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《The Sherlock Holmes Book》作者：Leslie S. Klinger

In 1946, almost 70 years ago, Edgar W. Smith pondered in an editorial in the Baker Street Journal, “What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?” Nearly 130 years after Holmes first appeared, subsequently embedded in the hearts of millions, it is appropriate to reconsider this question.

First, Smith wrote, “we love the time in which he lived.” When Smith wrote these words, that golden era, when it was “always 1895,” was only a half-century earlier, and well within the living memory of Smith (who was born in 1894) and his contemporary readers. Now it is an alien country, as mythical and foreign as the era of the Roman empire, the battlefields of Napoleon, or the court of Elizabeth I. While it may be true that we do love the Victorian era, we love it as we love the Old West or the countryside of Arthur’s Camelot, only as it exists in our imaginations, not in our memories. Even Smith knew that the late nineteenth century was no paradise but instead a time of great changes, for people of color, for women, and for the middle class. In the world of 1946, just righting itself from the cataclysms of war and the horrors of the Holocaust, how could Smith justify a love for a character as out-of-date as Sherlock Holmes?

Smith’s answer was emblematic of 1946, when the world could still believe in heroes: “[Holmes] stands before us as a symbol,” he wrote, “a symbol...of all that we are not but ever would be... 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.... [He] is the personification of something in us that we have lost or never had… And the time and place and all the great events are near and dear to us not because our memories call them forth in pure nostalgia, but because they are a part of us today. That is the Sherlock Holmes we love—the Holmes implicit and eternal in ourselves.”

Those were stirring words for a world on the brink of peace and prosperity. The Allies had fought a terrible war, the last “good” war, and the madmen were defeated, by common men and women— heroes—from many lands. But if Holmes was only a hero, as Smith implied, he failed us, for he did not slay the dragon, at the Reichenbach Falls or later.

Seventy years later, we can see that the spirit of Moriarty did not die in a bunker in Berlin or in a palace in Tokyo. His hand is clear after 1946, in the wars in which so many died, in Korea, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Even today, his minions continue to foment crime, corruption, hunger, and poverty, in a world with factions no longer easily divided into good or evil.

And yet we return to Holmes. Smith was right in saying that Holmes appeals to us for “all that we are not but ever would be.” But it is not Holmes’s heroism that calls to us, for he was not a hero (or perhaps not just a hero). Rather, he was an individual, in an age when individuality seemed lost in the teeming masses of the Empire. Heroic or not, Holmes always did the right thing. Some have pointed out that he was arrogant, cold, high-handed, misogynistic, unfeeling, manipulative—and these are difficult charges to deny. Yet those are all merely facets of his single-minded character, unswerving in his pursuit of justice, without regard for the conventions of law or society. Holmes is what we dream of and yet hesitate to be: a man apart from the crowd. While he had only a single friend, Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes was very much a part of his world, as comfortable with the grooms and street urchins as with the bankers and nobility. In an age bound by rules and rituals for social circumstances of every sort, even death, Sherlock Holmes followed only his own rules.

The mystery writer Raymond Chandler, writing many years after the death of Conan Doyle, had little liking for the Holmes stories. His ideal detective, he said, lived up to a simple credo: “[D]own these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” Yet these words could not more accurately describe Holmes. Unafraid, untarnished, focused on his fixed goal, Holmes inspires all of us to believe that we need not be heroes; rather, we can make the world a better place by doing the right thing.

Leslie S. Klinger

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12 INTRODUCTION

T

hink of the silhouette: the deerstalker, the Roman nose, the pipe. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is, quite simply, the most famous figure in all of crime fiction. What’s more, he is one of the most recognizable fictional characters in the Western world—and beyond. And although he owes something to his literary predecessors in the detective fiction genre, Sherlock Holmes is the template for virtually every fictional detective that has followed him. Even those who did not emulate him were obliged to do something markedly different, so seismic was his impact.

The brilliant, impatient master of deductive reasoning who shared rooms at 221B Baker Street with his faithful chronicler, Dr. John H. Watson, is as popular today as when the young and ambitious author Conan Doyle created him. Without doubt, Sherlock Holmes is a figure for the ages, and this book is a celebration of the detective in all his myriad facets.

Early inspirations

When the American writer Edgar Allan Poe wrote about a proto-Holmes protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, in a series of stories that virtually forged the detective fiction format, he had his rather remote sleuth utilizing observation, logic, and lateral thinking—all while demonstrating his skill to an awestruck unnamed narrator; the Holmes formula, in fact, in embryo.

Conan Doyle was a close reader of such Poe stories as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), and he borrowed a variety of notions from Dupin and developed them far beyond anything Poe had ever dreamed of. Influenced also by his charismatic professor at Edinburgh University, Dr. Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle forged an imperishable canon of work over some 40 years with his stories and novels about the Great Detective, each brimming with atmosphere and invention.

No man... has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done.

Sherlock Holmes

A Study in Scarlet (1887)

Conan Doyle inspired a reading public so obsessed with Holmes that the writer’s attempt to kill off the character he had grown tired of (in the short story “The Final Problem,” pp.142–47) was met with national outrage.

Writer at work

Conan Doyle’s own life was often as remarkable as anything to be found in his more bizarre fiction, particularly in his later years, when his interest in spiritualism increasingly came to the fore. His feelings toward the character he had created in Sherlock Holmes were famously mixed. A well-known Punch cartoon of the day showed the author chained to the great detective, and Conan Doyle often expressed his frustrated wish to be remembered for something other than his famous protagonist. But it was Sherlock Holmes rather than the author’s own preferred historical fiction that made Conan Doyle one of the most celebrated popular writers of his age.

The famous duo

Apart from the mesmerising genius of his detective, Conan Doyle’s most durable achievement within the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels was the relationship he established

INTRODUCTION 13

between the logical sleuth and his colleague Watson (the latter a surrogate for the reader), which the writer finessed into something immensely satisfying. Much of the pleasure of the stories and novels may be found in the interaction between Holmes and Watson as much as from the jaw-dropping revelations of the plots.

Holmes on the page

The Sherlock Holmes Book not only examines the complete canonical collection of 56 short stories and the four memorable novels (the most famous of which, of course, is The Hound of the Baskervilles, pp.152–61) but also applies the kind of forensic attention to all things Holmesian that the sleuth himself utilized in his cases— including the life and character of his creator, along with Conan Doyle’s non-Holmes work.

Beyond the canon

While the original canon of Holmes stories and novels remains the key element in the detective’s popularity, it is the infinite—and continuing—flexibility of Holmes and Watson as characters that has rendered them relevant and ripe for multiple reinterpretations even today, in a manner that such Holmes imitators as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot could not begin to rival.

One reason for the longevity of the character is his immensely flexible appeal when adapted for drama—on stage, film, and television. Actors love to take up the magnifying glass, pipe, and violin, and surround themselves with the cozy clutter of 221B Baker Street. All the key actors who have taken on the mantle of Holmes are celebrated here, from the earliest portrayals to the most recent: Benedict Cumberbatch starring in a massively successful modern-day reimagining of Sherlock Holmes in the 21st century.

In these pages, you will also find the literary offshoots—the creation of adventures for the great detective by writers other than Conan Doyle, which began even when the author was still alive, and included such practitioners as his son, Adrian Conan Doyle. Over the years, there have been many Holmes pastiches, from retellings of canonical works to complete reinventions of the detective’s cases.

Other areas for examination are the influence of Conan Doyle’s writing on the crime fiction genre, along with the ways in which the Holmes stories provide insight into historical and social aspects of Victorian England, 19th-century criminology and forensics, and the science and methods of logical thought and deduction.

The Great Detective

In short, The Sherlock Holmes Book provides a complete guide to all aspects of Holmesiana. It is a celebration of Conan Doyle’s most fascinating creation, the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes. ■

Barry Forshaw and David Stuart Davies

Consultant editors

When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock Holmes

The Sign of Four (1890)

STEEL TRUE

BLADE

STRAIGHT

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

A

rthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859. His mother, Mary Foley, was of Irish extraction; she could trace her ancestry back to the influential Percy family of Northumberland, and from there to the Plantagenet line. Mary recounted tales of history, high adventure, and heroic deeds to the young Arthur, which were to be the seeds of inspiration in his later writing career. The family was large—Arthur was the eldest of 10 children—and life was difficult for his mother, who struggled to bring up the family on the meager income provided by her unambitious husband Charles Altamont Doyle—a civil servant and occasional artist. Charles was prone to bouts of epilepsy as well as depression and alcoholism, which eventually led to his being institutionalized in 1893.

Education and influences

In order to help Arthur escape his depressing home background, Mrs. Doyle scraped enough money together to send him to Stonyhurst College, a strict Jesuit boarding school situated in an isolated part of Lancashire. It was at this

That love of books… is among the choicest gifts of the gods.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Through the Magic Door (1907)

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 15

Conan Doyle is pictured here at work in the garden of Bignell Wood—the family’s rural retreat in the New Forest, Hampshire— during the late 1920s.

establishment that he began to question his religious beliefs, and by the time he left the school in 1875 he had firmly rejected Christianity. Instead he began a lifelong search for some other belief to embrace— a search that eventually led him to spiritualism. It was also at Stonyhurst that he encountered a fellow pupil named Moriarty—a name that he would use to great effect later, in his writings. Conan Doyle was always picking up trifles and tidbits of information, ideas, and concepts that he encountered and stored away with the idea of possibly using them in the future.

After studying for a further year with the Jesuits in Feldkirch in Austria, Conan Doyle surprised his artistic family by choosing to study medicine at Edinburgh University. During his time at the university— 1876 to 1881—he encountered two professors who would later serve as models for his characters. In his autobiography, Memories and Adventures (1924), he describes Professor Rutherford with his “Assyrian beard, his prodigious voice, his enormous chest and his singular manner”—characteristics that Conan Doyle would later assign to the colorful Professor George Edward Challenger, the central character in his famous science-fiction novel The Lost World (1912). Even more significant was his association with Dr. Joseph Bell, whose method of deducing the history and circumstances of his patients appeared little short of magical. Here was the model and inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, and it is interesting to note that

Founded in 1891, The Strand Magazine was an illustrated monthly featuring short stories, including the highly popular Sherlock Holmes tales, which appeared in complete form.

the first collection of Holmes short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), is dedicated “To My Old Teacher Joseph Bell.” It has been said that Conan Doyle looked upon Bell as a father figure because he lacked one at home.

To help to pay his university tuition and assist his mother with the upkeep of the family, Conan Doyle undertook many part-time jobs, including that of medical assistant in Birmingham, Sheffield, and Shropshire. He even served as a ship’s doctor on an Arctic whaler, another experience that provided material for his writing—particularly the ghost story “The Captain of the Polestar” (1890), and “The Adventure of Black Peter” (pp.184–85).

From doctor to writer

After graduating in 1882, Conan Doyle became a partner in a medical practice in Plymouth, Devon, with Dr. George Turnaville Budd, who had been a fellow ❯❯

16 INTRODUCTION

Born May 22 in Edinburgh, to Sets up his A Study in Scarlet, Charles Altamont own medical the first Sherlock Meets and

Doyle and Mary practice in Holmes novel, falls in love Foley. Southsea. is published. with Jean Leckie.

1859 1883 1887 1897 1876 1885 1891 1900

Enrolls at Edinburgh University Marries “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first Went to South Africa

to study medicine and meets Louise Hawkins Holmes short story, appears in to serve as a

Dr. Joseph Bell—the main (“Touie”), sister The Strand Magazine. medic for British

inspiration for Holmes. of a patient. troops in the

Second Boer War

(1899–1902).

student at Edinburgh University. Budd was an eccentric and volatile man and the partnership soon disintegrated, leaving Conan Doyle to pack his bags and set up a practice on his own in Southsea, Hampshire. By this time he had already tried his hand at writing fiction and had several short stories published, but it was while in Southsea that he made a more determined effort to achieve success as an author. As he slowly built up his medical practice, Conan Doyle toyed with the idea of creating a detective story in which the protagonist—a character called Sherrinford Holmes—solved a crime by deductive reasoning in the manner of Joseph Bell. In Memories and Adventures he observed: “Reading some detective stories, I was struck by the fact that their results were obtained in nearly every case by chance. I thought I would try my hand at writing a story in which the hero would treat crime as Dr. Bell treated disease and where science would take the place of romance.” This idea materialized in the form of the novel A Study in Scarlet (pp.36–45), with Sherrinford becoming Sherlock—and a legend was born. It was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887; Conan Doyle accepted the meager fee of £25, and in so doing relinquished all claims to the copyright.