and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin — an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour. [“The Golden Pince-Nez”]
Listing the unpublished cases in The Tin Dispatch-Box (1965, reprinted 1994), I defined them as “any criminal investigation or professional business in which Holmes was involved or took a particular contemporary interest. Using this definition, there are altogether 111 cases.” (The listing which led to that total has a few omissions.) Such cases are of interest to the would-be biographer as clues to filling in the great stretches of Holmes’s career not covered in the published stories, and as instances in which he made use of his powers to solve mysteries about which the reader would love to hear.
The unpublished cases have provided motifs for a number of “pastiches,” or imitations of the original tales, including several of the Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1952–53) by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr. They were also the basis of many scripts by Edith Meiser and her successors for a long-running series of American radio dramatizations (1932–43). For such purposes the unpublished cases are ideal, since generally there is merely a thought-provoking phrase, rather than a plot to which the writer must stick.
A surprising amount can, however, sometimes be deduced about an unpublished case. Edward F. Clark, Jr., in the Baker Street Journal in 1963 offered a careful exegesis of a few words in “The Final Problem”: “I knew in the papers that [Holmes] had been engaged by the French republic upon a matter of supreme importance.” A number of scholars have toyed with “the papers of ex-President Murillo,” mentioned in “The Norwood Builder,” identifying that gentleman with various former South American leaders. Exploration of what Watson meant to say begins to overlap with investigation of Doyle’s sources, as when “the peculiar persecution of John Vincent Harden” is said to have been suggested to the author’s mind by his reading about Texas bandit John Wesley Hardin. Some of the unpublished cases refer to historical people, including the Pope (presumably Leo XIII) and Vanderbilt (one of the New York railroad clan). Others contain intriguing but inexplicable names, personal or geographical, including “Isadora Persano” and “the island of Uffa.” In a class by itself is “the giant rat of Sumatra,” a phrase that has intrigued not only pasticheurs and scholars but also the designers of new hazards in the popular game “Dungeons and Dragons.”
THE ROOMS AT 221B BAKER STREET
The arrangement of Holmes’s (and, in some of the stories but not all, Watson’s) rooms is unclear, and in any case may have changed over the years. “The Mazarin Stone,” a story that is a one-act play lightly rewritten, contains what amount to stage directions, calling for exits and entrances hardly compatible with a conventional suite in Baker Street. It is more satisfactory to build up the lodgings — and particularly the sitting room, where most of the action takes place — in the mind’s eye. Still, a creditable job has been done by the proprietors of several restorations, particularly the one at the “Sherlock Holmes” public-house in Northumberland Street, London. Some enthusiasts have 221B rooms in their own homes; one created by the late Allen Mackler is now housed at the Wilson Library of the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. Illustrators, stage designers, and television producers have faced the same challenges as creators of the full-scale article, generally emphasizing whichever features of the room, authentic or otherwise, are needed for their immediate purposes.
A monstrous amount of furniture must be fitted into the room if every sentence in the Canon is to be taken as true. The chairs on either side of the fire, in which one imagines Holmes and Watson sitting to chat, are a bare beginning: Don MacLachlan, writing in Canadian Holmes in 1989, includes in the inventory “12 chairs, two stools, one sofa, and something sittable-on by the window. Enough seating for at least 17 people.” But there are many other objects in the room as well, from the dining table to the workbench with Holmes’s chemicals, not to mention a bearskin rug, a safe, a sideboard, and the coal-scuttle in which Holmes kept his cigars. A plausible floor plan was drawn by Julian Wolff to accompany his analysis of the rooms in the Baker Street Journal in 1946. He includes a bathroom adjacent to the sitting room — a facility that may have amounted to a luxury in 1895. He also puts Holmes’s bedroom (which figures in “The Dying Detective” in particular) adjacent to the sitting room, relegating Watson to an upper storey (British “second,” American “third,” floor).
The dominant feature of the suite at 221B must have been clutter. Holmes had “a horror of destroying documents,” Watson reports, and attached his unanswered letters to the mantelpiece with his jackknife. Chemical experiments were often in progress, discarded newspapers and telegrams littered the floor, and relics of cases were, Watson says, wont to turn up in the butter dish. There may have been a little space left for Watson’s cherished portrait of General “Chinese” Gordon, but the conventional decorations of a Victorian sitting room, the antimacassars and ostrich eggs, must have been almost entirely absent. For it is probably a mistake to imagine a spacious room; the chamber of a pair of bachelors was surely rather cosy than elegant.
“You know my methods,” Holmes repeatedly told his companion. If the reader does not know them — as sometimes, it seems, Watson did not — they are evident in passages throughout the Canon, or systematically set out in Brad Keefauver’s book The Elementary Methods of Sherlock Holmes (1987). Keefauver considers Holmes’s immense general knowledge, his reference library, his readiness to compare the present case to precedents in criminal activity, his use of disguise, and other stratagems and resources. But the essence of Holmes’s detective ability lay in the data he was able to collect and the reasoning in which he engaged.
Chiefly, Holmes worked from facts. “I cannot make bricks without clay,” he said once; and over and over again, “It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts.” And for him facts were usually tiny things — a burnt match in the mud, the torn and ink-stained finger of a glove:
I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a bootlace.... Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details. My first glance is always at a woman’s sleeve. In a man it is perhaps better first to take the knee of the trouser. [“A Case of Identity”]
In using such a procedure to size up a client or a suspicious character, Holmes is following the example of Doyle’s medical mentor, Joseph Bell. It is a technique exactly suited to the Victorian age, a period of many specialized trades, and to the British multiplicity of social classes and local customs. In a modern, homogenized North America, where all classes dress alike and only a few people work in trades that leave such marks as the weaver’s tooth or the compositor’s left thumb, a Sherlock Holmes might have a much more difficult task.
The observation of trifles is not limited to assessing profession and character. Holmes uses it particularly in examining the scene of a crime, engaging in the famous “floor-walk” with his “powerful convex lens” in search of tiny objects: a pill in A Study in Scarlet, “what seemed to me to be dust” (but was tobacco ash) in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” Footprints and other traces are a specialty. The ability to see details, rather than “general impressions,” makes it possible for Holmes to understand the significance of a chip on a railing in “Thor Bridge,” and of beeswing in a wineglass in “The Abbey Grange.”
Writing in the journal Endeavour in 2004, Laura Snyder, a specialist in the history and philosophy of science, assesses whether Holmes can fairly be called a pioneering “scientific detective.” She concludes in part:
Rather than inventing forensic science, the Holmes stories instead
