Davies on One Complicated Hour

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag; has published One Complicated Hou in Regulation and Imagination: Legal, Literary and Historpical Perspectives on Highway Robbery (Green Bag Press, 2025). Here is the abstract. Regulation and Imagination: Legal, Literary and Historical Perspectives on Highway Robbery (Green Bag Press 2025)

Can a Wall Street tycoon be a pirate? Can a judge?

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Davies on Sherlock Holmes: Real or Imagined? Living or Dying?

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag; has published Sherlock Holmes: Real or Imagined? Living or Dying? at 2025 Baker Street Almanac 1. Here is the abstract.

Readers of the November 22, 1913 issue of Collier’s Weekly magazine had the joy of taking in Arthur Conan Doyle’s new Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective.” Recipients of the nifty little Christmas 1913 keepsake booklet of “The Dying Detective” put out by the advertising department at Collier’s got to read almost exactly the same story. The typesetters did a near-perfect job of making sure that the text of “The Dying Detective” in the booklet matched the text in the magazine. Indeed, there are just three notable differences between the booklet and magazine texts. The first two differences appear to be intentional and definitely are not defects. The third is, alas, a typographical finish-line fail. While there does not appear to be much worthy of study in the textual differences between the two 1913 Collier’s versions of “The Dying Detective,” addingThe Strand Magazine to the mix may change things. There is at least one difference between, on one hand, both of those Collier’s versions and, on the other hand, the version in the December 1913 Strandthat might merit a closer look. On page 609 of The Strand, while conversing with Dr. John Watson, Holmes says, “Strange how the brain controls the brain!”

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Davies on How Watson Learned the Trick: An Illustrated, Annotated, Partial Manuscript Edition @GB2d @horacefuller

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, has published How Watson Learned the Trick: An Illustrated, Annotated, Partial Manuscript Edition at 2023 Baker Street Almanac 315. Here is the abstract.

At about 500 words, How Watson Learned the Trick (HOWW for short) is puny when compared to Arthur Conan Doyle’s typical Sherlock Holmes and John Watson adventures, which tend to run 7,000 to 10,000 words. But the story of how HOWW came to be written, and how it has been treated since, is probably worthy of longer treatment than many of those typical tales. We will, however, try to keep it short (with some superb new original illustrations of the story itself by Madeline Quiñones). Note: This work is (or will be) published by the Green Bag (www.greenbag.org), which hopes you will find it useful.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The ACD (Arthur Conan Doyle) Society Is In Session! @AcdSociety

 The ACD Society has launched! The Society is devoted to studying and enjoying Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works.

The Society awards prizes for the best scholarly writing about Doyle, so if you have nominations, please submit them! See the Society's website for instructions. (Full disclosure: your L&H Blog editor is a member of the Scholarly Writing Committee).

There are lots of other activities the Society promotes, including awards for fiction and poetry and for visual arts involving ACD, and a newsletter you can receive if you join. Membership is inexpensive ($10 a year). 

Follow the ACD Society on Twitter at @AcdSociety.

Rosenblatt on the British Patent Controversy and the Sherlockian Canon

Elizabeth Rosenblatt, University of California Davis, is publishing 'What One Man Can Invent Another Can Discover:' The British Patent Controversy and the Sherlock Holmes Canon in Canon Law: Lawyers, Law and the Sherlockian Canon (William A. Walsh and Donny Zaldin, eds., 2018). Here is the abstract.

Over the course of the 19th Century in Great Britain, patent law and policy developed quickly in an atmosphere of heated debate. In the first half of the century, some advocated for a patent system that provided greater ownership to inventors, while others advocated for abolition of patents altogether. The one thing people could agree on, it seemed, was that the then-existing system was flawed. In the latter half of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th, Parliament overhauled the patent system, including unifying the patent systems of England, Ireland, and Scotland, establishing the Patent Office, and passing the Patents Designs and Trademarks Act. In the midst of this atmosphere of debate and change, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 54 stories and 4 novels about the detective Sherlock Holmes, some of which address inventions. This chapter considers the treatment of patents and patent law in the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories to illuminate popular Victorian and Edwardian understandings of, and ambivalence about, the patent law of the time.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Yo, Ho, Ho: Sailors and Rum @GB2d

Ross E. Davies, George Mason Univesrity Law School; The Green Bag, is publishing Sailors and Rum, at Sea and Ashore in Deadly Harpoon: A Facsimile of the Original Manuscript of “The Adventure of Black Peter” by Arthur Conan Doyle with Annotations and Commentary (Glen Miranker, ed., BSI Press 2018)). Here is the abstract.

An examination of the regulation and culture of grog in Victorian maritime life, using a scenario drawn from a Sherlock Holmes story -- “The Adventure of Black Peter.”

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Davies on Sherlock Holmes: Expert Witness @GB2d

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, is publishing Sherlock Holmes: Expert Witness in Canon Law: Lawyers, Law and the Sherlockian Canon (William A. Walsh and Donny Zaldin, BSI Press, 2018). Here is the abstract.

This paper explains the treatment of expert witnesses in late-Victorian English courtrooms, using a scenario drawn from a Sherlock Holmes story -- “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” -- and a prosecution for murder.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Alton on Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Holmes: A Tale of Two Testaments

Stephen R. Alton, Texas A & M School of Law, has published Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Holmes: A Tale of Two Testaments as a Texas A& M University School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper. Here is the abstract.

This article takes the form of an epistolary exchange across the centuries, comparing and contrasting two noted wills in Victorian literature. The first of these testaments is the final will of Dr. Henry Jekyll, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; this will bequeaths the doctor’s estate to his friend and attorney, Gabriel John Utterson. The second testament is the putative will of Jonas Oldacre, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Norwood Builder; this will bequeaths Oldacre’s estate to the young solicitor who drafted the will, John Hector McFarlane. Taken together, these two testaments raise the issues of the testator’s capacity and intent to make the will, undue influence and bequests to attorneys (notably to the drafting attorney), due execution of the will, and the effect of the beneficiary’s possible murder of the testator. A comparison of these two fictional Victorian-era wills remains relevant today because the legal issues that these two testaments raised in 19th century England are still very much present in 21st century America.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Davies on The Bimetallic Question in "The Valley of Fear"

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, has published The Bimetallic Question in the Valley of Fear at 33 Sherlock Holmes Journal 156 (Summer 2018). Here is the abstract.

The vicissitudes of post-Civil War currency policy are reflected in variations in the text of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, "The Valley of Fear."

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

"Where Do You Get Your Ideas?" @MphilPopLitTCD

A helpful page on exploring the possible influences on Victorian and Edwardian age crime and mystery writers in the UK using digital resources available through the New York Public Library. BTW, it's "Sir Arthur," not "Sir Doyle," as TCD MPhil Pop Lit @MphilPopLitTCD points out. Nevertheless, very interesting materials inviting readers to do their own investigations into the law and culture of policing and detecting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In addition to Doyle, other turn of the 20th century and Golden Age writers who used real crime to inspire their novels include Edgar Allan Poe,

Here's a very selected bibliography of secondary works that discuss the subject.

The Cambridge Companion To Crime Fiction (Martin Edwards, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Guillaume Foussard, The Emergence of French Crime Fiction During the Nineteenth Century.

Stephen Knight, The Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (McFarland, 2011).

Stephen Knight, Towards Sherlock Holmes: A Thematic History of Crime Fiction in the 19th Century World (McFarland, 2016).

J. Kingston Pierce, Gaslight and Gunplay: Digging Up Crime Fiction's 1800s Roots.

Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (2d ed.) (Penguin Books, 1986).



See also the Indiana University Libraries' excellent webpage on The First Hundred Years of Detective Fiction, 1841-1941 and the British Library's page on Crime and Crime Fiction.

If You Like Sherlock Holmes, You Might Also Like...

From the blog Interesting Literature, a list of ten literary detectives for those who like Sherlock Holmes. It includes such clever sleuths as C. L. Pirkis's Loveday Brooke and R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke. There's also E. W. Hornung's Dr. John Dollar. Hornung was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's nephew, and was the creator of the inimitable "gentleman-thief" Raffles, played on screen by Ronald Colman. 

You may also appreciate these rivals of Sherlock Holmes, collected in several volumes by various editors.

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Hugh Greene, ed., Penguin Books, 1972). DVD 2009.
The Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Hugh Greene, ed., Penguin Books, 1974). DVD 2010.
Cosmopolitan Crimes: Foreign Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Hugh Greene, ed., Penguin Books, 1972)
The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Hugh Greene, ed., Pantheon Books, 1976).
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Alan K. Russell, ed., Castle Books, 1978).
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Alan K. Russell, ed., Castle Books, 1979).

A New Book on the Development of Sherlock Holmes Into a Worldwide Literary and Cultural Icon: Bostrom's From Holmes To Sherlock

Newly available in English translation: Mattias Boström, From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women Who Created an Icon (The Mysterious Press, dist. by Grove Atlantic, 2017).

Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a unique literary character who has remained popular for over a century and is appreciated more than ever today. But what made this fictional character, dreamed up by a small-town English doctor in the 1880s, into such a lasting success? In From Holmes to Sherlock, Swedish author and Sherlock Holmes expert Mattias Boström recreates the full story behind the legend for the first time. From a young Arthur Conan Doyle sitting in a Scottish lecture hall taking notes on his medical professor’s powers of observation to the pair of modern-day fans who brainstormed the idea behind the TV sensation Sherlock, from the publishing world’s first literary agent to the Georgian princess who showed up at the Conan Doyle estate and altered a legacy, the narrative follows the men and women who have created and perpetuated the myth. It includes tales of unexpected fortune, accidental romance, and inheritances gone awry and tells of the actors, writers, and readers who have transformed Sherlock Holmes from the gentleman amateur of the Victorian era to the odd genius of today. Told in fast-paced, novelistic prose, From Holmes to Sherlock is a singular celebration of the most famous detective in the world—a must-read for newcomers and experts alike.

Stern on Narratives of Criminal Procedure from Doyle to Chandler to Burke @ArsScripta @alafairburke

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, is publishing Narratives of Criminal Procedure from Doyle to Chandler to Burke in volume 51 of the New England Law Review (2017). Here is the abstract.

Despite the considerable body of work aimed at showing that law is a form of narrative, these efforts have not found many adherents for the view that legal briefs and judicial opinions make better bedtime reading than mystery novels or courtroom dramas. This well-attested preference for fictional narrative suggests that the kind of satisfaction it offers is very different from the pleasures to be had from the genres of professional writing that we associate with forensic advocacy and decision-making. In the latter case, narrative serves the purpose of persuasion. Fiction may also seek to persuade, but more fundamentally it seeks to engage readers in the characters and the events, encouraging a kind of immersion in the story that is hardly necessary, and is rarely attainable, in legal writing. Writers who have been successful in both areas are rare, because they have had to master a variety of skills that are often breezily assumed to be complementary or even cognate, but that turn out to have little in common once we look under the overarching label of “narrative” and try to specify them more concretely. Consider, for example, the roles of dialogue, characterization, and perspective (not to mention the orchestration of events so as to pique the reader’s curiosity, rather than simply to make the details readily comprehensible). The usual forms of legal writing offer no opportunity for cultivating these skills, whereas the novelist can hardly do without them. Alafair Burke is among the few writers who have pursued a truly successful literary career while also producing a significant amount of work in the legal arena. In what follows, I consider the place of the criminal justice system in her most recent novel, The Ex. To provide some context for that discussion, I first show how legal mechanisms for investigating and prosecuting crime have figured in British and American literature over the last three hundred years. Then, I turn to Burke's novel, showing how it uses techniques of literary narrative to conspire with its treatment of doctrinal questions in criminal procedure. Bennett Capers's Re-Reading Alafair Burke's The Ex, also on SSRN, is a contribution to the same NELR Symposium.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Davies on The Fan-Judges: Clues To a Jurisculture of Sherlockian Fandom @georgemasonlaw

Ross E. Davies, George Mason School of Law, is publishing The Fan-Judges: Clues to a Jurisculture of Sherlockian Fandom in volume 23 of Transformative Works and Cultures (2017). Here is the abstract.

American judges sometimes encourage other participants in the legal system to behave like Sherlock Holmes. They are relying on a shared culture that both appreciates a literary figure and recognizes a human capacity to emulate an imaginary creature (here, Sherlock) outside the context in which it was created. Consciously or not, the judges are tapping into classic fandom, but do they think of it that way, and should they?

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Rosenblatt on The Great Game and the Copyright Villain

Elizabeth Rosenblatt, Whittier Law School, is publishing The Great Game and the Copyright Villain in volume 23 of Transformative Works and Cultures (2017). Here is the abstract.

This essay explores the reactions of Sherlock Holmes fans and enthusiasts to assertions of intellectual property ownership and infringement by putative rights holders in two eras of Sherlockian history. In both the 1946–47 and 2013–15 eras, Sherlock Holmes devotees villainized the entities claiming ownership of intellectual property in Holmes, distancing those entities from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and casting them as greedy and morally bankrupt. Throughout each era, Sherlockians did not shy away from creating transformative works based on the Holmes canon over the objections of putative rights holders. This complicates the usual expectation that copyright assertions against fans are likely to chill fan production. The essay explores possible reasons why Sherlockian fandom might differ from other fandoms in this respect, including the role of the Great Game form of Sherlockian fandom in shaping fan attitudes toward their subject.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Davies on a Map Or Chart of the Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual @GB2d

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School and The Green Bag, is publishing Some Sort of Map or Chart of the Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual in volume 17, no. 5 of Green Bag Single Sheet Classic. Here is the abstract.

When and where did the Musgrave Ritual germinate, when and where did Sherlock Holmes solve the mysteries of the Ritual and of the disappearance of Rachel Howells, and when and where did Holmes tell the whole story to John Watson? This map and its companion explain. Maybe.

Download the map and essay from SSRN at the link.

A Review of Michael Sims's Arthur and Sherlock

Amy Henderson reviews Michael Sims's Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes for the Washington Post. Here (reprinted in the National Post here).

It's Sherlock! @WhatInTheHill @sjwilder100

Via LSU Libraries' Special Collections Blog, a post by scholar Kristopher Melchosky. on what makes Sherlock Holmes so distinctive and attractive as a character.

A New Book on Conan Doyle and His Most Famous Literary Creation

Via @MichaelSimsBook and @pastoffences

Michael Sims is publishing Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes (Bloomsbury, 2017). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

As a young medical student, Arthur Conan Doyle studied in Edinburgh under the vigilant eye of a diagnostic genius, Dr. Joseph Bell. Doyle often observed Bell identifying a patient's occupation, hometown, and ailments from the smallest details of dress, gait, and speech. Although Doyle was training to be a surgeon, he was meanwhile cultivating essential knowledge that would feed his epistolary dreams and help him develop the most iconic detective in fiction. 

Michael Sims traces the circuitous development of Conan Doyle as the father of the modern mystery, from his early days in Edinburgh surrounded by poverty and violence, through his escape to University (where he gained terrifying firsthand knowledge of poisons), leading to his own medical practice in 1882. Five hardworking years later--after Doyle's only modest success in both medicine and literature--Sherlock Holmes emerged in A Study in Scarlet. Sims deftly shows Holmes to be a product of Doyle's varied lessons in the classroom and professional life, as well as built out of the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe, Émile Gaboriau, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens--not just a skillful translator of clues, but a veritable superhero of the mind in the tradition of Doyle's esteemed teacher.

Filled with details that will surprise even the most knowledgeable Sherlockian, Arthur and Sherlock is a literary genesis story for detective fans everywhere.

 

Clarke on Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock Now Available in Paperback

Clare Clarke's Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock is now available in paperback from Palgrave Macmillan. Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

This book investigates the development of crime fiction in the 1880s and 1890s, challenging studies of late-Victorian crime fiction which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures and have offered an over-simplified analytical framework, thereby overlooking the generic, moral, and formal complexities of the nascent genre.

Price is $90 (compare to $95 for hardcover, so not much of a discount).  However, the author indicates that price is incorrect; the correct price is 16.50 pounds for the paperback. I have asked about the price in USD.

Update: July 25, 2016:  pricing for paperback still not fixed.

Via Simon Stern @ArsScripta.