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and the extent to which Holmes’s London has established itself as a stereotypical vision of Victorian London’ (Kayman 42).

As Kayman points out this type of fiction’s reliance on facts becomes particularly perceptible in Doyle’s character depiction: ‘Doyle’s success in presenting fiction as fact is apparent both in the remarkable status of Sherlock Holmes himself . . . 4 Geography and CharacterizationĦ The detective story, Clive Bloom argues, is ‘the only fiction that insists on dealing with facts’ (Bloom 14). Mapping the novella’s narrative structure will hopefully shed some light upon the intriguing links between the sciences of deduction and geography. Then, we examine how the whodunnit is shaped by the geography of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and by that of London’s urban maze. In particular, we are going to see whether geological, meteorological and topographical facts purport to resolve the crime. In our geo-critical analysis of A Study in Scarlet, we first look at the characters’ portrayals through natural and human geographies, in order to explain the hero’s deductive talents and elucidate his antagonists’ villainous profiles. Geographical deduction engages in a dialogue between the sciences of deduction and geography.

4 Less famous than his Sherlock Holmes fiction, Doyle’s article ‘On the Geographical Distribution of (.)ĥ Our contribution focuses on the overlooked geographical dimension of A Study in Scarlet and centres around what we choose to call ‘geographical deduction’.

Far from limiting his analysis to London’s geology, Holmes traces the Brixton murder back to the American West, where the topographical structure of the relief emerges significant to Holmes’s deduction. The footprints belong to a certain Jefferson Hope, an American pioneer, who kills two of his fellow citizens in London in what looks like acts of revenge for having killed the woman he loved.

In a long train of deductions, Holmes reasons backwards taking into account the indicative impressions in the clay. The facts rapidly emerge as Holmes unweaves the scarlet thread of murder due to London’s soil: ‘I had this fellow’s stride on the clay outside’ (33). for no other hypothesis would meet the facts’ (91). Holmes traps the murderer as he attempts to leave the Devonshire fog.Ģ Sherlock Holmes applies his science of deduction for the first time, however, in A Study in Scarlet (1887), Conan Doyle’s original novella in which the detective proceeds ‘by the method of exclusion . . . This time, Holmes deduces the presence of the butterfly-chasing Jack Stapleton on the moor’s rugged landscape because of the weather: ‘The steps grew louder, and through the fog, as through a curtain, there stepped the man whom we were awaiting’ (Doyle 2007, 290). The detective’s pragmatic method of deduction is equally present in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–02), a serialised novel in which ‘n investigator needs facts and not legends or rumours’ (Doyle 2007, 278). 1 Holmes treats the science as such when deducing the murderer’s identity from a wooden legged man’s footprints left in the grounds around Pondicherry Lodge: ‘It is the impression of a wooden stump’ (Doyle 2007, 121). The detective story sets out with a first chapter entitled ‘The Science of Deduction’, described as ‘an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner’ (Doyle 2007, 98). 1 All subsequent quotes are taken from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holme (.)ġ Sherlock Holmes’s science of deduction initially appears in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s second novel The Sign of the Four (1890).