Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes

Let it be said straight off: I am not a Sherlockian.^xxi I am no Holmesian, I have not memorized the canon backwards and forwards, I belong to no scion of the Baker Street Irregulars (although the idea of being an Adventuress of Sherlock Holmes does have a certain appeal). I will even admit that until I began actually writing a book in which Conan Doyle’s detective plays a major part, I had not read the stories since “The Speckled Band” and The Hound of the Baskervilles back—way back—in high school.

By now, of course, I am well aware of the multitudinous works of higher criticism on the Conan Doyle canon, critical volumes filled with essays concerning such pressing questions as how many times Dr. Watson married and the original color of Mrs. Hudson’s hair before being the landlady of Sherlock Holmes turned it white. Most of these, although one suspects not all, agree firmly with the judgment of Dorothy L. Sayers when she wrote that the whole business of Holmesian commentaries “must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord’s: the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere.”

However, be they tongue in cheek or deadly serious, there is no getting around the fact that there are a lot of these essays and volumes, and that when relative neophytes such as myself are asked to give a talk on the subject, we are either left scratching around for some immensely arcane issue that has not been worked to death, or find ourselves dependent on those who have gone before.

I was trained as a theologian; I am not too proud to use the work of earlier scholars. Therefore, my talk largely consists of a series of quotations from minds better than mine. This may appear either as shameful laziness or as a rather obvious attempt to lend a spurious air of academic respectability to a worn garment, and I admit that when I first realized I had nothing but a string of quotes, I did come near to panic. However, I decided that really, as there is nothing new under the sun to be said about Conan Doyle or Sherlock Holmes anyway, I might as well present a few nuggets mined by others for the contemplation of my listeners.

In his introduction to John Gardner’s brilliant On Moral Fiction, (not, by the way, the John Gardner who writes crime fiction), Charles Johnson writes that very occasionally a writer

creates something that becomes emblematic for some sector of our experience. This happens when a writer stumbles, by genius or dumb luck, on an archetypal character. In some cases this naming, this dramatizing, crystallizes an experience we all know but until this creation occurs, have not found a way to utter.

Until the character of Sherlock Holmes crystallized under the pen of an out-of-work medical doctor in the end of the last century, Victorian England, and in its footsteps the rest of the world, did not have its defining modern hero, a man (I fear, inevitably a man) who could confront the truly awful problems of the age with the best weapons and values of that age: the power of science and knowledge arrayed against the immorality and chaos that threatened on all sides, a hero who depended not so much on swordplay (fisticuffs occasionally) as his mind. Problems, Sherlock Holmes says, are solvable, when the right person tackles them. That Holmes is as much adored in the late twentieth century as in the year of his birth says a great deal for the power of the image that Conan Doyle tapped into—or, if you insist, created.

Conan Doyle himself conceived of Holmes primarily as a thinking machine. In the first short story (not the first novel) he refers to Holmes’

...cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was...the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.... He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer.... For the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. [“A Scandal in Bohemia”]

For those of us who had not read the Holmes stories since before we could vote, it sometimes comes as a surprise to find things going on in the stories other than this Thinking Machine persona. Indeed, it is a great joy not only as a literary discovery but as a bearer of psychological insight to stumble across this Holmes Who Laughs, a Holmes who shakes with passion.

The first we hear of Holmes is in the novel A Study in Scarlet. The narrator Dr. Watson is newly in London, having been invalided out of the army following an encounter with a Jezail bullet in Afghanistan. He runs into a friend, Stamford, and over a drink tells the man of his search for affordable rooms. Stamford recommends a young researcher he knows from the medical school, with the caveat, however, that “Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes—it approaches to cold-bloodedness.” He even suggests that Holmes might readily give a touch of poison to a friend (or, one wonders, to a roommate?) to see how it worked—although he admits that Holmes would be just as likely to take it himself.

And yet, the first we see of Holmes, working over a test tube in the hospital laboratory, he is springing to his feet with a cry of pleasure. He chuckles to himself, he seizes Watson’s sleeve (this perfect stranger) in eagerness to show him the results of this thrilling experiment, and claps his hands, looking as delighted as a child with a new toy, his eyes glittering.

Not perhaps the image of cold-bloodedness Stamford’s words had brought to mind. Fixation, perhaps, but not cold-bloodedness. About his work, at any rate, Sherlock Holmes is certainly passionate—but remember, the root meaning of passion is suffering. Webster’s gives several meanings for the word. The first three refer to the Easter passion, the suffering on the cross. The fourth mentions “emotion and an intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction,” and the sense of an outbreak of anger (to fly in passion at something.) Only in the fifth position do we get down to the idea of passion as “ardent affection.”

In speaking of the person of Sherlock Holmes, not just as a scientist but as a human being, Conan Doyle uses a spare, almost mythic language rather than the more descriptive style of the novelist. The descriptions we are granted are few and specific, and make it necessary to look for the indicators of personality in something other than the straightforward story line. These often come in little bursts, as if the man Holmes occasionally thrusts his way into Conan Doyle’s slow and deliberate account by the very force of his personality. Violent emotion appears, rapidly suppressed, and unexpected sparkles of humor pop to the surface.

Now, Victorian humor is a very special thing. A classic of the type is Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, filled with dry, self-deprecating, and occasionally very heavy-handed humor. In the Holmes stories, it is poor Watson who generally bears the brunt of these humorous asides.

In The Valley of Fear, Holmes declares sarcastically, “Your native shrewdness, my dear Watson, that innate cunning which is the delight of your friends, would surely prevent you from enclosing cipher and message in the same envelope,” and later on adds, “Perhaps there are points which have escaped your Machiavellian intellect.” In “The Three Students”, Holmes berates Watson,

By jove! My dear Watson, it is nearly nine, and the landlady babbled of green peas at seven-thirty. What with your eternal tobacco, Watson, and your irregularity at meals, I expect that you will get notice to quit, and that I shall share your downfall.

A rather different sort of jest is made in The Hound of the Baskervilles when Holmes admits to Watson that, although he has travelled to Devonshire by means of the Ordnance Survey maps, actually “My body has remained in this armchair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco.” He then explains his preference for the smoky fog he has generated in their rooms: “It is a singular thing, but I find that a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought. I have not pushed it to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions.”

Later in the Baskerville case, he says drily, “In a modest way I have combated evil, but to take on the Father of Evil himself would, perhaps, be too ambitious a task.”

Holmes may be a thinking machine with a sense of humor, but he is also capable of friendship and love. “Quick, man, if you love me!” he says to Watson. After nearly killing Watson by burning a hallucinogenic powder in their closed rooms in the Devil’s Foot adventure, he apologizes, and Watson answers him “with some emotion, for I had never seen so much of Holmes’s heart before.” In the case of “The Three Garridebs”, when Watson is shot, Holmes cries, “You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!” It was worth a wound (says Watson)—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time he caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All his years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.

“It’s nothing, Holmes. It’s a mere scratch.” Holmes rips up Watson’s trousers with his pocket-knife to examine the wound. “You are right,” he cries, with an immense sigh of relief. “It is quite superficial.” His face set like flint as he glared at their prisoner.... “By the Lord, it is as well for you. If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.”

Admittedly, Holmes’ friendship and companionship with a loyal partner such as Watson is a different thing from his feelings towards women. Holmes is described as having a good but slightly paternalistic attitude towards women, to whom he can demonstrate sympathy, but nothing much stronger. He does become extremely devoted to one woman, in the very first short story, whom he refers to henceforth as The Woman, but only because she outsmarts him at his own game. (Actually, this may not be a bad recommendation for a man, that he be devoted to a woman who has beaten him soundly....) In “Copper Beeches”, troubled by a case without data involving a young woman, he mutters that he would not wish a sister of his to accept the situation that this woman is about to assume as governess to a very shady set of people, in a remote area.

Interestingly enough, it seems clear in Conan Doyle’s mind that, although Holmes will not marry, he could consider it. Again in the “Copper Beeches” story, Watson ends his narrative by noting sadly that, in spite of his hopes (and surely by this time in their partnership he would have known Holmes well enough to know if hopes were utterly impossible), Holmes manifested no further interest in the young lady of the case once it was solved. When in the “Devil’s Foot” case, Holmes speaks of Dr. Sterndale’s dastardly act, he says, “I have never loved, Watson, but if I did, and if the woman I loved had met such an end, I might act even as he has done.”

Similarly, in the Charles Augustus Milverton case, when Holmes wishes to insinuate himself into the blackmailer’s household, one day he walks into Baker Street and announces to Watson that he is engaged. Watson, although surprised, is far from dissolving into hoots of laughter or otherwise expressing polite disbelief; indeed, he begins enthusiastically to congratulate him until Holmes cuts him off with the information that it is only a part of his role in the household.

And finally, in The Valley of Fear, Holmes reflects speculatively, “Should I ever marry, Watson, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her.” Holmes, ever the romantic.

The cold passion of Sherlock Holmes is another of these appealing dichotomies, this character who epitomizes both the rational mind and the bursts of escaping passion. Were he simply a cold theoretician, he would not still be so alive more than a century after he first appeared.

In an essay in the 1976 edition of the Mystery Writer’s Handbook, John D. MacDonald addresses this question of the complexity of a character:

Too often in mystery fiction, the attempt to devise a real and believable detective has degenerated into a complication of props rather than expanded into a complication of character, a subtlety and complexity of the spirit. The original fault is perhaps due to that misinterpretation of Sherlock Holmes which places too much weight on the needle, the violin, the pipe. We remember Holmes as a man who, primarily, was troubled in spirit, was obsessed with the sense of evil, whose arrogance was defensive. Yet we see around us today a score of fictional detectives who have been given merely the props without the spirit.

In “The Dying Detective”, his enemy calls Holmes an amateur of crime. I would remind you that the Latin root of the word means love. To borrow again from John Gardner (in reference to a book whose flaw he sees as its facile openness of sentiment):

That is one great technical problem which modern fiction has as yet found no way to break through. Feeling, the heart of the novelist’s business, sits waiting for the right incantation, nervous and bored.

I would like to suggest that Arthur Conan Doyle was doing just that. By using spare language (mythic in its form rather than novelistic), spare description, spare emotion, he forms a backdrop in which the slightest passion and fury resounds, where a whisper of love is as a shout, where a twitch of anger is more eloquent than another man’s furious bellow.

In the fictional dream, as in our dreams as we sleep, there is some urgent concern—something that needs to be achieved and cannot be achieved easily, something worth achieving in the first place, though possibly crazy.

For more than a century now, readers have been grateful that an underemployed medical doctor in Victorian England persisted in his craziness, and brought Sherlock Holmes to life.

i See the “Introduction to The Grand Game” for Father Knox and the theological underpinnings of the Sherlockian Game.

ii For a discussion of that wound, see “Watson’s War Wound” in this collection.

iii See “Sherlock Holmes and Sabine Baring-Gould” in this collection.

iv I have yet to discover if being given the name of a Mafia-like organization is a not-so-subtle reference to the demands of loyalty that were immediately placed upon me.

v The 1911 date is for Knox’s presentation to the group of Oxford students known as the Gryphon Club; its actual publication was not until 1928, in Knox’s Essays in Satire.

vi The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, et al.

vii As Sayers (herself a fairly conservative Christian) notes, the game of applying the methods of Higher Criticism to the Canon had “the aim of showing that, by those methods, one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible. Since then, the thing has become a ^hobby among a select set of jesters.” (Unpopular Opinions, 1946.)

viii Imagine my regret, then, when my betters within the BSI spurned my proposed title for this volume: Hard Knox: One Hundred Years of Holmesian Criticism. Although A Select Set of Jesters might have been nice, too.

ix It being January, field tomatoes would have been difficult to obtain.

x Being a member of the US-based Baker Street Irregulars, I shall use the term “Sherlockians” rather than the British “Holmesians.”

xi The Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, share many stories and much of their arrangement; the problem boils down to, Why are there differences?

xii As a large planetary object will pull smaller bodies to it, so in Scripture will authority figures draw material not originally their own: Some of Paul’s Epistles show signs of having been composed by “Paul” (i.e., they are Deutero-Pauline,) whereas the book of Isaiah was authored by Proto-, Deutero-, and Trito-Isaiahs.

xiii One (admittedly whimsical) translation for which might be, Witness for the Persecution. May I note that my Greek is Koiné, not Attic?

xiv Also, as the Knox essay makes clear, the critique methods of classical Greek literature—although as mentioned in the previous footnote, classical Greek is beyond my scope.

xv “Centuries” in the case of Biblical scholarship; “decades” for the Sherlockians.

xvi This typo in the so-called “Sinner’s Bible” cost its printers the huge fine of £300 and has entertained four centuries of textual critics.

xvii Best known for his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, or Prologue to the History of Israel.

xviii The letters refer to the Yahwist (Y being J in German), a writer, working in the southern kingdom in the tenth century BCE, who uses the name Yahweh for God; the Elohist (from the northern kingdom, a century or so later) for whom God is initially Elohim; the Deuteronomist, writing probably in Jerusalem around 600 BCE, whose work is primarily in Deuteronomy; and the Priestly source, a hundred years after D and in exile in Babylon, whose work is scattered throughout.

xix In the sense that “Paul” is an umbrella under which a number of unrelated epistles were gathered.

xx Until one of the co-editors of this collection chooses to write such a story, we will have to content ourselves with this plethoric footnotes of spurious scholarship.

xxi I was not, when this was written. Since then I have been converted to the cause—see “Textual, Higher, Radical & Midrashic Criticism” in the present volume.