The crime that Doyle gives Holmes to investigate is a simple one: an American businessman is found dead in an empty house, the sinister word “Rache” scrawled in blood on the walls.
Thorndyke would bring more rigorous science to the detective story, but Doyle sowed the seeds that Freeman harvested. Hans Gross, four years later) with understanding the significance of dust. “By a study of minutiæ, footprints, mud, dust, the use of chemistry and anatomy and geology, this detective must reconstruct the scene of a murder as though he had been there and casually fling out information into astounded faces.” In his day, the head of the police laboratory at Lyons even credited Doyle (and Dr. John Dickson Carr ( The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1949) credits Doyle with being the first scientific criminologist, when no system of scientific criminology existed. “The author has equalled the best of his predecessors in that popular line by bringing to light a seemingly impenetrable crime by means of severely logical deductions from apparently unconnected and well-nigh imperceptible traces and he has actually succeeded in inventing a brand new detective, only reminding the reader of Poe’s in being an amateur of genius in that particular direction.” “Nobody who cares for detective stories should pass over A Study in Scarlet, by Conan Doyle,” wrote The Graphic.
(Certainly Le Shérif, an 1839 opéra-comique for Halévy, is a prototype: impossible crime, red herrings, investigators, and a least likely culprit that anticipates Wilkie Collins.)īut Doyle’s contemporaries, like most critics since, believed he had achieved something novel. There had even been detective stories: most famously Wilkie Collins’ Moonstoneand Dickens’s Edwin Drood in France, some of Eugène Scribe’s plays and operas qualify. There had been detectives before Sherlock: Poe’s Dupin (“a very inferior fellow”) and Gaboriau’s Lecoq (“a miserable bungler”). Holmes, of course, was to become the most famous detective of all time, but that came later, with the short stories in the Strand.
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