Arthur Conan Doyle - The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE PENGUIN COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and died in 1930. Within those years was crowded that prodigious variety of activity and creative work that made him so great an international figure and inspired the French to give him the epithet of the good giant. He was the nephew of Dickie Doyle the artist, and was educated at Stonyhurst, and later studied medicine at Edinburgh University where the methods of diagnosis of one of the professors are said to have provided the idea for the methods of deduction used by Sherlock Holmes.

He first set up as a doctor at Southsea and it was while waiting for patients that he first began to write. His success as a writer was only one of the facets of a versatile man. He was a champion of those convicted of crimes they had not committed, as witness his efforts in proving the innocence of Oscar Slater; a sportsman, a flesh and blood detective himself, for whose help there were frequent demands; a physician in the Boer War; a preacher and a missionary.

His greatest achievement was, of course, his creation of Sherlock Holmes, who soon attained an international status and constantly decoyed his creator from work that he preferred. At one time Conan Doyle killed him but was obliged by public protest to restore him to life. Holmes was a rival who had so many of the characteristics and experiences of Conan Doyle that he even adopted one of his creators friends, Dr Watson, and turned him also into one of the famous characters of fiction. Penguin also publishes, in individual volumes, A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England

www.penguin.com

This collection first published by Doubleday & Company Inc. 1930

Published in Penguin Books 1981

Reissued with a new Foreword 2009

Foreword copyright Ruth Rendell, 2009

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193181-4

FOREWORD

THE ULTIMATE IN fame reaches an author and his creation when a character in his fiction is seen by readers as a real person. More than that when this assumption is made without thought or reasoning but taken for granted. The creation is so convincing, his or her character so thoroughly and deeply drawn, their ways and habits, propensities and virtues so established, their appearance so confidently described, that the reader has little doubt that this is a living human being.

Dickenss Mr Pickwick is or has been such a one and so, I think, has Shakespeares (and Verdis) Falstaff. But neither of them has come near to meriting that absolute confidence in a characters true existence as Sherlock Holmes. When I lived very near to Baker Street and the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b, visitors used to stop me to ask where Sherlock Holmes lived or even lives. They believed in him as a real detective. They took Dr Watsons chronicles of his adventures as true records of a dauntless investigators exploits.

As early as his first novella, The Sign of Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had begun receiving post directed to Sherlock Holmes. One fan asked to be sent a copy of his monograph on tobacco ash, others asked for Holmess autograph; some enclosed gifts for Holmes, including violin strings and shag tobacco. Another wrote applying for a job as his housekeeper. The detective had become a rave and a celebrity, part of the national consciousness. He was as famous as Queen Victoria.

But for Doyle the success of Sherlock Holmes obscured his more serious work and he called his stories a lower stratum of literary achievement. It was the old story of the popular entertainer who dreams of playing Hamlet. For Doyles literary historical novels were never very readable and are now largely forgotten, while the Holmes stories, which their author categorized as pot-boilers, are recognised as original works of genius.

Thanks to the portraits by Sidney Paget, Holmess appearance is better known than that of most fictional characters. And this long, lean figure and face, dark, saturnine and with a kind of burning intelligence, has suffered from no competition. If other artists have attempted a likeness, their efforts have had no success. This is what Holmes looks like and what his readers accept. This, moreover, is what the actors who have portrayed him on film and television look like. Everyone who has ever seen an episode in the series is familiar with the late Jeremy Brett whose resemblance to the Paget portrait was almost uncanny. How old is Holmes? His estimated age in His Last Bow places his year of birth as around 1854, his birthday given as January 6th because this date is Epiphany, a manifestation of some divine or superhuman being? Or is it the merest chance?

He is therefore no more than thirty-three when the stories begin. A magical age? The age when, according to a mediaeval tradition, we shall all meet in heaven? In films he looks older. He feels older. To viewers he is middle-aged but these adaptations are none the worse for that. Excellent as are the performances of those playing Holmes, Dr Watson and Holmess loyal housekeeper Mrs Hudson, they are often good, occasionally brilliant, but they cannot compete with the real thing. The stories when translated to film have the advantage of sets and costuming appropriate to their period, of action and of dramatic acting, but they leave little to the viewers imagination and deny him or her the pleasure of a close study on the printed page of Holmess deductive methods. To derive the maximum satisfaction from his writing, Doyles fiction needs to be read.

He began the Holmes stories in 1887 and in the ensuing decades his detective was said to have been in active practice for twenty-three years wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories. His was not the first detective fiction. It was preceded long before by William Godwins Adventures of Caleb Williams, by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, among others, and by Wilkie Collinss The Moonstone, but his protagonist was the first detective to be presented as personality, hero and star. While his other work is entertaining and, in the case of The Lost World, original, the Sherlock Holmes stories constitute a landmark in English literature. Holmes was not only a celebrity in his authors lifetime and far beyond but the forerunner of a thousand fictional detectives investigating crime and pursuing criminals all over the world.