Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of Abiding Fame

 From The American Conservative:

Sherlock Holmes is the most recognized figure in English literature. It is worth noting that the author of this 590-page study of the impact of Holmes on popular culture is neither English nor American, but Swedish. Holmes’s impact has been so great that in a 2014 poll, 58 percent of the people surveyed believed him to be real.

Bostrom traces Conan Doyle’s development of the Holmes character and its massive success in late Victorian and Edwardian England, going on to gain a worldwide audience by World War I. The first third of the book, in which he details how Conan Doyle fleshed out the various quirks of Holmes’s personality, are among the most fascinating—especially if one is a Holmes novice. Conan Doyle wrote 56 short stories and four novels featuring Holmes. Among his personal favorites were “The Sign of the Four” and the novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. (I personally have a soft spot for “The Adventure of the Second Stain.”) Those written prior to World War I were by far his best work. The last batch of stories, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, written in the 1920s, lacked the verve of his earlier work.

Bostrom has some interesting insights into why the Holmes character became such a success. He believes the creation of his faithful companion, Dr. Watson, as a sounding board for Holmes’ unique attributes as well as a narrator for the stories was a stroke of genius. He argues that Watson’s very normalness humanized Holmes. Conan Doyle broke new ground. Not only did Holmes become the first great detective (and not Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin), but all subsequent master sleuths also have a partner to serve as a sounding board for their genius and, often, a source of humor. Think Poirot and Hastings, Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter, or more recently Morse and Lewis.

Bostrom believes two of the major contributions to our final image of Holmes were Sidney Paget’s drawings of him and William Gillette’s play. Paget gave Holmes his tall body, hawk nose, and turned what Conan Doyle described in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” as Holmes’s “close-fitting clothe cap” into a deer stalker. Gillette’s play, which was performed over a thousand times, took Paget’s ideas and added his calabash pipe. Gillette also made famous the Persian slipper tobacco holder, the V.R. formed by Holmes’s target practice, and the violin, as part of the Holmes portrait.

Conan Doyle was surprised by the success of his creation and often protested that his other tales—the Brigadier Gerard stories and novels like The White Company—were his best work. In The Final Problem, Conan Doyle tried to kill off his creation, but the stories were too lucrative, and the popular protests were overwhelming. Twenty thousand subscribers to The Strand, where Holmes’s stories appeared, canceled their subscriptions, and the future King Edward VII was said to be completely distraught. Conan Doyle discovered for the first time that he was not in control of Holmes and brought him back to life—he was not a mere literary creation but a living and important character to the public. (Read more.)

Share