Imagine for a moment that the world is lit by gaslight. The Victorian Era is in full swing. Gentlemen wear frock coats and top hats, women wear dresses and gloves. The world smells of horses and coal smoke and the unpleasant stench of the Thames River. Mists waft down cobblestone streets and the livery of crime is not shown by the clothes but by the deep and sinister motivations of corrupt humanity.
In this world of telegrams and horse-drawn carriages, a criminal is only as guilty as the police are adept. Nefarious deeds cause mayhem and the culprits get away more than not. Nothing so technical as forensics yet exists. There are no DNA databases, nor fingerprint records. There Is only the endless string of mysteries and a sullen city beset by an element ready to commit blackmail, theft, forgery, kidnapping and, most notoriously, murder.
Amid this crime-ridden city is a penetrating intellect of such incredible power, that his name has become synonymous with solving crimes and his skill in the art of detection—an art that he built almost entirely with his own masterful abilities--is world-renown.
He has solved every kind of perplexing crime, from stolen Naval treaties to ghostly hounds haunting the Devonshire countryside and everything in between. When a mystery baffles the police, or an outré adventure that requires more than the police can manage, there is only one man to seek.
Modern audiences may not recognize the man waiting in the rooms of 221B Baker Street. This man is not wearing a cloak or deerstalker cap nor is he smoking a Meerschaum pipe. These images came much later when the great consulting detective appeared in film. Rather, the man is tall, rail-thin, with hawk-like features. He is fastidiously neat, with eyes sharp as any bird of prey. He prefers a black clay pipe and can play his Stradivarius violin extremely well.
Ask anyone and they will already know the man that I refer to. He is the world's greatest detective, a crime diagnostician with genius-level mental acuity and energy. Here is the man we have come to know as Sherlock Holmes.
We know of Holmes because of his sole friend and companion, the redoubtable John H. Watson. This magnificent biographer, without whom there would be no tales of Sherlock Holmes, is the composer of the many short stories and four novel-length tales of the great detective. He has been a firsthand observer of the many fantastic adventures where the magnificent Holmes solves cases that defy the average mind.
Unlike our modern conception of Watson, who is often portrayed as a heavy-set, older man with greying hair and a perpetual look of dubious surprise on his face, the Watson we know from the books is much different. He describes himself as less than Holmes, but is forever ready for a fight, is himself an amateur practitioner of the Holmesian method of deduction, and is of an age with Holmes, so that, while he is probably physically larger, he is not old or obese.
Together, the detective and the biographer have solved 60 documented crimes, 56 short stories, and four novels, but with countless other mysteries mentioned in the background. These stories, usually published in a periodical, were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and became a sensation in his own time.
Holmes and Watson are, with few exceptions, known around the world. They have become part of our modern idiom. Anytime anyone solves a problem that baffles others, or when someone uses observation to make a deduction successfully, we are wittingly or unwittingly nodding at this great literary forebear.
Sherlock Holmes, of course, was not real, but during his time in print, he was a superhero in his own right, and while his stories were still being published, people would write in or seek to find Conan Doyle to ask for the detective’s help. Imagine their distraught cries of agony when they discovered that Holmes and Watson were no more than the merest figment of the author’s imagination.
Watson first meets Holmes in the novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887) while looking for a place to live. He is admittedly put off by Holmes’s somewhat rude and single-minded nature, but eventually, the two become friends, as Watson watches Holmes solve a mystery that began in the Utah desert, when a man, left by two Mormons with a little girl to die, comes to England and gets his revenge.
This book was so successful that Conan Doyle began writing a second novel with the duo called, The Sign of the Four (1890). Then, came a series of twelve short stories published in The Strand magazine, called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), followed by The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). The final twelve stories were punctuated with the tale of how Holmes died while defeating the “Napoleon of Crime”, James Moriarty by plummeting with him into the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.
Conan Doyle breathed a sigh of relief, believing that he had put an end to his great consulting detective, but public outcry at Holmes’s premature death was such that he published his third (and in this writer’s opinion, the best) novel featuring Sherlock Holmes and James Watson, called The Hound of the Baskervilles (in several parts in 1901 and 1902). I treat this book with its due reverence in another essay, but I will add here that there is no more powerfully written and engaging book of the crime and mystery genre. The book takes place before Holmes’s death, but the story only whetted the public’s appetite for more stories.
Eight years later, having experienced a great deal of fuss, including, allegedly, a bomb in his mailbox, Doyle gave in to public pressure and wrote another series of thirteen stories called (unironically) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905). It is at the beginning of this series where Holmes, not dead, but in hiding from several of Moriarty's henchmen, has been plotting and planning to bring these men to justice and accidentally meets with Watson while in disguise.
In 1914, Conan Doyle wrote the last Sherlock Holmes Novel, The Valley of Fear, which figures prominently in the coal regions just north of my home county in Pennsylvania and deals with (in other names) the Molly MacGuires and the coal strikes and is the second-best novel of the four.
Then, in 1917, Doyle published seven more tales in, His Last Bow. Finally, in 1927, he released thirteen more short stories in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes which culminated forty years, minus a brief hiatus, of Sherlock Holmes stories.
Although considered outside the Sherlock Holmes Canon, Conan Doyle wrote several plays, ‘vignettes’, and essays in which Holmes is referred to or makes appearances. Beyond these, there are several other collections of short stories, written by other authors featuring Holmes and Watson that are available to those who may not claim themselves to be purists and many are worth reading, including one by Stephen King, called The Doctor’s Case in which Watson uses the methods he has been taught by Holmes to solve a murder.
Many others have keened the edge of their writing by trying to emulate Conan Doyle’s master consulting detective, but regardless of how good they appear to be, a real fan can (while being happy to read another Holmes and Watson tale) detect the counterfeit. Although he had a love/hate relationship with his most famous character and felt much of his life’s work fell by the wayside because of Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hit upon a stroke of genius when he first wrote about Holmes and Watson and the world is a better place for it.
On New Year’s Day, 2023, the entire canon of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories became public domain, which means that anyone can write a Sherlock Holmes movie or novel or book without the express permission of Conan Doyle's estate. There are at least 67 films about Holmes, and upwards of 29 TV shows featuring the duo. The best non canonical movie is the 1985 adventure film called Young Sherlock Holmes, depicting the consulting detective as a teenager solving crimes and meeting Watson as a fellow student. I would give the two Guy Ritchie films, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as the adventurous Victorian partners, a nod as they are entertaining, but not quite accurate enough to feel genuine.
For a true and honorable variant of the Holmes stories, one must turn to the Grenada series, made popular on PBS, which was faithful, both to the original tales and novels and to the descriptions of Holmes and Watson in those stories. Jeremy Brett beautifully captures the impulsive and sometimes manic and depressive Holmes, while first David Burke and then Nigel Hardwicke portrayed Watson. Of the original canon, 43 of Conan Doyle’s stories were adapted, and an admirable, if somewhat dated (now) full-length made-for-TV film of The Hound of the Baskervilles is worth a watch, now free on YouTube.
Sherlock Holmes has been represented in film and on television by countless actors, though in the middle of the 20th Century, he was probably most notably made into radio and cinematic reality by the portrayal of Basil Rathbone (as Holmes) and Nigel Bruce as Watson. This may be where the deerstalker cap, cloak, Meerschaum pipe and magnifying glass that now encapsulate our concept of Sherlock Holmes took the public imagination. This, too, is where we get the obese and older and somewhat perplexed Watson.
Regardless of how he is (or will be) represented, though, there is no doubt that there is only one real and true consulting detective and only one albeit fictional biographer. When there is a crime that no one else can solve and when you are at your last end of hope, simply send or go yourself to 221 B Baker Street, London and apply to the one man who can help you: Sherlock Holmes.
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