The Mystery of the Kibble Crook

In tales like "The Speckled Band," "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," "The Crooked Man," The Sign of Four, and many others, Arthur Conan Doyle would make the issue of imperial guilt and contamination a trademark of the British detective story at the turn of the century. The meeting and collaboration of Doctor Watson and Sherlock Holmes itself was only occasioned, after all, by Watson's return to England from Afghanistan where he had been wounded in the Afghan wars while serving as medical officer for the occupying British Army. When he lists the strongest areas of speciality in Holmes's considerable but selective knowledge, Watson should not have marveled that the master detective's knowledge of "sensation literature" was so "immense." In -502- addition to heralding the extension of what Hobsbawm calls the "Age of Capital" into the worldwide markets of the "Age of Empire" for England and the other European powers as well, the literary development the Holmes phenomenon represents also suggests how the commercialization of the human subject, as it was documented in the sensation novel, was only a prelude to its more radical exploration and colonization, both at home and abroad ...»