Consumptive Killers: Tuberculosis and Crime Fiction From L. T. Meade to Doc Holliday

Abstract This article examines the figure of the criminal consumptive in British and American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there is a substantial body of criticism dealing with the connections between criminal and pathological discourses in the fin-de-siècle and the first decades of the twentieth century, this piece argues for a more direct imaginative connection between tuberculosis and criminality in medical literature and fiction of this time. Beginning in the mid-century, but intensifying after Robert Koch’s identification of the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882, consumption was often tied to particular forms of emotional incoherence and ‘insanity’: the tubercular individual was supposedly inclined to frantic action, unaccountable ‘sensitivities’, and a potentially violent selfishness. In this rendering, the consumptive was thought to be inherently predisposed to become a killer. This article takes L. T. Meade’s story ‘The Horror of Studley Grange’ (1894) as a key literary case study for this discourse, but it also turns in its final section to consider the surprising ways in which early fictional representations of the consumptive Wild West gunslinger Doc Holliday depart from it. This article argues that writers such as Alfred Henry Lewis and Walter Noble Burns convert the tropes of consumptive dangerousness into signs of martial valour, reworking the narrative structures of pathological criminality into forms more suited to their frontier setting. In the presence of Holliday, works like Lewis’s The Sunset Trail (1905) and Burns’s Tombstone (1927) come to suggest that there is something tubercular about the character of the American West itself.