1891 Arthur Conan-Doyle (as Arthur Doyle snootily relabelled himself in later life) wanted, in 1891, to kill Holmes even more desperately than the detective’s arch-foe, Professor Moriarty. Sherlock Holmes, Doyle complained, ‘takes my mind from better things’.
Holmes originated, famously, in one of Doyle’s tutors at Edinburgh’s School of Medicine, Professor Joseph Bell. (Professor Moriarty – the virtuoso of the binomial theory – is, as critics note, Holmes’s dark self; it is significant that the two of them should eventually perish ‘locked in each other’s arms’.)
Professor Bell was famous for ‘reading’ symptoms and deducing a patient’s background as soon as he or she set foot in his surgery. Holmes does the same trick often enough at 221b Baker Street, to the amazement of an anything but Bell-like Dr Watson (‘the idiot friend’, as Julian Symons calls the detective’s dumb accomplice).
In the mid-1880s, Doyle – in his mid-twenties, and a none too successful doctor in Southsea – toyed with the idea of some stories centred on an amateur sleuth, ‘J. Sherrinford Holmes’, who would employ Bell’s deductive techniques to solve crimes. The outcome was the Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887). No top-drawer publisher would take it, and it was eventually serialised in a magazine edited by Mrs Beeton’s husband (see 14 March).
Holmes attained mass popularity when the editor of George Newnes’s newly-founded Strand Magazine made Holmes a main selling item. The editor, Herbert Greenhough Smith, apprehended that ‘here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe’. These Sherlock Holmes stories were devised to correct ‘the great defect’ in current detective fiction, lack of logic. They were illustrated by Sidney Paget, who supplied the detective with his famous deerstalker and aquiline profile. A new ‘Holmes’ could double the Strand’s circulation to half a million. A franchise was born.
The formulaic stories were, Doyle came to believe, beneath him. In The Final Problem, the famous hand-to-hand fight to the death was staged on a fearful ledge by the majestic Reichenbach Falls, above Meiringen in Switzerland.
Watson does not witness the struggle, but reconstructs it from footprints, Holmes’s ‘alpine-stock’, ‘small silver cigarette case’, and a note left on the fatal grassy ledge above the ‘dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam [where] will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation’.
‘All time’ proved premature. Doyle was not allowed to kill his golden goose. It was too golden. Under the lure of cash (particularly dollars), Holmes was exhumed in 1901 and 1905 and innumerably thereafter in what became a veritable industry. Moriarty too was brought back to life in a trilogy by the 20th-century popular writer John Gardner (1926–2007).
The funicular station at the base of the mountain leading to the falls has a memorial plaque dedicated to the ‘most famous detective in the world … At this fearful place, Sherlock Holmes vanquished Professor Moriarty, on 4 May 1891.’ Or not.