as quite a small child, was sent home from Sunday school when he started asking embarrassing questions about how, if Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are imaginary, the Judeo-Christian deity is not likewise imaginary. He was entirely unable to accept the “Semitic mythology” in which he was expected to believe. This was an attitude which stayed with him for his entire life. To him, nothing was more absurd than the sentimental notion that any sort of cosmic creator would notice or care in the slightest about the doings of creatures on our particular planetary flyspeck.
* * * *
You will notice how many Lovecraft stories resemble detective stories in their structure. “The Call of Cthulhu” details a methodical, inexorable investigation which assembles clues and leads the protagonist to a terrible conclusion. The other key Holmes observation which must have impressed Lovecraft is the one repeated several times throughout the Canon, that once all other possibilities have been eliminated, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.5
Try as they may to avoid doing so, Lovecraftian characters inevitably work out that, yes, a gigantic squid-faced being has indeed been sleeping for millions of years under the Pacific and waits to claim the Earth again, or that there are indeed winged Fungi from Yuggoth in the Vermont hills, or that one Joseph Curwen of Providence, Rhode Island (died, 1771) has actually managed to return to life after more than a century in the grave and impersonate his hapless descendant, Charles Dexter Ward, or that the rural disturbances collectively known as “The Dunwich Horror” are caused by the appalling interbreeding between Yog Sothoth and a human disciple, and this threatens to end the world as we know it.
* * * *
Lovecraft did not go in much for continuing investigator characters, but subsequent writers quickly picked up on the obvious implications. He was certainly familiar with such “psychic detectives” as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki or Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence. Dr. Willett in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” or Professor Armitage in “The Dunwich Horror” and most especially Police Inspector Legrasse, who figures in “The Call of Cthulhu” very easily could have, having concluded one “case” that averted cosmic menace, gone on to devote the rest of their careers to such activities.
August Derleth quickly produced one Laban Shrewsbury, who stars in a whole series of Lovecraftian adventures (The Trail of Cthulhu et al.) and the contemporary writer C.J. Henderson has written an entire volume of subsequent investigations of Legrasse (The Tales of Inspector Legrasse). Surely more writers will continue in this mode in the future. Even Peter Cannon, scholar, humorist, and pastichist, has produced a tale, Pulptime, in which Lovecraft, his friend Frank Belknap Long, and an aged Sherlock Holmes actually meet in the 1920s and share an adventure together.
What Lovecraft was doing, then, was applying the Holmesean method to the universe at large. He had dispensed with the small stuff—human crime—and taken on a larger subject—the frightful position of mankind in a vast and uncaring cosmos over which we have no control, but his characters proceed with the same logical, step-by-step deduction that Holmes used for mundane matters, until they arrive, not unflinchingly, we will admit, but still arrive, at the same thing that Holmes was after: the truth, however mind-blasting it might be.
That’s what the grown-up H.P. Lovecraft, late of the Providence Detective Agency, was after all along.
He knew Holmes’s methods, and applied them, not to human crime, but to the haunted-house gulfs of cosmic infinity.
Sources
Cannon, Peter. “Parallel Passages in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ and ‘The Picture in the House.’” Lovecraft Stories, Vol. 1 No. 1 (Fall 1979), pp. 3-6.
____________. “You Have Been in Providence, I Perceive.” Nyctalops #14 (March 1978), pp. 45-46.
Joshi, S.T. I Am Providence, The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. (2 vols). New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010.
Lovecraft, H.P. Letters to Alfred Galpin. Edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. New York, Hippocampus Press, 2003.
Lovecraft, H.P. and August Derleth. Essential Solitude, The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (2 vols.) edited by David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008.
1 H.P. Lovecraft. Letters to Alfred Galpin, p. 19.
2 H.P. Lovecraft. Essential Solitude, p. 323.
3 H.P. Lovecraft. Essential Solitude, p. 203-204.
4 H.P. Lovecraft. Essential Solitude, p. 322.
5 For instance, “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth,” from The Sign of the Four. In The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, p. 613. Note 26, p. 614, lists numerous further expressions of the same sentiment in other stories.
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND SCIENCE FICTION, by Amy H. Sturgis
Detective fiction and science fiction are siblings of a sort. Both are descended from the Enlightenment’s faith in a systematic, comprehensible universe. They even share a parent. Edgar Allan Poe not only created fiction’s first detective of note, C. August Dupin, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1841), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844), but he also served as a key voice in early science fiction. A quick glance at the table of contents of Harold Beaver’s edited collection The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976) reveals stories dealing with mesmerism, galvanism, resurrection, and even time travel, among other concepts, following the trail blazed by Mary Shelley and anticipating Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and other stars in the science fiction constellation. These authors posed the question of “what if?” and extrapolated from contemporary scientific knowledge to offer imaginative answers spiced with the flavor of plausibility.
Despite the close relationship of the genres, it’s a rare character who moves back and forth comfortably between the two. Sherlock Holmes, however, has made a lasting home in both the detective and science fiction literary worlds. Understanding why Holmes has appealed to science fiction audiences and how he has been incorporated into the science fiction canon yields useful insights into the Great Detective’s lasting popularity.
Conan Doyle, Holmes, and the Science Fiction Sensibility
During his forty-five years as a writer, Arthur Conan Doyle published works in a wide variety of genres, non-fiction and fiction, from historical romance to contemporary politics. It is worth noting that before, while, and after achieving fame with the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, Conan Doyle also wrote science fiction. There is no one “science fiction moment” in his career; on the contrary, he maintained a life-long involvement with the genre.
For example, the publication of his “The Great Keinplatz Experiment” (1885), a tale about personality exchange, predated the introduction of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet by two years. After A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, and in the same year as the debut of the first collection of Holmesian short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), Conan Doyle published both “The Los Amigos Fiasco” and The Doings of Raffles Haw. The former tells the story of how a condemned criminal gains superpowers when subjected to an experimental electric chair; the latter explores a chemist’s transformation into an alchemist who discovers the secret of transmuting
