The Notched Hairpin (2 page)

Although Millum's retrospective narrative is (if we believe the novel to be contemporary with its publication) set in the mid 1920s, he describes a society of moneyed intellectuals heavily influenced by Victorian
fin de siècle
decadence.
The Yellow Book
, the notorious periodical illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley (yellow was itself a late Victorian signifier of decadence, whether social, mental, or physical), gets a mention (47); Oscar Wilde runs throughout the narrative, from the explicit mention of Tite Street (47) to the unattributed quotation from
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
(“Who can tell to what red hell the sightless soul may stray” (49)). Millum's circle, however, inverts aestheticism; the Wildean love of beauty for its own sake is distorted into the motto of “To find the grotesque in everything, that is the secret of life” (49). One is reminded here of Wilde's preface to
The Picture of Dorian Gray;
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault” (3). Millum and Sankey's circle thus represents decadence pushed to its furthest conclusion, severed from aestheticist ideals. As Millum says, “when everything, without exception, is ridiculous, there is nothing left that has any real interest—one is on the frontier of insanity” (50). From here, it is a short step to murder.

In many ways, then,
The Notched Hairpin
is Heard's attempt to resolve the often contradictory dialogue between the Holmesian canon and
fin de siècle
decadence. The early Holmes, as he appears in
A Study in Scarlet
(1887) and
The Sign of Four
(1890), is (as Ian Ousby points out in his now dated but still useful discussion) the model of decadence, the aesthete kept separate from wider respectable society and who must replace intellectual and artistic stimulation (when it is lacking) with the chemical stimulant of cocaine. It is, after all, Holmes himself who makes an explicit connection between crime and art when he provides the title for
A Study in Scarlet:
“Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon?” (44). And although Conan Doyle is often taken to resemble the epitome of the anti-decadent (and later, anti-modernist) advocate of muscular imperialism, it should not be overlooked that
The Sign of Four
was commissioned by the American monthly
Lippincott's Magazine
in tandem with Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. The two authors had already met at a dinner given by Joseph Stoddart (the editor of
Lippincott's)
, and although Doyle's moral and aesthetic philosophies were often the opposite of Wilde's, he nonetheless found much to admire in
The Picture
(Stashower 107). After 1891, however, and in the move from novels to short stories, Holmes shifts from aestheticism to ascetism. His cocaine usage largely disappears, and the narrowly specialised Holmes of
A Study in Scarlet
(as shown by Watson's list of Holmes' “limits” (20)) gives way to a more widely informed persona, able to quote at length authors of whom he had previously appeared unaware, and therefore much more fitting of a Victorian middle class ideal of education. There were, of course, material reasons for such a shift in characterisation, not least the fact that after his first two novels Doyle moved to the
Strand Magazine
, a monthly periodical explicitly concerned with its readers' cultural health and which addressed itself towards conservative values of the family—the decadent Holmes would have been out of place here. Holmes' specialist interests in
A Study in Scarlet
represent a late nineteenth century characterisation of decadence as the part obscuring or destroying the whole; early and mid twentieth century detective fiction, as a genre based around the part revealing or constructing the whole, does not sit easily with decadence.
The Notched Hairpin
addresses these tensions by dramatising the eventual exhaustion of decadent values, charting their collapse into a comfortable bourgeois existence (it is not a coincidence that the first part of the novel concentrates on property to the extent of personifying it as “The Red Brick Twins”). If late Victorian decadence was (as Regenia Gagnier argues) characterised by “its distance from, and rejection of, middle class life” (Gagnier 65),
The Notched Hairpin
represents the eventual triumph of that previously excluded class.

In fact, the resurgent cultural
bourgeois
of the novel are greatly expanded: as Mycroft comments, “the police in the higher ranks have now become so intelligent and even scholarly. It illustrates the old advice: it always pays never to talk down to your audience, never to despise your foe, never to patronize the police” (197). In such a speech Heard also invites his audience to be similarly alert, to be scholarly in their reading of the novel. In this respect, Mycroft's choice of holiday reading matter, Milton's masque
Comus
(“So while I read
Comus
and, being so much the elder, brood on the dreaming water of
Sabrina fair
…” [8]), gains particular significance.
Comus
(or to give it its historically proper title,
A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle)
concerns the fate of a Lady and her two brothers lost in the Shropshire woods; the Lady becomes separated from her siblings and falls into the clutches of the demonic supernatural villain Comus. Comus imprisons her and tries, poetically, to convince her to drink a magic potion which will turn her into one of his crew, a band of followers who have given in to sensual temptation and have consequently been transformed into animalistic figures. The brothers find the Lady and rout Comus' army, but fall short of defeating the tempter himself; they invoke Sabrina, the river spirit, to finish the job. The text's inclusion in
The Notched Hairpin
might easily be overlooked as simply providing a bit of local literary colour (after all, Milton's Ludlow text is paired here with Housman's poetic cycle
A Shropshire Lad)
but closer examination of the novel uncovers an intriguing set of subtle references. There is, for instance, the rather antagonistic pairing of Milton and Housman; Housman famously comments in poem LXII of
A Shropshire Lad
that “Malt does more than Milton can/To justify God's ways to man” (Housman 42), such literary bickering neatly mirroring the friendlier antagonism between Silchester and Mycroft, established from the first line onwards (Mycroft's urgent “Don't touch” is met with Silchester's rather clumsier meditation on ‘tact').

Likewise, the scene of the murder, the enclosed garden with an imposing stone throne at its centre, is strikingly similar to the setting of Milton's play; caught in Comus' headquarters deep in the woods, the Lady is imprisoned in a magic throne from which she cannot rise without Comus' permission. Sankey, too, has such a magic chair; Heard frequently and deliberately draws our attention to “a beautiful stone chair carved in lovely half-marble Hopton Wood stone” (14) which exerts a kind of mystical fascination over Silchester. Part two begins with his own temptation: “I was just about to seat myself on this throne and see how it felt—and I was certain that it must feel as good as it looked …” (19). The story of the murder as told by the house agent intrudes, however, and puts him off; Silchester now feels that the chair “had about it an unpleasant sense of its last disagreeable occupant and his disagreeable last session” (13); instead, it is Mycroft who takes his place. Silchester does eventually get to sit in the throne, but it is striking that as he does so he experiences a paralysing mental unease: “was I again to find everything being ravelled, tangled, and confused, and maybe even our certainty of securing this place put in jeopardy? I was sufficiently upset to say unguardedly “I don't understand!”” (36). What happens next is vital for understanding the significance of
Comus
in the novel; Mycroft reassures Silchester that everything will be resolved and explained, and then asks “Will you please get up and follow me?” (36). Silchester dutifully rises; his temporarily paralysing confusion is lifted by the magic spell of Mycroft, inviting him to leave the chair. Mycroft's invitation to “get up and follow me” and Silchester's response (“I rose” (36)) might easily be read as slightly ponderous writing; why does Heard linger on the detail of Silchester getting up? Why doesn't Mycroft simply ask Silchester to follow him, as rising from the chair would be implied anyway? Such details only make sense if we accept that Heard is having some subtle fun here; the fussy Silchester becomes Milton's Lady, imprisoned until released by explicit command to rise. It might be tempting here to cast Mycroft as Comus, the knowing trickster; a more fitting comparison, however, and one which Mycroft makes himself earlier, would be with Sabrina, the river nymph who is summoned to resolve this peculiar Shropshire problem and who frees the Lady from the chair.

It may seem that I have wandered somewhat from contamination, decadence, and that phrase “Don't touch.” But the key theme of
Comus
is self control, the ability to resist the temptations of decadence. Comus' victims, his animalistic criminal crew, are complicit in their own downfall; Milton is careful to specify that Comus can only transform those who wish to be transformed. Thus, the Elder brother argues to the Younger that their sister will ultimately be safe because she possesses “a hidden strength” (Milton 100); that is, chastity: “She that has that, is clad in complete steel” (100). Likewise, the Lady points out to Comus that while her body may be imprisoned, “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind/With all thy charms” (105). There's that word touch' again; Comus' sensuality is clearly a tactile one. He ‘feels', rather than hears, the approach of others (93); he speaks of the gods “Forbidding every bleak unkindly Fog/To touch the prosperous growth of this tall Wood” (96). Even the Lady's younger brother is aware of the tactile dangers that face her, and fears “Lest some ill greeting touch attempt the person/Of our unowned sister” (99). And it is Sabrina's touch that restores order and releases the Lady: “Next this marble venom'd seat/Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat/I touch with chaste palms moist and cold,/Now the spell hath lost his hold” (111). To touch is to have power; and, returning from Milton to Heard, this is exactly the kind of power that Mycroft uses to release Silchester from the throne and, of course, to solve the novel's moral mystery.

But if Mycroft represents Sabrina, the question remains of who represents Comus, the tempter who brings about the dissolution of the decadent. Without giving too much away, such a role is clearly played in
The Notched Hairpin
by O. K. Johnstone, the Islamic slave master to whom Sankey and Millum fall victim through their own decadence. Johnstone is the most problematic aspect of the novel, and certainly where the novel shows its age; modern readers may baulk at the description of his “black presence” (57). Yet it should also be noted that Johnstone appears in the context of subtle and epigrammatic jokes at the expense of colonialist hypocrisy: Johnstone notes that “Education is said to be liked by the white, but only if it leads the black to serve him. Well, we have learned the lesson” (61). Likewise, he remarks of his cocoa plantation that “For some reason, that rather cloying drink wrung from black labor always appeals to the Quaker and nonconformist conscience” (60); the supposedly Christian pleasures of temperance are enjoyable only because their exploitative conditions of production are forgotten.

It is these, and similar, moral questions that are the real mystery of
The Notched Hairpin
. They are, for instance, at the heart of Mycroft's criticism of the police (which, if we pursue the Miltonian analogy to its conclusion, stand in for the well meaning but ultimately ineffectual brothers). Mycroft argues that the police “can't prevent [crime] because they are not really interested in the great problems of all detection-human motive, human desire, and the greatest of all tragedies, our vast desires and our mean, inadequate, hopeless means” (90) (and since Heard puts us firmly in the English Midlands, we might also note the echo here of George Eliot's
Middlemarch
[1871–2] and its explorations of “spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity” [Eliot 3]). Whereas Hercule Poirot's frequent invocation of the psychology of crime often ultimately appears as little more than window dressing for the working out of a more materialistic puzzle, Mycroft's mention of the psychology of motive and desire is central to
The Notched Hairpin
. This is not to say that Christie's novels were literary puzzles without characters (they were far from that) or indeed that Heard's fiction is based on detailed psychological portraiture, since it is more interested in wider philosophical questions than in a particular criminal psychology. On that basis, another historical cotext for
The Notched Hairpin
is Bertrand Russell's
Authority and the Individual
, published in the same year (developed from Russell's Reith lectures for the BBC in 1948). Although Heard and Russell belong to very different philosophical perspectives,
The Notched Hairpin
and
Authority and the Individual
address similar questions; where does individual morality intersect with social responsibility, and with wider concepts of civilization itself? Put another way, how are individuals meant to respond to the rules and interdictions presented by society, civilization, and authority? And who represents that authority? Who is it who commands, “Don't touch”?

Dr. Christopher Pittard

University of Portsmouth, UK

Christopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He has published articles and books on Victorian literature and culture and detective fiction, including articles for
Victorian Periodicals Review, Women: A Cultural Review
, and
Clues: A Journal of Detection
. His latest book is
Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction
(Ashgate 2011). Dr Pittard is also a member of the faculty of the Dickens Project at the University of California Santa Cruz and is on the editorial advisory boards of
The Journal of Popular Fiction
and
Clues: A Journal of Detection
.