Christy Edwall casts a forensic eye over Arthur Conan Doyle’s observational methodology.

1

Here’s a game. Next time you’re at the shop, look, really look, at the person in front of you in the checkout line. Notice what’s in their basket. What character – what private life – can be glimpsed from its contents?

Two boxes of cat food. Four two-litre bottles of water. Crisps. A brick of ice cream. A sleeve of pasta. Tins of tomatoes. The customer in front of you is a cat owner, clearly. A cat sitter would use the food provided by the owner. She might be buying cat food as a favour to a friend, family member, or a bed-bound neighbour. But why two boxes rather than one? No, this is a cat owner. Economical, hence the bulk-buying, on reduced income, maybe, but not so reduced that she can’t allow herself a treat.

In all likelihood, she lives alone. Too easy, you think, given the cat food, but she holds herself with an independent attitude, as she waits for the conveyer belt to slide her purchases towards the man at the till. Also, there’s no meat in the basket, no chicken to roast, there’s unlikely to be a man of the house. The absence of ready-to-heat pizzas or fish fingers suggests this is not a house with children. No, this woman in front of you lives where no one will judge her for her pleasures: pasta with tomato sauce on a Friday night.

Repeat, to your own amusement, ad infinitum.

2

When you play this game, or any time you try to observe a stranger on a train, you’re doing what James Joyce called ‘Sherlockholmesing’: reading character and circumstance through the extraction of small, precise, observable details.

Holmes’s party trick of reading character and history is infamous. ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,’ the detective says to Watson on their first meeting. This is no witchcraft, as Holmes explains to the mystified doctor; he merely observed that the man he saw opposite him ‘has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’

Such acuity of perception gives Holmes the upper hand in social encounters. The subject is wrong-footed, astonished by his observations, disarmed, and startled into disclosure. Holmes is the man on whom, as Henry James wrote of the fiction writer, nothing is lost. Whether it’s the clay from a particular square of the city caught in the teeth of a boot, or ink stains on the hand, a neglected hat brim, or a bruise on a young woman’s wrist, Holmes’s art is one of surfaces.

3

So what would Sherlock Holmes, that expert of the external, make of the East Sussex town of Crowborough? He might observe that, on its solidly red-brick and pragmatic streets, there are no fewer than three nail salons on a single street. The betting shop, vape shop, and tanning salon, in addition to the two hearing centres and three funeral homes, point to an accommodation of 21st-century realities.

On the other hand, the family butcher’s, the independent pharmacy established in 1937, the two travel agents, and two social clubs – the Crowborough Social Club and the Constitutional Club – suggest a persistent strain of local pride. Taken together, the Waitrose next to the Morrisons, and the Farrow & Ball outlet opposite the Wetherspoons at the town’s crossroads, suggest Crowborough’s mixed nature: a town neither on the up, nor giving in to a downward sag. Still, Holmes might be surprised to see his creator cast in bronze in front of the Constitutional Club, looking remarkably like Nigel Farage.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle moved to Crowborough in 1907 when he bought Windlesham Manor, a gabled, slate-roofed Edwardian mansion on the south-west edge of town. Today the house is a residential care facility, with a chef who cooked for the late Queen. Taking lodging in the most affordable room would set you back £54,860 per year, but prospective residents might be heartened by the knowledge that its former occupant is no longer buried vertically in the garden, given his views on the porousness of the line between life and death.

When Conan Doyle moved to Sussex, he was famous, successful, and content. His first wife, an invalid, had finally died, leaving him to make a long-awaited second marriage with a younger woman. Sussex comes up fairly frequently in the Sherlock Holmes stories; not surprising, perhaps, for a detective whose cases are largely confined to the Home Counties. Horsham appears in The Adventure of the Five Pippins, as do the fictional villages of Lamberley in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, and Birlstone in The Valley of Fear, which, being ten or twelve miles west of Tunbridge Wells, is a fictional neighbour to Crowborough.

It is Sussex, too, to which Holmes retires after he leaves the metropolis: not to Crowborough but further south. According to Watson’s preface to His Last Bow, published in 1917, the detective could be found on a ‘small farm upon the downs five miles from Eastbourne, where his time is divided between philosophy and agriculture’. Retirement does not mean inactivity, however. In the title story, Holmes – emerging in August 1914 from two years of embedded disguise as an Irish American collaborator with the Germans – shows Watson the ‘fruit of [his] leisured ease’, Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen.

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The inspiration for Holmes’s observational method came from Arthur Conan Doyle’s years as a medical student in Edinburgh. He was struck by the approach taken by his mentor, Joseph Bell, who made a show of quick deduction from external evidence. ‘Carry the same idea of using one’s senses accurately and constantly,’ Bell said, ‘and you will see that many a surgical case will bring his past history, national, social, and medical, into the consulting room as he walks in.’

A retired doctor once told me that she could diagnose a certain disease in a person interviewed on television. It was the swollen hands, she said, and the colour of the skin. Attentive looking is essential for medical diagnosis. Flushed cheeks, fevered eyes, or trembling hand might be a passing state, or it could be a sign of tuberculosis, infection, or nervous degeneration.

In Holmes’s first outing, A Study in Scarlet, the detective diagnoses the florid face of the murderer from the blood on the floor, but it is Watson who diagnoses the aortic aneurism in the man after his arrest. The fatal condition is one which intensifies his need for revenge, but also spares him the indignity of a trial and execution. He is found in his cell ‘with a placid smile upon his face, as though he had been able in his dying moments to look back upon a useful life, and on work well done’.

5

Although his medical training took him as far as the Arctic, the Gold Coast, and, later, to cholera-stricken, wartime South Africa, Conan Doyle was not a successful physician. In fact, he owed literary his career to the empty hours at his surgery desk. In those early, uneven years of medical practice, first at Portsmouth, Southsea, and then in London, looking became as much of a pleasure activity for Conan Doyle as a professional calling. An early enthusiast of photography, he published several essays in the British Journal of Photography in the early 1880s, several years before Sherlock Holmes debuted in A Study in Scarlet. (Although neither Conan Doyle nor his creation were connoisseurs of modern art, readers coming to the novel for the first time may misinterpret the ‘study’ as a scientific activity – or the puzzle offered by a criminal investigation – rather than Holmes’s reference to visual art. After all, ‘Why shouldn’t we use a little art jargon?’ he teasingly asks Watson.

In his earliest photographic essay, After Cormorants with a Camera, published October 1881, Conan Doyle describes a jaunt to the Isle of May, northeast of Edinburgh. After several days lugging around bulky equipment in search of ‘photographic novelty’, and coming across some hunting friends, the essayist asks himself, ‘Why not take a cormorant at the moment of its being shot?’ The essayist and his friend rig a run where the friend can shoot everything that passes the lens, and the order is given to the photographer to ‘fire away’. ‘Shooting’, of course, is a word that belongs to photography as well as to guns, and taking a picture is a kind of murder: the conversion of a living subject into still life. Or as the French call it, nature morte.

In another of Conan Doyle’s youthful excursions, On the Slave Coast with a Camera, which describes a voyage to the West Coast of Africa, the writer is amused by the frightened response of local fishermen who dive overboard when he focuses his camera at them. The incident is described in the clumsy, racialised language which marks much of Conan Doyle’s imperial encounters, as one of the fishermen misidentifies the camera as ‘[d]em thing gatling gun’. The Gatling gun, a rapid-fire multi-barrel American firearm, was a lot slicker than Conan Doyle’s camera. This observation is one which, to the author and his imagined audience, reveals the hilarious ignorance of African natives, but also underlines the kinship between the gun barrel and the camera lens. Neither was innocent. Conan Doyle’s amusement at the exchange is oblivious to the seriousness by which colonial subjects had to read their encounters with white visitors. From a 21st-century perspective, it is the British visitor, and not the Ghanaian fishermen, who is exposed as missing the point.

Conan Doyle would be exposed again in his defence of the Cottingley hoax. The hoax started in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley, when two young cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, claimed to have photographed fairies. The images of cavorting sprites, which were really paper cut-outs propped up by hatpins, exploded in the Edwardian equivalent of going viral. Although Conan Doyle was sufficiently on guard against mischief to ask Spiritualist friends and a few Kodak experts whether the images could be fakes, he was convinced enough to use the photographs to illustrate his article for the Strand, ‘The Evidence for Fairies’. As with the tricks and disguises of impersonators and actors in the Holmes canon – the murderer dressed as an old woman, the respectable, married man made up as a beggar with a twisted lip – looking only gets you so far.

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In the Sherlock Holmes stories, as with Conan Doyle’s use of the Cottingley images, photographs authenticate. In A Scandal in Bohemia, the exact nature of the photograph of Irene Adler and the King of Bohemia is never described – leaving the reader to imagine its indiscretion – but it is dangerous enough for the King to want to retrieve it at all costs. The very existence of the photograph suggests the medium’s exploitation by criminals and deviants. Photography is leverage. It is also an alibi. In The Red-Headed League, the criminal John Clay conceals his tunnelling between the basement in his employer’s house and the bank vault next door behind the illusion of a darkroom. ‘Never was such a fellow for photography,’ says his employer, Jabez Wilson. Here, as in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, photography becomes a socially acceptable cover for odd and secretive behaviour, just as a camera allows someone to look at others in ways that would be intrusive without the lens.

For Bernd Stiegler, author of Arthur Conan Doyle and Photography, the detective is the camera. Everything is ruthlessly exposed to his vision. In his retirement, however, perhaps as a sign of his weakened powers, Holmes stoops to the explicit use of technology. The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane, which explores the mysterious death of a young man from scourge-like welts on his back, is unusually narrated by Holmes after his retirement to his bees in East Sussex rather than his faithful chronicler, Watson. Much has changed: the detective no longer lurks in the low fog of London, and the story takes place after the timeless decades of gas-lamps and hansom cabs. It is 1907, Watson is only an occasional visitor, and photography has developed to the extent that the sleuth is using it for a reference of a dead man’s wounds, as detectives do after post-mortems in modern crime shows. ‘This is my method in such cases,’ says Holmes, handing the enlarged image of welts to Inspector Bardle of the Sussex Constabulary.

7

I took photographs of Windlesham Manor at dusk the first day after the clocks went back. By the time I found the house, the day was quickly disappearing, but I was struck by the arterial bloom of the plant to the left of the door, which was identified by my plant app (I’m no Sherlock Holmes) as Redvein Chinese Lantern. A second study in scarlet. There was little to glean from the house’s front. The house and its occupants were inside; a single woman in scrubs, a care worker at the end of her shift, was walking back to her car with a bag over her shoulder. A heaped skip in the corner of the parking yard suggested internal works were ongoing. Otherwise, there was little left over from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s day, aside from the Manor’s comfortable exterior. Its bow windows, thick fringes of wisteria, and peaked gables were attractive, and the windows in every direction showed the pleasures of looking were built into its bones. Only the television aerial, and the outstretched tendril of a dying creeper, suggested the house’s continued receptivity to invisible currents of information.