Holmes evidently has some of the qualities one might want most in a friend, the right combination of loyalty (emphasized in “The Dying Detective” when Holmes is obliged to pretend betrayal) and independence. The mutual affection of Holmes and Watson is understated, both as a demonstration of the friendship’s firmness and as a natural consequence of Victorian formality. “My dear Watson,” and “My dear Doctor,” Holmes still calls his colleague after twenty years of shared danger. He is obeying the conventions of his time and place, but no doubt the stress was all on the “dear.”
How tolerable Holmes may have been as a companion is another question altogether. His “cat-like love of personal cleanliness” is balanced by a pack-rat love of clutter, an indifference to the proper places for household objects, a taste for strong tobacco to the point of filling his rooms with a thick blue haze of smoke. He is demanding, both of Watson and of strangers; he is secretive, preferring to spring surprises rather than take a companion into his confidence. He is also a captive of many Victorian prejudices, seen in their ugliest form in his baiting of a black man in “The Three Gables” and one or two remarks that may be anti-Semitic. At times he fawns on the rich and aristocratic, although he can be contemptuous of those, such as the King of Bohemia, who do not live up to noblesse oblige, and he can occasionally be very gentle with the lowly.
Most notably, Holmes is moody, alternating periods of energy, enthusiasm, and prodigious work with periods of languor, inactivity, and apparent depression. Alan Bradley and William Sarjeant in Ms. Holmes of Baker Street (1989), affecting to believe that the detective was secretly a woman, attribute this alternation of moods to the influence of a strong menstrual cycle. Most other commentators have unhesitatingly seen it as a manic-depressive personality at work. Holmes could be arrogant (though rarely as disagreeable to Watson as Basil Rathbone makes him in his films of the 1940s) and nervous (though not nearly so full of tics, shrill cries, and mindless movement as Jeremy Brett makes him in the television series of the 1980s).
In the early stories, most explicitly The Sign of the Four, Holmes is seen as a user of drugs, “a seven-per-cent solution” of cocaine, which is a stimulant and anti-depressant. Watson scolds him for this abuse of his body, but seems resigned to it. Use of such drugs was legal in the England of the 1890s, and is used to emphasize Holmes’s mercurial personality and his pose of sophisticated eccentricity. Many details are elucidated by Jack Tracy and Jim Berkey in Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson (1978):
Holmes’s cocaine habit was in no way unlawful. . . . Not until 1916 was the sale of cocaine restricted to a doctor’s prescription. . . . If Holmes made use of a 10- to 20-mg. dose in each of his three-times-daily injections, then his habit was costing him between 2¢. and 4¢ a day. . . . 10 percent became the official strength of solution in the British Pharmacopoeia in 1898. . . . One grain, or 65 mg. — legally purchased from the neighbourhood chemist — would then provide three ample doses, one day’s supply, and a grain a day was often mentioned in the literature of the time as a recommended dosage for the treatment of melancholia.
The horrified reaction of modern readers, aware of contemporary drug abuse, is a misunderstanding of the character as Doyle was drawing him and his habits.
HOLMES AND WOMEN. “Women have seldom been an attraction to me,” Holmes says in “The Lion’s Mane,” “for my brain has always governed my heart.” But the converse is far from true; something in Holmes’s character has attracted the opposite sex since the days when the first stories were being published, and Doyle received proposals of marriage on his character’s behalf. One contemporary woman has observed that “I feel sorry for men Sherlockians, because they don’t have Sherlock Holmes to fall in love with.” Even within the Canon, such women as Violet Hunter (“The Copper Beeches”) and Mary Morstan (who eventually marries Watson) show some attraction to Holmes. He does not reciprocate, making a number of derogatory remarks about women, although he does demonstrate an expert knowledge of perfumes and millinery when they are relevant to his investigation. The apparent exception, on which many Sherlockians have written at length, is Irene Adler of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” significantly a story written before Holmes’s character was fully formed and demonstrated. He calls Irene Adler “the woman,” giving a lasting impression of infatuation even though Watson assures the reader that there was nothing emotional in Holmes’s admiration of her. She is an extraordinary woman compared to the damsels in distress who populate many of the other tales, and those who insist that Holmes should have a mate could do worse than settle for her.
“May I marry Holmes?” William Gillette is said to have telegraphed to Doyle when he was writing his play Sherlock Holmes at the turn of the century, meaning that he felt the need to introduce a love interest. Doyle’s response: “You may marry him or murder him or do what you like with him.” Gillette did, and numerous dramatizers and authors have followed suit, including Jerome Coopersmith, who explained what he had done in the musical Baker Street (1965): “I gave Sherlock Holmes a girl friend, and that is as it should be.” Novelist Laurie R. King has gone farther, giving Holmes a wife, a far younger woman named Mary Russell who is a theology student and apprentice detective, in a series of novels that began with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994). They have attracted a large coterie of (mostly female) fans with an online presence (www.rj-anderson.com/russell), although many sober Sherlockians have trouble recognizing the Holmes they portray. In the Canon itself, the fair sex is, as Holmes says, Watson’s department. (Holmes’s love life, and related issues, are treated at length in my book In Bed with Sherlock Holmes, 1984.)
THE GREAT HIATUS. No aspect of Holmes’s life is odder than the three years that are said to have elapsed between May 1891 and April 1894, that is, between the events of “The Final Problem” and those of “The Empty House.” The latter story offers Holmes’s brief narrative: after escaping Professor Moriarty at the Falls of the Reichenbach, he travelled to Tibet, conducted explorations under the name of Sigerson, visited such exotic sites as Mecca (where non-Muslims are not welcome) and Khartoum (capital of the Sudan, during an interlude between bitter wars against Britain), and spent time at Montpellier in France doing laboratory research into “the coal-tar derivatives.”
The reader who sees the stories as biography demands a better truth, an explanation that adds something to the understanding of Holmes’s personality. The fascination with the Great Hiatus (a term for this three-year interlude apparently coined by Edgar W. Smith in a 1946 article in the Baker Street Journal) may also proceed from a wish to know exactly why and how Holmes changed — why, as folklore insists that a contemporary reader told Doyle, “Sherlock Holmes may not have died when he fell down that waterfall, but he was never the same man afterwards.” Jack Tracy, in his Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana (1977), says quite truthfully: “In the absence of supporting evidence, an enormous number of alternate theories have been formed to account for Holmes’s activities during this period, each more outrageous than the others.” For example, the story of his involvement in the August 4, 1892, murders at Fall River, Massachusetts, in which Lizzie Borden was acquitted, has yet to be told. The events of “Wisteria Lodge” are alleged to have taken place in 1892, clearly an impossibility.
A FIGURE OF REAL LIFE. William S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1962) is a full-length “biography,” with this significant authorial note: “No characters in this book are fictional, although the author should very much like to meet any who claim to be.” He thus takes to its extreme the Sherlockian game of treating Holmes as a historical figure, skillfully blending inferences from the Canon with information from more conventional historical sources. He begins with Holmes’s birth, continues with his hypothetical education and his known early cases, and goes through the dramatic points of his career as narrated in most of the sixty stories. Final chapters deal with his retirement and with his imagined death on January 6, 1957, on a cliff top in Sussex.
Along the way, Baring-Gould introduces a number of ideas that are sometimes accepted by Sherlockians