Sherlock Holmes

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print in 1887, tucked inside a Christmas annual called Beeton's, in a novel titled A Study in Scarlet. Nobody could have predicted what would follow. By the 1990s, over 25,000 stage adaptations, films, television productions, and publications had featured the detective. Guinness World Records lists him as the most portrayed human literary character in film and television history. He is not even a real person.

  The questions worth asking are not simply what Holmes does, but why a fictional consulting detective from Victorian London came to feel so real that, in a 2008 survey of British teenagers, 58 per cent of respondents believed he had actually existed. Why did 20,000 readers cancel their magazine subscriptions when his creator tried to kill him off? And what does it mean that a character whose creator described him as "a mere calculating machine" ended up inspiring one of the first cohesive fan communities in the world?

• 2. The Men Behind the Detective

  ›

  Arthur Conan Doyle met Joseph Bell in 1877 at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, where Doyle worked for him as a clerk. Bell was a surgeon with an extraordinary habit: he could draw sweeping conclusions about a patient's life from the smallest physical detail, the texture of a callus, the angle of a stain. Holmes's famous method of observation was built directly on Bell's practice. Bell himself later wrote to Doyle, "You are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it."

  Sir Henry Littlejohn, the Chair of Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, also shaped the detective's character. Littlejohn was simultaneously Police Surgeon and Medical Officer of Health in Edinburgh, a man who bridged the worlds of medicine and criminal investigation. He gave Doyle a living model of how scientific inquiry could serve justice.

  The literary tradition mattered as well. Doyle once wrote of Edgar Allan Poe's detective stories that each was "a root from which a whole literature has developed," asking rhetorically where detective fiction would be without Poe. Holmes was also shaped by Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq, whose stories were widely read at the time Doyle began writing. To acknowledge these debts while declaring independence from them, Doyle had Holmes dismiss both Dupin and Lecoq inside the first story itself: Dupin was "a very inferior fellow" and Lecoq "a miserable bungler."

• 3. Watson, Baker Street, and the Work

  ›

  Financial difficulties in A Study in Scarlet bring Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson together as flatmates at 221B Baker Street, with Mrs. Hudson as their landlady. Holmes works as a detective for twenty-three years; Watson assists him for seventeen of those years. Watson writes most of the stories as frame narratives, summaries of Holmes's most interesting cases, which Holmes regularly dismisses as sensational and inaccurate.

  Holmes's client list stretches across the full hierarchy of Victorian society. A British prime minister and the King of Bohemia visit 221B Baker Street in person. The President of France awards Holmes the Legion of Honour for capturing an assassin. The King of Scandinavia and the House of Orange are among his clients. He aids the Vatican at least twice, and acts for the British government in matters of national security on several occasions. He declines a knighthood for services that "may perhaps some day be described." Yet he is equally willing to take cases from impoverished pawnbrokers and governesses.

  Holmes charges on a fixed scale, sometimes remitting his fees entirely. In "The Adventure of the Priory School" he earns a fee of 6,000 pounds, at a time when the annual expenses of a rising young professional ran to around 500 pounds. He would refuse to help even the wealthy if a case failed to interest him, and he habitually let the police take public credit for his work.

• 4. The Mind and the Method

  ›

  Watson's early assessment of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet rated his knowledge of literature, philosophy, and astronomy as nil, his knowledge of politics as feeble, and his knowledge of chemistry as profound. Holmes himself claimed in the same story to be unaware that the Earth revolves around the Sun, on the grounds that such information was irrelevant to his work. He believed the mind had a finite capacity for storage, and that learning useless things reduced one's ability to learn useful ones.

  The later stories quietly walked that position back. In The Valley of Fear, Holmes declares that "all knowledge comes useful to the detective." In "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" he calls himself "an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles." Looking back in 1912, Conan Doyle wrote that in A Study in Scarlet Holmes was "a mere calculating machine" but that he had to make him "more of an educated human being as I went on with him."

  Though the stories label Holmes's method "deduction," he primarily relies on abduction, inferring the most plausible explanation for a set of observed details. His governing principle, stated in The Sign of Four, is that "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." He follows Sir Isaac Newton's rule of "hypotheses non fingo," and warns in "A Scandal in Bohemia" that "it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." He is also a cryptanalyst who wrote a monograph analyzing one hundred and sixty separate ciphers.

• 5. The Man Beneath the Method

  ›

  Watson describes Holmes as "bohemian" in his habits. Holmes keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence pinned to the mantelpiece with a jack-knife. He hoards documents to the point where "every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned."

  Holmes goes without food during periods of intense intellectual activity, believing that "the faculties become refined when you starve them." He relaxes by playing the violin or attending concerts, and wrote what was considered the definitive monograph on the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus. He occasionally uses cocaine, injected in a seven-percent solution, and sometimes morphine. Both were legal in 19th-century England. Watson, a physician, describes the cocaine habit as Holmes's only vice and worries throughout the stories about its effect on his mental health, noting in "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" that although he had "weaned" Holmes from the drug, the addiction was "not dead, but merely sleeping."

  Holmes is physically formidable as well as intellectually acute. Watson says in "The Yellow Face" that "few men were capable of greater muscular effort." Holmes boxed at university, introduced himself to a prize fighter in The Sign of Four as someone who had fought three rounds with him at Alison's rooms, and the fighter recalled him as a man who had "wasted his gifts." Holmes also used a Japanese martial art known as baritsu to throw Professor Moriarty to his death at the Reichenbach Falls; baritsu was Conan Doyle's rendering of bartitsu, which combines jujitsu with boxing and cane fencing.

• 6. Death, Resurrection, and the Great Hiatus

  ›

  Conan Doyle killed Holmes in 1893 in "The Final Problem," a final confrontation with the criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty. Doyle's stated reason was that his literary energies should not be directed too much into one channel. The public reaction surprised him deeply. The Strand Magazine lost 20,000 subscribers. Readers sent anguished protest letters; one woman began hers with "You brute." The legend that Londoners wore black armbands in mourning is unverified, with the earliest known reference to such events dating only to 1949. Still, the recorded reaction was unlike anything previously seen in response to a fictional event.

  For eight years Conan Doyle resisted. In 1901-02 he serialised The Hound of the Baskervilles, carefully set before Holmes's death so that it did not require a resurrection. In 1903, he wrote "The Adventure of the Empty House," set in 1894, in which Holmes reappears before a stunned Watson and explains he had faked his death to deceive his enemies.

  Fans refer to the gap between Holmes's apparent death in 1891 and his return in 1894 as the Great Hiatus. The earliest known use of that expression dates to 1946. After "The Empty House," Doyle wrote Holmes stories sporadically for another twenty-four years, with the final tale published in 1927.

• 7. Irene Adler and Holmes's Attitude Toward Women

  ›

  Irene Adler appears in only one story, "A Scandal in Bohemia," yet she holds a singular place in the Holmes canon. A retired American opera singer and actress, she is described at the story's outset in the most striking possible terms: "To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman." She is one of only a handful of people to best Holmes in a battle of wits, and the only woman to do so.

  Holmes's general view of women is explicitly stated across several stories. In The Sign of Four he says, "Women are never to be entirely trusted, not the best of them." He tells Watson that he finds women's motives "inscrutable," comparing them to quicksand. He writes in "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" that "women have seldom been an attraction to me, for my brain has always governed my heart." At the end of The Sign of Four he states that love is "an emotional thing," and that whatever is emotional is opposed to "that true, cold reason which I place above all things."

  Yet Watson also notes that Holmes has "a peculiarly ingratiating way" with women, and that their housekeeper Mrs. Hudson is fond of him specifically for his "remarkable gentleness and courtesy" in his dealings with her sex. The contradiction runs through the character: theoretical distrust combined with practical chivalry, summed up in Watson's phrase, "He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent."

• 8. Legacy and the World He Made

  ›

  Holmes influenced the creation of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, introduced in 1920, and helped inspire anti-hero characters built almost as an antidote to the masterful detective, including the gentleman thief A. J. Raffles, created by E. W. Hornung in 1898, and Arsene Lupin, created by Maurice Leblanc in 1905. Leblanc directly featured Holmes in his Lupin stories until legal objections from Conan Doyle forced him to rename the character "Herlock Sholmes."

  The phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" is never spoken in any of the sixty Conan Doyle stories. The nearest approximation in the canon appears in "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" from 1893, where Holmes explains a deduction and, when Watson exclaims "Excellent," Holmes replies simply "Elementary." The full phrase was popularized in part by actor William Gillette, and reached a wide American audience through the Rathbone-Bruce film series from 1939 to 1946.

  In 2002, the Royal Society of Chemistry bestowed an honorary fellowship on Holmes for his use of forensic science and analytical chemistry in popular literature. As of 2024, he is the only fictional character so honoured. The first of his statues worldwide was unveiled in Meiringen, Switzerland, in September 1988, sculpted by John Doubleday; a second appeared in Karuizawa, Japan, the following month; by 2019 statues of Holmes stood in cities as far apart as Moscow, Edinburgh, and Chester, Illinois. The Sherlock Holmes fandom, meanwhile, had long since established itself as one of the first cohesive fan communities in the world, a fact that connects the gaslit rooms of 221B Baker Street to every corner of present-day fan culture.