Part 9 (1/2)
Why They Might Deceive Us.
Saint Augustine (De Mendacio, pp. 8688) was the first philosopher to explicitly cla.s.sify different types of deception. In particular, he categorized various kinds of lying based on the purpose for which it is done. For instance, there are lies that harm someone and help no one, lies that harm someone and help someone else, lies that harm no one and help someone, and lies told ”solely for the pleasure of lying.” However, this taxonomy is not very helpful when it comes to cla.s.sifying deception in the Sherlock Holmes stories (a.k.a. the ”Canon”).
There may be a few lies in the Canon that harm no one and help someone. In ”The Adventure of the Second Stain,” Holmes is asked by the Secretary for European Affairs to retrieve a sensitive doc.u.ment that has been stolen from his ”despatch-box.” Holmes discovers that the doc.u.ment has been removed by the Secretary's own wife. But instead of exposing her, he secretly replaces the doc.u.ment in the despatch-box and tells the Secretary, ”the more I think of the matter the more convinced I am that the letter has never left this house.”
Since the doc.u.ment is safe, the lie arguably does no harm and it saves the wife from potentially losing her husband. But almost all of the examples of deception that Watson records fall into the category of helping the deceiver and harming someone else. In fact, even the lie in ”The Adventure of the Second Stain” ends up making the Right Honourable Trelawney Hope look a bit foolish for having thought that the doc.u.ment was stolen in the first place.
But fortunately, there is a more useful way to cla.s.sify the deceptions in the Canon according to their purpose. Most notably, criminals use deception to conceal who committed the crime. For instance, Colonel Valentine Walter and Hugo Oberstein steal the ”Bruce-Partington Plans.” But they kill the junior clerk at Woolwich a.r.s.enal and plant several of the doc.u.ments on his body to make it look as if he was the thief.
Criminals sometimes attempt to hide the fact that a crime has been committed at all. In ”The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” Dr. Grimesby Roylott of Stoke Moran kills his step-daughter so that she cannot get married, and he does so in a way that conceals the fact that she was murdered. (As we'll see below, there's a veritable epidemic of parents in Victorian England who are willing to take extreme measures to keep their daughters from getting married.) He sends a venomous snake down a bellrope into her locked bedroom to bite her, which leaves no visible evidence of foul play.
But in addition to covering up the crime, criminals also use deception to commit the crime in the first place. Most notably, Vincent Spaulding (a.k.a. John Clay) deceives Jabez Wilson about there being a ”vacancy on the League of the Red-headed Men.” The ruse keeps Wilson out of his p.a.w.nshop for several hours a day so that Clay and his accomplice can dig a tunnel into the vault of the neighboring City and Suburban Bank.
In ”The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” Jonas Oldacre plants false evidence to suggest that he has been murdered by the unhappy John Hector McFarlane. He uses a little of his own blood, and McFarlane's thumbprint from a wax seal on an envelope, to place a b.l.o.o.d.y thumbprint on the wall.
Some of Holmes's own clients try to deceive him simply to avoid embarra.s.sment. In ”The Problem of Thor Bridge,” Mr. Neil Gibson tries to deceive Holmes about the nature of his relations.h.i.+p with the governess of his children (at least until Holmes accuses him of lying). Dr. Gregory House, a fictional medical detective who is loosely based on Sherlock Holmes (see Jerold Abrams, ”The Logic of Guesswork in Sherlock Holmes and House”), has the same sort of problem. (”I don't ask why patients lie, I just a.s.sume they all do.”) In fact, Holmes explicitly draws the a.n.a.logy between a client lying to him and a patient lying to a doctor. (”And it is only a patient who has an object in deceiving his surgeon who would conceal the facts of his case.”) Holmes himself regularly uses deceit in order to solve the crime. In ”A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson throws a ”plumber's smoke-rocket” through a window so that Irene Adler will think that there is a fire and will reveal the location of the indiscreet photograph that Holmes has been engaged to retrieve. In ”The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes puts a wax bust of himself in the window of 221B Baker Street to convince Colonel Sebastian Moran ”that I was there when I was really elsewhere.” In ”The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone,” Holmes does the exact opposite. He pretends to be a wax replica of himself so that Count Negretto Sylvius will think that he is elsewhere when he is really there.
Holmes even goes so far as to fake his own death at the Reichenbach Falls to protect himself from the Moriarty gang (”The Adventure of the Empty House”). The ”tragedy” at the falls occurred before the ”Norwood Builder” faked his own death. But Holmes might have gotten the idea from John Douglas in The Valley of Fear. In addition to faking his own death, Douglas (while working as a Pinkerton in America) was a counterfeit counterfeiter (”I never minted a dollar in my life. Those I gave you were as good as any others”).
Holmes often deceives Watson as well as the criminals he's chasing. Just like the rest of the world, Watson is completely convinced that Holmes died with Moriarty at that ”fearful place.” And, as if Watson had not already suffered enough grief, Holmes later persuades him that he (Holmes) is dying of a rare tropical disease (”The Adventure of the Dying Detective”). But Holmes usually only deceives Watson as a means of deceiving the criminals that he's chasing. For instance, Watson had to believe that Holmes was dead because ”it is quite certain that you would not have written so convincing an account of my unhappy end had you not yourself thought that it was true.”
It's not completely clear why Holmes needs to maintain this fiction for three years. After all, a ”confederate” of Moriarty was a ”witness of his friend's death and of my escape.” Holmes has a much better excuse for deceiving Watson in ”The Adventure of the Dying Detective.” He wants Watson to fetch Mr. Culverton Smith (”the man upon earth who is best versed in this disease”) and, as he later explains to Watson, ”if you had shared my secret you would never have been able to impress Smith with the urgent necessity of his presence, which was the vital point of the whole scheme.”
As the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out just a few years before Holmes supposedly fell into that awful abyss, ”men believe in the truth of that which is plainly strongly believed.”
And finally, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself engages in deception. He's always trying to deceive his readers about what's really going on, until Holmes reveals the solution to the mystery. As Doyle explains in his autobiography, ”having got that key idea, one's next task is to conceal it and lay emphasis upon everything which can make for a different explanation.” In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Doyle provides us with several possible suspects. In addition to being the butler (always a suspicious character in murder mysteries), Mr. Barrymore has ”a full, black beard” just like the man that followed Sir Henry Baskerville in London and he could have the motive of keeping Baskerville Hall for himself. The escaped convict Selden, the Notting Hill murderer, is loose on the moor and is ”a man that would stick at nothing.” There is also the suspicious, unidentified ”man on the tor” that Watson sees silhouetted against the moon (who turns out to be Holmes himself). Or the curse of the Baskervilles could actually be true and there is a ”hound of h.e.l.l” roaming the moor.
How They Might Deceive Us.
It's useful to know about the different reasons why people deceive. This can make us more aware that a person might have a motivation to deceive us. But it's even more important to understand how people deceive. According to J. Bowyer Bell and Barton Whaley and to Paul Ekman, there are two main ways to deceive. You can ”hide the truth” or you can ”show the false.” For instance, Dr. Roylott just hides the truth that he murdered his step-daughter. By contrast, Colonel Walter and Oberstein show the false that Cadogan West stole the plans for the submarine (as well as hiding the truth that they did it).
Either way, the ultimate goal is the same. As several philosophers have pointed out, in order for something to count as deception, the goal must be to foster in someone a false belief, or at least to lower that person's confidence in a true belief. For instance, Dr. Roylott wants people to believe that his stepdaughter was not murdered and Colonel Walter and Oberstein want people to believe that West stole the plans.
Admittedly, it's possible to hide the truth from someone just in order to ”keep him in the dark.” I might steal the latest copy of Variety from your mailbox so that you will not learn that the new Sherlock Holmes film is going to be written by the guy that accused George Costanza of double dipping. However, with only a few exceptions, philosophers don't count this as deception. Similarly, Holmes is not deceiving anyone when he keeps his chain of reasoning secret. As he explains to Watson in A Study in Scarlet, ”I'm not going to tell you much more of the case, Doctor. You know a conjuror gets no credit when once he has explained his trick, and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.” When the same issue comes up in ”The Red-Headed League,” Holmes quotes the Roman historian Tacitus, ”Omne ignotum pro magnifico” (Everything unknown appears magnificent). Likewise, the ”cipher messages” used in ”The Adventure of the Dancing Men” and in The Valley of Fear are not intended to deceive. They are simply designed to keep everyone but the intended recipient ignorant of the contents of the message.
A Master of Disguise.
As Bell and Whaley have pointed out, there are several different techniques for hiding the truth and showing the false. These techniques can be ill.u.s.trated by looking at the various ways that disguises function in the Canon.
Several of the villains that Holmes chases down disguise themselves. Most notably, Mr. Neville St. Clair becomes ”The Man with the Twisted Lip” because he could make more money as a professional beggar than as a journalist. In ”A Case of Ident.i.ty,” James Windibank ”disguised himself, covered those keen eyes with tinted gla.s.ses, masked the face with a moustache and a pair of bushy whiskers, sunk that clear voice into an insinuating whisper, and doubly secure on account of the girl's short sight, he appears as Mr. Hosmer Angel, and keeps off other lovers by making love himself.”
Sometimes criminals even disguise other people. Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle of the ”Copper Beeches” make their governess (without her knowledge) appear to be their daughter. The goal is to convince the daughter's fiance that she's no longer interested in him. In fact, criminals sometimes disguise animals. Silas Brown dyed the distinctive white forehead of ”Silver Blaze” so that he would blend in with the other horses at Mapleton.
And as we all know, Holmes himself is a master of disguise. He often pretends to be a member of the working cla.s.s so that he can conduct his investigations with greater anonymity. He appears as a ”rakish young workman” (”The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”), a ”mariner who had fallen into years and poverty” (The Sign of the Four), a ”drunken-looking groom” (”A Scandal in Bohemia”), an ”ill-dressed vagabond” (”The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”), and a ”doddering, loose-lipped” opium fiend (”The Man with the Twisted Lip”). And he has set up various locations around London where he can change into these disguises (”The Adventure of Black Peter”). Unlike Clark Kent, Holmes cannot just hop into the nearest phone booth to change his ident.i.ty.
According to Sherlock Holmes in ”The Great Game” (from the first season of Sherlock with Benedict c.u.mberbatch), ”the art of disguise is knowing how to hide in plain sight.” But hiding the truth is not the only possible goal of putting on a disguise. Disguises can also be used to show the false in several different ways. In addition, there are actually several different ways to hide the truth with a disguise.
Hiding in Plain Sight.
One way that disguises can hide the truth is called masking (or camouflage). This is when the person or the thing disguised is not intended to be seen at all. A prime example is a chameleon changing its color to blend in with the surrounding environment. Similarly, a criminal might use the thick London fog to hide himself. As Holmes explains to Watson, ”See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the cloudbank. The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim” (”The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”).
Holmes himself is really good at this technique. In ”The Adventure of the Devil's Foot,” when Holmes tells Dr. Leon Sterndale that he was followed, Sterndale says, ”I saw no one,” to which Holmes replies, ”That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.” As Holmes explains in the Jeremy Brett adaptation of ”The Man with the Twisted Lip,” the goal is to ”merge with the surroundings.” The murderer in A Study in Scarlet is quite good at it too. When he's finally caught, he says to Holmes (in the Benedict c.u.mberbatch adaptation), ”See, no one ever thinks about the cabbie. It's like you're invisible. Just the back of a head. Proper advantage for a serial killer.”
Another way that disguises can hide the truth is called repackaging. This is when the person or the thing disguised is made to look like something else. For instance, several species of insects have evolved to look like sticks or leaves. In a similar vein, ”Silver Blaze” is made to look like just any other horse. Unlike with masking, this is not an attempt to keep people from seeing the disguised item, but just to keep them from recognizing it for what it is.
The most famous example of this technique from detective fiction is The Purloined Letter. The stolen letter was made to look like a different letter and then hidden by the thief in plain sight. While the ruse fools the Parisian police, the letter is discovered by Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. I'm somewhat hesitant to bring up this example as Holmes thought that ”Dupin was a very inferior fellow” (A Study in Scarlet). Dupin had a confederate create a commotion to distract the villain, so that he could recover the purloined letter. Despite Holmes's disdain for his French counterpart, this event may have inspired Holmes's attempt to trick Irene Adler.
Disguises are often a combination of these two techniques. Frequently, something (or someone) is disguised with the hope that no one will even notice it (masking). However, the disguise is such that, if someone does notice it, she will not recognize it for what it really is (repackaging). This is probably what the murderous cabbie really had in mind. Similarly, in ”The Final Problem” and ”The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes disguises himself as an Italian priest and as an ”elderly deformed” book collector so that the Moriarty gang will not notice him at all. But if they do notice him, as they probably do when Watson b.u.mps into him and upsets his books, they are unlikely to recognize him as the famous consulting detective.
Finally, dazzling is yet another way to hide the truth. When pursuers know that a particular person or thing is in a particular location, masking and repackaging are not going to be effective techniques. However, it's still possible to confound the pursuers. An octopus might shoot out ink to confuse a predator and escape. Similarly, law firms sometimes provide boxes and boxes of doc.u.ments so that the opposition will not be able to find the one incriminating doc.u.ment in the ”haystack.”
Since we don't know ”the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant” (”The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger”) or the ”story for which the world is not yet prepared” about ”the giant rat of Sumatra” (”The Adventure of the Suss.e.x Vampire”), I cannot say for sure whether or not Holmes ever faced dazzling. But the readers of the Holmes stories certainly have. Doyle himself was engaged in dazzling when he pointed to multiple false explanations of the crime as he did in The Hound of the Baskervilles. With several possible suspects in each of her mysteries, Agatha Christie is the queen of this technique.
Creating a False Impression.
In addition to hiding the true, disguises can also be used to show the false. One way that disguises can do this is called mimicking. This is when the person or the thing disguised is made to look like something else, not just to remain hidden, but to gain some other advantage. For instance, several species of cuckoo lay their eggs in the nests of other birds so that these other birds will raise them (believing them to be their own offspring). Similarly, when Mr. Windibank pretends to be his stepdaughter's young suitor, he certainly wants to hide his true ident.i.ty, but it is equally important that he display his false ident.i.ty to her.
It's possible to mimic a type of person, as when Neville St. Clair disguises himself as a beggar. And it is also possible to mimic a particular person as when the Rucastles' governess is made to appear to be their daughter. In addition, mimicry does not always involve a disguise per se. For instance, the b.l.o.o.d.y thumbprint that Oldacre created ”mimicked” an actual b.l.o.o.d.y thumbprint left by McFarlane.
Another way that disguises can show the false is called inventing. This is just like mimicking except that something (or someone) is disguised as something else that never existed before. In other words, a new reality is created. A good example of this is The Hound of the Baskervilles itself. As Watson describes it, A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more h.e.l.lish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.
However, Jack Stapleton had simply painted a large hound with phosphorus to make it appear to be a ”hound of h.e.l.l.”
Finally, decoying is yet another way to show the false. A bird will sometimes lure predators away from its nest by pretending that it has a broken wing. In A Study in Scarlet, when the murderer (who was an American and not a German) wrote the German word for revenge in blood on the wall, ”it was simply a ruse to divert inquiry into a wrong channel.” And in ”The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter,” Dr. Leslie Armstrong literally leaves a false trail for Holmes. He leaves home in his brougham in the opposite direction from his true destination and then he doubles back. In other words, he ”disguises” his destination.
Decoying can certainly involve showing the false. Pretending to have a broken wing is actually a type of mimicking. Also, decoying can be carried out by inventing. But despite the fact that Bell and Whaley cla.s.sify decoying as a type of showing the false, the ultimate goal is to hide the truth. Moreover, it can be carried out without showing the false at all. For example, if the bird actually does have a broken wing, it can still lure predators away from its nest.
By the way, according to Holmes, Stapleton used his wife, who was pretending to be his sister, as a ”decoy” in The Hound of the Baskervilles. But this was not decoying in the sense that Bell and Whaley have in mind. Stapleton ”hoped that his wife might lure Sir Charles to his ruin” rather than away from anything. In other words, he was using her in the way that a hunter uses a decoy duck. So, this is just another case of mimicking.
Deceived by Words.
The princ.i.p.al distinction drawn by philosophers is between lying and other forms of deception. For instance, in The Valley of Fear, Cecil Barker told ”a great, big, thumping, obtrusive, uncompromising lie” about the shooting at Birlstone. By contrast, Jonas Oldacre merely planted false evidence to frame John Hector McFarlane. He did not actually say anything false. Of course, prevaricators typically engage in both verbal and nonverbal deception. For instance, Barker also planted a ”smudge of blood like the mark of a boot-sole upon the wooden sill.” And when he is finally caught, Oldacre does lie about his motivations. He claims that ”it was only my practical joke.”
This distinction is important, as several philosophers have argued, because all other things being equal, lying is worse than other forms of deception. Most notably, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that, while it is always wrong to lie, it is sometimes okay to deceive in other ways.3 But this distinction is also important for the epistemological questions of how people are deceived and how deception can be detected.
If it becomes known that a piece of evidence has been placed somewhere intentionally, it is immediately suspect. Since it was not there the first time that he searched Oldacre's house, Holmes knew that the b.l.o.o.d.y thumbprint must have been put there on purpose by someone other than John Hector McFarlane. In other cases, he is able to rule out the possibility that a clue has been left intentionally. For instance, in ”The Problem of Thor Bridge,” the note from the governess is clutched so tightly in Mrs. Gibson's hand that ”it excludes the idea that anyone could have placed the note there after death in order to furnish a false clue.”
As Harvard philosopher Richard (a.k.a. ”The Colonel”) Moran points out, ”ordinarily, if I confront something as evidence (the telltale footprint, the cigarette b.u.t.t left in the ashtray) and then learn that it was left there deliberately, even with the intention of bringing me to a particular belief, this will only discredit it as evidence in my eyes. It won't seem better evidence, or even just as good, but instead like something fraudulent, or tainted evidence.”
However, things work differently when someone deceives us by telling us something false. When someone tells us something, it's always clear that she's doing so on purpose. In fact, we believe what someone tells us precisely because she explicitly offers her a.s.surance that what she says is true. So, some indication other than the intentionality of the act is needed to cast doubt on the veracity of testimony.
Infernal Lies.
What exactly is a lie? According to most philosophers, a lie is a false statement that is intended to deceive someone. But a false statement is still a lie even if it does not succeed in deceiving that someone. In particular, Holmes is rarely taken in by the lies that he's told. For instance, he can tell immediately that what Barker says to the police ”is a clumsy fabrication which simply could not be true.” In ”The Final Problem,” Holmes saw that ”the letter from Meiringen was a hoax.” And in ”The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” after a visit from the conman John Garrideb (a.k.a. James Winter), Holmes asks, ”I was wondering, Watson, what on earth could be the object of this man in telling us such a rigmarole of lies.”
But it must be conceded that even Holmes is occasionally fooled by deceivers. For instance, in ”The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” Inspector Baynes arrests Mr. Aloysius Garcia's cook for his murder. Although the inspector's real suspect is Mr. Henderson of High Gable (a.k.a. Don Murillo, the Tiger of San Pedro), he ”arrested the wrong man to make him believe that our eyes were off him.” And his ruse fools Holmes as well as his suspect.