Conclusion

‘You will be amused to hear that I am at work upon a Sherlock Holmes story. So the old dog returns to his vomit.’1 Arthur Conan Doyle to Herbert Greenhough Smith Sherlock Holmes, who died in Switzerland in May 1891, returned to the world on 23 October 1899. The location for his rebirth was, somewhat surprisingly, the Star Theatre in Buffalo, New York. Early the following month, Holmes moved to New York where he could be found in Manhattan’s Garrick Theatre on 236 separate occasions, before making his way across the United States. In September 1901, Holmes went back to Great Britain, arriving (like so many travellers from the US) at Liverpool, before reaching London on 9 September 1901. He was so much in demand that on 1 February 1902 he received an audience with King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. In 1902 he was again in New York, was seen travelling across northern England in 1903, and for the next thirty years popped up repeatedly in various American towns and cities....

The East Wind

Holmes’s words to Watson at the end of ‘His Last Bow’ (1917) express an idea of warfare that sits uneasily with our contemporary perception of the First World War. Today we are accustomed to associate that war with the horrors of the Western Front: the battles of the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) loom large in our cultural memory as paradigms of unnecessary bloodshed and strategic incompetence. But this was not how Conan Doyle saw it – and he saw the Western Front at first hand, while both his brother, Brigadier-General Innes ‘Duff’ Doyle, and his son Kingsley were in the thick of the action. At the invitation of the War Office, Doyle toured the British, Italian and French Fronts in 1916, and the Australian Front in 1918, using his authority as Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey to don an improvised khaki uniform ‘which was something between that of a Colonel and Brigadier, with silver roses instead of stars or crowns upon the shoulder-states’.1

The Heat of the Amazon Was Always in her Blood

For a man who never set foot there, South America seemed to exert an unusual degree of influence over Conan Doyle’s imagination. His great post-imperial romance The Lost World was his most sustained exploration – in every sense of the word – of the imagined continent, and much can be read into his decision to locate a dinosaur-inhabited plateau in the centre of the Amazonian rainforest. For the British explorers under the leadership of Professor Challenger who set off in search of evidence of prehistoric life in the modern age, the interior of Brazil is one of the last remaining blank spaces on the map: only in such unexplored terrain can prehistory survive, untroubled by the twentieth century. The blank space exerts an irresistible appeal over the Challenger expedition, which comprises men who long to add to the world’s knowledge, to their own celebrity and to their own wealth (they discover diamonds, inconveniently located in the lair of some particularly aggressive pterodactyls).

The Worst Man in London

Charles Augustus Milverton, blackmailer of society women in the 1904 story that bears his name, is assumed by critics to be based on a real person – but which real person is open to doubt. The favourite is Charles Augustus Howell, a larger-than-life associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (whose members knew him as ‘Owl’), friend to James McNeill Whistler and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and one-time secretary to John Ruskin. However, it is by no means established that Howell was, in Lancelyn Green’s words, a ‘scoundrel and blackmailer’. He certainly seems to have fallen out with a lot of people, but the more outlandish stories about his life and death – Oscar Wilde may be the source for the claim that Howell was found dying outside a Chelsea public house ‘with his throat cut and a ten shilling piece between his clenched teeth’ – may be urban myths rather than actual facts: his death certificate, for instance, records that he died of pneumonia.

Singular Occurrence at a Wedding

The action of ‘The Noble Bachelor’ starts with Watson reading the day’s newspapers, and Holmes reading his correspondence. Both, coincidentally, find themselves reading about the same case. Holmes has a letter requesting his services from Lord St Simon, the noble bachelor of the story’s title. Watson, meanwhile, reads aloud a story headlined ‘Singular Occurrence at a Fashionable Wedding’. We learn that Lord St Simon is a bachelor no more, having just married the American heiress Hatty Doran; however, the bridal party had barely sat down for the wedding breakfast when Hatty, claiming indisposition, left the table, and disappeared, causing Holmes to comment, ‘They often vanish before the ceremony, and occasionally during the honeymoon; but I cannot call to mind anything quite so prompt as this’ (Adventures, 225). Foul play is suspected, leading to the arrest of Flora Miller, one of Lord St Simon’s former lovers who tried to force her way into the wedding breakfast, ‘alleging that she had some claim upon Lord St Simon’ (225).

Introduction

‘You know my methods. Apply them, and it will be instructive to compare results.’ Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890) ‘A Case of Identity’ (1891) opens, like so many stories in the Sherlock Holmes saga, in 221B Baker Street, where Holmes and Dr Watson receive a new client who bears a problem that is also a story. Watson is both Holmes’s pupil in the science of detection and, crucially, the story’s narrator. Both roles give him the scope to observe and record the client, Miss Mary Sutherland: his description for the reader of her ‘preposterous hat’, ‘vacuous face’ and ‘general air of being fairly well to do, in a vulgar, comfortable, easy-going way’ (...

The Rock of Gibraltar

Marital unhappiness is a persistent theme of the Holmes stories, from the first (A Study in Scarlet) to several of the last (‘The Adventure of the Retired Colourman’ and ‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’, both published in 1927). A Study in Scarlet begins as a detective story but its backstory is, as we have seen, a melodrama of forced marriage and domestic tyranny. ‘A Case of Identity’ concerns a courtship that is an elaborate deception, and the story opens with a digression on the ‘Dundas separation case’. This is reported in a newspaper as a ‘husband’s cruelty to his wife’, prompting Watson to claim that he knows the details without even reading the article: ‘There is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent nothing more crude.’ However, Holmes has investigated the case and reveals that it is actually more unusual: ‘The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife’ (Adventures, 31).

The Fall of the House of Musgrave

In Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle recounted how his Edinburgh lecturer, Joseph Bell, provided the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes’s methods of reasoning: ‘It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.’ But Bell was not the only source for Holmes. His literary model was Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘masterful’ Parisian detective, Le Chavalier C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), and reappeared in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844). Poe was one of the most powerful literary influences on Doyle’s writing.

The Roylotts of Stoke Moran

Dr Grimesby Roylott, the wicked stepfather in ‘The Speckled Band’, is one of Conan Doyle’s most grotesque, gothic villains. Like several other evildoers in the Holmes stories – Jonathan Small in The Sign of Four, Colonel Barclay in ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893), Colonel Sebastian Moran in ‘The Empty House’ – Roylott has gone bad in the East. Having established a medical practice in Calcutta, he narrowly avoided execution after beating his servant to death in a fit of rage: his stepdaughter Helen Stoner tells Holmes that ‘[v]iolence of temper approaching to mania has been hereditary in the men of the family, and in my stepfather’s case it had, I believe, been intensifi ed by his long residence in the tropics’ (175). After serving a prison sentence in India, he returned to England ‘a morose and disappointed man’ (175), and attempted to put his medical knowledge to good use by establishing a new medical practice in London.

Stone into Money

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published in the bestselling Strand Magazine in 1891–2, shows Holmes investigating not just his clients’ problems, but the hidden wiring of Victorian Britain. The wires were the social and economic relationships that connected cab drivers to kings, pawnbrokers to bankers, and hotel attendants to countesses. In these stories Holmes detects not only the physical traces of those relationships, such as the bruises on a woman’s wrist or the shiny patch on a man’s cuff, but also the financial traces. Usually overlooked by readers and critics, Holmes’s skill as an economist is fundamental to his detective method, and fundamental to the social function of Conan Doyle’s detective fiction.