I can’t think of a more wildly successful success story. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs could only dream of it.
Name someone who rose to prominence in 1887 and still permeates world culture on the covers of magazines, at the motion-picture box office, on TV, in computer games, on eBooks, in downloads. Still stumped?
While it’s been said that I Love Lucy, a sitcom phenomenon that’s been with us a mere sixty years, is playing somewhere every minute of every day, I hereby state boldly that right now, someone is reading a Sherlock Holmes story. I’m not even including the hundreds of thousands—millions—who at this moment are exposed to Holmes in some form.
His creator never saw it coming.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew to hate Sherlock Holmes; he banned the name from family conversation. The skyrocketing popularity of the World’s First Consulting Detective must fizzle out eventually, he thought. Holmes would soon be forgotten, and Doyle with him. He wanted to be remembered for his history of the Boer War.
Ask anyone what that war was all about. Now ask anyone about Sherlock Holmes.
Writers are often unreliable on the subject of their work.
A generation later, his daughter, Dame Jean Conan Doyle, expressed the same kind of fear, turned inside-out. Inundated with requests for permission to publish Holmes pastiches and parodies by other writers, she declared a moratorium on the grounds that the sheer volume of imitations—many, many times the weighty fifty-six stories and four novels of the original Canon—would extinguish her father’s memory. She, too, felt that the creation had devoured its creator; but this time, Holmes’s endurance was the culprit, rather than his fragility.
She needn’t have worried. While it’s true that many people don’t immediately think of Conan Doyle when Holmes’s name is mentioned, those same people will instantly connect his name with his detective’s.
It’s a sideways kind of immortality, but hardly unique in literature. Robert Louis Stevenson is less well-known than either Long John Silver or Dr. Jekyll, and while Anna Karenina may pass muster with the bouncer at the door of an exclusive literary nightclub, Leo Tolstoy might need a reference. Daniel Defoe? Let me think. Robinson Crusoe? Oh, of course. A writer is best known for the most vivid shadows thrown by the light of his imagination.
Holmes and Watson are ubiquitous—as always. At least one film based on their adventures appeared every decade of the twentieth century, a tradition that’s continued into the twenty-first. On steroids.
The old explanation, that modern audiences yearn for the order and gentility of the Victorian era, doesn’t hold up. How do we account for the popularity of two new TV shows placing Holmes in our own time? What’s so sexy about DNA, anyway? It can’t hold a candle to footprints and tobacco-ash.
Ironically, the answer lies in the past.
When Universal Pictures took over the film series starring Basil Rathbone, the producers jettisoned the gaslight and horse-drawn cabs and replaced them with air-raid sirens and all the other trappings of World War II. Londoners enduring the Blitz needed the morale boost: Hitler had the Luftwaffe, but Britain had Sherlock Holmes.
Clearly, the age of watch-chains and bustles still has its points. It hasn’t hurt the box-office success of two recent Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Jr., with Jude Law as a dynamic and sexy (as originally intended) Dr. Watson. But in our time of terrorists, serial killers, and drug gangs, the magic of television has given us Sherlock Holmes once again.
Not that Conan Doyle didn’t try to take him away from us.
Divorce was out of the question. He loathed the thought of writing more adventures, but knew that simply to stop would be to invite his readers to pester him without mercy. Nothing would do but murder.
Wisely, having established his detective as without parallel, he couldn’t let him be taken out by any of the petty swindlers, would-be bank robbers, and sundry trash he’d already shown he could outwit on deadline. Enter Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime; and the super villain was born. (His adapters have spent countless hours working this afterthought into Holmes’s backstory.) I can’t think of a suspense writer who hasn’t commandeered the concept to his own ends. This pair of opposite equals would end their lives in a bloody draw.
He paid for this sin. “You brute!” wrote one outraged fan; in our modern hyper-violent world, there would be death threats.
Personally, I don’t buy that Sir Arthur was committed to his plan. If he truly wanted to eradicate Holmes, he’d have done the deed in full view of the faithful Dr. Watson, and remove all doubt. Leaving a convenient note on the cusp of the grim Reichenbach Falls was the nineteenth-century equivalent of that infamous episode of the TV series Dallas in which hero Bobby Ewing’s death was revealed to have been only a dream. No writer with the vision to invent both the world’s first consulting detective and literature’s first arch-fiend would fail to leave himself an out. (He was pestered anyway; even the Grim Reaper was no match for a public determined not to quit cold turkey.) At the end of “The Final Problem,” he might as well have paraphrased a delicious line at the end of every James Bond film: “Sherlock Holmes Will Return in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House.’”
Had he done so, however, we’d never have had that poignant Out Our Way panel by cartoonist J. R. Williams, showing a little boy reading in bed with a stricken look on his face and the caption: “The death of Sherlock Holmes.”
With the exception of two stories—both, significantly, excluding Watson as narrator—I can’t help thinking that the writer was having enormous fun with his creations, despite his grumping en familie. The witty banter, the circumlocutive reasoning in regard to arcane clues, and the wild races through hew hedges, Medieval thoroughfares, and down the racing Thames, fairly drip with endorphins. A writer is most enjoyable when he’s enjoying himself. This much I know.
Was Conan Doyle an innovator?
On the face of it, the evidence against him is damaging. One page into Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and anyone remotely familiar with Holmes’s methods and living arrangements must see that coincidence doesn’t apply. Granted, characterization wasn’t Poe’s long suit; apart from his feats of ratiocination, the Chevalier Auguste Dupin is notable only for his insistence on keeping his curtains drawn and his candles burning to simulate eternal night, and the narrator has neither name nor apparent existence outside the association. Poe’s imitator would give us the endearing, infuriating idiosyncrasies unique to his detective, Watson’s private life, medical practice, and above all the caring and patience required to wean his friend from his destructive addictions to cocaine and morphine.
Well, I’m okay with that; and I’ve been a victim of plagiarism myself. In my case, the perpetrator merely copied a story I’d published word-for-word, changing only some character names and geographical references, and revealing no talent beyond a rudimentary knowledge of cut-and-paste. Conan Doyle at least brought skill to the enterprise. Some purists sniff and say, “That’s like complimenting a thief for investing the money more wisely than his victim.” Possibly so, but I can’t help noting similarities in the relationship between Dickens’ convict and young Pip in Great Expectations and that of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver and Jack Hawkins in Treasure Island, and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres was hardly the first attempt to recast Shakespeare in a contemporary setting, or even to select King Lear as the vehicle. The Bard himself borrowed freely from Plutarch and Christopher Marlowe; the Elizabethan Age was a cesspool of intellectual theft. So I’m going to look the other way, consoling myself that Poe hasn’t suffered. In fact, his stories have remained in print for more than 150 years.
The pilferage, if that’s what it was, didn’t stop with Conan Doyle. Sax Rohmer’s sharp-profiled, pipe-smoking Sir Denis Nayland-Smith and his physician biographer, Dr. Petrie, are doppelgängers for Holmes and Watson, and the titular devil doctor in The Insidious Fu-Manchu would face legal action by Professor Moriarty were that party not smashed to bits at the base of the falls. For that matter, all the Blofelds, Drs. Mabuse and No, Svengalis, Zecks, Wo Fats, Lex Luthors, Sumurus, Jokers, (and, yes, even yours truly’s Madame Sing) owe their inspirations to the fertile mind of the retired practitioner from Scotland.
Dame Agatha Christie—may her tribe increase—based the eccentric Hercule Poirot and his docile companion Captain Hastings solidly on her inspiration; the Belgian detective’s boredom with commonplace crime and keen interest in the outré bear close comparison. I would go so far as to say that when Hollywood discovered Holmes and Watson, the “buddy film” was born.
Why Sherlock Holmes? The world has had its share or Herculeses, Robin Hoods, and Supermen. Why make room for another mythic hero?
Because the room is vacant.
There will always be a world in which the fog hovers thick around black vs. white; where the difference between goodness and dark deeds hangs on the tick of a clock, the hammer of a well-worn service revolver gripped in a steady hand; where “it is always 1895,” to quote the great Sherlockian Vincent Starrett. A solitary image stands in the No Man’s Land in between: a hawklike profile in a fore-and-aft cap, drawing on a curved-stem pipe, with a staunch presence at his side, poised to pounce. John Wayne’s Ringo Kid, Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, Gary Cooper’s Marshal Will Caine, framed in their bright doorways, Bruce Willis in Die Hard, are but an extension of this Malloryan myth. It may not have begun with Conan Doyle; we must confer with Homer on that. But he will remain forever in those ranks.
“Come, Watson, come! The game’s afoot!”
So it’s become a cliché. What truth hasn’t?
The contributors chosen for this anthology have had the candor to acknowledge their debt (and to receive the imprimature of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate). They have managed to capture the spirit and cadence of the originals, and to expand the creator’s vision to embrace problems that never came Holmes’s way—or perhaps they did, and for Watson’s own reasons were consigned to the fabled tin dispatch-box where he kept his notes on adventures he didn’t publish, to be rescued and trotted out by his literary descendants. They are all well-established authors, creators of their own characters, and represent every genre including that catch-all, mainstream. With me, they share an admiration for their inspiration, as well as vivid memories of youthful evenings sitting up in bed, reading of the death of Sherlock Holmes, registering horror, then skepticism. He was never born, and so he can never die.
—Loren D. Estleman