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In 1886, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began writing his first Sherlock Holmes adventure, "A Study in Scarlet," one of the titans of adventure fiction was H. Rider Haggard. The hero he created, grizzled colonialist sharpshooter and adventure-seeker Allan Quatermain, entertained British readers with his treasure-hunting exploits in "undiscovered" parts of Africa. Somehow, this relic of Victorian white supremacism survived well into the modern era, in spinoffs created in a variety of media. For instance, Quatermain resurfaces in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen franchise.
He also returns in veteran Sherlockian James Lovegrove's SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE DEVIL'S DUST, but in this Holmes-and-Watson adventure, Quatermain is introduced as the detecting duo's antagonist, and his trust in what we might call manifest destiny annoys Holmes in a manner that hopefully we moderns will understand. To Quatermain's declaration that there is "a method to my madness," Holmes shoots back, "And more than a dash of madness in your method... Your plan, assuming that you even have one, seems to be either to lie in wait or else ruffle up feathers in the hope that one or other will somehow, as if by magic, cause the truth to reveal itself. I have found the patient, forensic accumulation of knowledge a far more reliable system."
Holmes must deal with Quatermain due to the latter's entanglement with the suspicious death, apparently by poisoning, of a loner lodger who calls himself Inigo Niemand but carries a handkerchief monogrammed with different initials. As Holmes and Watson investigate Niemand's death, they repeatedly encounter Quatermain, whose son Harry's own suspicious death in Africa might have something to do with "Niemand's" history. As in A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, and several shorter canonical Holmes adventures, chaos comes to London from (post-)colonial frontier zones, but the trail leads to home-bred criminality, too. Readers of the canon will be pleased to discover several minor characters and situations re-evaluated, but the mystery remains difficult to disentangle.
The power of this book lies in its opposition of the thinker Holmes's clash with the action man Quatermain's--and more urgent clashes of world-views. A minor character, a Zulu visitor to London based on one of Haggard's characters, acquaints Holmes and Watson with the Zulu ideal of ubuntu: "that people should all recognise each other as human beings; equals under the sun," and "members of one great tribe." It's a lesson that not only Quatermain needs to learn, but that Holmes does as well. This is suggested in Holmes's musing on why, today, Quatermain remains compelling. "As life becomes ever more mechanized and industrialised, and city and populations grow, one has to ask oneself how a man such as he will survive," Holmes muses. "He is an endangered species, his habitat shrinking. I almost pity him." It's the qualifier "almost" that draws the reader back to Quatermain's demonstrated capacity to endanger others, as a flesh-and-blood fighter and a heroic ideal.
To Lovegrove's gripping SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE THINKING ENGINE (2015) and many other adventures, THE DEVIL'S DUST is a worthy companion. Lovegrove keeps us returning nostalgically to Holmes, yet questioning the story-worlds that Doyle and his contemporaries built and the narratives they serve.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. She specializes in nineteenth-century literature. https://uwgb.academia.edu/RebeccaNesvet
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, August 2018
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