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Beyond Sherlock Holmes: An Introduction

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Victorian Detectives in Contemporary Culture

Abstract

Sherlock Holmes seems to have enjoyed a monopoly on Victorian fictional detection and recent reappearances of other nineteenth-century investigators suggest that audiences are hungry for more. The chapter presents an overview of the continued yet changing presence and appeal of the figure of the Victorian detective, real and fictional, including the appearance of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin (1841) and factual developments, like the establishment of the Detective Department (1842) with its vibrant depictions by Charles Dickens. It explains the ubiquitous absence of Victorian female detectives from the collection and provides possible reasons behind the renaissance of Victorian and Victorian-like sleuths.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (2005), Heather Worthington presents a broader perspective: “it was in the popular literature of the first half of the nineteenth century that many of the patterns and themes of the later fully-fledged genre of crime fiction were first articulated” (1). She discusses representations of detectives in periodical literature and the beginnings of detective fiction.

  2. 2.

    Good’s case is presented, for example, in The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders (Chapter 4, “Policing Murder”).

  3. 3.

    This does not mean that there were no other fictional detectives at the time. Popular in the 1850s were, for example, William Russell’s pseudo-memoirs or J. and C. Brown’s Recollections of a Detective Police -Officer (see Haia Shpayer-Makov 232–238).

  4. 4.

    See Bleak House, Chapters XXV, LIII, LVII, LXII.

  5. 5.

    Both the 1860 case and life of Jonathan Whicher are described in a superb account by Kate Summerscale in her The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (2008).

  6. 6.

    Apart from employing an inconspicuous boy, Cuff’s attention to seemingly irrelevant details may also be perceived as a characteristic of the detective created twenty years later by Conan Doyle : “At one end of the inquiry there was a murder, and at the other end there was a spot of ink on a table cloth that nobody could account for. In all my experience along the dirtiest ways of this dirty little world, I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet.” (The Moonstone 97)

  7. 7.

    For more on the 1877 scandal see, for example, Haia Shpayer-Makov’s The Ascent of the Detective (38–39).

  8. 8.

    The phrase “twentieth-century Victorian” was used by Jonathan Cranfield to title his book about the relationship between Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine (2016).

  9. 9.

    Male detectives dominate academic discourse, too. Detective, Barry Forshaw’s edited collection (2016), includes thirteen case studies: twelve are about men, one is about two women (“Detectives Sarah Lund & Saga Norén”); Private Investigator, edited by Alistair Rolls and Rachel Franks (2016), includes ten case studies, and the ratio is six to four: the female investigators discussed are Veronica Mars, Mavis Seidlitz, Ruth Epelbaum, and Louise Morvan.

  10. 10.

    Other books analysing Victorian female detectives are, e.g. Kathleen Klein’s The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (1995), or, to some extent, Kate Watson’s Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860–1880: Fourteen American, British and Australian Authors (2012). An overview of crime fiction and police reality is presented by Erika Janik in Pistols and Petticoats: 175 Years of Lady Detectives in Fact and Fiction (2016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko

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  1. Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
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  1. Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland

    Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko

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Krawczyk-Żywko, L. (2017). Beyond Sherlock Holmes: An Introduction. In: Krawczyk-Żywko, L. (eds) Victorian Detectives in Contemporary Culture. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69311-8_1

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