Arthur Conan Doyle was happy to number himself among Lang's “new barbarians.” He always professed to prefer those of his works that fit within the romance tradition: historical novels like The White Company (1893), Micah Clarke (1893), and Sir Nigel (1906) and exotic adventure tales like The Lost World (1912) and The Poison Belt (1913). To later readers, the Sherlock Holmes tales are at once more familiar and less likely to read in terms of male romance conventions. Yet those stories display many of the same anxieties that we have been examining, anxieties concerning the erotics of interpretation, the pathologized body, and the decline of empire. If we tend not to approach the Holmes canon in this way, that is in part because the detective genre actively discourages certain forms of attention. As Fredric Jameson points out, the classic detective story is usually said to be “about” nothing beyond the logic of detection. The genre represents itself as a “form without ideological content,” concerned only with ahistorical questions of epistemology and rationality. This is certainly Holmes's view of detection, and he has been singularly successful in dictating the terms within which his cases have been understood.

As a way to begin opening up the Holmes tales to other kinds of understanding, I want to set The Sign of Four (1890) against one of its unacknowledged (by Doyle, at any rate) sources, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868).