When I first visited Lichfield, I gave myself too long in that small City. I’d spied all the Samuel Johnson things I’d come for, spent hours in the Birthplace Museum and hunted out the other places he knew so I went into the Erasmus Darwin House as something to do. I knew little about the man then and I was amazed at the scope of his interests, the depth of his scientific knowledge, the influence of his poetry and the sheer likability of the man. Then I read a biography of him, it was more hagiography than biography and it cooled me to him a little.
There’s a very fun series of books by Lillian de la Torre called Samuel Johnson: Detector. In them, Samuel Johnson is cast in a Holmesian role with Boswell as his Watson. They’re good fun even if the prose is a little wooden. Having read those, I was excited to see Charles Sheffield had done a similar thing with Erasmus Darwin, though Darwin’s cases have a more supernatural flavour, X-Files in the late 1700s.
This book is a collection of stories where Darwin, flanked by Pole, loosely based on one of Darwin’s associates, find themselves amidst something strange or supernatural and Darwin, using his keen analytical eye find out the truth behind them. The first story in the collection even has a cryptozoological air, with a trip to Scottish Lochs where a seabeast awaits. The first story written, the last in the collection also includes an evolutionary left turn - but the rest of the stories were rooted in reality, to an extent.
The mysteries were pretty engaging. I guessed the twist of the ‘Lambeth Immortal’, because something similar happened to my Mum at a gig, so the little clues jumped out a bit at me but mostly I was left feeling like I’d seen a good trick without being tricked. My favourite story was ‘The Heart of Ahura Mazda’, which reminded me a little of the series Jonathan Creek. Indeed, Darwin and Pole would make for fun Sunday tea-time adventures, I’d watch that.
I found the most important element of the book to be Darwin’s detecting methods. Unlike Holmes, he mades iron clad deductions that always prove correct, Darwin makes adductive hypotheses that he then tests and rules out. As such, he doesn’t investigate from a position of certainty or authority, but one of openness an testing. He describes how he has many theories but needs a sieve to sort them out, or that he hasn’t added two and two and made twenty, but subtracted two and two and made zero.
A lot is made of his skills as a diagnostician - rather like another Holmes-inspired character, House. While Darwin was a respected doctor and had a particular knack at knowing if a patient was going to die, I found his fame as a medical man was too emphasised. The plots of three of the stories partially existed because of this reputation and he seems to be a famous man because of it. As well as not squaring with my impression of Darwin, there was less emphasis on his poetry, engineering and other skills - though some Lunar Society members get mentions.
Because they were short stories publishes in different places, we get some of the same beats when it comes to setting up our characters. We are always informed of Darwin’s weight and his missing front teeth and of Pole’s malaria - it grows a little repetitive and might have been edited out a little when being put into a whole book. Reading them altogether, it also becomes an oddly repetitive motif that it’s always winter or autumn in the stories, I guess for atmosphere in each one, but it becomes a bit of a bingo card.
That said, I think the writing was better than the Samuel Johnson: Detector series and I really enjoyed Darwin and Pole together. I also liked how Darwin was unlike other detective figures, he has his quirks but they were quirks of Erasmus Darwin, not detectivey ones. It’s nice to read a detective story where the protagonist is a fat, content, intellectually curious man who gets on with people and is always ready to eat a big meal. It was nice to have a decent man at the centre of things, not brooding or moody, figuring problems out with an intelligence that is motivated by curiosity and wonder. It’s a nifty little book and praises a praiseworthy man.