On Sherlock Holmes and "Mysteries"

Or, HBomberGuy is right, but not that right

Some friends recently told me that I absolutely had to watch HBomberGuy's video about the Roblox oof. And they were correct, that video whips ass. So, as I do on the rare occasions I find video essaysists I like, I began watching everything he's ever made. Something that made me both hoot and also holler was his video about the BBC Sherlock made by Moffatt. But as I finished it up earlier today, I realized he hits a point repeatedly that's not quite as true as it seems. And, mind you, as my subtitle says, he's right, there's just This One Thing.

That Thing is that the Sherlock Holmes stories don't adhere to the "rule" that mysteries must give the audience all the clues.

I'll crib from the fine tradition of gender studies theorists, and tell you about my personal history with this. As you probably already know, I've got a phd in literature focused on gothic fiction. I focused specifically on speculative fiction -- scifi, fantasy, horror, all that good stuff -- and its relationship to genre. My specialty period is the Victorian era, so Holmes is sort of close to the edges of my wheelhouse. I didn't specialize in mysteries, but since Holmes is also gothic, there's overlap.

And more personally still, Holmes is probably why I became a Victorianist. We read a Holmes story in my seventh grade English class -- probably "The Speckled Band" -- and I immediately went to the library. They had these two cheap paperbacks, already rebound into hardcover library binding, and I read them. I read them over and over. I still have strong sense memories of those specific books, and I was deeply disappointed when I discovered they weren't published like that. I couldn't buy my own copies. I do own those editions, in the paperbacks. I eventually found them in the wild and got my parents to buy them for me. I tried to show off the cipher from the Dancing Men story, and as it turns out, there's no "K" presented in the stories. So my attempt to make a cool bookmark that read "Sherlock Holmes" in dancing men cipher failed at the outset.

That's probably enough of that. Let's turn instead to Arthur Conan Doyle. He was, famously, a physician, trained at the University of Edinburgh. He also claimed to have based Holmes on a doctor who trained him, one Joseph Bell, who insisted that physicians should simply be able to diagnose people based on looking at them, and purportedly did the Holmes thing to people who came into the free clinic. The way that clinic worked was basically you could be seen by a doctor for free but in the presence of the students, so it was a teaching opportunity. Which is, honestly, not the worst idea, if it's all done with consent. At any rate, Doyle described this doctor as able to not only diagnose illnesses but also personal histories and occupations from a quick glance.

It's also probably worth pointing out that Doyle himself acted as a detective twice, once managing to obtain the release of a person falsely accused of a murder. He just read the stories in the newspaper and decided they didn't add up. More simply, he was apparently pretty smart.

So why does one of the best stories he ever wrote make no fucking sense?

I mentioned "The Speckled Band" above. You can read it, if you never have, here. I'm going to spoil the ever loving shit out of it, but on the other hand, I'm overtly claiming I'm going to spoil the solution to a story that makes no sense, so I guess you can take it or leave it. But it's a good story so you should read it eventually!

Let me try to be brief: a woman comes to Holmes, saying her step father, who is An Asshole, and who was in the Indian wars (so also a colonialist, whee), is going to kill her. Her evidence is that she's about to get married. The money her father is living on is actually the portion of her own mother's fortune, that he keeps in trust for the daughter until she is married. And also she had a sister who died -- right before she was married.

Holmes and Watson go down, investigate, walk the grounds and the room, and notice some weird shit. Here's what they notice: her room is being renovated suddenly, so she has to sleep in another room. This same thing happened to her sister. The bed is bolted down. The bell pull doesn't work. The woman remembers a weird whistle the night her sister died. She also recalls her sister's dying words were "the speckled band." There are Romani folks around (yes, the story uses the Bad Word for them). The father has an impressive array of weapons looted from India. He has a fucking cheetah that stalks his grounds. So he's an Asshole. There's an air vent in the room. It does not communicate outside. It communicates to the adjacent room. The adjacent room is the step father's study.

OK. That's a lot of detail, right? You can, in fact, put it together yourself. She's been moved to the room and forced to sleep under the bell pull rope so something can be dropped on her from the vent. There are weird "exotic" animals, so maybe the guy is even dropping an animal on her. You can even get so far as saying, well, what about that bell pull rope? What needs a rope? Fucking snakes that's what.

But, look. Listen to me. Snakes don't have ears. You know all that stuff where snake charmers play flutes and such to make snakes dance? That doesn't work. What they do is to stamp the ground while playing flute, which looks like they're keeping time, which they are. But also the snake is "hearing" that -- snakes hear, mostly, by sensing vibrations through their stomachs. They are very good at catching vibrations in the ground, which makes them good at both catching prey and avoiding larger animals that might prey on them in turn.

Guess what? It's a fucking snake. And you'll love this part. The whistle was to call it back. The asshole keeps it in a safe. Like, I presume he takes it out to feed it because of the next fact, but safes are airtight, the snake would die. Finally, he feeds the snake milk. Fucking milk. Snakes don't drink milk!

This makes no sense. It's just stupid. The solution was a fucking magic snake that doesn't really exist, which can be trained to attack on command using a series of whistles.

If you're sort of following along at home and want to know the ending, it's as neat as the rest: Holmes and Watson waited up in the room and removed the lady to their hotel room. When the snake came down, Holmes beat the shit out of it with a stick, causing it to retreat and angrily strike the asshole, who dies. Holmes uses the snake-handling lash the guy had to put it back in the safe, explains everything, and the story ends.

Holmes figured it all out based on clues that make no sense. This is, in fact, remarkably like the BBC Sherlock, which, as Hbomberguy pointed out, never make sense. The thing about "The Speckled Band" isn't that it makes no sense. It's a pair of points: Doyle considered it one of his best stories and he also said on occasion that he wanted the stories to make sense. He didn't say the reader should be able to figure it out -- more on that "rule" in a moment -- but that they should hang together well, that they were consistent. So when there are off hand comments about Holmes figuring things out based on how much butter had melted, or how strange it is that someone's going around asking for geese -- those are plausible even if they are not probable.

One conclusion we can make is that Speckled Band is about the process of detection in fiction. Doyle considered it one of his best stories because it boils the formula down to the quintessence, the pure unmitigated joy of reading a detective go about their work. And that joy is not, in Doyle's opinion, about being able to figure out the mystery from clues, but instead of watching the detective make sense of a world turned to chaos.

This is the point I'd like to acknowledge my source. The outlining of this story and the conclusion that it is about genre expectations is from the work of John A. Hodgson, specificlaly their essay titled "The Recoil of 'The Speckled Band': Detective Story and Detective Discourse." I have it in Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays, which Hodgson edited. It's a great book, and if you're a real sicko for this kind of thing, you'll love it!

I'm acknowledging my source specifically here because I'm going to begin to depart from it, not by disagreeing, but by using it as a jumping-off point. As I said earlier, detective fiction is a form of gothic fiction, and gothic fiction is traditionally about destabilizing our view of the order the world is in. Good and Evil do not exist in nature; crimes can go unpunished; the houses of God can house the worst sinners. Gothic fiction disrupts our feeling of safety in the world, that even if we aren't safe, the world has justice and truth in it. What if, really, it's all whatever the hell?

Detective fiction fucks with that. Life is disrupted, destabilized, and the detective fixes it. The detective is effectively one of the first modern hero archetypes: instead of slaying the beast that disrupted the natural harmony of creation, like a knight or a cavalier or something, they solve the philosophical disruption. Something apparently unnatural happens, like a person being murdered in a locked room, and explains how it was natural after all. Remember Doyle dove into this headfirst with Hound of the Baskervilles, which takes the explained supernatural of writers like Radcliffe and makes that not the tidy way of getting around distasteful stuff but the mechanical engine at the core of the work.

The detective puts the pieces of the broken reality tunnel back together. They're a wizard in reverse. To loop back to Hodgson's article, that may be what Doyle was describing in "Band": the pleasure is in things making sense, not in making sense of them yourself.

Now, obviously, the sub-genre where you do just that is very popular. Think of Agatha Christie, right? But Doyle wasn't doing that.

And to briefly touch on what I said in the intro, which was, quite honestly, just an admission of what inspired me to write, not an attempt to "prove someone wrong" -- Hbomberguy frequently talks about the original Holmes stories as though you could figure them out. He sort of does a set theory mistake, where they're mysteries, and mysteries are defined as being works you can figure out if you're careful, and doesn't address that in fact Doyle never really bothered with that.

This is, personally, why I didn't immediately hate Sherlock, though certainly by season 3 my interest was flagging and I didn't even finish season 4, so I only learned about the "big twist" from the video essay I linked. It didn't bother me, strictly, that there was so little detail given about the clues, because the clues in the stories were always presented in such a way that you couldn't really do anything with them, and in fact you could argue quite well that totally different interpretations are possible.

Perhaps one of the most famous scenes of "detection" is the intro of Hound, which I won't copy over here, but you can of course read it yourself if you haven't. What I'll include is the excellent gag that ends it. In discoursing about the stick their visitor left behind, Holmes notes he has a dog, based on tooth marks. To refer to my earlier remark, at no point is the stick described as having tooth marks until Holmes brings up the dog. But the gag is this:

It may have been—yes, by Jove, it is a curly-haired spaniel.” ...

“My dear fellow, how can you possibly be so sure of that?”

“For the very simple reason that I see the dog himself on our very doorstep, and there is the ring of its owner...."

Look, that's a good joke. Doyle is showing us that yes, Holmes can figure things out more accurately than Watson, but it's because of his observation more than his startling intelligence. Remember, this is based on a guy who tried to teach his students to do this. And Bell purportedly considered Doyle one of his best students.

My main points have been made, I suppose, this has been denouement. Doyle wasn't necessarily interested in presenting the reader with enough information to make deductions for themselves. When he did provide clues, they were often outrageous or wrong, because they were based on made-up shit. But Doyle himself appears to know that, and to be saying more about the genre than simply trying to come up with easy excuses to write himself out of a corner. [^1]

I already wrote at length about hardboiled detective fiction so I'll just link that here. Hardboiled detective fiction is actually more in line with Holmes than with Poirot. The protagonists may overtly make jokes about how they're not Sherlock Holmes, because that's not how this works, but they figure things out by just being stubborn and in the right place at the right time. You can't read Red Harvest and figure it out before the Op tells you. The book's not even trying.

However, since the context of this was originally thoughts coming into my head after finishing HBomberGuy's video, I do want to briefly say that he's right. I liked Sherlock but it is bad and Moffatt is just a bad show runner. And setting aside whether the Holmes stories actually set up the mystery for you, everything else he says about the show's disrespect for the joy of mysteries is true. Just 100%, Whedon-level contempt for the actual people watching this thing.

[^1]: I can't write that without acknowledging that the reason why there are jokes about where Watson was shot is that Doyle didn't remember where he said Watson had been shot and didn't bother to look it up, leading him to get it wrong sometimes. But if you put me to the test I'd probably admit I believe the solutions to his puzzles mattered more to him than those details.