13 - A Nobler Man Never Walked the Earth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2021
Summary
One of the most problematic characters in any Holmes story is Steve Dixie, the black gangster who bursts into Holmes's room at the beginning of ‘The Three Gables’. He is a man of contradictions, simultaneously ridiculed and full of menace. His size and apparent physical aggression – ‘his sullen dark eyes’ have ‘a smouldering gleam of malice in them’ (Case-Book, 133) – are in counterpoint to his comic appearance: Watson remarks on his ‘very loud grey check suit with a flowing salmon-coloured tie’ (133). Instructed by his superior to warn Holmes that his life is at threat ‘if he go down Harrow way’ (134), he enters like ‘a mad bull’ and twice threatens Holmes with physical violence: ‘It won't be so damn fine if I have to trim you up a bit’ (133); ‘you’ll get put through it for sure if you give me any lip’ (134). However, Dixie is ‘easily cowed’ by Holmes's ‘icy coolness’ (134–5) and Holmes's suggestion that he knows about Dixie's involvement in ‘the killing of young Perkins outside the Holborn Bar’ (134). After Dixie's departure, Holmes laughs offthe encounter: ‘he is really rather a harmless fellow, a great muscular, foolish, blustering baby’ (135). Dixie's contradictions are, indeed, his essence. He cannot be presented as thoroughly menacing as that would concede power and agency to a figure who is Holmes's inferior mentally, physically and socially. But nor can he be a firmly comic character, as that would make him harmless or likeable. Dixie has to be both comic and threatening in order for him to be so thoroughly demeaned.
Reading ‘The Three Gables’ today, it is impossible not to be repelled by Doyle's offensive characterisation. This is the only Holmes story to feature the word ‘nigger’ (143), used by a police inspector but with apparent approval from Holmes. Despite having a geographical scope that stretches from Harrow in West London to Birmingham's Bull Ring, Dixie speaks in an end-of-the-pier Deep South patois, addressing Holmes as ‘Masser’ (133) and employing formulations like ‘this boy done get into trouble’ and ‘So help me the Lord!’ (134).
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- Information
- The Case of Sherlock HolmesSecrets and Lies in Conan Doyle's Detective Fiction, pp. 138 - 146Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018