Abstract
Examining the remains of Stevie, killed in Greenwich Park by the premature detonation of the bomb he had been carrying, Chief Inspector Heat addresses the constable who has just collected the body parts and laid them on a waterproof sheet: ‘“You used a shovel, ” he remarked, observing a sprinkling of small gravel, tiny brown bits of bark, and particles of splintered wood as fine as needles’ (SA 71). Observing the data — the gravel, bark and splinters in and around the body parts — Heat’s inference is immediately confirmed by the constable. The novel’s Edwardian readers might well have recognized Heat’s logical method here as ‘the science of deduction’, a process of inferential reasoning associated with the most famous fictional character in any genre at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 The genre was detective fiction, and the character was Sherlock Holmes.
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Notes
See Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 66. Symons (pp. 35–42) provides an excellent synoptic account of the rise of detective fiction, which followed the emergence of investigative institutions in Britain, France and America. Martin Priestman’s Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990) is also useful, and takes a detour through ‘Heart of Darkness’ (pp. 140–2) as a narrative of detection.
Andrew Glazzard, ‘“Some reader may have recognized”: The Case of Edgar Wallace and The Secret Agent’, The Conradian 37.2 (Autumn 2012), 19–34.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (London: Pan Books, 1975), p. 12.
Douglas Kerr, Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 41–4.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London: Pan Books, 1976), pp. 79–80.
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer (London: Verso, 1988), p. 142.
Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. xiii, 17–18.
See Haia Shpayer-Makov, The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 257–8.
C.E. Howard Vincent, A Police Code, and Manual of the Criminal Law (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1881), p. 253.
Haia Shpayer-Makov, ‘Explaining the Rise and Success of Detective Memoirs in Britain’, in Clive Emsley and Haia Shpayer-Makov (eds), Police Detectives in History, 1750–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 119.
Arthur Morrison, Martin Hewitt, Investigator (London: Ward, Lock & Bowden, 1894), pp. 295–9; Chronicles of Martin Hewitt (London: Ward, Lock & Bowden, 1895), p. 196.
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 8.
Morrison, Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, p. 19; R. Austin Freeman, The Red Thumb-Mark (Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001), p. 127.
Jacques Futrelle, The Chase of the Golden Plate (London: Hesperus Press, 2012), pp. 89–90.
L.T. Meade, The Sorceress of the Strand (London: Ward, Lock, 1903)
Algernon Blackwood, John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1908); Freeman, John Thorndyke’s Cases; E.W. Hornung, The Crime Doctor (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1914).
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes (London: Pan Books, 1976), p. 308.
Israel Zangwill, The Big Bow Mystery (London: Henry & Co., 1892), pp. 162–6.
Robert Hampson, ‘Chance: The Affair of the Purloined Brother’, The Conradian 6.2 (1981), 5–15.
Joseph Conrad, ‘Chance: An Episodic Tale with Comments’, New York Herald, 18 February 1912, 42.
Some critics, however, regard the novel as endorsing a Darwinian or materialist-scientific world-view. See for example Allan Hunter, Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism (London: Croom Helm, 1983)
Ludwig Schnauder, ‘The Materialist-Scientific World View’, in Allan H. Simmons and J.H. Stape (eds), The Secret Agent: Centennial Essays (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 95–106.
See for example Robert Hampson, ‘“If you read Lombroso”: Conrad and Criminal Anthropology’, in Mario Curreli (ed.), The Ugo Mursia Memorial Lectures: Papers from the International Conrad Conference, University of Pisa, September 7th-11th 1983 (Milan: Mursia International, 1987), p. 327.
See Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent (Penrith: Humanities E-books, 2007), p. 45.
B. Fletcher Robinson, The Chronicles of Addington Peace (London: Harper and Brothers, 1905), pp. 17–18.
Jon Thompson, Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 77. Thompson makes the important point that detective fiction has a hermeneutic as well as merely escapist or reassuring function: ‘it explores what it means to be caught up in the maelstrom of modernity’ (p. 8).
G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1901), p. 120.
Arthur Conan Doyle, His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (London: Pan Books, 1976), pp. 49–50.
J.G. Littlechild, Reminiscences of Chief-Inspector Littlechild (London: Leadenhall Press, 1894), p. 76.
Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Lodger (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 46.
Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills (London: Macmillan, 1923), p. 27.
Con Coroneos, ‘Conrad, Kropotkin and Anarchist Geography’, The Conradian 18.2 (Autumn 1994), 17.
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© 2016 Andrew Glazzard
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Glazzard, A. (2016). ‘Armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced society’: Detectives, Professionalism and Liberty in The Secret Agent . In: Conrad’s Popular Fictions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137559173_2
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