Conclusion

Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunged over the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem (FINA), the twenty-sixth story. What we read about the post-Reichenbach Holmes is that he had “never been the same man afterwards” (Stashower 1999, 443). Actually the very first story written after Holmes and Moriarty went over the falls was The Hound of the Baskervilles (HOUN). It is the most famous Holmes tale, and it is always rated as the very best one too. The next three stories, The Empty House (EMPT), The Norwood Builder (NORW), and The Dancing Men (DANC) are all rated fairly well. So Conan Doyle gets to the halfway point quite strongly (DANC is the thirtieth story). But soon the quality drops off. The fifty-six Holmes short stories have been rated several times (Bigelow 1993, 130–138). It is revealing to compare the first thirty stories with the last thirty. Here are the results from the 1959 ratings done by readers of The Baker Street Journal. Eight of the ten stories on the “best” list are from the first half of the Canon. Only two later stories make the list. The “worst” list is just the reverse. Nine of the ten stories are from the second half; eight of the tales on the worst list are from the last twelve stories that Conan Doyle wrote, between 1921 and 1927. Even Conan Doyle himself agreed with this. In 1927, he listed his twelve favorite short stories and later added his next seven. Conan Doyle’s list has fifteen early stories and four late ones. . . . Arthur Conan Doyle’s Favorite Holmes Short Stories SPEC (10), REDH (4), DANC (30), FINA (26), SCAN (3), EMPT (28), FIVE (7), SECO (40), DEVI (43), PRIO (32), MUSG (20), REIG (21), SILV (15), BRUC (42), CROO (22), TWIS (8), GREE (24), RESI (23), NAVA (25) . . . When the four long stories are included, not much changes. Generally HOUN displaces The Speckled Band (SPEC) as number one. But the later stories still fare poorly. One of the second-half tales that is always rated high is The Bruce Partington Plans (BRUC).

Sherlock Holmes: Pioneer in Forensic Science

Holmes may have admired Bertillon’s work, but that did not prevent him from being resentful about it in The Hound of the Baskervilles (HOUN). When Dr. James Mortimer told Holmes that Bertillon was the highest expert in Europe, Holmes admitted that he was off ended by the ranking. So who was this man held in such high regard? Alphonse Bertillon was a French anthropologist born in 1853. His poor academic performance was followed by difficulty holding a job. In 1879, his influential father Louis, a famous physician and anthropologist, obtained a job for him as a clerk with the Parisian police (Wagner 2006, 97–98). He started work in March 1879, and became interested in the problem of identifying recidivists, that is, repeat off enders. It was French policy to exile recidivists to their colonies (Cole 2001, 33). But there was no procedure for identifying them. Fingerprinting did not exist, and even mug shots were not yet used. Upon a second arrest, recidivists would merely use a pseudonym. Bertillon wanted to develop a system of identification based on ideas mentioned in 1840 by a Belgian statistician named Quetelet (Wagner 2006, 98). Bertillon found his job with the police to be very boring, as he collected and filed much information, most of it never used again and worthless. So, on October 1, 1879 (Cole 2001, 49), he submitted a report proposing a method of identification using body measurements. The report was ignored (Wagner 2006, 98). Louis Bertillon liked his son’s suggestion. Louis had in fact attempted to classify people, not identify them, by measuring the lengths of their bones. So he was naturally attracted to Alphonse’s idea to use such measurements to identify criminals (Cole 2001, 34). In 1882, with help from his influential father, Alphonse Bertillon was given two assistants and some funding. He was given three months to identify a repeat offender. He succeeded with one week remaining.

Meet the Main Characters

In this section we will examine the factors which led to Sherlock Holmes becoming such a recognizable literary figure. Several factors contribute to this. After describing his physical characteristics and his personality, we look at the most important feature of his fame, his brilliant deductive abilities. It is in this that Arthur Conan Doyle is somewhat indebted to his mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell, as described in chapter 1. In A Study in Scarlet (STUD), the very first Holmes tale, Dr. Watson describes Sherlock Holmes as being more than six feet tall, very lean, with piercing eyes and a thin hawk-like nose. Holmes’s voice was high and occasionally strident. We learn later that his eyes were gray and he had a narrow face and black hair. Most illustrators over the years have faithfully reproduced this picture of the great detective (see figure 2.1). Very little about Holmes’s background is revealed to us. Most of what we do know is told in The Greek Interpreter (GREE). In this tale, the twenty-fourth of the sixty, Watson is shocked to learn that Holmes has a brother named Mycroft. It turns out that neither of the roommates has told the other that they have a brother. We also learn that the Holmes brothers are from a family of country squires. The family traces itself back to the Frenchman Horace Vernet (1789–1863), a noted painter of military scenes. Clearly there was enough money in Holmes’s background for him to attend college. We know from The “Gloria Scott” (GLOR) that he did attend for two years. In The Musgrave Ritual (MUSG), Watson describes Holmes as very untidy. Apparently he kept his cigars in a coal scuttle and his tobacco in the toe of a Persian slipper. His correspondence was affixed to the mantel by a jackknife. In what is considered a patriotic gesture (Tracy 1977, 379), he honored his queen by using a pistol to shoot the letters VR, for Victoria Regina, into the wall of the Baker Street rooms.

Sherlock Holmes: Chemist

The previous chapter discussed Sherlock Holmes as a scientifically oriented detective. He was also knowledgeable about science in general. Practically every story contains at least some mention of one of the sciences. Having explored how Holmes used science in his detective work, we now look at his interest in research and his love of things scientific. In The “Gloria Scott” (GLOR), one of just two of the sixty stories narrated by Holmes instead of Watson, he says, “during the first month of the long vacation. I went up to my London rooms where I spent seven weeks working out a few experiments in organic chemistry.” Watson tells us in The Three Students (3STU) that without his chemicals, Holmes was “an uncomfortable man.” So there are clear indications that Holmes was devoted to science and that his first love was chemistry (see figure 4.1).Commentators disagree about Holmes’s chemistry abilities. Most praise Holmes as a chemist (see Cooper 1976; Gillard 1976; Graham 1945; Holstein1954; Michell and Michell 1946). The most notable critic of Holmes’s chemistry is Isaac Asimov. His objections are discussed in section 4.4. Dr. Watson even disagrees with himself about Holmes the chemist! Before Watson even meets Holmes, at the very outset of A Study in Scarlet (STUD), he is told by Young Stamford that Holmes is “a first-class chemist.” Stamford then performs the historic role of introducing Holmes and Watson. It doesn’t take Watson long to realize that his new roommate is a unique mixture of knowledge and ignorance. When he learns in STUD that Holmes is unfamiliar with the Copernican theory and the composition of the solar system, Watson is stunned. . . . Holmes: you say we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work. Watson: But the Solar System. Holmes: What the deuce is it to me?. . . Holmes believes the brain has a limited capacity. Therefore useless facts like the nature of the solar system should be forgotten, lest they crowd out important things.

How Sherlock Holmes Got His Start

One can achieve somewhat of an understanding of how Sherlock Holmes came to exist by looking at the contributions of three people: Conan Doyle himself, Edgar Allan Poe, and Conan Doyle’s mentor in medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell. First we shall look at Conan Doyle, focusing on those aspects of his life that led to his writing of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was English and his mother, Mary Foley, was Irish. His father had a drinking problem and was consequently less a factor in Conan Doyle’s upbringing than was his mother. Charles would eventually end up in a lunatic asylum (Stashower 1999, 24). Mary Doyle instilled in her son a love of reading (Symons 1979, 37; Miller 2008, 25) that would later lead him to conceive of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle’s extensive reading had a great influence on the Sherlock Holmes stories (Edwards 1993). He was raised a Catholic and attended Jesuit schools at Hodder (1868–1870) and Stonyhurst (1870–1875), which he found to be quite harsh. Compassion and warmth were less favored than “the threat of corporal punishment and ritual humiliation” (Coren 1995, 15). Next he spent a year at Stella Matutina, a Jesuit college in Feldkirch, Austria (Miller 2008, 40). As Conan Doyle’s alcoholic father had little income, wealthy uncles paid for this education. By the end of his Catholic schooling, he is said to have rejected Christianity (Stashower 1999, 49). At the less strict Feldkirch school, his drift away from religion turned toward reason and science (Booth 1997, 60). At this time he also read the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, including his detective stories. So, although Sherlockians debate the “birthplace” of Holmes, a claim can be made that Holmes was conceived in Austria. In 1876, Conan Doyle began his medical studies at the highly respected University of Edinburgh. These years also played a large role in shaping the Holmes stories. One obvious factor was his continued exposure to science.

Sherlock Holmes: Other Sciences

Sherlock Holmes knew more chemistry than any other science. But in this chapter, we shall find that he was well informed in a number of other sciences as well. Since mathematics contributes to all sciences, we first examine the Canon for instances of mathematical knowledge. We find a number of references to and uses of math in nearly all the early stories. After Holmes and Moriarty supposedly went over the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem (FINA) and Holmes returned, he rarely used math again. In A Study in Scarlet (STUD), Watson scoff s at a magazine article that claims that the conclusions of a trained observer are as “infallible as so many propositions of Euclid.” He soon learns that his new roommate Holmes is the author of the article. So here, very early on, we have Holmes drawing a mathematical analogy to his deductive work. He invokes Euclid again in the second story, Sign of Four (SIGN). This time he chides Watson about his writing style. Holmes accuses Watson of allowing romanticism to creep into his narration of the previous case, STUD. According to Holmes, this awkward technique produces “much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.” The fifth proposition states that if two sides in a triangle are equal, then the angles opposite those two sides will also be equal. Note that Holmes makes no calculation using Euclid’s proposition, but he depends on Watson’s knowledge of math to make a point about the way the narrative of STUD was written. This is the first time, but not the last, that he criticizes Watson the chronicler. In SIGN, Holmes’s conversation again assumes that his listener is acquainted with mathematical terms. When he sees that Tonga has left a footprint in creosote, he claims that tracking him will be as easy as using the “rule of three,” which states that if three of the four terms in a proportion are known, then the fourth may be calculated.