The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries were written by Arthur Conan Doyle and began with “A Study in Scarlet” (Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1887). Holmes went on to appear in sixty-six short stories and three novels. Although Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is known today primarily for the Holmes stories, he was a competent professional writer who produced a range of material, his best work being his historical adventures rather than his mysteries.

A wide range of real-life people have been put forward as models for Holmes, but the consensus decision is that Joseph Bell (1837-1911), a Scottish surgeon and medical lecturer who Conan Doyle studied under at the University of Edinburgh, was the primary inspiration for Holmes. (The fictional inspiration for Holmes was Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin [see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries]).

Sherlock Holmes is a consulting detective, operating from his flat on Baker Street in London. Assisted by his friend and the narrator of his stories, Doctor Watson, Holmes is active in London and across England, solving a wide variety of crimes and hiring himself out to a range of clients.

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most famous characters on Earth. Doyle’s stories of Holmes have been translated into over fifty languages. Holmes has appeared in more films than any other character. Holmes may well have appeared in more stories than any other character on Earth. He has inspired hundreds of imitations (see: The Great Detective). There are journals devoted to him and no end of academic and popular writing about him, including dozens of pastiches and homages published every year. But many of those who know of the character of Holmes have not read many, or any, of Conan Doyle’s stories and will be surprised when they do.

No series of stories gets to be as widely read and loved as the Holmes stories without a certain amount of essential quality. The Holmes stories are usually entertaining reads, and many of the puzzles and mysteries are intriguing and even fascinating, as are Holmes’ solutions. Conan Doyle wrote enough Holmes stories, over a long enough span of time, to create a memorable fictional universe, one that continues to draw devotees to it. But the stories aren’t perfect, as Doyle himself acknowledged. They have the celebrated inconsistencies: how many wives did Watson have? Where was Watson’s wound? Did Holmes have huge gaps in his education or not? How can the contradictory dates of the stories be reconciled? These won’t matter to the casual reader, but the inconsistencies begin to accumulate when many of the stories are read at once. An inattention to petty details is a minor flaw in a writer, but it is a flaw, something which Conan Doyle admitted. (Though a professional, Conan Doyle cared far more about his historical fiction than his mystery fiction, and put far more effort into The White Company and The Brigadier Gerard Adventures than he did into the Holmes stories).

Nor is Conan Doyle a particularly compelling stylist in these stories. The stories are briskly and efficiently (if dryly) told, and Conan Doyle’s narrative style improves as the years go by, but the most Conan Doyle achieves is smoothness with the occasional flash of wit. His characters, with a few exceptions–Holmes and Professor Moriarty, among a few others–are cursory sketches, and his dialogue is more often utilitarian than witty or memorable. Conan Doyle is better in the short stories than in the novels, but even in the short stories he has an unfortunate tendency to interrupt the narrative with long explanations. Those stories told more or less in the present tense, like “The Adventure of The Final Problem,” are easier to read than those which follow the usual Holmes template and have Holmes’ client spend several pages explaining the problem before Holmes takes the case and the story resumes in the present tense. Conan Doyle’s approach works better in his historical pieces, especially the Brigadier Gerard stories, rather than in his mysteries, where ultimately it underwhelms. One is reminded of the Raymond Chandler quote that “Conan Doyle made mistakes which completely invalidated his stories...and Sherlock Holmes after all is mostly an attitude and a few dozen memorable lines.”¹

It might be argued that the appeal of the Sherlock Holmes stories is not so much the fiction as it is what the fiction is perceived to stand for. An unfortunate tendency in criticism of Holmes and the Holmes stories is for critics, through the use of selective editing and prompted by Doyle’s skillful creation of a romantic fantasy, to construct a version of Victorian England and a version of the character of Holmes which never existed. Otherwise sensible critics and writers have described the Victorian years as full of “dignity” and “grace.” Holmes’ London has been described as “comfortable” and “contented.”² Holmes himself has been described as a “Galahad” and a “Socrates” devoted to logic.³ This romanticization of late-Victorian London is unfortunately common among Holmesians and ignores the darkness of Imperial England (see: Fin-de-Siècle Unease) and the real desperation of much of London’s population during the years of Holmes.

The other great appeal of the stories is the Holmesian pose, the “attitude” Chandler wrote of. Holmes’ pose–superior, free of emotion and worry, and unencumbered by the necessities of real life–is an enviable one. Holmes is in fact a fantasy figure, the ultimate bachelor fantasy. He is free of restrictions; he has no need for women or desire for them (Holmes’ misogyny is matched by the occasional misogyny of the series); he has no need for wealth; he is respected by everyone and superior to everyone around him; and he can go wherever he wants at a moment’s notice and do whatever he wants. The Holmesian pose is undoubtedly an attractive one for many male readers and provides the same type of übermensch fantasy figure role model as Superman.

Within the community of Holmes fans there is some controversy over the “real” canon of Holmes stories. Generally speaking (though this is by no means universally true), Holmes fans view the stories published before Holmes’ “death” in “The Adventure of the Final Problem” as more legitimate than the post-death stories, with some fans going so far as to say that the Holmes who returned from seeming death in “The Empty House” in 1903 wasn’t the real Sherlock Holmes. But even in the twenty-five stories written before Holmes’ death changes can be seen in both the stories and in Holmes himself.

The stories improve in quality and become smoother reading. Holmes himself becomes a warmer and less inhuman character; his negative qualities soften and his relationship with Watson becomes slightly less abusive. The Holmesian pose in the early stories has a clear element of self-conscious superiority, while the pose in later stories acquires at least a nodding acquaintance with fallibility. Holmes is an unlikable bastard in the early stories, and he and the Holmesian attitude do not improve for a number of stories. After finishing the early stories the clear-eyed reader will marvel at Watson’s restraint in not throttling Holmes while he slept.

Holmes is not, in fact, likeable, particularly in the early stories. He is socially awkward, to say the least, and a difficult person to be friends with, as Watson would surely admit. On a few occasions he does show some warmth and affection for Watson, even if it is of the repressed High Victorian style of the goodbye note to Watson in “The Final Problem:” “Pray give my greetings to Mrs. Watson, and believe me to be, my dear fellow, Very sincerely yours, Sherlock Holmes.”⁴ (That’s how Holmes says goodbye to his closest friend of over a decade. Repressed affection, if not smothered altogether). There are moments when Holmes is genuinely concerned for Watson’s well-being, but there are many more moments of unkindness, of Holmes’ scorn (sometimes not disguised at all) for Watson’s intellect, and of general rudeness. Holmes’ relationship with Watson is complicated and is similar to that of many old married couples. This has led to a theory that Holmes is a repressed homosexual, but this theory, while entertaining, mistakes Holmes’ primary characteristic. Holmes’ sexuality is not repressed. It is absent altogether. Holmes is above passion and distrusts emotion. If anything, he is asexual, with his well-known admiration for Irene Adler (see: “The Adventure of a Scandal in Bohemia”) being purely intellectual.

But likeable or not, the Holmesian character type is a powerful one, both in terms of its appeal to reader and within the stories themselves. Holmes is a powerful character, physically–witness his trick with the poker in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”–but his knowledge and intellect, and his cutting tongue, dominate all those around him. It shouldn’t be wondered, then, that other mystery writers modeled their own characters on him. Holmes is the Great Detective par excellence. Holmes wasn’t the first Great Detective, of course. He had predecessors, from Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin to Henri Cauvain’s Maximilien Heller (see: Maximilien Heller). But Holmes caught the imagination of both the public and other mystery writers, and it was Holmes and not Dupin who inspired so many imitations, and it was Holmes who permanently influenced the writing of mystery fiction. Holmes’ specific contributions to the Great Detective character type were twofold. The first was his stress upon logic, which appealed to an audience who had been better-educated and better-trained to appreciate scientific methods than Poe’s audience had been. The second was Holmes’ amateur status. Dupin was an amateur, but he was a languid shut-in. Holmes is an amateur who has the social status of a consulting professional specialist. And Holmes is active, unlike Dupin. Holmes leaves his flat to investigate crime scenes and to meet with victims and suspects. Dupin is a hermit who rarely leaves his lodgings.

Logic is Holmes’ ideal and his motivating force. But the other thing that drives him is pride, something Watson, duffer that he is, sees clearly. Holmes is extremely–even monstrously–vain. It is true that Holmes is an immodest man with much to be immodest about. He has great capabilities, and he is well aware of all of them. His ego manifests itself in a number of ways. There is his continual correction of Watson’s mistakes and the many small ways in which Holmes shows Watson up and puts him down. There is Holmes’ “modesty” (clearly false and quite unconvincing) over his “little” monographs. There are Holmes’ unjustified insults about Dupin and Émile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq (see: The Lerouge Affair) in “A Study in Scarlet,” base jealousy from an unknown detective toward his more famous betters. And there is Holmes’ pettiness and almost compulsive abusiveness toward Lestrade and the other police. Holmes’ scorn for them is not even politely expressed. Holmes does soften in the later stories, becoming slightly more humble, or at least willing to admit to the occasional error. He becomes less harsh in his insults and dismissals of others and more wry. But he never really loses his vanity.

Holmes’ devotion to logic, his abhorrence of emotion, and his excessive concentration on scientific experiments–he is seen performing them throughout the stories–undoubtedly stunted his social growth, which is why he is so socially awkward. He can be startlingly rude if interrupted. He can be abrupt, disconcertingly so, as Watson notes in "A Scandal in Bohemia." And he is so far gone in his pursuit of science that he seems to think nothing of beating corpses in a dissecting room just to see how fast the bruises rise, as he does in “A Study in Scarlet.”

The preceding might suggest that Holmes is a bad person. He is not. Although there are times when it is clear that Holmes is a consulting detective for pride’s sake and to sooth and flatter his vanity, there are a number of other moments when the reader sees Holmes’ passion for justice. Holmes’ anger toward the vile James Windibank, in "The Adventure of a Case of Identity," speaks well of him. Similarly, there are also occasions when, faced with the choice between justice and mercy, as he is in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," Holmes chooses mercy.

But the key to understanding Holmes’ character is his mood swings. It is a recurring theme in the Holmes stories: Holmes is either languid and lazy or in constant motion. Holmes works without stopping on cases, and then lapses into sullen, apathetic isolation. His infamous cocaine habit, Watson tells us, is Holmes’ antidote for this. Watson also describes Holmes as having a “Bohemian soul” because of his distaste for society and preference for solitude. Holmes’ inertia could be interpreted as part of the affected pose of upper-class men in England in the early and mid nineteenth century, ala Ouida’s Bertie Cecil in Under Two Flags and E.W. Hornung’s Raffles (see: The Amateur Cracksman). But this does not fit with Holmes’ record in the stories, particularly his cocaine addiction, which would not be done behavior among gentlemen. Some Holmesian critics have ascribed Holmes’ mood swings to his cocaine addiction. This is an interesting theory, but it has matters backwards. Holmes does not have mood swings because he uses cocaine. He uses cocaine to offset the lows of his mood swings. And Holmes has these lows because he is a manic-depressive. When Doyle created Holmes and wrote the first two dozen Holmes stories, he would not have known the phrase “manic-depressive,” which appeared only in 1901. But Holmes’ behavior certainly fits the bipolar, manic-depressive pattern: the manic, frenzied behavior during the highs and the emptiness and anomie during the lows.

Fictional detectives before Sherlock Holmes came in two types, hunter-trackers who followed clues that others had not found or noted, and Poe’s genius who solved mysteries by interpreting clues that others could not understand. They are basically not complex character types, one readers follow with interest and the other readers follow with awe. Hunter-tracker professionals, like Dick Donovan [see: The Dick Donovan Mysteries], from notebook fiction, were the star detectives before Sherlock Holmes gained traction in 1891, after which they, and police detectives in general, become a definite minority. What Conan Doyle did to supplant them was to remove his detective from the police who, what with the Turf Fraud Corruption case in 1877, and Jack the Ripper and Fenian bombings in the 1880s, were not in the best repute. More importantly, he humanized Poe’s grouchy, aloof, genius, largely by giving him attributes of a physician— he freely admitted that Dr. Joseph Bell was his model for Holmes, Holmes is a consultant (parallel to the medical specialist to whom G.P.s like Conan Doyle referred stubborn or puzzling cases), and Baker Street is several blocks from Harley Street where high priced physician/consultants saw patients. What writers and editors were on the lookout for after 1893 when the Sherlock Holmes stories apparently ended was a detective who was not the determined police officer, who was really smart, but was not Sherlock Holmes.⁵

Print: Arthur Conan Doyle and Leslie Klinger, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.

¹ Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Norton, 1968), 19.

² Edgar W. Smith, “The Implicit Holmes,” in Philip A. Shreffler, ed., Sherlock Holmes by Gas-Lamp: Highlights from the First Four Decades of the Baker Street Journal (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), 15.

³ Smith, “The Implicit Holmes,” 16.

⁴ Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” 742.

⁵ LeRoy Lad Panek, After Sherlock Holmes: The Evolution of the British and American Detective Stories, 1891-1914 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 199.