Leslie S. Klinger - The Sherlock Holmes Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

In 1946, almost 70 years ago, Edgar W. Smith pondered in an editorial inthe Baker Street Journal, What is it that welove in Sherlock Holmes? Nearly 130 years after Holmes first appeared,subsequently embedded in the hearts of millions, it is appropriate to reconsider thisquestion.

First, Smith wrote, we love the time in which he lived. When Smithwrote these words, that golden era, when it was always 1895, was only ahalf-century earlier, and well within the living memory of Smith (who was born in 1894)and his contemporary readers. Now it is an alien country, as mythical and foreign as theera of the Roman empire, the battlefields of Napoleon, or the court of Elizabeth I.While it may be true that we do love the Victorian era, we love it as we love the OldWest or the countryside of Arthurs Camelot, only as it exists in ourimaginations, not in our memories. Even Smith knew that the late nineteenth century wasno paradise but instead a time of great changes, for people of color, for women, and forthe middle class. In the world of 1946, just righting itself from the cataclysms of warand the horrors of the Holocaust, how could Smith justify a love for a character asout-of-date as Sherlock Holmes?

Smiths answer was emblematic of 1946, when the world could still believe inheroes: [Holmes] stands before us as a symbol, he wrote,a symbolof all that we are not but ever would be We see him asthe fine expression of our urge to trample evil and to set aright the wrongs with whichthe world is plagued. [He] is the personification of something inus that we have lost or never had And the time and place and all the greatevents are near and dear to us not because our memories call them forth in purenostalgia, but because they are a part of us today. That is the Sherlock Holmes welovethe Holmes implicit and eternal in ourselves.

Those were stirring words for a world on the brink of peace and prosperity. The Allieshad fought a terrible war, the last good war, and the madmen weredefeated, by common men and womenheroesfrom many lands. But if Holmeswas only a hero, as Smith implied, he failed us, for he did not slay the dragon, at theReichenbach Falls or later. Seventy years later, we can see that the spirit of Moriartydid not die in a bunker in Berlin or in a palace in Tokyo. His hand is clear after 1946,in the wars in which so many died, in Korea, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Eventoday, his minions continue to foment crime, corruption, hunger, and poverty, in a worldwith factions no longer easily divided into good or evil.

And yet we return to Holmes. Smith was right in saying that Holmes appeals to us forall that we are not but ever would be. But it is not Holmessheroism that calls to us, for he was not a hero (or perhaps not just a hero). Rather, hewas an individual, in an age when individuality seemed lost in the teeming masses of theEmpire. Heroic or not, Holmes always did the right thing. Some have pointed out that hewas arrogant, cold, high-handed, misogynistic, unfeeling, manipulativeand theseare difficult charges to deny. Yet those are all merely facets of his single-mindedcharacter, unswerving in his pursuit of justice, without regard for the conventions oflaw or society. Holmes is what we dream of and yet hesitate to be: a man apart from thecrowd. While he had only a single friend, Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes was very much apart of his world, as comfortable with the grooms and street urchins as with the bankersand nobility. In an age bound by rules and rituals for social circumstances of everysort, even death, Sherlock Holmes followed only his own rules.

The mystery writer Raymond Chandler, writing many years after the death of ConanDoyle, had little liking for the Holmes stories. His ideal detective, he said, lived upto a simple credo: [D]own these mean streets a man must go who isnot himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. Yet these words could notmore accurately describe Holmes. Unafraid, untarnished, focused on his fixed goal,Holmes inspires all of us to believe that we need not be heroes; rather, we can make theworld a better place by doing the right thing.

Leslie S. Klinger

Think of the silhouette: the deerstalker, the Roman nose, the pipe.Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes is, quite simply, the most famousfigure in all of crime fiction. Whats more, he is one of the mostrecognizable fictional characters in the Western worldand beyond. Andalthough he owes something to his literary predecessors in the detective fictiongenre, Sherlock Holmes is the template for virtually every fictional detective thathas followed him. Even those who did not emulate him were obliged to do somethingmarkedly different, so seismic was his impact.