Watson, however, is surprised when this distinctly histrionic fellow glances at him and declares, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” How, the doctor wonders, did he know that? When the pair set up bachelor quarters at 221B Baker Street, Watson continues to be puzzled by his new roommate. What does Holmes do for a living? Why do all these strange people come to call? Sometimes the man spends hours just lying upon a sofa in the sitting room, “hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night. On these occasions I have noticed such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion.” Not for the first time will Watson be proved wrong in his deductions.
Nonetheless, putting on his diagnostician’s hat, he takes to studying Holmes, listing his strengths and weaknesses, noting his profound knowledge of chemistry and crime. Then, one day, Watson happens upon a magazine article entitled “The Book of Life,” which “attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way.” To Watson’s incredulity, his flatmate reveals that he is its author. In fact, Holmes admits that he possesses “a turn both for observation and deduction” and has consequently established himself as a “consulting detective.” He serves as the court of last resort when Scotland Yard is stymied. Utterly astonished, Watson interjects that he had no idea such individuals existed “outside of stories,” thus subtly imputing to Holmes and himself the reality of flesh and blood.
A few pages later a letter from Inspector Tobias Gregson arrives announcing the discovery of a dead man at Lauriston Gardens. The body, it turns out, is that of Enoch J. Drebber, most recently a resident of Cleveland, Ohio. Why was Drebber in London? Since there is no obvious wound, how was he killed? And for what reason? On the wall of the empty room is scribbled, in blood, the single word “Rache.” I’ll say no more about what happens, beyond pointing out our first glimpse of Holmes at a crime scene:
He whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face. So engrossed was he with his occupation that he appeared to have forgotten our presence, for he chattered away to himself under his breath the whole time, keeping up a running fire of exclamations, groans, whistles, and little cries suggestive of encouragement and of hope. As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forward through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent.
Conan Doyle admitted that Holmes’s armchair wizardry—as when, in “The Blue Carbuncle,” he concludes from an old hat that a man’s wife has ceased to love him—was derived from the example of his own medical school teacher at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell was renowned for both his theatricality and his ability to make startling and accurate deductions upon first meeting a new patient. That said, Holmes the sleuth-hound, nosing about on the ground and talking to himself, derives from Gaboriau’s Père Tabaret, who behaves in just this manner in L’Affaire Lerouge (which, as more than one scholar has noticed, could almost be loosely translated as “A Study in Scarlet”).
On the way back to Baker Street, Holmes interviews the police constable who discovered the murder and from him learns about a drunk found on the street nearby. At this point he interrupts with an utterly enigmatic question: “Had he a whip in his hand?” Most readers are likely to say to themselves, “What? Where did that come from?” Obviously, Holmes has registered some significant detail which has escaped our attention. But he doesn’t tell us what it is. Instead, he withholds his deductions until the right moment for their revelation, thus generating that feather touch of irony running throughout these stories (and most golden-age detective fiction): Holmes always knows more than we do. As he once sternly told Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.” What is meaningful to the detective invariably remains mysterious to the reader.
In A Study in Scarlet Holmes also flaunts his familiarity with the entire “calendar of crime,” remarking, for instance, that in interpreting the Lauriston murder “the cases of Dolsky in Odessa, and of Leturier in Montpellier, will occur at once to any toxicologist.” (In later stories Watson matches such name-dropping, frequently referring to cases “for which the world is not yet prepared”: What would we give to know more about “The lighthouse, the politician and the trained cormorant” or “The Amateur Mendicant Society” or, best of all, “the giant rat of Sumatra”!) Besides his scientific superiority and criminal expertise, Holmes here exhibits his fundamentally bohemian nature as well. Like a bored aesthete, he listens distractedly, even disdainfully, to Inspector Gregson’s report on the testimony of Enoch Drebber’s landlady. “‘It’s all quite exciting,’ said Sherlock Holmes, with a yawn. ‘What happened next?’” The condescension is unmistakable—and yet Holmes has actually learned a vital piece of information.
A Study in Scarlet proves noteworthy, too, for the first appearance of the Baker Street Irregulars, the London street urchins who can go anywhere and overhear anyone, and who consequently serve the detective as a city-wide surveillance system. Most important of all, Watson discovers his own new vocation: Near the story’s end, he tells Holmes, “You should publish an account of the case,” and then adds, “If you won’t, I will for you.” The detective shrugs. “You may do what you like, Doctor.”
The initial characterization of Holmes as part Babbage calculating machine, part decadent aesthete is reinforced in The Sign of Four. This novel opens with the shocking scene of the detective injecting himself with a hypodermic syringe. “Which is it today?” Watson sarcastically inquires. “Morphine or cocaine?” To which Holmes languidly answers, “It is cocaine,” then adds, “a seven-percent solution. Would you care to try it?” As disturbing as this vignette can seem to modern sensibilities, bear in mind that cocaine was then regularly prescribed for depression and that Holmes’s mild dose would cost him only pennies. In fact, he isn’t really a drug addict; he’s an adrenaline junkie.
By this time the doctor and the detective have been residing together for some while, and Watson knows all too well the moodiness and melancholy of the bored Holmes: “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work . . . I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.” Holmes requires the constant intellectual challenge of a mystery, the exhilaration of the chase. In The Sign of Four he finds abundant cerebral and physical excitement, culminating in a headlong pursuit down the Thames River after a one-legged man and his devilish (though anthropologically unlikely) companion. How devilish? At one point, Holmes says quietly to the armed Watson, “Fire if he raises his hand.” In context, this is one of the most electrifying sentences in the canon.
What, though, led Conan Doyle to bring back Holmes, given that he probably never intended to write about him again after A Study in Scarlet? It is a remarkable story. In 1889 J. M. Stoddart of Lippincott’s Magazine, published out of Philadelphia, traveled to London in search of new material for his pages. He invited two rising young authors to dinner at the Langham Hotel—which now displays a plaque commemorating the evening—and quickly signed up both for short novels. So Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Arthur Conan Doyle produced The Sign of the Four (in later British editions, The Sign of Four, 1890). The latter book’s portrait of the fussy and hypochondriacal Thaddeus Sholto is, in part, an affectionate caricature of Wilde.
Early in this second novel, Conan Doyle establishes a distinct contrast between Holmes as inhuman “automaton” and the all-too-human Watson, who early on admits to “an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents.” This would suggest that one of the doctor’s vices—obliquely alluded to in A Study in Scarlet—is sexual promiscui
ty (another, we later surmise, is gambling). After Watson meets Mary Morstan, who has come to Holmes for help, he calculates that “she must be seven-and-twenty now—a sweet age, when youth has lost its self-consciousness and become a little sobered by experience.” This certainly sounds like the practiced libertine. Yet Watson falls in love with Miss Morstan at first sight, simply, purely, and totally.
Nothing if not atmospheric, The Sign of Four depicts London as a kind of Arabian Nights realm of wonders, Baghdad on the Thames. The novelist Graham Greene once confessed that of all the Holmes adventures only “that dark night in Pondicherry Lodge, Norwood, has never faded from my memory.” From the beginning Conan Doyle exerted his considerable descriptive powers (in part because, still living in Southsea, he knew London largely from maps):
It was a September evening, and not yet seven o’clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light, which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more. I am not subject to impressions but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed.
Consider two details in this passage, the first being Conan Doyle’s jarring repetition of the verb “threw.” This is probably an indication of the high speed with which he habitually scribbled his Holmes stories. Even by nineteenth-century standards, Conan Doyle could be an astonishingly facile writer. In this instance he signed the contract for The Sign of Four on August 30, 1889 and delivered the manuscript just a month later; A Study in Scarlet was written almost as fast. To complete a short story would seldom require more than a couple of days. Once a plot had been worked out, the actual writing could be done in a single draft, with perhaps a few light corrections afterward. Second, let me draw your attention—as Holmes might say—to the phrase “flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.” This is another of those many covert allusions that thicken the texture of Conan Doyle’s writing. In this instance, the image is drawn from the Venerable Bede, who in a famous passage of his Ecclesiastical History of England (circa AD 731) compares the meaningless life of a pagan to a sparrow that flies from a stormy winter’s night into a warm mead hall and then, all too quickly, passes back into the surrounding darkness.
In The Sign of Four Mary Morstan brings Holmes several mysteries: What happened to her father after Captain Morstan arrived in London from military service in the East and suddenly vanished? Why has she received a lustrous pearl of great price on each of her birthdays over the past six years? Could there be any importance to a scrap of Indian paper inscribed with four interlinked crosses and the words “the sign of the four”? (To this last, the contemporary response would be “Duh.”) And, most immediately pressing, who is the mysterious correspondent asking to meet her at seven that evening “at the third pillar from the left” of the Lyceum Theater? She may bring two friends, if she feels insecure, but no police. Of course, Watson and Holmes agree to accompany their new client.
Much will happen that night, but eventually the nervous Thaddeus Sholto will guide the little company to Pondicherry Lodge, once the home of his late father Major Sholto and currently that of his twin brother Bartholomew. At the gates they are stopped by a former prizefighter named McMurdo, now working as a bodyguard. Here Holmes discloses an unexpected detail from his past: As an amateur he once boxed against McMurdo, who remembers his “cross-hit . . . under the jaw.” The pugilist then tells the detective, “You’re one who has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.” (The “fancy” is a slang term for the fight game.) Are there, then, no limits to Holmes’s abilities? His subsequent acrobatics on the roof of Pondicherry Lodge will actually be compared to those of Blondin, the aerialist who walked across a wire suspended over Niagara Falls. Detective, aesthete, human calculating machine, actor, music and art lover, bibliophile, boxer, acrobat—Holmes is obviously far more than “a theorist,” as the obnoxious Inspector Athelney Jones here calls him. A few chapters further on Holmes even scrapes together a meal of oysters and grouse, telling Watson, “you have never yet recognized my merits as a housekeeper!”
Just as A Study in Scarlet is thematically a study of obsession in various forms—passionate love, religious fanaticism, long-planned revenge, detectival relentlessness—so The Sign of Four puts forth a series of ethical stress tests, as Conan Doyle probes the complexities of the riven human heart and conscience. One character is faced with a life-or-death moral dilemma. Another sacrifices his honor for a treasure he never uses. Watson falls in love but tortuously hesitates to declare himself. Holmes himself assumes so many radically different personae that they begin to imply multiple personalities. Thaddeus Sholto is effeminate and generous, while his twin is brutally masculine and miserly. Even the instinctively kind Watson experiences a visceral, but psychologically suspicious, loathing for a disabled military man whose early history closely mirrors his own. As for the villains: they emerge from the shadows as grotesque figures out of medieval allegory or Freudian nightmare.
While The Sign of Four is intimately connected to the turmoil and bloodshed of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, its main action takes place in 1888. The 1880s were themselves a particularly violent decade in English history, one that included a series of Fenian dynamite bombings, an attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria (by a man who hated the number four), and, most infamously, the 1888 Whitechapel “Jack the Ripper” murders: at one point Holmes analyzes a letter just as the police analyzed those of the vicious serial killer. This was also the period when scientists began to chart and tabulate human behavior, when Alphonse Bertillon measured skulls (anthropometry) for indications of latent criminality, and Cesare Lombroso argued that crime was an atavistic throwback to the primitive savage. Such classification and typology are regularly alluded to throughout the story. Watson clearly believes in these phrenological pseudo-sciences: Mary Morstan’s face, he writes, indicated “a refined and sensitive nature.” But Holmes will have none of it: “I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.”
Not least, Holmes’s second published case proffers the first iteration of what would become his best-known, and most repeated, aphorism: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” From this viewpoint, much of The Sign of Four certainly does seem improbable or even impossible, like the Muslim-Sikh name Mahomet Singh. But these cavils will occur to the reader only later. Once begun, there’s no resisting the sheer rush, the nonstop narrative excitement of this dark and wondrous tale.
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES AND THE VALLEY OF FEAR
You might have thought that the second appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson would have been greeted with huzzahs from a grateful public. No such luck. The Sign of Four proved only modestly successful. Conan Doyle was still pinning his publishing hopes on The White Company and other “serious” books. But having few patients for his new London medical practice and needing money, in 1891 he decided to submit some short stories to a recently established magazine called The Strand. The first was titled “A Scandal in Bohemia” and opened with the tantalizing sentence: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.” In the resourceful and daring Irene A
dler, the sleuth of Baker Street truly meets his match: she turns out to be far more than just “the daintiest thing under a bonnet.” In the following months, “The Red-Headed League,” “The Five Orange Pips,” and “The Speckled Band” would finally make Conan Doyle famous and Sherlock Holmes immortal. As the grateful editor of The Strand proclaimed, he had found “the greatest natural-born storyteller of the age.”
But fairly soon Conan Doyle began to tire of these trivial entertainments; they kept him from “better things.” Only the writer’s formidable mother persuaded him to continue writing about Holmes and Watson for a while longer. In “The Greek Interpreter” he even doubled the narrative’s star power by introducing Sherlock’s lazy, corpulent, and smarter older brother Mycroft, whose specialty is “omniscience” and who sometimes “is the British government.” And then finally, inevitably, he introduced Holmes’s most dangerous and implacable foe, the criminal genius Professor James Moriarty. When, despite the entreaties of friends, family, and editors, Conan Doyle irrevocably determined to kill off Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem” (1893), he arranged for the detective to confront the Napoleon of Crime on the treacherous paths high above Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls. The two enemies grappled and, to all appearances, tumbled into the gulf below. Having elected to sacrifice his life to preserve the world from evil, Holmes—once merely an inhuman calculating machine and bohemian aesthete—had now become, in Watson’s words, “the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.”
Thereafter, among other projects, Conan Doyle took to chronicling the glorious and comic exploits of the Napoleonic soldier Etienne Gerard (in their way, they are as good as the Holmes stories), while The Strand ran a series of mysteries solved by Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, the first of the so-called rivals of Sherlock Holmes. But the world wanted the one, the only. While on a golfing holiday Conan Doyle learned from a younger friend named Bertram Fletcher Robinson about the supernatural folklore of Dartmoor, including occasional sightings of a spectral dog of death. Together the two writers began to sketch out “a real creeper.” Before long, Conan Doyle concluded that this was a case for Sherlock Holmes.
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