|
|
|
“I’m going to kill him.”
Those are the opening words of the recently-released novel The Sherlockian, spoken by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
He’s not talking about killing a person, but a fictional character — Sherlock Holmes, the world-famous detective whom Doyle created, yet over time came to resent and want to rid himself of forever.
Doyle had done such a masterful job in sketching the biographies and the intricate details of the lives of Holmes and his faithful friend, John Watson M.D. — not to mention their sundry adventures — that many readers began to view them not as fictional characters, but as real people. That’s how personally invested the public became in the stories.
Holmes’ deerstalker hat and pipe, his violin playing, the cocaine use when overcome by ennui, his friendship with Watson and their residence at 221B Baker Street in London, his reduction of even the most excruciating puzzle to being “elementary” (a word he actually used in only one story, The Crooked Man), the thrill of his announcement that “the game is afoot!” whenever a new case arrived with its myriad challenges. They may not have been real, but they seemed so real that people simply assumed that the two characters were as well.
This verisimilitude led any number of English citizens, and those from foreign countries, to write letters to Holmes (which were rerouted to Doyle) asking the great detective for his help in solving some particularly perplexing mystery. To this day, letters addressed to Holmes at 221B Baker St. continue to arrive at the London Post Office.
From his very first act of crime detection — examining the ground for footprints in A Study in Scarlet — Holmes enthralled reading audiences across the globe with his inordinate skills of deduction. Devoted readers, the “Sherlockians,” view the full volume of Doyle’s works on Holmes (56 short stories and four novels published over 40 years) as something akin to the holy grail of literature and, as such, refer to it reverentially as “The Canon.”
How to explain such adulation and devotion?
Well, Holmes himself explains what drives him, and what has kept readers worldwide coming back for more for well over a century now, in that debut appearance when he says: “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.” His occupation, as we are told in The Speckled Band, is “to see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
Those are the opening words of the recently-released novel The Sherlockian, spoken by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
He’s not talking about killing a person, but a fictional character — Sherlock Holmes, the world-famous detective whom Doyle created, yet over time came to resent and want to rid himself of forever.
Doyle had done such a masterful job in sketching the biographies and the intricate details of the lives of Holmes and his faithful friend, John Watson M.D. — not to mention their sundry adventures — that many readers began to view them not as fictional characters, but as real people. That’s how personally invested the public became in the stories.
Holmes’ deerstalker hat and pipe, his violin playing, the cocaine use when overcome by ennui, his friendship with Watson and their residence at 221B Baker Street in London, his reduction of even the most excruciating puzzle to being “elementary” (a word he actually used in only one story, The Crooked Man), the thrill of his announcement that “the game is afoot!” whenever a new case arrived with its myriad challenges. They may not have been real, but they seemed so real that people simply assumed that the two characters were as well.
This verisimilitude led any number of English citizens, and those from foreign countries, to write letters to Holmes (which were rerouted to Doyle) asking the great detective for his help in solving some particularly perplexing mystery. To this day, letters addressed to Holmes at 221B Baker St. continue to arrive at the London Post Office.
From his very first act of crime detection — examining the ground for footprints in A Study in Scarlet — Holmes enthralled reading audiences across the globe with his inordinate skills of deduction. Devoted readers, the “Sherlockians,” view the full volume of Doyle’s works on Holmes (56 short stories and four novels published over 40 years) as something akin to the holy grail of literature and, as such, refer to it reverentially as “The Canon.”
How to explain such adulation and devotion?
Well, Holmes himself explains what drives him, and what has kept readers worldwide coming back for more for well over a century now, in that debut appearance when he says: “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.” His occupation, as we are told in The Speckled Band, is “to see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart.”
Doyle himself soon began to feel that his own life and greater literary ambitions were becoming overshadowed (indeed, overwhelmed) by Holmes, and the public’s unending fascination with him. He had grown tired of writing the stories — the “cheap penny dreadfuls,” as he took to calling them — and he longed to move on to more “substantial” works. But try as he might, he couldn’t seem to shake ol’ Sherlock.
Yet he soon came up with a far speedier solution: He would kill the venerable Mr. Holmes, relegating him to the graveyard of eternally-buried characters whose lives expired in some work of fiction. Then he would be free of him forever.
And kill him he did, dispatching of Holmes by hurling him over the Reichenbach Falls following a final death match with his arch-nemesis, the diabolical genius Professor Moriarty, in the story The Final Problem. Holmes had already planted the seeds for the downfall of Moriarty as well as his extensive criminal empire before perishing, thus allowing him (good) even in death to be the ultimate victor over evil.
Still, that was cold comfort to the millions of Sherlockians who reacted with an outpouring of grief and anger at the publication of that story, and its shocking conclusion, which Doyle simply could not have anticipated. The gulf between the disappointment and momentary displeasure he expected, and the actual reaction of readers, was as massive as the plot hole in The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist.
Men in London began wearing mourning weeds to mark Holmes’ “passing.” Doyle, meanwhile, was flooded with letters of protest and sorrow. “You brute!” one lady addressed him in the salutation of her entreaty that he bring the now-deceased detective back to life.
Doyle was eventually forced to resurrect Holmes in The Adventure of the Empty House, explaining that the great detective had actually faked his own death at the Reichenbach Falls to outsmart Moriarty’s henchmen (Sherlockians call this “The Great Hiatus,” the period between Holmes’ death in The Final Problem and his return in Empty House).
And so, Sherlock Holmes was back on the case, and has remained so ever since.
He is now approaching his 125th anniversary (Scarlet was published in 1887), and he has been the subject of so much of popular entertainment — the wonderful Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce films of the 1940s; the terrific British television series starring the late Jeremy Britt; a blockbuster modern-day film featuring Robert Downey Jr. in the title role, with the sequel due this December; and the book The Sherlockian, which follows two separate cases, the first a contemporary murder surrounding a Sherlockian’s discovery of Doyle’s mysterious long-missing diary and the second one a 19th-century investigation by Doyle himself and Bram Stoker (yes, that Bram Stoker) with eery ties to the first; among many others.
Sherlockians know that where Holmes appears, plenty of thrills are sure to follow. As Doyle himself put it in The Norwood Builder, “altogether it cannot be doubted that sensational developments will follow.”
That they did — and always do with Sherlock Holmes, who lives on in perpetuity with Dr. Watson at 221B Baker Street in London, always waiting — along with millions of devotees — for the game to be afoot again.
After all, as Frederick Busch observed of Holmes: “He cannot die. Even his creator couldn’t kill him.”
e-mail: tom3264@msn.com, or go to tom's Facebook page to send a message
