Sensational Adventures: Sherlock Holmes and His Generic Past

Sensational Adventures: Sherlock Holmes and His Generic Past Leslie Haynsworth Denver, Colorado OFTEN ANNOUNCING themselves as "The Adventure of...", the Sherlock Holmes stories explicitly direct our attention through their very titles to their affinities with the adventure tradition in nineteenthcentury British fiction.1 It is not surprising, then—especially in light of Arthur Conan Doyle's own professed admiration for the adventure genre, and for the imperial project itself2—that modern critical assessments of the stories have often called attention to the ways in which they mirror both the narrative patterns and the thematic concerns of the adventure tradition.3 Most notably, the figure of Holmes himself has been cited as performing much the same kind of work as does the traditional adventure hero. As Jon Thompson puts it, "Through the figure of Sherlock Holmes, and through the empirical values he championed, Conan Doyle's fiction ratified the principles of an imperial, patriarchal Britain."4 In a similar vein, Dennis Porter asserts that Holmes "embodied the heroic qualities of an ascendant middle class that had learned to groom itself for an imperial role under the influence of a variety of ideological state apparatuses, including . . . middle-brow literature."5 As these remarks suggest, Holmes undoubtedly does owe much of his appeal to the heroic conventions generated by imperial adventure stories like Rider Haggard's She (1887) and Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), for—keen-witted, wearily disdainful of conventional society and devoted to his work to the exclusion of all affective ties—he displays many of the important characteristics of the prototypical adventure hero.6 Indeed, both Thompson and Porter suggest that we might plausibly view Holmes as a kind of literal embodiment of imperialist ideology, at least insofar as it informs notions of "ideal" masculine subjectivity. 459 ELT AA : A 2001 But if the Holmes stories reiterate both the conventions and the convictions of the adventure tradition, they are also—and equally—inflected in readily apparent ways by domestic fiction and sensation fiction —genres whose values and narrative goals are typically identified by the adventure story as being antagonistic to its own. In "Ordering the Sensational: Sherlock Holmes and the Female Gothic," Jasmine Yong Hall argues that the sensational elements of the Holmes stories are in fact crucial to their appeal, for without their damsels in distress and their lurid accounts of highly-charged domestic entanglements, Holmes's work would appear "trivial."7 Moreover, sensation fiction is a direct literary influence on the early Holmes stories: Doyle borrows liberally from the plot of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) in The Sign of Four, for example, and Christopher Rodin suggests that Collins's influence is felt throughout the Holmes canon, and even in the character of Holmes himself.8 Heightening the emotional resonances of the crises the great detective is called upon to resolve, the sensational elements of the Holmes stories undoubtedly enhance the titillating effects of Holmes's investigations. But given their protagonist's own aversion to affect, it would seem that it is not through their sensational details that the stories perform their most significant cultural work. Curiously, then, the two critics who most often and most directly call attention to the importance of sensationalism in the Holmes stories are none other than Sherlock Holmes and John Watson themselves. Holmes in fact persistently berates Watson for "sensationalizing" his accounts of their cases. In "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," for example, the great detective remarks that "you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing."9 Watson readily admits to being guilty as charged; in fact, he smiles when he confesses that "I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records."10 Holmes and Watson alike agree, then, that in Watson's hands Holmes's investigations become "sensational adventures"; while Holmes himself asserts that "Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should...