BAD BLACK MEN AND COMICAL CHINESE


(1979) has positioned Doyle within a
canon of Victorian writing that he sees
as part of a larger, culturally bound way
of conceiving the East as exotic, cruel,
sensual, opulent and barbaric in such a
way as to legitimise and naturalise West-
ern civilisation and its domination over
the east:

 Without examining Orientalism as a
 discourse one cannot possibly
 understand the enormously systematic
 discipline by which European culture was
 able to manage and produce the Orient
 politically, sociologically, militarily,
 ideologically, scientifically and
 imaginatively during the post-
 enlightenment period. (1979: 3)

 The net result of Conan Doyle's fiction
is to demonise the Orient and to implic-
itly affirm 'English civilisation'. There is
a sense that the urban safety of bourgeois
London is threatened by the proximity of
the 'colonies,' in particular in the East Fig. 2 Illustration overleaf: Mas-
End where the Chinese and the port area saguer's drawing for Fantoches 1926,
are located. It is with such arcane and taken from the 1993 edition of the
closed societies (the Chinese, the Hin- novel (Havana: Editorial Capitin
dus) and dangerous geographic areas San Luis: 124).
(the East End, the haunt of the Ripper) that Victorian detective fiction is
obsessed. The detective, be he Poe's Dupin in the inner city of Paris or Conan
Doyle's Holmes in fog-bound Victorian London, is a figure who can traverse
these prohibited spaces and bring their secrets to light. The Afro-Cuban cults

suspects. They echo the mysterious Brahmins in Collins's The Moonstone (1992:34)
who arrive at the Verinders' house in search of their diamond. Like the Gypsies in
Doyle, the Brahmins are innocent. But they are seen to be proof of the curse
associated with the theft of the gem, stolen from a sacred temple in India, which,
by its possession seems to bring disaster on those who possess it. The butler,
Betteridge, describes the situation thus: '...Here was our quiet English house
suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond bringing after it a conspiracy of
living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man... Who ever heard
the like of it in the nineteenth century, mind; in an age of progress, and in a country
which rejoices in the blessings of the British Constitution?' For a detailed discussion
of Conan Doyle's fascination with Empire, see Thompson (1993).