art in the blood is liable to take

  the strangest forms.”

  Introduction to The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (Random House Library edition)

  It really is the only explanation. Not just for Mr Sherlock Holmes, who says those words as he muses over the source of the detecting abilities he shares with his brother Mycroft (and thus siding with the Detective-as-artist school of thought over the Detective-as-calculating-machine school), but equally to explain the man who penned the words, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. How else to account for the strange, vivid, flowers of fiction that burst from this outwardly ordinary British gentleman, except to say that Conan Doyle had art in his blood? Certainly he came from a family of artists on his father’s side, and his mother was a born storyteller with a strong sense of the dramatic.

  That Sir Arthur’s father, a failed artist from a clan of successful artists, was also a huge problem to the family—erratic, alcoholic, and finally condemned to a mental asylum—while his beloved storyteller mother was a strong moralist who raised her seven living children to the Roman Catholic faith, served to lay the groundwork for an extreme polarity of vision that was to characterize Conan Doyle’s life and work.

  Conan Doyle started out ordinary enough. He grew up in Edinburgh, went to an appropriately brutal boy’s school in England, followed it with medical school like a good son, did well on his exams, and splurged on a brief trip with an Arctic whaling expedition that put some money in his pocket but more to the point gave him Adventure enough to blow the cobwebs of the lecture hall from his brain. Then he settled down to work.

  Except that he didn’t. He spent the next ten years hopping from one place to the next, acting as medical officer aboard a West African steamer and training as an oculist in Vienna, marrying and begetting and trying his best to be a responsible husband and father.

  But he could not deny the art in his blood. Even while at medical school he had written fiction, and now, in the slow intervals between patients, the doctor sat at his surgery desk and took up his pen. (All praise to the patron saints of storytelling and doctors, for ensuring that the Conan Doyle medical practice, although considerably more of a success than the man’s later self-mythologizing would indicate, did not roar immediately into p
acked waiting-rooms.) Mysteries and adventures, historical tales and fantasies, one after another they trickled out and, with gratifying and increasing regularity, found homes for themselves in the pages of Strand and Cornhill Magazine, until in the spring of 1886, Conan Doyle found the character he was born to write: with a sharp cry of triumph and the words “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” Sherlock Holmes met Dr. John Watson, and a legend was born.

  Note, please, the sequence in our introduction to the young proto-detective: The ecstatic cry comes first, then the analytical deduction. Holmes might be called a thinking machine, even by his closest friend, but it is that cry that rings in our ears, that almost childlike delight in his discovery over the test-tubes that animates his thin face in our mind’s eye, forging a human link to the close analysis of perceived data that follows.

  Dichotomy delights. Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective, might think of himself as a cool-blooded calculator of data, might even convince his audience that he is nothing but a feverish brain appended to an inconvenient body, but any reader of Conan Doyle knows better. We know that Holmes’ cold and massive rationality is in fact driven by an equally immense passion, for life and action and above all, for Justice.

  Holmes may indeed be a Thinking Machine, but he is a machine that regularly bubbles over with joie de vivre: He jokes, he rants, he plays pranks, he relishes his food and lusts after the challenge of a good case, he loses himself in music and philosophizes on the Goodness represented by the existence of a rose and once, just once, reveals his heart to Watson.

  Yet it can not be denied that Holmes at times verges on the inhuman, greeting the news of a client’s death with mild regret and a philosophic determination to solve the case regardless, shamefully misusing his ever-faithful companion-at-arms Watson (or indeed any number of other innocents) when a case seems to call for it, and often seeming incapable of looking beyond the puzzle before him to its human elements. Holmes is dichotomy personified: the scientist fuelled by passion, the arch-egotist who lives for the good of his fellow man, the friendless misanthrope adored by millions, and even (whisper this last) the monk-like bachelor who has contributed so much to the fantasy lives of women.

  Holmes is not the only one of Conan Doyle’s creations to demonstrate the author’s innate sense of polarity. One of the Professor Challenger stories frankly shocks modern sensibilities by appearing to blithely wipe out the world’s entire population in order to prove the Professor right; one wonders uneasily if Mrs Challenger was saved merely to provide necessary genetic material for the next stage of human development. Certainly the Professor’s affections did not extend to his neighbours, his long-time employees, or even his King, any of whom might have benefited from a word of warning concerning the efficacy of oxygen.

  By all accounts, however, the author himself was a man of hearty affections and considerable loyalties. He would not divorce a dying wife, even with an eager and much-loved second-wife-to-be waiting patiently in the wings. His softness of heart led him to lengthy advocacy of strangers (such as the case of George Edalji, a half-blind Hindu accused of the nocturnal serial mutilation of…cows. Holmes would have burst out in his famous biting laugh.) The doctor was an easy touch for causes.

  Which brings us, necessarily, to Conan Doyle’s spiritualism. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the world’s great rationalist, was a fervent believer in all things spiritual, ghostly, ectoplasmic, and charlatan. A self-declared agnostic who stated firmly that he could not accept an unprovable thesis such as Christianity, he later seized on the eminently disprovable performances of mind-readers and automatic writing to explain his world.

  Particularly after the disasters of the Great War, he became ever more deeply committed to the belief that his dead son had survived the grave and that his mother was watching over him; in the end he gave all his energies and most of his fortune to the sort of muscular spiritualism that called to him, declaring the furthering of mediums to be his mission in life. He was convinced, for example—he knew to his bones—that Harry Houdini escaped his chains not by mere trick, but by dematerialising from within their iron bonds and resuming his corporeal self off to one side. He stuck to his belief even when Houdini explained, over and over again, that it was mere technique: Poor deluded Houdini might not recognise his own psychic powers, but Conan Doyle did.

  A bundle of contradictions, Sir Arthur: gullible skeptic; earth-bound romantic; law-abiding suburbanite whose great hero had little respect for the law or the law’s agents; spokesman for rationality who yet joyously accepted a child’s simplistic photographs as proof of the existence of fairies; creator of a character any writer would kill for (as those of us who have tried to write Holmes are too painfully aware) who after a brief seven-year run heartlessly tossed the character off a high waterfall because he was threatening to interfere with his creator’s “real work” of historical romances; unschooled literary force capable of tight-knit prose studded with such nerve-tingling gems as the horrified, “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”; or the admission that a mystery was proving “a three-pipe problem”; or the most famous of all his exchanges, the protest, “The dog did nothing in the night-time” followed by Holmes’ enigmatic reply, “That was the curious incident.”

  Immortal, language-enriching phrases, vital, immediate places and people flowed from the doctor’s pen with an ease that makes a writer writhe with envy. And the most frustrating thing is knowing that the Holmes stories were so easy for Conan Doyle, he discounted them entirely. They were of such minor importance in his own mind that he would toss off a story with little revision, send it off, pay his bills, and then return to his real work. Conan Doyle was like some artist capable of exquisite, evocative pen-and-ink sketches who yet sees value only in the huge, overworked oil canvases he insists on producing.

  The only revenge a poor imitator can take is the knowledge that the unloved detective won out in the end, that the light and unimportant fiction Conan Doyle reverted to when time came to support a family and his spiritualist enterprises managed to sneak around the backs of those closely researched and utterly earnest historical novels and take on a life of their own away from their creator, leaving Holmes standing alone, uncreated, timeless, and infinitely more immediate in the world’s eye than the stolid British doctor under whose name the stories are kept on shelves from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar.

  (It may even be a good thing that Conan Doyle did not take the Holmes stories seriously, or we might have seen the detective’s personality stretched and twisted to promote the cause of spiritualism. Holmes depending on automatic writing to solve a case, or consulting an ectoplasmic medium: one shudders at the possibilities.)

  Thus, in the end, Sir Arthur was overtaken by his own creation, Holmes’ great shadow engulfing his own. Surely there can’t be many writers who habitually receive mail addressed to his or her fictional character—and, moreover, get it delivered by the postman? We might spare a moment of sympathy for the good doctor’s dignity, as he battled to free himself from the sticky webs of his own brilliant fiction.

  But perhaps only a moment. I for one am happy enough to take up my slim, engagingly worked volume about, and by, a man transformed by the art in his blood; I join with a throng of others in a Babel of languages, all of us eager to step again into those pages lit perpetually by the hissing gas jets, as we prepare to flag down a hansom cab in the pursuit of villainy.

  The game, surely, is still afoot.

  VI. Textual, Higher, Radical, and Midrashic Sherlockian Criticism

  Introduction to The Grand Game, Volume 1

  eds. Leslie S. Klinger and Laurie R. King

  The rule of the game is that it must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord’s…

  —Dorothy L. Sayers

  In January, 2010, I was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars (as “The Red Circle.”)iv Before my suitcases were unpacked back in California, Les Klinger (“The Abbey Grang
e”) was on the phone to ask if I wouldn’t like to help edit a book of Sherlockian scholarship. Overlooking the first law of travel (Never make a decision until the suitcase is back in the closet.) I said sure, sounds like fun.

  Les Klinger is not a successful lawyer for nothing.

  His proposal was based on the 2011 centenary of Monsignor Ronald Knox’s landmark essay, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.”v I first came across this work in 1987, when I began writing a series of novels in which Sherlock Holmes plays a part.vi As an academic by training and by inclination, my first impulse had been to see what other scholars made of this person about whom I found myself writing. I spent some time in the library, gravitating not to works concerned with the literary merit or symbolic content of the Holmes stories, but to those that treated the stories as historical truth. The works that, as I found later, comprised “The Game” of Sherlockian scholarship—Knox’s paper, along with Dorothy L. Sayers’ comment at the top of this essay,vii were but two of the gems I came across. From my first introduction to “The Game” and its solemn players, my general impression was that these people were all having a grand time of it.viii

  In 2007, I was given the opportunity to make my own minor contribution to Sherlockian criticism, when I presented my theory on “Watson’s War Wound” to the BSI, coming away ridiculously pleased that they had not thrown hot-house tomatoesix at this woman who had co-opted The Master for her own nefarious purposes. That gratitude may explain why I was so willing to say “Yes” to my fellow Irregular.