Locating the Colonial in the Regulated Urban Space of Sherlock Holmes's London

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, which are both canonical and popular, are exemplary of how empire is textually embedded in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction about urban life. Reading the corpus within the framework of materialist postcolonial theoretical propositions, this article demonstrates how the stories, which link the colonial with the criminal, draw maps of London that locate particular areas of the city as sites in which Asia as colonial threat is hesitantly integrated into the metropolitan landscape. As also contemporaneous nonliterary texts testify, the stories, particularly "The Sign of Four" (1890), recognize the particularly ambivalent role of the Thames and corresponding transportation infrastructures, which both enable the building of the imperial metropolis and pose as a gateway for external threats to enter. The stories depict the city as spaces regulated not only by civic apparatuses but also epistemological conventions, both of which serve as regulatory functions that manage risks of social precarity to ensure civic order and imperial surplus. However, the stories as representative of the detective story genre at the turn of the century also demonstrate ambivalent attitudes toward governmental authority, providing textual spaces for critique of the colonial discourse.