the original pretense of all adventurers, liars, and storytellers—that every word you are about to hear is true. For at least two hundred years before him, a writer of fiction might employ teasing initials, pseudonyms, and half-censored dates to give the impression that his story had been drawn from some available record, or that the author could personally vouch for its accuracy, but not without harming the innocent, embarrassing the guilty, or defaming the dead. Conan Doyle took this gambit one step further: not only were the Holmes stories presented as factual, with all the necessary names disguised, but their having been published, and subsequently widely read and even enjoyed, was known to their characters. Holmes was not only aware of his status as the subject of Watson’s “chronicles,” he resented it, and mocked it, even as he profited by the fictional version of the very real success that the stories enjoyed, first in the pages of the Strand and Collier’s, then in the many collected editions.
This kind of heroism, aware of its own literary celebrity, was not entirely new. The heroes of the Iliad know that they will one day feature in an epic song. In the second volume of Don Quixote, the knight’s career is distorted by the first volume’s publication (and subsequent piracy). And the opening lines of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn display the same sort of post-publication self-awareness. The difference, and the innovation, is in Dr. Watson. Unlike the singer of the Iliad, or the narrator of Don Quixote, Watson is at once an active participant in the adventures and their recorder. And unlike Huck Finn, he deliberately presents himself, over and over, as an author preparing accounts for immediate publication, as the man charged with translating Holmes’s notes and his own recollections into stories that will, as Holmes sourly puts it, “pander to popular taste.” He serves as the guarantor of the stories’ “factuality” by experiencing them firsthand, by faithfully transcribing them, and finally by taking the heat for the supposed difficulties and annoyances their publication causes for Holmes. Watson’s repeated insistence on his own active part in the stories’ finding their way into the hands of the reader—fully half begin with some kind of recognition of their own published status—encourages us to confuse the two doctors, Watson and Conan Doyle, who seem physically and even in their appetites to resemble each other.
Conan Doyle’s decision to play this particular fictional trick—to confuse the boundaries between fact and fiction, to write a disguised version of himself into the stories, to have Watson insist on the literal truth of the accounts—had consequences, like all the best tricks, that he did not foresee. On the one hand it produced the thousands of people who have written letters to Sherlock Holmes over the years and mailed them hopefully to 221B Baker Street (where they are read and answered, to this day, by a specially designated employee of the Abbey National Bank, which has offices at that address). It produced a sense of happy confusion in at least one discerning reader over the years: “Perhaps the greatest of all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence.” The pleasure to be derived from pretending to take fiction as fact was also one of the necessary conditions for the rise of the Sherlockians.
The other necessary condition for the rise of that alternately amusing and tedious tribe (not always alternately; to be honest, not always amusing) was the haste and carelessness that so often attended Conan Doyle’s writing of the tales. The first twenty-four Holmes stories were written in a period of twenty-nine months, and they are replete with all the contradictions, lacunae, and interesting mistakes of inspiration working under deadline. After the first batch there followed a ten-year interval, corresponding to two years in the world of Holmes and Watson (after the “death” of Holmes, in Moriarty’s arms), during which time Conan Doyle forgot a lot of things he had already written about Watson and (the now resurrected) Holmes, producing further contradictions and errors. The perennially thorny question of Watson’s wife, Mary, who may or may not have been his first or second wife, and may or may not have died, is the best-known example of this kind of authorial haste.
Conan Doyle, who always wrote quickly and claimed not to revise, seems to have been almost willfully careless when writing his Holmes stories, as if the act of disregarding each story’s predecessors and the assertions made therein about Holmes and Watson somehow mitigated their cumulative importance. Or perhaps Conan Doyle simply could not bear to reread them.
Thus the Holmes stories are constructed around a series of gaps. Some of these gaps are introduced only to be filled by the intuitions and inferences of the Great Detective: they are mysteries to be solved, as when the plans for the Bruce-Partington submarine have disappeared. Then there are the gaps deliberately introduced by Conan Doyle and deliberately left unresolved, in order to lend a greater air of authenticity to his stories. Some of these take the form of those famous allusions to other, unpublished or even unwritten cases that remain, in the view of Watson or Holmes, too scandalous, too libelous, or simply too horrifying to see the light of day. The best known of these is probably that of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, “a story,” as we are deliciously warned, “for which the world is not yet prepared.”
And then there are all the tantalizing gaps introduced purely through authorial carelessness into the chronology of the stories and the histories of the characters—the lack of information, for example, about Holmes’s university career; the strange intermittence and obscure fate of Watson’s wife, Mary, who suddenly disappears from the stories, or the oddly migratory wound that Watson received, in his leg or his shoulder, from a Jezail bullet.
Into these gaps has flowed the mock-scholarly tide of the Sherlockians. For the last ninety years, since Monsignor Ronald A. Knox’s essay “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” a vintage work of deliberate, straight-faced English silliness, writers well known and obscure have been devoting themselves, with a silliness that is sometimes deliberate and faces that are always straight, to trying to settle the questions raised by the gaps that Conan Doyle left lying around the canon. Their labors have produced the vast corpus of Sherlockian essays, papers, and monographs, treating subjects which range from the high incidence in the stories of women named Violet, to the shape and design of the Beryl Coronet. They have sought to analyze the angle at which Colonel Moran must have fired his air gun at the wax dummy of Holmes that Mrs. Hudson so diligently turned around in front of the window of the Baker Street flat, and to settle once and for all the deepest puzzle of all: why Mrs. Watson, or the first Mrs. Watson (in the event that you believe there to have been a second Mrs. Watson), should call her husband James when his name is John. The Sherlockians are playing the game begun by Conan Doyle—the game of pretending that the stories are true, that Holmes and Watson are, or were, real people, that Watson really wrote all the stories and that Conan Doyle was no more than “the Literary Agent.” In this sense, the Sherlockians, or Holmesians (rhymes with Cartesians), as they are called in the UK, are all Conan Doyle’s fault. He asked for them.
Monsignor Knox’s puckish essay was more than a piece of self-parodying scholarship: it was an appropriation, for his own fictive purposes, of the characters, situations, and what would now be termed the “universe” or “continuity” of Conan Doyle’s stories. “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” led directly, through works like William Baring-Gould’s 1962 “biography” of Holmes, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (essentially a novel in the form of a biography), Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), and Nicholas Meyer’s film The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), to the contemporary, largely Web-based phenomenon that has devotees of various television programs, cartoons, and film series presenting their own prose versions of the adventures, histories, and sex lives of characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess. Such efforts are often derided or dismissed for the amateur productions they are, but the fact is that for at least the past forty years—since (take your pick) the French New Wave, or the Silver Age of Comics, or rock and roll’s British Invasion—popular media have been in the hands of people who grew up as passionate, if not insanely passionate, fans of those media: by amateurs, in the original sense of the word.
The first short story that I ever wrote was a tale of Sherlock Holmes, a pastiche written in a clumsy,
