One of the sad facts of the literary business is that authors tire of characters. No matter how successful or delightful one’s heroes, sooner or later their adventures seem repetitious and their quirks, irritating. The Muse departs and their continuation becomes wearying.
But Sherlock Holmes’s case presents some interesting features. As early as 1891 Conan Doyle was writing to his mother—then and until her death, his chief confidante—that he had in mind to slay Holmes. Fans of the Great Detective can be thankful she reacted with horror.
The stories continued for the moment, but two years later on a hiking trip in Switzerland, he discussed Holmes’s death with his companions and the Reichenbach Falls were suggested as a venue. By December, he added two words to his diary: “Killed Holmes.” Outcry ensued.
In the immediate aftermath, Conan Doyle declared that he’d had an “overdose” of Holmes and compared the experience to eating too much fois gras. Twenty-six stories were enough. Three years later at the Author’s Club, he claimed extravagantly that Holmes’s death was not murder but justifiable self-defense: “…if I had not killed him, he would have killed me.”
Conan Doyle was able to ignore the public dismay and the pleas of his editors but not financial realities. His family was large and largely poor. His wife’s health was declining, he had young children and a great personal need for activity and adventure. Money was required. Holmes returned for the most famous of his cases, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and later for other adventures, all to the author’s great profit.
Still, he remained ungrateful.
When William Gillette requested alterations in Conan Doyle’s stage version, he telegraphed the American actor: “You may marry him, murder him or do anything you like with him.”
Clearly the Holmes stories were not as close to Conan Doyle’s heart as his “serious work,” the historical novels and the later volumes on spiritualism. Indeed, he felt that Holmes kept him from “higher things” in the literary realm and perhaps in another realm as well, for the Great Detective’s relentless logic and materialism only partially reflected his author’s mind.
An excellent mind it was, too, capable of seeing weaknesses in a much-touted tuberculosis cure (by the great Robert Koch, no less), clearing several people falsely convicted of crimes and producing a trenchant analysis of British military medicine during the Boer War. He foresaw the dangers of submarine warfare and campaigned for better equipment and protections for British soldiers and sailors. In these matters, he was all Holmes.
But another side of his character, equally powerful and deeply rooted, was a hunger for spiritual experience. Raised a Catholic, he wrote an ecstatic letter to his mother about receiving his first communion. This childhood piety was literally beaten out of him at a harsh Jesuit boarding school. Modern science, led by Darwin, finished orthodox Christianity forever without destroying a longing for something transcendental.
His solution was an exploration of the thickets of Victorian alternate spirituality, first very much in the spirit of scientific inquiry via séances, experiments with table rapping, ghost hunting and membership in the Society for Psychical Research. Significantly, he later resigned from this body, citing their “skepticism.”
Holmes, naturally, is exceedingly skeptical where paranormal phenomena is concerned. He doesn’t believe in ghosts or vampires or a Hound from Hell and when he comes up against the Baskerville’s phantom dog he soon lays bare the-all-too human agents behind what are some of the creepiest phenomena in literature.
It’s a wonderful performance, but maybe an ambiguous joy to his author, who was increasingly absorbed in spiritualism. Faced with the long terminal illness of his first wife, his father’s confinement and death for alcoholic dementia, the premature death of his oldest sister, and the huge World War I losses, including his oldest son and his brother, Conan Doyle increasingly sought solace in the afterlife and in continued communication with the dead.
He saw spiritualism as a new stage in religion and the comforts of spirit communication as a public good. Despite loss of friends and the damage to his intellectual and literary reputation, he devoted the energies of his last decades and much of his fortune to the promotion of his beliefs.
It is sad to read his defense of the evidence of fairy folk presented in The Coming of the Fairies, which he took as further evidence of a transcendental spiritual world. The scientist remains in his careful recording of camera settings and apertures, but science and logic are quite lost in the spiritualist’s refusal to see that the goblins and fairies look suspiciously like cut-out paper figures.
Holmes would not have made such a mistake. It was perhaps not just the difficulties of constructing the detective’s adventures or a fear that the great man might outstay his welcome that motivated Conan Doyle’s repeated efforts to rid himself of his most popular character. Holmes represented, in exaggerated form, the author’s own critical intellect, the intellect that helped him to fame, influence and wealth, but which threatened the spiritual cravings of his personality, cravings that with age and loss grew ever more pressing.
Ironically, the exaggeration of the analytical mind that made Sherlock Holmes so distinct and so memorable was to become an uneasy intellectual conscience for a man abandoning science, materialism and logic. Conan Doyle was, in a sense, destined to be haunted by his own outstanding creation.
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Janice Law writes novels and non-fiction as well as short stories. Her most recent books are Homeward Dove (Wildside) and Mornings in London (Mysterious Press), the last installment of her Lambda award winning series featuring the gay, alcoholic painter, Francis Bacon.