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ОглавлениеIN WRITING THE SHERLOCK HOLMES tales, Arthur Conan Doyle invented the valuable literary genre of “linked” short stories: their plots are independent (so that they can be read in any order) but the central characters and settings continue. A detective is the perfect figure to appear in such a structure, for he remains unchanged while a succession of clients bring their various problems to him.
Because Holmes appears in all the stories, Watson in all but two, and several other characters repeatedly, it is easy for the reader to see the tales as fragments of biography. Enthusiasts, either believing or pretending to believe, have speculated and written endlessly about Holmes’s accomplishments and character, and about the deeds he may have performed which Doyle (or Watson) unaccountably failed to record. In addition, it is easy to see themes and characteristics that appear in story after story, some with gradual changes over the decades from A Study in Scarlet to the final, sad tales published in 1927.
Readers who see the Canon as a unit, rather than as unconnected stories, have felt the need for reference books that help them trace the developments and locate specific names or incidents. An early alphabetical guide of this kind was Jay Finley Christ’s An Irregular Guide to Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1947). It was valuable, but idiosyncratic and, even with two supplements, inadequate. A modern successor is Good Old Index (1987), by William D. Goodrich. Both are keyed to the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes. Some devotees prefer The Canonical Compendium (1999) by Stephen Clarkson, with references to several editions of the Canon. Rather different, and enjoyable as well as useful, is Jack Tracy’s Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana (1977), which concentrates on proper names and some matters of Victorian daily life, defining them and indicating the story (but not the precise page) that gives each its interest to a reader of the Canon.
“What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?” asked Edgar W. Smith in his first essay as editor of the Baker Street Journal (1946). His answer began with discussion not so much of Holmes as of Holmes’s time, but then it turned to the figure of the great detective himself:
Not only there and then, but here and now, he stands before us as a symbol — a symbol, if you please, of all that we are not, but ever would be. His figure is sufficiently remote to make our secret aspirations for transference seem unshameful, yet close enough to give them plausibility. We see him as the fine expression of our urge to trample evil and to set aright the wrongs with which the world is plagued.
That is a lot to ask of a human being, or even of a literary approximation of a human being, and yet enthusiasts continue to ask it. Perhaps it would be better first to take the measure of Holmes as a man — “the best and wisest man whom I have ever known,” Watson is made to call him, borrowing a phrase first used by Plato about Socrates.
Holmes reports that his ancestors were “country squires” and that a grandmother was a sister of “Vernet, the French artist” (presumably Émile Jean Horace Vernet, 1789–1863). His older brother Mycroft appears significantly in two of the stories, and is glimpsed in a third. Otherwise, the reader knows nothing of Holmes’s family or background beyond vague hints about his university education. The Canon provides an outline of his career, from his early cases as an amateur (“The ‘Gloria Scott’” and “The Musgrave Ritual”) through his establishment in London as a consulting detective; his meeting with Watson in (probably) January 1881; ten years of professional success; his encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach in 1891; his return from supposed death three years later; a further nine years of professional work; his retirement to Sussex, from which he emerged for counter-espionage work (“His Last Bow”) in 1912–14. During his active career he is said to have handled thousands of cases, only a handful of which are chronicled. The great stretches of time unaccounted for — if one accepts Holmes as a historical figure, and the tales as fragments of his biography — are an immense temptation to the tale-spinner and the scholar alike.
HIS LIMITATIONS. Sherlock Holmes is first presented in A Study in Scarlet as a tall, thin, flamboyant, and eccentric student in the pathology laboratory of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, where he is developing a practical test for bloodstains. By Chapter II he is rooming with Watson at 221B Baker Street, and before long Watson, puzzled about his companion, tries to set out his “limits” in a famous chart:
1. Knowledge of Literature. — Nil.
2. “ “ Philosophy. — Nil.
3. “ “ Astronomy. — Nil.
And so on. Eventually he discovers that Holmes is “a consulting detective,” who believes in keeping in the “lumber-room” of his brain only such information as he is likely to need. As the acquaintance deepens, however, it becomes clear that Holmes is by no means so utilitarian in his thoughts, or so innocent of literature, philosophy, astronomy, and the rest. Indeed, by the time of “The Lion’s Mane” late in the Canon, the reader is not surprised to hear Holmes himself speaking of the vague and half-remembered information stored somewhere in the “box-room” that his mind has become.
Holmes’s intellectual limits extend at least to these distances:
• A vast knowledge of (non-fictional) criminal literature and the history of crime and strange occurrences, which he is wont to cite for the bewilderment of professional detectives.
• Technical knowledge of tobacco ash, footprints, tattoos, ciphers, manuscript dating, and other such subjects, on all of which he claimed to have written monographs — to say nothing of “the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand.” At the end of his career he prepared The Whole Art of Detection.
• A detailed knowledge of London, including its geography and an extraordinary number of its people among all classes.
• An enjoyment of serious music and at least a superficial acquaintance with composers and performers, although it appears that he attended concerts as a means of relaxation rather than to be stimulated through close attention as a genuine musical aficionado might. He also showed the ability to play the violin passably, and the flexibility to extract noises from it while it was flung carelessly across his knee rather than held in the usual position.
• An acquaintance, perhaps broad rather than deep, with literature in a number of languages; he refers to Hafiz, Horace, Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, Goethe, and even the occasional English author, and claims at one point to be carrying “my pocket Petrarch.”
• “A good practical knowledge of British law,” as Watson puts it — the sort of familiarity that bred contempt, judging from a number of incidents in which Holmes lets malefactors go free, breaks into dwelling-houses in the nighttime, extorts evidence in defiance of the Judges’ Rules, and otherwise comports himself outside the law.
• Considerable knowledge of chemistry, to the point that he spent months (at least) conducting researches at Montpellier shortly before the affair of “The Empty House.” He used chemistry in his professional work at times, probably chiefly to detect poisons, but also apparently did experiments to occupy his mind in the intervals between cases. He was frequently unable, however, to explain his work clearly to Watson, who reports him attempting to “dissolve” a hydrocarbon as though that were a difficult achievement.
• An unparalleled ability to observe trifles about a person, room, or road and to apply logic and a knowledge of daily life in order to reconstruct the events of the past.
HOLMES THE MAN. But there is more to Sherlock Holmes than this intellectual catalogue; there remain the traits that caused Watson to label him “best and wisest.” Such traits are not so easily listed, for they are conveyed to the reader — as they were to Watson — through long acquaintance and leisurely intercourse.
Christopher Morley, selecting episodes from the Canon and preparing a school edition of them in 1944, called his volume Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship. The modern reader may snicker at the portrayal of a close, emotional friendship between two adult men, and certainly at such sentiments as Holmes and Watson express about one another in “The Three Garridebs” at the dreadful moment when Watson is wounded. Are they lovers? one may wish to ask. They are not, although one or two pornographers have chosen to interpret them that way. They are simply close friends, demonstrating a kind of relationship that was common both in the literature and in the real life of the 1890s. It was an era when friendship between men and women on equal terms was virtually impossible, and when the bonds one might associate with soldiers under fire could also be formed between men in the world of London clubs and flats. The picture of it seen in Holmes and Watson appears wholesome indeed beside the male relationships in, say, George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894).
Holmes evidently has some of the qualities one might want most in a friend, the right combination of loyalty (emphasized in “The Dying Detective” when Holmes is obliged to pretend betrayal) and independence. The mutual affection of Holmes and Watson is understated, both as a demonstration of the friendship’s firmness and as a natural consequence of Victorian formality. “My dear Watson,” and “My dear Doctor,” Holmes still calls his colleague after twenty years of shared danger. He is obeying the conventions of his time and place, but no doubt the stress was all on the “dear.”
How tolerable Holmes may have been as a companion is another question altogether. His “cat-like love of personal cleanliness” is balanced by a pack-rat love of clutter, an indifference to the proper places for household objects, a taste for strong tobacco to the point of filling his rooms with a thick blue haze of smoke. He is demanding, both of Watson and of strangers; he is secretive, preferring to spring surprises rather than take a companion into his confidence. He is also a captive of many Victorian prejudices, seen in their ugliest form in his baiting of a black man in “The Three Gables” and one or two remarks that may be anti-Semitic. At times he fawns on the rich and aristocratic, although he can be contemptuous of those, such as the King of Bohemia, who do not live up to noblesse oblige, and he can occasionally be very gentle with the lowly.
Most notably, Holmes is moody, alternating periods of energy, enthusiasm, and prodigious work with periods of languor, inactivity, and apparent depression. Alan Bradley and William Sarjeant in Ms. Holmes of Baker Street (1989), affecting to believe that the detective was secretly a woman, attribute this alternation of moods to the influence of a strong menstrual cycle. Most other commentators have unhesitatingly seen it as a manic-depressive personality at work. Holmes could be arrogant (though rarely as disagreeable to Watson as Basil Rathbone makes him in his films of the 1940s) and nervous (though not nearly so full of tics, shrill cries, and mindless movement as Jeremy Brett makes him in the television series of the 1980s).
In the early stories, most explicitly The Sign of the Four, Holmes is seen as a user of drugs, “a seven-per-cent solution” of cocaine, which is a stimulant and anti-depressant. Watson scolds him for this abuse of his body, but seems resigned to it. Use of such drugs was legal in the England of the 1890s, and is used to emphasize Holmes’s mercurial personality and his pose of sophisticated eccentricity. Many details are elucidated by Jack Tracy and Jim Berkey in Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson (1978):
Holmes’s cocaine habit was in no way unlawful. . . . Not until 1916 was the sale of cocaine restricted to a doctor’s prescription. . . . If Holmes made use of a 10- to 20-mg. dose in each of his three-times-daily injections, then his habit was costing him between 2¢. and 4¢ a day. . . . 10 percent became the official strength of solution in the British Pharmacopoeia in 1898. . . . One grain, or 65 mg. — legally purchased from the neighbourhood chemist — would then provide three ample doses, one day’s supply, and a grain a day was often mentioned in the literature of the time as a recommended dosage for the treatment of melancholia.
The horrified reaction of modern readers, aware of contemporary drug abuse, is a misunderstanding of the character as Doyle was drawing him and his habits.
HOLMES AND WOMEN. “Women have seldom been an attraction to me,” Holmes says in “The Lion’s Mane,” “for my brain has always governed my heart.” But the converse is far from true; something in Holmes’s character has attracted the opposite sex since the days when the first stories were being published, and Doyle received proposals of marriage on his character’s behalf. One contemporary woman has observed that “I feel sorry for men Sherlockians, because they don’t have Sherlock Holmes to fall in love with.” Even within the Canon, such women as Violet Hunter (“The Copper Beeches”) and Mary Morstan (who eventually marries Watson) show some attraction to Holmes. He does not reciprocate, making a number of derogatory remarks about women, although he does demonstrate an expert knowledge of perfumes and millinery when they are relevant to his investigation. The apparent exception, on which many Sherlockians have written at length, is Irene Adler of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” significantly a story written before Holmes’s character was fully formed and demonstrated. He calls Irene Adler “the woman,” giving a lasting impression of infatuation even though Watson assures the reader that there was nothing emotional in Holmes’s admiration of her. She is an extraordinary woman compared to the damsels in distress who populate many of the other tales, and those who insist that Holmes should have a mate could do worse than settle for her.
“May I marry Holmes?” William Gillette is said to have telegraphed to Doyle when he was writing his play Sherlock Holmes at the turn of the century, meaning that he felt the need to introduce a love interest. Doyle’s response: “You may marry him or murder him or do what you like with him.” Gillette did, and numerous dramatizers and authors have followed suit, including Jerome Coopersmith, who explained what he had done in the musical Baker Street (1965): “I gave Sherlock Holmes a girl friend, and that is as it should be.” Novelist Laurie R. King has gone farther, giving Holmes a wife, a far younger woman named Mary Russell who is a theology student and apprentice detective, in a series of novels that began with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994). They have attracted a large coterie of (mostly female) fans with an online presence (www.rj-anderson.com/russell), although many sober Sherlockians have trouble recognizing the Holmes they portray. In the Canon itself, the fair sex is, as Holmes says, Watson’s department. (Holmes’s love life, and related issues, are treated at length in my book In Bed with Sherlock Holmes, 1984.)
THE GREAT HIATUS. No aspect of Holmes’s life is odder than the three years that are said to have elapsed between May 1891 and April 1894, that is, between the events of “The Final Problem” and those of “The Empty House.” The latter story offers Holmes’s brief narrative: after escaping Professor Moriarty at the Falls of the Reichenbach, he travelled to Tibet, conducted explorations under the name of Sigerson, visited such exotic sites as Mecca (where non-Muslims are not welcome) and Khartoum (capital of the Sudan, during an interlude between bitter wars against Britain), and spent time at Montpellier in France doing laboratory research into “the coal-tar derivatives.”
The reader who sees the stories as biography demands a better truth, an explanation that adds something to the understanding of Holmes’s personality. The fascination with the Great Hiatus (a term for this three-year interlude apparently coined by Edgar W. Smith in a 1946 article in the Baker Street Journal) may also proceed from a wish to know exactly why and how Holmes changed — why, as folklore insists that a contemporary reader told Doyle, “Sherlock Holmes may not have died when he fell down that waterfall, but he was never the same man afterwards.” Jack Tracy, in his Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana (1977), says quite truthfully: “In the absence of supporting evidence, an enormous number of alternate theories have been formed to account for Holmes’s activities during this period, each more outrageous than the others.” For example, the story of his involvement in the August 4, 1892, murders at Fall River, Massachusetts, in which Lizzie Borden was acquitted, has yet to be told. The events of “Wisteria Lodge” are alleged to have taken place in 1892, clearly an impossibility.
A FIGURE OF REAL LIFE. William S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1962) is a full-length “biography,” with this significant authorial note: “No characters in this book are fictional, although the author should very much like to meet any who claim to be.” He thus takes to its extreme the Sherlockian game of treating Holmes as a historical figure, skillfully blending inferences from the Canon with information from more conventional historical sources. He begins with Holmes’s birth, continues with his hypothetical education and his known early cases, and goes through the dramatic points of his career as narrated in most of the sixty stories. Final chapters deal with his retirement and with his imagined death on January 6, 1957, on a cliff top in Sussex.
Along the way, Baring-Gould introduces a number of ideas that are sometimes accepted by Sherlockians as authentic parts of Holmes’s life, although they are best classified as folklore:
• That Professor Moriarty was his mathematics tutor in his youth.
• That Holmes had a second brother, Sherrinford (a name taken from Doyle’s earliest notes for A Study in Scarlet, which used the name “Sherrinford Holmes” for the detective himself, and “Ormond Sacker” for Watson).
• That Holmes toured America as a young actor in 1879–81.
• That he assisted in the solution of the Jack the Ripper murders in London in 1888.
• That he enjoyed a dalliance with Irene Adler in Montenegro shortly after his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls.
At the same time, he gives the status of history to speculations that have been vaguely accepted by Sherlockians, such as a birth date for Holmes of January 6, 1854. The year seems plausible from several Canonical references. The month and date are attributed to Christopher Morley, who apparently chose them to match those of his brother Frank, and to refer to Twelfth Night, a play which Holmes twice quotes. A later scholar has seen significance in Holmes’s behaviour on a January 7 in The Valley of Fear: he shows signs of suffering from a hangover.
More recent “biographies” of Holmes are the work of June Thomson (Holmes and Watson, 1995) and Nick Rennison (Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography, 2005). In addition, a number of novelists have imagined or reimagined parts of Holmes’s life, from Michael Harrison (I, Sherlock Holmes, 1977) to countless authors of pastiches. Doyle might well have been astonished by such detailed attention to his creation, although he saw something of Holmes’s power in the indignant letters he received after “The Final Problem” killed off the detective, as well as the proposals of marriage that arrived for Holmes at other times in his career. Letters in fact still are directed to Holmes at his address of 221B Baker Street, and through the latter half of the twentieth century were answered by a staff member at the Abbey National Building Society, which happened to occupy that address. A selection of them was published as Letters to Sherlock Holmes (1985). More recently, correspondence addressed to 221B is delivered to the Sherlock Holmes Museum nearby at 239 Baker Street. The existence of such letters is a tribute to the plausibility of the figure Doyle originally created, although the image of Holmes that now lives in the public mind is much less subtle and complex than the one that lives in the pages of the Canon.
The Canon, save for four short stories and a few other passages, is presented as memoirs by John H. Watson, a former army doctor who was the companion of Sherlock Holmes for most of his working life. Indeed, the first half of A Study in Scarlet is subtitled as “a reprint from the reminiscences” of the good doctor, leading playful bibliographers to speculate about the very limited press run those Reminiscences must have had. Watson thus must be considered first as an “author” (in which case Arthur Conan Doyle is relegated to the status of Literary Agent, a title some Sherlockians have been happy to give him) and then as a character.
As author — biographer, one might say — Watson is a trifle self-conscious; several Canonical stories mention exchanges between him and Holmes about the narratives he has published, which Holmes says are full of “romanticism” and empty of detective logic. “I could not tamper with the facts,” Watson indignantly replies in The Sign of the Four. But there is much evidence that he does tamper with them, both deliberately and accidentally. “The Second Stain,” for example, acknowledges the need to be “vague in certain details,” to avoid betraying state secrets. The frequent references to towns and streets that do not exist, politicians who did not hold office, and weather that does not match the records in The Times, all suggest similar concealment. Other inconsistencies, such as the jump from June to September within a few hours in The Sign of the Four, can be attributed to carelessness. Sherlockians have taken joy for several decades in identifying and explaining such little errors, often blaming them on a medical man’s dreadful penmanship. Late in the Canon, Watson is very bold about addressing his audience directly, as when he uses the introductory paragraph of “The Veiled Lodger” to announce that a certain story will be made public if illicit attempts to get at his papers are not abandoned. By that time, the relationship between Holmes and Watson is one of equals, the author having an established position just as the detective has. Holmes himself observes that “I am lost without my Boswell,” alluding to James Boswell, the companion and biographer of the eighteenth-century figure Dr. Samuel Johnson. Certainly Holmes without Watson is far different, far less comprehensible, the forlorn eccentric of “The Lion’s Mane” with no one to narrate the tales — and, more important, no one to serve as reliable setting for his sparkling gem.
Watson has been called “boobus Britannicus,” a phrase originated by Edmund Pearson (in The Bookman, 1932), who blamed illustrator Arthur Keller for making Watson look truly stupid. That was before Nigel Bruce’s bumbling portrayal in the 1940s films where he is made a constant fool, the better to set off Basil Rathbone’s Holmes. But the original Watson is no boob. Holmes is perhaps generous in telling Watson that “though you are not yourself luminous, you are a conductor of light,” but beyond doubt Watson is a man of common sense — as a physician, and certainly an army doctor, must be — and of courage as well as other good qualities which Holmes often recognizes. He may patronize Watson for lacking intellect to match his own, sometimes descending to cruelty, but it seems clear in most of the stories that he also respects Watson’s judgement. A passage in The Valley of Fear is particularly telling. Holmes has spun an elaborate web of speculation about the case, and Watson is doubtful:
“We have only their word for that.”
Holmes looked thoughtful. “I see, Watson. You are sketching out a theory by which everything they say from the beginning is false.... Well, that is a good sweeping generalization. Let us see what that brings us to....”
Watson proves to be wrong and Holmes right, of course, but the mutual respect remains. Holmes also finds his companion valuable as a reliable ally in time of emergency, the man who carries the gun in several crises and who will keep his wits about him. Indeed, there is more. At the end of “The Abbey Grange” he addresses his friend: “Watson, you are a British jury, and I never met a man who was more eminently fitted to represent one.” Readers of the stories have generally agreed, as did Edgar W. Smith in one of his eloquent editorials in the Baker Street Journal (1955), observing that it is the admirable Watson, rather than the unpredictable Holmes, who would make the more welcome friend. He may be ancestor of a hundred foolish companions to brilliant detectives (a cliché which also owes something to early Westerns), but he is himself an very fine fellow.
Biographical details about Watson are few. Of his family, the reader hears only about the “unhappy brother” whose alcoholism and death are chronicled in the early pages of The Sign of the Four. Watson took his medical degree in 1878 from the University of London (which validated credentials earned through hospital study, rather than providing medical instruction of its own), entered the army, and served in the Second Afghan War. British troops were in Afghanistan for the defence and consolidation of the Empire, and in particular to deter Russia from menacing India through the mountains. A treaty signed in 1879 with local puppet rulers got little respect from the heavily armed populace, and a powerful force massed in the spring of 1880. As Watson reports in A Study in Scarlet, he was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand, which took place July 27, 1880, about fifty miles northwest of Kandahar. It was an utter rout for the British; he was unusually lucky to survive in the slaughter and terrible heat, and to be carried to Kandahar in safety and eventually returned to England. Maiwand (2008) by Richard J. Stackpoole Ryding tells the story of the battle but somehow omits any reliable explanation of how Watson was injured. Although he claims that the Jezail bullet which hit him struck his shoulder and grazed the subclavian artery, there are references in later Canonical tales to a wound in his leg, or in one instance to an injured Achilles tendon. A number of Sherlockians have tried to reconcile all those references, suggesting two wounds, a faulty memory, malingering, or a bullet with an ingeniously complicated trajectory.
Repatriated to England, Watson soon met Holmes (on January 1, 1881, according to at least some scholars) and took up residence with him at 221B Baker Street. He remained there, apparently, for about seven years, until his marriage to Mary Morstan, at the end of The Sign of the Four. Thereafter, in several cases that are part of The Adventures, Watson is clearly living with a long-suffering wife, presumably Mary, and has entered private medical practice. Repeatedly he leaves Mary (and turns over the practice to an accommodating colleague, Jackson or Anstruther) briefly to accompany Holmes on some adventure. But by the time of “The Empty House,” which takes place in 1894, Watson has suffered a bereavement, and is free to move into the old rooms again, abandoning medicine for biography, when Holmes returns to London after a three-year absence. Still later, in “The Blanched Soldier,” Holmes speaks of Watson having “deserted me for a wife,” and one infers a second marriage.
Sherlockians traditionally drink a toast to “Dr. Watson’s second wife,” and a number of them have tried to identify her. The chronology is impossibly complicated, with inconsistencies that can be attributed to Watson’s muddled thinking or, more realistically, to Doyle’s complete indifference to such details. Of course it is more fun for Sherlockians to speculate that, as one of them has put it, “Watson had as many wives as Henry VIII.”
The fair sex is his department, as Holmes says; but he is chivalrous about it, and decent in every way. (Rex Stout’s article “Watson Was a Woman,” in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1941 and the anthology Profile by Gaslight three years later, was only a joke.) He seems to be the ideal Britisher, whom the author holds up to the reader as the measure of the less conventional Holmes. Indeed, one might say, he seems to be the author’s representative. Says Peter Costello in The Real World of Sherlock Holmes (1991): “Dr. Watson, whatever other models he may have had in real life, such as Conan Doyle’s own secretary Major Wood, is largely drawn from Doyle himself. For a start both are medical men of much the same age with sporting interests. Both have a bluff, hearty appearance. Both seem conventional, Imperialist in politics, non-intellectual men of action. Dr. Watson even shares Conan Doyle’s love for Southsea, and his literary tastes.” If Holmes is Arthur Conan Doyle’s mentor, Joseph Bell, surely Watson is Doyle himself.
PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY. For all the reputation he has developed as Holmes’s arch-enemy, Professor James (if that was in fact his given name) Moriarty figures in only three stories — in “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House,” with complementary narratives of the events surrounding his death, and briefly in The Valley of Fear. Countless cartoonists and parodists have drawn Moriarty into their creations; such respectable Holmesians as the producers of the Granada television series of the 1980s have succumbed to the temptation to expand his role, for example making Moriarty the genius behind the events of “The Red-Headed League,” an idea for which there is no justification in the original story.
Moriarty is presented, in “The Final Problem” and the second chapter of The Valley of Fear, as the master-criminal behind “half that is evil and ... nearly all that is undetected” in London:
He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed — the word is passed to the professor, the matter is organized and carried out.
In short, Moriarty is the modern Jonathan Wild, a successor to the criminal leader who operated in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century (born in 1683, he was hanged in 1725) and is known chiefly from Henry Fielding’s 1743 satire The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild the Great. Alec MacDonald, the Scotland Yard inspector in The Valley of Fear, vaguely dismisses Wild as “someone in a novel.” Holmes, of course, noting that Wild was real, adds that “The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up.” In “The Final Problem” he calls Moriarty “the Napoleon of crime.” The title is apparently borrowed from the sobriquet of another real-life criminal, Adam Worth (1844–1902), best known for the 1876 theft of a portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire by Thomas Gainsborough from a London gallery. His story is told in The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre (1997).
Moriarty is presented as a professor of mathematics, formerly of “one of our smaller universities,” dismissed as the result of “hereditary tendencies” which led him into unspecified wickedness. “At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem which has had a European vogue,” Holmes says, referring to one of the basic principles of algebra. More ominously, he elsewhere refers to Moriarty’s work on The Dynamics of an Asteroid, which has been interpreted as having to do with space travel or even atomic energy (and may in fact be a study of the notoriously complicated three-body problem of gravitational attraction). Sherlockians have sometimes compared his academic career with that of Simon Newcomb (1835–1909), an astronomer and author in other fields who worked at the Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere and is known as the rival of logician Charles Sanders Peirce. Of Moriarty’s personal life the only information provided in the Canon is that one brother was “a station master in the west of England” and another, also named James, a colonel. The professor’s physique was remarkable, as Holmes describes it in “The Final Problem,” as he was “extremely tall and thin,” with a great domed forehead, rounded shoulders, and a habit of oscillating his face “from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.”
Some close readers of the text have suggested that Moriarty never existed — that he was a fantasy of a drug-addicted Holmes, or at least that he was an innocent man, all his crimes imagined by Holmes in some paranoid delusion. Nicholas Meyer used that idea to good advantage in his highly successful novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), and Jeremy Brett’s play The Secret of Sherlock Holmes (1989) offers a variation on it. That extreme is no more reasonable than the popular Sherlockian belief that everything evil has Moriarty behind it, and the vague impression among the public that the Holmes stories are about one struggle after another between the detective and the professor, rather as Denis Nayland Smith endlessly battles Fu Manchu in the writings of Sax Rohmer. A particularly well-rounded picture of Moriarty the master criminal is provided in a trilogy of novels by John Gardner: The Return of Moriarty (1974), The Revenge of Moriarty (1975), and, much delayed, Moriarty (2008).
IRENE ADLER. “She is the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet,” Holmes reports in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” before setting eyes on Irene Adler. No matter: the description has been generally accepted, as has Watson’s report that Holmes characterized her as “the woman.” She is mentioned in one or two other stories, but only in reference to the adventure of which she is the central figure, “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
Early in that story, Holmes looks her up in a reference book and reports that she is an operatic contralto, born in New Jersey and now retired from the international stage. He patronizingly calls her a “young person”; the King of Bohemia, who feels the threat of blackmail from her, calls her a “well-known adventuress.” Holmes is engaged to recover the compromising papers from her clutches, and quite fails to do so. By the end of the tale, having seen the lady in person, he is so impressed — perhaps with her courage and intelligence, perhaps with her beauty — that he asks for her photograph as a souvenir, and allows Watson to record that he had been “beaten by a woman’s wit.”
Irene Adler lives in St. John’s Wood, the fashionable London neighbourhood in which wealthy men did typically install their mistresses. She is presumably modelled on the women known as adventuresses, grandes horizontales, or “pretty horsebreakers” — courtesans more realistically associated with the 1860s, such as Laura Bell, Cora Pearl, Catherine Walters, and Caroline Otero. Fanfare of Strumpets (1971), a non-Sherlockian book by that venerable Sherlockian Michael Harrison, is full of anecdotes about them. In Irene Adler there may also be a whiff of the scandalous Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) and of Lillie Langtry (1852–1929), “the Jersey Lily” who became a mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales. Yet another original is clearly Lola Montez (1818– 61), whose intrigues with Louis of Bavaria had been notorious five decades earlier. At a less exalted level, Sherlockians associate Irene Adler with “Aunt Clara,” the spoilt heroine of a 1940s comic song, the full story of which is told in We Always Mention Aunt Clara (1990) by W.T. Rabe.
There is little in the text of the story to justify attaching to Irene Adler either the social standing or the morals of such women. A feminist interpretation of her life (as put forward, not surprisingly, by some of the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes) makes her an early career woman, misused and cast aside by a snob of a Bohemian prince. The American mystery novelist Carole Nelson Douglas interprets her in that way with particular sensitivity and conviction in a series of eight books:
• Good Night, Mr. Holmes (1990)
• Good Morning, Irene (1991), also published as The Adventuress
• Irene at Large (1992), also published as A Soul of Steel
• Irene’s Last Waltz (1994), also published as Another Scandal in Bohemia
• Chapel Noir (2001)
• Castle Rouge (2002)
• Femme Fatale (2003)
• Spider Dance (2004)
But most readers, it seems, have preferred to see her as the woman Sherlock Holmes loved and lost (or, in a minority view, loved and later won). Belden Wigglesworth celebrated her in a poem in the Baker Street Journal in 1946, one of many such apostrophes:
I wonder what your thoughts have been,
Your inmost thoughts of him, Irene, Across the years?....
Did you forget?
Did Baker Street quite lack a Queen? I wonder.
These and other imaginings are discussed at length, as are all aspects of Irene Adler, in chapters of my book In Bed with Sherlock Holmes (1984). There is much to say about her, and much that has already been said, but the Canon provides little basis for either sentimental or prurient speculation about a Holmes-Adler connection.
MYCROFT HOLMES. The brother of Sherlock Holmes, older than he by seven years, figures in two cases, both of which he brings to the detective’s attention. One is “The Greek Interpreter,” in which the client, Mr. Melas, happens to lodge in the same building as Mycroft. The other is “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” a government affair in which Mycroft, on behalf of the highest authorities, demands his brother’s assistance — for Mycroft, who “audits the books in some of the government departments” in the first case, turns out in this later one to have a much more crucial position. “Occasionally he is the British government,” Holmes tells an astonished Watson:
We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other.... Again and again his word has decided the national policy.
Such a description foreshadows the computerized “expert systems” of modern times, and indeed Robert A. Heinlein (in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 1966) found it appropriate to name an omniscient computer Mycroft. In more recent years the name has been borrowed for a number of software projects, including “a network that allows thousands of people to collaborate on large, complex jobs” developed at the University of California at Berkeley.
Watson describes Mycroft’s body as “gross,” his fat hand “like the flipper of a seal.” His habits are unvarying and unathletic — “Jupiter is descending,” says Holmes when his brother condescends to call. Otherwise, “Mycroft has his rails and he runs on them. His Pall Mall lodgings, the Diogenes Club, Whitehall — that is his cycle.” (The Diogenes Club, described in “The Greek Interpreter,” is a club — which Sherlock Holmes finds “soothing” at times — for unclubbable men, forbidden by by-law to take any notice of one another, or to talk, save in the Strangers’ Room.) But his detective powers are immense. “It was Adams, of course,” he says to his more active brother about a case the latter has been working to solve. Action, of course, is “not my métier,” but theorizing and thought from an armchair — in that, Mycroft Holmes excels. The passage from “The Greek Interpreter” in which the brothers compete in deductions about a stranger on the street is a classic, so much so that Doyle used it as one of his “readings” when he lectured in North America in 1894:
“An old soldier, I perceive,” said Sherlock.
“And very recently discharged,” remarked the brother.
“Served in India, I see.”
“And a non-commissioned officer.”
And so on. Not for nothing has it been suggested that Nero Wolfe, the corpulent, chair-bound detective created by Rex Stout in Fer-de-Lance (1934), The Doorbell Rang (1965), and several dozen other novels, is a relative of Mycroft Holmes.
MRS. HUDSON. The best appreciation of Holmes’s landlady, Mrs. Hudson, is an article by Vincent Starrett that appeared in the 1944 anthology Profile by Gaslight. He writes of her possible background, her management of the house at 221B Baker Street, her staff, and her loyalty to Holmes, shown particularly in her patience with his foibles. Other writings about her have interpreted her relationship with the detective in various ways, some suggesting that it was peculiarly personal. Certainly the kind of devotion seen in “The Empty House,” in which she repeatedly crawls to Holmes’s wax bust “on my knees” and in danger of her life to adjust its position, suggests something more than the usual relationship between tenant and landlady.
But “landlady” may be slightly misleading. In story after story, Mrs. Hudson is presented as the “housekeeper,” and it seems possible that rather than owning the house outright, she had it on a long-term lease and proceeded to rent rooms to gentlemen. Watson does speak, in “The Dying Detective,” of Holmes’s “princely” rental payments to her. On the other hand Holmes frequently treats her as an employee, demanding refreshment and ignoring scheduled mealtimes, and abuses the fabric of the building when it suits him. The most famous instance is his indoor target practice, in which he shoots the initials V.R. (for Victoria Regina) into the wall — an activity which must at least have filled the house with plaster-dust.
There may well have been a housemaid at 221B, although she is never mentioned, and certainly there was Billy the pageboy, at least during some periods. Other staff are uncertain; Holmes in “Thor Bridge” speaks of a “new cook,” which may imply that there had been a former cook, or may mean that Mrs. Hudson had finally delegated the kitchen duties to an employee. Breakfast may have been her forte, for it is mentioned in story after story, and in “The Naval Treaty” Holmes offers the high praise that Mrs. Hudson has “as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman,” a comment that has led to the general impression that she was in fact Scots. Then there is the famous reference in “A Scandal in Bohemia” to “Mrs. Turner,” one of those cruxes that Sherlockians love; it has been variously interpreted as meaning a cook, a temporary replacement while Mrs. Hudson was holidaying or unwell, or simply absent-mindedness on someone’s part.
Of the woman herself we know little, not even her first name, although without evidence she has been identified with the “Martha” who is the housekeeper in “His Last Bow.” Holmes once speaks of her cronies, but their identity is as unknown as Mrs. Hudson’s taste in amusement, food, or furnishings. Even her physique can only be inferred from a reference to her “stately tread.” What matters to the reader of the Sherlock Holmes tales is her reliable maintenance of the house in Baker Street, and her presence (in only fourteen of the sixty stories) as the motherly figure without whom the sometimes childlike Holmes would be lost in London. For that role, readers remember and honour her. Vincent Starrett again: “It is proverbial that landladies never die.”
BILLY. The pageboy of 221B Baker Street appears in ten of the stories, only three times by name. The “Billy” who ushers in visitors in The Valley of Fear, circa 1889, can hardly be the same boy who is there for “Thor Bridge” and “The Mazarin Stone” more than a decade later. A succession of boys is the obvious explanation, and it may be as few as two of them, since the appearances are clustered, most in stories that take place in the 1880s, two in the early 1900s. Among the latter is the passage in “The Mazarin Stone” that has made Billy the object of great affection among readers:
It was pleasant to Dr. Watson to find himself once more in the untidy room of the first floor in Baker Street.... Finally, his eyes came round to the fresh and smiling face of Billy, the young but very wise and tactful page, who had helped a little to fill up the gap of loneliness and isolation which surrounded the saturnine figure of the great detective.
“It all seems very unchanged, Billy. You don’t change, either....”
A mythical character can remain unchanged for a quarter of a century; perhaps Billy now deserves that title.
THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS. The youngsters who helped Holmes in a few cases would be of the smallest importance to modern readers had not the American Sherlockians of the 1930s chosen the name “Baker Street Irregulars” for their organization. They might almost have been the same people, for the children of (say) 1890 were middle-aged folks in 1934, when the American BSI had its beginning.
But the original Irregulars were Londoners (one presumes Cockney accents), urchins or “street arabs” in the contemporary phrase. They are seen in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, where their wages are fixed at one shilling a day (around $5 in modern buying power), and their leader is Wiggins. After these two early cases they return only in “The Crooked Man,” when the leader is Simpson, the earlier generation of boys having presumably grown past the age when they could be of use to Holmes as unobtrusive spies. In one other case, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes uses a boy (Cartwright), but as a lone agent on Dartmoor rather than as the leader of a London gang.
“Irregulars” are combatants not from the regular army (George Washington used the word about his own ragged troops). Applying it to the boys of Baker Street (and there may have been girls too; the text is indefinite), Holmes means investigators who are independent of the police. He uses the same word in “Lady Frances Carfax” to mean himself and Watson.
Throughout the tales, Watson is made to drop hints about other cases in which Sherlock Holmes was engaged. Usually he makes mention of the other business that was under way at the time, but sometimes he compares the current case to some other, and on several occasions Holmes does the same thing, drawing both on his direct experience and on his reading.
Such allusions range from the generic (“a very commonplace little murder,” Holmes calls his current business in “The Naval Treaty”) to the memorable:
As I turn over the pages, I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy, and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin — an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour. [“The Golden Pince-Nez”]
Listing the unpublished cases in The Tin Dispatch-Box (1965, reprinted 1994), I defined them as “any criminal investigation or professional business in which Holmes was involved or took a particular contemporary interest. Using this definition, there are altogether 111 cases.” (The listing which led to that total has a few omissions.) Such cases are of interest to the would-be biographer as clues to filling in the great stretches of Holmes’s career not covered in the published stories, and as instances in which he made use of his powers to solve mysteries about which the reader would love to hear.
The unpublished cases have provided motifs for a number of “pastiches,” or imitations of the original tales, including several of the Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1952–53) by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr. They were also the basis of many scripts by Edith Meiser and her successors for a long-running series of American radio dramatizations (1932–43). For such purposes the unpublished cases are ideal, since generally there is merely a thought-provoking phrase, rather than a plot to which the writer must stick.
A surprising amount can, however, sometimes be deduced about an unpublished case. Edward F. Clark, Jr., in the Baker Street Journal in 1963 offered a careful exegesis of a few words in “The Final Problem”: “I knew in the papers that [Holmes] had been engaged by the French republic upon a matter of supreme importance.” A number of scholars have toyed with “the papers of ex-President Murillo,” mentioned in “The Norwood Builder,” identifying that gentleman with various former South American leaders. Exploration of what Watson meant to say begins to overlap with investigation of Doyle’s sources, as when “the peculiar persecution of John Vincent Harden” is said to have been suggested to the author’s mind by his reading about Texas bandit John Wesley Hardin. Some of the unpublished cases refer to historical people, including the Pope (presumably Leo XIII) and Vanderbilt (one of the New York railroad clan). Others contain intriguing but inexplicable names, personal or geographical, including “Isadora Persano” and “the island of Uffa.” In a class by itself is “the giant rat of Sumatra,” a phrase that has intrigued not only pasticheurs and scholars but also the designers of new hazards in the popular game “Dungeons and Dragons.”
THE ROOMS AT 221B BAKER STREET
The arrangement of Holmes’s (and, in some of the stories but not all, Watson’s) rooms is unclear, and in any case may have changed over the years. “The Mazarin Stone,” a story that is a one-act play lightly rewritten, contains what amount to stage directions, calling for exits and entrances hardly compatible with a conventional suite in Baker Street. It is more satisfactory to build up the lodgings — and particularly the sitting room, where most of the action takes place — in the mind’s eye. Still, a creditable job has been done by the proprietors of several restorations, particularly the one at the “Sherlock Holmes” public-house in Northumberland Street, London. Some enthusiasts have 221B rooms in their own homes; one created by the late Allen Mackler is now housed at the Wilson Library of the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. Illustrators, stage designers, and television producers have faced the same challenges as creators of the full-scale article, generally emphasizing whichever features of the room, authentic or otherwise, are needed for their immediate purposes.
A monstrous amount of furniture must be fitted into the room if every sentence in the Canon is to be taken as true. The chairs on either side of the fire, in which one imagines Holmes and Watson sitting to chat, are a bare beginning: Don MacLachlan, writing in Canadian Holmes in 1989, includes in the inventory “12 chairs, two stools, one sofa, and something sittable-on by the window. Enough seating for at least 17 people.” But there are many other objects in the room as well, from the dining table to the workbench with Holmes’s chemicals, not to mention a bearskin rug, a safe, a sideboard, and the coal-scuttle in which Holmes kept his cigars. A plausible floor plan was drawn by Julian Wolff to accompany his analysis of the rooms in the Baker Street Journal in 1946. He includes a bathroom adjacent to the sitting room — a facility that may have amounted to a luxury in 1895. He also puts Holmes’s bedroom (which figures in “The Dying Detective” in particular) adjacent to the sitting room, relegating Watson to an upper storey (British “second,” American “third,” floor).
The dominant feature of the suite at 221B must have been clutter. Holmes had “a horror of destroying documents,” Watson reports, and attached his unanswered letters to the mantelpiece with his jackknife. Chemical experiments were often in progress, discarded newspapers and telegrams littered the floor, and relics of cases were, Watson says, wont to turn up in the butter dish. There may have been a little space left for Watson’s cherished portrait of General “Chinese” Gordon, but the conventional decorations of a Victorian sitting room, the antimacassars and ostrich eggs, must have been almost entirely absent. For it is probably a mistake to imagine a spacious room; the chamber of a pair of bachelors was surely rather cosy than elegant.
“You know my methods,” Holmes repeatedly told his companion. If the reader does not know them — as sometimes, it seems, Watson did not — they are evident in passages throughout the Canon, or systematically set out in Brad Keefauver’s book The Elementary Methods of Sherlock Holmes (1987). Keefauver considers Holmes’s immense general knowledge, his reference library, his readiness to compare the present case to precedents in criminal activity, his use of disguise, and other stratagems and resources. But the essence of Holmes’s detective ability lay in the data he was able to collect and the reasoning in which he engaged.
Chiefly, Holmes worked from facts. “I cannot make bricks without clay,” he said once; and over and over again, “It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts.” And for him facts were usually tiny things — a burnt match in the mud, the torn and ink-stained finger of a glove:
I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a bootlace.... Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details. My first glance is always at a woman’s sleeve. In a man it is perhaps better first to take the knee of the trouser. [“A Case of Identity”]
In using such a procedure to size up a client or a suspicious character, Holmes is following the example of Doyle’s medical mentor, Joseph Bell. It is a technique exactly suited to the Victorian age, a period of many specialized trades, and to the British multiplicity of social classes and local customs. In a modern, homogenized North America, where all classes dress alike and only a few people work in trades that leave such marks as the weaver’s tooth or the compositor’s left thumb, a Sherlock Holmes might have a much more difficult task.
The observation of trifles is not limited to assessing profession and character. Holmes uses it particularly in examining the scene of a crime, engaging in the famous “floor-walk” with his “powerful convex lens” in search of tiny objects: a pill in A Study in Scarlet, “what seemed to me to be dust” (but was tobacco ash) in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” Footprints and other traces are a specialty. The ability to see details, rather than “general impressions,” makes it possible for Holmes to understand the significance of a chip on a railing in “Thor Bridge,” and of beeswing in a wineglass in “The Abbey Grange.”
Writing in the journal Endeavour in 2004, Laura Snyder, a specialist in the history and philosophy of science, assesses whether Holmes can fairly be called a pioneering “scientific detective.” She concludes in part:
Rather than inventing forensic science, the Holmes stories instead presented the “science of criminal detection” in a positive light in Britain. This was particularly important after the 1859 Smethurst case, in which a leading toxicologist had been forced to admit that his earlier findings ... had been mistaken....
Sherlock Holmes did not invent forensic science, but he probably did more than any other person, fictional or not, to portray it as a valuable tool.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877–1947), dubbed by one biographer “the father of forensics,” will be disappointed to hear it.
Finally, of course, Holmes has the knowledge of previous cases, and his general knowledge of society, to help him focus his attention:
“How did you see that?”
“Because I looked for it.” [“The Dancing Men”]
What he does not have is the improbable, detailed knowledge of every science, craft, and art seen in such later detectives as R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke. Holmes is widely read and experienced, but chiefly in the areas that he knows will come in handy. His methods strongly resemble those of the physician, writes Kathryn Montgomery Hunter in Doctors’ Stories (1991): he compares the symptoms of his current case to those of many previous cases, his own and those of other investigators, before making a diagnosis and prescribing treatment. Chapter V of the present work includes some consideration of the state of science in Holmes’s time.
The form of reasoning Holmes uses, which he variously calls “deduction,” “logical synthesis,” and “inference,” is certainly not the same as the traditional formal logic, which is a form of mathematics developed in the middle ages, concerned not with truth but with consistency. The simplest example of a “syllogism,” the form into which logic casts its ideas, is this:
All dogs are mortal.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is a dog.
Therefore the Hound of the Baskervilles is mortal.
The first two statements, or “premises,” lead to the conclusion; thus the syllogism is logically sound. A second syllogism,
Scotland Yard inspectors are detectives.
Sherlock Holmes is a detective.
Therefore Sherlock Holmes is a Scotland Yard inspector.
is unsound because of what logic calls “the fallacy of the undistributed middle.” The premises may or may not be true, but either way they do not prove the conclusion. On the other hand, a logically sound syllogism can have wildly untrue premises, and thus demonstrate nothing about the truth of the conclusion.
Holmes rarely works in this way, although he speaks of it: “From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara.” If traditional logic is “deduction,” a moving from the general to the specific, from cause to effect, then Holmes’s method is really “induction,” moving from the specific to the general, from effect to cause. (“The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards,” he says in A Study in Scarlet.) The nineteenth-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce spoke of induction as moving from “case” and “result” to “rule”: “These beans are from this bag. These beans are white. [Therefore,] all the beans from this bag are white.” Peirce also offered a third form of logic, abduction: “All the beans from this bag are white. These beans are white. These beans are from this bag.” As philosophers Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, along with colleagues, explain in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (1983), Holmes is strongly inclined to that sort of logic, as in “The Second Stain”:
Here is one of the three men whom we had named as possible actors in this drama, and he meets a violent death during the very hours when we know that that drama was being enacted. The odds are enormous against its being coincidence. No figures could express them. No, my dear Watson, the two events are connected.
But neither induction nor abduction is rigorously valid: the process is prone to error, coincidences do happen, and an effect can have many causes.
As Keefauver demonstrates, Holmes frequently works through “deduction” in a different sense: imagining as many explanations for the facts as possible, then deducting (eliminating) the less promising. In his most famous dictum (“The Beryl Coronet”) he alludes to this process: “When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The danger of course is deeming something “impossible” when it is not. Holmes often does that, but such is the art of the detective story that he never goes wrong in his leaps.
THE MYTH AND THE HERO. To call Sherlock Holmes the “hero” of the Canonical stories is more than simply to observe that he is the central figure. A hero is someone who acts in a cause, such as freedom or justice, and according to certain conventions. One classic statement of the hero “pattern” is that of Lord Raglan (in The Hero, 1936), who finds twenty-two common features in the stories of figures from Oedipus to King Arthur. Holmes can be seen to have about thirteen of those features, a higher score than Siegfried’s, and equal to that of Robin Hood. He “prescribes laws,” for example (The Whole Art of Detection), nothing is known of his childhood, nothing is known of his death.
Many of Raglan’s “heroes” are supposed gods. Holmes is not presented as a god (although G.K. Chesterton wrote about his apotheosis in “Sherlock Holmes the God” as early as 1935), or even as a king, but merely as “the head of his profession.” However, it is hard to deny that some of his appeal derives from his conformity to the classic pattern. Most important is his “death” at the Reichenbach and his “resurrection” three years later. (A fall from grace and a mysterious death at the top of a hill are involved in several of Raglan’s points.) The spring dates of Holmes’s death and resurrection, and the name of the adversary whom he conquers (Moriarty, suggesting moriar, “I shall die”), remind the attentive reader of Easter, and the Christian story of the death and resurrection of Jesus (who incidentally scores at least sixteen points on Raglan’s scale). Springtime resurrection is of course not unique to Christianity, for most religions include some hint of it, based on the natural cycle of vegetation.
Holmes’s heroic qualities are such that enthusiasts have tried to associate him with practically every known hero and other prominent figure, pretending that he is the descendant of Shakespeare, the colleague of Marconi, the lover of Sarah Bernhardt, the antagonist of Hitler, the father of Nero Wolfe, the grandson of Horatio Hornblower, and the near relative of Mr. Spock of “Star Trek.” Science fiction master Philip José Farmer connected many heroic figures of popular literature, including Holmes, in his hypothetical “Wold Newton Universe,” first revealed in Tarzan Alive (1972). All such speculations are feeble attempts at describing the emotional, even spiritual, significance of a figure like Sherlock Holmes, who bestrides his world, and the world of the imagination, like a colossus.
There are various short catalogues of the figures who, though fictional or nearly so, have become universally known; they may perhaps include Santa Claus, Robinson Crusoe, Romeo, and Ronald McDonald, but there is no doubt whatsoever that they include Holmes. It is also said that only two characters from literature regularly receive mail. One is Juliet, whose correspondents are lovelorn teenage girls, and the other is Sherlock Holmes.
SEXUAL IMPLICATIONS. Although one might expect a “detective story” to be concerned only with crime and adventure, in fact the Sherlock Holmes tales are rich in love and sexual elements as well. They can be seen from the earliest tales to the latest: A Study in Scarlet is about a murder prompted by sexual jealousy, as is “The Retired Colourman,” the last story in The Case-Book.
Holmes’s own love life receives much attention, chiefly through attempts to read more into his relationship with Irene Adler than the text warrants. Some Sherlockians have also attempted to link him with Violet Hunter of “The Copper Beeches,” largely through such paragraphs as this one, identified by David Hammer in Baker Street Miscellanea (1991):
I remember nothing until I found myself lying on my bed trembling all over. Then I thought of you, Mr. Holmes.
Taking sentences out of context can, of course, be a delight — John Bennett Shaw, the master of that craft, collected many examples in a paper he titled “To Shelve or to Censor” (1971). A classic is Holmes’s remark in “The Speckled Band” that “Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up,” an idiom with quite different meanings in America and England.
Legitimate romance plays an important part in The Sign of the Four, in which Watson’s love affair with Mary Morstan alternates with Holmes’s detective work as the plot develops, and in such short stories as “The Noble Bachelor.” Less proper relationships drive the plots of “A Case of Identity,” “The Crooked Man,” and “The Cardboard Box.” In The Hound of the Baskervilles, much of the dramatic complexity comes from the relations between the sexes: the apparently wholesome attraction between Sir Henry Baskerville and Beryl Stapleton, the sadomasochistic relationship between Beryl and Jack Stapleton, the sad if not scarlet past of Laura Lyons. Then there are any number of stories in which romance provides a subplot, a “love interest” to vary the pace, from Arthur Cadogan West’s desertion of his fiancée in “The Bruce-Partington Plans” to Violet Smith’s engagement in “The Solitary Cyclist” (a matter which leads Holmes to make a remark that makes the lady blush coyly).
Not surprisingly, traces of the author’s own life and relationships can be seen in all these features. Mary Morstan in The Sign of the Four is in many respects a portrait of his first wife, Louise. The solid bonds of love between John and Ivy Douglas in The Valley of Fear strongly suggest those between Doyle and his second wife, Jean, to whom he had been married seven years when the book was published. Most important in reflecting the author’s experience and feelings, however, are a cluster of stories published in the first decade of the twentieth century, during and just after a difficult period in his life, while he was married to the dying Louise but already in love with Jean. In these tales — “The Norwood Builder,” “The Solitary Cyclist,” “The Devil’s Foot,” and others — sex is a source of trouble, and repeatedly there are men obliged to choose between two women, or women obliged to choose between two men. In the most dramatic example, “The Abbey Grange” (published in 1904, two years before Louise’s death), Doyle puts in the mouths of his characters eloquent arguments for divorce-law reform. Such motifs appear in his stories as late as 1922, when he published “Thor Bridge” and pictured the illicit lady-love of Holmes’s client, Neil Gibson, as a woman much like Jean, and every bit as acceptable for him as his true wife.
Sexual motifs have been examined by a number of Sherlockian writers, but chiefly for prurient effect, or as a way of demonstrating that Victorian life was by no means sexless. The latter point should hardly need making again, after demonstration in such non-Sherlockian volumes as The Worm in the Bud (1969) by Ronald Pearsall and The Other Victorians (1974) by Stephen Marcus. It was an era of fashionable mistresses and grandes horizontales, pervasive street prostitution and some white slavery, and lavish pornography. That sexual enthusiasm prevailed, but public discussion of sexual matters was impossible, goes far to explain the origins of the kinds of crime Holmes is seen investigating. Sex in the Sherlockian Canon is discussed at full length in my book In Bed with Sherlock Holmes (1984).
OTHER THEMES. Literary theorists and indeed ordinary readers have spotted a number of other themes running through the stories, such as these:
• The conflict between reason (enlightenment, science, civilization, urbanization) and superstition (the ignorant, the supernatural, the primitive, the countryside) as represented, for example, by the contrast between Holmes and such antagonists as Tonga in The Sign of the Four, the Hound of the Baskervilles, and Dr. Grimesby Roylott with his cheetah, his baboon, and his “speckled band.”
• The nature of masculinity, as seen in a society dominated by men and indeed, so far as the events of the Holmes stories are concerned, populated mostly by men, and represented by a figure whose primary relationship is with another man and who veers from decisive, even violent action, including boxing and swordsmanship, to idleness, “catlike” neatness and a “dreamy” enjoyment of violin music.
• Holmes’s ambivalent attitude to the established social order, which he expresses sometimes as fawning on the upper classes and sometimes as undisguised contempt, although he almost always works to enforce the law in the interest of the established authorities and the middle class.
Such topics lie just beneath the surface of stories that are considerably more than puzzles to be solved or adventures to provide thrills.
