In a quick exchange of tweets the other day, I reflected with some fellow amateur Sherlockians on the close of “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, that Holmesian adventure I read every Christmas Eve.
It struck us that the story ends in a far more perfunctory manner than do many of its adaptations, most obviously the Granada version with the peerless Jeremy Brett. In that iteration of the story, Holmes is persuaded – after some brief cajoling by Watson – to go out of his way to ensure the release of John Horner, the man wrongly accused of the crime that the great detective has just solved. The scene is touching in its seasonality: as the snow floats downwards, an innocent man emerges from a forbidding Victorian jail to embrace his wife and young children. In this telling, Holmes’s yuletide triumph is to save this family from disgrace and penury. Merry Christmas to all!
In the original story, however, this isn’t quite what happens. In fact, Holmes is fairly perfunctory about the fate of the wrongly accused, relying on the true thief’s promise not to testify: “If Horner were in danger it would be another thing, but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must collapse.” Anyway, moving on: it’s wildfowl for supper. Holmes’s Christmas gift here is really to himself – the satisfaction of a case well solved – and to the perpetrator of the crime, who is allowed to leave 221B a free man, on the proviso that he flees the country. Horner is left rather on the hook, in what modern readers can find an unsatisfactory resolution – particularly at Christmas.
In a recent episode of the excellent However Improbable podcast, Marisa and Sarah also pause over this moment, and have some fun expanding on Holmes’s curious politics: he is simultaneously anti-establishment, berating the deficiencies of the police, but also fundamentally conservative, never acting in anything like an activist or revolutionary capacity. The crime is solved, and the miscarriage of justice is a sort of second-order event. In this, Holmes is a common type of the English gentry – the genteel bohemian, at odds with society but also comfortably above it.
It occurred to me that in this the story is at odds with another Victorian Christmas staple, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This story is famously engaged with social issues, taking its own protagonist on a journey from active malevolence (as opposed to Holmes’ detached ambivalence) towards enlightened fellow-feeling with those less fortunate. Next to Ebeneezer Scrooge, Sherlock Holmes is in danger of seeming stubbornly complacent, a full forty years on from the Ghost of Christmas Future’s dire warnings.
The animating ethics of A Christmas Carol are of course Christian. Conan Doyle, however, was, while writing “Blue Carbuncle”, a lapsed Catholic, an agnostic in search of a new faith. He had explored Mormonism (and fed much of what he’d learned into A Study in Scarlet), but abandoned it primarily because of his views on polygamy – and, importantly, also because he professed to have originally abandoned Catholicism to escape a priestly elite that in Mormonism he found in altered form retained. He was en route, of course, to his embrace of Spiritualism, but had yet to reach full conversion. In “Blue Carbuncle”, we find Holmes figured not as an intercessor between Horner and justice, powered by an almost evangelical zeal to do good; but as a man full of doubt in the judicial system – and yet unable to offer a wholly imagined alternative. This is an unresolved tension, but then perhaps this is a characteristic of the agnostic.
On one topic, however, let there be little doubt: this blog wishes everyone the very best of the holiday season. May we all feel the joy of a John Horner redeemed.
@Number 71 