Gentleman Detective - Early Examples

Early Examples

Gentlemen detectives appeared early in modern detective fiction, which began in the late 18th century.

C. Auguste Dupin, created by Edgar Allan Poe, is widely considered to be the first fictional detective in English literature. He appeared in three short stories written in the 1840s: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844).

Poe created Dupin before the word detective had been coined, but began many common elements of detective fiction: Dupin shares some features with the later gentleman detective. He was "…the first fictional detective of importance and the model for virtually every cerebral crime solver who followed." More specifically, Dorothy L. Sayers noted that "Sherlock Holmes modelled himself to a large extent upon (Poe's) Dupin, substituting cocaine for candlelight, with accompaniments of shag and fiddle-playing."

Dupin is French, not English, but is probably a gentleman. He comes from a once wealthy family but has been reduced "by a variety of untoward events" to more humble circumstances. He is entirely amateur and contents himself only with the basic necessities of life. He lives in Paris with his close friend, the anonymous narrator of the stories. Like the much later Lord Peter Wimsey (see below), Dupin is a bibliophile, and met his narrator friend while both were searching for "the same rare and very remarkable volume" in an obscure library. For hobbies, Dupin is "fond" of enigmas, conundrums, and hieroglyphics. Dupin also bears the French title Chevalier, meaning that he is a knight in the Légion d'honneur.

The classic British gentleman detective appears soon after Poe's Dupin. A gentleman amateur is the ultimate hero of The Moonstone (1868), a famous epistolary novel widely considered the first true detective novel in English. Its author, Wilkie Collins was a lawyer, and a close friend of Charles Dickens. Collins also used gifted amateurs to solve his somewhat earlier mystery novel, The Woman in White (1859).

In The Moonstone, Rachel Verinder is the only child of a rich, aristocratic widow. On her eighteenth birthday, she is bequeathed an enormous diamond; that night, this 'moonstone' is stolen from the country house of her mother, Lady Verinder. After local police are baffled, a Bow Street Runner called Sergeant Cuff is called in. Sergeant Cuff is honourable and skilful, but he is not a gentleman, and is unable to break Rachel's reticence about what is clearly an inside job.

The mystery is eventually solved by Franklin Blake, who is a gifted amateur—and definitely a member of the gentry. The social difference between Collins' two detectives is nicely shown by their relationships with the Verinder family: Sergeant Cuff becomes a great friend of Lady Verinder's steward (chief servant), whereas Franklin Blake eventually marries Rachel, her daughter.

The most famous of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, may also be considered a gentleman, at least by background. Holmes was the creation of Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He appeared in four novels and fifty-six short stories, all but four stories narrated by his associate, the equally famous Dr Watson. These works cover in fiction a period from around 1878 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914. Both characters also appear in many non-canonical novels and stories.

Holmes is a brilliant London-based and self-styled consulting detective. In their debut (the 1887 novel, A Study in Scarlet), he tells Watson that this occupation is unique (which at that date it was). As a retired army doctor, Dr Watson is far closer to the stereotypic English gentleman than Holmes, yet has no social reservations about beginning his long association with the detective. In the best traditions of the gentry, Holmes proves to be physically brave, and competent with fists, sword and pistol. Like the earlier Dupin and the later Lord Peter Wimsey (see below), Holmes is also a competent cryptanalyst (for instance, The Dancing Men, 1903).

Conan Doyle never gave much background about Holmes' family, but his hero was apparently born in 1854 (estimated from His Last Bow, 1917). He also has an eccentric older brother, Mycroft Holmes, a senior public servant and member of the Diogenes Club. As further indirect evidence that Holmes is an educated gentleman, Conan Doyle indicates that Holmes is fluent in Latin (A Study in Scarlet, 1887), and as the series continues his speech is replete with references to the Bible, Shakespeare, and even Goethe. Holmes had earlier attended university, where he began his detecting as an amateur (The Gloria Scott, 1893, and The Musgrave Ritual, 1893). A violinist himself, Holmes loves music (The Red-Headed League, 1890), sometimes to the point of eccentricity; in The Bruce-Partington Plans (1912), Watson reports that "Holmes lost himself in a monograph which he had undertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus."