Dr Stephen McWilliams plots the links between literary figures and detective novels — some with a strong medical influence — and investigates the possibility of writing his own sleuthing novel.
If the shelves of my local bookshop are to be believed, most 19th-century literary figures were super-sleuths in their time. Indeed, any prominent child of the Victorian era was seemingly a nonentity if they hadn’t solved a murder or two.
Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Sandor Ferenczi, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr – the list goes on. They were all at it, busily making astute observations as they examined clues that had otherwise confounded the local constabulary.
h4. The Candlelight Murders
A perfect example is Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders, in which the discovery of a 16-year-old boy lying dead in an upstairs room entices the famous 19th-century writer to become a super-sleuth, albeit temporarily. Wilde teams up with a slightly-more-believable accomplice in the shape of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and, between them, they set out to solve the murder, Wilde using his singular genius and sharp wit, and Doyle his astute powers of observation.
Set in 1889, the story sees Wilde use his unique access to all levels of late-Victorian society — from the drawing rooms of the rich and powerful to the backstreets of the criminal underclass, thus allowing him to effectively investigate a string of bizarre and inexplicable killings.
But it is more in Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle puts his powers of deduction to the test. Based on true events, the story initially contrasts the circumstances of its two heroes, Doyle – the son of an alcoholic from a run-down area of Edinburgh – and George Edalji – the son of the Indian-born vicar of a small Staffordshire village called Great Wyrley. Doyle, as we know, grows up to become a doctor and one of the most famous writers of his time, while his counterpart becomes an obscure Birmingham-based solicitor, specialising in the intricacies of railway law.
The paths of these two men cross in 1907, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle intervenes in a miscarriage of justice. George Edalji has been wrongly accused of the ‘Great Wyrley Outrages’, a curious set of true events in which numerous horses and livestock were slashed and maimed.
When Doyle comes to his aid, his efforts eventually culminate in the establishment of the Court of Appeal in English law. Alas, the story is one that might easily have been written for Doyle’s most famous creation – the logical, precise and cocaine-addicted Sherlock Holmes.
h4. Medical background
Doyle originally wrote short stories to supplement his income. Business at his eye practice was reputedly not brisk, and writing helped to fill the lull periods between infrequent consultations. His stories were certainly influenced by his medical background, as in the case of, for example, The War in South Africa, which was based on his experiences as a senior physician during the Boer War.
Sherlock Holmes is, however, the hero for whom Doyle will always be remembered. First introduced to the public in 1887 in A Study in Scarlet, the fictional detective was famously modelled in part on the author’s old university professor, Joseph Bell, to some degree on Edgar Allen Poe’s detective Dupin, and finally on a former criminal named Eugene Francois Vidoq. The latter, of course, became the first chief of the Surete in Paris — on the principle that it takes a thief to catch a thief.
Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are not the only literary and historical figures to be portrayed as fictional detectives, however, as we can see in Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club. The story centres around a number of brutal and bizarre killings, including that of State Supreme Court Justice Healey, who is badly assaulted and then left in his garden to be eaten alive by strategically-placed maggots.
Meanwhile, a minister – Elisha Talbot – is discovered buried upside-down with his feet set on fire, while a third victim, Phinneas Jennison, is found sliced open exactly down the middle. Gruesome stuff.
When members of the Dante Club – a small group of poets who are in the process of translating The Divine Comedy from Italian to English – notice similarities between these murders and the various punishments dealt out in Dante’s Inferno, they set out to solve the crimes in an effort to salvage Dante’s reputation.
h4. Sleuthing skills
Thus the unlikely sleuthing skills of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, and James Russell Lowell are put to the test. But, when it comes to real-life historical figures solving fictional crimes, it is Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder that ices the cake. Set in New York in 1909, the novel begins with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi arriving to deliver a series of lectures on the controversial subject of psychoanalysis.
Within hours, they become involved in trying to crack the case of a brutal attack upon the 17-year-old daughter of a couple of high-society Manhattan denizens. The assault is seemingly so sadistic that the young girl is left with amnesia for the event and an inability to speak. Thus Freud agrees to supervise his host, Dr Stratham Younger, as he analyses the young girl in an effort to trace the perpetrator.
h4. Too implausible?
So, why have so many writers chosen real-life literary and historical figures as their protagonists? Isn’t it all, with the exception of the true story of Arthur and George, just a little too implausible? Possibly so, but as we may be witnessing the inception of a new sub-genre (the marriage of biography and popular crime fiction), it becomes more credible when we note that most of the authors in this emerging trend are, in fact, scholars of the literary and historical figures about whom they write.
h4. A glamorous genre
And isn’t any fictionalised account of celebrity super-sleuthing infinitely more exciting than a simple biography? Crime is a glamorous genre after all, and if the boring old Victorians can be put to work solving murders, all the better for the reader.
Presumably we haven’t seen the last of it, not least because Brandreth’s sequel – Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death – is apparently in the pipeline. In the meantime, I may try my own hand at such a novel – perhaps Emily Brontë and Napoleon III teaming up to solve a spate of highway robberies in 1840s South County Dublin! It just might work.
About Gary Culliton
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