THE SIGN OF FOUR: A Postcolonial Reading of Sherlock Holmes

This episode will be focused on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, the second novel in the Sherlock Holmes series. Our interest here will be on how the modes of observation and deduction that Holmes deploys reveal his sense of the moral topography of London, the strangers that constitute its underclass and criminal worlds, and the relationship of all these to the British Empire. As in other Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories, The Sign of Four turns on how in the nineteenth century new money was often tied to various characters’ misadventures abroad and how on their return to metropolitan London with their ill-gotten loot forms of reckoning took place that served to stage justice as a confrontation between the metropolis and Empire. We will see how the classic detective novel gives us signs of social heterogeneity as the expressions of both information and enigma, such that it extends the demands of the novel form but ties social heterogeneity to social disorder and its correction. As an example of the classic detective, Sherlock Holmes expresses a supreme confidence in his methods primarily because he is an upper class white man and thus is not under any pressure to justify himself in the English nineteenth-century social world depicted in the novel. This is in sharp contrast to the Black noir detective genre such as we find in say Walter Moseley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, where the detective Easy Rawlins is concerned as much with the consequences of racial profiling on his own identity as he is on how to sift through the corruption that marks all levels of society in post-WWII Los Angeles as dangerous. As we will see, Sherlock Holmes’ superb qualities as an all-knowing detective are also tied to how he is able to take knowledge of the Empire completely for granted, which he also brings to bear in his interpretation of the problems of crime in London. We will also see how barbarism and moral deficit are assimilated to racial and class markers, thus also suggesting that crime is the purvey of strangers to the social norms of genteel society and of those that whose judgment has somewhat been morally deformed through misadventures within the Empire.
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Suggested Readings
· Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography, (London: Vintage, 2000).
· Philip Meadows-Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; first published 1839).
· Rudyard Kipling, Kim, (New York: Chelsea House Publications, 1987).
· Sally Shuttleworth, “Diseases of Modern Life”, European Research Council Project, (diseasesofmodernlife.web.ox.a...)
· Yumna Siddiqi, “The Cesspool of Empire: Sherlock Holmes and the Return of the Repressed,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 34.1 (2006): 233-247.
· Stephen K. Knight, Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity, 2nd edition, (London: Palgrave, 2010).
· Stephen K. Knight, “The Postcolonial Crime Novel,” The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel, ed. Ato Quayson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 166-187.
· Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 2006; first published 1983).

[@zahraaadnan1862]

THANK YOU so much professor! This was so helpfull, god bless you.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

Glad it was helpful, Zahraa!

[@jeromemasamaka8938]

Thanks Prof. Quayson, for this insightful analysis of everyone’s favorite. Doyle wrote in a period of great sleuth masterpieces. It’s strange that the good old detective fiction genre has lost its appeal, to some extent. Prof what do you think accounts for this? Perhaps, the movie industry has co-opted it? CSI series for instance? If so, why is the conventional novel still enjoying popularity in spite of screen stories whereas the sleuth narrative is now more popular on screen?

[@CriticReadingWriting]

Jerome, actually, the detective genre has not lost its appeal at all. Quite the opposite. There are lots of new detective fictions being churned out on an almost daily basis. The purists will say, of course, that they don't match the classic era of the genre. But that is open to debate.