By the time he wrote “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” Conan Doyle was growing tired of Sherlock Holmes, and the tiredness shows in the messiness of the story. This was the eighth of ten Holmes stories published in 1893, after seven in 1892 and six in 1891; and the novels A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890) had preceded the short stories. No wonder Conan Doyle was ready to kill Holmes off, as he did in “The Final Problem” — though of course he felt obliged to bring him back later, with less and less success. That’s a story for another day.
(In his letters he sometimes wrote of Holmes, “I am weary of his name,” but in his memoirs he gave a more decorous explanation: “At last, after I had done two series of [Holmes stories] I saw that I was in danger of having my hand forced, and of being entirely identified with what I regarded as a lower stratum of literary achievement. Therefore as a sign of my resolution I determined to end the life of my hero.” Conan Doyle took much greater pride in his historical fiction, for instance The White Company.)
In the story at hand, Mr. Melas is an interpreter, a “remarkable linguist” who is Greek “by extraction” and who specializes in that language. He tells Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes — about whom more in a moment — about his recent experience of being kidnapped and taken to some unknown location to serve as a translator between his two English captors and a Greek man whom they also hold captive, along with that man’s sister.) The two Englishmen eventually release Melas and give him some money for his trouble, though one of them warns him: “If you speak to a human soul about this — one human soul, mind — well, may God have mercy upon your soul!”
So when the Holmes brothers hear this story, what do they do? Why, Mycroft places an advertisement — an advertisement based on everything Melas has told him — in all the papers of London, seeking information about the situation. In other words, he ensures that Melas’s captors, who have shown themselves to be ruthless and violent men, and who have made the most dire threats against him, will know everything. Mycroft shows no awareness of this likelihood, while Sherlock merely remarks to Melas, “I should certainly be on my guard if I were you, for of course they must know through these advertisements that you have betrayed them” — and then walks away, leaving Melas to his fate. Moreover, when Sherlock and Mycroft finally decide to take some action, they move in a most leisurely fashion.
Then, at the end of the story, while the Holmes brothers and Dr. Watson do manage to save Melas, the Greek man dies and his sister is carried away who knows where. Not only do our heroes not find the criminals, they don’t even look for them — they just go back home. Some time later they read a newspaper article that describes the deaths of two Englishmen abroad. These may or may not be the criminals; Holmes doesn’t bother to try to find out.
So, obviously, Conan Doyle just wasn’t thinking through the details, even some of the most important details, of his own story. He was writing in a hurry and wanting to be done not just with this story but with Sherlock Holmes. And yet …
The invention of Mycroft Holmes is a stroke of genius. This is the first story in which he appears, indeed the first time we learn of any member of Sherlock’s family, and after two novels and twenty stories his introduction gives the reader quite a turn. The idea of another Holmes who has even greater intellectual gifts than Sherlock but absolutely none of Sherlock’s energy is a terrific one. Mycroft is brilliant and fat and lazy, a character interesting in himself — he is the essential predecessor to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe — but even more interesting as a kind of funhouse-mirror version of Sherlock.
(Also, the Diogenes Club, of which Mycroft is a co-founder, sounds awesome.)
And this contrast in Conan Doyle — between a mind still fizzing with ideas and that same mind sick and tired of the donkey work of working out the details of stories — is, I am convinced, the source and cause of The Game. The Game, which treats Holmes and Watson as real people and Watson’s narratives as faithful accounts of what actually happened, is a way of maintaining delight in Conan Doyle’s imaginative creations while avoiding too much sobering contemplation of his obvious bunglings.
Thus Ronald Knox, in his essay “The Mystery of Mycroft,” has an excellent explanation for the strange behavior of the Holmes brothers in “The Greek Interpreter”: Mycroft is in cahoots with the two kidnappers. And not just that: “It can hardly be supposed that a man of his attainments would have leagued himself with a couple of garrotters like Latimer and Kemp with any good will. The association can only be explained if we conjecture that both he and they were part of a greater organisation. Enough said, for every student of Holmes literature; the next word that leaps to the mind is Moriarty.” To this Knox adds some interesting reflections on the possibility of Mycroft’s being a kind of double agent, and on how much Sherlock was likely to have known of “his brother’s duplicities.”
This will strike some of my readers as an odd comparison, but when I think of the Sherlockian Game I think of Jacques Derrida — and particularly of Derrida’s magnificent long essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination. The essay is a detailed reading of Plato’s Phaedrus that begins by noting the long line of critics who have complained that the dialogue is “badly composed.” Some say that Plato wrote it when he was young and didn’t yet know what he was doing; others say that he wrote it as an old man who had lost his intellectual fastball. Okay, says Derrida, but what if we start with a very different assumption? What if we assume that all the eccentricities and apparent shortcomings of the dialogue are in fact cunningly devised stratagems? What would see then?
The hypothesis of a rigorous, sure, and subtle form is naturally more fertile. It discovers new chords, new concordances; it surprises them in minutely fashioned counterpoint, within a more secret organization of themes, of names, of words.
Note that Derrida does not argue that the dialogue’s author did in fact know what he was doing. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he cared whether Plato meant or intended all that may be found by the shrewd student of the Phaedrus. He is merely saying that the working assumption that the dialogue is fiendishly complex and wholly coherent is more “fertile” — it “discovers” more, it unearths “a more secret organization.” It’s more fun. Derrida is playing the Platonic Game.
Academic literary criticism doesn’t do fun these days. It rarely has, of course, but now it has descended fully into an apparently permanent, and permanently dour, secular-Calvinist recitation about structures of oppression — and, when critics lift their heads long enough to notice that students are utterly bored by all this, have no better response than to say Neoliberalism made me do it. I am not sure academic literary criticism can ever come back from its moribund state, but its best chance of doing so would be to try to have some fun. Surprise itself. Play the Game.
