Detecting the Man in the Macintosh: James Joyce and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The mystery of the man in the macintosh never seemed glamorous to me until I read Frank Kermode’s marvelous work The Genesis of Secrecy, in which he describes Macintosh as a “drab” but, nevertheless, compelling enigma.¹ In Kermode’s discussion of the various contexts in which Macintosh appears, I was struck by one in particular, the unexpected appearance of the man at Paddy Dignam’s funeral. “Where the deuce did he pop out of?” Bloom asks; “he wasn’t in the chapel, that I’ll swear” (u 6.826-27). For entirely unrelated reasons, I was reading The Valley of Fear at the same time as Kermode’s book and remembered a similar phrase in that novel, which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published in 1914 during the first years of Joyce’s work on Ulysses.²

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are called to a moated manor house in order to consult on a murder investigation in which a man presumed to be John Douglas is found dead in his office. They find that the body whose face has been blown off is not Douglas at all and that, instead, he has been hiding in a secret room connected to the office. Having solved the mystery, Holmes calls him forth from his hiding place, and the other characters are amazed. Inspector MacDonald, one of the policemen investigating the case, exclaims: “If you are Mr. John Douglas of Birlstone Manor, then whose death have we been investigating for these two days, and where in the world have you sprung from now? You seemed to come out of the floor like a jack-in-box” (Valley 211-12). Certainly the phrasing here with its mild oath—”where in the world have you sprung from now”—recalls Bloom’s question in Ulysses: “where the deuce did he pop out of?” The contexts in which the questions are asked also bear a certain similarity. In each case, someone appears unexpectedly and seemingly from out of nowhere at the location of a dead body.

By itself, of course, this similarity is not particularly persuasive, but it sparked my interest, especially when it occurred to me that Macintosh’s presence at the funeral increased the number of mourners to thirteen or, as Bloom describes it, “death’s number” (u 6.825-26). Consider the number of characters associated with Douglas’s death in The Valley of Fear. A man writing under the Coleridgean pseudonym “Fred Porlock” alerts Holmes and Watson to the murder, which, at least initially, was thought to have been orchestrated by Holmes’s arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Along with Holmes and Watson, the murder is investigated by three policemen, White Mason, Inspector MacDonald, and Sergeant Wilson, and they are assisted by the local physician, Dr. Wood. Within the manor house, the housekeeper, Mrs. Allen, and the butler, Ames, are the only servants who see the body, and Douglas’s friend Cecil Barker and his wife, Mrs. Douglas, are the first to discover the murder. These are the only characters concerned with the corpse lying in Douglas’s office, and they number twelve. When Douglas emerges from his secret hiding place and reports that in self-defense he killed the man presumed to have been Douglas, the number of characters associated with the body increases to thirteen.

The gruesome corpse found in Douglas’s office was shot in the face with a sawed-off shotgun, and the force of the discharge rendered his face unrecognizable, which is why the policemen fail to realize that the man is not Douglas. The detectives are struck by the peculiarity of this weapon, especially since its powerful blast is so noisy that it would have alerted everyone in the house. When Douglas later reappears alive and well, they are duly shocked. Compare this to the “Circe” episode: following the arrival of a scarlet-bedecked Timothy Harrington and his associate, that placeholder Lorcan Sherlock, Macintosh is shot by a cannon, presumably at Bloom’s command, only later to reappear downstairs as a ghostly “male form” taking his...