Murder, My Dear Watson

  This is certainly a “self-effacing” enough statement, but it’s hard to see how this modest fellow with a “methodically slow mind” could ever serve to stimulate Sherlock Holmes, or, for that matter, compose the fifty-six short stories and four novels of the Holmes Canon with the rare insight and perceptivity with which Watson is clearly gifted.

  The solution to this dilemma does not lie in Watson’s being a common man whose very lack of Holmes’s intellectual abilities (a negative quality) makes him a foil for Holmes. Instead, it lies in his psychological inclination toward the irrational (a positive quality in Watson) that supplements Holmes’s apparent cold reason. The result is that the reader is presented with a coherent vision of a world carefully balanced between the rigorous logic of the head and the passion of the heart.

  Nowhere in the Sherlockian Canon is this dichotomy clearer than in those numerous remarks about Holmes’s antipathy toward women. In The Sign of the Four, in which Watson takes a wife for the first time, and in which the doctor boasts of “an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents,” Holmes comments, “Love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true, cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself lest I bias my judgment.” And he adds his darkly cynical assurance that “the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three children for their insurance money.”

  This last comment is typical of Holmes’s rather perverse delight in needling Watson with unseemly statements and behavior. Here one thinks of Watson’s shock when he learns that Holmes has beaten cadavers in a medical school to discover how long after death bruises may be produced, or later at Holmes’s appearing in Baker Street after having strolled about London carrying a harpoon, and certainly of his casually inquiring as to whether Watson would care to partake in a few cubic centimeters of the detective’s cocaine. Such occurrences surely seem to place Watson at the awkward disadvantage that Holmes so enjoys, and yet at the same time they betray Holmes’s own emotion— his deriving pleasure at Watson’s expense. So Holmes isn’t as intractably emotionless as he pretends, and it is Watson’s very emotionalism that often draws such behavior from Holmes.

  Watson, though, does have his moments of cool logic. Again in The Sign of the Four, Holmes proclaims that “there is no great mystery in this matter,” at which point he expounds his theory about the case. But upon Watson’s raising a series of very sound objections to that theory, Holmes must pensively admit: “There are difficulties; there are certainly difficulties.”

  But just as we can’t make Watson too much like Holmes, we can’t pretend that Holmes is a seething cauldron of hidden emotion either. This has been a major difficulty with many Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In books such as Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (Dutton, 1974) and motion pictures such as Murder by Decree, there is a strong inclination to try to “humanize” Holmes by drawing from the caverns of his psyche an impossible progression of traumatic emotions. What this does is disrupt the balance between doctor and detective. In The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Watson must become the rationalist in order to deal with Holmes’s drug addiction, whereas in Murder by Decree, in which Holmes (played by Christopher Plummer) actually weeps big glycerine tears, poor James Mason’s Watson has the look of a lost cocker spaniel precisely because Holmes the rationalist takes over Watson’s emotional role as well.

  As the subtle interplay of the Holmes-Watson relationship unfolds in the original Holmes stories, it becomes clear that even Holmes and Watson’s professions relate to how their personalities dovetail. Sherlock Holmes is the rational man of science with an understated inclination toward the emotional; Dr. Watson acts principally as a romantic author who tends toward the world of science because of his moderately successful medical practice.

  In fact, it is as the narrator and presumptive author of the Holmes stories that Watson puts his emotionalism to work, in the process revealing something of the great detective’s thoughts and even his feelings. To refer to Watson merely as the chronicler of Holmes’s cases is misleading, for it is Watson as author who chooses the details of his friend’s life and career that he will use in his stories. If Watson’s bent were simply toward a well-paced adventure yarn, he would not take the time that he does to enrich the tapestry of life at 221B Baker Street for his readers, by including those many private glimpses into the detective’s home and his heart.

  A classic example of the latter is Watson’s quoting Holmes’s mournful thoughts upon meeting Josiah Amberley in “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”: “Is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not his story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow—misery.” There are many other moments in Watson’s tales during which Holmes is caught by the doctor with a chink in his rational armor, and it’s Watson’s sensitivity that reveals them to the reader.

  Watson, therefore, exercises his options in constructing a narrative that is balanced. He is not, heaven forbid, greedily trying to find weaknesses in Holmes in order to expose them and justify his own emotionalism. Instead, he is motivated to report these moments because of his own emotional passion—and by his realization that a Holmes without emotion is an automaton, as much as a Watson without insight cannot be a writer.

  This doesn’t stop Holmes, though, from upbraiding Watson on a number of occasions for investing his stories with too much emotionalism, too much romance. Says Holmes in The Sign of the Four:

  Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love story into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

  In “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman,” Watson attempts to report the results of an investigation carried out at Holmes’s request: “Right in the middle of [the weary suburban highways] lies this old home, surrounded by a high sun-baked wall mottled with lichens and topped with moss, the sort of wall—” To this Holmes responds sharply: “Cut out the poetry, Watson. . . . I note that it was a high brick wall.”

  These examples are typical of Holmes’s impatience with Watson’s writing style, of the scientist’s impatience with the novelist’s techniques. Yet even in the midst of this apparent resentment, it is Holmes in “A Case of Identity” who, by commenting on truth versus fiction, suggests, perhaps without knowing it, that even truth may demand Watson’s particular narrative skills:

  My dear fellow, life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on . . . it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

  To remark that truth is stranger than fiction may seem insipid on Holmes’s part, but when coupled with his strong objection to Watson’s treatment of his cases, the irreconcilable contradiction of Holmes’s position becomes clear. Holmes himself suggests that the cold, hard truth is more like fiction than fiction itself.

  He suggests this, in fact, not only by implication but in actual practice. Toward the end of his association with Watson, Holmes finds it necessary to record a story himself since Watson had not been present. In “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” Holmes writes:

  . . . I have often had occasion to point out to [Watson] how superficial are his own accounts and to accuse him of pandering to the popular taste instead of confining himself rigidly to facts and figures.. . . I am compelled to admit that, having taken my pen in hand, I do begin to realize that the matter must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader.

  He goes on to tell a very Watsonian tale, and the same thing happens in “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane” in which the st
yle is again Watson’s but the narrator is Holmes. It should be small surprise that Holmes is able to adopt Watson’s writing style when he needs to, as he is obviously well-versed in literature generally, and more than familiar with Watson’s writing in particular. Despite Watson’s initial observation in A Study in Scarlet that Holmes’s knowledge of literature is “nil,” Holmes quotes or paraphrases from literature in a majority of the stories—from Horace and Hafiz to Shakespeare and Sand. It’s just that on the most ideal level, the scientific logician—which Holmes always strives to be—must find the emotional element of storytelling repugnant.

  So it’s almost always left to Watson to record the most galvanic moments of emotional stress, for to have Holmes do so would be to compromise his rational facade. Probably the best example in all of the stories is Watson’s relating the horrors that he and Holmes experience when they come under the effects of the Devil’s Foot drug:

  A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that within this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Vague shapes swirled and swam amid the dark cloud-bank, each a menace and a warning of something coming, the advent of some unspeakable dweller upon the threshold, whose very shadow would blast my soul.

  Though Holmes may disapprove of the way Watson describes the event, he certainly cannot deny its emotional intensity. This instant of “freezing horror” is the most eloquent emblem of the Holmes-Watson friendship. Holmes, with his typical cool scientific curiosity, suggests that he and Watson experiment with the drug, which is suspected in a murder case. Because of his fraternal loyalty, Watson agrees. Bound by these archetypal motives, the two men plunge together into a pit of horror, and together are subject to its terrors. But at this moment of ultimate hellishness, it is Watson, not Holmes, who rouses himself to sanity enough to drag himself and Holmes into fresh air where they are able to recover. And it is Holmes who softens his aloofness enough to apologize to his friend: “Upon my word, Watson!” says Holmes. “I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for one’s self, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry.”

  So the balance between the heart and the head in this deep friendship—between what Holmes calls the love story and the fifth proposition of Euclid—is not in a rigid opposition between an unperceptive bumbler and a logician who always sets things right. Nor is it, as some pastiche writers have suggested, between a Holmes who is incapable of controlling his emotions and a Watson capable of asserting Holmesian logic when it becomes necessary. If that were the case, either Holmes or Watson would be expendable at any given moment.

  No, it is between a very human logician and a very insightful physician who represent different means of interpreting life—but who, reaching toward one another, provide a cohesive quality to the Sherlockian Canon that has unified its sixty stories in the reading public’s fond eye for more than seventy years.

  And if ever there were any doubt as to the profound depth of Holmes and Watson’s friendship, it must utterly vanish in witnessing the scene in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs” when Watson takes a bullet in the leg from the pistol of the vicious Killer Evans. Grabbed up in Holmes’s “wiry arms” after Evans is subdued, Watson is helped to a chair, the detective fairly shouting: “You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!” And turning to Evans, he adds chillingly: “If you had killed Watson, you would not have left this room alive.”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES ON THE INTERNET

  Christopher Redmond

  THE CHAMPION LETTER-WRITER of the Baker Street Irregulars, the late John Bennett Shaw, was not a user of the Internet. His typewritten letters, rich with character, would not have translated well into E-mail format. Then again, who knows what he might have made of this new medium if he had been with us longer? Today it seems a requirement that the Sherlockian’s bookshelf, laden with volumes Shaw recommended in a list of one hundred “basic” books about Sherlock Holmes, must be accompanied by a connection to the wires that circle the world, wires that distribute a whole new form of Sherlockian literature.

  Today’s Sherlockians live with one foot in the computer age and the other in the Victorian age. For those of us who love Sherlock Holmes, our heads, and frequently our typing fingers, are firmly in the world of computers and networks, but our hearts and our inward eyes are in the age of gaslight and telegrams.

  Take a look at one of those one hundred best books, the Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana of Jack Tracy, published in 1977 and unlikely ever to be surpassed as an essential reference book about the Holmes stories. The introduction is one of the finest pieces of Sherlockian writing ever, eloquent and thought provoking. However, I think it’s also wrong. Tracy asserts that everything has changed since the late Victorians, that modern readers can’t be expected to understand the olden days—not just the details of daily life, the gasogenes and post office pens and shillings, but larger matters of scientific optimism, psychological unsophistication, and ethnocentric confidence. But we are still the product of Victorian thinking. We may be more cynical than the Victorians, but our lives are governed by mass media, corporations, and statistics—all essentially Victorian inventions.

  It’s startling to realize that the invention of the computer came closer to 1895 than to 2001. Various candidates to be the first were developed in the 1940s. And although there were military needs for computing devices, the real impulse for the development of data processing equipment was the need to deal with masses of census information, largely a product of the Victorian urge to count, measure, and control. Those early computers were what are called mainframes. Desktop computers are more familiar to most people now, joined by laptops and palmtops, and the action is not so much in inventing individual computers as in hooking them together.

  In 1983, I helped to put together an issue of the little magazine Canadian Holmes about Sherlock Holmes and the computer. One can’t read those articles now without smiling. We all saw computers as nothing but big calculators. One article assessed how useful a computer might be in calculating a train’s speed based on how fast the telegraph poles fly past, as Holmes did in the story “Silver Blaze.” There was some recognition of the computer for manipulating words. (Watson using WordPerfect to record Holmes’s adventures.) The possibility of databases from which Holmes might retrieve information when needed was seen as far-fetched. There was no inkling of the computer in its central use these days as a communications device. The killer application, E-mail, never crossed anybody’s mind.

  Sherlock Holmes himself welcomed technology. The first time we glimpse him, in A Study in Scarlet, he is devising a chemical test for blood, and later he seems current about typewriters, microscopes, and gramophones. Later still, he installs a telephone at Baker Street. And if Holmes enjoys technology, unquestionably Sherlockians do, and use computers lavishly, especially as the access point to networks—that is, the Internet.

  Internet users are very often looking at Web sites and interacting with them. However, the Internet also includes E-mail, and other forms of communication such as newsgroups and chatrooms. As software becomes more sophisticated, these channels are becoming more or less unified; a user can click from a Web site to send E-mail, or from an E-mail message to go to a Web site. And pretty much anything on the Internet can also be captured and distributed on a CD-ROM. The important differences have to do with convenience (CD-ROMs are faster and don’t require wires) and cost (usually the user pays to acquire them, whereas the Internet is more or less free). So most of what can be said about the Internet is potentially true about those shiny round disks as well.

  When anyone looks for Sherlock Holmes on the Internet, the first thing to expect would be the texts of the stories. The sixty stories are available on sites all over the Web, in English and in several translations, although it’s not quite clear who first put them onto a
Web site, or when. In 1999 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes appeared in the repertoire of Project Gutenberg, the most extensive site for literary texts, and other parts of the Canon are being added. But the final volume, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, is not there, because American copyright law still covers the Case-Book stories. Those last dozen tales are, however, available—even to American users—from sites in several other countries.

  The same questions come up that Sherlockians raise when they look at a printed copy of the tales: What text is this, and how good is it? Even casual readers know about some variations from one printed edition to another: the passage that appears in both “The Cardboard Box” and “The Resident Patient” in many editions, the famous “crows” (rather than “crowds”) at the Lyceum Theatre in The Sign of the Four, and so on. Any edition is better than none, and adequate to captivate a twelve year old. But the experienced reader wants a good text, especially if thinking of basing a research paper on the information in the printed pages.

  Most texts available on the Internet are apparently derived from a scanning done by Robert Stek twenty years ago. He originally distributed the scanned text on diskettes, and today’s texts on the Web and CD-ROM are generally copies of copies of his. Computer-literate Sherlockians are hugely indebted to Stek, but what he produced contains a number of errors, as most scanned texts do. Both Stek’s and Gutenberg’s versions come from the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes, still the most common printed edition in America despite its weaknesses. Indeed, most readers may not know that there are alternatives; for example, the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by W. S. Baring-Gould, uses the British text published by John Murray, with no duplication between “The Cardboard Box” and “The Resident Patient.”