Essential McLuhan 26 From DaVinci to Holmes Joyce’s famous remark that, “though he might have been more humble, there’s no police like Holmes,” contains a world of insight. It includes the modern world and elucidates it at the same instant. Joyce explored popular phraseology and heroes with a precision which this book cannot emulate. In the above phrase which refers to “no place like home,” Joyce diagnoses the collapse of family life and the rise of the police state amidst a welter of sentiment which is partly rosy and partly lethal. Homes are now a part of a police system. Holmes, the homehater and woman-hater, is the hero of the “home-loving” and feminized middle class. The arrogant, sterile Holmes and the happy prolific homes of the late Victorian world are fused in a single image which arrests the mind for contemplation and insight. The passion for Holmes and man-hunting literature (which gives the modern world a major point of correspondence with the symbolic figure of Nimrod and the tower of Babel) goes along Why are both scientist and artist crackpots and pariahs in the popular imagination? Holmes, Renaissance titan or Last of the Mohicans? Watson, wife or mother of the virtuoso of crime? The sleuth cult foreshadows the arrival of the police state? with the commercial passion for exploiting the values of childhood, femininity, and domesticity. On paper there has never been such a cult of the home. In entertainment there has never been such a cult of the sleuth. To provide in a few words a pedigree for the figure of the sleuth who dominates thriller fiction may not be very convincing. The quickest way to get a view of the matter is via Holmes, Kipling, and Darwin. However, Kipling’s Mowgli and Edgar Queeny’s “granitic believer in the law of the jungle,” when taken together, open up interrelations between familiar vistas. In the opening paragraph of Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes is described as follows: He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen; but, as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions save with a gibe and a sneer… Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high- power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. Here is the split man of the head-versus-heart, thought-versus-feeling type who appeared in the early seventeenth century. But it was not until Darwin that the head (science) became definitely and consciously antisocial. Mr. Queeny derives his “law of the jungle” versus “crusading idealist” from this later nineteenth-century phase of the older split.