The following is an excerpt from The Man Who Would Be Sherlock: The Real-Life Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, by Christopher Sandford.
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One of the paradoxes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s indestructible sleuth is that he seems both to embody the past and belong to the present. Although there’s a generous amount of period detail to the Holmes stories, with their soupy miles of cobblestone streets, he’s also a thoroughly modern, even futuristic human calculating machine, who takes full advantage of such emerging disciplines as psychiatry, forensics, toxicology, ballistics, analytical chemistry and anthropometrics—the use of precise body measurements to “profile” criminals—to complement his legendary powers of observation. Although Conan Doyle, like most authors, deplored the habit of identifying ‘real-life’ models for his characters, he also took the opportunity to pay Dr Joseph Bell (1837–1911) the compliment of calling him the “true Holmes.”
The frock-coated Bell was 39 years old when Doyle, an impoverished medical student, first attended one of his lectures at Edinburgh University. Described as a “thin, white-haired Scot with the look of a prematurely hatched bird, whose Adam’s apple danced up and down his narrow neck,” the doctor spoke in a piping voice and is said to have walked with a jerky, scuttling gait “suggestive of his considerable reserves of nervous energy.” Bell was a keen observer of his patients’ mental and physical characteristics—”The Method” as he called it—which he used as an aid to diagnosis. A lecture in the university’s gaslit amphitheater might, for example, open with Bell informing his audience that the subject standing beside him in the well of the auditorium had obviously served, at some time, as a non-commissioned officer in a Highland regiment in the West Indies—an inference based on the man’s failure to remove his hat (a Scots military custom) and telltale signs of tropical illness, among other minutiae. Added to his impressive powers of deduction, Bell also liked to bring an element of drama to his lectures, for instance by once swallowing a phial of malodorous liquid in front of his students, the better to determine whether or not it was a deadly poison. (He survived the test.) For much of the last century, Bell has been the individual most popularly associated with the “real Holmes.”
That notwithstanding, there would be several other ingredients in what Conan Doyle called “the rather complex chain” leading to his detective’s creation. Pinning down Doyle’s real-life models should be a straightforward matter of checking the known facts of his life in the years prior to March 1886, when he put pen to paper on the first Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet. We know that he read voraciously, and that he drew heavily on the analytical-detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Emile Gaboriau. It’s also known that Doyle was concerned with finding a narrative way to show the potential of forensic science for solving crime. And it can be safely said that he brought a moral dimension to the stories, at the end of which, however outlandish their plots, affairs were successfully restored to their rightful, late Victorian order. Many of these strands came together in the person of Joe Bell, who in 1878 picked Doyle out to serve as his outpatient clerk, the beginning of a relationship between the brilliant man of reason and his somewhat stolid accomplice that would foreshadow that between Holmes and Dr Watson. As we’ll see, there are also various other candidates whose individual talents and eccentricities mirrored those of the fictional inhabitants of 221b Baker Street.
At this point, one begins to see why so many readers are convinced that the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories was really one Dr John Watson, and that Conan Doyle was merely a kind of glorified literary agent behind the scenes. (There are many more strange theories about the series than that.) But writing, to Doyle, was very much an imaginative or moral exercise, and not just a parlor game where the intellectual elite would try to identify the models for his best-known characters. Sherlock Holmes, it seems fair to say, was a composite of several historical, living or invented figures. We’ll touch on some of these in later pages. But, critically, Holmes also reflected the personality of his creator, a man who combined a lifelong passion for scientific inquiry with a finely honed sense of honor and justice and, just as important, an absolute willingness to offend the political or religious orthodoxy of the day.
This, then, is a tale of two detectives. The first one is the mythological figure of Sherlock Homes, a combination of several pioneering Victorian professionals, and of his author’s imagination. The result is a character who has endured for some 130 years, and whom we still associate today with wearing an Inverness cape, smoking a calabash pipe and uttering the immortal line, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” none of which appear in any of his sixty originally published appearances. Along the way, Holmes has survived everything from his creator’s periodic attempts to kill him, to being hijacked for countless literary sequels and knockoffs—including one, with the title A Samba for Sherlock, in which a nearly blind detective gropes his way around the barrios of Rio de Janeiro, and another, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which outs him as a feminist.
Part of Holmes’s appeal, surely, lies in Conan Doyle’s skillful creation not just of a memorable leading man, but also a dramatis personae that helps sustain our interest in the series as a whole. The characters “ring well,” as the author Saul Bellow (something of a closeted gothic-crime fan) once told me. “They may not be realistic, but they feel real and they feel right … If it isn’t what the Victorian underworld was like, it’s what we like to think it was like.”
As well as the pairing of Holmes and Watson that would become the prototype of a whole raft of comically mismatched yet interdependent double acts, from Jeeves and Wooster to Morse and Lewis, we’re perhaps equally drawn, with a shudder midway between joy and revulsion, to that “Napoleon of crime,” Professor Moriarty. Like Holmes’s deerstalker hat and signature cape, the notion of Moriarty far exceeds his physical presence in the published stories, where he appears just twice, but even so he’s insinuated himself into our consciousness as the archetypal evil genius. It’s all part of the process of bringing the series closer to real life than Doyle himself might admit.
Today there are thriving clubs and societies and, thanks to the internet, enjoyably spirited long-distance discussions that try and establish such matters as which train, exactly, Holmes might have taken to Baskerville Hall, or the correct location of the wound Watson suffered in the Afghan War. It’s in no way intended as a slight to note again that there may be no other characters in English literature, not excluding those of P.G. Wodehouse, who continue to excite such fanatical and, at times, slightly dotty devotion.
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Sherlock Holmes is an austere masterpiece; a universally recognizable character made up of several true-life or imagined ingredients. But he’s also the literary embodiment of his author. Conan Doyle was eminently well qualified to write about the horrors of Victorian urban life, having worked as a young medical assistant in 1870s Sheffield and Birmingham, among other character-forming experiences. Fifty years later, Doyle could still shock audiences with a variety of macabre tales of his youth, such as the time he was led into an ill-lit back parlor where a “grotesquely misshapen form, with pitted complexion, hooded eyes and a face gnawed by pox” lay pathetically awaiting his care. Nor was his subsequent six-month spell as the ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler without its colorful incident, as seen by his 1904 story, “Black Peter.”
While this whole period was grist for Conan Doyle’s later career, it also touched off or accelerated his lifelong dread of drunkenness—the “great frailty” that afflicted his own father Charles, who spent several years as an inmate of the Montrose Lunatic Asylum before his premature death in another institution. In short, the man who invented Sherlock Holmes was on terms of more than passing familiarity with the forces of social and criminal darkness.
Joseph Bell may have been the basic template for the character, but Holmes also reflected Doyle’s own mixture of scientific reason and almost monomaniacal pursuit of justice in the face of the blundering and often corrupt Establishment. It’s true that in December 1912 Doyle rebuked a critic with a poem ending in the lines, “So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle / The doll and its maker are never identical.” It’s also true that Joseph Bell himself—not a man to unduly shun any available credit—once wrote a letter to Doyle stating, “You are yourself Sherlock Homes and well you know it.”
The machine-like impersonality of Holmes’s methods mirrors the impenetrability of Holmes the man. Even to scholars and those countless ordinary fans around the world who devote themselves to a close textual study of the series—the so-called Holmesians or Sherlockians—there are still tantalizing gaps and unresolved discrepancies. To this day, apparently well-adjusted and intelligent minds eagerly debate the character’s family background (solidly British, although related to the Vernet dynasty of French painters), or matters such as where he went to university, and whether he was truly a confirmed bachelor or, rather, one of those tragic literary figures who have had their hearts broken earlier in life and turn their backs on romantic love as a result.
Might Holmes have been schizophrenic? Was he a practical joker? Or totally humorless? Did he vote? Enjoy a night out?…In all likelihood, we’ll never know.Might Holmes have been schizophrenic? Was he a practical joker? Or totally humorless? Did he vote? Enjoy a night out? Could he have suffered the childhood trauma of seeing one or both of his parents killed by street robbers, an event that, as in the case of Batman, served as the motivation for his whole subsequent crime-fighting career? In all likelihood, we’ll never know. Nowhere in the roughly three-quarters of a million words Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes do we ever learn the character’s exact age, his birthplace, or his birthday. In 2015, eighty-eight years after his last official appearance, Holmes seemingly made a comeback in a story that had allegedly lain undisturbed for decades in a Scottish loft. Entitled “Sherlock Holmes: Discovering the Border Burghs and, by Deduction, the Brig Bazaar,” the tale in turn became a mystery—a true addition to the canon, or merely a pastiche by a hand that may or may not have been Doyle’s? To review the books, monographs, films, and other, more ad-hoc projects inspired by Holmes today is not to note a revival of interest, but simply to let down a bucket into a bottomless well.
But perhaps the greatest enigma of all is how a morally austere Scotsman who had barely set foot in London before his thirtieth birthday, and who was convinced his true literary calling lay in Napoleonic-historical romance, could have created a thoroughly contemporary dramatic hero, who also happened to be a bipolar drug addict given to shooting up cocaine three times a day to overcome his lassitude, and whom we associate with an intimate working knowledge of the English capital’s underworld and back streets. It’s a tribute to Doyle’s powers of improvisation that London, which he knew largely from the contemporary Post Office Directory, the nearest thing to Google Maps of the day, is often described as another character in the stories.
It’s also well known that Doyle, unlike the detective’s millions of diehard fans, soon grew weary of Holmes, once admitting, “I feel towards him as I do to pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.” Having brought the character to life in 1886, he was trying to kill him again as soon as 1890. Holmes’s apparent watery end in “The Final Problem,” published in the December 1893 edition of The Strand magazine, scarcely two years after his debut there in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” triggered the perhaps apocryphal story that bereaved readers had walked around the streets of England wearing black armbands. Doyle himself was more stoical, jotting only the words “Killed Holmes” in his notebook.
He took a similarly laconic approach when the American Collier’s Weekly offered him the fabulous sum of $25,000, or roughly £6,000, to revive Holmes in a series of six stories. “Very well, ACD,” he scribbled back on a postcard. Even so, Doyle was always shrewd enough to see a long-term future for Holmes. Rather like an iconic 1960s rock band contemplating a reunion, there would be periodic hints of a one-off comeback, if not a full-scale return to public life. Although Holmes the detective remained dead, there was “no limit to the number of papers he left behind or the reminiscences in the brain of his biographer,” Doyle wrote in The Strand’s sister paper Tit-Bits in December 1900. The inevitable followed with the first published installment of The Hound of the Baskervilles just eight months later. When the American actor William Gillette brought the character of Holmes to the stage at around the same time, Doyle allowed, “It’s good to see the old chap again.” The old chap would continue to appear in periodic new adventures until as late as 1927, taking Holmes up to an era when fictional detectives were dealing with pushy leading ladies and fascist spies. By then he had outlived many of the late Victorian conventions and physical trappings (gloaming and gaslight, swirling river fogs) of his heyday, and Doyle himself survived the character he had long felt so conflicted about by just three years.
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Excerpted from The Man Who Would Be Sherlock: The Real-Life Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, by Christopher Sandford, Courtesy Thomas Dunne Books. Copyright © 2018, Christopher Sandford.
