The History of the Mystery

Sherlock's explanation of his abilities is a continuation of the ratiocination of Dupin with a description of his discipline and intense training in the science of detection and the practical skills and information he will need to solve crimes. The detective will face various problems. The reader has to believe that the detective has the abilities needed to overcome obstacles. The success of the story depends on the difficulty of the problems, such as the false clues and the various suspects. There may be enigmas, which are those events or objects where meaning is hidden by cryptic or ambiguous alterations. The word may be generally applied to anything very difficult to explain. Riddles are enigmas, usually in the form of a question that may be in a guessing game that involves paradoxes. A puzzle is a situation problem that often requires some ingenuity to solve or explain. A conundrum is applied to riddle whose answer is a pun and generically applied to any puzzling question problem. The game is between the author and the reader, but there is a rule. In the true mystery story, there cannot be a supernatural explanation. The explanation of the solving of the mystery must be in human terms and must respond to every question posed by the author, if the reader is to be satisfied.

Reliance on human reason to solve problems came about, according to Sarah Armstrong, in her book Myth and Ancient Literature, when people began to live in permanent urban settlements. They had told tales centered almost entirely on the primordial feats and struggles of the gods or ancestral ancestors. Those gave way to reliance on human ingenuity as people began to see themselves as independent agents. Poe's Dupin explains what seem to be out of human experience events or impossible to understand events in human terms. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes provides explanations over and over to Dr. Watson.

No detective relies more on reason and logic than did Sherlock Holmes. Yet Conan Doyle was able to combine the reason with practicality. A bewildered Dr. Watson confesses that he puzzled over the peculiar nature of what Sherlock knows about and what he has no knowledge of. Eventually, Sherlock enlightens Watson, saying that he only wants to know what is relevant to his profession of crime solving. This includes such matters as poisons and other means of murder. All non-relevant information Sherlock eliminates from his mind so as to keep his ability to focus on what is involved in crime solving. Sherlocks' intense investigation of the details of a crime scene, the information he can glean from a few clues continue to amaze the good doctor. The sometimes arrogant Sherlock is capable of making disparaging remarks about the lesser techniques of other detectives, for instance, his predecessor Dupin.

The humor of the relationship between the Watson and Sherlock is a relief from the often grim nature of their tasks as they encounter murderers. The doctor's charm makes him an ideal narrator to tell readers about the detective who is a difficult person with little patience. The fact that he cannot understand until Sherlock enlightens him opens the opportunity for author Doyle to expound on how a thinking man solves a mystery.

To say that mysteries rely on human reason for answers does not mean they cannot have a mythic quality. A detective must have a worthy opponent, who has to be doing evil. Sherlock's battle with the greatest criminal of all, Moriarity, has a mythical quality. Sherlock must fight the evildoer to death. The story goes that Conan Doyle wearied of writing Sherlock Holmes stories, so he had the detective die. The reading public would not forgive this, they wanted new stories of the great detective. So the author had to devise an explanation and bring the great detective back to life so that he can baffle the readers further with his brilliant deductions.

The first two publications of Sherlock Holmes were in novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four. It was the Strand magazine publication of the series of shorter stories about Sherlock that catapulted the detective into world- wide fame. The stories were later collected into The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1890). The success attracted other writers who created detectives of different kinds.

M.P. Shiel wrote about Prince Zaleski, a Russian exile who lives in London with his servant Ham. The Prince solves mysteries through intense concentration, combining inductive reasoning with intuition. Jacques Futrelle's detective is known as "The Thinking Machine" and "The Problem of Cell 13" is a famous story. It was 1911 when renowned author G. K. Chesterton introduced Father Brown, a Catholic priest as the detective. Chesterton's short piece about mysteries, in Allen and Chacko's Detective Fiction, is titled A Defense of Detective Stories. Chesterton conceives of the detective story as the form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. He sees the bricks and stones of London as being symbols. A message from the men who put them there. "Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon ". These details "even under the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes" are good things that remind us of the humanity of the city. Because the great authors do not write about something as exciting as when the eyes of the great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin to flame in the dark, we have to look to popular literature for the poetry, the manners, the costumes of the people in their city. Further, there is "the romance of police activity" that reminds us that there is a chaotic world underlying civilization. The lonely detective "stands alone" which reminds us that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure. This romance of the police force reminds us that the quiet police management protecting us is a successful knight errantry. The police force had indeed become a fixture in city life.

The English poet W. H. Auden, who confessed he was addicted to murder mysteries, was, like other literati, a defender of the genre. Allen and Chacko included Auden's The Guilty Vicarage in their Detective Fiction. He discusses Sherlock and Father Brown as amateur detectives. Sherlock is a "genius in whom scientific curiosity is raised to the status of a heroic passion", therefore, he is in a state of grace. He suffers from melancholy, because he remains so detached and he uses drugs to escape boredom when he is not working. His reason for being a detective is a love of the neutral truth. Father Brown is interested in saving the soul of the guilty, if he can solve a murder, find the criminal and get the person to confess, and to repent which saves the soul. Sherlock brings the murdered to justice, Father Brown offers the murderer an example, a man who is also tempted to murder but is able by faith to resist temptation.

Not all the detectives of the early 20th century were males, nor were all the detectives created by English writers from Britain. A prolific English woman created seemingly unlikely detectives :a nosy English spinster, a rather rotund Belgian and a bright young couple. Unlikely as these people would seem for the role of detective, the books they are characters have sold in the millions and continue to do so.