Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has decided to murder Sherlock Holmes.
“I do not wish to be ungrateful to Holmes, who has been a good friend to me in many ways,” Doyle wrote, but added that, “I have sometimes been inclined to weary of him.”
On a holiday visit to Switzerland (where he casually introduced the sport of skiing from Scandinavia) Sir Arthur’s eye was caught by the Reichenbach Falls—“a terrible place, and one that I thought would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my banking account along with him.”
As he pondered the evil deed, Conan Doyle must have remembered with some misgivings the story written by his friend James Barrie, in which the great Holmes warns his literary creator Doyle against such actions: “By my help,” Sherlock reminded him, “you have ridden extensively in cabs, where no author was ever seen before. Henceforth you will ride in buses!”
But it was useless to plead, for the Scots-Irish knight’s resolve was strong, since he felt that the detective character was keeping him from other writing-projects.
Doyle pitched his luckless sleuth over the dreadful precipice.
It happened in his 1893 story The Final Problem. That troublesome fellow Holmes was at last out of his hair, thought the author.
But the reading public was outraged.
“You brute!” wrote one female Sherlockian fan to Doyle.
“The general protest against my summary execution of Holmes,” recalled the astonished Sir Arthur, “taught me how many and how numerous were his friends…I heard of many who wept.”
Mark Twain, another of Sherlock’s legion of fans, decided to bring the Baker Street sleuth back to life, and penned A Double-Barreled Detective Story – for good measure, Twain added a teen-aged American nephew of Holmes’s, named “Fetlock Jones.” He also supplied poor Holmes with a hefty, Twain-esque moustache.
“There he sat,” wrote Twain of the great sleuth, “not a myth, not a shadow, but real, alive, compact of substance, and almost within touching distance with the hand.”
And so he remained ever since. For Sherlock Holmes, who was never born in the ordinary way, it seems can never die. Finally, even the reluctant Doyle himself was forced to give in to public demand and revive the character again in his 1903 Adventure of the Empty House (the first entry of the Return of Sherlock Holmes series.)
Holmes has never been gone for long since then.
Although this fictional bloodhound was first created by Doyle in 1887, thousands of people all over the world today are still so convinced of his flesh-and-blood reality that they send Holmes huge quantities of mail every year, addressed to his imaginary London premises and asking the legendary private-eye’s help in solving mysteries—or just personal problems.
His remarkable appeal, far from diminishing over the years, has kept increasing, and in recent months the Sherlockian crazy has escalated to its greatest heights ever.
New movies and TV shows have been slated featuring such current stars as Roger Moore (007), Robert Shaw (JAWS), Larry Hagman and Nicol Williamson as Holmes. Patrick MacNee of THE AVENGERS has turned Holmes’s sidekick Dr. Watson into a more dapper chap, and such distinguished names as Laurence Olivier, Leo McKern and John Huston have been enrolled as the nefarious Professor Moriarty.
Comic-books, board-games, hard-cover best-sellers and TV commercials by the number have blared the great detective’s name in the market place. An old radio series has been revived, as have several plays in New York and one on national tour with STAR TREK’s Leonard Nimoy under the deerstalker; and of course the original Doyle classics have been extensively reprinted along with dozens of Holmesian adventures served up by lesser hands—including Sherlock Holmes on the Screen, co-authored by the present writer with Douglas C. Hart.
Some of this current enthusiasm is surely due to the nostalgic craving to return from our chaotic world back to Sherlock’s simpler, horse-drawn era. But more than just nostalgia is responsible, too. In many respects, Holmes fits more closely into our current times than he did originally into the days of Victoria.
So many of Sherlock’s activities, which seemed to be only “eccentric” foibles decades ago, have now become the daily concerns of many of us. His struggle against drug addiction, his enthusiasm for Oriental Martial Arts and Tibetan mysticism: these are only a few of the great detective’s preoccupations with which the rest of us are only just catching uBut Holmes, after all, has always been contemporary: he has never been out of style. His adventures during the twenties, thirties, and forties on radio and in movies were usually “updated” with car-chase sequences, submachine-gun-toting gangsters and (finally) Nazi spies, so that today the filmic exploits of Clive Brook, Raymond Massey, Basil Rathbone and the rest (not to mention such airwave interpreters as Orson Welles) reflect the atmosphere of their own bygone period even better than they do Holmes’s original nineteenth-century milieu.
Publication Date: Fall 1976 Liberty Reprint Issue