Sherlock Holmes and The Klan

I’ve been reading “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” on my Kobo e-reader; it’s one of the 100 free titles that came with it, so I figured, why not?

So, the other day I was reading The Five Orange Pips, [spoiler alert in that link] one of the short stories in that collection. The story revolves around the Ku Klux Klan, which struck me as a bit odd for 1892. Given that the original Klan had long since disappeared, and the D.W. Griffith inspired “Klan revival” was another 25 years or so away, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was either surprisingly ahead of the times, or surprisingly behind them.

I was not aware that people in Europe were even aware of the Klan at the point in history, yet Doyle seems to have grasped their salient features.

I’m not sure if this is a question or not, but I’m just amazed at reading something which I wouldn’t have thought 19th century Brits would know about. And the way in which the “three Ks” are part of the mystery of the story, suggest to me that very few of them, save A.C.D., *did *actually hear of them.

Well, sure Doyle knew about the Klan and lots of stuff. He regularly scanned the heliograph, as surfing the net was then known.

Someone once said that the Americans in the Sherlock Holmes stories are like people from another planet. Doyle clearly knew little about the U.S. He picked up the little he knew from random reading and shoved it almost randomly into the stories.

Writing about Americana outside the big cities was considered exotic in the day. It was like setting a story in Africa or India, only better in some ways because the British would have been far more familiar with Africa and India through their massive colonization efforts.

Doyle used these themes in many stories. The Pinkertons battle a group patterned after the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania in The Valley of Fear. And the very first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, has a long flashback to 1847 Utah and nasty goings-on among the Mormons.

Doyle didn’t know much about America, though, any more than Edgar Rice Burroughs knew much about Africa while writing Tarzan. It was color for the readers, and nothing more.

You have to remember that the Sherlock Holmes stories are pulp fiction. They were written in serial form for the newspapers of Doyle’s era. They were not literature, at the time. Doyle plays fast and loose with quite a bit, including science, biology and non-British history.

A similar attitude towards America can be found in any of Jules Verne’s books which mention it (most notably, Around the World in 80 Days).

The Bavarian Illuminati were suppressed in 1784, but continue to feature in fiction and conspiracy theories to this day. Doyle may have simply exercised similar license WRT the Klan.

This is wrong on several counts.

The Holmes stories are not pulp fiction. They weren’t ever written in serial form. And they never appeared in newspapers.

The primary place of publication of short stories for over 200 years has been magazines. That takes in a lot of territory. The magazines and the stories range from the highest literary quality, or at least ambition, to the lower and crudest.

Virtually all of the early famous Doyle stories appeared in The Stand magazine. That lays somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. It published good stories by authors with some literary reputation, although it aimed at a popular, middle-class audience so the stories didn’t get too high brow. Doyle’s American publisher was Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, about which the same can be said. The Sign of the Four was first published there, and simultaneously in the British version of the magazine, and A Study in Scarlet in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. The last stories were first published in places like *Collier’s *and *Liberty *magazines. These are also solid mid-list magazines, with very high payment rates, which was what Doyle cared about. As he should.

The Strand was miles above the pulps in reputation and quality. Nobody of the day would ever have confused the two. Doyle was considered a writer of literature. He was not Joyce, but literature doesn’t have to be.

Doyle wrote 60 Holmes tales, 56 short stories and 4 novels. A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four are both short novels and both were published whole in a single magazine issue. The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear are longer, and both were serialized in The Strand. That was absolutely standard for all novels published first in magazines of all qualities. (Science fiction magazines like *Analog *still do so today.) However, you shouldn’t think of the stories being written to beat monthly deadlines, as even Dickens’ would have been. They were written as full novels and just broken up for publication.

That Doyle played fast and loose with every single topic he wrote about is certainly true, but has nothing to do with anything else. That was just Doyle. And most everybody else.

Huh. Learn something new every day. Thank you.

I remember when Phogg arrives in San Francisco and the people are nearly rioting about an upcoming election. Phogg assumes it must be an election for the office of general or something, and is told, “No, only a justice of the peace.”

I was thinking more about the rickety railway bridge. “Shouldn’t we take all the passengers off, walk across the bridge, and get back on the train on the other side, just in case?” “But, man, we’ll be crossing at ninety miles per hour! Think of it, ninety miles per hour, how could anything go wrong?”

My memory of “The Five Orange Pips” is that the protagonist was being threatened because of past membership in the Klan and skullduggery that occurred many years before when the Klan would actually have been active (supposedly his confederates were worried that papers in his possession revealing their crimes would come to light).

Given conditions in America at the time the story was published it’s unlikely that aging Klansmen would have needed to send an assassin(s) overseas to shut up a witness, but the story isn’t that unbelievably far-fetched.

For true goofiness, it’s hard to beat Holmes (and apparently, Doyle) believing as of the 1890s that there was still hope of the U.S. and England reuniting in some form of an Anglo-American Union.

I’d say that was actually less far-fetched. Britain was feeling threatened economically and militarily by Germany and to a lesser extent France. The Social Darwinists were also busy extolling the virtues of the Anglo race as the superior race and the destined rulers of the world. A lot of people were agitating for a renewal of a union with the U.S. It was scientifically logical for that to occur. The notion of a Master Race didn’t begin with Hitler.

For some reason, this doesn’t get mentioned an awful lot when the Victorian Era is praised. But when Doyle attributed it to Holmes, his readers would see it as the sign of an enlightened mind.

What was most far-fetched for me was the supposed military efficiency with which the Klan’s victims were killed, and how it was so perfectly framed to as to look like an accident. Perhaps there was a difference between the “first klan” and “second klan,” but covert ops were never something I associated with the Klan. I’ve always seen them portrayed with public lynchings and burning crosses and other very loud, overt acts. The way Holmes describes these killings in “The Five Orange Pips” is almost proto-MI6, IMHO.

And from what I’ve seen, according to him every single American on the planet was quite fond of the expression, “By thunder!”.

-Joe

Well, two things to consider there.

First, a bunch of drunk racist thugs doesn’t make for the best villain - particularly against someone like Holmes. So, there’s your literary reason.

Second, the reason they could get away with that in the USA was because a lot of times in the places they operated the local authorities were on their side - if they weren’t actually the same side. They could be quite brazen in their actions because…who’s going to do something about it? That’s not going to be quite so applicable in England. There’s your real-world reason.

-Joe

Your point is well taken. Thanks. :smiley:

You mean we’re not? By thunder! That’s outrageous!

And – I’m going by vague memory here – isn’t that sentiment expressed by Holmes to an American? Holmes has certainly demonstrated an ability to flatter people when it suits him. So it might not necessarily be something that Holmes deeply believes.

That’s quite an ejaculation.

The Doyle oddity that always got me was in Speckled Band, where Holmes spies the presence of a saucer of milk and confidently takes it as affirmation of his theory. Because, of course, it’s perfectly natural to train a venomous snake by treating it with milk. Whaaat?