A Strange Disappearance (1884) as w

A Strange Disappearance (1884) as well as the 'not always irreproachable translations
o f Gaboriau and D u Boisgobey' published by the 'enterprising' Vizetelly
in his 'Popular French Novels' series.*^ Given that Conan Doyle claimed to
have been reading Gaboriau's Lecoq, the Detective (1881), The Lerouge Case (1881),
and The Gilded Clique (1884) in the mid-i88os, i t is likely that the 'volume' the
proto-Holmes throws aside is one of these three novels.** The early notes also
included some preliminary ideas about the two main protagonists. While
Sacker was, at this point, simply said to live w i t h Holmes and to have come
from Afghanistan, Holmes, clearly the hero, was already a more fully
developed figure. He was to be a 'reserved', 'sleepy eyed young man'; working
as a 'Consulting detective' and living on £400 a year; and he was to be a
'philosopher', a connoisseur - he is a 'Collector of rare Violins . . . A n Amati'
- and a scientist associated in some way with a 'Chemical laboratory'.** As
Conan Doyle later recalled the genesis of the story, both his revisionist
objectives and his idea of Holmes were pardy inspired by his medical mentor,
the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Bell whom he had already alluded to in one of
his earliest stories.** When he considered writing a story along the lines
suggested by Poe and Gaboriau, he immediately thought of his charismatic
teacher's 'eagle face, of his curious ways, o f his eerie trick o f spotting details'.**
He described his subsequent thought process i n a n interview for Tit-Bits in
December 1900:
I began to think, suppose my old professor at Edinburgh were in the place of one of
these lucky detectives, he would have worked out the process of effect from cause just as
logically as he would have diagnosed a disease, instead of having something given to
him by mere luck, which . . . does not happen in real lifc.^'
His plan was, then, to rewrite the detective genre by investing i t w i th a new
aura of plausibility and scientific rigour and by devising an alluring but
credible intellectual hero.
By the time he returned to these initial ideas i n March 1886, after
completing his t h i r d novel The Firm of Girdlestone, he had made some emendations
and designed a narrative, composed largely of borrowed fragments,
around which to develop his innovative plan. For the 'real story' to be
uncovered by Holmes, he adopted the conventional mystery genre device of
the vengeance plot familiar to h im in the stories of Mayne Reid, Wilkie
Collins, and Stevenson.*^ For the background to this plot and to his villains, he
exploited, often unduly, the notion o f the Mormons as a ruthlessly oppressive
secret society found in one of his favourite Stevenson stories, 'The Destroying
Angel'.*^ He Jilso setded on a new, more mundane name for Sacker as well as
a more imposing first name for his hero; and he defined more clearly the
nature of the relationship between the two - Sacker/Watson was to be a firstperson
narrator who would play a commonplace Boswell to Holmes's charismatic
Johnson. At the same time, while keeping to his revisionist scheme, he
slighdy modified his initial conception of his hero, and so created an