Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong (6 page)

When a clue is a matter of choice, it is also a matter of interpretation; hence the plurality of possible meanings. The second
flaw in the Holmes method stems from the subtly maintained confusion between scientific law and statistical generality.

Holmes usually bases his deductions on statistical recurrences, but he omits the fact that these recurrences have no constraining
power over reality. Rather, they only sketch the shape of probabilities and therefore leave open the possibility for exceptions
in every case.

Thus it is altogether excessive for Holmes to speak of “deduction” (“as Dr. Mortimer . . . deduced from the cigar ash”)
²⁹
when he refers to the doctor’s hypothesis relating the size of the heap of ashes in front of the wicket-gate to the length
of time that Sir Charles Baskerville lingered there.

What slips between scientific law and statistical generality is in fact the individual suspect. As an object of investigation,
the suspect does indeed come under the jurisdiction of statistics—which can include him within a range of probable perpetrators—but
he is not under the rule of scientific law; in every circumstance, the suspect retains a share of free choice that allows
him to avoid complete predictability.

A suspect cannot exonerate himself by saying he fled the scene of the crime by flying away; no one can free himself from the
law of gravity. But the deduction that Mortimer and Holmes make is not ironclad. It is true that in many cases a large pile
of ash signifies a smoker standing still, but it can just as well signify that he waited for a long time before he tapped
his cigar. It is true, too, that prolonged standing in the cold could be motivated by a meeting, but it could also be explained
if Sir Charles had been lost in thought, or if he had observed something that interested him.

It is the human subject in general, and the element of the unconscious in particular, that slips into this gap between scientific
law and statistical regularity. In so doing, it escapes the Holmes method, which functions perfectly and with great elegance
on abstractions but is not necessarily adapted to resolving the complex individual problems with which the police are confronted.

The third flaw in the Holmes method is the lack of understanding about the place of the subject in the overall interpretation
of the case. The pseudoscientific Holmes method eliminates the factor of individual psychology among the actors in the mysteries
it is trying to solve. But it also eliminates this factor in the investigator himself, even though it is a key determinant.

This psychological factor plays a prominent role in the overall construction that allows the investigator not just to interpret
clues, but even to decide what is a clue and what is not. Holmes’s construction of the events, which tallies with Dr. Mortimer’s,
has obviously been created by the detective, at least partially, before the investigation has even properly begun.

The detective’s hypothesis rests on a figure and a motive. The figure is that of the murderer with the dog, a criminal who
makes use of both legend and a beast to commit his murders. Note that this construction eliminates other hypotheses, for instance
that of accident—defended by the police—or that of a murder committed in some different way. Like a magnetic pole, it quickly
attracts a whole series of “clues,” such as animal footprints, which would not necessarily be examined at all in the framework
of other constructions.

It is clear, too, that from the very beginning Holmes places a higher value on one motive in his selection and interpretation
of clues—namely, on financial interest. This is obviously not to be ignored when the victim possesses a large fortune. But
it is not the only reason for which human beings commit murders, and it has the drawback of leaving other possible explanations
for the tragedy of Baskerville Hall unexplored.

This construction is trapped in an imagined universe, a universe that truly belongs to Holmes, even though it finds sustenance
in the imaginations of those close to him. It is an imagined world that, although the detective fights against it—Holmes does
not believe in the legend of the hound responsible for carrying out the curse—nonetheless remains closely linked to a fantastic
vision of reality; from a hound alone, there is a simple transposition to a murderer with a hound.

Not only is there an imagined world at work behind Holmes’s hypothesis, then, but there is reason to think that the hypothesis
is truly active
only because
it is animated by a private fantasy world—determined both by the sex and the social standing of the detective—which shapes,
and thus perturbs, his way of seeing the world.

Far from being a closed system, the Holmes method thus allows alternative solutions to subsist, both at the point-by-point
level of clues and at the level of the overall construction.
^*

* Holmes is beaten by a woman, Irene Adler, who is always a step ahead of him and guesses everything he will do.

* “Watson,” said he, “if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident in my powers, or giving less pains
to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.” (“The Yellow Face,”
in
The Complete Sherlock Holmes,
New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1930, p. 415.) James McCearney notes that “out of the twenty-four stories published
between July 1891 and December 1893, a good half dozen of them result in partial or total failure” (
Arthur Conan Doyle
, Paris: La Table ronde, 1988, p. 152).

† Aside from mistakes, major elements sometimes elude Holmes. These range from a key plot point—such as an important link
of kinship, in “The Adventure of the Priory School”—to a secret, as in “The
Gloria Scott
.”

* A list of Holmes’s failures in stories not narrated by Watson figures at the beginning of “The Problem of Thor Bridge.”

* See also on this point Umberto Eco’s analyses in
The Limits of Interpretation
, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Counter-Investigation

I
What is Detective Criticism?

TO HIGHLIGHT THE SORT of problem that the Sherlock Holmes method exemplifies, I created a dozen or so years ago my own method
of investigation, to which I gave the name
detective criticism
. The aim of this method is to be more rigorous than even the detectives in literature and the writers who create them, and
thus to work out solutions that are more satisfying to the soul. Before applying this method to the most famous of Conan Doyle’s
novels, I would like to give a brief presentation of it, recalling the circumstances of its creation and explaining its principles.

The first inspiration for detective criticism was Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex
, or more precisely my reading of texts by American critics—such as Sandor Goodhart and Shoshana Felman—who cast doubt on
the traditional version of the murder of Laius by Oedipus. Studying the contradictions in Sophocles’ text, the two authors,
who drew inspiration from Voltaire’s ironic remarks on the plausibility of the plot, came to the conclusion that it was never
actually proven that Oedipus was guilty of the crime of which he finally accuses himself.
^*

One of the problematic details is the number of Laius’s attackers. The only witness to the murder, a servant of the king’s,
declared that his master had been killed by several people; he never changed his testimony. Yet once Oedipus has convinced
himself of his own guilt, the witness is not brought back for questioning, although his testimony flagrantly contradicts the
results of Oedipus’s investigation. A strange oversight, and one that encourages all sorts of suppositions—including that
the accused Oedipus is innocent.

We can imagine all the consequences that an innocent Oedipus might entail. To take just one example, one of the most important
theories of our era, psychoanalysis, is largely based on this ancient myth, and upon the conviction that Oedipus killed his
father. The theory elaborated by Freud would of course not collapse if the Greek hero were proved innocent, but it would not
emerge entirely unscathed, either. While some specialists in mythology such as Jean-Pierre Vernant have long expressed doubts
about the “Oedipal” nature of the criminal act—a term that depends on an anachronism—the reinterpretation offered by Goodhart
and Felman goes farther: it calls into question the very existence of the crime itself.

These studies were a revelation for me. My only reservation was that they had opened a path of research but did not go far
enough. The American critics were content to point out the improbabilities in Sophocles’ text, and went only as far as suggesting
that Oedipus did not necessarily kill Laius. So their approach was simply negative. But they didn’t undertake to go on to
the obvious next step, the constructive one: to solve the mystery disclosed by their reading by unmasking the real murderer.

So the main difference that separates detective criticism not only from other studies based on investigation, but also from
the rest of literary criticism is its
interventionism
. While other methods are usually content to comment on texts in a passive way, whatever scandals those texts might present,
detective criticism intervenes in an active way, refusing to go along. It is not content with pointing out the weaknesses
in texts and casting doubt on presumptive murderers; it boldly risks any number of consequences by actually looking for the
true criminals.

The main premise of detective criticism is this: many of the murders narrated in literature were not committed by the people
accused by the text. In literature as in life, the true criminals often elude the investigators and allow secondary characters
to be accused and condemned. In its passion for justice, detective criticism commits itself to rediscovering the truth. If
it is unable to arrest the guilty parties, it can at least clear the names of the innocent.

Having arrived at this theoretical premise, it made sense to flesh it out. Agatha Christie offered a favorable field for research,
both because of her eminence in the realm of the detective story and also because of the literary quality of her work. It
would have been all too easy to show that unpunished criminals lurk inside books not originally conceived of as detective
novels.

To make the demonstration even more convincing, I decided to work on Christie’s book
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, regarded as a masterpiece of precision.
^*
This novel draws its celebrity from the fact that the murderer is the narrator. Through entries in his journal, the narrator,Dr.
Sheppard, tells how he gets involved with the investigation that the detective Hercule Poirot is conducting into the murder
of the village squire, Roger Ackroyd. But, according to Poirot, the doctor leaves out of his story the fact that he himself
is the criminal—that it was Sheppard who killed Ackroyd, to keep him from publicly accusing Sheppard of being a blackmailer.
In the final pages of the book, the triumphant Poirot turns to Sheppard, accuses him of committing the murder, and encourages
him to commit suicide.

The nice idea of having an investigation narrated by the murderer himself ensured the book’s fame, but at the same time ignored
a whole series of concrete problems. I won’t go over all the contradictions in the text here, but no serious investigator
today can blithely accept Hercule Poirot’s conclusions. In short, the ingenuity of the narrative device distracted readers
from the only question that matters for detective criticism—one possibly more prosaic than reflections on literary effectiveness,
but more in keeping with ethics: Who
in fact
did kill Roger Ackroyd?

To take a simple example of the problems the text presents, the presumed murderer, Dr. Sheppard, in order to give himself
an alibi, is supposed to have used a dictaphone that can start automatically. Like a radio alarm clock, the apparatus, planted
in the victim’s office, can be set to turn itself on and play a recording of the victim’s voice. His voice will be heard by
the other occupants of the house after Dr. Sheppard has left the scene, thereby proving his innocence. When he arrives at
the house later, summoned by the victim’s butler, Dr. Sheppard is supposed to have discreetly whisked away the apparatus used
to give him an alibi.

Aside from the fact that this audio device is never found by anyone—which is a regrettable quality in a piece of evidence—Poirot’s
reasoning comes up against a material impossibility. Preparing such a sophisticated device takes time—especially in 1926,
when such a thing would have been technologically very advanced—yet it’s only on the morning of the murder that Sheppard learns
that Ackroyd is preparing to accuse him of blackmail. He has just a few hours to get things ready. We have his precise schedule
for the day, corroborated by several witnesses, and it reveals no period of time sufficient for him to make such an apparatus.
So when is Sheppard supposed to have put it together?
^*

An unlikelihood of this kind—and it is far from being the only one in Poirot’s solution—casts doubt on the guilt of the presumed
murderer. But I wasn’t content to question our detective’s conclusions. I intended, by reopening the case, to look for the
real criminal. Although it is difficult to accuse someone with certainty after so many years, the cluster of clues I gathered
together leads ineluctably to one single person, whose name I revealed in the final pages of my book, thus carrying out the
additional step beyond the work of those critics who had voiced doubts about the guilt of Oedipus.

After this first attempt, which was crowned with success but which dealt with a book in which literary criticism took little
interest, it made sense to see if such a method could be just as effective with a masterpiece of world literature, studied
by many specialists. Shakespeare’s most famous play,
Hamlet
, perfectly suited this project, not least because it has the structure of a detective story, with the main character leading
the investigation to clarify the circumstances round the death of his father, whose ghost has pleaded with him for vengeance.
^*

The case presented itself in an entirely different way from
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
. Not only has the play given rise to a considerable number of critical interpretations, but others had already pointed out
the improbabilities contained in the argument that has held sway for centuries: that the victim’s brother Claudius, who quickly
married his brother’s widow and took his throne, is the murderer.

To cite only one of the most obvious improbabilities, the famous performance of the play-within-a-play poses an insoluble
problem. As we know, Hamlet, the victim’s son, convinced of his uncle Claudius’s guilt, prepares a trap for him by asking
a troupe of traveling actors to play the murder scene in front of the presumed murderer, to see how he will react. Claudius
reacts as Hamlet expects he will, which tend to support the argument of his guilt. Upon seeing the exact circumstances of
the murder reenacted—the murderer supposedly pouring poison into his sleeping victim’s ear—Claudius, annoyed, abruptly leaves
the hall.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century and the arrival of a reader—the critic Walter Wilson Greg—who was more
attentive than the others, that this version of the facts was faulted. Greg recalls that in Shakespeare’s time plays were
often preceded by a “dumbshow,” a pantomime during which the actors silently played out the important moments in the play.
And that is indeed the case with our play, put on by the itinerant actors; we are told explicitly that it is preceded by a
dumbshow representing for the first time a murder by poisoning.

Now we can see the problem this presents, and we wonder why it took centuries to see it. If Claudius is indeed his brother’s
murderer, how do we explain that he remains seated unperturbed during the first representation of the murder, but gets up,
furious, at the second? The hypotheses advanced by Shakespearians—the notion, for instance, that his annoyance grew on him
progressively—are hardly convincing. In any case they leave open the other hypothesis: that Claudius does not react to the
first representation of the murder because he is innocent, and walks out on the second because he is annoyed by the clamor
Hamlet is making in the hall—noise that is clearly indicated in the stage directions.

Once we can vanquish our internal hesitations and accept the hypothesis of Claudius’s innocence, we must resolve to reopen
the file—to ponder whether there exists in Shakespeare’s play another suspect who might have committed the murder. That is
precisely what I did in
Enquête sur Hamlet
, arriving at a different conclusion from the one the play suggests and the majority of Shakespeare scholars confirm. The
adoption of this conclusion, when it is finally accepted by Shakespearian criticism, should significantly change performances
of
Hamlet
.