JOHN ALBECK
Detecting in the Dark: Some Light Reading
Like a light bulb clicking on over the head of a cartoon character,
the solution to the “Adventure of the Speckled Band” is immediately
clear to Sherlock Holmes, once he has seen all the evidence, while the
other characters remain “in the dark.” This darkness, however, is not
just a figure of speech; his faithful sidekick, Watson, and his client,
Miss Stoner, are literally unable to see until Holmes strikes a match and
reveals the true nature of the “speckled band.” Dupin, in “The Murders
in the Rue Morgue,” has a similar flash of insight that sheds light on
the impossible puzzle of the locked room. Light and dark play crucial
roles in both of these mysteries, in a figurative as well as a literal sense.
Obviously, we need light to see, yet the solutions to the problems
remain shrouded in darkness; everyone can see the evidence, but only
Dupin and Holmes can bring the answers to light. “You have evidently
seen more in these rooms than was visible to me,” Watson says to
Holmes, to which the detective replies, “No, but I fancy that I may have
deduced a little more” (Doyle 363-64). “Truth is not always in a well,”
lectures Dupin (Poe 186), but it may as well be for everyone else,
including the reader, who doesn’t share the detectives’ extraordinary
powers of insight into the darkest depths of the murders.
Conan Doyle may not have understood the image of the light bulb
that symbolizes insight in the cartoons of today, but he certainly saw
his detective as bringing the “light” of understanding to the mystery
shrouded in darkness. At the very outset of the “Adventure of the
Speckled Band,” Miss Stoner begs Holmes to “throw a little light
through the dense darkness that surrounds [her]” (Doyle 348). After all,
the murder of her sister and the terrifying whistles occurred “in the
dead of the night” (Doyle 351). When Holmes comes to the mansion,
however, it is “a perfect day, with a bright sun” (Doyle 358), perhaps
indicating the illumination that Holmes brings to the matter. By the
same token, darkness and suspicion seem to arrive when the doctor
returns home at dusk. Later, as Holmes and Watson sit “in the gathering
darkness” in their room at the inn awaiting the signal from the mansion,
Holmes becomes concerned and warns his companion that “There is a
distinct element of danger” (Doyle 363). Furthermore, as they approach
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the mansion later that night, Holmes and Watson have a frightening
run-in with a baboon as it darts “swiftly across the lawn into the
darkness,” hinting at the sinister role that the exotic animals play in the
story (Doyle 365). Light represents knowledge and safety, while darkness portends evil, danger, and the unknown.
Light and dark come into play in “Murders in the Rue Morgue”
as well, but Poe’s detective seems to have a different relation to the
dark. Dupin and the narrator are “enamored of the Night for her own
sake,” and avoid the daylight as much as possible (Poe 181). As in the
“Speckled Band,” though, the murders of Mme. L’Espanaye and her
daughter are committed in the middle of the night. The darkness
surrounding this crime is so deep that the newspaper report of the
murder proclaims, “There is not, however, the shadow of a clew
apparent” (Poe 185). Only Dupin, who dwells in the shadows, can
make any sense of the mystery. Holmes, too, prowls dark environments
in search of his answers, such as a dingy opium den in “The Man with
the Twisted Lip.” Perhaps Poe and Conan Doyle mean to say that one
must be intimately acquainted with darkness in order to understand
such dark acts.
Indeed, the idea that one must dwell in the darkness in order to
bring light to it occurs in the “Speckled Band” as well, where Holmes
and Watson find it necessary to spend a night in the darkness of Miss
Stoner’s room in order to reach a final conclusion about the mystery of
her sister’s death. They are summoned to the room, however, by a lamp
in the window, which Watson describes as “one yellow light twinkling
in front of us through the gloom to guide us on our sombre errand”
(Doyle 365). The light leads them to the place of the final conclusion.
Then, after spending several hours in a room where “the shutters cut off
the least ray of light, and [they] waited in absolute darkness,” Holmes
strikes a match and springs into action, while Watson is so blinded by
the “sudden glare flashing into [his] weary eyes” that he can see
nothing (Doyle 366). Holmes then “lit a lamp and led the way down the
corridor,” finally bringing the whole affair to light (Doyle 367).
Dupin also succeeds in shedding light on his problem, not by
lighting a candle but by opening a window to let the light in. As he
notes, the conundrum of a dead body alone in a room locked from the
inside left the police stumbling in the dark because “their perceptions
had been hermetically sealed against the possibility of the windows
having ever been opened at all” (Poe 192). But, through deductive
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reasoning, he knows just where to look for clues and finds that “a
careful search soon brought to light the hidden spring. [He] pressed it,
and, satisfied with the discovery, forbore to upraise the sash” (Poe
189). Just like Holmes’s lighting of the lamp, Dupin’s opening of the
window both literally and figuratively brings the solution to light.
Some of the uses of light and dark in these two tales do not fit so
easily into the mold of light representing good and dark representing
evil. Light is not always desirable; too much light can be blinding or
distracting, or it can reveal your presence to your enemies. In “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the sailor recollects his chase of the
orangutan through the dark streets of Paris until “the fugitive’s
attention was arrested by a light gleaming from the open window of
Madame L’Espanaye’s chamber, in the fourth story of her house” (Poe
196). In this case, the light from the window attracts the orangutan to
the room where it subsequently murders Mlle L’Espanaye.
Even more puzzling are the light-giving abilities of the darkloving detectives. Why do Holmes and Dupin, who spend so much time
in the darkness, have such remarkable powers of illuminating insight?
Insight, that flash of understanding that suddenly reveals the solution
to a previously indecipherable problem, is a quality that Sherlock
Holmes undeniably uses in solving the speckled band mystery. To be
sure, Holmes relies primarily on his legendary powers of deduction. He
carefully examines the seemingly impenetrable locked shutters outside
the deadly room in the Roylott mansion and, finding nothing, declares,
“Well, we shall see if the inside throws any light upon the matter”
(Doyle 360). After examining the interior, he eliminates the door as a
possible means of entry for the murderer. The only remaining solution,
he sees, is the tiny ventilator. Yet while Watson remains befuddled by
this apparent dead end, Holmes explains that “the idea of a snake
instantly occurred to me” (Doyle 368). Watson sees all the evidence but
can make nothing of it; Holmes deduces what he can from the same
clues and suddenly hits upon the answer.
Dupin arrives at his solution in a remarkably similar fashion. He
first decides which exits the murderer could not possibly have used and
then turns the spotlight of his attention on the only remaining possibility. Using the information he gathers, he makes an insightful jump to
the conclusion that the atrocities were committed by none other than an
orangutan. (Dupin’s intuition is somewhat less impressive than
Holmes’s, since he has the advantage of discovering a non-human
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orange hair beneath the murder victim’s fingernails, a detail that the
police had somehow overlooked, in drawing his conclusion.) Oddly
enough, the narrator denounces “ingenuity” as a problem-solving technique at the beginning of the story as inferior to true “analysis,” yet
ingenuity plays a key role in Dupin’s inventive solution to the mystery.
He does note, however, that “while the analyst is necessarily ingenious,
the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis” (Poe
179). Holmes and Dupin illuminate the depths of the puzzles using both
sharp analysis and creative ingenuity.
The lingering questions are where these amazing abilities come
from and what they have to do with the Dark, which seems to be the
detectives’ natural element. Just as our eyes become sharper in a dark
room after we have had a few minutes to become accustomed to the
lower light level, perhaps Holmes and Dupin have such keen “night
vision” because they spend so much time in the dark. The darkness
calls to mind other analogies as well. Nocturnal animals, such as owls
or bats, have remarkable ways of snaring their prey in the absence of
all light. Even eerier possibilities exist, when one considers all of the
other strange creatures, natural or supernatural, that come out at night.
Turning the light of scrutiny on the detectives themselves reveals an
intriguing, and even suspicious, acquaintance with the dark.
❧
Works Cited
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” In
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Vol. 1. New
York: Bantam Books, 1986.
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In The Short
Fiction of Edgar Allen Poe: An Annotated Edition, notes by
Stuart and Susan Levine. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill Co., 1976.
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