A scandal threatens the Kingdom of Bohemia, and therefore the King himself repairs in some haste to 221-B Baker Street, London NW1, to seek out the help of Sherlock Holmes. And thus unfolds Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891) – the third Sherlock Holmes tale, the first short story in the Holmes canon, and one of the Holmes works that is likely to be of greatest interest to modern readers.
Conan Doyle was a physician by training. Accordingly, it is probably no coincidence that when he began crafting his tales of the master-detective Sherlock Holmes, he chose to mediate the experience of Holmes’s investigations through the character of a doctor - one John H. Watson. Dr. Watson is a pleasant, intelligent, and ethical person – a fine companion for the journey – but his relatively conventional outlook and perspectives on life provide plenty of room for him, and us, to be perpetually amazed by Holmes’s astonishing breadth of knowledge and seemingly preternatural ability to find his way toward the solution of a mysterious crime.
Before writing “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Conan Doyle had written two Sherlock Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890), and the tales had proven immensely and immediately popular. It is therefore interesting that Conan Doyle did not persist with novels, but turned to the opportunity to write shorter stories about the brilliant detective and his loyal physician friend.
Part of the pleasure of following Holmes and Watson on their adventures consists in the manner in which Conan Doyle follows a formula that manages not to seek formulaic. We know that Dr. Watson will make his way to 221-B Baker Street, where Holmes will be “buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature” (pp. 2-3). Holmes will make some sudden and startling, and yet casual, demonstration of his own brilliance, and then he will set forth some of his general principles for conducting a deductive investigation – as when he says, near the beginning of this story, that “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts” (p. 8). Only after the completion of these initial rituals will the details of a new case emerge.
What may cause “A Scandal in Bohemia” to stand out from other Sherlock Holmes tales, for contemporary readers, is the character of Irene Adler – a name that will be familiar to moviegoers, because of the zest and energy with which Canadian actress Rachel McAdams portrayed Irene Adler in the Guy Ritchie films Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). At the core of this story is the manner in which Irene Adler – though always seen at a distance, or at second-hand – emerges as a vividly realized character who, at crucial moments in the story, shows herself to be a worthy opponent for the brilliant Holmes.
Watson begins “A Scandal in Bohemia” by saying of Irene Adler that “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman”, and adds that “In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex”. Watson, who tends to moralize, calls Irene Adler a woman “of dubious and questionable memory”, and insists that Holmes did not love Irene Adler. But he makes clear that, in some way, Irene Adler was special to Holmes – for “there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler” (p. 2).
Irene Adler’s credentials, like Holmes’s, are formidable. Reading over her file, from the copious collection of files that Holmes keeps on all potential persons of interest, Holmes reads of Irene Adler’s talents: “Born in New Jersey in the year 1858. Contralto – hum! La Scala, hum! Prima donna, Imperial Opera of Warsaw – yes!” (p. 17) Like Holmes himself, Irene Adler is a bit of a polymath – someone who is good at everything.
As mentioned above, Holmes’s client for the case chronicled in “A Scandal in Bohemia” is the King of Bohemia himself. Disguised as a Bohemian count, the king has made his way to 221-B Baker Street because, as the king admits, “Some five years ago, during a lengthy visit to Warsaw, I made the acquaintance of the well-known adventuress, Irene Adler” (p. 17). They exchanged letters, and were even photographed together; but ultimately, the king decided that Irene was not suitable as a marriage partner for a king.
Now, the king fears that Irene Adler will thwart his planned marriage to a Scandinavian princess by sending the photograph to the princess’s family. When the king says of Irene Adler that “she has a soul of steel. She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men. Rather than I should marry another woman, there are no lengths to which she would not go – none” (p. 19), one senses Holmes’s growing sympathy for Irene, and his increasing disaffection for his royal client.
Yet Holmes takes the case, and begins ferreting out clues – using, in the process, his well-known talent for disguise. He learns that Irene Adler, at her villa in the Saint John’s Wood area of northwest London, has been receiving a lawyer named Godfrey Norton. In a flashback, Holmes recounts his surprise at learning, when he followed Irene and Godfrey to the Church of Saint Monica, that the relationship between Irene and Godfrey was not strictly a lawyer-client relationship. Holmes tells Watson that, while he was still disguised as a horse-groom, “I was half-dragged up to the altar, and before I knew where I was found myself mumbling responses which were whispered in my ear, and vouching for things of which I knew nothing, and generally assisting in the secure tying-up of Irene Adler, spinster, to Godfrey Norton, bachelor” (p. 31).
In a manner that recalls Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” (1844), Holmes reasons out where in Irene’s house the photograph is likely to be, and makes plans for its recovery. Employing a group of people, Holmes concocts an elaborate ruse that gets him admitted to Irene’s home. He describes his reasoning to Watson, in a manner that might seem somewhat gender-essentialist today: “When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is as once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse….A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box” (p. 42).
Holmes comes to understand that “The photograph is in a recess behind a sliding panel, just above the right bell-pull” (p. 45); and at this point, it seems as though the recovery of the photograph will be a simple and routine undertaking. But Irene Adler has one more move to make in this elaborate game of chess – one that increases the reader’s sympathy and admiration for her, particularly when one reads what she has to say in a letter that she leaves for Holmes.
One of my many readings of “A Scandal in Bohemia” took place in the context of a trip to London a few years ago. My wife and I were staying in the Marylebone section of the city, and we made a point of visiting the Sherlock Holmes Museum – at, yes, 221-B Baker Street. The wall tiles at the nearby Baker Street Station of the London Underground are decorated with silhouettes of Holmes wearing his deer-stalker hat and smoking a pipe. Holmes is virtually a living presence in that part of London – evidence of the way in which his adventures have made generations of readers want to travel along with him, just as Dr. Watson originally did.
Many of the pleasures of “A Scandal in Bohemia” will be familiar to fans of Conan Doyle’s work, but the presence of the Irene Adler character gives this story something distinctive. As this story concludes, the reader understands why, as Watson observes in a closing remark, whenever Sherlock Holmes “speaks of Irene Adler…it is always under the honourable title of the woman” (p. 53). Truly, “A Scandal in Bohemia” is scandalously entertaining.