I read this quite a few years ago and plan to re-read it when I get it from the library. One of the genre's I looked at whilst doing my BA was detective fiction and I've found one of my research essays. So, hopefully nobody will mind and I won't bore them too much, but this is an excerpt from it regarding Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.
"A series of events occurring in Victorian England contributed to detective fiction, evolving the genre and transforming it. Events such as: the "formation of the Bow Street Runners...the passing of Sir Robert Peel's Metroplitan Police Act of 1829 which established the Metropolitan Police and led to the setting up in 1842 of a special criminal Investigation Department dedicated to detective work" (Cox, 1992). Furthermore the idea of the literary detective was introduced by Charles Dickens in his novel Bleak House (1853), he uses a police detective.
The market for detective fiction grew and the reading public increasingly demanded sophisticated "crime and mystery with minuteness and particularly of a detective officer" (Cox, 1992). At this juncture the public is presented with one of the most legendary and renowned detectives of its time: Sherlock Holmes. The reading public embraced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character. Again, playing upon the familiar, Holmes was a figure who was "solid, contemporary...dominated by London and its suburbs" (Cox, 1992). Furthermore, Holmes empathised with his readers when he became "increasingly...articulate, indeed to defend the values of the broad middle stratum of English Society" (Cox, 1992). The public could associate with him, ordinary individuals could call upon him. It was not uncommon for mail addressed to Baker Street; pleas for Sherlock Holmes' help, his character being so embedded in Victorian society.
The Sherlock Holmes' stories were structured in a sequential fashion. Holmes and Watson would wait until consulted, or perhaps a newspaper story would catch the eye, observations would be made, analysed, until finally, with only Holmes knowing the truth, Watson and readers alike were enlightened, the mystery was solved. This formula using a central character, was repeated time and time again. In the end, Doyle tired of this structure and finally killed his character off. Regardless, Holmes and what followed were the professional amateur sleuth and consulting detective.
Before Sherlock Holmes, the detective novel would often result in a natural or providential turn of events. That is, it was not mere deductive power that brought a criminal to justice, but rather, an act of God. Holmes' rationality and analytical intelligence paralleled what was scientific and technical within that era. "Doyle consciously decentres the lurid details of acts of criminality in the interest of fictionalising the processes through which crime is detected" (Longhurst, 1989). With the advent of a new police force and new technological advances, such as fingerprinting, the emergence of a new discipline, criminology, it comes as no surprise that "most academic studies which puzzle over detective fiction argue that it is, at root, a literature of social and psychological adjustment" (Longhurst, 1989)."
Cox, Michael, 1992, Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection, an Oxford anthology, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Longhurst, Derek (ed.), 1989, Gender, genre and narrative pleasure, Reading popular fiction, Unwin Hyman, Great Britain.
