Why didn’t Sherlock Holmes catch Jack the Ripper? Of course, the astute reader knows why Sherlock Holmes did not catch Jack the Ripper — Holmes was a fictional character.
But as those of us who investigate crimes in a post-CSI world can attest, fictional characters can set standards that real people have to live up to.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published the first Sherlock Holmes story in 1887. One of the fascinating things about reading Doyle’s stories now is how they blur the lines between fiction and history. They are told in a first-person narrative under the guise of memoirs. They frequently reference real places and events. The narrator, Watson, refers to cases in the newspaper as if they actually happened.
In “The Five Orange Pips,” Watson opens by saying “When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years ’82 and ’90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave. Some, however, have already gained publicity through the papers.”
Fiction Influences Public Perception
The stories were very self-referential, and frequently talked about how the very stories Watson was publishing were increasing Holmes’ fame. A modern reader who was unfamiliar with the series could mistake them for actual memoirs. It’s easy to see why there are cults of people on the Internet today that treat Holmes as a true historical figure and try to fill in the gaps of Doyle’s stories.
Because Sherlock Holmes was so intertwined in the period in which he was set — and because Doyle portrayed him as the infallible pursuer of justice — it is hard not to envision a link between Holmes and the true crimes of his era. No crime captured the public’s imagination at the time quite like the Whitechapel murders and Jack the Ripper.
Between five and 11 murders were blamed on Jack the Ripper between 1888 and 1891. Police investigated countless persons and even arrested multiple suspects — though all were eventually released for a lack of evidence.
From 1890 to 1893, in the midst of the hysteria over the Whitechapel murders, Doyle published one Holmes novel and 24 short stories. I didn’t find a single reference to the murders in any Holmes piece of the period.
In an article that ran in an 1894 edition of the Aberdeen Weekly Journal, the reporter referred to an interview between Doyle and an unnamed American reporter. The reporter asked Doyle how Holmes would have handled the Ripper investigation. Doyle is quoted as saying, “I remember going to the Scotland Yard museum and looking at the letter which was received by the police, and which purported to come from the Ripper. It was written in red ink in a ‘clerky hand.’ I tried to think how Holmes might have deduced the writer of that letter.”
Doyle went on to outline all that Holmes would have deduced from the letter and how Holmes would organize the investigation. He even criticized the Scotland Yard investigation, saying, “oddly enough, the police did not, as far as I know, think of that, and so they failed to accomplish anything.”
If Doyle was truly confident in his theory and Holmes’ methods, it would seem logical that there would have been some mention of the era’s most notorious criminal in the memoirs of Watson. Instead, in a masterful bit of avoidance, Doyle invented a criminal even more dastardly than the Ripper: Dr. Moriarty. With the diabolical genius Moriarty controlling so much of London’s crime, (perhaps even pulling the strings on the Whitechapel murders themselves) Holmes was unable to mess with a trifling matter like the Ripper.
And since Holmes met his apparent demise on the Moriarty case and disappeared for 10 years at the tail end of the Whitechapel murders, it cannot be seen as a slight on his abilities that he was never able to identify the Ripper. In the world created by Doyle, it was the purest of chance that prevented Holmes from working on the Whitechapel murders and a stroke of good luck for the Ripper.
Fast Forward to Today
It would be wrong to expect a work of fiction to provide meaningful insight into a true crime story. That would be like criticizing the writers of CSI for not solving the JonBenét Ramsey murder or finding Jimmy Hoffa’s body. But like I mentioned earlier, fictional characters can set standards that real people have to live up to. The following excerpt was from a letter to the editor titled, “The Incapacity of Scotland Yard” that ran in Reynold’s News in London in 1897:
The assumption is that if a man is strong, healthy and brave, he will make a good detector of crime. As a matter of fact, the annals of crime in other countries show that the best men for difficult jobs have been of a quite different stamp — shrewd little old men, for example, with no muscular development but with cunning brains. Such men are disqualified in this country, where the men are measured by muscle, and not by brain. Our wiseacres expect a man who has spent his life in picking up unconsidered trifles like muzzleless dogs to be qualified to pick up the clues in some complicated mystery. A traffic regulator is chosen for the delicate work of Sherlock Holmes. This is all wrong.
I am sure somewhere, at this moment there is a descendant of that person upset because the delicate work of Gil Grissom is being assigned to real-life police investigators.
