“Elementary, my dear Professor Hatton….”
What is it about Hatton and Roumande which reminds so many readers of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson? Don’t get me wrong, I’m deeply flattered by the comparison. What writer, wouldn’t be? Sherlock Holmes and his side kick, Watson are the most iconic sleuthing team in crime writing history. Holmes is the detective whose unrivalled brilliance solves the crime, whilst dependable old Watson narrates the stories thus giving us unique, observational insights into the Great Man, only occasionally stepping into the frame wielding a gun or his medical bag. We admire both men for different reasons but the team has a leader and the leader is indisputably, Sherlock Holmes.
Hatton and Roumande are different. One readers sums it up very nicely saying that Monsieur Albert Roumande is “far more than any Watson.”
I think so too, so I shall start with Monsieur Albert Roumande. He’s a diener, meaning servant of the morgue. His jobs involve cleaning, pickling and preserving cadavers, keeping the cutting tools sharp, general admin and financial management , training of new assistants, the odd bit of anatomical drawing, hanging up herbs to mitigate the stench of the morgue and so forth. He has a strong sense of his own class (artisan), his nationality (decidedly French) and his heritage – his great grandfather learnt the trade of diener, at the footstep of the guillotine, during the Revolution when Paris was awash with both bodies and blood. A fine time for anatomists, then.
Meanwhile, Professor Adolphus Hatton is the younger man at thirty three and English but he’s far from posh. He understands the meaning of hard work, hailing from a poor, rural background himself. As a boy, he grew up on the land, whilst his family scraped together the money and paid for …
