There is a very strange irony at the heart of literary history. A man made of paper and ink who never took a breath or cast a shadow has been the subject of more academic research, more societies across the globe and more dramatic adaptations than perhaps any character in literature – and almost any historical individual. His name is Sherlock Holmes. And the question we should be asking is not ‘Who is he?’ but ‘Why doesn’t he go away?’
The Origins: A Doctor Behind the Detective
Many, if not all of those that admire Holmes know he was the brain child of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-a Scottish doctor, the creator and author of A Study in Scarlet (the very first Holmes tale published in 1887). There are many things below that very basic premise that are of interest.
Conan Doyle largely modelled Holmes on a surgeon named Dr. Joseph Bell, whom Conan Doyle had studied under at Edinburgh University. Bell was supposed to be remarkably good at deducing people’s profession, habits, or illness purely by looking at them, before they had even opened their mouths. Conan Doyle admired Bell’s ability to such an extent that he wrote the doctor into his fiction and expanded on his abilities into that of the superhuman.
Perhaps less known is that Conan Doyle based Holmes’s scientific investigation partially on himself. Doyle was himself a fervent believer in the law, even becoming the champion for two real-life men, George Edalji and Oscar Slater, who were falsely convicted of two crimes. This meant that, to some extent, the character not only was inspired by Doyle’s teacher but reflected Doyle’s core belief.
Then there’s the ironically fitting detail that Conan Doyle actually came to detest his most famous character. He saw Holmes as an obstacle from the writing of what he considered his ‘weightier’ work. Conan Doyle even killed him off in the story The Final Problem in 1893, throwing Holmes and Moriarty off the Reichenbach Falls. However, the ensuing reader furore (it is said that people in London wore black armbands) was such that Conan Doyle was forced to bring his detective back in 1903 in The Adventure of the Empty House.
The Character: What Makes Holmes So Singular
But on one level Sherlock Holmes is simply a consulting detective living at 221B Baker Street in London, who solves cases that leave Scotland Yard completely dumb founded using observation and deduction along with a truly encyclopedic amount of knowledge concerning various irrelevant topics. He is also a man of habit, playing his violin at odd hours, keeping tobacco in a Persian slipper, tending to be profoundly misanthropic when not provided with an intellectually challenging case to unravel and possessing one only friend, Dr. John H. Watson, his chronicler and moral compass.
Firstly, there is the method. Holmes did not just make wild guesses, nor was he psychic. He explained and embodied what he termed ‘the Science of Deduction’. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”, became a creed, which touched many people far removed from the genre. Scientists, doctors, analysts, and researchers alike have called the model by which Holmes worked their own ‘business logic’, their own scientific principle.
Secondly, there is his fallibility. Holmes is not merely a thinking engine, as he would sometimes have you believe. He struggles with a genuine Victorian affliction; cocaine addiction, to keep the demons of ennui at bay with his seven-percent solution while he awaits a case challenging enough to spark his attention. He struggles with solitude and is temperamentally incapable of simple warmth but nonetheless, possesses the ability to be incredibly loyal. The paradox of an immensely clever man handicapped by lack of the challenge necessary to keep him from his own internal demons is far more human than that of any heroic figure:
Third, it is the precision of his knowledge. Holmes knows the type of ash which comes from which brand of cigarette. He has studied 100 kinds of tobacco ash, knows the soil of each London district, is an authority on handwriting and dating documents, foot-prints and tattooing-these are some examples. Such unique and unusual information gives a feeling of plausibility.
The Popularity: A Character Who Became a Belief
Arguably no one character in history has been adapted so many times as Sherlock Holmes. In fact he has been declared by Guinness World Records to be the ‘most portayed human character in literature for film and television’ with over 250 different actors playing him on the screen in over 75 different countries. There are at least 60 translations of the tales in print and a club for Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, called the Baker Street Irregulars, was formed in New York in 1934 and still exists today making it one of the oldest literary societies in existence.
The truly remarkable thing is the level to which the world accepts him as fact. 221B Baker Street was not actually a location during the time the stories were written; at the time, Baker Street didn’t stretch that far. The actual building now in that range of addresses, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, has thousands of letters sent to Holmes annually, while the Abbey National Bank, which had held that part of Baker Street for decades before the museum was opened, had its own secretary dedicated to replying to him.
In the Holmes societies, or ‘Sherlockian’ or ‘Holmesian’ groups as they are often called, they take part in what is known as ‘the Great Game’. This is where they write serious academic papers as if Sherlock Holmes and Watson were historical figures, and Conan Doyle was nothing more than Watson’s literary agent. Questions discussed in these papers range from “What university did Holmes attend?”, to “when was he born?”, “who was the woman Sherlock Holmes loved more than any other?”, and “where was Watson’s war wound exactly located?”.
Unknown and Uncommon Facts
I’ll share some less common but interesting facts about Holmes that even avid readers might not know about him.
Holmes has a brother, Mycroft, but in only four of the sixty stories has Mycroft had an appearance. He claims Mycroft possesses even more observant and deductive faculties than himself, but none whatsoever to carry out any decisions made; a government agent, in fact. Mycroft can be found lounging around the members-only Diogenes Club; the club has a “rule of silence” among members. It is interesting, and rarely remarked upon, however, that Mycroft is said to have established Britain’s secret services, which is very early on in English literature for an intelligence chief; several decades before Ian Fleming’s M.
Holmes is also a baritsu master-a genuine form of martial art incorporating aspects of judo and wrestling, that was briefly fashionable in England in the 1890s. It is this martial art that saved his life at Reichenbach when he confronted Moriarty. Conan Doyle mispelt this as “baritsu” in the original stories, and it was misspelled in print for many years, until researchers stumbled on the facts.
Not many people, still, know that Holmes kept bees. He spent his old age at a small farm at the Sussex Downs; he was a beekeeper, and the author of ‘Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen. ‘ I think that there is something quite touching about the fact that this extremely logical, urban detective should spend his old age at the Sussex Downs, tending bees.
And lastly there is the Holmes-Moriarty dynamic, a pattern on which rivals throughout literature have been based. Professor James Moriarty is Holmes’ most arch-villain. He only appears in two of the original sixty stories. His character was so strong that all his successors paled into insignificance. The “criminal mastermind” was the structural form that, for decades, rival figures from Hannibal Lecter to Voldemort have adhered to.
The Legacy: Why Holmes Still Matters
In a golden age of entertainment, Holmes not only survived he multiplied. The BBC version updated him to twenty-first century London and made him, within a year or two of airing, one of the most successful British television dramas of the century, an introduction to many people who’ve never so much as opened an issue of Conan Doyle. Elementary relocated him to New York City and famously gender-swapped Watson, Bollywood has also taken its turn with the character, and there have been anime, K-dramas, movies and a huge variety of other manifestations all over the world. Every new generation, seemingly, finds something in Holmes to fit its own age of anxieties and desires.
Ultimately, perhaps, that is Holmes’s greatest strength: the fantasy of the knowable world. In an age of uncertainty, disinformation, and an erosion of truth, the notion of a man who, from a thirty second observation, can tell us what is in fact the case comes as a remarkable comfort. Holmes, the patron saint of rationality in a world that frequently seems to reject it.
Conan Doyle once wrote, in frustration, that he had “a good mind to kill Holmes for good.” He never quite managed it. Neither has time.
By: RAGINI BHATTACHARYYA
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