The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Read Online

In both cases, the truth lies underneath the surface; the narrative of the client hides the deeper narrative which detective and analyst alone can perceive.

The faith in reason which Sherlock Holmes embodies was, perhaps, appealing because it was already waning as the stories first appeared and had all but vanished under the impact of war when the last adventures appeared in the 1920s. The fierce secularism of the earliest stories is self-evident throughout. It is notable, for example, that while the occasional member of the nobility is grudgingly allowed an appearance – if at the cost of being generally presented in a bad light – that other staple of nineteenth-century fiction, the clergyman, is notable by his absence. There are scarcely any references to religion in any of the stories presented here, almost no vicars, priests, curates, bishops, of any sort. Even the account of the wedding in ‘The Noble Bachelor’ mentions almost the entire congregation except for the officiating priest. Holmes’s excursions to the country, such as in ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, take him to a society quite unlike that visited by his fellows, for he goes to no villages with churches in them, and when he makes inquiries the last place he ever thinks of going is the vicarage, which so many other detectives have regarded as their first port of call. Almost the only mention of anything ecclesiastical is a far-off glimpse of the steeples of Tavistock in ‘Silver Blaze’ – distant, decorative and irrelevant. This absence of any reference to orthodox religion is matched by the equal absence of any spiritual references or overtones at all. The world of Holmes is a purely material one, unconcerned with anything beyond.

However, the stories had something of a nostalgic tinge to them even when new; they appeared just as a wholesale turning-away from the positivistic ideal and a revolt against rationality were getting under way. Holmes was setting out his creed about the ideal reasoner at the moment that the realism of Émile Zola was being challenged by the mysticism of Joris-Karl Huysmans, that William James was lecturing on the varieties of religious experience, that physicians such as Jean-Martin Charcot, who had spent their life attacking religion, were beginning to send patients on pilgrimage to Lourdes and write on the power of faith. Conan Doyle himself abandoned the rationalism of Holmes to turn to spiritualism and a willingness to believe in fairies. The logicality of the stories became little more than an ideal, a reassurance that reality could be subjected to reason even when all the evidence suggested otherwise. This insistence on the explainability of life, the belief that it can be controlled and ordered through logic, is one of the relatively few points of contact between the stories and their twentieth-century successors in England. The difference, however, is stark once more. For all their great value as entertainment, which has ensured Holmes and Watson a vast audience ever since, underlying the stories there was if not exactly a serious purpose then at least a serious intellectual framework: the cases embody a fascinating moment in the evolution of ideas and convey something of that excitement. By the time of the ‘golden age’ after the First World War all this subterranean content had been stripped out, and as a result the detective story – including the last appearance of Holmes himself – had become little more than a clever game.

FURTHER READING

The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. William S. Baring-Gould, 2 vols. (1968) is indispensable.

BIOGRAPHIES

Booth, Martin, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle (1997)

Coren, Michael, Conan Doyle (1995)

Dudley Edwards, Owen, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes (1983)

Higham, Charles, The Adventures of Conan Doyle (1976)

Lellenberg, Jon L., The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1987)

Stashower, Daniel, The Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (2000)

Symons, Julian, Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle (1979)

Weller, Philip, and Roden, Christopher, The Life and Times of Sherlock Holmes (1992)

ALSO OF INTEREST

Symons, Julian, Bloody Murder (1992)

Watson, Colin, Snobbery With Violence (1971)

CHRONOLOGY

A chronology of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life and work is likely to be skeletal. As a highly professional writer, a medical specialist, a public campaigner against injustice, a would-be politician, as well as a sportsman, spiritualist, and well-meaning amateur in fields ranging from skiing to weaponry, he threw himself with generous energy into a variety of lives, any one of which would have satisfied most people. A brief account of his activities can, at best, only suggest the range of an extraordinary life.