From Sherlock Holmes To ‘The Kid Detective,’ A Brief 4-20 Exploration Into Why So Many Detectives Turn To Drugs

I devoured Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries when I was way too young to understand them. My parents got an omnibus of them at a yard sale and brought it home to help me learn English and oh how I loved how the language felt in my head, how Holmes created order out of a confusion of signs and symbols. These stories are dear to me to this day. From them, I went to Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, thrilled by the horror stories, enchanted by the poetry, and amazed to discover him as at least one parent of Sherlock Holmes. Poe had a detective, too, created years before the term “detective” had been coined, named C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin figured in three short stories: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and the incomparable “The Purloined Letter” (which Rian Johnson recently paid homage to in The Glass Onion). Dupin’s strategy was not his obvious intelligence, but his emotional intelligence. Poe called it “ratiocination” and defined it as a kind of extreme empathy that allowed Dupin to project himself in anyone’s shoes and, using the knowledge gained from this intimate perspective, suss out the process of any crime. These three stories are the blueprint for everything that followed: every breed of detective in every phylum of detective story. For me, the more I did my own investigation into the history of this soothing pastime (what’s better, after all, than fables with solutions?) the more it became clear that the first detective, the one whom Dupin himself emulates, is Oedipus, and that Oedipus’ Moriarity, the grand fiend he’s been tasked to bring to justice, is himself. 

I wonder if I didn’t connect so strongly with Sherlock Holmes and Auguste Dupin as a lonesome little kid with a stutter, the only Chinese kid in a white elementary school, because I recognized myself in them. Not their brilliance, of course, but an iconoclasm severe enough to suggest neurodivergence. They’re weirdos, beset by anxiety, tending toward addiction, and alone by tragedy or circumstance, misunderstood by the greater world. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, with what appears to be obsessive compulsive disorder indicated by his insistence on maintaining a bank balance of exactly 444₤ 44s 4p (among other things), is treated as an object of mirth by his subjects. He dresses oddly, speaks differently, is picky about what he eats, and often suffers from anxiety and an upset stomach. I loved him, too, and John Dickson Carr’s peculiar detective Gideon Fell and, then, modern examples like Jake Kasdan’s weirdo Daryl Zero from Zero Effect, and Tony Shalhoub’s severely OCD-afflicted Adrian Monk from the 8-season run of the television show Monk. I have always loved heroes that portrayed the struggle, and the importance, of self-acceptance. Heroes who confirm how empathy can be a valuable tool for navigating a capricious world and its difficult-to-parse relationships instead of a mortal vulnerability. Heroes who speak to how neurodivergence might naturally cause isolation and loneliness, but that there are true friends who’ll vibe with your wavelength eventually, and a place where your mocked and despised weaknesses can be developed into strengths. 

In Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet” (1887), Holmes mentions his fictional counterpart Dupin as “inferior” and “showy.” I used to take that as a serious indictment of Poe’s work, but I see it now as a character defect of Holmes — a certain narcissism that he blunted with various narcotics and stimulants. I have often felt the same immediate loathing of those who exhibit what I perceive as my own most obvious, and most hated, qualities. In 1889, Doyle writes in “The Sign of the Four”:

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks.  Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Sherlock Holmes, in addition to cocaine he snorts now and again from his snuffbox, is an intravenous drug user. I saw this as a weakness for most of my life; now I see it as an unsuccessful strategy Holmes was employing in order to self-medicate his mental difference. In later stories, Dr. Watson helps his friend “wean” himself from his addiction to “various substances.” Holmes thinks he needs illicit drugs to function, but in actuality, he doesn’t. It’s one of the rare times the great detective is wrong.

By the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, after a string of political assassinations decimated leaders of the American progressive and Civil Rights movements, the detective genre began to reflect a new collective pessimism. What if detectives, even as they solved the cases they were assigned, were no longer capable of restoring society? In 1941, even if Sam Spade in John Huston’s adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon plays by his own set of rules, at the end of the day he turns in the woman he loves to avenge the murder of a partner he doesn’t even like. By the 1970s, Jake Gittes’ successful uncovering of the machinations of a grand plot in Chinatown doesn’t save his girl from death nor her daughter from what is sure to be a lifetime of abuse; Joe Frady’s uncovering of a corporation of hired assassins in The Parallax View makes exactly as little of a ripple in the grand design of the universe as Harry Moseby’s uncovering of a convoluted snuggling operation in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves. That is, the more detectives learn in the 1970s, the less they understand. The only thing they successfully uncover is that the corruption of our systems is so deeply entrenched that shining a light on it can no longer kill it.

Even Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe gets a reimagining in 1973 in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Unlike the 1953 novel’s version of him, this Marlowe (Elliot Gould) isn’t quick with the world-weary quip in the service of a clearly-defined narrative with a sad but satisfying resolution, but mumbly and listless, drugged, it would seem, losing fights with his cat and incapable of understanding how and why the world has changed around him. His confusion is ours and his placid acceptance, indicated by his refrain of “it’s okay with me,” speaks more to tired resignation than to any actual understanding.

“Pothead” heroes proliferated in this period — spurred by a general disillusionment and despair, I think, but also most obviously by cultural icons like Dr. Timothy Leary encouraging a generation of kids in 1967 to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Do a little acid maybe to fling open Aldous Huxley’s “doors of perception,” or on the other side, smoke a little weed to better cope with the violent end of the Summer of Love. Might as well accept it, there’s nothing you can do about it in a country that will institute a draft for an unjust war and open fire on their own students. In the detective genre, even kids got wastoid representation in monster-hunter Shaggy, introduced in Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo first broadcast in 1969.

Three years before, there were hints of the coming empathy chill in Richard Anderson’s spy movie The Quiller Memorandum (1966) in which a zoned-out George Segal is tasked with trying to figure out who’s been picking off a few British secret agents in a nightmarish Cold War Berlin populated by neo-Nazis and puppets. With a screenplay by Harold Pinter, it is the most direct in terms of tone and execution, antecedent to Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Even Sherlock Holmes isn’t immune to a retrofit in the 1970s. In the decade, Holmes is a mournful, closeted semi-recluse who can’t save a woman who has retained his services and in the final scenes of Billy Wilder’s deeply melancholy The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) retreats to his room to take a “7% solution of cocaine” to soothe his grief. He’s also a mental patient in Anthony Harvey’s They Might Be Giants (1971) played by George C. Scott where a shrink named Watson (Joanne Woodward) is pulled into his delusion to engage a case in which the entire design of the universe is forced into a kind of order at odds with all evidence to the chaotic contrary; and he’s something of a fraud, too, in Gene Wilder’s The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1974). There’s no one, not even the great man himself, coming to save a world broken beyond fixing.

I think the resurgence of narcotized detectives in the new millennium speaks to a collective numbness caused by the untrammeled death of the planet, a growing wealth divide, and unredressed sociopolitical injustice. It’s less now about taking the edge off pain than it is a survival strategy. Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant II: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) finds its “hero” detective Sgt. Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) strung out on vicodin, cocaine and dope in a post-Katrina Big Easy when he’s asked to investigate the murders of five Senegalese immigrants. In a strange film’s strangest sequence, a blissed out McDonagh hallucinates a pair of iguanas on his coffee table, crooning a Johnny Adams standard to distract McDonagh, and us, during an interrogation. Herzog shoots the lizards in extreme close-up, forcing us into the same irrational, hallucinatory space as the addict. Later, McDonagh uses a crack pipe he’s shared with the subject of his investigation as evidence for a conviction. For these criminal, demented labors, he’s promoted to Captain. It’s another escalation of the intoxication trope in detective stories. Initially a tool for adaptation, it’s now finally the only way a mad world is legible. The only hope for making sense of the senseless is to get high as a kite.

Paul Thomas Anderson echoes the sentiment in his Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice (2014) in which a mostly incoherent Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) stumbles through 1970s Los Angeles and its collection of New Age spiritualists, hippies, Black Panthers, drug dealers, and other assorted period fauna. It’s not even clear what this detective’s quarry is as he ping-pongs between one quest and another. He is a detective without a case, but really, more like the little Dutch Boy a few fingers short of the number of holes sprung in our cultural dam.

More recently, David Robert Mitchell’s underseen Under the Silver Lake (2018) pairs beautifully with Richard Kelly’s modern cult classic Southland Tales (2006): two detective films with confused narrators uncovering, with no benefit to them, grand conspiracies with inscrutable aims run by anonymous malefactors. They are mystery films in a larger sense — paranoid conspiracy scenarios like those of the 1970s detective cycle, but magnified now by a real sense of anguish and resignation in place of the shock and outrage of the 1970s. They deal with cults and mad conspiracy theories; insta-celebrities and the manipulation of the media apparatus. Their heroes are truth-finders but there’s nothing left to solve.

I think there was still a feeling back in the 1970s that the real-life resolution of monstrous events like Watergate, masterfully-told in Alan Pakula’s superlative procedural All the President’s Men, might bring about some sort of positive change. There was still faith that everyone had shame and shared a concept of decency. Now? Any kind of hopefulness bad people can be brought to justice much less be trusted to do the obviously right thing feels quaint and even pathetic. In a state so fallen, the only recourse is self-medication: the drugged milk bars of A Clockwork Orange (1971) or the suicide booths of Soylent Green (1973). I think of another line from Poe, this from his “The Raven.” It goes: “Quaff oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore.” I’ve had it memorized for forty years now because I had to look it up to understand that the narrator is wanting to drink something that will make him forget what he’s lost. I was confused by the “kind” in front of the memory-erasing poison and had to confront before I was ready the thought that perpetual inebriation or suicide might not only be a mercy, but the last recourse for those infected with too much useless wisdom.

I want to wrap on a high note, though, with Evan Morgan’s unforgivably slept-on The Kid Detective (2020) starring Adam Brody as an Encyclopedia Brown manque, Abe Applebaum. Now 32 and long past his days as the mystery-solving toast of the town, Abe is entrusted with one last case: the murder of a child in his bucolic little burg that unearths old secrets and past hurts. Halfway through, he breaks open a capsule of what he’s been told is a popular new designer drug and snorts it, waking up hours later, naked, in a dumpster. The moment of his greatest befuddlement also represents a break in his case as the nature of the drug, and the promises he’s made during his blackout, leads him to solving not just the new caper, but a caper that has haunted him for all of his adult life and driven him into isolation and shame. The last shot of the film is Abe weeping openly, uncontrollably, even though things appear to be looking up for him for the first time in decades. He’s coming out of a nightmare, a bad trip, a period of numbness where things like justice felt impossible, and self-loathing was the demon he had to escape through numberless chemical strategies.

If these drugged detective stories point to hopelessness — a collection of worlds in which Colonel Kilgore of Apocalypse Now is the only character who can survive the war because he’s as insane as the war itself — here’s a drugged detective story that offers a glimpse into a possible happy outcome for all of us. One where at the end of our long nightmare of watching criminals flaunting their crimes with no fear of reprisal, we finally get a few heroes who are brave enough to believe in a just society again, smart enough to layout enough evidence to convince the inconvincible, and clever enough to swing the pendulum back toward righteousness. You should look it up. For all The Kid Detective’s tough topics and reckoning with repressed horrors, hope is an incredible place to spend a couple hours.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.