Sherlock Holmes: deduzione e Criminologia tesina

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Premessa

Sembrerebbe quasi inutile introdurre un personaggio di tale fama come quella del detective più conosciuto al mondo, Sherlock Holmes. Con i suoi metodi non convenzionali e la sua particolare perspicacia, Holmes è in grado di risolvere qualsiasi mistero posto sotto la sua attenzione. Trattasi della famosissima iconografia del detective, rappresentato con pipa in bocca, cappello da caccia in testa e lente d’ingrandimento in mano, o della quasi ridondante frase fatta “Elementare, Watson!”, la figura di Holmes è da sempre, o almeno dal 1887 – anno della prima sua avventura –, ammirata dal pubblico, quasi idolatrata, ma allo stesso tempo si è venuta a formare un’aura di mistero intorno a questa persona, che affascina molti lettori. E io non sono da meno.

Sherlock Holmes e suo “padre”, Arthur Conan Doyle, mi hanno sempre regalato racconti interessanti che con gioia mi hanno fatto immergere in una Londra Vittoriana densa di fumi e in piena rivoluzione scientifica, e quando mi sono trovato a confrontarmi con la tanto temuta “tesina di Maturità”, ho immediatamente pensato che miglior occasione non esisteva per rendere omaggio a queste due grandi personalità. Del resto, fin da tenera età, sono sempre stato affascinato dal mistero e, seppur risulti quasi insolito, dalle investigazioni svolte per risolvere un caso investigativo.

Ai giorni nostri nozioni di criminologia, sia attraverso la cronaca nera o per programmi televisivi, si sono diffusi e incuriosiscono una sempre maggiore fascia di popolazione. E proprio partendo dalla devozione verso il detective io, attraverso il mio elaborato, spero di riuscire a ricollegarmi a codeste conoscenze, sia in ambito di casi di criminalità, sia in ambiti più “umanistici”.

La scelta di trattare alcuni argomenti in lingua Inglese ricade nel fatto che, durante il periodo di studi, ho potuto frequentare per un anno una scuola superiore negli Stati Uniti d’America, Nord Carolina, e ho ritenuto questa un’ottima occasione per sfruttare ciò che ho imparato, soprattutto considerando che, negli anni a venire, frequenterò il corso di laurea di Economics & Management, in cui le materie verranno interamente svolte in lingua Inglese.

Introduzione

Si introduce l’argomento trattato considerando lo scrittore che diede alla luce il detective inglese, Arthur Conan Doyle. Di questo autore si esamineranno i passaggi che portarono alla creazione dei primi romanzi, con cenni sulla vita del poeta e su alcune sue considerazioni. Segue un’analisi dei personaggi principali della serie di Sherlock Holmes, delle schede riassuntive dei principali romanzi e film, in aggiunta ad eventuali notizie e/o curiosità e dettagli sull’epoca storica. Questa prima parte del saggio verrà proposta sia in lingua Inglese che in Italiano.

Si prosegue con l’esaminazione del lavoro del Dr. Moriarty, formidabile nemesi di Holmes, con un’allusione alla statistica, in particolar modo al calcolo combinatorio, e a possibili applicazioni in ambito informatico (attraverso la progettazione con il programma R).

Si passa ad un sintetico approfondimento sul metodo di deduzione (anche in ambito filosofico) per poi analizzare i metodi forensi di analisi del DNA, che differisce enormemente dalle scene riportate nelle produzioni filmiche, per infine considerare il sistema americano di archiviazione delle informazioni genetiche in ambito criminologico.

Si conclude con una sintesi sull’origine della criminologia e della Fisionomica, collegando il discorso allo scrittore italiano Lombroso e il suo concetto di criminalità per nascita.

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Chapter 1

Arthur Conan Doyle: the writer behind the cases

Paragraph 1: Introduction to the chapter

Follows a brief paragraph on the character of Sherlock Holmes and his “father”, Arthur Conan Doyle

There seems little need to “introduce” Sherlock Holmes, or the sixty stories about him written by Arthur Conan Doyle between 1886 and 1927. In the intervening decades, the character of Holmes – along his companion and chronicler, Dr. John H. Watson – has taken on a life of its own, and has become almost certainly the most famous character in all of fiction, readily identified even by people who have never read one of the stories: it has been claimed that the original stories have been translated into more languages than any other work, save the Bible.

Such is Holmes’s fame that even items associated with the detective have become a visual shorthand for mysteries, detection, and the solving of crimes: think of the curved pipe, the deerstalker hat, and the magnifying glass, any one of which conjures up an image of Sherlock Holmes. Despite the fact that it appears nowhere in the original tales, the phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson” has entered the language, as an aphorism that suggests what is baffling to others is readily apparent to the speaker.

What makes this popularity, and longevity, even more amazing is the fact that the Sherlock Holmes stories were written quickly and carelessly by their author, who felt that his literary fame would rest on other, more serious work.

Paragraph 2: The individual behind the detective

Follows a brief summary about Arthur Conan Doyle, in relation with the stories of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a born storyteller. He had a natural talent inherited from the artistic Doyle family – his grandfather, John Doyle, was a fine political cartoonist and satirist; his uncle, Richard Doyle, was a fine illustrator and diarist; and his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was also an artist.

Although Doyle's family was well-respected in the art world, his father, Charles, who was a life-long alcoholic, had few accomplishments to speak of. Doyle's mother, Mary, was a lively and well-educated woman who loved to read. She found particularly delightful telling her young son outlandish stories. Her great enthusiasm and animation while spinning wild tales sparked the child's imagination. As Doyle would later recall in his biography, "In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life." As we can read in his autobiography “Memories & Adventures”, he was an avid and rapid reader.

Educated at the Jesuit Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, he enrolled as a student of medicine at Edinburgh University in 1876.

Money was always in short supply, and in 1880, to help with the family’s expensive, Conan Doyle enrolled as a ship’s surgeon on the steamship Hope, bound for the waters of the Artic. He served a further similar term in 1882 aboard the steamer Mayumba headed for West Africa. After a disastrous partnership, he went into private practice in Southsea, where he spent his spare time writing, one of his best works of this period being the Victorian ghost novel “The captain of the ‘Pole-Star’”. In addition to short stories, he tried his hand at a novel, “The firm of Girdlestone”, only to have it rejected by publishers.

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For many years, he had been fond of the work of French novelist Emile Gaboriau, creator of police detective monsieur Lecoq; and C. Augute Dupin, Poe’s masterful detective, had been one of his heroes from boyhood. Now he pondered how he could bring about his own addition to the detective stories:

“I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science. I would try if I could get this effect. It was surely possible in real life, so why should I not make it plausible in fiction? It is all very well to say that a man is very clever, but the reader wants to see examples of it – such examples as Bell gave us every day in the wards. The idea amused me. What should I call the fellow? I still possess the leaf of a notebook with various alternative names. One rebelled against the elementary art which gives some inkling of character in the name, and creates Mr. Sharps or Mr. Ferrets. First it was Sherringford Holmes: then it was Sherlock Holmes. He could not tell his own exploits, so he must have a commonplace comrade as a foil – an educated man of action who could both join in the exploits and narrate them. A drab, quiet name for this unostentatious man. Watson would do. And so I had my puppets and wrote my “Study in Scarlet”.”

Conan Doyle considered his first Holmes tale, “A Study in Scarlet”, to be “as good as I could make it, and I had high hopes”. Not surprisingly, he was hurt when the rejections began to mount by many publishers. Finally, the manuscript was sent to Ward, Lock & Co., who specialized in cheap and often sensational literature and who will publish the book a year later, in 1887, due to the market being flooded with cheap fiction in 1886.

With a home found for “A Study in Scarlet”, Conan Doyle turned his hand to writing other novels. He had given little thought to writing more Holmes stories, but as a result of the modest success that “A Study in Scarlet” achieved in America, he was invited by J. M. Stoddart, an agent of Lippincott’s, to dine at London’s Langham Hotel. One of his table companions on that particular occasion was Oscar Wilde, and the two were invited to write pieces for Lippincott’s Magazine. Wilde’s contribution was “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, and Conan Doyle decided that he would bring Holmes back for another adventure: “The Sign of the Four”. Conan Doyle had never intended that Sherlock Holmes should appear in more than one story, and with this new novel, it became necessary to give the character greater depth and solidity. Here was an opportunity to make his creation known to a wider and more reputable readership, and a more sophisticated presentation was essential.

Sherlock Holmes emerges from “The Sign of the Four” as an altogether more rounded and plausible character; but also – importantly – one with the potential for further development. And it was not only Holmes who could be given greater stature and resonance: the figure of Dr. Watson, too, benefits from Conan Doyle’s increasing creative assurance. The relationship between the two central characters becomes an essential component of the narrative and is based on a growing bond of friendship that would become a key ingredient of the ensuing cycle’s success.

By the end of 1890 Conan Doyle had closed his Southsea practice, and following a visit to Venice for study purpose, he returned to London, where he isolated himself: it is from this period of reflection and inspiration that the character of Sherlock Holmes emerged, fully formed.

“A number of monthly magazines were coming out at that time, notable among which was “The Strand” […]. Considering these various journals with their disconnected stories, it had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that the reader to that particular magazine. On the other hand, it had long seemed to me that the ordinary serial might be an impediment rather than an help to a magazine, since, sooner or later, one missed one number and afterwards it had lost all interest.

Clearly the ideal compromise was a character which carried through, and yet instalments which were each complete in themselves, so that the purchaser was always sure that he could relish the whole contents of the magazine. I believe that I was the first to realize this and “The Strand Magazine” the first to put it into practice […]. Looking around for my central character I felt that Sherlock Holmes, whom I had already handled in two little books, would easily lend himself to a succession of short stories.”

As Conan Doyle became a household name, he felt the time was right to revive his interest in writing historical novels. “The Strand”, meanwhile, had been pressing for further Sherlock Holmes stories: the first series had been very successful with the public, and the magazine’s fortunes were going from strength to strength.

Despite this, Conan Doyle was not convinced that Holmes was work upon which he should be engaged. As he wrote to his mother:

I have done five of the Sherlock Holmes stories of the new series […] I think that they are up to the standard of the first series, & the twelve ought to make a rather good book of the sort. I think of slaying Holmes in the sixth & winding him up for good & all. He takes my mind from better things…

His mother protested and provided him with the bases for a new plot. The reprieve, however, was only temporary.

The “Strand Magazine” approached Conan Doyle for a further series of Holmes stories in 1892, when he was working on another historical novel. He was not keen to produce more: the intricacies of plot necessary for the short story detective were as time-consuming as those for a novel. He considered how he could around the “Strand’s” latest approach, and decided to ask one thousand pounds for the new series in the hope that this would prove a deterrent. The ploy didn’t work: the magazine accepted his terms without hesitation, and he was forced to begin considering ideas for the stories that would eventually become “The Memories of Sherlock Holmes”.

By the time the final story of the “Memories” was completed, the decision to “kill off” Holmes had been executed. Christmas 1893 was to be a sad one for readers of “The Strand”: “The Final Problem” appeared in the December edition of the magazine, prefaced with Sidney Paget’s illustration of Holmes and Professor Moriarty locked in combat above the Reichenbach Falls and captioned “The Death of Sherlock Holmes”.

"The Death of Sherlock Holmes" by Sidney Paget

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Conan Doyle seemingly had no regrets, as we can read from a letter to a friend:

“I couldn't revive him if I would, at least not for years, for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.”

However, there may have been other reasons for the writer killing off his famous creation, as it happened in the same year that Doyle’s alcoholic father died in an asylum.

“I have never for an instance regretted the course I took in killing Sherlock. That does not say, however, that because he is dead I should not write about him again if I wanted to,

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for there is no limit to the number of paper he left behind…”

…and there had been many occasion which set Doyle’s imagination on fire, from mysterious tales to friend’s unbelievable stories.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't just write mysteries, he actually solved a few. One of particular interest to him was The Curious Case of Oscar Slater - for the murder of Marion Gilchrist, a wealthy 82-year-old woman from Glasgow. Doyle applied the “Holmes method”, in which he uncovered new evidence, recalled witnesses and questioned the prosecution's evidence. His findings were published as a plea for Slater's pardon. It caused a sensation and there were calls for a retrial, but all this was promptly ignored by the Scottish authorities. The desperate and incarcerated Slater later smuggled messages out of prison and Doyle's interest in the case was reignited. He wrote to politicians and used his own money to fund Slater's legal fees. One politician, Ramsay McDonald - Britain's first Labour prime minister - informed the Scottish Secretary that the police and the legal authorities had colluded to withhold evidence and influence witnesses. Slater was subsequently

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released from prison with £6,000 compensation but never shared it with Doyle.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the immediate impact of the Sherlock Holmes stories when they were first published. Conan Doyle did not invent the detective story – that honor goes to Edgar Allan Poe – but through his immensely popular creation, and his inventive series of tales, he was almost single-handedly responsible for creating a huge public interest in tales of mystery and detection.

The demand of the reading public for more of the same, meant that almost every other magazine had to have its own fictional sleuth to rival Holmes. Despite the plethora of lady detectives, scientific detectives, comical detectives, and psychic detectives who were thus created, however, there was only one Holmes, and these imitations – many of them very good in their own right – never seriously rivalled the Master.

There is perhaps no area where the debt other detective novels’ writers own to Doyle is so profound as in the matter of the detective’s companions; and it is a testament to this debt that “Watson” has entered the language as a synonym for the companion or best friend of the main character.

Conan Doyle was quick to admit his own indebtedness to Edgar Allan Poe, and certainly the Holmes tales borrow heavily from Poe’s three stories about detective C. Auguste Dupin. However, where Poe’s “Watson” is such a nonentity that he is never even given a name, Conan Doyle was quick to realize the importance of a vivid and realistic grounding force for his detective, someone who observes and makes notes, acts as a sounding-board, is there to provide assistance when needed, and (most importantly) stand in for the reader, asking the questions that we would ask. It is by no means an easy task to make such a character come alive, and it is to Conan Doyle’s credit that he succeeded in making Dr. Watson as memorable a character as Holmes himself, an “Everyman” without whom the Holmes stories are almost unthinkable.

2 A.C. Doyle’s comment reported in the magazine “Tit-Bits”.