by Daniel Smith
Edgar Allan Poe, who, in his carelessly prodigal fashion, threw out the seeds from which so many of our present forms of literature have sprung, was the father of the detective tale, and covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own. For the secret of the thinness and also of the intensity of the detective story is, that the writer is left with only one quality, that of intellectual acuteness, with which to endow his hero . . . On this narrow path the writer must walk, and he sees the footmarks of Poe always in front of him. He is happy if he ever finds the means of breaking away and striking out on some little side-track of his own.
An inferior fellow? Mais non!
Cock-Sure
Just as Dupin suffered under Holmes’s scrutiny, so did another literary forebear – Monsieur Lecoq. ‘Lecoq was a miserable bungler,’ insisted Holmes. The Frenchman had, suggested the Baker Street detective,
. . .only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book [Monsieur Lecoq, a novel published in 1868] made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid.
Monsieur Lecoq was the creation of Émile Gaboriau and, despite Holmes’s protestations, the stories in which he featured (starting with a cameo debut in L’Affaire Lerouge in 1866) were a formative influence on Conan Doyle. In L’Affaire Lerouge, Lecoq was described as ‘formerly an habitual criminal, now at one with the law, skilful at his job’. The character was based in no small part on Eugène François Vidocq, who had published his memoirs in 1828. Vidocq was quite the villain in his youth but was persuaded to become first a police informer and then an investigator. With first-hand knowledge of the criminal mind, he proved a smash hit at the job and eventually came to head the French national department of criminal investigations and established the world’s first private detective agency. There were even rumours that he was the perpetrator of several crimes that he later ‘solved’ and his memoirs reveal a man who lived life as if it was a picaresque novel. Yet he also developed skills that Holmes himself fostered – from forensic analysis to mastery of disguise and thorough record-keeping. Lecoq was the bridge from Vidocq to Holmes, and Conan Doyle respected Gaboriau’s achievement in bringing him to life. In particular, he admired his ‘neat dovetailing of his plots’, with A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear in particular reflecting Gaboriau’s preference for a structure in which the first half of a book focuses on the process of detection and the second half on explaining the circumstances that led to the crime.
Smoking Slippers
Holmes gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘smoking slippers’ by stashing his haul of tobacco in a Persian slipper in his rooms at No. 221b. This was just one of the many eccentric touches he brought to his legendary abode (which comprised two bedrooms and an airy sitting room bathed in natural light from two broad windows). Aside from great towers of books and papers and all the kit for his chemical experimentation, he also had a coal scuttle which he filled with further smoking paraphernalia, not to mention a bear-skin rug and a photo of ‘the woman’, Irene Adler. His post, meanwhile, was generally secured on the mantelpiece by means of a jack-knife blade. As for that Persian slipper, it might have been better used for its intended purpose, given the famous seventeen steps Holmes had to ascend and descend every time he came and went from his dwellings.
MRS HUDSON’S PLACE
Descriptions of 221b Baker Street played an integral part in building up our understanding of Holmes’s character, as well as serving as the jumping-off point for so many epic adventures. In fact, no less than forty-six of the canonical stories started here, with twenty-seven also reaching their conclusion back at Mrs Hudson’s place.
Home from Holmes
But where exactly was No. 221b? At the time that Holmes and Watson lived there, no such address existed in the real world. Baker Street house numbers extended only up to 85. There is one school of thought that Conan Doyle envisaged his characters living on what was known as Upper Baker Street, at the northern end of modern Baker Street. Others, though, have interpreted hints in the stories (and particularly descriptions of locations in ‘The Empty House’) as pointing to a site significantly further to the south. The whole knotty issue was only made more confusing when London’s urban planners decided to renumber Baker Street in the 1930s – a long time after Holmes’s own residency had finished. The stretch of road that theoretically included 221 was now taken up by the headquarters of the Abbey National building society. Then, in the 1990s, the Sherlock Holmes Museum was opened on Baker Street on property stretching from 237 to 241 according to the modern numbering. Westminster City Council, however, took it upon themselves to recognize the museum’s address as 221b – a designation challenged by the Abbey National until it departed the area in 2002. Quite what Baker Street’s many postal workers must have made of it all over the years is anyone’s guess!
A Place to Call Home
No. 221b Baker Street is among a handful of addresses that have resonance around the globe. It is, we all know, the home of the great detective. But it was not his first address in London. As is revealed in ‘The Musgrave Ritual’, that honour rests with Montague Street in the city’s Bloomsbury area, from where he practised as a detective. His rooms there were described as ‘just round the corner from the British Museum’, a location with obvious appeal as Holmes liked to visit that venerable institution to gather information pertinent to his work. The Museum, based on the collections of Hans Sloane, dates back to 1753 and was opened to the public six years later. Its famous reading room – a magnificent circular, domed chamber set into the museum’s courtyard – was designed by Sydney Smirke and built in the 1850s. In Holmes’s time, there was no more agreeable place to consult a book or an index in the whole of the country, and there was every chance he might bump into a public figure of the ilk of Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker or Oscar Wilde while perusing the reading room’s myriad shelves. Montague Street ran (and still runs) along the eastern side of the museum. We see Holmes visiting the museum twice in the canon: once in The Hound of the Baskervilles to investigate the background of Stapleton, and once in ‘Wisteria Lodge’ when Watson learns from a casual aside that Holmes had made a trip there in the course of a fevered investigation.
The End?
After Conan Doyle died in 1930, it was understood by disappointed fans that ‘Shoscombe Old Place’, which appeared in The Strand in March 1927, was the final canonical story. Then, in 2015, there were reports of one of the great literary discoveries – a long-lost Holmes story written by Conan Doyle himself. A historian by the name of Walter Elliot unearthed the treasure in his attic – a charming curio of just 1,300 words, written around 1904 for inclusion in a 49-page volume called The Book o’ the Brig. The collection was put together to raise money for the restoration of a bridge that had been washed away in the Scottish town of Selkirk during floods in 1902. Entitled ‘Sherlock Holmes: Discovering the Border Burghs and, by deduction, the Brig Bazaar’, it is centred around an exchange between Holmes and Watson in which the detective displays his customary brilliance to deduce just how Watson intends to spend his weekend. It is no Hound or ‘Speckled Band’, but it is nonetheless engaging in its own way. Conan Doyle was very fond of Selkirk and, as well as contributing this story, he also appeared in person to open the fundraising bazaar. It is thought that the two-day event raised some £560 – a not insignificant sum at the time but one which pales against the value of the first Conan Doyle Holmes story to be discovered in nearly nine decades.
Off the Record
Although the traditional canon is taken to comprise A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear and the fifty-six short stories that appeared in The Strand, Conan Doyle wrote several other short pieces that featured Holmes. The earliest was ‘The
Field Bazaar’ from 1896, a short story written in response to a request from his alma mater, the University of Edinburgh, for a contribution to a charitable magazine. It was a rather post-modern affair, in which Watson and Holmes are seen having breakfast together, with Watson having received a request very similar to the one that had been sent to Conan Doyle in the first place. Holmes then sets about revealing the nature of the letter through a characteristic display of his powers of observation. Later, in 1924, Conan Doyle wrote the curiosity that is ‘How Watson Learned the Trick’ – a tale of just over 500 words specially written to be produced in a micro-format that could be included in the library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, Edward Lutyen’s astonishing giant-sized dolls’ house created for the wife of King George V.
The Amateur Reasoner
In 1898, five years after killing off Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote two further mystery stories for The Strand, ‘The Story of the Lost Special’ and ‘The Story of the Man with the Watches’. The first – about a train and its passengers disappearing – features a reference to ‘an amateur reasoner of some celebrity’, while the latter – about a dead man found on a train with several pocket watches in his jacket – also has an amateur sleuth at work. In both cases, the amateur makes impressive but flawed attempts to resolve the cases. Numerous students of the Holmes stories have suggested that this was Conan Doyle’s way of giving his hero an anonymous airing after several years of silence. Whether they add much to the core canon, however, is uncertain.
Smarter than Einstein?
No one can doubt that Holmes was smarter than the average, but just how intelligent was he? The detective himself was quite clear that some people are just born cleverer than others. ‘It is a question of cubic capacity,’ he once said. ‘A man with so large a brain must have something in it.’ So, in 1999, John Radford – Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of East London – decided to figure out just how bright Sherlock was. In his book The Intelligence of Sherlock Holmes and Other Three-pipe Problems, he scoured the original stories for clues and used three different methods of estimating the detective’s IQ (intelligence quotient). He concluded, unsurprisingly, that Holmes displayed an extremely high level of intelligence – something in the range of 190. By comparison, Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein are thought to have had IQ scores in the range of 160. While IQ may not be a perfect measure of intelligence (a fluid concept), it is nonetheless an important indicator of an individual’s ability to think abstractly. Just imagine where we might be if, rather than fight crime, Holmes had used his talents to develop time travel or explain the origins of the universe!
Take It to the Bank
If we are to believe the words of Dr Watson at the start of ‘The Adventure of Thor Bridge’, the Charing Cross branch of Cox & Co. bank was home to a gold mine. For somewhere in its vaults was a ‘travel-worn and battered dispatch-box with my name, John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid’. It was crammed, so we are led to believe, with papers mostly concerned with Holmes’s many investigations. If the canon gives us a taster of his peculiar genius, the Cox & Co. vaults offered the promise of a much larger feast. Cox’s was undoubtedly a good choice for such a treasury. Founded in the mid-18th century, principally to facilitate the government’s payment of members of the armed forces, it soon became the bank of choice for retired soldiers, such as Watson. Initially based in Whitehall, its head office moved to 16–18 Charing Cross, where Whitehall and Trafalgar Square meet, in 1888. In 1922, the bank bought the Henry S. King & Co. bank and rebranded as Cox & Kings, but was soon itself sold to Lloyds Bank and relocated to Pall Mall. Over the years, its role has changed so that now Cox & Kings is primarily a travel company. Yet despite all these changes, ardent fans continue to hope that Watson’s trusty dispatch box remains buried in its bowels, to one day offer up its secrets to the world.
Arms and the Man
Both Holmes and Watson carried firearms in multiple canonical cases. Watson was still in possession of his service sidearm, which was probably an Adams revolver, while Holmes favoured Webley handguns. Holmes had good reason to feel the need to be armed. Across Conan Doyle’s stories, he was attacked with, variously, a cane, a bludgeon, a knife, a heavy masonry slab, a horse-and-carriage, an air gun (twice), poison (three times) and firearms (four times).
A Good Reade
In The Sign of the Four, Holmes gives us an insight into one of the books that most influenced his own thinking – The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade. He said of this text that it is among the ‘most remarkable ever penned’. William Winwood Reade, who lived from 1838 until 1875, was a British adventurer, historian and philosopher. The Martyrdom of Man, published in 1872, was intended as an over-arching history of Western civilization, divided into four broad sections: War, Religion, Liberty and Intellect. These abstract concepts are, Reade suggested, the historical drivers of human progress, with the ‘age of the Intellect’ set to bring an end to the period of war and religion. It is easy to see how such a thesis might have appealed to Holmes, the very epitome of intellect. Moreover, Reade suggested that while every individual may be a mystery, Man as a species could be understood in terms of scientific probability. Holmes gave this account:
He remarks, that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.
Such a view clearly chimes with Holmes’s own methods in seeking to understand the actions of the individual by a study of the mass. In ‘Shoscombe Old Place’, for example, he is heard to exclaim: ‘Capital, Watson! A thumb-nail sketch. I seem to know the man.’ It was by ‘playing the percentages’ – judging what the ‘average’ person might do – that Holmes ultimately was able to make one of his most famous assertions: ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’
Not So Elementary, My Dear Watson
It is the single phrase for which Sherlock Holmes is most famous. Yet he never actually said it – not in Conan Doyle’s original stories, anyway. While he often said ‘elementary’ and ‘my dear Watson’, he never put the words together. The closest he came was in ‘The Crooked Man’ but even then the phrases were in the wrong order and separated by fifty-two words. The credit for coining the phrase in a literary context seems to lie with that genius of the comic novel, P. G. Wodehouse. It debuted in Psmith, Journalist, a story first serialized in 1909–10 and published as a novel six years later. At one point, Psmith is about to explicate certain events to his companions, telling them: ‘I fancy that this is one of those moments when it is necessary for me to unlimber my Sherlock Holmes system.’ When a certain Billy Windsor concurs with Psmith’s conclusions, Psmith retorts: ‘Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary.’ Yet, there is evidence to suggest that the phrase had entered popular discourse even before Wodehouse’s intervention. Way back in 1901, for example, an advert for Charles Ford’s wondrously named Bile Beans for Biliousness presented itself as a Holmes pastiche and included the line: ‘Elementary, my dear Potson.’
BIRTH OF A CATCHPHRASE
If it didn’t come from Conan Doyle’s pen, where had the line ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ come from so that by the turn of the century advertisers were hijacking it for their own commercial ends? The great Holmesian scholar Mattias Boström has made a convincing case that it must have originated in William Gillette’s celebrated play of Sherlock Holmes in 1899 (see here). While the line is absent from the original script, it seems likely that it found its way into the stage performance and from there into the hearts of its audience.
Not Even the Brightest in the Family
Sometimes it can be tough being a younger sibling. Such was the case for Sherlock, who found himself to be the intellectual inferior of his older brother, Mycroft. Some seven
years senior, Mycroft lived in and worked out of Whitehall – that part of London that serves as the very heart of British government – and spent each evening at the Diogenes Club on Pall Mall, ‘the queerest club in Britain’ full of ‘the most unsociable and unclubable men in town’, each in search of an opportunity for silent contemplation. According to Holmes, Mycroft had ‘the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living’. High praise from a man who Watson once famously observed was ‘an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart . . . pre-eminent in intelligence’. According to Sherlock, Mycroft acted as a ‘clearing house’ of information and analysis for the government – a role to which he was well suited given ‘his specialism is omniscience’. Where once he was considered ‘a short-cut, a convenience’, he grew to be ‘an essential’. It is even said in ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ that he was ‘the most indispensable man in the country’ and ‘occasionally. . . is the British government’. Mycroft was thus quite an act to follow but Sherlock did have certain advantages over his sibling. Specifically, he had a physical energy to which his corpulent brother could only aspire. Given the amount of racing around required in the field of criminal investigation, only the younger Holmes boy ever stood a chance of becoming the world’s most celebrated detective.