Meghan C.

Nazareno Professor Linda Haas Writing 37 02 February 2014 Genre Convention: Police When there is a crime, there is the police. Mister Athelney Jones, one of the police detectives in the Sherlock Holmes series, makes his first appearance in chapter five in The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle. In The Sign of the Four, Detective Jones wrongly concludes who the murderer of a man named Bartholomew was - his brother, Thaddeus. Like today, policemen in Victorian London existed to uphold the public law; but distrust from the people of London was strong. The police force's strategies to rule out a criminal are considerably deficient and careless. Unlike what Maslakowski says about Sherlock in her A Case of Identity paper, the police are irrational, illogical, unscientific, dependent, and inattentive to details. These characteristics are conveyed in The Sign of the Four. Ignoring the clues and evidence in front of them, the police represent flaws in crime solving tactics in the Victorian London era because they prove to generate illogical conclusions and the innocent is often convicted of crime. However, the police portrayed in the mystery genre of Sherlock Holmes are by no means the enemy or antagonist. They still exist to serve justice and catch the criminals at bay, but are just incompetent in doing so; hence why Sherlock is there to solve the crime. In page 41 of The Sign of the Four, Mister Jones says,"It's Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the theorist It's true you set us on the right track; but you'll own now that it was more by good luck than by good guidance." This suggests that Jones thinks Sherlock's intelligence has nothing to do with him solving a case. His judgment on Holmes' procedures for solving crimes may seem

biased or personal, but his opinion really does reflect on the police force's view on solving mysteries. Saying that, "it was more by good luck than by good guidance," stresses the impression that details and clues are considerably insignificant in truly solving a crime. Even after Sherlock tells Jones about the mysterious steps on the sill found at the crime scene, Jones' reply is, "If it was fastened the steps could have nothing to do with the matter. That's common sense!" (The Sign of the Four, 41). Though the police detective can use clues such as footprints in order to create a logical assumption of what may have happened and who the guilty may be, he chooses not to. Before Detective Jones entered the crime scene, he already came up with a conclusion that Bartholomew's brother, Thaddeus, is the culprit; he then uses the clues and evidence left behind in the crime scene to somehow prove that his conclusion is correct. One instance is when he exclaims, "Thaddeus brought this up, and if this splinter be poisonous Thaddeus may as well have made murderous use The only question is, how did he depart? Of course, here is a hole in the roof" (The Sign of the Four, 42). Like Victorian London police in this convention, he does not take a step back further away from his own perspective for the wider picture; such as with the note left, "The Sign of Four". Contrasting Holmes, Jones does not overcome his own biases while solving crimes. With proper training, he can overcome the automatic wiring of his brains to become more objective in his thinking. Yet this training was non-existent in the police force. Not only was their training present in detective work, but their ignorance was more than visible. In John Adams', Sherlock Holmes: The Meaning of Observation, he says, "The lack of observation is coming to be regarded as the blot upon modern education. We are continually being told that we do not observe enough". Adams' view on observation is applicable to how Jones approaches his cases. Detective Athelney Jones does know that the facts are important, the

only error in determining those facts is that he cannot tell the difference between proofs and biased assumptions. Any detective can observe clues. However, the evidence provided in a crime scene, such as the one in The Sign of the Four, require knowledge to understand and deduce. For example, footprints suggests a person's height, types of dirt may show an important location, and prior information or history before the crime was committed all prove to be necessary to solve a case. The police in Sherlock Holmes do not possess any of these obtainable skills because of their certainty that an emphasis on education is not necessary to solve a crime, no matter how complex. However, they still turn to Mister Sherlock Holmes in times of difficulty because of his knowledge, and respect him nonetheless even though his investigations tend to be eccentric. Compared to the police, Sherlock can sometimes be unethical, something that the police are not expected to be like. Inspector Lestrade, a detective that appears in more stories than Jones, brought up the situation of "having to deal with a hard-headed British Jury" (The Boscombe Valley Mystery, 146). Lestrade's complaint may be the reason why Jones attempts to solve crimes easily and quickly. Holmes can choose whether to pursue a criminal or not, and the police have no choice - often making them poor detectives for they may hardly have any enthusiasm for the case. "And no he [Bartholomew] is dead, and the police will be called in, and I shall be suspected of having had a hand in it. Oh, yes, I am sure I shall," Thaddeus Sholto proclaimed; and surely Detective Jones concluded that Thaddeus was the murderer of his brother (The Sign of the Four, 35). The police are all too willing to accept surface appearances for the sake of easily "solving" and finishing a case. The police may be biased, ignorant, and believe in luck, but they are also restricted in their cases by both the law and the necessity to solve an uninteresting crime. They hold numerous flaws in their crime solving strategies and they aren't professionals when it comes to

deducing, so their verdicts have a great chance of being wrong because of their inconsistent conclusions. They have the goal serving justice, but generally lack the knowledge, rationality, and deduction skills; just like in modern day texts. Although the law enforcement in any crime solving story wants to solve crime, they are frequently incapable to do so without their own version of Sherlock Holmes.

Works Cited "The Development of a Police Force - Victorian Crime and Punishment from E2BN." The Development of a Police Force - Victorian Crime and Punishment from E2BN. E2BN, n.d. Web. 02 Feb. 2014. Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1892. Print. Maslakowski, Katya. "Join Academia.edu & Share Your Research with the World." A Case of Identity: Contested Representations of Sherlock Holmes and the Formation of the Ideal Liberal Subject. Academa, n.d. Web. 02 Feb. 2014. Rosenthal, Julien. "The Development of a Police Force - Victorian Crime and Punishment from E2BN." The Development of a Police Force - Victorian Crime and Punishment from E2BN. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Dec. 2014.