by Sean
Narration plays a crucial role in properly situating the reader in their role as a player in the “game” of the detective story. Tell them too little, and they might lack some of the critical clues needed to deduce the culprit. Tell them too much, and you rob the reader of the chance to solve the mystery on their own. In “A Case of Identity,” Watson’s first-person perspective firmly places us, as the reader, into the former category—we are far from being on an even playing field with Holmes.
A “Watson” can indeed be a very useful mechanism for keeping the reader abreast of the investigation while also keeping the detective’s internal deductions secret. This is one way of setting up the detective story “game,” by allowing the reader to “play along” with the detective as though they were a sort of secondary, passive detective. However, seeing through Watson’s eyes doesn’t just mean not being privy to Holmes’s deductions: we also miss out on Holmes’s famously (or perhaps infamously) near-supernatural powers of observation. In “A Case of Identity,” we can see more clearly than ever just how hopelessly outmatched Watson is, when faced with the powerhouse of observation that is Holmes. How can we hope to deduce the culprit when our only viewpoint is one that, according to Holmes, “misse[s] everything of importance” (Doyle 37) when initially describing Mary Sutherland’s appearance?
Admittedly, we do learn all of the important clues having to do with Miss Sutherland’s appearance right away: Holmes does us the favor of boldly accusing her of shortsightedness (32) in his typical fashion, sans evidence. This information permits us to deduce how she might have been able to mistake a very familiar face in her beloved Mr. Angel. But we are nonetheless stripped of the chance to deduce her shortsightedness on our own, since Watson simply does not notice or provide us with the necessary visual details.
The above can perhaps be excused as a matter of Doyle’s style. We are most likely meant to simply be amazed at Sherlock’s ability to draw shocking conclusions from women’s sleeves or men’s trouser-knees (37). Perhaps the “fair play” comes after, once super-observer Holmes has had the chance to provide all his impossibly obscure insights. However, at least in “A Case of Identity,” this isn’t quite the case either.
Granted, according to the “rules” of fair play, the reader is certainly given ample evidence with which to suspect Hosmer Angel’s true identity. Miss Sutherland’s shortsightedness, along with Mr. Angel’s gentle voice and tinted glasses (34) hint strongly that Mr. Angel is someone she knows in disguise. And according to one popular mystery rule, as articulated by S. S. Van Dine, the culprit “must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story” (Van Dine, “Twenty Rules,” 191). Combined with her stepfather, James Windibank’s, conveniently timed business trips to France, as well as Windibank’s clear financial incentive to keep Mary unmarried, the rules of the detective story very smoothly guide the reader to a clear picture of whodunit and whydunit.
But the reader is somewhat lacking in non-circumstantial evidence to pin the deception on Windibank—it’s almost as if some small piece of the puzzle is still missing when Windibank arrives at Baker Street for the final confrontation with Sherlock. That’s when, suddenly, at the end of the story, Holmes brings forward sixteen “slight defects” in the typewritten letter from Windibank, which match up exactly with the defects present in Mr. Angel’s letters to Miss Sutherland, providing the first direct link between Mary’s stepfather and her missing lover. This point, arguably, is where Watson’s point of view, combined with Sherlock’s observational prowess, reveals itself as a true problem. It’s quite common—and perfectly “fair play”—for the culprit to only be fully implicated in the final part of the story, through the discovery of some conclusive clue by the detective. But Watson has simply shielded us from information that was plain to Sherlock from the moment he opened Hosmer’s letters: we were never told anything about the individuality of typewriters’ defects, and we had no reason to suspect that such a piece of evidence could be used in implicating Windibank. Imagine if, at the very end of a detective story, the detective were to miraculously produce from his coat a set of fingerprints which he claims matches those of the culprit. This is the very definition of withheld evidence, and thus, the antithesis of fair play. Marie Rodell, writing about the proper use of mystery clues with respect to fair play, argues that technical findings based on forensic clues—e.g., the results of fingerprint analysis—“must be reported to the reader, on which reader and detective will base their conclusion” (Rodell, “Clues,” 52). But what makes this example especially egregious is that the reader isn’t even prepared with the knowledge that typewriters might possess such a “fingerprint”—unlike Sherlock, who has “devoted some little attention” to the forensic analysis of typewriters and even considers “writing another little monograph” on the topic (Doyle 39). The reader cannot hope to compete with Holmes’ vast technical knowledge nor his powers of observation, especially when situated in the viewpoint of poor Watson.
Fortunately, these “sins” may very well have been necessary first steps in guiding the genre toward a more even playing field for the reader. As we’ve seen, some authors’ proposed “don’ts” of detective storytelling sound eerily similar to some of Sherlock’s most beloved tricks. And even as early as “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” Doyle’s withholding of clues is arguably much less egregious (although Sherlock’s reticence and seeming leaps in logic are perhaps just as frustrating).
Intermittent Mechanism 