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ELDRITCH, MY DEAR WATSON, by Darrell Schweitzer

The H.P. Lovecraft—Sherlock Holmes Connection

“As for ‘Sherlock Holmes’—I used to be quite infatuated with him!” wrote the horror master H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to his friend Alfred Galpin in 1918, “I read every Sherlock Holmes story published and even organized a detective agency when I was thirteen, arrogating to myself the proud pseudonym of S.H. This P.D.A. [Providence Detective Agency—DS]—whose members ranged between nine and fourteen years in age, was a most wonderful thing—how many murders and robberies we unraveled! Our headquarters were in a deserted house just outside of the thickly settled area, and we enacted, and ‘solved,’ many a gruesome tragedy. I still remember our labours in producing artificial ‘bloodstains on the floor!!!’”1

As S.T. Joshi remarks in his monumental biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence, this letter gives us one of the most pleasing glimpses of the young author, before the nervous “collapse” of his later teens, playing detective with the neighborhood kids, perhaps with a little more brilliance and determination than most—it is clear that Lovecraft was the leader in all this—but nevertheless behaving very much like a normal boy for perhaps the first and only time in his life.

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Lovecraft went on in a letter to August Derleth in 1931:

“But I may remark that I, too, was a detective in my youth—being a member of the Providence Detective Agency at an age as late as 13! Our force had very rigid regulations, & carried in its pockets a standard working equipment consisting of police whistle, magnifying glass, electric flashlight, handcuffs (sometimes plain twine, but “handcuffs” for all that!), tin badge, (I have mine still!!!), tape measure (for footprints), revolver, (mine was the real thing, but Inspector Munroe (at 12) had a water-squirt pistol while Inspector Upham (at 10) worried along with a cap-pistol) & copies of all newspaper accounts of desperate criminals at large—plus a paper called The Detective, which printed pictures and descriptions of outstanding “wanted” malefactors…. We shadowed many desperate-looking customers, & diligently compared their physiognomies with “mugs” in The Detective, yet never made a full-fledged arrest. Ah, me—the good old days!”2

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It is just as well that Detective Lovecraft a.k.a. “S.H.,” did not show off his quite genuine pistol while stalking a suspect. Those were indeed more innocent times, when parents did not think too seriously about letting their 13-year-old play with a real pistol, even one which was (presumably) in less than working order.

This great fascination with Sherlock Holmes and with mystery fiction was, quite clearly for Lovecraft, a phase. In both letters, the larger context is a discussion of juvenile tastes and former habits. Lovecraft’s fascination with detective stories was not restricted to the Sherlock Holmes stories either. He read an enormous amount of general pulp fiction between about 1905 and 1914, including virtually every issue of Argosy and All-Story during this period, which contained much detective fiction. As a child he had been by all indication an avid reader of dime-novels and other juvenile mysteries of the period (some of which was published in a format similar to a modern comic book, although mostly text), following the exploits of Nick Carter, King Brady, and other largely-forgotten heroes. Many of his earliest attempts at fiction were detective stories of a sort, such as “The Mystery of the Grave-yard” (1898 or 1899, i.e., written when Lovecraft was eight or nine) which is nothing less than a miniature dime-novel, with very short chapters, some no more than fifty words.

But, certainly as he grew a little older, Sherlock Holmes was his favorite, and he definitely (as is clear from his letters) read the first three Holmes novels, and the collections The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. He did not read the later Canon, as far as we can tell, ever. He read some of Doyle’s supernatural work, though affording him no more than one sentence, a longish sentence in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” singling out “Lot No. 249” and “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’” for praise. Overall, despite his dismissing Doyle’s later Spiritualist writings as “senile drivel,” Lovecraft seems to have regarded the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories as a very competent storyteller, and particularly good reading for younger folks.

But detective fiction, by and large, was something he felt he had outgrown as he reached adulthood. In a 1929 letter to Derleth he expresses doubt that S.S. van Dine’s Philo Vance would have much appeal for him, remarking, “I hate these laboriously whimsical & artificially mannered fiction-heroes—they are so mechanical that these lose all touch with reality & become grotesque bores.”3 He does promise to look into Father Brown sometime, though there is no indication he ever did. In other letters, mostly to persons other than Derleth, he expresses less than complete enthusiasm for Derleth’s detective novels, although he does courteously praise Derleth’s Holmes-pastiche Solar Pons series.

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If it were merely the case that H.P. Lovecraft enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes series in his youth and then lost interest, there would be no point in writing this article. The only question is what this circumstance—the early enthusiasm for Holmes on the part of HPL—means.

Essentially, Lovecraft and detective fiction had a philosophical parting of the ways. In 1914, as a result of letter exchanges between Lovecraft and other readers in the pages of The Argosy, Lovecraft discovered amateur journalism, and for the first time in his life came into wide contact with other literary-minded persons. This broadened his tastes and outlook enormously. But more to the point, Lovecraft’s interest had always been toward the cosmic. Another of his boyhood obsessions was astronomy, and it was the intensive study of this subject, together, no doubt, with the experience of staying up nights peering into the depths of infinity through his telescope that convinced Lovecraft that, ultimately, mankind had only a very small, even trivial role to play in the cosmos at large. As if that were not enough, at precisely this time astronomers had just determined that those swirling “nebulae” they had been observing were in fact other galaxies, made up, not of clouds of gas, but of billions of stars, and located much further away than previously thought. So, if anything, the depths of infinity had just gotten considerably larger.

For Lovecraft, then, the fascination (and the aesthetic attraction) was in the vast sweep of time and space. He sought the cosmic in fiction, in his own and in what he read. Lovecraftian horror stems largely from the characters’s realization of their own helpless and trivial role in the cosmic scheme of things. It is as if anyone could say abstractly that the history the Earth might be written out as a 300-volume encyclopedia, and the history of mankind occupies only the bottom half of the last page—but Lovecraft genuinely felt this. As a consequence, for all he might admire Holmes’s brilliance and rationality and the deft artistry of the Doyle stories, which clearly stood for him head and shoulders over most other such fiction, the actual plots of detective stories failed to hold his interest.

* * * *

In that same 1931 letter to Derleth, a couple of paragraphs earlier, he had explained, “I never acquired an interest in the peep-show contrasts & ignominies empirically classified as ‘scandal’—perhaps because of a cosmic perspective which felt no vast difference betwixt one sort of inane behavior and another sort of inane behavior on the part of terrestrial puppets.”4 In other words, if organic life itself is to be seen, as Lovecraft saw it, as a chemical-electrical phenomenon which may have occurred briefly on one particular fly-speck planet in a vast and chaotic universe, then it didn’t particularly matter who politely poisoned whom in an English country-house or made off with milady’s jewels. The mature Lovecraft didn’t find mere crime to be of sufficient dramatic interest.

So the matter narrows down to what Lovecraft carried away from his youthful Sherlock Holmes enthusiasm. Things we do or read in childhood do go on to shape the adults we become, even if we “outgrow” them. Scholar Peter Cannon has written about the Holmesean influence on Lovecraft at some length. There are the motifs and the parallel passages, as to be expected, and one easily recognizes the source of the spectral, baying creature in Lovecraft’s story “The Hound.”

But it’s more than that. What would have appealed most to Lovecraft, and remained consistent with his philosophical outlook throughout his life, was Holmes’s rationality, as summed up by the Great Detective’s famous statement (in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”) that “This Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground…. No ghosts need apply.” Holmes is making an explicit rejection of the supernatural, or at least of his interest in it. “The world”—meaning the material plane—is “large enough” for him.

Lovecraft, too, completely rejected the supernatural in any “spiritual” sense. There are no ghosts in his fictions. Human beings, who are bio-chemical phenomena of random Nature, have no “souls.” Even in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” which deals with the resurrection of the dead, this resurrection is achieved by material means, a matter of “essential salts” collected from the dust of the grave and processed through arcane alchemy. His monsters, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, et al., are immensely powerful cosmic beings, the products of a broader universe of which mankind knows virtually nothing, but they are not “gods” in the traditional sense.

Lovecraft, 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.