The first two Holmes novellas, first published in magazines then in book form, weren’t particularly successful. But the editor of The Strand magazine, George Newnes, saw their potential and commissioned Conan Doyle to write 12 short stories using the Holmes and Watson characters, publishing one a month from July 1891 to June 1892. It was these monthly instalments which began Holmes’s rise to global fame.
A Scandal in Bohemia
Client: The King of Bohemia calls to say he is engaged to an eligible aristocrat but has had an affair with Irene Adler who has photos of them together. Holmes disguises himself as a groom to get the lie of the land, visits her and arranges an elaborate ruse whereby a fire cracker is thrown into the living room and her startled glance at the wall shows Holmes where the safe is. But the next day when he calls to claim them, she has decamped. She is always The Woman.
The Adventure of the Red-Headed League
Client: Jabez Wilson. Jabez is invited to join a league established by an American philanthropist; he is paid to go sit in a room and transcribe the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is an elaborate ruse to get access to his cellar and tunnel into the bank next door.
A Case of Identity
Client: Mary Sutherland, a quiet legatee of a will, becomes engaged to Hosmer Angel at a dance but he mysteriously disappears. Turns out it is none other than her mother’s young second husband trying to swindle her out of her inheritance.
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
Client: Alice Turner. In Herefordshire a landowner has been murdered by Boscombe pool and his son found bloodied and with the weapon. Eventually the richer neighbouring landowner reveals the back story where one was a bandit and one a security guard in Australia. The bandit, John Turner, came back to Blighty to go straight but was haunted by the blackmailing McCarthy who was determined to marry his son to Turner’s daughter, Alice.
The Five Orange Pips
Client: John Openshaw, his uncle Elias returned from the States in the 1860s but has been nervous since receiving an envelope containing 5 orange pips, becoming drunk and paranoid until he is found dead in a pool. Then his brother receives a letter containing five orange pips and instructions to leave ‘the papers’ on the sundial… It is leaders of the Ku Klux Klan coming and going to Britain on sailing ships, posting threats and murdering the unfortunate recipients of the pips.
The Man with the Twisted Lip
Client: Mrs. St. Clair. She glimpses her husband at the window of an opium den, runs upstairs, there is no-one but a raddled addict. The addict is her husband, ashamed to be a City beggar.
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
No client. A goose contains a vast blue jewel. It was stolen by James Ryder in league with a serving girl to the Countess of Morcar, smuggled across London then, in a panic, stuffed down the crop of one of his sister’s geese at her goose farm in Brixton, but then the wrong goose is despatched in a job lot to a pub where it is bought by a man who, drunk, is beset by toughs and drops the goose, which is rescued by a hotel commissionaire who brings it to Holmes!
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
Client: Miss Helen Stoner. Impoverished Dr. Roylott forces Helen Stoner, an heiress, to move into a particular bedroom of his heavily mortgaged ancestral home, Stoke Moran where her sister had mysteriously died, her last words being, ‘The speckled band’. It is a poisonous snake brought back by Roylott from India.
The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
Client: Victor Hatherley. Victor is hired by a German-speaking man to fix a powerful hydraulic device in the country. He quickly realises it is not mining but counterfeiting equipment and makes his escape with the help of a sweet anguished lady but not before the swinish German has hacked off his thumb with a cleaver! He makes his way to Watson who brings him to Holmes…
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
Client: Lord Robert St. Simon marries Miss Hatty Doran of San Francisco in a very high society wedding but she disappears from the wedding breakfast. Holmes establishes she has been contacted by her first, American, husband, long thought to be dead and has returned to him.
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
Client: Alexander Holder of Streatham, a banker, brings home a priceless coronet but awakes in the night to find his son wrestling with it, half of it snapped off and stolen, his son refuses to say more and is charged. Holmes to the rescue!
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
Client: Violet Hunter is mysteriously offered a job at very high pay to be a governess, to have her hair cut, wear a blue dress and sit in a window just so every day. She realises there is a locked wing of the house and suspects someone is incarcerated there, and asks Holmes’s advice…
The Sherlock Universe
From the get-go Conan Doyle deploys the simple strategy of having Dr Watson refer to innumerable other cases which Holmes has investigated, but most of them never written up in his case notes or stories. For example, Watson mentions in passing that in 1887 along Holmes was involved in the Adventure of the Paradol Chamber, the Amateur Mendicant Society, the loss of the Sophy Anderson, the adventures of the Grice Patersons, the Camberwell Poisoning, the Tankerville Club Scandal and so on. In The Speckled Band he says that Holmes was involved in now fewer than 70 cases between 1882 and the time of writing (1891).
This multiplicity, this cornucopia of events and cases which Watson conjures up in throwaway references, creates a universe around the adventures which he actually writes up, which 1) helps to give them plausibility and 2) continually reinforces the sense of Holmes’s fame and superhuman abilities.
It is also attractive to a certain type of mentality, a certain type of fan, who loves immersing themselves in the minutiae of the fictional universe, a mentality which in our day extends to a vast range of adaptation and merchandising – the Robert Downey Jnr movies, the Benedict Cumberbatch TV series, the new books and stories, the books about the historical background and wider context, quiz books, the board games and mugs and t-shirts and top trumps sets etc etc.
Literature and quotations
Early on in A Study in Scarlet Watson humorously summarises Holmes’s fields of knowledge and says ‘Literature: Nil’. In fact this is extensively refuted in the texts themselves, where Holmes is very given to sententiously quoting from a wide range of literary sources:
- In A Study in Scarlet Holmes quotes Boileau: ‘Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire’ (‘A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him’). The very last words of the novella are a quote from Horace: ‘Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo / Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplor in arca’ (‘The public hiss at me, but I cheer myself when in my own house I contemplate the coins in my strong-box’)
- Almost the last words of The Sign of Four are a quote from Goethe: ‘Schade dass die Natur nur EINEN Mensch aus Dir schuf / Denn zum wuerdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff’ (‘Nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man and a rogue’)
- In The Boscombe Valley Mystery, when bored, Holmes pulls out a pocket edition of Petrarch.
- In A Case of Identity he quotes the Persian poet Hafiz.
- In The Red-Headed League he quotes Flaubert writing to George Sand, ‘L’homme c’est rien, l’oeuvre c’est tout’ (‘The man is nothing, the work is everything.’)
- In The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor he quotes Thoreau.
Apart from Watson being wrong about Holmes’s lack of knowledge of literature, I think these literary quotations demonstrate two key aspects of the texts:
- Their sententiousness: Holmes is an extremely didactic character. On one level, the stories consist of Holmes endlessly lecturing, teaching and scolding Watson.
- Their multitextuality: the stories are made up of numerous other texts: newspaper reports and adverts, notes, police reports, Holmes’s own files and records, and so on. The stories are pieced together, stitched together like puzzles made of fragments of other texts.
The fin-de-siècle and Oscar Wilde
There are numerous points of contact between the Holmes and the works of Oscar Wilde.
We’ve seen how The Sign of Four was commissioned by the same publisher who commissioned The Picture of Dorian Gray, an indication of 1) how close the London literary scene was and 2) the financial realities underlying the creation of short dramatic stories.
But Holmes also has a lot in common with Wilde’s aristocratic protagonists, Lord Henry Wotton or Lord Arthur Saville. It’s true he is not an exquisite fainéant, a dandy, an aesthete. But he does display plenty of aristocratic disdain for convention, effortless superiority over the laughably incompetent bourgeois police detectives, a lordly indifference to how he is perceived, sang-froid and indifference to personal danger.
Ennui He suffers from the same kind aristocratic ennui (boredom) which drives the Wildean hero into dangerous moral territory. At the end of The Adventure of the Red-Headed League, when Watson admires his deductive skills, Holmes replies:
‘It saved me from ennui,’ he answered, yawning. ‘Alas! I already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.’
Paradox And Holmes is much given to paradoxes: time and again his detective work reveals the strange and telling lying behind the apparently innocent and mundane, or vice versa; and sometimes he summarises his attitude in witty paradoxes which sound just like Wilde:
‘It is, of course, a trifle, but nothing is so important as trifles.’
London the cesspool of Empire
One of the many appealing things about the stories is how Doyle capitalises on London’s position as heart of the greatest empire the world has ever known to bring in characters with backstories from all over the world:
- The Red-Headed League claims to have been set up by an American millionaire.
- In The Boscombe Valley Mystery the two fathers made their money in the colonies, in Victoria state, Australia.
- The Five Orange Pips is about the long reach of the sinister Ku Klux Klan from far away in the American South.
- In The Adventure of the Speckled Band the ill-fated Dr. Grimesby Roylott has brought his snakes back from India.
- The Noble Bachelor marries the daughter of an American who made his pile in the California Gold Rush.
And so it goes on, creating a particularly quaint and dated vision of the world when half the map was painted red and the world was run by Anglo-Saxon chaps.
Women
If the chaps are, for the most part, noble Anglo-Saxons, then the women are even more dated, fixed in amber from that period – saintly, innocent, virginal helpmeets, dutiful daughters, and damsels in distress. The image of the concerned and helpless young lady, flushed and panting, caught in a hapless plight and requiring help from Holmes the Master-Male, recurs again and again. Any grown-up would be repelled by this stereotyping, but Holmes isn’t for grown-ups.
Books & Boots 