Adler of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” significantly a story written before Holmes’s character was fully formed and demonstrated. He calls Irene Adler “the woman,” giving a lasting impression of infatuation even though Watson assures the reader that there was nothing emotional in Holmes’s admiration of her. She is an extraordinary woman compared to the damsels in distress who populate many of the other tales, and those who insist that Holmes should have a mate could do worse than settle for her.
“May I marry Holmes?” William Gillette is said to have telegraphed to Doyle when he was writing his play Sherlock Holmes at the turn of the century, meaning that he felt the need to introduce a love interest. Doyle’s response: “You may marry him or murder him or do what you like with him.” Gillette did, and numerous dramatizers and authors have followed suit, including Jerome Coopersmith, who explained what he had done in the musical Baker Street (1965): “I gave Sherlock Holmes a girl friend, and that is as it should be.” Novelist Laurie R. King has gone farther, giving Holmes a wife, a far younger woman named Mary Russell who is a theology student and apprentice detective, in a series of novels that began with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994). They have attracted a large coterie of (mostly female) fans with an online presence (www.rj-anderson.com/russell), although many sober Sherlockians have trouble recognizing the Holmes they portray. In the Canon itself, the fair sex is, as Holmes says, Watson’s department. (Holmes’s love life, and related issues, are treated at length in my book In Bed with Sherlock Holmes, 1984.)
THE GREAT HIATUS. No aspect of Holmes’s life is odder than the three years that are said to have elapsed between May 1891 and April 1894, that is, between the events of “The Final Problem” and those of “The Empty House.” The latter story offers Holmes’s brief narrative: after escaping Professor Moriarty at the Falls of the Reichenbach, he travelled to Tibet, conducted explorations under the name of Sigerson, visited such exotic sites as Mecca (where non-Muslims are not welcome) and Khartoum (capital of the Sudan, during an interlude between bitter wars against Britain), and spent time at Montpellier in France doing laboratory research into “the coal-tar derivatives.”
The reader who sees the stories as biography demands a better truth, an explanation that adds something to the understanding of Holmes’s personality. The fascination with the Great Hiatus (a term for this three-year interlude apparently coined by Edgar W. Smith in a 1946 article in the Baker Street Journal) may also proceed from a wish to know exactly why and how Holmes changed — why, as folklore insists that a contemporary reader told Doyle, “Sherlock Holmes may not have died when he fell down that waterfall, but he was never the same man afterwards.” Jack Tracy, in his Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana (1977), says quite truthfully: “In the absence of supporting evidence, an enormous number of alternate theories have been formed to account for Holmes’s activities during this period, each more outrageous than the others.” For example, the story of his involvement in the August 4, 1892, murders at Fall River, Massachusetts, in which Lizzie Borden was acquitted, has yet to be told. The events of “Wisteria Lodge” are alleged to have taken place in 1892, clearly an impossibility.
A FIGURE OF REAL LIFE. William S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1962) is a full-length “biography,” with this significant authorial note: “No characters in this book are fictional, although the author should very much like to meet any who claim to be.” He thus takes to its extreme the Sherlockian game of treating Holmes as a historical figure, skillfully blending inferences from the Canon with information from more conventional historical sources. He begins with Holmes’s birth, continues with his hypothetical education and his known early cases, and goes through the dramatic points of his career as narrated in most of the sixty stories. Final chapters deal with his retirement and with his imagined death on January 6, 1957, on a cliff top in Sussex.
Along the way, Baring-Gould introduces a number of ideas that are sometimes accepted by Sherlockians as authentic parts of Holmes’s life, although they are best classified as folklore:
• That Professor Moriarty was his mathematics tutor in his youth.
• That Holmes had a second brother, Sherrinford (a name taken from Doyle’s earliest notes for A Study in Scarlet, which used the name “Sherrinford Holmes” for the detective himself, and “Ormond Sacker” for Watson).
• That Holmes toured America as a young actor in 1879–81.
• That he assisted in the solution of the Jack the Ripper murders in London in 1888.
• That he enjoyed a dalliance with Irene Adler in Montenegro shortly after his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls.
At the same time, he gives the status of history to speculations that have been vaguely accepted by Sherlockians, such as a birth date for Holmes of January 6, 1854. The year seems plausible from several Canonical references. The month and date are attributed to Christopher Morley, who apparently chose them to match those of his brother Frank, and to refer to Twelfth Night, a play which Holmes twice quotes. A later scholar has seen significance in Holmes’s behaviour on a January 7 in The Valley of Fear: he shows signs of suffering from a hangover.
More recent “biographies” of Holmes are the work of June Thomson (Holmes and Watson, 1995) and Nick Rennison (Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography, 2005). In addition, a number of novelists have imagined or reimagined parts of Holmes’s life, from Michael Harrison (I, Sherlock Holmes, 1977) to countless authors of pastiches. Doyle might well have been astonished by such detailed attention to his creation, although he saw something of Holmes’s power in the indignant letters he received after “The Final Problem” killed off the detective, as well as the proposals of marriage that arrived for Holmes at other times in his career. Letters in fact still are directed to Holmes at his address of 221B Baker Street, and through the latter half of the twentieth century were answered by a staff member at the Abbey National Building Society, which happened to occupy that address. A selection of them was published as Letters to Sherlock Holmes (1985). More recently, correspondence addressed to 221B is delivered to the Sherlock Holmes Museum nearby at 239 Baker Street. The existence of such letters is a tribute to the plausibility of the figure Doyle originally created, although the image of Holmes that now lives in the public mind is much less subtle and complex than the one that lives in the pages of the Canon.
The Canon, save for four short stories and a few other passages, is presented as memoirs by John H. Watson, a former army doctor who was the companion of Sherlock Holmes for most of his working life. Indeed, the first half of A Study in Scarlet is subtitled as “a reprint from the reminiscences” of the good doctor, leading playful bibliographers to speculate about the very limited press run those Reminiscences must have had. Watson thus must be considered first as an “author” (in which case Arthur Conan Doyle is relegated to the status of Literary Agent, a title some Sherlockians have been happy to give him) and then as a character.
As author — biographer, one might say — Watson is a trifle self-conscious; several Canonical stories mention exchanges between him and Holmes about the narratives he has published, which Holmes says are full of “romanticism” and empty of detective logic. “I could not tamper with the facts,” Watson indignantly replies in The Sign of the Four. But there is much evidence that he does tamper with them, both deliberately and accidentally. “The Second Stain,” for example, acknowledges the need to be “vague in certain details,” to avoid betraying state secrets. The frequent references to towns and streets that do not exist, politicians who did not hold office, and weather that does not match the records in The Times, all suggest similar concealment. Other inconsistencies, such as the jump from June to September within a few hours in The Sign of the Four, can be attributed to carelessness. Sherlockians
