Sherlock Holmes In America

INTRODUCTION: “AMERICAN, AS YOU PERCEIVE” by Jon L. Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower

“It is always a joy to meet an American,” declares Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor,” “for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same worldwide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”

It should not come as a surprise, then, to find that the Sherlock Holmes stories are fairly bursting with Americans. The Great Detective’s very first outing, A Study in Scarlet, features a lengthy flashback set in the Mormon community of Utah, while the novel The Valley of Fear turns on an account of nefarious doings in the coal-mining communities of Pennsylvania. Americans feature prominently in several of the most popular Holmes adventures, including The Five Orange Pips and The Adventure of the Dancing Men, and no less a figure than the woman, the legendary Irene Adler “of dubious and questionable memory” who bested Sherlock Holmes, hailed from New Jersey. If further evidence is required, one need only recall that Holmes himself posed as an Irish-American spy named Altamont to outwit the German spymaster Von Bork in His Last Bow.

Like his famous detective, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an enthusiastic admirer of the United States. In boyhood he was fascinated by the frontier tales of James Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid, and as a young writer he drew inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte. Over the course of his lifetime, Conan Doyle made four visits to the United States, and called for the creation of an Anglo-American society to promote understanding and friendship between the two nations. The dedication of his novel The White Company reads: “To the Hope of the Future, the Reunion of the English Speaking Races, This Little Chronicle of Our Common Ancestry Is Inscribed.”

In that spirit, the present volume brings together a collection of new stories written by some of today’s best mystery writers, in which Holmes and Watson strike out for the United States. “That’s paying for brains, you see,” as Holmes remarks in The Valley of Fear, “the American business principle.” Some readers may balk at finding the Great Detective uprooted from his familiar Baker Street digs, but we believe we are playing the game according to Doyle.

“It air strange, it air,” he once wrote, in a story called The American’s Tale, “but I could tell you queerer things than that ’ere-almighty queer things. You can’t learn everything out of books, sirs, no how. You see it ain’t the men as can string English together and as has had good eddications as finds themselves in the queer places I’ve been in. They’re mostly rough men, sirs, as can scarce speak aright, far less tell with pen and ink the things they’ve seen; but if they could they’d make some of your European’s har riz with astonishment.”

Indeed, as Sherlock Holmes once observed, “American slang is very expressive sometimes.”