We Can Make the World a Better Place

by Roger Johnson

Sherlock Holmes, as we all know, is the great English detective. Except that he was part French, his grandmother being “the sister of Vernet, the French artist”. (But which Vernet? There were four generations of notable painters in the family: Antoine, Joseph, Carle and Horace. The last, born in 1789, was probably Holmes’s great-uncle.)

It’s little wonder, then, that the French have claimed the detective as their own, especially since his author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, freely admitted that an important influence on the creation of Sherlock Holmes was the great French amateur reasoner, the Chevalier C August Dupin - but Dupin was himself a fictional character, created by an American, Edgar Allan Poe. Holmes himself dismissed Dupin as “a very inferior fellow”, but Conan Doyle made his position clear in “To an Undiscerning Critic”:

As the creator I’ve praised to satiety

Poe’s Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,

And have admitted that in my detective work,

I owe to my model a deal of selective work.

But is it not on the verge of inanity

To put down to me my creation’s crude vanity?

He, the created, the puppet of fiction,

Would not brook rivals nor stand contradiction,

He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,

Where I, the Creator, would bow and revere.

And what of Arthur Conan Doyle himself? He seems always to have thought of himself as an Englishman, for all that he was born in Edinburgh, of an Irish mother and an Anglo-Irish father. Arthur’s childhood was divided between his Scottish home town and his English boarding school, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. He went back to Edinburgh to study medicine at the University, and after graduating in 1882, he moved to the south-west of England. He never lived in Scotland again, but, as you can hear in the interview filmed in 1927, he retained a distinct Scottish accent throughout his life. (The film is easily accessible on YouTube. The statement that it was made in 1930 is erroneous.)

Besides, he was happy to acknowledge another, even more important influence on Sherlock Holmes: Dr Joseph Bell, one-time President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and lecturer at the Medical School at Edinburgh University. In his memoirs, Conan Doyle wrote: “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer an exact science.”

The Scots - and the Irish too - know that England has no exclusive ownership of the great detective, or of his creator.

The Americans have also asserted their right: Elementary, with its updated Holmes living and working in New York, is evidence of that. In fact, what Robert Keith Leavitt felicitously dubbed “221b Worship” has from the start been stronger in the United States than almost anywhere else. The first authorised dramatisation was the work of an American, William Gillette - there had been numerous unofficial adaptations and spoofs before Gillette’s 1899 play Sherlock Holmes-and it was in America that the detective was first portrayed on film, on radio, and on television.

In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, not then widely known to have accepted honorary membership in the Baker Street Irregulars, rather dubiously declared that the detective was actually American, and that “his attributes were primarily American, not English”.

Mostly, however, admirers around the world have been content with the idea that Sherlock Holmes is as English as, well, as most Englishmen - which is to say, not entirely. Nicholas Utechin, my predecessor as co-editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, has proud Russian ancestry; I, like Holmes, am part French. In all probability, there’s no such thing as “pure English blood”.

The authentic chronicles of Sherlock Holmes comprise sixty tales, long and short, nearly all narrated by the faithful Dr. John H. Watson. Only a few of those cases took the detective himself away from England, but in at least thirty-five of them, an essential part of the puzzle - not necessarily criminal - originated abroad. On occasion, Holmes acted as a spy or a counter-spy, as in the affair of “The Bruce-Partington Plans”, which he investigated at the urgent request of his brother Mycroft - who sometimes, as Watson was astonished to learn, was the British government. The man behind the theft of the top-secret plans was one Hugo Oberstein, identified by Holmes as “the leading international agent”.

We may mourn the days when hand-written letters were the norm, but Holmes himself, remember, preferred the telegram, and in later years had a telephone installed at 221b. He would surely approve of the amazing technology that helps strengthen the ties between the widely scattered groups of his devotees and enables us to keep in touch around the world almost instantaneously.

There are literally hundreds of such groups, large and small. Peter Blau, Secretary of the senior American society, The Baker Street Irregulars, maintains an invaluable list, accessible at www.sherlocktron.com, which shows that most of them are in the United States, though The Sherlock Holmes Society of London and the Japan Sherlock Holmes Club probably have the largest membership, with well over a thousand members each.

It isn’t only clubs and societies. There are restaurants, bars, hotels, and shops throughout the world, all celebrating Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and their creator. Two of the finest screen adaptations of the stories are lavish television series made in Russia. The most important book on the Holmes phenomenon - certainly the most important of this century - is Från Holmes till Sherlock by the Swedish scholar Mattias Boström, published in the UK under the misleading title The Life and Death of Sherlock Holmes. (The American edition, printed from the same plates, is correctly entitled From Holmes to Sherlock.)

In these divisive times, with nationalism, racism, and xenophobia prominent in the news, the devotees of Sherlock Holmes form that elusive ideal, a genuine international community, and our divisions are guided by taste and informed opinion.

Never mind Hugo Oberstein! The true leading international agents are Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Roger Johnson, BSI, ASH

February 2018