A Taste for Honey (2 page)

I know more of bad men than of bad bees. Heregrove will get rid of the present hives, maybe. But, mark my words, he will not give up beekeeping and the new lot will not be less malignant, but more, if he can make. A man like that gets the habit, the taste for malicious power. It grows, and it is harder to break than an addiction for morphia, I know. (31–32)

Here is one explicit reference to Sherlock in the novel—his addiction to morphia—and also to concerns about killing for the
love
of killing, which are all the more resonant considering that this novel was published during World War Two.

These tensions are all the more compelling considering that the action—the committing of the crime and the resolution—takes place within a small village and that there are, aside from the ubiquitous comedic servant Alice, only three main characters: the first-person narrator Sydney Silchester, the detective Mr. Mycroft and the killer Heregrove. Silchester fulfills the common function of mediating between the detective and the reader—the Watson figure, as Silchester illustrates, is necessary in that he translates for the reader the detective's cryptic words and action—“Would you be good enough to tell me what we are looking at and what it is meant to convey?” (27), he asks Mycroft at their first meeting.

While Silchester is keen to let all know that he would rather be left alone, the plot hinges on his taste for honey. But if Silchester and Mycroft are linked together by their detecting—the former undertaking much of the physical activity and the latter the intellectual (and emotionally judgmental) activity—so too are Mycroft and Heregrove linked. Silchester notices the physical similarities when talking with Heregrove: “He looked at me with a curiously expressionless face. He certainly was not what fashion papers call prepossessing. Dark, strong, resolute, and intelligent—yes, all these, and cold. Where had I seen a face as cold as that? Of course—old Mycroft's; but there it seemed to me that coldness came from detachment, this from hardness” (42).

Indeed, just as Heregrove traps Silchester into buying his honey so that he can have an object to kill, Mycroft also traps Silchester with his honey—his intricately lettered sign high up in the hedge pulled Silchester out of his life of retreat—“I supposed I liked life at second hand—reflected, not too real” (5)—into one of necessary action and emotional involvement. This linking of Mycroft and Heregrove makes the final confrontation all the more emotionally fraught.

The final pages of the novel are a justification of the means—however illegal—to stop a killer. If the detective is always right in the detective novel—necessary, some would argue, for a genre in which the reader identifies so strongly with the protagonist—then the detective-as-killer complicates the question of morality. Mycroft tells Silchester that what they do is justified because there is no other way of stopping Heregrove: “The law protects us from the sudden, unpremeditated violence of the untamed blackguard. It is helpless against the calculating malice of a man who patiently and deliberately studies to get around its limitations” (95). Yet the novel does call into question what it means to take a life: if Heregrove kills and is punished, is presenting Mycroft as the supreme moral authority enough to pardon him, in the eyes of the reader, for doing the same with impunity? The detective who kills renders ambivalent the righteous position allocated to this figure within the genre. Silchester certainly does recognize that Mycroft offers Heregrove an escape:

He was, in actual fact, face to face with his judge who was pleading with him to take a last chance—if, as it seemed to me, it was a spurious offer—to escape his doom. It was appallingly thrilling to me, this scene, which, with its tragicomic irony, seemed to me, as I watched it, to be more terrible than any trial scene, when the dry-mouthed prisoner at the bar sees the judge put on the black cap. (117)

Yet the ambivalence that Silchester feels, regarding the illegal actions and the way in which Mycroft acts as judge and jury, is clear in his simultaneous experience of awe and discomfort: “he was a wonder, a man ahead of his age in skill and also in justice … somehow, the very supermanly quality about it all put me off, daunted me. I don't want to have to live with mental or moral geniuses” (139). Returning to the opening of the novel, we see that Silchester has drawn back from Mycroft and reverted back into his solitude.

This is a novel which meta-fictively parodies Conan Doyle's Holmes stories. Mycroft slyly alludes to his fame—or his brother's fame—at the end of the novel and is tellingly rather surprised when Silchester has not heard of him. The arrogance of the detective—he
cannot
believe that his (brother's) fame has not preceded him—is borne out, however, by the reader's knowledge. The reader is aware of Mycroft's actual identity, which Silchester, in spite of the number of hints which Mycroft drops, is unable to detect for himself: even though he is told Mycroft's last name, Silchester is unable to recall it when writing his narrative. His inability to remember may be an indication of how he has been traumatized, both by a murderous attack and by his participation
in
murder. The novel opens with him repeatedly articulating his concerns: “But my mind goes round and round like a pet rat in his whirligig. That's because I can't write and also because I am really considerably worried, shocked, and perhaps frightened. Getting it all down, will help. Get it down, then, I will, and no more blundering about as though I were trying to keep something back from someone” (6). While the Silchester at the end of the novel may seem calmer, it is this Silchester who, after the attack on Heregrove, sits down to write an account of what occurred and who then clearly reveals his deep distress. In the end, only through narrating is Silchester able to ascribe responsibility for what happens to Heregrove. Revealing the tensions of first-person narrative, Silchester finishes his story with the insistence that “Mycroft did it, not I” (142). At this point, the complete parody of the Holmesian narrative emerges: Sherlock may commit petty crime for the purposes of combating criminals, but he does not kill. Precisely what Mycroft did is left ambiguous by Silchester's narrative—was “it” solving the crime or punishing the criminal? Ending on this lack of clarity demonstrates the tensions normally contained by positioning the detective as an arbiter of absolute truth and justice, tensions that look ahead to the concerns of post-war detective fiction in both Britain and America.

Works Cited

Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” 1944.
The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays
. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1946. 222–37.

Conan Doyle, Arthur. “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.”
The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes
. 1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. 913–31.

Conan Doyle, Arthur. “The Greek Interpreter.”
The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes
. 1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. 435–46.

Queen, Ellery [Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee]. Preface to “The Adventure of Mr. Montalba, Obsequist.”
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
6.24 (Sept 1945): 98.

Stacy Gillis, Ph.D., is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University, UK. She has published widely on detective fiction, cyberpunk and feminist theory and has a particular interest in the rise of the British detective novel in the early twentieth century. For more information visit
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/staff/profile/stacy.gillis

Chapter I

THE SOLITARY FLY

Someone has said that the countryside is really as grim as any big city. Indeed, I read a novel not long ago that made out every village, however peaceful it looked, to be a little hell of all the seven deadly sins. I thought, myself, that this was rather nonsense—a “write-up”—devised by those authors who come to live out of town and, finding everything so dull, have to make out that there's no end of crime going on just behind every barn door and haystack. But in the last month or so, I'm bound to say I've had to change my mind. Perhaps I have been unfortunate. I don't know. I do know that many people would say that I had been fortunate in one thing: in meeting a very remarkable man. Though I can't help saying that I found him more than a little vain and fanciful and rather exhausting to be with, yet there is no doubt he is a sound fellow to have with one in a tight corner. Though, again, I must say that I think he is more to be valued then, than when things are normal and quiet. Indeed, as I shall show, I am not sure that he did not land me in one trouble in getting me out of another, and so, as I want to be quiet, I have felt compelled, perhaps a trifle discourteously, to refuse to go on with our acquaintanceship.

But I must also own that I did and do admire his skill, courage, and helpfulness. I needed such a striking exception to the ordinary (and very pleasant) indifference of most people, because of the quite unexpected and, I may say, horrible interest that one person suddenly chose to take in me. Yet, as I've said, perhaps I would never have known that I had become of such an awkward interest—the whole thing
might
have passed over without my ever having to be aware of my danger if this same well-meaning helper had not uncovered the pit past which I was unconcernedly strolling. And certainly the uncovering of it led me into great difficulties. I don't like being bothered. I like to think sufficiently well of my neighbors that I can feel sure they won't interfere with me, and I shan't have to do anything to them, and, perhaps I should add, for them. I must be frank, or putting all this down won't get me any further. I suppose—yes, there's no doubt—I came to live in the country because I wanted to be left alone, at peace. And now I have such a problem on my mind—on my conscience! Well, I must set it all down and then, maybe, it will look clearer. Perhaps I'll know what I ought to do. At the worst it can remain as a record after me, to show how little I was really to blame, how, in fact, the whole thing was forced on me.

As I've said, I came to live in the country because I like quiet. I can always entertain myself. When you are as fortunately endowed as that, mentally, and your economic endowment allows you to collect round you the things you need to enjoy yourself—well, then, persons are rather a nuisance. The country is your place and N
o
C
ALLERS
the motto over your door. And I would have been in that happy condition today if I had stuck to my motto. I'm a Jack-of-all-trades, a playboy, if you will. I potter in the garden, though I really hardly know one end of a flower from the other; amuse myself at my carpenter's bench and lathe; repair my grandfather clock when it ails; but fall down rather badly when it comes to dealing with the spring mechanism of the gramophone. I'm no writer, though. I write a neat hand, as I hate slovenliness. But I like playing at making things, not trying to describe them, still less imagining what other people might be thinking and doing.

I have some nice books with good pictures in them. I'm a little interested in architecture, painting, and, indeed, all the arts, and with these fine modern volumes you needn't go traveling all over the place, getting museum feet, art-gallery headache, and sight-seeing indigestion. You can enjoy the reproductions quite as much as the originals when you consider what the originals cost, just to look at, in fatigue and expense. I like turning over the colored plates and photographs of my books in the evening, looking sometimes at a cathedral and then, with only the exertion of turning the page, at the masterpiece of painting which the cathedral contains, but which the photographer was allowed to see in a good light and the visitor is not, and then at an inscription which is quite out of eyeshot of the poor tourist peer he binocularly never so neckbreakingly.

I read a novel now and then, but it must be a nice, easy story with a happy ending. I never wanted to marry; and certainly what I have to tell should be a warning. But I like—or liked, perhaps I should say—to think of people getting on. It made me, I suppose, feel they wouldn't trouble me if they were happy with each other. I suppose I liked life at second hand—reflected, not too real. And certainly, now that it has looked straight at me, I can't say I wasn't right, though I may have been irresponsible.

Well, I mustn't waste more time on myself, though perhaps in a record like this there should be some sort of picture of the man who tells the story and how he came to have to tell it. My name—I believe they always start by asking that—is Sydney Silchester. My age doesn't matter—though I suppose they'd pull
that
out, if they were once on the track of all this; though what difference it makes whether I'm thirty or fifty I can't see. “Of years of discretion,” is the description that occurs to me and seems apt. For certainly I am not of years of indiscretion—never, as it happens, was. “Old for his years,” they used to say; and now, I believe, young. But am I any longer—“of years of discretion?” Certainly had I been discreet I would somehow not have become involved in all this! But my mind goes round and round like a pet rat in his whirligig. That's because I can't write and also because I am really considerably worried, shocked, and perhaps frightened. Getting it all down, I must repeat, will help. Get it down, then, I will, and no more blundering about as though I were trying to keep something back from someone.

As I've said, it all began through my breaking my rule—the rule, as it happens, of all village life of the better-off, of “keeping myself to myself.” It was an accident, in a way, or rather two accidents coming on the top of each other. I'm fond of honey and one of the pleasant things about living in the country is that you can get the real stuff. But what was a little odd in my neighborhood, though I never thought about it, was that practically no one kept bees—said they couldn't make them thrive. Now I wish that I hadn't been so fond of it. Somehow I was too lazy or too busy with other things to try beekeeping myself. That was certainly fortunate. Bees always seemed to me troublesome insects—but how troublesome I never suspected.