Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10. Arthur Conan Doyle
dispensed with the small stuff—human crime—and taken on a larger subject—the frightful position of mankind in a vast and uncaring cosmos over which we have no control, but his characters proceed with the same logical, step-by-step deduction that Holmes used for mundane matters, until they arrive, not unflinchingly, we will admit, but still arrive, at the same thing that Holmes was after: the truth, however mind-blasting it might be.
That’s what the grown-up H.P. Lovecraft, late of the Providence Detective Agency, was after all along.
He knew Holmes’s methods, and applied them, not to human crime, but to the haunted-house gulfs of cosmic infinity.
Sources
Cannon, Peter. “Parallel Passages in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ and ‘The Picture in the House.’” Lovecraft Stories, Vol. 1 No. 1 (Fall 1979), pp. 3-6.
____________. “You Have Been in Providence, I Perceive.” Nyctalops #14 (March 1978), pp. 45-46.
Joshi, S.T. I Am Providence, The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. (2 vols). New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010.
Lovecraft, H.P. Letters to Alfred Galpin. Edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. New York, Hippocampus Press, 2003.
Lovecraft, H.P. and August Derleth. Essential Solitude, The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (2 vols.) edited by David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008.
1 H.P. Lovecraft. Letters to Alfred Galpin, p. 19.
2 H.P. Lovecraft. Essential Solitude, p. 323.
3 H.P. Lovecraft. Essential Solitude, p. 203-204.
4 H.P. Lovecraft. Essential Solitude, p. 322.
5 For instance, “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth,” from The Sign of the Four. In The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, p. 613. Note 26, p. 614, lists numerous further expressions of the same sentiment in other stories.
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND SCIENCE FICTION, by Amy H. Sturgis
Detective fiction and science fiction are siblings of a sort. Both are descended from the Enlightenment’s faith in a systematic, comprehensible universe. They even share a parent. Edgar Allan Poe not only created fiction’s first detective of note, C. August Dupin, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1841), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844), but he also served as a key voice in early science fiction. A quick glance at the table of contents of Harold Beaver’s edited collection The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976) reveals stories dealing with mesmerism, galvanism, resurrection, and even time travel, among other concepts, following the trail blazed by Mary Shelley and anticipating Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and other stars in the science fiction constellation. These authors posed the question of “what if?” and extrapolated from contemporary scientific knowledge to offer imaginative answers spiced with the flavor of plausibility.
Despite the close relationship of the genres, it’s a rare character who moves back and forth comfortably between the two. Sherlock Holmes, however, has made a lasting home in both the detective and science fiction literary worlds. Understanding why Holmes has appealed to science fiction audiences and how he has been incorporated into the science fiction canon yields useful insights into the Great Detective’s lasting popularity.
Conan Doyle, Holmes, and the Science Fiction Sensibility
During his forty-five years as a writer, Arthur Conan Doyle published works in a wide variety of genres, non-fiction and fiction, from historical romance to contemporary politics. It is worth noting that before, while, and after achieving fame with the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, Conan Doyle also wrote science fiction. There is no one “science fiction moment” in his career; on the contrary, he maintained a life-long involvement with the genre.
For example, the publication of his “The Great Keinplatz Experiment” (1885), a tale about personality exchange, predated the introduction of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet by two years. After A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, and in the same year as the debut of the first collection of Holmesian short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), Conan Doyle published both “The Los Amigos Fiasco” and The Doings of Raffles Haw. The former tells the story of how a condemned criminal gains superpowers when subjected to an experimental electric chair; the latter explores a chemist’s transformation into an alchemist who discovers the secret of transmuting lead into gold.
Two years later, his novel of telepathic vampirism, The Parasite, followed. In 1910, well into the phenomenal success of his Sherlock Holmes works, Conan Doyle published “The Terror of Blue John Gap,” a short story about a monstrous creature who lives underground. Two years after the release of the final Sherlock Holmes stories came The Maracot Deep (1929), Conan Doyle’s novel of the discovery of Atlantis by a deep-sea scientific expedition. This list is hardly exhaustive. Over the decades Conan Doyle also produced a number of other stories that could be considered to have science fiction elements, as well.
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Perhaps his greatest achievement in the genre remains his works centered on the scientific jack-of-all-trades known as Professor Challenger. Just as Conan Doyle drew on his own real-life mentor Joseph Bell to create Sherlock Holmes, he modeled George Edward Challenger on another figure he knew from the University of Edinburgh: Professor of Physiology William Rutherford. Between 1912 and 1929, Conan Doyle published three novels (The Lost World, The Poison Belt, and The Land of Mist) and two short stories (“When the World Screamed” and “The Disintegration Machine”) in the series, pitting the larger-than-life Challenger against such forces as dinosaurs surviving on a remote plateau in South America, a poisonous band of ether fated to intercept the Earth, and a brilliant technological invention with the potential to become a most dangerous weapon. The Challenger stories remain popular—and the inspiration for various pastiches—today.
Sherlock Holmes and the Science Fiction Sensibility
Given Conan Doyle’s relationship to the genre, it should come as little surprise that the four novels and fifty-six short stories that comprise his Sherlock Holmes canon are infused with a “science fiction sensibility.” Consider, for example, how John Watson initially hears of Sherlock Holmes from Stamford in the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. Stamford describes Holmes as “a little too scientific for my tastes—it approaches to cold-bloodedness.” Stamford goes on to characterize the man as the sort who might, “out of a spirit of inquiry,” use his friend—or, for that matter, himself—as a test subject for experimentation, due to his “passion for definite and exact knowledge.”
When Watson first encounters Holmes in person, in the chemical laboratory of St. Bart’s Hospital, he describes the scene in this way:
Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames. There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. “I’ve found it! I’ve found it,” he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. “I have found a reagent which is precipitated by hæomoglobin, and by nothing else.” Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shone upon his features.
In short, the reader’s introductions to Holmes represent him with the single-minded zeal of a scientist in the familiar setting of a scientist. He is portrayed as a cerebral hero, one whose goal is not to conquer a land, win a girl, or defeat a villain, but rather to know. And, as the reader discovers along with Watson, Holmes employs his own disciplined method with exact precision in order to achieve this goal. His drive to understand, to solve