by Daniel Smith
LIGHTING THE TOUCH-PAPER?
Surprisingly, though, Sherlock Holmes did not feature in the first story Conan Doyle published in The Strand Magazine. The Strand was published monthly from January 1891 but Holmes made his debut only in the July. Back in March, Conan Doyle had contributed a story called ‘The Voice of Science’, which served as a gentle parody of provincial intellectual life. It tells the tale of one Mrs Esdaile of the Lindens, Birchespool, who serves as secretary for the local ladies’ branch of the wonderfully named Eclectic Society. The narrative revolves around a gramophone – then a wonder of modern science (its appearance here prefiguring its later scene-stealing cameo in ‘The Mazarin Stone’). Mrs Esdaile’s intention is to wow attendees by playing a recorded lecture by a well-known academic. However, her son, Rupert, has other ideas as he bids to stop his sister, Rose, from being wooed by a certain Captain Beesly, who is to be in attendance. He executes a cunning ruse using the gramophone to ensure Beesly’s disgrace. Rose, meanwhile, ends up being courted by a far more suitable candidate. All in all, it is a perfectly amiable little trifle but gave barely a hint of the publishing pyrotechnics Conan Doyle was about to unleash through Holmes. In a relationship that ran from 1891 until 1930, The Strand printed 121 of Conan Doyle’s short stories, 70 of his articles, 9 novels, 2 interviews and a single poem. What would the members of the Eclectic Society have made of it all?
TWELVE OF THE BEST
In 1927, just before the publication of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (the final collection of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories), The Strand Magazine ran a competition. Readers were challenged to rank the twelve best short stories, with the winner being whoever most closely replicated Conan Doyle’s own ranking. The generous prize was £100 and an autographed copy of Conan Doyle’s Memories and Adventures. According to Conan Doyle, although he entered into the challenge light-heartedly, he soon realized that there was serious work to be done. He dismissed the dozen later stories included in The Case-Book, on the grounds that readers were less familiar with these tales. However, had he chosen to include them, he believed two of the Case-Book tales would have made it to his ‘dozen best’ – ‘The Lion’s Mane’ for its plotting and ‘The Illustrious Client’ for its ‘certain dramatic quality’. His criteria for inclusion were varied. Apart from originality of plots and a general sense of dramatic tension, he favoured those that, variously, introduced significant characters (notably Professor Moriarty and Colonel Moran), that had ‘more female interest than is usual’, and that displayed a ‘historical touch’. Others he dismissed for faults that might have escaped the general reader. ‘Silver Blaze’, for instance, was dismissed because its ‘racing detail’ was ‘faulty’. Nonetheless, he reassured his readers, he had striven to ensure all the stories were ‘as good as I could make them’. Below is Conan Doyle’s ‘top of the pops’ in full.
1. ‘The Speckled Band’
2. ‘The Red-Headed League’
3. ‘The Dancing Men’
4. ‘The Final Problem’
5. ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’
6. ‘The Empty House’
7. ‘The Five Orange Pips’
8. ‘The Second Stain’
9. ‘The Devil’s Food’
10. ‘The Priory School’
11. ‘The Musgrave Ritual’
12. ‘The Reigate Squires’
THE IGNOBLE BACHELOR
Writing in the late 1920s in response to an accusation that the later Holmes stories were not as good as the earlier ones, Conan Doyle rated ‘The Noble Bachelor’ (published in 1892) as ‘about bottom of the list’.
CRIMINAL PLOTS
Across the canon, Holmes takes on no less than thirty-seven cases of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter – homicide (most commonly by poison) being Conan Doyle’s favoured crime for Holmes to investigate. Nonetheless, there are also fourteen cases of theft and robbery, four each of blackmail and kidnap (or false imprisonment), not to mention two tales that involve counterfeiting. Perhaps more surprising, some ten stories (over 15 per cent of the entire canon) involve no crime having been committed at all.
Sowing the Seed
Conan Doyle’s first foray into the world of publishing had actually come way back in 1879 when, as a twenty-year-old, he had a short story in Chambers’s Journal– a publication which aimed to be the journal of ‘Popular Literature, Science, and Art’. The tale was called ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley’ and was published on 6 September that year. Subtitled ‘A South African Story’, it centres on the adventures of two young English fortune hunters in Cape Colony. Tom Donahue and Jack Turnbull are told by a neighbour, Dick Wharton, of the legend of the Sasassa Valley ghost – a hellish creature with glowing eyes. They venture to the valley where they catch sight of the apparently supernatural beast on a cliff. Marking the spot with sticks, they return in daylight to investigate further. They are overjoyed when they think they have discovered a large diamond but their hopes are soon dashed . . . but only for the time being. While firmly in the category of juvenilia, the story nonetheless hints at what was to come. There is an acute sense of adventure, an intriguing mystery, a hovering shadow of fear. It is fast-paced, if not as elegantly written as the classic tales of the older Conan Doyle. However, the author’s name was not attached to it for many years. It was originally published anonymously and it was only in the 1890s that it was credited to Conan Doyle and then only in certain international editions.
The Price of Success
For most of his early life, Conan Doyle did not have much money, but he always harboured hopes that he would make a fortune from his literary skills. It was a risky strategy, but how it paid off! Back in 1883, he was a struggling doctor on the English south coast and his tax return for that year showed no liability – in other words, his income was insufficient to be taxed. When the tax man sent back his return with the comment ‘most unsatisfactory’ written across it, Conan Doyle returned it once more with a comment of his own: ‘I entirely agree.’ It was at about the same time that he sent his mother a letter in which he spoke of his determination to secure ‘some three-figure cheques’ for his writing. That would take a while, though. A Study in Scarlet brought him just £25 and The Sign of the Four about £100. By the time he signed with The Strand in 1891, he was getting £35 per story for the first six Holmes stories (not bad considering the previous two works had been novels and these were but short stories) and then £50 for the next six – an indicator of how quickly Holmes’s popularity had grown. He was, according to his correspondence, able to churn out four of the tales in a fortnight. But it was with the next dozen stories, commissioned in 1892, that he started to hit pay-dirt. For those twelve yarns he was paid a thousand pounds. After attempting to kill off Holmes in 1893, it was always going to take a big offer to entice Conan Doyle to bring his character back from the brink. Sure enough, in 1901 he received something near £5,000 for The Hound of the Baskervilles, then the following year he received an unprecedented $45,000 from Collier’s magazine for just the US serialization of thirteen new adventures. While it is always problematic to attempt historical monetary conversions, it is safe to say that this would equate to a seven-figure sum today. Clearly, sometimes crime does pay.
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
Such was the immediate impact of Holmes’s early appearances in The Strand that parodies of varying quality started to appear within months. More often than not they featured a detective whose name was a terrible pun based on the original, with the authors similarly adopting pseudonyms that were contortions of Conan Doyle’s own name. So, for instance, ‘The Adventures of Sherwood Hoakes’ by A. Cone and Oil (pseudonym of Charles C. Rothwell) appeared in The Ludgate Weekly in April 1892. However, the original parody was probably a story called ‘Robinson’s Daughter’, published a few weeks earlier in the comic magazine, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday. One of the most popular series of parodies appeared in 1893, when Punch magazine published ‘The Adventures of Picklock Holes�
� by Cunnin Toil (pseudonym of R. C. Lehmann). The first wave of tales ran through to 1894, with another collection appearing ten years later and a final story (‘His Final Arrow’) coming out in 1918.
CHUBB-LOCK HOLMES
Another interesting addition to the parody genre was the ‘Chubb-lock Holmes’ comic strip that sprang to life in Comic Cuts in 1894. It was the product of no lesser talent than Jack Butler Yeats, brother of W. B. Yeats (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature) and himself regarded as one of Ireland’s finest painters of the twentieth century.
Where Angels Fear to Tread
Shortly after completing A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle decided to write a play that borrowed heavily from parts of that landmark story. Angels of Darkness, which he wrote around 1889, is something of a literary oddity, not least because it features Watson (or at least, a version of Watson) but no Holmes. The script essentially lifts sections of A Study in Scarlet and transports them to San Francisco. There are some fairly unpalatable scenes to the modern mind – particularly those that attempt to make comic mileage out of some crude racial caricatures. Watson, meanwhile, enjoys some undeniable sexual tension with a young lady called Lucy – a fact he almost certainly didn’t go on to share with Mary Morstan (see here). Conan Doyle did not do much with the play once it was finished, presumably realizing that there were greater rewards to be had by writing more original Holmes stories instead. For a long while, myths about the contents of the script whirled around the Holmesian world, with the likes of John Dickson Carr believing it best that it never came to public light. It was nonetheless published at the turn of this century, intriguing as an item of Holmes apocrypha, but clearly a product of its time and with little to recommend a revival.
Carved into History
Being immortalized in statue form is an honour that befalls few literary creations. Yet Holmes can boast at least five major statues, spread across the world. The first to be unveiled, in September 1988, is to be found at Meiringen in Switzerland, not far from the Reichenbach Falls, which play such an important role in the Holmes legend. Sculpted by the English artist John Doubleday, it is the only seated statue of the great detective: for added interest it incorporates clues to all sixty canonical stories on its plinth. Just the following month, another statue was erected, this time at Oiwake in the Japanese resort town of Karuizawa. This location was selected on the basis that it was here that the translator Ken Nobuhara had added the finishing touches to the first full Japanese version of the canon. Yoshinori Satoh created the life-size sculpture. Edinburgh was the next to get its own Holmes, which appeared in Picardy Place (where Conan Doyle had been born) in 1991. This version – by Gerald Laing – is also life-size, depicting the detective with trademark deerstalker, pipe and cape. Then, perhaps belatedly, London took its turn. John Doubleday was again the sculptor and the project was funded by the Abbey National building society, whose main offices were thought to be on the site of 221b Baker Street. Again shown with pipe, deerstalker and cape, this one stands a mighty 3 metres high and is to be found on Marylebone Road, outside the entrance to Baker Street underground station. It was unveiled in 1999. G. K. Chesterton had suggested a London statue to Holmes as long ago as 1927, so it was a long time coming. Then, in 2007, Moscow joined the party, unveiling a statue of both Holmes and Watson, located not far from the city’s British embassy.
Art in the Blood
Based on an exchange between Holmes and Watson in the 1893 story, ‘The Greek Interpreter’, we know that Holmes was related to the Vernets, a famous real-life family of French painters. The conversation occurred one summer’s evening as the two men discussed ‘hereditary aptitudes’.
‘In your case,’ Watson told Holmes, ‘. . . it seems obvious that your faculty of observation and your peculiar facility for deduction are due to your own systematic training.’
‘To some extent,’ Holmes replies, ‘but, nonetheless, my turn that way is in my veins, and may come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist.’
There were, in fact, three generations of Vernet painters so it is not entirely clear which one Holmes was referring to. However, it’s safe to assume that Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–89) is too old to have been Holmes’s great uncle (seeing as Holmes is thought to have been born around 1854). But his son Antoine Charles Horace (1758–1835), who was commonly known as Carle, could fit the bill, as might Carle’s own son, Horace Vernet (1789–1863). Given the popular image of Holmes as both the epitome of Englishness and an icon of scientific rationalism, this particular aspect of his heritage is intriguing to say the least.
Drawn from Life
As Holmes claimed descendancy from the famous Vernets, so too could Conan Doyle point to an artistic strand within his family. Specifically, his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was an accomplished painter and professional illustrator. He even got the chance to illustrate some of his son’s work, although it is sad to reflect that his contributions are not particularly celebrated. It was a response symptomatic of a life dogged by problems and unfulfilled promise. Born in 1832 into a family of artists and illustrators (Arthur’s uncle, Henry, founded the National Gallery of Ireland), Doyle illustrated a good number of books’ including The Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and was invited to exhibit his watercolours at the Scottish Royal Academy. Yet the success and adulation he craved remained elusive. Prone to depression, he increasingly took to drink and from the 1870s spent a number of spells in psychiatric institutions. Nonetheless, in 1888, he was given the job of illustrating A Study in Scarlet. If it was hoped that this might revive his spirits, the results were disappointing to say the least – the drawings reflecting a talent in serious decline. His health continued to spiral downwards and he died at an institution in Scotland in 1893. Arthur considered him a ‘great unrecognized genius’ whose life was blighted by his refusal to acknowledge ’the realities of life’. The author’s enduring affection for his father is hinted at by the use of ‘Altamont’ as Holmes’s alias in ‘His Last Bow’.
The Name’s Holmes . . . Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle originated a now world-famous phrase synonymous with another fictional hero of enduring appeal. Ian Fleming’s James Bond is, of course, also known by the designation 007. The ‘Double O’ prefix indicates that he carries a licence from MI6 (Britain’s foreign intelligence service) granting him the right to kill at his discretion in the interests of completing his field missions. Such is the powerful hold of the phrase ‘licence to kill’ that it provided the title of an episode of the film franchise in 1989. Yet Conan Doyle used those very words as a caption to a rather jaunty self-portrait way back in 1881. In August that year, he graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a bachelor’s degree in medicine and a master’s in surgery. In celebration, he drew an image of himself, behatted and wearing a suit, dancing while holding up his degree. Underneath is the legend: ‘Licensed to kill.’
A LICENCE TO THRILL
While Holmes sometimes resorted to violence when necessary to solve a crime (and regularly armed himself with deadly weapons), he never directly killed anyone. No need for a licence to kill, then – just a licence to thrill, instead.
Dear Mr Holmes . . .
As Holmes’s popularity grew, the less clear the boundary between fact and fiction became. This is exemplified by the extraordinary volume of correspondence sent to Holmes by people convinced that he was a real person who could come to their aid. From his early appearances in The Strand right through to the present day, he has received missives from a disparate array of correspondents. Nor have they come merely from over-eager fans or credulous child readers. The archives show that plenty of apparently sophisticated and well-connected adults, among them lawyers and police officers – have made contact in the hope of engaging his services. One of the first letters was from a tobacconist in Philadelphia seeking a copy of Holmes’s monograph on identifying different types of ash. In another letter, dated 1913, a man named Felix de
Halpert hoped to reach Conan Doyle at the 221b Baker Street address to ask for his assistance in investigating the murder of a Polish prince, which was likely the work of Russian agents. In the early days, letters sent to No. 221b were customarily redirected to Conan Doyle or Scotland Yard, although some also found their way to Joseph Bell and William Gillette, too. From the 1930s the Abbey National building society in Baker Street dealt with Holmes’s post, employing a dedicated secretary to deal with the heavy workload. More recently, though, it has been the Sherlock Holmes Museum on Baker Street that has taken up the slack.
Disrespecting One’s Elders
C. Auguste Dupin, the Parisian amateur detective created by Edgar Allan Poe, is often cited as the first great literary detective. Although he appeared in just three stories, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844), his influence on future generations of crime writers is incalculable. Like Holmes, he used extraordinary logical reasoning and close observation to unravel the most perplexing mysteries. Holmes, though, was rather snotty about his predecessor’s capabilities. In A Study in Scarlet, for example, Watson commented that Holmes reminded him of Dupin, only for Holmes to respond: ‘Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow.’ Holmes went on that he ‘had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine’. Later, in ‘The Cardboard Box’, Dupin was this time damned with faint praise, described underwhelmingly as a ‘close reasoner’. These critiques, however, were written with some irony by Conan Doyle, who never hid his admiration for Poe. He was, according to Conan Doyle, ‘. . . the supreme original short story writer of all time’. ‘Each [of his detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed . . . Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?’ In a 1902 preface to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, he went further still: