Collins Classroom Classics - The Sign of Four

Introduction The Sign of Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes adventure, begins not with the crime at the heart of the novel, but with a brilliant display of deduction. And what is the occasion for such brilliance? – an unremarkable visit to the Post Office.

It is a reminder that, for Sherlock Holmes, no detail is too ordinary, no mystery too mundane. His detecting work is motivated not by a desire to bring criminals to justice, but by the thrill of solving an intellectual puzzle. In this, Holmes reflects his creator’s interests.

As a medical student in Edinburgh, Doyle worked as an assistant to Dr Joseph Bell. Bell’s sharp observation and deduction in his medical work fascinated the young Doyle, and Bell became something of an inspiration for the character of Holmes.11 Today, there are over 250 Sherlock Holmes societies worldwide, and so many dramatised versions of the great detective that, even if you’ve not read one of the stories, you’d probably recognise the character on screen. Every year, tourists pour from Baker Street station in London to visit the museum on the site of the fictional lodgings shared

by Holmes and Watson – 221b Baker Street – hoping to catch a sense of this quintessential Londoner. For a character who famously scorns emotion in favour of ‘true cold reason’ (p.146), Sherlock Holmes inspires a remarkable outpouring of devotion in his fans; almost enough to make us forget that he is a fiction.

Yet fiction he is, however closely Doyle followed the activities of the London Metropolitan Police, and iv

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however well he captures the nineteenth-century London of our imagination – a city of alleys and peasouper fogs, of shadowy docks and elegant squares, the London of Jack the Ripper. In fact, as Doyle told his publisher, when he wrote The Sign of Four in 1890 he barely knew London and had found most of his information from a Post Office map!

Contexts Born in Edinburgh, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was originally a doctor. He published his first novel and Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet, aged 28; he would go on to write over fifty of the detective stories for which he is best known. Yet Doyle himself preferred to write historical novels, even going so far as to ‘kill off’ Holmes in 1893. (The public outcry at Holmes’s death was such that he soon brought him back to life!)

The rise of the modern detective Sherlock Holmes is, arguably, the most famous literary detective; however, he wasn’t the first. Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, an ‘unofficial’ detective displaying remarkable powers of logic, first appeared in the United States almost fifty years earlier in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841). Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) is generally regarded as the first English detective novel, introducing many of the conventions of the mystery genre.

What was it that made these detectives so popular with Victorian readers?

While crime was nothing new, policing and solving crime were: the London Metropolitan Police was established in 1829, followed by a detective branch at Scotland Yard in 1842, and the London Criminal Investigation Department in 1878. In 1888, only two v

INTRODUCTION

years before The Sign of Four was published, the horrific murders of five London women created panic around the mysterious figure of ‘Jack the Ripper’, whose identity has never been established. This fed the public’s fascination for crime, reflected in the continuing popularity of penny dreadfuls – sensationalised accounts of contemporary crimes, which fuelled existing fears of ‘the criminal classes’.22 Detective novels such as The Sign of Four drew on the same anxiety, but they also offered a solution: while the real detectives of Scotland Yard might fail to allay Londoners’ fears, literary detectives such as Holmes could reassure readers by restoring order to the terrifying chaos of the crime scene. An interest in solving crime, not just policing it, had taken shape.

Science Doyle’s stories reflect the growing interest in the new ‘scientific’ methods of solving crime so expertly employed by Holmes, such as the analysis of typewritten or handwritten documents, fingerprints and footprints.

Sherlock Holmes’s approach to crime is driven by rationalism. Unlike the ineffectual policemen whom Doyle portrays, with their insistence on ‘apply[ing] common sense to the matter’ (p.53), Holmes is gifted with extraordinary powers of detection. Like Doyle’s old teacher, Joseph Bell, Holmes bases his deductions on analytical observation of the evidence. His cool demeanour at the crime scene in Chapter 6, for example, is in marked contrast to the huffing and puffing of Inspector Athelney Jones. Holmes’s confidence in his ‘peculiar powers’ (p.3) is well founded: not only does he conduct his own experiments (for instance, on different types of tobacco ash), he is a master of disguise (fooling even Watson), and is as comfortable in the slums as in vi

CHAPTER 1 The Science of Deduction Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks.

Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.

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Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch, or the additional exasper­ation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.

‘Which is it to-day?’ I asked, ‘morphine or cocaine?’

He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. ‘It is cocaine,’ he said, ‘a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?’

‘No, indeed,’ I answered, brusquely. ‘My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet.

I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.’

He smiled at my vehemence. ‘Perhaps you are right, Watson,’ he said. ‘I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.’

‘But consider!’ I said, earnestly. ‘Count the cost!

Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change and may at last leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another, but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.’

He did not seem offended. On the contrary, he put his finger-tips together and leaned his elbows on the arms of his chair, like one who has a relish for conversation.

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‘My mind,’ he said, ‘rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession – or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.’

‘The only unofficial detective?’ I said, raising my eyebrows.

‘The only unofficial consulting detective,’ he answered. ‘I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection. When Gregson or Lestrade or Athelney Jones are out of their depths – which, by the way, is their normal state – the matter is laid before me. I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist’s opinion. I claim no credit in such cases. My name figures in no newspaper. The work itself, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward. But you have yourself had some experience of my methods of work in the Jefferson Hope case.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said I, cordially. ‘I was never so struck by anything in my life. I even embodied it in a small brochure with the somewhat fantastic title of ‘A Study in Scarlet’.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘I glanced over it,’ said he.

‘Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.’

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Glossary Chapter 1 1

morocco: type of soft leather often used for wallets

2

Beaune: a wine from Burgundy, France

2 black-letter volume: a book printed in old-fashioned, Gothic-style writing 2 Afghan campaign: military conflict between British India and Afghanistan, 1878–80 (we learn in Chapter 2 that Watson was an army surgeon) 3 Gregson or Lestrade or Athelney Jones: (fictional) Scotland Yard inspectors 3 Jefferson Hope case: reference to the fictional case in A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes novel 3 ‘A Study in Scarlet’: here referring to Watson’s retelling of the case 3 the fifth proposition of Euclid: part of a theory of geometry 4 Baker Street: London street near Marylebone, where Holmes and Watson share lodgings 4 Jezail: simple, often handmade, musket, often used in British India 4

François le Villard: another fictional (French) detective

5 ‘magnifiques’, ‘coup-de-maîtres’, and ‘tours-deforce’: all French compliments: ‘magnificent’, ‘a master stroke,’ and ‘masterpiece’ (tour-de-force is also used in English, like the word cliché, for instance) 5

Indian lunkah: a type of Indian cigar

5 Trichinopoly, bird’s-eye: types of tobacco (the first named after a district in British India) 5 plaster of Paris: white powder, quick-setting when mixed with water, used to make casts 6

lithotypes: a type of print

6 telegram: a written message conveyed by telegraph via wires, much faster than sending a letter 147

GLOSSARY

7

send a wire: send a telegram message

9 fifty-guinea watch: a guinea was an old gold coin, worth one pound and a shilling; this was a valuable watch 10 pawnbrokers: business offering loans, with personal property used as a pledge of repayment 11

salver: a formal tray, on which visitors often left their card

Chapter 2 12 turban: here, a type of female headgear inspired by Indian turbans, popular in the early nineteenth century 13

Indian regiment: i.e. the British Indian army

14 Andaman Islands: group of around 300 islands between India and Myanmar 14

34th Bombay Infantry: fictional army regiment

14 Upper Norwood: a hilly South London suburb near the Crystal Palace 15 governess: an unmarried woman employed by a family to teach young children 15 The same day there arrived through the post: Victorian London had several postal deliveries daily, so a letter could arrive within a few hours 15

sixpence: an old silver coin (equivalent to decimal 2.5p)

18 Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man: Victorian explorer and writer, and his ‘universal’ secular history of the world 18

pathology: study of the way diseases develop

18 will-o’-the-wisps: light phenomenon on swampy land that looks like pale flames, seen in folklore as fairy-lights to lure travellers from their path Chapter 3 19

late of the: recently a member of

20

four-wheeler: four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage

22 the Strand: a famous central London street near the River Thames, known for its theatres 148

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22

memoranda: notes

22

pocket-lantern: a folding lantern

22

hansoms: two-wheeled one-horse carriage

23

street Arab: homeless street child

23

mounted to the box: driver’s raised seat

23 Afghanistan: country between British India and Russia (see above for Afghan campaign) 23

musket: a type of rifle

24

the Surrey side: the south side of the River Thames

24 Cold Harbour Lane: South London road joining Camberwell and Brixton 24 villas: suburban houses (detached or semi-detached) with garden 24

Hindoo: old spelling of Hindu

24

Sahib: British Indian term for ‘sir’ or ‘master’

24

khitmutgar: Indian term for a servant

Chapter 4 26

hookah: a water-pipe for smoking

26–7 Thaddeus, Bartholomew: names of two of Jesus’s disciples 27 Chianti: red wine from Italy 27 Tokay: sweet white wine from Hungary 28 Corot, Salvator Rosa, Bouguereau: three modern painters (French, Italian, French) 28 the modern French school: ‘modern’ here means from around 1860 onwards 29 Pondicherry: a French colonial capital in India, on the coast 29

prize-fighters: boxers

30

chaplet: a garland or circlet for the head

30

quinine: medicine used to treat malaria

30

Agra: city in northern India, home to the Taj Mahal palace

33

Venetian carafe: type of colourful and elaborate glass jug 149