I, Ripper

“I suppose I see,” I said. “I hope I can make the world see.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“Then I’m off to the Sholes machine, and I will—”

“Now hold for a second,” he said. “I do have, since you have convinced me that this is the course you mean to pursue, a suggestion.”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“This is a precipitous time for your enterprise, and I wonder if you are aware of that fact.”

“I am aware that the public is desperate for an end to the menace and terror of Jack,” I said.

“Not exactly. As of December of last year and more so since June of this year, a great many members of the public, particularly people of our sort, who matter and determine the course of our nation’s mental drift, have come to believe in the moral and intellectual authority of the amateur detective. As a figure, he is enlarging in the public imagination, even while that of the professional police detective has diminished. You yourself, to judge by your comments, are in his thrall. The horror of Jack and the utter failure of Warren’s coppers to halt or solve it has perhaps multiplied this condition. The people want a heroic detective to solve it. In their bosom, they yearn for a man to emerge who has insights, understandings, analytical and deductive powers, forensic attributes, a knowledge of darkness and its methods, and the will and righteous energy to project such on the malefactor while protecting the public. The public yearns for Sherlock Holmes.”

“Of course,” I said. “I had admired the creation. I see him and Watson in us, I must admit.”

“I have at last read A Study in Scarlet, in the Ward Lock edition. It seems to have entered that zone of private but vast awareness. Because Conan Doyle, an opthalmalogist, as I understand it, created the ideal detective. Sherlock Holmes: a man of science, a man of deduction paramount and refined, a man of calm, overall a man of complete rationality who sees what others have missed and is able to put facts in their proper order and context.”

“Exactly,” I said, quite pleased that the living Sherlock Holmes had validated my insight.

“The structure is also interesting. He himself does not narrate. He is, rather, observed by a junior partner, a fellow of keen observation as well as astute literary powers. This would be Watson, an MD actually, recently retired from military service. Holmes solves the case, Watson tells the tale.”

“You are suggesting—”

“What I am suggesting is that before you write your story, you reread Conan Doyle’s. In that way you will learn how someone has done it masterfully, the rhythms between the narrator and the hero, the careful placement of clues, the cycle of interpretation and revelation, all reported in oak-solid, dead-lucid English prose. That is, read A Study in Scarlet again and then write your story in the penumbra of its influence. Thus will you prosper. Thus will you do justice not only to Dare and Jeb but to Polly, Annie, Long Liz, Kate, and poor Mary Jane, and in a way, even to poor Colonel Woodruff, God rest his tormented soul.”

“Excellent advice,” I said. “I shall forthwith. We must publish the day after the funeral, even if they have not found the body. It is imperative that we name the colonel, so that the police may open his rooms and there, no doubt, find Annie’s rings, perhaps a knife, perhaps some pickled bits of Judy, some bloody rags, all signs of his perfidy, making our case air-tight.”

I stopped at Mudie’s on New Oxford and bought the Ward Lock & Company edition of A Study in Scarlet.

And so it was that afternoon that I reintroduced Mr. Holmes and his amanuensis, Dr. Watson, to my life. It was a cracking good read. Conan Doyle wrote clearly and directly, without affectation or ruse. Moreover, he had a gift for vigorous narrative that perhaps approached Louis Stevenson’s or Dickens’s even at this early stage of his career. I roared through the thing a second time, transfigured and pleased to be in the company of two such interesting gentlemen. While I saw a lot of Holmes in Dare, however, I saw very little of Watson in myself, except by structure of the story. Where Watson was wise and well salted, I was impetuous, ambitious, perhaps too brilliant to do anybody any good as an assistant, having a need for my own way and the prime spotlight. Knowing that, I told myself, would be very fine guidance for the long article I was about to write, for I would be able to control my love of self enough to let the true hero, Professor Dare, have center stage. It would benefit not only him but me as well.