A Study in Scarlett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 debut Sherlock Holmes novel, memorably finishes with roughly 5 chapters of salacious anti-Mormon caricatures. Whereas Part I of Scarlett ends with the eponymous detective aptly nabbing the murderer that had eluded the police, Part II features the narrative of the arrested killer, an American named Jefferson Hope; his is a tale involving debauched Mormon polygamists in Salt Lake City kidnapping Hope’s bride-to-be under the direction of Brigham Young. She dies shortly after a forced marriage in the endowment house; Hope swears vengeance, tracking the two polygamists responsible across the United States, then across Europe, finally catching them in London where he exacted his revenge.
Mormonism itself has absolutely nothing to do with how Sherlock solves the crime, which he does through logic and clues, as he is famous for (the character was fully-formed from his first tale); he isn’t finding clues in the Book of Mormon or Temple symbolism or any nonsense like that. My point, simply, is that the Utah back story is utterly gratuitous; Doyle could’ve saved himself 5 chapters by having Hope just say, “they murdered my wife so I tracked them down and killed them,” and none of Sherlock’s dazzling detective work would’ve been upset. The long Mormon back-story all smacks of pure penny-dreadful sensationalism, exploiting the worst slanders of Mormonism then circulating in Great Britain, just to make the story “sexier” and create sympathy for the villain.
Upon first finishing the tale, I reflected philosophically that, well, Mormons were hardly the only marginalized group to be characterized by degrading and reductive stereotypes in Victorian England; this thought was apt as I continued forward into Doyle’s second novella, The Sign of Four, which features similarly retrograde stereotypes of India. For while the circumstances and motivations for the murders were different, Sign of Four’s basic structure remains the same as Scarlett’s; sensational murders, bizarre clues, the police baffled, and Sherlock Holmes deploying a dazzling array of deductive reasoning and close observation by which to catch what turns out to be a rather sympathetic villain, one who then gives his lengthy back story.
In this case, the killer is Jonathan Small, a British Army enlistee stationed down in India during an infamous mass uprising of the barbarous natives (that the people of India perhaps did not wish to be occupied by a foreign force and were justified in revolt never seems to occur to anyone in this tale). Down in India, “where a man’s life is not as valued” as in Worcestershire (as though murder is solely the predilection of “uncivilized” nations needing the restraining influence of a stern Anglo-Saxon hand), Small has a knife put to his throat by one of his Indian guards; they tell him that if he swears to join him and two others in murdering a nobleman traveling in disguise, that they will split his wealth with him. He consents, the dirty deed is done that night, but after the uprising is quashed, all four of them are caught and put in prison–yet not before they hide the fortune so none else can recover it.
Years past, and he finds that the English Captain running his prison is hard up in gambling debts; he uses the buried treasure to bargain with the Captain for an early release. But the Captain betrays him, and takes the whole treasure for himself and returns to England. Small, with the help of an Indian “savage,” escapes from prison and slowly makes his way back to London where he exacts his revenge. As in “Scarlett,” all this back-story could’ve been spared if Doyle had just written,”He stole my money in India so I got him back.”
Just as the Mormons are portrayed as salacious and perverted in “Scarlett,” the Indians are unnecessarily portrayed as uncivilized and savage in “Sign of Four;” Doyle certainly wasn’t deviating from established stereotypes when he wrote his Sherlock Holmes stories.
Except…he still kind of was. Sherlock himself, for example, is a confirmed bachelor, which in family-friendly Victorian England was itself socially deviant (a BYU English prof. once said that Mormon lit is like Victorian lit: lots of kids runnin’ around, nobody talkin’ about how they got there). Times have certainly made that particular deviancy less jarring; but then, perhaps to ensure that time wouldn’t lessen Holmes’s brand of deviancy, Sign of Four explicitly opens with Holmes jabbing a hypodermic needle up his vein while Watson says with a sigh, “What is it this to-day, morphine or cocaine?”
At one point in Sign of Four, Watson, while admiring Holmes’s incredible intellect, says how lucky it is that Holmes chose to be a detective rather than a criminal, for he would have been unstoppable. In other words, Sherlock Holmes the celebrated detective, punisher of crime, champion of justice, help of the police and bane of crooks everywhere, is only a notch away from being a full-fledged deviant himself.
All this is just a round-about of saying that although Doyle was still reinforcing dominant stereotypes about “deviants” from Victorian morality like the Mormons and the Hindus, their mere inclusion in the opening tales of Sherlock Holmes reveals a preoccupation with deviancy itself, implying that deviancy is where Sherlock’s true sympathies lie. Now, neither Mormons nor Hindus are the better for their portrayal in Sherlock, but it is note-worthy that both groups are used to to create actual sympathy for the chief deviant of all, the murderer! Rather than the standard Scooby-Doo ending where the captured villain says, “And I would’ve gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!”, Doyle goes long out of his way to ensure the readers’ sympathies are not with the police, not with law and order, not even with the victims even, but with the deviants themselves!
Moreover: in both novellas Sherlock employs “the Baker Street Irregulars,” a gang of filthy “Arab” street urchins, to gather his intelligence, preferring them over the regular police force; that is, Sherlock excels at catching deviants precisely because he prefers the deviants themselves. Sherlock constantly declares his distaste for the “common” and “mundane” of the “everyday,” because it is out in the margins, in the deviancy, where he prefers to exist, even flourish. Sure, he protects the quotidian status quo of middle-class morality through his detective work, and he keeps the deviant marginalized as the “everyday” demands; hence in Sherlock’s world, the Mormons must remain salacious, and India must remain uncivilized. But I suspect that even if Doyle had known better, even unconsciously, he still couldn’t have “legitimized” the Mormons or India, even if he’d wanted to; for to legitimize something is to normalize it, so that it is no longer unusual, no longer stimulating, and Holmes’s mind “rebels at lack of stimulation.”
Doyle makes the murderers sympathetic even as he punishes them; he brings in Mormons and India without “redeeming” them–at least, not within the eyes of Victorian morality. In every case, Sherlock Holmes casts in his lot with the deviants without normalizing them, because somehow, intuitively, Conan Doyle understands that the greatest crime he could commit would be to normalize something interesting.
Perhaps the kindest thing Guy Ritchie’s 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie did was make Sherlock deviant again (any who complain about his Ritchie’s characterization clearly hasn’t read the books). And though I can’t speak for India, perhaps the kindest thing Doyle did for Mormonism was to keep us in the margins; Hugh Nibley once said that we in the Church spend far too much time trying to include ourselves in the world, to participate in Babylon, to go “mainstream,” sweeping the “weird” things we do under the rug, forgetting that the scriptures themselves say that we are to be a “peculiar people.” Brigham Young himself said that his greatest fear was that this Church would become popular, and thus all earth and hell would join and drag us down to hell with them.
So, while I can’t excuse Doyle’s regressive characterizations, I can at least give thanks to Sherlock Holmes himself, for keeping us “peculiar,” for keeping us unpopular, deviant, and therefore interesting; in this manner he keeps us from stagnating, he keeps us stimulating, he keeps us from being dragged down to hell.