Holmes’s heroic qualities are such that enthusiasts have tried to associate him with practically every known hero and other prominent figure, pretending that he is the descendant of Shakespeare, the colleague of Marconi, the lover of Sarah Bernhardt, the antagonist of Hitler, the father of Nero Wolfe, the grandson of Horatio Hornblower, and the near relative of Mr. Spock of “Star Trek.” Science fiction master Philip José Farmer connected many heroic figures of popular literature, including Holmes, in his hypothetical “Wold Newton Universe,” first revealed in Tarzan Alive (1972). All such speculations are feeble attempts at describing the emotional, even spiritual, significance of a figure like Sherlock Holmes, who bestrides his world, and the world of the imagination, like a colossus.
There are various short catalogues of the figures who, though fictional or nearly so, have become universally known; they may perhaps include Santa Claus, Robinson Crusoe, Romeo, and Ronald McDonald, but there is no doubt whatsoever that they include Holmes. It is also said that only two characters from literature regularly receive mail. One is Juliet, whose correspondents are lovelorn teenage girls, and the other is Sherlock Holmes.
SEXUAL IMPLICATIONS. Although one might expect a “detective story” to be concerned only with crime and adventure, in fact the Sherlock Holmes tales are rich in love and sexual elements as well. They can be seen from the earliest tales to the latest: A Study in Scarlet is about a murder prompted by sexual jealousy, as is “The Retired Colourman,” the last story in The Case-Book.
Holmes’s own love life receives much attention, chiefly through attempts to read more into his relationship with Irene Adler than the text warrants. Some Sherlockians have also attempted to link him with Violet Hunter of “The Copper Beeches,” largely through such paragraphs as this one, identified by David Hammer in Baker Street Miscellanea (1991):
I remember nothing until I found myself lying on my bed trembling all over. Then I thought of you, Mr. Holmes.
Taking sentences out of context can, of course, be a delight — John Bennett Shaw, the master of that craft, collected many examples in a paper he titled “To Shelve or to Censor” (1971). A classic is Holmes’s remark in “The Speckled Band” that “Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up,” an idiom with quite different meanings in America and England.
Legitimate romance plays an important part in The Sign of the Four, in which Watson’s love affair with Mary Morstan alternates with Holmes’s detective work as the plot develops, and in such short stories as “The Noble Bachelor.” Less proper relationships drive the plots of “A Case of Identity,” “The Crooked Man,” and “The Cardboard Box.” In The Hound of the Baskervilles, much of the dramatic complexity comes from the relations between the sexes: the apparently wholesome attraction between Sir Henry Baskerville and Beryl Stapleton, the sadomasochistic relationship between Beryl and Jack Stapleton, the sad if not scarlet past of Laura Lyons. Then there are any number of stories in which romance provides a subplot, a “love interest” to vary the pace, from Arthur Cadogan West’s desertion of his fiancée in “The Bruce-Partington Plans” to Violet Smith’s engagement in “The Solitary Cyclist” (a matter which leads Holmes to make a remark that makes the lady blush coyly).
Not surprisingly, traces of the author’s own life and relationships can be seen in all these features. Mary Morstan in The Sign of the Four is in many respects a portrait of his first wife, Louise. The solid bonds of love between John and Ivy Douglas in The Valley of Fear strongly suggest those between Doyle and his second wife, Jean, to whom he had been married seven years when the book was published. Most important in reflecting the author’s experience and feelings, however, are a cluster of stories published in the first decade of the twentieth century, during and just after a difficult period in his life, while he was married to the dying Louise but already in love with Jean. In these tales — “The Norwood Builder,” “The Solitary Cyclist,” “The Devil’s Foot,” and others — sex is a source of trouble, and repeatedly there are men obliged to choose between two women, or women obliged to choose between two men. In the most dramatic example, “The Abbey Grange” (published in 1904, two years before Louise’s death), Doyle puts in the mouths of his characters eloquent arguments for divorce-law reform. Such motifs appear in his stories as late as 1922, when he published “Thor Bridge” and pictured the illicit lady-love of Holmes’s client, Neil Gibson, as a woman much like Jean, and every bit as acceptable for him as his true wife.
Sexual motifs have been examined by a number of Sherlockian writers, but chiefly for prurient effect, or as a way of demonstrating that Victorian life was by no means sexless. The latter point should hardly need making again, after demonstration in such non-Sherlockian volumes as The Worm in the Bud (1969) by Ronald Pearsall and The Other Victorians (1974) by Stephen Marcus. It was an era of fashionable mistresses and grandes horizontales, pervasive street prostitution and some white slavery, and lavish pornography. That sexual enthusiasm prevailed, but public discussion of sexual matters was impossible, goes far to explain the origins of the kinds of crime Holmes is seen investigating. Sex in the Sherlockian Canon is discussed at full length in my book In Bed with Sherlock Holmes (1984).
OTHER THEMES. Literary theorists and indeed ordinary readers have spotted a number of other themes running through the stories, such as these:
• The conflict between reason (enlightenment, science, civilization, urbanization) and superstition (the ignorant, the supernatural, the primitive, the countryside) as represented, for example, by the contrast between Holmes and such antagonists as Tonga in The Sign of the Four, the Hound of the Baskervilles, and Dr. Grimesby Roylott with his cheetah, his baboon, and his “speckled band.”
• The nature of masculinity, as seen in a society dominated by men and indeed, so far as the events of the Holmes stories are concerned, populated mostly by men, and represented by a figure whose primary relationship is with another man and who veers from decisive, even violent action, including boxing and swordsmanship, to idleness, “catlike” neatness and a “dreamy” enjoyment of violin music.
• Holmes’s ambivalent attitude to the established social order, which he expresses sometimes as fawning on the upper classes and sometimes as undisguised contempt, although he almost always works to enforce the law in the interest of the established authorities and the middle class.
Such topics lie just beneath the surface of stories that are considerably more than puzzles to be solved or adventures to provide thrills.
THE PUBLISHING OF SHERLOCK HOLMES has been a substantial industry for a hundred years. Each of the sixty stories, though it may appear fixed and inevitable on the printed page, finds its present form — its content, its text, its typography, its illustration — as the result of choices and chances not only on the part of Doyle but on the part of publishers, editors, typographers, and readers over the decades.
An understanding of the stories’ origins, the circumstances of their writing, and the details of their transmission from the author’s pen to the modern printed page is valuable in understanding their intentions and their ingenuity. The reader must sometimes be a bibliographer, sometimes a critic, and sometimes a connoisseur of language and of art.
There is no complete bibliographical listing of editions of the Canon. Some editions, especially early ones, appear in Green and Gibson’s Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle (1983) and other works on Doyle. Ronald B. DeWaal’s World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes (1974), International