In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 Victorian Highs Detection, Drugs, and Empire Marty Roth The war with China has begun, and already several hundred Chinese have been murdered by our cruisers, because the government of China will not allow us to poison its subjects; in which poisoning, it appears, we have obtained a vested right. An expedition is Wtting out at Plymouth to “destroy Canton if necessary”; and Pekin also, it appears, if the Emperor “does not do us justice.” Was there ever such an atrocious proceeding? It is enough to raise up all Asia to “do justice” on the English, for their centuries of crime, misrule and oppression in the East. —J. J. Darling, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1840 Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats. —J. B. Priestley, Observer, May 1949 85 The early history of detective Wction is saturated with narcotic drugs. Edgar Allan Poe was an opium and Wilkie Collins a laudanum addict, and opium circulates through The Moonstone. Charles Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood begins in an East End opium den, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Man with the Twisted Lip” ends in one. As for other drugs that were soon to become illicit, Count Zaleski, M. P. Shiel’s dandiWed detective, smokes hashish cigarettes: the narrator of “The House of Orven” reports that “the air was heavy with the scented odor of . . . the fumes of the narcotic cannabis sativa . . . in which I knew it to be the habit of my friend to assuage himself.”1 And in The Sign of Four Sherlock Holmes injects himself with morphine or cocaine three times a day.2 In an American silent Wlm of 1916 entitled The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, even that paragon of athletic health, Douglas Fairbanks, played the “world’s greatest scientiWc detective,” a character named “Coke Ennyday” who sticks a needle into some part of his body every thirty seconds. Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip” is a disjointed tale that seeks to implicate almost all of its characters in addiction. It begins as a different kind of case, a story about a doctor and his patient: a frantic wife pleads with Dr. Watson to Wnd her husband, an opium addict, and Watson Wnds him where he may well belong, in an opium den in the “furthest east of the city.”3 There he also Wnds an Asian-looking addict who turns out to be Holmes in disguise, because Holmes is himself looking for a possible third addict, Neville St. Clair, a professional man who was seen by his wife apparently threatened by violence at an upper window of this very opium den. Detectives might have taken drugs to calm or to stimulate their highly wrought and Wnely tuned nervous systems in what was early recognized as an anxious profession. Holmes “only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting .”4 And a female detective of 1917 is confronted by her Watson: “‘So you have fallen back on the cola stimulant again, Miss Mack?’ She nodded glumly, and perversely slipped into her mouth another of the dark brown berries, on which I have known her to keep up for forty-eight hours without sleep and almost without food.”5 By contrast, they might have done drugs as poets who dreamed the solutions to their mysteries, like Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin. Prince Zaleski smokes hashish because he is a turn-of-thecentury aesthete and decadent—“He lay back on his couch, volumed in a Turkish beneesh, and listened to me . . . with woven Wngers, and the pale inverted eyes of old anchorites and astrologers”—and the aesthete, we have often been told, is one of the more likely templates for the detective.6 So the Sherlock Holmes who takes cocaine also reads “old black-letter” volumes , plays Mendelssohn lieder on the violin, quotes Goethe and Jean Paul and speaks “on miracle plays, medieval pottery,” and “the Buddhism of Ceylon.”7 Just as early detective Wction is deeply, perhaps constitutively, steeped in drugs, it is also associated with empire, and this connection is constitutive. In this Wction, crime is the dark side of conquest and imperial rule returning to pollute the metropolitan homeland. At the very beginning of the genre stands the story of a gigantic ourang-outang taken to Paris...

Share