This month we celebrate the birth of the most universally famous of all literary characters — Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective. The intrepid sleuth’s deerstalker hat, Inverness cape, calabash pipe and magnifying glass are recognized by readers everywhere, and the stories have been translated into more than 60 languages, from Arabic to Yiddish.
Like the heroes of so many popular stories and myths, Sherlock Holmes was born in poverty and nearly died at birth from neglect. Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle was a novice medical practitioner with a dearth of patients. To while away his time and to help pay a few bills, Doyle took pen in hand and created one of the first detectives to base his work squarely on scientific methods.
In December 1887, 125 years ago, Sherlock Holmes came into the world as an unheralded and unnoticed Yuletide child in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. When, not long after, The Strand Magazine began the monthly serialization of the first dozen short stories entitled “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” the issues sold tens of thousands and the public furiously clamored for more.
At the height of success, however, the creator wearied of his creation. He yearned for “higher writing” and felt his special calling to be the historical novel. In December 1893, Doyle introduced into the last story in the Memoirs series the arch criminal Professor James Moriarty. In “The Final Problem,” Holmes and the evil professor wrestle at a cliff’s edge in Switzerland. Grasping each other frantically, sleuth and villain plummet to their watery deaths at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls.
With Holmes forever destroyed, Conan Doyle felt he could abandon his mystery stories and turn his authorial eyes to the romantic landscapes of the Middle Ages. He longed to chronicle the clangor of medieval battles, the derring-do of brave knights and the sighs of lovesick maidens.
But the writer’s tour back in time would not be that easily booked: Sherlock Holmes had taken on a life of his own, something larger than the will of his creator. The normally staid, stiff-upper-lipped British public was first bereaved, then outraged. Conservative London stockbrokers went to work wearing black armbands in mourning for the loss of their heroic detective. Citizens poured out torrents of letters to editors complaining of Holmes’s fate. One woman picketed Conan Doyle’s home with a sign branding him a murderer.
Finally, Conan Doyle could resist the pressures from publisher and public no more. In September 1903, 10 years after the “death” of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s detective rose up from his watery grave in the Reichenbach Falls, his logical wonders to perform for the whole world. “The Adventures of the Empty House” demonstrated that Holmes had not really perished at Reichenbach. He had only faked his death in order to avoid retribution at the hands of Moriarty’s henchmen.
“The Return of Sherlock Holmes,” the series of 13 stories that brought back Doyle’s hero, was greeted eagerly by detective-starved British readers whose appetites had been whetted by “Hound,” and the author continued writing Sherlockian stories right into 1927. When in 1930 Arthur Conan Doyle died at age 71, readers around the world mourned his passing. Newspaper cartoons portraying a grieving Sherlock Holmes captured the public’s sense of irreparable loss.
Such is the power of mythic literature that the creation has outlived his creator. However many times the progenitor tried to finish off his hero, by murder or retirement or flat refusal to write any more adventures, the Great Detective lives, vigilant and deductive as ever, protecting the humble from the evils that lurk in the very heart of our so-called civilization. Sherlock Holmes can never truly die. His readers will never let him.
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