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Diplomacy and Detection in Conan Doyle's "The Second Stain" Christopher Metress Samford University IN A 1984 ESSAY entitled "Sherlock Holmes, Order, and the Late-Victorian Mind," Christopher Clausen argued for a critical reconsideration of the Sherlockian canon. According to Clausen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories have been too often the subject of the most tedious pseudo-scholarship in the history of letters, most of it premised on the facetious assumption that Holmes weis a historical character whose biography needs filling in. . . . Whether because of its ambiguous standing somewhere in the no-man's land between 'popular culture' and serious literature or because the people who write articles about what university Holmes attended and whether he was ever an actor have driven everyone else away, there has been remarkably little critical discussion of the Holmes canon, ι AU of this pseudo-scholarship, Clausen concludes, has blinded us to the larger significance of the Sherlock Holmes stories: "the canon as a whole—with its observant, analytical hero who comes into professional contact with all strata of urban and rural society from kings (e.g. Ά Scandal in Bohemia') to beggars (e.g. The Man With the Twisted LiP*)—offers an unrivaled and largely overlooked source for the study of late-Victorian ideas, attitudes, and culture."2 Despite Clausen's plea for critical reconsideration, articles still continue to be written premised upon the assumption that Holmes was indeed a historical character. We need only check the latest issue of The Baker Street Journal to see this kind of scholarship at work. But we must note as well a marked shift in critical approaches to the canon, a shift that answers Clausen's call for a reconsideration of the canon as a source for studying, if you will, the late-Victorian frame of mind. Recent 39 ELT 37 : 1 1994 essays by Kirby Farrell, Lawrence Frank, Colin Loader, Michael Atkinson and Jasmine Yong Hall each manifest a different critical approach to the canon, but they share one thing in common—a belief that Conan Doyle's Sherlockian writings deserve careful attention as both highly suggestive socio-cultural narratives and highly complex literary constructions .3 Each essay in its own way negates the claims of critics like Kim Herzinger, who writes that "It is surely not the literary value of Conan Doyle's stories which commands our attention; what we admire is the figure Holmes cuts in the world of imagination. And that figure far transcends the value of the texts themselves. . . . [H]igh critical seriousness . . . has, thankfully, never burdened the study of Sherlock Holmes. He simply could not stand the pressure."4 In the pages that follow, I will focus on one particular story in the canon, The Adventure of the Second Stain," and offer a reading that underscores the intricate narrative structure of the tale and suggests what this structure reveals about the cultural project of this story and the canon as a whole. As we shall see, it was Conan Doyle's project to engage in a cunning critique of late-Victorian England, a critique that would allow him to both expose the tumultuous passions jeopardizing late-Victorian cultural order and yet conceal those very passions at the same time. Thus, a close analysis of "Second Stain" shows that, despite the cautious pronouncements of Herzinger and others, the Sherlock Holmes stories not only can withstand the pressure of high critical seriousness, they demand it.5 The Second Stain" was first published in December of 1904 and collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. It is not, like "A Scandal in Bohemia," The Red-Headed League," The Musgrave Ritual," or The Speckled Band," a frequently anthologized story. Furthermore, like most of the post-Reichenbach tales in the canon, The Second Stain" is considered an inferior story. As so many critics have contended, Sherlock Holmes may have survived the faU at Reichenbach, but he was never quite the same again. The critical consensus is that the same holds true for the stories themselves. When and where The Second Stain" has been the focus of a close reading, it has been subjected to the kind of "pseudo-scholarship" that Clausen rejects: until this point, critical...

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