Appendix III
BIRTH. Sherlock Holmes may have been born in 1854; the reason for this is that in His Last Bow, published in 1914, he is described as a man of 60 years of age. The great Sherlockian scholars, Christopher Morley and William Baring-Gould have further refined this to give him a birthday of 6 January. He has a brother, Mycroft, elder by seven years. We gain few clues as to his lineage except that he says his ancestors were country squires and that his grandmother was sister to the French artist Vernet.
BUDDHIST ENLIGHTENMENT. Some believe Holmes to still be alive because: 1) He spent some time with the chief Lama in Tibet during the Great Hiatus and gained Buddhist enlightenment: this would account for his returning in the hours of our greatest peril, e.g. during the Second World War, or in the present day – witness BBC’s Sherlock or CBS’ Elementary which are seen as indications by some that he is here – as enlightened beings are not bound by laws of life and death. It has also been pointed out that he practises mindfulness which is a key Buddhist concept. 2) His death has never been reported in The Times newspaper.
CONSULTING DETECTIVE. Sherlock Holmes refers to himself as the world’s only Consulting Detective, a role he invented. C. Auguste Dupin, created by Edgar Allan Poe, appeared in what is usually seen as the first ever detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, in 1841.
DISGUISES. Holmes has a flair for the theatrical and is an expert in disguises. Among the most memorable are a sailor in The Sign of Four; an old Italian priest in The Final Problem (see Walk 2); and a doddering bookseller in The Adventure of the Empty House (see Walk 3).
DRUGS. Holmes sometimes uses drugs, especially if he has no stimulating case on which to work. Sometimes this is morphine and at others, cocaine, which he injects in a 7 per cent solution. Both drugs were legally obtainable when the stories were written. Both Watson and Holmes smoke cigarettes, cigars and pipes, but Watson does not consider this a vice.
ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE. Sherlock Holmes had an electric locomotive named after him in the 1920s by the London Metropolitan Railway. The Metropolitan is one of the underground lines serving Baker Street Tube station today.
FANDOM. The idea of fandom, a way of life incorporating extreme interest in a person, group or character has been significantly influenced by Holmes, beginning, perhaps, in 1893 when, upon ‘killing off’ Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was responsible for 20,000 people cancelling their subscription to The Strand Magazine.
FEES. The fee that Conan Doyle received for A Study in Scarlet in 1887 was just £25. By the dawn of the new century, however, he was one of the world’s wealthiest men of letters.
The fees Holmes charges are generally on a fixed scale, except when he either waives them altogether, or charges more to clients who are wealthy and/or, by his reasoning, deserving of a financial lesson – he charges the Duke of Holderness £6,000 in The Adventure of the Priory School.
GREAT HIATUS. The period May 1891 – April 1894, when everyone, including Watson, thought Holmes was dead is referred to as the Great Hiatus.
HUMAN CHARACTER (MOST PORTRAYED). Holmes is, according to Guinness World Records, the most portrayed human character in literary history; depictions by means of film, audio and theatre run into the tens of thousands and show no signs of slowing today. The stories are available in seventy languages.
HONOURS. In terms of Honours, Holmes received the Legion of Honour in 1894 for the tracking down of Huret, the Boulevard assassin in Paris. He refused a knighthood. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the only fictional character ever thus honoured.
HUMAN MEMORY. Holmes believes that the capacity for human memory is finite, that you can indeed fill up your head with non-essential things. That is why he astonishes Watson by not knowing that the earth revolves around the sun. Conan Doyle changes this as the stories progress, probably to make Holmes a more rounded and interesting character study.
KNOWLEDGE. Watson makes an assessment of Holmes’ knowledge shortly after meeting him in A Study in Scarlet. Briefly, the situation is as follows: Literature, Philosophy and Astronomy – nil; politics – feeble; Botany – variable, well up on belladonna, opium and poisons but knows nothing of everyday gardening; Geology – practical but limited, can easily tell different soils from each other; Chemistry – profound; Anatomy – practical; Sensational Literature – immense, he knows ‘every detail of every horror’ perpetrated in the last century; British Law – good practical knowledge.
MIDDLE NAME OF WATSON. Dr Watson’s middle name is unknown. The initial is ‘H’, but nowhere in the canon is the name given. Favourite guess is probably ‘Hamish’, which Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) liked to think; this is also given as his middle name by Watson in the BBC production of Sherlock.
PARODIES. Parodies are humorous stories where the names of Holmes and Watson, or the title of the tales, are often changed for comic effect. J.M. Barrie wrote a short parody, My Evening with Sherlock Holmes (Speaker Magazine, 28 November 1891), in which the writer, annoyed that Sherlock Holmes is receiving so much attention, resolves to spend an evening getting the better of him; it involves a very funny exercise in what can be deduced from Sherlock Holmes’ hat. The parodies over the next few years included the following: The Adventures of Sherwood Hoakes (1892); The Adventures of Shylock Oames (1892); The Adventures of Chubblock Homes (1893); The Adventures of Picklock Holes (1894); The Adventure of the Tomato on the Wall (1894); The Recrudescence of Sherlock Holmes (1894); The Sign of the ‘400’ (1894); The Genius of Herlock Sholmes (1895); and The Cat of the Bunkervilles (1902).
PASTICHES. A pastiche is defined as an artistic work in the style of another, and there are very many Sherlock Holmes pastiches. The first was by Conan Doyle’s friend, J.M. Barrie. It was called The Late Sherlock Holmes and was published in 1893. The tradition of the pastiche has continued to this day. Conan Doyle’s son, Adrian, wrote twelve original stories, The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes.
SHERLOCK HOLMES DAY. There is a Sherlock Holmes Day – 22 May. It was first celebrated in 2019 and was chosen simply because it is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday. The same day is also apparently Nutty Fudge Day.
WATSON’S WAR WOUND. Watson’s war wound is one of the mysteries of the canon. When we first meet him (and he first meets Sherlock Holmes) we are told that his left arm has been injured and that he holds it in a stiff and unnatural way. In the very next story, The Sign of Four, Watson sits nursing his wounded leg because, ‘I had a Jezail bullet through it sometime before.’ As with other areas of the canon, theorists have been at work. Some have gone to great lengths to work out a number of ways Watson could have been sitting, standing or perhaps tending to a patient where a single bullet could have caused both injuries. The most extreme idea is that Watson was killed and that his orderly, Murray, whose bravery he says saved him when shot, took his identity; the subsequent guilt accounts for this and other confusions about his life, including whether he was called ‘James’ or ‘John’.
‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?’
The Sign of Four
WOMEN AND HOLMES. Holmes’ attitude to women is more complex than often presented. He thought that being married would affect his judgement and the one thing that Conan Doyle forbade when writers asked if they could adapt his plays is a ‘love interest’ for Holmes. He looks remarkably infatuated with Irene Adler, though, in A Scandal in Bohemia. He can be very charming, which is one reason Mrs Hudson tolerates him as a tenant. Also, in The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton he rapidly becomes engaged to a maid, only to vanish when she can no longer be of use in gaining information for him.