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LRK on: Holmes
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
– A Holmes Chronology

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Author's Preface

     My attitude toward Sir Arthur Conan Doyle bears a marked resemblance to the attitude of Mary Russell to Sir Arthur's creation: immense respect and affection balanced by a realistic eye. ACD was both a writer of his time and a man who transcended his limitations by giving voice to a modern archetype. Over the years I have attempted to explain my thoughts about the man, and through him about his creation. For two articles by LRK on ACD, see“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” in AZ Murder Goes Classic (Poisoned Pen Press, Scottsdale, AZ, 1997) and the introduction to the Modern Library Paperback Classics edition of Hound of the Baskervilles (Random House, October 2002.) The following article was written for the Penguin Classics web site as a general introduction to Conan Doyle.

"Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms."

It really is the only explanation. Not just for Mr Sherlocsk Holmes, who says those words as he muses over the source of the detecting abilities he shares with his brother Mycroft (and thus siding with the Detective-as-artist school of thought over the Detective-as-calculating-machine), but equally to explain the man who penned the words, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. How else to account for the strange, vivid, flowers of fiction that burst from this outwardly ordinary British gentleman, except to say that Conan Doyle had art in his blood? Certainly he came from a family of artists on his father's side, and his mother was a born storyteller with a strong sense of the dramatic. That Sir Arthur's father, a failed artist from a clan of successful artists, was also a huge problem to the family-erratic, alcoholic, and finally condemned to a mental asylum-while his beloved storyteller mother was a strong moralist who raised her seven living children to the Roman Catholic faith, served to lay the groundwork for an extreme polarity of vision that was to characterise Conan Doyle's life and work.

Conan Doyle started out ordinary enough. He grew up in Edinburgh, went to an appropriately brutal boy's school in England, followed it with medical school like a good son, did well on his exams, splurged on a brief trip with an Arctic whaling expedition that put some money in his pocket but more to the point gave him Adventure enough to blow the cobwebs of the lecture hall from his brain; then he settled down to work. Except that he didn't. He spent the next ten years hopping from one place to the next, acting as medical officer aboard a West African steamer and training as an oculist in Vienna, marrying and begetting and trying his best to be a responsible husband and father.

But he could not deny the art in his blood. Even while at medical school he had written fiction, and now, in the slow intervals between patients, the doctor sat at his surgery desk and took up his pen. (All praise to the patron saints of storytelling and doctors, for ensuring that the Conan Doyle medical practice, although considerably more of a success than the man's later self-mythologising would indicate, did not roar immediately into packed waiting-rooms.) Mysteries and adventures, historical tales and fantasies, one after another they trickled out and, with gratifying and increasing regularity, found homes for themselves in the pages of Strand and Cornhill Magazine, until in the spring of 1886, Conan Doyle found the character he was born to write: With a sharp cry of triumph and the words "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive," Sherlock Holmes met Dr John Watson, and a legend was born.

Note, please, the sequence in our introduction to the young proto-detective: The ecstatic cry comes first, then the analytical deduction. Holmes might be called a thinking machine, even by his closest friend, but it is that cry that rings in our ears, that almost childlike delight in his discovery over the test-tubes that animates his thin face in our mind's eye, forging a human link to the close analysis of perceived data that follows.

Dichotomy delights. Sherlock Holmes, the world's first consulting detective, might think of himself as a cool-blooded calculator of data, might even convince his audience that he is nothing but a feverish brain appended to an inconvenient body, but any reader of Conan Doyle knows better. We know that Holmes' cold and massive rationality is in fact driven by an equally immense passion, for life and action and above all, for Justice. Holmes may indeed be a Thinking Machine, but he is a machine that regularly bubbles over with joie de vivre: He jokes, he rants, he plays pranks, he relishes his food and lusts after the challenge of a good case, he loses himself in music and philosophises on the Goodness represented by the existence of a rose and once, just once, reveals his heart to Watson.

Yet it can not be denied that Holmes at times verges on the inhuman, greeting the news of a client's death with mild regret and a philosophic determination to solve the case regardless, shamefully misusing his ever-faithful companion-at-arms Watson (or indeed any number of other innocents) when a case seems to call for it, and often seeming incapable of looking beyond the puzzle before him to its human elements. Holmes is dichotomy personified: the scientist fuelled by passion, the arch-egotist who lives for the good of his fellow man, the friendless misanthrope adored by millions, and even (whisper this last) the monk-like bachelor who has contributed so much to the fantasy lives of women.

Holmes is not the only one of Conan Doyle's creations to demonstrate the author's innate sense of polarity. One of the Professor Challenger stories frankly shocks modern sensibilities by blithely murdering off the world's entire population in order to prove the Professor right; one wonders uneasily if Mrs Challenger was saved merely to provide necessary genetic material for the next stage of human development. Certainly the Professor's affections did not extend to his neighbours, his long-time employees, or even his King, any of whom might have benefited from a word of warning concerning the efficacy of oxygen-even though, by all accounts, the author himself was a man of hearty affections and considerable loyalties. He would not divorce a dying wife, even with an eager and much-loved second-wife-to-be waiting patiently in the wings. His softness of heart led him to lengthy advocacy of strangers (such as the case of George Edalji, a half-blind Indian accused of the nocturnal serial mutilation of...cows. Holmes would have burst out in his famous biting laugh.) The doctor was an easy touch for causes.

Which brings us, necessarily, to Conan Doyle's spiritualism. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the world's great rationalist, was a fervent believer in all things spiritual, ghostly, ectoplasmic, and charlatan. A self-declared agnostic who stated firmly that he could not accept an unprovable thesis such as Christianity, he later seized on the eminently disprovable performances of mind-readers and automatic writing to explain his world. Particularly after the disasters of the Great War, he became ever more deeply committed to the belief that his dead son had survived the grave and that his mother was watching over him; in the end he gave all his energies and most of his fortune to the sort of muscular spiritualism that called to him, declaring the furthering of mediums to be his mission in life. He was convinced, for example—he knew to his bones—that Harry Houdini escaped his chains not by mere trick, but by dematerialising from within their iron bonds and resuming his corporeal self off to one side. He stuck to his belief even when Houdini explained, over and over again, that it was mere technique: Poor deluded Houdini might not recognise his own psychic powers, but Conan Doyle did.

A bundle of contradictions, Sir Arthur: gullible skeptic; earth-bound romantic; law-abiding suburbanite whose great hero had little respect for the law or the law's agents; spokesman for rationality who yet joyously accepted a child's simplistic photographs as proof of the existence of fairies; creator of a character any writer would kill for (as those of us who have tried to write Holmes are too painfully aware) who after a brief seven-year run heartlessly tossed the character off a high waterfall because he was threatening to interfere with his creator's "real work" of historical romances; unschooled literary force capable of tight-knit prose studded with such nerve-tingling gems as the horrified, "Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"; or the admission that a mystery was proving "a three-pipe problem"; and the most famous of all his exchanges, the protest, "The dog did nothing in the night-time" followed by Holmes' enigmatic reply, "That was the curious incident."

Immortal, language-enriching phrases, vital, immediate places and people flowed from the doctor's pen with an ease that makes a writer writhe with envy. And the most frustrating thing is knowing that the Holmes stories were so easy for Conan Doyle, he discounted them entirely. They were of such minor importance in his own mind that he would toss off a story with little revision, send it off, pay his bills, and then return to his real work. Conan Doyle was like some artist capable of exquisite, evocative pen-and-ink sketches who yet sees value only in the huge, overworked oil canvases he insists on producing.

The only revenge a poor imitator can take is the knowledge that the unloved detective won out in the end, that the light and unimportant fiction Conan Doyle reverted to when time came to support a family and his spiritualist enterprises managed to sneak around the backs of those closely researched and utterly earnest historical novels and take on a life of their own away from their creator, leaving Holmes standing alone, uncreated, timeless, and infinitely more immediate in the world's eye than the stolid British doctor under whose name the stories are kept on shelves from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar.

(It may even be a good thing that Conan Doyle did not take the Holmes stories seriously, or we might have seen the detective's personality stretched and twisted to promote the cause of spiritualism. Holmes depending on automatic writing to solve a case, or consulting an ectoplasmic medium--one shudders at the possibilities.)

Thus, in the end, Sir Arthur was overtaken by his own creation, Holmes' great shadow engulfing his own. Surely there can't be many writers who habitually receive mail addressed to his or her fictional character-and, moreover, get it delivered by the postman? We might spare a moment of sympathy for the good doctor's dignity, as he battled to free himself from the sticky webs of his own brilliant fiction.

But perhaps only a moment. I for one am happy enough to take up my slim, engagingly worked volume about, and by, a man transformed by the art in his blood; I join with a throng of others in a Babel of languages, all of us eager to step again into those pages lit perpetually by the hissing gas jets, as we prepare to flag down a hansom cab in the pursuit of villainy.

The game, surely, is still afoot.

A Holmes Chronology

Readers of the Mary Russell books, beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, will notice that Sherlock Holmes they contain is a somewhat younger man than most Holmesians (or Sherlockians, on the left side of the Atlantic) have been led to expect. He is, after all, long retired to the Sussex Downs (as seen in the preface of His Last Bow) and the Sidney Paget drawings of him that accompanied the original Strand magazine publications depicted a man already middle aged in the 1880s. So what’s this with referring to him in 1915 as “fifty four”?

First of all, we must remember that specific references to age and even dates are both rare and conflicting within the Conan Doyle canon. Sir Arthur was not aiming to construct a fictional biography; he was writing tales to entertain, and often couldn’t be bothered with the details.
Let us look at two of the stories that do give certain reference points of dates.

A Study in Scarlet
The initial appearance of Holmes and Watson into each other’s lives, and into ours, comes in A Study in Scarlet, published in the 1887 Christmas issue of Beeton’s Annual. It is narrated, as are most of the Holmes tales, by Dr John Watson, who tells of receiving his medical degree in 1878 and going to India in time for the Second Afghan War, which began in November of that year. Watson therefore was on the Northwest Frontier by March or April of 1879, where he was wounded in the battle of Maiwand, which took place in late July, 1880. He was evacuated when the relief forces arrived (in September), then lay with “months” of fever before recovering and being sent home to England.

(Incidentally, and having nothing to do with this chronology, the question has often come up as to the precise nature of Watson’s wound. Here he claims the Jezail bullet takes him in the leg, yet later in the canon the injury migrates to his left shoulder. The simple explanation is that the bullet, as with most Afghani bullets being home-made from bits of scrap metal, has fallen apart in mid-air, thus hitting Watson in two places. This explanation, I should say, I owe to my husband, who has not read a Holmes story since he was a schoolboy in Simla, but who knows his Afghan war history.)

In London, Watson meets an old colleague, complains to him of the high cost of living in the city, and is taken to meet a rather peculiar fellow who also happens to be looking to share rooms. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” Holmes tells Watson, and the doctor and the audience are hooked. This meeting in the laboratories of St Bart’s hospital would have taken place in the winter or spring of 1881, and over the next weeks of sharing Mrs Hudson’s house, Holmes is making his first ventures into the profession of consulting detective.

And here we come into our first chronological conundrum. Watson refers to seeing a printed piece of (as he finds it) nonsense called “The Book of Life” on the fourth of March, but neglects to tell us if this is 1881 or 1882. If the former, then the entire period between Watson’s arrival in London and his being introduced to Holmes’ odd profession takes a mere few weeks; if the latter, then long months wandering the city, followed by many months getting to know Holmes, makes it March of 1882.

In any case, Holmes is finished with his two years of university (as given in “The Gloria Scott”) and embarking on his work, but still young enough that he is finding himself.

"The Gloria Scott" Adventure
Now let us turn to the second story, that of “The Gloria Scott,” published in 1893. This is a tale narrated to Watson by Holmes himself, concerning his first real case. It opens during Holmes’ university career (the year is not given), when he goes to visit the house of one of his few friends, Victor Trevor, and meets the young man’s father. There he shocks the older man into a dead faint with a demonstration of his skills in observation and logical deduction. Some weeks later, at the end of the long vacation, Holmes is called again to the Trevor house, to find that the father is dying.

The man’s history comes out as follows. Born James Armitage, Trevor was convicted of making use of funds that were not his and transported to Australia on the barque Gloria Scott, only to have the ship taken over by his fellow convicts and sunk. Armitage participates unwillingly, is put off the boat carrying the mutineers, and eventually finds rescue and is taken to Australia, a free man.

In Australia, it is said, “we prospered, we travelled, [and] we came back as rich Colonials to England,” after which “for more than twenty years we have led peaceful and useful lives.” Until, that is, one of the murderous prisoners tracks down Trevor/Armitage, and addresses him, saying “it is thirty years and more since I saw you last.” The man, whose name interestingly enough is Hudson, blackmails the elder Trevor into an early death, at which point both younger men learn the story.

If we take all the story’s internal dates at face value, we must add “thirty years or more” to the date of the Gloria Scott’s wreckage in November of 1855, which would mean that Holmes was finishing his university career in 1885—clearly problematic when one takes the Study in Scarlet dates into account. If, however, one excuses Hudson’s “thirty years” as exaggeration, and takes Trevor’s twenty years as closer to the facts, adding a brisk five to make a success of the gold fields in Australia and return home rich, then we are looking at 1880 as the second year of university for our detective, much closer to the facts of Watson’s introductory tale.

The birth date of Sherlock Holmes
Working backwards from those dates, we look for the birth date of Sherlock Holmes. Assuming that he began university at a reasonably early age—it was, and indeed still is, commonplace for bright students to enter at seventeen or even younger—then a date for the Gloria Scott adventure of 1885, with Holmes then 17, would present us with a birth date of 1868. If the tale takes place in 1880 and Holmes is, say, 19, then he was born in 1861. In this case, he is 54 when he meets Mary Russell on the Sussex Downs in 1915; if one takes the later birth date, he would be only 47.

Either chronology would mean that when Holmes ?retired? from Baker Street in 1903 to keep bees on the Downs, he was not yet forty, so that his Baker Street career was that of a man in his twenties and thirties. That this perception jars with our image of the man is not because of any conflict with Conan Doyle’s words, but is rather due largely to the original Sidney Paget drawings, which invariably show a man in his middle years—being, after all, modeled on Paget’s older brother.

The other reason we think of Holmes as older can be traced to the secondary literature about the life of Holmes, the “higher criticism” of such notables as Dorothy L. Sayers and Ronald Knox. And, most importantly, of William S. Baring-Gould, whose detailed “biography” of the great detective bears some fairly remarkable resemblances to the life of his own grandfather, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, squire of Lew Trenchard, collector of folk-music, writer of turgid bodice-rippers, saints’-lives, natural history books on werewolves, and popular hymns (“Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Now the Day is Ended” but two.) In fact, a close comparison of the first volume of Baring-Goulds’s autobiography, Early Reminiscences, and his grandson’s later  will show an at times identical series of events, down to the wording of childhood hobbies and a German winter spent in tents—although he did add a decade to his grandfather’s birth date for that of the detective.

In addition, stage and film productions of the Holmes stories, wherein the character was played by actors in the middle years (from William Gillette to Basil Rathbone), served to nail down the public’s mental picture of Holmes as a man with thinning hair and the deliberate manner of a man in his fifties. His younger years have been set aside for films that dwell on the titillating, the unlikely, and the hugely conjectural.

In conclusion, readers familiar with the Holmes canon who encounter the Russell books assume that the author has violently manipulated the chronology for her own purposes, to make a younger Holmes who is hence both more active and more believable as the partner of a young woman. In fact, I have merely restored Holmes to his proper years, and freed him up for a long and healthy middle age.