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The Sherlock Holmes stories
Pay tell me,' says Sherlock Holmes one day to Watson, 'what you can infer from this hat?'
'The wearer is clearly a plumber, though one who has not worked for some time. He is very tall, and losing his hair rapidly; he has been in India, probably within the last three years; he keeps a dog, probably an Alsatian, and drinks heavily; and no doubt he has a small granddaughter.'
'That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he had now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than for- merly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influ- ence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.'
One of these passages is genuine, the other is a fake. To Holmes fans who know the stories virtually by heart, no prizes are offered for spotting which is which; to others, the only prize, I fear, is self- congratulation for realising that the first has just been made up by me, whereas the second comes from The Blue Carbuncle'. If you turn up the story, you will discover that the reason for deducing that the absent hat-wearer was 'highly intellectual' is simply that the hat is very big, and 'a man with so large a brain must have something in it'; the wife has ceased to love him because 'the hat has not been brushed for weeks' (in Conan Doyle's world, men do not brush their own hats); and the further speculations ('that he leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is middle-aged', etc) rest on foundations almost as shaky, and lead me to decide that my parody is by comparison a pretty modest effort. Holmes' habit of looking at his clients, or their hats, above all at footprints, and then putting two and two together to make 20, is accompanied with a smugness that in his admirers induces reverence, even awe, and to his critics seems pompous to the point of absurdity. It must be clear that I belong to the latter class. The man who glances at his client and begins, 'Beyond the obvious fact that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China . . — such a man, naturally enough, likes to • close his eyes, place his elbows upon the arms of his chair, and begin 'the ideal reasoner would ...'. Holmes is not only the ideal reasoner, he knows it and likes to tell us so; and poor Watson, as everyone knows, is there as a foil, struggling gallant- ly, like the reader, to keep up with the daz- zling hero.
Though the real foil, of course, is not Watson but Inspector Lestrade, along with his fellow plodders in the police force; for Holmes belongs to that now archaic breed of amateur detective who leaves the simple-minded policemen puzzled and panting. Conan Doyle's official detectives are so stupid that they do not even realise how clever Holmes is: they watch him solve case after case without ceasing to tell him patronisingly that clever theories are all very well, but what matters are common sense and facts. Nowadays, the brilliant detective is himself a policeman. Adam Dalgliesh is not as arrogant as Holmes, but he is much more attractive. Holmes knows nothing of literature, and does not know that the earth goes round the sun; Dalglie sh writes poetry. His foil is Sergeant Fox, his assistant, whom he calls Brer Fox with just a touch of the condescension that in Holmes is blatant. The underlying pattern is the same, but how much more subtle things have now got.
Conan Doyle writes in broad strokes and familiar clichés: this is even clearer once we turn from Holmes himself to the situations he deals with. They are colourful enough — to get a man out of his house so that they can tunnel under it to the bank next door, the robbers invent the 'red-headed league', and pay him to sit in an office copying out the Encyclopaedia Brittanica; but the underlying human relationships are of the crudest. Watson's wife, for instance, is made up of nothing but wifely solicitude for her husband, and womanly care for her friends. 'Folks who were in grief came to my wife like birds to a lighthouse.'
But the clichés have never impeded Conan Doyle's popularity; indeed, they have helped it. Readers enjoy the male bonding between Holmes and Watson, the cleverness of the icy cool and (it's often forgotten) drug-taking bohemian, and the stupidity of public officials. This has made Holmes part of our folklore; and — most striking — seems to have led admirers to forget the difference between fact and fic- tion — a fashionable enough view in 1993. 'Biographers' of Holmes look for clues that will tell them which university he went to ('Camford' is the usual conclusion) or when he was born, in just the way real biographers look for facts about their real- life cases. There is a nice irony in this meeting of extremes: the sophisticated post-structuralists who claim that history is a kind of fiction, and the Holmes fans who naively treat fiction as if it were history. Would Holmes — or his creator — have enjoyed the irony? I feel sure that Holmes, if alive today, would never have heard of post-structuralism, and if it was mentioned, would tell Watson not to clutter up his mind with trivia.
Laurence Lerner
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