Classic Mysteries – Ash Clifton, Writer

The Roots of Noir Detective Fiction in…Sherlock Holmes?

Whenever I am feeling stressed out in the evening, I re-read something old, familiar, and soothing. For me, that is often the Sherlock Holmes stories. I read a story here, a story there, and pretty soon I’ve worked my way through the entire collection. Again.

On each iteration, though, I discover something new. Recently, I re-read Doyle’s 1904 story, “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” It’s one of the lesser known of the Sherlock tales, which is ironic because it’s also one of the best. Part of the reason for its obscurity is due, I suspect, to its boring title (more of a “label” than an actual title). I mean, if you had a choice between reading a story called “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” or “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” which would you pick?

Anyway, I really admire this story, for a number of reasons. Its titular character, Milverton, is a As for Milverton, we learn that he is a master blackmailer, who funds his lavish lifestyle by obtaining compromising letters (what we would now call kompromat) written by rich, aristocratic ladies. He buys the letters from treacherous servants in the ladies’ households, then uses them to extort ruinous sums from the lady in question, often pouncing right before her wedding to some duke or count or whatever. Holmes explains all this to his friend Watson in 221-B Baker Street as they wait for titular villain to stop by. (Milverton’s latest target, an unnamed rich lady, has hired Holmes to get her letters back.)

It’s a very similar premise to another of Doyle’s great stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which I wrote a post about some years ago entitled “Sherlock Holmes was a Fixer”. As in that prior story, Holmes serves as more of a trouble-shooter than a traditional detective here, using his intellect and knowledge of the underworld to sort out a client’s problems. More importantly, in both stories Holmes finds himself compelled to break the law in order to get his client out of trouble. In “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” he disguises himself as a working-class tradesman in order to infiltrate Milverton’s household. As Holmes explains to Watson after the fact:

“You would not call me a marrying man, Watson?”

“No, indeed!”

“You’ll be interested to hear that I’m engaged.”

“My dear fellow! I congrat——”

“To Milverton’s housemaid.”

“Good heavens, Holmes!”

“I wanted information, Watson.”

“Surely you have gone too far?”

“It was a most necessary step. I am a plumber with a rising business, Escott, by name. I have walked out with her each evening, and I have talked with her. Good heavens, those talks! However, I have got all I wanted. I know Milverton’s house as I know the palm of my hand.”

“But the girl, Holmes?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “You can’t help it, my dear Watson. You must play your cards as best you can when such a stake is on the table. However, I rejoice to say that I have a hated rival, who will certainly cut me out the instant that my back is turned. What a splendid night it is!”

I love that line, “You can’t help it, my dear Watson.” It seems to encapsulate the great theme of the noir and hard-boiled detective fiction that would emerge later in America. Namely, how do you fight evil effectively without becoming evil yourself? The answer, of course, is that you can’t. Not completely. As the morally expedient Sam Spade says to his similarly disapproving secretary in The Maltese Falcon, “That’s just the way it is, dear.”

Speaking of The Maltese Falcon, I would bet that Dashiell Hammett read (and re-read) “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” The villain of Hammett’s novel, Gutman (played so with such risible gusto by Sydney Greenstreet in the 1941 film version), seems like a direct descendent of Doyle’s Milverton. As Doyle describes him,

Charles Augustus Milverton was a man of fifty, with a large, intellectual head, a round, plump, hairless face, a perpetual frozen smile, and two keen gray eyes, which gleamed brightly from behind broad, gold-rimmed glasses. There was something of Mr. Pickwick’s benevolence in his appearance, marred only by the insincerity of the fixed smile and by the hard glitter of those restless and penetrating eyes. His voice was as smooth and suave as his countenance, as he advanced with a plump little hand extended, murmuring his regret for having missed us at his first visit. Holmes disregarded the outstretched hand and looked at him with a face of granite. Milverton’s smile broadened, he shrugged his shoulders, removed his overcoat, folded it with great deliberation over the back of a chair, and then took a seat.

Now look at Hammett’s introduction of Gutman…

The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown. His eyes, made small by fat puffs around them, were dark and sleek. Dark ringlets thinly covered his broad scalp. He wore a black cutaway coat, black vest, black satin Ascot tie holding a pinkish pearl, striped grey worsted trousers, and patent-leather shoes.

Note how both villains are presented as soft, one way or another. That is, both are overweight, (Milverton is just “plump” while Gutman is “flabbily fat”), their girth symbolizing not only their greed but their apparent harmlessness. Which makes them all the more dangerous, of course. People underestimate them. They want people to underestimate them. In the same way, both are impeccably mannered and well dressed, with a bit of the dandy about them. The only really threatening thing about them, on the surface, is their compelling eyes (Milverton’s are “hard,” “keen” and penetrating; Gutman’s are “dark and sleek”).

Yet both are formidable opponents, both physically and intellectually. Milverton, for his part, moves “quick as a rat” when Holmes and Watson try to use physical force against him, drawing a revolver to defend himself. He is so capable, in fact, that Holmes resorts to simple robbery in hope of retrieving the kompromat. After seducing Milverton’s hapless maid, he explains how he plans to break into the man’s library and crack his safe.

As in all noir fiction, Holmes’s corruption is contagious. It spreads. Watson insists on coming along on the caper, and soon finds himself enjoying it. As he relates,

My first feeling of fear had passed away, and I thrilled now with a keener zest than I had ever enjoyed when we were the defenders of the law instead of its defiers. The high object of our mission, the consciousness that it was unselfish and chivalrous, the villainous character of our opponent, all added to the sporting interest of the adventure.

Naturally, the operation goes pear-shaped. After breaking into Milverton’s library, Milverton returns to the room and they are forced to hide behind a tapestry. They listen, helpless, as the man conducts a clandestine, midnight meeting with an unknown woman, one whom he assumes to be another disgruntled maid but who is actually one of his former victims. The lady shoots him dead, then flees. Holmes, having already cracked Milverton’s, tosses all the letters into the fire, after which he and Watson do a runner, barely escaping the dead man’s enraged house staff.

With the main plot essentially over, the story still has a couple of surprises in the last pages. Indeed, there is a bit of transgressive humor near the end, when Holmes and Watson are visited the next morning by Inspector Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, seeking their help in a puzzling new case that has arisen overnight—namely, the burgling and murder of one Thomas Milverton! As Lestrade reports, there were two criminals involved in the matter.

“Criminals?” said Holmes. “Plural?”

“Yes, there were two of them. They were as nearly as possible captured red-handed. We have their footmarks, we have their description, it’s ten to one that we trace them. The first fellow was a bit too active, but the second was caught by the under-gardener, and only got away after a struggle. He was a middle-sized, strongly built man—square jaw, thick neck, moustache, a mask over his eyes.”

“That’s rather vague,” said Sherlock Holmes. “My, it might be a description of Watson!”

“It’s true,” said the inspector, with amusement. “It might be a description of Watson.”

This wonderful black comedy is, of course, another way the story pre-sages noir fiction. Holmes, like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, takes gleeful delight in outwitting the cops, even though he has no real animus towards them. In some ways, Holmes is a prototype of those later detectives. Like them, he is an island unto himself, obeying the law when possible but otherwise following his own, internal, moral code, no matter where it might lead.

It’s a very modern, almost existentialist version of Holmes, one that is seldom seen in the pop-cultural depictions of him.

Not bad, for a story that’s over a century old.

My Rex Stout Shout-Out

It’s a well known fact of life that the older you get, the more you find yourself drawn to old things. This has always been true for me. I find myself particularly entertained by the classic pop culture of the twentieth century.

A few years ago, for instance, I was working my way through the works of two great pop writers: the James Bond thrillers by Ian Fleming, and the Nero Wolfe mysteries of Rex Stout. I would alternate between them, tearing through each series in no particular order. Each of them offered a different kind of thrill, and also a window into the past.

Young people today are familiar with the Bond stories thanks to the great and continuing set of movies based on them, the latest incarnation being the fine English character actor Daniel Craig. The Nero Wolfe novels are, of course, less well-known. To sum them up briefly, they recount the adventures of a reclusive, brilliant, and enormously fat detective who seldom leaves his Manhattan brownstone, preferring to solve his cases remotely. To do the actual legwork of investigation, he sends out his much younger, hipper assistant, Archie Goodwin (who narrates the novels). It is Goodwin who does most of that sleuthing required (as well as some frequent romancing of the numerous femme fatales). He brings the information back to Wolfe, who then solves the case by virtue of his sheer intellect.

I regard both series—the Bond novels as well as the Wolfe novels—as gems of pop literature: clever, witty, sexy, and (most importantly) sharply written. And so you can imagine my delight when, in the early chapters of Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, I came upon the following exchange between Bond and his craggy, avuncular boss, M.

Bond automatically took his traditional place across the desk from his Chief.

M began to fill a pipe. “What the devil’s the name of that fat American detective who’s always fiddling about with orchids, those obscene hybrids from Venezuela and so forth. Then he comes sweating out of his orchid house, eats a gigantic meal of some foreign muck and solve the murder. What’s he called?”

“Nero Wolfe, sir. They’re written by a chap called Rex Stout. I like them.”

“They’re readable,” condescended M.

This was the literary equivalent of having two good friends from separate areas of your life and inviting them both over for dinner, only to discover that they already know each other. More to the point, I found my love of Rex Stout vindicated by Fleming’s obvious approval. Had I looked, I could have found lots of other sources of vindication: Kingsley Amis also loved Stout, as did Isaac Asimov. (Asimov, in fact, was a life-long member of Stout’s fan club, The Wolfe Pack.)

But the more I thought about it, the more Fleming’s Rex-Stout-shout-out made perfect sense. The character of James Bond bears more than a passing resemblance to Archie Goodwin. Both are tough guys—street-smart and wise-cracking anti-heroes—who would rather deal with a shot of a whisky than a shot from a gun. Like Bond, Archie is a brilliant operator, not to mention a rampant womanizer (although without Fleming’s darker, misogynistic overtones).

In retrospect, Bond seems like a more British, post-modern version of Goodwin—meaner, hornier, and drunker. Both characters lend a vicarious thrill to nerds like myself (and, I would bet, to Amis and Asimov). They represent versions of the tough guys we would like to be.

If there are strong echoes of Archie Goodwin in James Bond, then there are somewhat fainter echoes of Nero Wolfe in M. Like M, Wolfe is a mastermind who seldom leaves his office, preferring to send Archie to do the actual leg-work. Also like M, Wolfe is a bit of a cipher. We know he is of Eastern European descent, and that his youth was both violent and tragic, but nothing more. Beyond this, he exists only in the present-time of the stories, the genius with no intimate connection his fellow man—except perhaps in his dependence on (and grudging friendship with) Archie himself.

In suggesting that Fleming may have been influenced by Stout, I mean no slur against the great spy novelist, nor to British popular literature in general. Indeed, a sharp student of British lit would be quick to point out that Stout, in turn, seemed to borrow heavily from that earlier colossus of the mystery genre, Arthur Conan Doyle. No less a figure than Edmund Wilson first pointed out the similarity between Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes; both are hyper-intelligent misanthropes whose stories are told by lesser men. Just as Watson’s narration humanizes Holmes, Goodwin’s voice filters Wolfe’s genius and makes him accessible to the reader.

In fact, I’ve often thought of the Nero Wolfe novels as a kind of fusion of the Sherlock Holmes with the grittier, wholly American sensibilities of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. If Wolfe is the inheritor of Holmes’ deductive powers, then Archie is the reincarnation of the hard-boiled American private eye.

Archie is also genuinely funny…

What Wolfe tells me, and what he doesn’t tell me, never depends, as far as I can make out, on the relevant circumstances. It depends on what he had to eat at the last meal, what he is going to eat at the next meal, the kind of shirt and tie I am wearing, how well my shoes are shined, and so forth. He does not like purple. Once Lily Rowan gave me a dozen Sulka shirts, with stripes of assorted colors and shades. I happened to put on the purple one the day we started on the Chesterton-Best case, the guy that burgled his own house and shot a week-end guest in the belly. Wolfe took one look at the shirt and clammed up on me. Just for spite I wore the shirt a week, and I never did know what was going on, or who was which, until Wolfe had it all wrapped up, and even then I had to get most of the details from the newspapers and Dora Chesterton, with whom I had struck an acquaintance. Dora had a way of—no, I’ll save that for my autobiography.

But while the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett often approached the level of high art, Stout’s novels remain happily in the realm of great genre fiction—beautifully written and with a sharp edge. Most of them involve snobbish, greedy rich people who need Wolfe to bail them out of some sort of trouble—a missing CEO, a murdered secretary, a looming scandal. If the true villain of Chandler’s work is the city of Los Angeles and all its soul-destroying corruption, then Stout’s is the corporate America of the 40s and 50s (the period when he wrote his best novels).

As with any pop classic, the Wolfe novels render of a deeply imagined world, peopled with distinct and vividly drawn characters: the cigar chomping Inspector Cramer; Wolfe’s fastidious Swiss chef, Fritz Brenner; Lon Cohen, the delightfully corrupt magazine editor who supplies Wolfe and Archie with much of their information. And, of course, there is Saul Panzer, the expert freelancer who represents a more cautious (not to mention Jewish) version of Archie himself.

But the real achievement of the novels comes from the sheer amusement of watching Wolfe demolish another fat-cat rich guy. It’s easy to detect a deep vein of progressivism running through all the Wolfe novels. Two of the main characters are Jewish, and Wolfe’s roster of clients often includes women, blacks, poor people, and (in one notable case), a victim of FBI harassment.

As the critic Terry Teachout writes…

Like all good detective stories, the Nero Wolfe novels are not primarily about their settings, or even their plots. They are conversation pieces, witty studies in human character…less mystery stories than domestic comedies, the continuing saga of two iron-willed codependents engaged in an endless game of oneupmanship. Archie may be Wolfe’s hired hand, but he is also an undefinable combination of servant, goad, court jester, and trusted confidant. His relationship with Wolfe is by definition uneasy, intimate but never affectionate—it’s plain to see that he loves Wolfe like a father, but inconceivable that he would ever admit such a thing—and so the intimacy is transformed into a daily contest for dominance. At least half the fun of the Wolfe books comes from the way in which Stout plays this struggle for laughs.

The Wolfe novels have enjoyed a resurgence in the last twenty years or so, largely thanks to an excellent A&E television series from the 90s starring Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton. The books underwent a really fine reprint from Bantam books, with great cover art (a campy combination of art deco and pulp luridness). The price of these paperbacks is inflating faster than BitCoins, but fortunately Bantam has released most of them as Kindle editions for under ten bucks. The penny-pinching Wolfe would be proud.