ABSTRACT
Just as Stevenson had written of Edinburgh as a city constructed from oppositions between a gothic past and a commercial present, so Doyle’s early fiction shows experimentation across a range of similarly con trasting forms. In his first three novels, gothicism competes both with contemporary realism and with historical fiction to define the direction of writing whose main imperative is the exploration of masculine dou bles. The father-son relationship is the main site for this exploration - one that is coupled with the act of narrating itself. This relationship is used to image a complicity between filial stories and the paternalistic, law-embodying truth modes, the sworn statements, legal testimonies and evidential diaries which they employ for their narration. In the name of truth, and sometimes in competition with it, these filial narra tors tell improbably tall stories. In Doyle’s first historical novel, Micah Clarke, this process is reversed. As Judge Jefferies interrogates the Sedgmoor rebels, legal discourse loses its authority, becoming instead the hysterical tool of a failing regime. At issue in Doyle’s first three novels, The Mystery o f Cloomber (1888), Micah Clarke (1889) and The Firm of Girdlestone (1890) is the truth status of a newly formulated narrative of masculinity.
