Everyone’s heard of him one time or the other. Books have been written dedicated to him. Fictional detectives ever since cannot help but ape him. Movies have been made featuring him. He had, and has, fan clubs dissecting him down to the smallest bone of his body. Advertisers use his name knowing it will sell (sure-lock Homes); parody writers affectionately name their characters after him (sheer-luck Gomes). Frankly, no fictional character has ever managed to plough his way so deep into the world’s collective consciousness. But yet, how much do we really know about him? Do we know who his brother was? What do we know about his love life? This is an attempt to discover Sherlock Holmes the man, Sherlock Holmes the friend, Sherlock Holmes the brother, Sherlock Holmes the lodger, Sherlock Holmes the detective.
The man himself
Probably no other story of Sherlock Holmes gives as much information about him as does ‘A study in scarlet’. One of the well-remembered incidents is when Holmes makes known to Watson his ignorance of the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Not only that, upon Watson correcting him, he remarks ‘Now that you have told me, I will do my best to forget it’ before launching into a small lecture on how a man’s brain is of limited capacity and how only a fool would fill it with every single bit of information he comes across.
Desiccated calculating machine who was abhorrent to all emotions but who still found time to be a wonderful violinist, a woman hater (‘He deeply distrusted the sex’) with the charm of a Casanova when required (He gets engaged to a woman to get facts in “The adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”), alternating between extremely lethargic sessions on the couch to outbursts of passionate energy, relying on cocaine and opium to get him through the quiet periods while feeding off the mental stimulus exerted by an unusual case to ease through the energetic ones. That would be Holmes in a nutshell. Oh, and then there is a small matter of being the greatest detective ever.
Friends, brothers, countrymen and enemies
There are very few references to Holmes’ immediate family members in the Canon (All Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle are collectively termed Canon). Mycroft Holmes, seven years his senior, appears in ‘The Greek interpreter’ to give us all a taste of his deductive powers (which, by Holmes’ admission, are much superior to his own). He also features very thinly in stories like ‘The Bruce-Partington plans’ and ‘The final problem’.
We see Holmes’ arch-enemy, Professor James Moriarty (‘The Napoleon of crime’), in ‘The final problem’ when Conan Doyle, vexed by the enormous amount of interest his sleuth was generating, decided to kill him off in 1894 at the base of the Riechenbach Falls, locked arm in arm with Moriarty. I confess I had a lump in my throat and my eyes were moist when I read the story for the first time. Especially the last sentence, ‘and there, deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation’.
However, the public outcry was so great following Holmes’ ‘death’ that Doyle was forced to bring him back after eleven years in 1905 in a story titled ‘The adventure of the empty house’ where he manages to get the better of Colonel Sebastian Moran, the ‘second most dangerous man in England’. Having said that, however, it is not the first Holmes title published after 1894, for Doyle wrote ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (published in 1901) and set it at a time before Holmes’ death. This period between 1894 and 1905 is commonly known among Sherlockians as the “The great hiatus”.
Love life
‘The motives of women are so inscrutable, their most trivial actions may mean volumes while their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin’. Holmes never paid them more than a cursory attention, treating them as parts of the problem he has to solve and nothing else. However, who can forget Irene Adler from ‘A scandal in Bohemia’ who outwitted the master himself and slipped away just before he could wrap his fingers around her. Watson mentions that Holmes never referred to her by any title other than ‘the woman’ ever since, so maybe Holmes is just as susceptible as everyone of us when it comes to the ‘L’ word.
Another woman in Holmes’ life deserves mention – Mrs Hudson, Holmes’ landlady at 221B where he stayed for thirteen years before the hiatus and God knows how many after it. A physical description of Mrs Hudson is not given in the entire Canon, and readers often assume that she was elderly and overweight, interpreting her affection to Holmes as a mother to a child. But there is nothing against the theory that she was a younger, sexier version of your typical English landlady. Once we accept that as a working hypothesis, possibilities start to arise. Is it too unreasonable to suggest that maybe, just maybe, on one of those cold, lonely English nights with nothing separating her from her lodger but a single floor, she ended up in the same bed as Holmes? And who knows how many such cold, lonely nights Baker Street has seen? If only the walls of 221B could talk.
Thoughts about the author
You would expect the creator of such a logical character to be something similar, but it is probably the biggest mystery of all that the most productive time of Conan Doyle’s Holmes career also coincided with his open acceptance of the paranormal. He joined the British Society for Psychical Research in 1893 just a year before ‘Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes’ was published. But the feather in the cap came when he publicly sided with Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in the Cottingley Fairies drama. It is puzzling to see how someone who has created Holmes can be drawn into all this rubbish, but maybe a closer examination will show us that it is not that puzzling after all, that maybe Holmes is too perfect, too unreal, too fanciful, and maybe that is why he is so dear to all of us. Someone, somewhere, sometime put it better than I ever could hope to. I will just quote him/her in closing.
“Sherlock Holmes, the greatest detective that never lived and who will never die.”
References
Over the course of writing this, I have borrowed shamelessly from the following sources
https://siracd.com/life_events.shtml
https://sherlockian.net/world/oldingpoem.html
https://classiccrimefiction.com/sherlock.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes
https://gutenberg.org/etext/834