The Other Side of Sherlock

Certain fictional settings live on in the mind as permanent features of our imaginative landscape, and we stroll in them at will, mostly for purposes of escape. Like stage sets they depend on recognizable fixtures: the swinging saloon doors of Westerns or the gas lamps of late Victorian London. Mention Baker Street and at once a grimy fog lit dimly by hissing lamps unfurls, invariably accompanied by the clopping of hansom cabs, the damp shine of black cobblestones, and the apparition of a cloaked figure in a deerstalker’s hat. Sherlock Holmes is only one of the spectral characters who step from that imagined London fog that seeps through the novels of Dickens and permeates “The Waste Land” of Eliot. Coal-smoke fog is now a thing of the past in London, but because of such fictional evocations, it still coils around our minds as though we had tasted its acrid pungency.Professor Moriarty isn’t the only villain concealed in that murk. The mist also hides W. F. Raffles, gentleman jewel-thief and cricketer extraordinaire. Nowadays Raffles survives, if at all, pretty much as a name. Like Svengali, who survived “Trilby” to become a byword, Raffles lives on as the crystallization of a manner. But his influence, while shadowy, has been extensive. Ernest William Hornung (1866-1921), the novelist who created him, is forgotten; Raffles, however, with his debonair demeanor and suave style, still flashes a covert smirk from the pages of such writers as Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, George Orwell, and Ian Fleming; I suspect that the sublime shenanigans of many a P.G. Wodehouse character – I am thinking especially of the irrepressible title character of “Leave It to Psmith” – also owe much to Raffles.From his first appearance in 1899, in “Raffles the Amateur Cracksman” (out of print but available for pennies on Abebooks), Raffles embodied a winning mixture of insouciance and punctilio. Completely amoral, the “cracksman” (old-fashioned slang for a burglar) still lives by a stringent code, and it is this scrupulosity in a career devoted to crime that gives him a certain dazzle. He is the epitome of the club man; he defines himself in terms of its standards and comports himself, even in the midst of a major heist, by its rules. He fears the law in the person of the dour Detective Mackenzie of Scotland Yard not only because his arrest would bar him from the Albany Club forever but because he would have “let down” his fellow members.E. W. Hornung was the brother-inlaw of Arthur Conan Doyle, whose sister Constance he married in 1893. It probably wouldn’t require the ratiocinations of a Sherlock Holmes to puzzle out the motives that led Hornung to create Raffles and his reluctant sidekick “Bunny” even while his brother-in-law was introducing that immortal sleuth and the stolid Dr. Watson to an eager public; and yet, the parallel is intriguing. Raffles, unlike Holmes, is supremely clubbable, but like Holmes he views crime as an intellectual challenge, a test of wits. An audacious theft, such as pinching the diamond and sapphire necklace of the Dowager-Marchioness of Melrose straight from her wattled throat or filching a colossal pearl from the grim clutch of its “Teutonic” guardian on a Mediterranean cruise, tickles Raffles’s fancy because of the sport involved. He is, of course, a brilliant bowler in cricket, that incomprehensible game, and loves rising to a “tricky wicket.” For Raffles, crime is a form of sport.In his classic essay of 1944, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” George Orwell expressed both his lingering admiration for Raffles, and his creator, and his dismay at the turn in disposition represented by James Hadley Chase’s 1939 novel “No Orchids for Miss Blandish.” Raffles’s code of behavior, however quaint and downright silly it now appears, counterbalanced the “cracksman’s” amorality; but Chase’s novel – a kind of noir knockoff of Faulkner’s “Sanctuary” – serves up graphic brutality, including dismemberment and serial rape, with savage gusto. Chase’s world, of course, is still our own, while much of the antiquated charm of the three Raffles novels (of which “The Amateur Cracksman” is the best) comes from the fact that, as Orwell notes, “Raffles and Bunny, after all, are gentlemen and such standards as they do have are not to be violated.”Perhaps the most absurd instance of this outmoded code occurs when Raffles purloins a pearl en route to the German kaiser and after many twists and turns, which land poor Bunny in the slammer, ends up mailing the jewel anonymously to Queen Victoria as a belated present for her jubilee. As Raffles ringingly puts it, “For sixty years, Bunny, we’ve been ruled over by absolutely the finest sovereign the world has ever seen.” Absurd as the gesture must seem to us now, it also prompts a faint, barely discernible pang. Was there ever a world in which such a flourish was conceivable? Can we imagine Tony Soprano, in a rush of patriotic fervor, sending a share of the swag to President Bush?In his introduction to the 1956 edition of “Raffles the Amateur Cracksman,” the great novelist Anthony Powell noted dryly that “social adjustments of recent years have done much to elevate the status of criminals as a class.” This would have dismayed Raffles the snob. Powell went on to remark that today there is “a tendency to look upon the lawbreaker as an invalid rather than a delinquent, and discover that his sins, though of scarlet, had been washed by the psychiatrists as white as cocaine.” This would have horrified Raffles the sportsman. If crime is a game, it has its rules, however bizarre; but there’s no playfulness – and so nothing “cricket” – in mere aberration.It’s a shame that Raffles and Sherlock Holmes never matched wits, except perhaps in the competing imaginations of their creators. I like to think of them both shadowing one another in that long-vanished London fog. The cerebral sleuth would probably have outwitted the stylish cracksman in the end, just as he has outlasted him in the affections of readers. Sherlock has not only justice but logic on his side and logic – if not justice – always wins out over style.eormsby@nysun.com

The Other Side of Sherlock

The Other Side of Sherlock

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