Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
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of clients bring their various problems to him.
Because Holmes appears in all the stories, Watson in all but two, and several other characters repeatedly, it is easy for the reader to see the tales as fragments of biography. Enthusiasts, either believing or pretending to believe, have speculated and written endlessly about Holmes’s accomplishments and character, and about the deeds he may have performed which Doyle (or Watson) unaccountably failed to record. In addition, it is easy to see themes and characteristics that appear in story after story, some with gradual changes over the decades from A Study in Scarlet to the final, sad tales published in 1927.
Readers who see the Canon as a unit, rather than as unconnected stories, have felt the need for reference books that help them trace the developments and locate specific names or incidents. An early alphabetical guide of this kind was Jay Finley Christ’s An Irregular Guide to Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1947). It was valuable, but idiosyncratic and, even with two supplements, inadequate. A modern successor is Good Old Index (1987), by William D. Goodrich. Both are keyed to the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes. Some devotees prefer The Canonical Compendium (1999) by Stephen Clarkson, with references to several editions of the Canon. Rather different, and enjoyable as well as useful, is Jack Tracy’s Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana (1977), which concentrates on proper names and some matters of Victorian daily life, defining them and indicating the story (but not the precise page) that gives each its interest to a reader of the Canon.
“What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?” asked Edgar W. Smith in his first essay as editor of the Baker Street Journal (1946). His answer began with discussion not so much of Holmes as of Holmes’s time, but then it turned to the figure of the great detective himself:
Not only there and then, but here and now, he stands before us as a symbol — a symbol, if you please, of all that we are not, but ever would be. His figure is sufficiently remote to make our secret aspirations for transference seem unshameful, yet close enough to give them plausibility. We see him as the fine expression of our urge to trample evil and to set aright the wrongs with which the world is plagued.
That is a lot to ask of a human being, or even of a literary approximation of a human being, and yet enthusiasts continue to ask it. Perhaps it would be better first to take the measure of Holmes as a man — “the best and wisest man whom I have ever known,” Watson is made to call him, borrowing a phrase first used by Plato about Socrates.
Holmes reports that his ancestors were “country squires” and that a grandmother was a sister of “Vernet, the French artist” (presumably Émile Jean Horace Vernet, 1789–1863). His older brother Mycroft appears significantly in two of the stories, and is glimpsed in a third. Otherwise, the reader knows nothing of Holmes’s family or background beyond vague hints about his university education. The Canon provides an outline of his career, from his early cases as an amateur (“The ‘Gloria Scott’” and “The Musgrave Ritual”) through his establishment in London as a consulting detective; his meeting with Watson in (probably) January 1881; ten years of professional success; his encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach in 1891; his return from supposed death three years later; a further nine years of professional work; his retirement to Sussex, from which he emerged for counter-espionage work (“His Last Bow”) in 1912–14. During his active career he is said to have handled thousands of cases, only a handful of which are chronicled. The great stretches of time unaccounted for — if one accepts Holmes as a historical figure, and the tales as fragments of his biography — are an immense temptation to the tale-spinner and the scholar alike.
HIS LIMITATIONS. Sherlock Holmes is first presented in A Study in Scarlet as a tall, thin, flamboyant, and eccentric student in the pathology laboratory of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, where he is developing a practical test for bloodstains. By Chapter II he is rooming with Watson at 221B Baker Street, and before long Watson, puzzled about his companion, tries to set out his “limits” in a famous chart:
1. Knowledge of Literature. — Nil.
2. “ “ Philosophy. — Nil.
3. “ “ Astronomy. — Nil.
And so on. Eventually he discovers that Holmes is “a consulting detective,” who believes in keeping in the “lumber-room” of his brain only such information as he is likely to need. As the acquaintance deepens, however, it becomes clear that Holmes is by no means so utilitarian in his thoughts, or so innocent of literature, philosophy, astronomy, and the rest. Indeed, by the time of “The Lion’s Mane” late in the Canon, the reader is not surprised to hear Holmes himself speaking of the vague and half-remembered information stored somewhere in the “box-room” that his mind has become.
Holmes’s intellectual limits extend at least to these distances:
• A vast knowledge of (non-fictional) criminal literature and the history of crime and strange occurrences, which he is wont to cite for the bewilderment of professional detectives.
• Technical knowledge of tobacco ash, footprints, tattoos, ciphers, manuscript dating, and other such subjects, on all of which he claimed to have written monographs — to say nothing of “the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand.” At the end of his career he prepared The Whole Art of Detection.
• A detailed knowledge of London, including its geography and an extraordinary number of its people among all classes.
• An enjoyment of serious music and at least a superficial acquaintance with composers and performers, although it appears that he attended concerts as a means of relaxation rather than to be stimulated through close attention as a genuine musical aficionado might. He also showed the ability to play the violin passably, and the flexibility to extract noises from it while it was flung carelessly across his knee rather than held in the usual position.
• An acquaintance, perhaps broad rather than deep, with literature in a number of languages; he refers to Hafiz, Horace, Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, Goethe, and even the occasional English author, and claims at one point to be carrying “my pocket Petrarch.”
• “A good practical knowledge of British law,” as Watson puts it — the sort of familiarity that bred contempt, judging from a number of incidents in which Holmes lets malefactors go free, breaks into dwelling-houses in the nighttime, extorts evidence in defiance of the Judges’ Rules, and otherwise comports himself outside the law.
• Considerable knowledge of chemistry, to the point that he spent months (at least) conducting researches at Montpellier shortly before the affair of “The Empty House.” He used chemistry in his professional work at times, probably chiefly to detect poisons, but also apparently did experiments to occupy his mind in the intervals between cases. He was frequently unable, however, to explain his work clearly to Watson, who reports him attempting to “dissolve” a hydrocarbon as though that were a difficult achievement.
• An unparalleled ability to observe trifles about a person, room, or road and to apply logic and a knowledge of daily life in order to reconstruct the events of the past.
HOLMES THE MAN. But there is more to Sherlock Holmes than this intellectual catalogue; there remain the traits that caused Watson to label him “best and wisest.” Such traits are not so easily listed, for they are conveyed to the reader — as they were to Watson — through long acquaintance and leisurely intercourse.
Christopher Morley, selecting episodes from the Canon and preparing a school edition of them in 1944, called his volume Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship. The modern reader may snicker at the portrayal of a close, emotional friendship between two adult men, and certainly at such sentiments as Holmes and Watson express about one another in “The Three Garridebs” at the dreadful moment when Watson is wounded. Are they lovers? one may wish to ask. They are not, although one or two pornographers have chosen to interpret them that way. They are simply close friends, demonstrating a kind of relationship that was common