Sherlock Holmes and the Puzzle of Blackmail

“Charles Augustus Milverton” is an outlier in the Sherlock Holmes series: on the one hand, the detective does almost no detecting, and on the other hand, the blackmailer who gives the story its title is remarkably fastidious in his choice of victims, eschewing criminals and restricting his attention to society women guilty only of writing “sprightly” letters that would horrify their punctilious husbands. In so characterizing the criminal, Doyle previews a well-known “puzzle” in criminal law theory, the “paradox of blackmail.” Since the mid-20th century, criminal law scholars have wondered why blackmail is a crime, given that all its components may be perfectly licit. By asking how the story anticipates these theories and explanations that scholars have offered for the criminalization of blackmail, we can consider relations between law and literature not simply as a question of how crime is represented in fiction but as a question that links legal history, doctrine, and theory, on the one hand, and narrative form and structure on the other hand. To frame the relation this way is to move beyond questions of “law in literature” as that label has conventionally been used.

About Simon Stern
Simon Stern teaches and researches in the areas of law and literature, legal history, law and sexuality, and criminal law. His research focuses on the evolution of legal doctrines and methods in relation to literary and intellectual history. Current research topics include the development of the “reasonable man” standard (and its precursors and analogues) since the 18th century, and the changing conception of legal fictions between the early modern period and the present. His research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Foundation for Legal Research, and the American Society for Legal History.

He is co-editor (with Robert Spoo) of the series Law and Literature, published by Oxford University Press. With colleagues at other universities in North America, Europe, and the UK, he convenes the Works in Progress series in Law and Literature, which provides a venue for new work in the field. He is also co-editor of Critical Analysis of Law, and a co-editor of the New Rambler Review.