Sherlock Holmes in Context - Sam Naidu PDF

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Sam Naidu
Editor
Sherlock Holmes
in Context
Editor
Sam Naidu
Rhodes University
Grahamstown, South Africa
Crime Files
ISBN 978-1-137-55594-6 ISBN 978-1-137-55595-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931563
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, the editor wishes to thank the delegates of the Sherlock Holmes: Past
and Present conference held at University College London, June 20–22,
2013, for the role they played in instigating the creation of this book.
A book such as this cannot be produced without the collaborative
efforts of various scholars in the field who give so generously of their
time and expertise. The editor wishes to thank the following reviewers:
Janice Allan; Jamie Bernthal; Clare Clarke; Christine Ferguson; Agnieszka
Jasnowska; Beth Le Roux; Dave McLaughlin; Christopher Pittard;
Antonija Primorac; Steve Rothman; and Megan Van Der Nest.
Also, I am grateful to the editors and publishers at Palgrave Macmillan,
April James, Peter Cary, Paula Kennedy, and Tomas Rene for their expert
guidance throughout this project.
A very special thanks to Theo and Gemma, for their meticulous, tireless,
and skilled efforts.
And finally, this book would not have been possible without the efforts
of Tom Ue, who is a committed and passionate Sherlockian scholar.
v
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Sam Naidu
“All that Matters is the Work”: Text and Adaptation in Sherlock 7

Ann McClellan
Clients Who Disappear and Colleagues Who Cannot Compete:

Female Characters in the BBC’s Sherlock 39
Benedick Turner
“I, Too, Mourn the Loss”: Mrs. Hudson and the Absence
of Sherlock Holmes 61
Charlotte Beyer
The Trickster, Remixed: Sherlock Holmes as Master of Disguise 83

Benjamin Poore
Holmes and his Boswell in Cosplay and Roleplay 101

Lynn Duffy
A “Horrific Breakdown of Reason”: Holmes and the

Postcolonial Anti-Detective Novel, Lost Ground 115
Sam Naidu
vii
viii CONTENTS
Sherlock Holmes and the Fiction of Agency 133

Martin Wagner
The Savage Subtext of The Hound of the Baskervilles 149

David Grylls
Holmes into Challenger: The Dark Investigator 167

Douglas Kerr
Modernizing Holmes: Location and Bringing Sherlock

into the Twenty-First Century 187
Emily Garside
Index 201
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1 “Season One Credits (‘A Study in Pink’).” BBC, 2010.

Author’s screenshot 10
Fig. 2 “Based on the Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(‘A Scandal in Belgravia’).” BBC, 2012. Author’s
screenshot 11
Fig. 3a, b PBS “His Last Vow” credits (“His Last Vow”). PBS, 2014.
Author’s screenshots 13
Fig. 4 Newspaper clip (“The Reichenbach Fall”; emphasis
added). BBC, 2012. Author’s screenshot 14
Fig. 5a, b Moriarty in “The Reichenbach Fall” and The Woman
in Green. BBC, 2012; Universal Studios, 1989.
Author’s screenshots 16
Fig. 6 “The Geek Interpreter.” (“A Scandal in Belgravia”).
BBC, 2012. Author’s screenshots 18
Fig. 7 “The Speckled Blonde.” (“A Scandal in Belgravia”).
Fig. 8 What next for the Reichenbach hero? (“The Reichenbach
Fall”). BBC, 2012. Author’s screenshot 20
Fig. 9 “The Reichenbach Fall” Title (“The Reichenbach Fall”).
BBC, 2012. Author’s screenshot 20
Fig. 10 Hound (“The Hounds of Baskerville”). BBC, 2012.
Fig. 11 H.O.U.N.D. (“The Hounds of Baskerville”). BBC, 2012.
Fig. 12a, b Hound project (“The Hounds of Baskerville”).
ix
x LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 13 Press conference “wrong” (“A Study in Pink”).

Fig. 14 “You know where to find me. SH” (“A Study in Pink”).
Fig. 15a, b Bruce-Partington plans text (“The Great Game”).
Fig. 16 Lauriston Gardens (“A Study in Pink”). BBC, 2010.
Fig. 17 Baker Street. Come at once text (“A Study in Pink”).
Fig. 18 If inconventient, come anyway (“A Study in Pink”).
Fig. 19 Till the next time, Mr. Holmes (“A Scandal in Belgravia”).
Fig. 20 “Let’s Have Dinner” (“A Scandal in Belgravia”).
Fig. 24 Dubercelle, The Devil upon Two Sticks. 1726. Le Diable
boiteux. By Alain-René Lesage. Vol. 1. Paris: Veuve Pierre
Ribou 1726, 25. (Copied from Meglin 1994: 265; Meglin
takes the image from a 1779 edition of the novel
[Paris: Chez Musier], but the engraving appeared
first in 1726) 137
Fig. 25 Final scene of They Might Be Giants: Justin Playfair
(George C. Scott) and Mildred Watson
(Joanne Woodward) awaiting Moriarty’s arrival.
Universal, 1971. Author’s screenshot 143
Introduction
Sam Naidu
This collection of essays provides an overview of the evolving cultural icon,

Sherlock Holmes, relating it to intellectual history. The main aim of the
collection is to situate the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon in its various
contexts, with the attendant intention of uncovering why it is that this
particular fictional construct is invested with such power within intellec-
tual history and the social imaginaries of popular culture.
Ever since the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes text, A Study in
Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle which appeared in Beeton’s Christmas
Annual in 1887, the character of Sherlock Holmes has captured the
imagination of readers and sparked the creativity of writers the world
over. In addition to the four novels and fifty-six short stories created by
Doyle (referred to as the canon), there has been produced over the years a
bounty of stories and novels, films, radio dramas, television series, maga-
zines, plays, Internet fanfiction, computer games, and other forms of
adaptation, with astonishing success and popularity. Numerous fan
clubs, societies, publications, websites, archives, databases and purveyors
of “Sherlockiana” also thrive, with the Baker Street Irregulars, established
in 1934, being the oldest and most prestigious of these. There exists also a
robust body of scholarship on Holmes, straddling various disciplines and
S. Naidu (*)
Department of English, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
e-mail: s.naidu@ru.ac.za
© The Author(s) 2017 1

S. Naidu (ed.), Sherlock Holmes in Context, Crime Files,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_1
2 S. NAIDU
critical approaches. As far back as 1944, Ellery Queen1 noted in the

introduction to his anthology of adaptations, The Misadventures of
Sherlock Holmes, “that more has been written about Sherlock Holmes
than about any other character in fiction. It is further true that more has
been written about Holmes by others than by Doyle himself” (Queen xii).
Seventy years later, Ellery’s words are more apposite than ever.
In recent years, the Sherlock Holmes icon, with diversifying genres and
media, has come to wield ever-increasing cultural value in widely divergent
locations globally where communities of fans have existed for almost a
century. According to Ridgway Watt and Green “the most recent biblio-
graphical index, The Universal Sherlock Holmes, lists nearly 25 000 pub-
lications,” but these are just literary texts (1). The distinctive feature of the
Sherlock Holmes icon is that is has been co-opted by an astounding
diversity of genres and media. Further, with imperial networks in the
past, and recently with modern technology, it is established as a transna-
tional icon. From the UK, where the BBC’s Sherlock television series has
generated unprecedented attention; to India, where the Sherlock Holmes
Society flourishes, festivals are held in Mizoram, and Holmes spin-offs
abound in literature as well as in Hindi cinema; to South Africa, where
post-apartheid crime fiction utilizes the figure of the quintessential detec-
tive to comment on a dysfunctional democracy, the mutating character of
Sherlock Holmes continues to function as a cultural icon, traversing time
and space with incredible facility. What is remarkable is not only the
manner and strength with which the canon has spawned adaptations,
but also the potency with which the adaptations have in turn generated
their own fans and further adaptations. The extremely “palimpsestuous”2
quality of this phenomenon is quite astounding.
This book covers a wide range of topics, but all cohere around the notion
of modern or contemporary adaptations of the original Doyle stories.
Collectively, these chapters on contemporary adaptations situate the iconic
Sherlock Holmes figure in a twenty-first-century, multi-media, heteroge-
neous, and innovative context. Ann McClellan’s chapter, “‘All that Matters
is the Work’: Text and Adaptation in Sherlock,” deploys various theories of
adaptation, appropriation, and intertextuality, to show how Sherlock plays
with the Barthian concept of “Text,” thus creating an interconnectedness
with the original Doyle canon and other Sherlock Holmes adaptations. The
chapter demonstrates that modes of communication characteristic of a
twenty-first-century context, such as mobile texts and blog posts, are inter-
estingly used in Sherlock to reify this television adaptation’s fidelity to
INTRODUCTION 3
Doyle’s nineteenth-century fiction. Then, in a chapter on gender politics in

BBC’s Sherlock, “Clients Who Disappear and Colleagues Who Cannot
Compete: Female Characters in the BBC’s Sherlock,” Benedick Turner
concisely captures how the television series enacts the deeply entrenched
rivalries of patriarchal societies. Turner argues that the series first neglects to
feature female characters but then does so later in order to gesture towards a
late Victorian anxiety about gender roles, which persists in our current
context. Charlotte Beyer takes up the theme of contemporary gender
politics in her chapter, “‘I, Too, Mourn the Loss’: Mrs. Hudson and the
Absence of Sherlock Holmes.” This chapter argues that adaptations which
feature Mrs. Hudson prominently offer contrasting dimensions of absence
and presence, thereby exploring cultural anxieties about detection, ageing,
and femininity. By analyzing portrayals and adaptations of Doyle’s charac-
ters, Beyer is able to offer insights into the persistent diminution of older
female characters in contemporary popular culture.
Benjamin Poore’s chapter entitled “The Trickster, Remixed: Sherlock
Holmes as Master of Disguise” offers a quirky and unusual account of the
deployment of disguises in the Holmes canon. Drawing on the notion of
the “trickster” archetype, this chapter goes on to comment on why the BBC
television series Sherlock does not make use of disguises in the way that the
original Holmes did, thus suggesting that this television adaptation of
Sherlock Holmes attempts a different approach to storytelling which is
reflective of what it means to be a hero in the context of contemporary
identity politics. In the following chapter, “Holmes and his Boswell in
Cosplay and Roleplay,” Lynn Duffy explores the critical potential of cosplay
and roleplay as newer forms of transmedia adaptation of the Sherlock
Holmes characters. The chapter furthers our understanding of Sherlock
Holmes fan culture, reflecting on creative ways in which Sherlock Holmes
characters are produced and consumed within fan communities.
Shifting location to South Africa, Sam Naidu’s “A ‘Horrific Breakdown
of Reason’: Holmes and the Postcolonial Anti-Detective Novel, Lost
Ground” explores how Michiel Heyn’s intertexual novel Lost Ground
represents the need, in a postcolonial context, for a shift from the episte-
mological quests of nineteenth-century, modernist detective fiction epito-
mized by Sherlock Holmes, to the “negative hermeneutics” and
ontological concerns of anti-detective fiction. Following on is Martin
Wagner’s chapter “Sherlock Holmes and the Fiction of Agency,” which
also problematizes the original Sherlock Holmes’s powers of reasoning. By
offering a comparative reading of “A Case of Identity” and the 1971
4 S. NAIDU
pastiche film There Must Be Giants, Wagner argues for the significant role
played by fictionality and imagination in sustaining the image of Holmes’s
superior deductive powers. The chapter revises the widespread notion that
Doyle’s stories posited the power of reason and science to master the
world, and thereby offered escapist comforts to their Victorian readers.
David Grylls’s chapter, “The Savage Subtext of The Hound of the
Baskervilles,” situates the novella in its fin de siècle literary context through
a study of its elements of superstition, fantasy, and atavism, alluding also
to the text’s oblique reference to sexual malpractices. Continuing the
literary analysis of the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan
Doyle, Douglas Kerr’s chapter, “Holmes into Challenger: The Dark
Investigator,” explores the relationship between Doyle’s two heroic fig-
ures, Sherlock Holmes and the other charismatic scientific investigator,
Professor George Edward Challenger, and argues that these characters
reveal Doyle’s complex response to the Victorian knowledge revolution.
Kerr’s contention is that these two detectives embody Victorian ambiva-
lence between awe and respect for science and anxiety over the growing
detachment and irresponsibility of scientists of that era.
Finally, the use of location in the adaptation process comes under scrutiny
in Emily Garside’s chapter, “Modernizing Holmes: Location and Bringing
Sherlock into the Twenty-First Century.” Garside examines the contempor-
ary London setting in the BBC Sherlock series, comparing it to the Victorian
London setting of the original stories and other adaptations. She comments
on the significance of Sherlock’s reimagining of some of the key locations in
Doyle’s stories as twenty-first-century equivalents, with a particular focus on
221B Baker Street, Baskerville Military Base, and St Bart’s Hospital. She
concludes that, in adapting Sherlock Holmes, location is integral to the
relationship between the adaptation and the canonical stories.
NOTES
1. Ellery Queen is both a pseudonym and a fictional character, created by two
authors of crime fiction, Daniel Nathan and Manford Lepofsky, in the 1930s
and 1940s in New York.
2. According to Gerard Genette “[A]ny text is a hypertext, grafting itself onto
a hypotext, an earlier text that it imitates or transforms” (ix). Here Genette,
influenced by Julia Kristeva’s work in this area, is commenting on literature
in general, but in the case of the Holmes adaptations the intentionality,
intensity, and prolific nature of the practice is extraordinary.
INTRODUCTION 5
WORKS CITED
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa
Newman and Claude Doubinski. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997.
Queen, Ellery. The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. Boston: Little, Brown &
Co., 1944.
Ridgway Watt, Peter and Joseph Green. The Alternative Sherlock Holmes: Pastiches,
Parodies and Copies. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.
Sam Naidu is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rhodes

University in South Africa. Her main research and teaching areas are: postcolonial
crime/detective fiction; transnational literature; African literature; the poetry of
Emily Dickinson; monstrous, grotesque, and abject bodies in literature; and the
oral–written interface in colonial South Africa.
“All that Matters is the Work”: Text
and Adaptation in Sherlock
Ann McClellan
In his essay, “From Work to Text,” Roland Barthes sets out to define a
foundational shift in textual theory: a poststructural move away from the
traditional monologic “Work” to the polyphonic “Text.” According to
Barthes, Works are holistic, canonical texts that represent a single author-
itative voice and perspective. They are rooted in “filiation” with the author
as “the reputed father and the owner of his work: literary science therefore
teaches respect for the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions,
while society asserts the legality of the relation of author to work” (Barthes
160–61). However, after the rise of postmodernism and poststructuralist
literary theory, the Work lost its authoritative hold over meaning and gave
rise to the Text. If Works are singular and monologic, Texts are heteroglot,
plural, a “stereophony of echoes, citations, references” (Barthes 161). Text
(coming, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, from “textile” –
“That has or may be woven. Also, of or pertaining to a man-made fibre
or filament, not necessarily woven”) functions like a “network,” “a multi-
dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash . . . A text is made of multiple writings drawn from many
cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contesta-
tion” (Barthes 161, 148–49). In contrast to the Work’s unidirectional
adherence to filiation, Texts emphasize the dialogic relationships among
A. McClellan (*)
Plymouth State University, New Hampshire, USA
e-mail: akmcclellan@mail.plymouth.edu

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_2
8 A. MCCLELLAN
and between all different kinds of sources; it is the “text-between of another

text” (Barthes 160). The specific language that Barthes chose to illustrate
this shift from New Critical Work to Poststructuralist Text is especially
important for analyzing Sherlock’s approach to adaptation and appropria-
tion. Sherlock takes Barthes’s theoretical concept of the networked Text and
treats it both literally and metaphorically through its fidelity to Doyle’s
original works, its use of onscreen text, and its explicit use of mobile texts
as Text to reinforce and challenge the show’s connection with – and
separation from – Doyle’s original stories.
Combining theories of adaptation, appropriation, and intertextuality,
this chapter analyzes how Sherlock plays with Text in both a literal and
metaphorical sense. Sherlock’s use of onscreen texts and SMS texts in
particular creates a visual network of references and cross-references
which highlight the show’s interconnectedness with previous Sherlock
Holmes tales and adaptations. Frequently described as a “machine” in
both the Arthur Conan Doyle canon and within the show itself,1 Sherlock
models a new mode of sourcing texts. The audience is brought into the
workings of Sherlock’s mind through the digitization of his thought
processes, research, and deductions as text on screen, much of which
explicitly or even obliquely references other Holmesian tales and/or
adaptations.2 He uses his mobile phone to look up the weather, train
tables, art history, and other facts which often (mis)direct audiences to
other Holmesian stories. However, rather than highlighting the show’s
intertextuality with an entire field of Sherlockian adaptations and appro-
priations, Sherlock’s text(s) perform a kind of doubling whereby the
Barthesian Work, referenced on screen, becomes reified (e.g., by being
literalized) and reconstituted. Ultimately, Sherlock’s text(s) end up
undoing their own inter/textuality until all that matters is the Work.
ADAPTATION AND APPROPRIATION

As a modernized televisual adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories,
Sherlock provides an interesting pivot point to analyze Barthesian Texts
and contemporary theories of adaptation and appropriation. For instance,
debates over fidelity versus bricolage-like appropriation in adaptation
studies provide a neat parallel to Barthes’s theories of the Work and
Text. For the past two decades, scholars have been arguing against using
fidelity to the source text as the primary criterion for judging an adapta-
tion’s success.3 In contrast, many theorists like Linda Hutcheon, Sarah
“ALL THAT MATTERS IS THE WORK”: TEXT AND ADAPTATION IN SHERLOCK 9
Cardwell, and Robert Stam have reoriented the conversation toward

adaptation as a form of hermeneutics, focused on elements of interpreta-
tion, transcoding, and genre. Robert Stam articulates some of the primary
motivations for this approach:
Film adaptations can be seen as a kind of multi-leveled negotiation of inter-

texts. . . . The source text forms a dense informational network, a series of verbal
cues that the adapting film text can then take up, amplify, ignore, subvert, or
transform. The film adaptation of a novel performs these transformations
according to the protocols of a distinct medium, absorbing and altering the
genres and intertexts available through the grids of ambient discourses and
ideologies and as mediated by a series of filters . . . (54; emphasis added)
Stam’s focus on the “network” of “intertexts” is reminiscent of the

language used more frequently with postmodern appropriations. Like
French pastiche, appropriations are composed of “a medley of references,
a composition made up of fragments pieced together” (Sanders 5). In
particular, “pasticcio” or “cento” pastiches quote, reference, reproduce,
and copy prior texts into a new text that indicates, sometimes even in the
title, that it is to be read as a pastiche (Dyer 13, 21). References to the
source text may be obscured or embedded in the new product, only visible
to audiences with specialized knowledge. Appropriations are in constant
communication with a diverse field of knowledge and discourses found in
a broad variety of media, and, as a result, audiences must engage in a kind
of active play that requires them to seek out the allusions and connections
to a body of work both inside and outside the boundaries of the appro-
priation. Such a shift from Work to Text, from adaptation to appropria-
tion, mirrors contemporary attitudes in postmodern remix culture which
emphasize interactivity and intertextuality above canon and fidelity.
Both Barthes and Stam use the network metaphor to describe the web-
like interconnectedness of Texts and adaptations in postmodern culture.
However, the network has now been digitized. Rather than seeing Texts as
woven textiles, as the etymology implies, the advent of hypertext and the
Internet transforms them into vast, unending computerized webs. Like
Barthes’s ideal Text, hypertext forces audiences to “abandon conceptual
systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, etc. and replace
them with nodes, links, and networks” (Landow 752). Contemporary audi-
ences are accustomed to the fragmented, de-centered webpage and to pie-
cing together bits of information from various Internet sources. They often
10 A. MCCLELLAN
communicate in fragments through texts and tweets, which frequently

incorporate their own genre expectations and modes. When today’s audi-
ence sees “network,” they think: computer. Keeping these new modes of
reading, writing, creating, and communicating in mind, the digitized net-
work can provide a new metaphor for intertextuality and adaptation studies.
SHERLOCK’S SOURCING AND FIDELITY

One of the first instances of text on screen in Sherlock is the title credits. As the
most portrayed literary character of all time with more than 500 film and radio
adaptations alone, it seems virtually impossible that a contemporary adaptation
could successfully disassociate Sherlock Holmes from his literary “father,”
Arthur Conan Doyle, in the way that Barthes articulates. However, in their
appropriation, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are, from the very beginning,
immensely careful about how they source their text, and they make clear from
season one that theirs is an appropriation of Sherlock Holmes rather than a
literal adaptation. In the credits for the first series, Moffat and Gatiss both
simultaneously undermine and invoke the authority of Sherlock Holmes’s
literary “father” (Arthur Conan Doyle) by claiming that their Sherlock is
“based on” Doyle’s character, not specific stories (Fig. 1). “Based on” implies
that Sherlock sees the Doyle canon as a springboard, a place from which to start.
The episodes’ credits remind viewers that each episode is penned by individual
writers (Moffat, Gatiss, and Steve Thompson), and Moffat and Gatiss are also
listed as the show’s “co-creators” within each episode.
Even though there are several indicators alerting audiences that this is an
appropriation of Sherlock Holmes, Moffat and Gatiss seem to go out of
their way to credit Doyle for the success of their show. In an interview with
Digital Spy, Mark Gatiss clarified: “I think it’s worth saying, first of all, this
Fig. 1 “Season One Credits (‘A Study in Pink’).” BBC, 2010. Author’s screenshot
series is credited as being created by Steve [Moffat] and myself. Obviously,

it’s Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius which is behind it.” Such oscillation
between fidelity and intertextuality highlights the seemingly conflicted
attitudes that Moffat and Gatiss have toward adaptation and appropriation.
Much of the original press about the show’s faithfulness to Doyle’s canon
seemed to be the result of an anticipated backlash from Sherlockian audi-
ences who feared the show’s modernization would dilute its authenticity.
For instance, the original press packs emphasized Sherlock’s fidelity to the
original stories, as well as later film and television adaptations (Rixon 168),
and many of the preliminary reviews proclaimed the show was “truer to the
spirit and heart of the original canon than other adaptations” (Takenaka
20–21). Sue Vertue, head producer for Hartswood Studios, used similar
language when discussing the show, claiming that “the whole soul of it is
the same and true to the original Sherlock Holmes stories” (“Unlocking
Sherlock”). Finally, Steven Moffat, perhaps the most public face of the
writers behind the show, claimed that Sherlock was, at heart, a faithful
adaptation of Doyle’s hero, arguing, “we’ve really been quite faithful in a
way to lots of the ingredients in those stories” (PBS Masterpiece).4
With so many early claims for appropriation in season one, it was a
surprise to see that the credits for Sherlock’s second season shifted away
from the appropriative “Based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes” to the much more specific, adaptation-like “Based on the Works
of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”5 (Fig. 2). Unlike the first season where the
writers advocated for their right to update and change the original stories,
these credits literally invoke the authorial power of the original Work.
Interestingly, the more episodes that Moffatt and Gatiss create, the more
Fig. 2 “Based on the Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (‘A Scandal in
Belgravia’).” BBC, 2012. Author’s screenshot
12 A. MCCLELLAN
faithful they seem to become to the original Doyle canon. Several factors
illustrate the adaptive turn in seasons two and three: the major character
names and plot points of each episode follow the trajectories indicated in
the original stories, and virtually all of the episode titles directly reference
specific story titles from the Doyle canon.6 Season three seems to take more
liberties with plot than season two, however. For instance, while “The
Empty Hearse” is, essentially, the story of Sherlock’s return and includes
several references to the original “The Empty House,” “The Sign of Three”
is a much looser adaptation of Doyle’s The Sign of Four.7 Similarly, although
the final episode in season three, “His Last Vow,” is a clear reference to
Doyle’s “His Last Bow,” the actual plot of the episode clearly follows
Doyle’s story, “Charles Augustus Milverton.” However, even though the
episode has a different canonical title, the show-runners still use onscreen
text – at least in the U.S. – to signal to their audiences that this is, in fact, a
faithful adaptation of a Doyle Work.
Ever since Sherlock’s first season on PBS in the U.S., the end credits
following each Sherlock episode have included a coded message embedded
in red letters. Sometimes they reference a clue from the episode (for
instance, the clue for “A Study in Pink” was “Rachel”); at other times,
the code reinforces what may have been a more oblique canonical reference
like “The Sign of Three’s” Isadora Persano, a character from Doyle’s story
“Thor Bridge,” which relates to one of the mysteries Sherlock recounts
during his best man speech. At the end of “His Last Vow,” specifically, the
credits make sure to reiterate to the audience that this episode is based on
Doyle’s “Charles August Milverton,” by hiding the reference in the credits,
which clearly spell out: MILVERTON (Fig. 3a, b). Such game-like ele-
ments subsequently engage audiences by mimicking the mystery genre’s
puzzle-solving techniques and continue to reinforce Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Work through their textual references to the original story titles, characters,
and dialogue.
Such close attention to Doyle’s authority as the author of the Sherlock
Holmes stories in the credits acts as a literal and figurative citation.
Conceptually, a citation is a summons; it “presumes a more deferential
relationship; it is frequently self-authenticating, even reverential, in its
reference to the canon of ‘authoritative’, culturally validated, texts”
(Sanders 4). However, Sherlock does not just cite Doyle as the originator
of the show; the author instead becomes a character in his own story.
In the season two finale, “The Reichenbach Fall,” the viewer is treated to a
quick flash of a newspaper story detailing Jim Moriarty’s trial (Fig. 4).
(a)
(b)
Fig. 3a, b PBS “His Last Vow” credits (“His Last Vow”). PBS, 2014. Author’s
screenshots
14 A. MCCLELLAN
Fig. 4 Newspaper clip (“The Reichenbach Fall”; emphasis added). BBC, 2012.
Author’s screenshot
In this image, Doyle’s authority is literally turned into text on the screen –
a picture of a print newspaper article projected onto the television
screen.8 The credits themselves are a form of literal citation, but here,
by including a direct reference to the show’s literary “father” in the
newspaper, the creators find new ways to source their Work within the
actual episode.9 Citing Doyle’s name as the originator of the Sherlock
Holmes stories is not enough for Sherlock’s creators; he must become an
actual plot point within the adaptation. Figuratively, referencing Doyle’s
name within a fictional newspaper in a fictional television show turns him
into a fictional character. Being inscribed as one of his own characters,
Doyle is “no longer privileged” as the author; “his life is no longer the
origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work” (Barthes
161). Reinscribing Doyle’s name on screen within the newspaper rein-
forces the dialectical, textual connection between the adaptation and
Doyle’s Work. This doubling simultaneously reinforces Doyle as the
powerful author figure and undermines that authority by turning him
into a fictional character within a fictional crime drama.
Even with the various citations to Doyle’s literary authority, Sherlock’s
creators constantly undermine their own professions of fidelity. Yes, produ-
cer Sue Vertue claims that Sherlock is “the same and true to the original
Sherlock Holmes stories” and then adds “but it has a modern twist”
(“Unlocking Sherlock”; emphasis added). Steven Moffat argues that the

show is “quite faithful” in how it incorporates the original stories into the
show, but then adds the caveat that it is “using them in new ways” (PBS
Masterpieces). Both Moffat and Gatiss have commented frequently that
their creation is influenced not only by Doyle’s original stories, but also by
other film adaptations and pastiches like the modernized Universal Studios
Basil Rathbone films of the 1940s and, significantly, Billy Wilder’s 1970s
incarnation, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle’s original fifty-six
short stories and four novellas weren’t the only things up for grabs:
“Everything was canonical,” co-writer and creator Mark Gatiss claimed in
the “A Study in Pink” DVD commentary. “Every version. We’re not just
drawing on the stories but the Rathbone films, Jeremy Brett . . . ”10
Sherlock’s bullet-ridden smiley face in “The Reichenbach Fall” harkens
back to his wall-plastered “V.R.” from Doyle’s original “The Musgrave
Ritual.” Other screenshots and mannerisms closely model Sidney Paget’s
original illustrations for The Stand Magazine. Many of the plot elements
from season two’s “A Scandal in Belgravia” seem based on the character of
Gabrielle Valladon in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. In another exam-
ple, one scene from “The Reichenbach Fall” was modeled on a strikingly
similar sequence from Basil Rathbone’s The Woman in Green. The scene
immediately following Moriarty’s acquittal in “The Reichenbach Fall”
shows Moriarty proceeding to 221B Baker Street and breaking into the
building. As he ascends the stairs, Sherlock’s violin playing pauses then
restarts, causing Moriarty to halt on the stairs, worried that Holmes has
heard his approach (Fig. 5a, b). By basing their own screenshots/mise en
scène on other adaptations, Moffat and Gatiss effectively widen the canonical
realm at the same time that they reinforce it. By claiming “everything was
canonical,” they are able to argue that every appropriation is also an
adaptation; if every version of Sherlock Holmes is the source text, then no
matter how Moffat and Gatiss assemble their version, it will always already
be faithful to another version previously in existence.
Ultimately, Moffat and Gatiss argue that their philosophy of adaptation
and appropriation is about finding “equivalents.” Moffat recalled:
I remember Mark thinking, he [John Watson] wouldn’t write a journal now;

he wouldn’t write memoirs. He’d write a blog . . . And he wouldn’t have
teams of homeless children; he’d have homeless people on the streets selling
The Big Issue. In a way, it allows you to see the stories in the way the original
reader would have read them . . . (“Unlocking Sherlock”)
16 A. MCCLELLAN
(a)
(b)
Fig. 5a, b Moriarty in “The Reichenbach Fall” and The Woman in Green. BBC,
2012; Universal Studios, 1989. Author’s screenshots
In a sense, Moffat seems to be arguing that updating Sherlock and appro-

priating key elements from the main stories ends up making them even
more faithful to the original texts; their bricolage approach to the canon
allows contemporary audiences to approximate the same position as
Doyle’s original authorial audience. Text onscreen becomes one way
Moffatt and Gatiss mediate between fidelity to Doyle’s original stories
and their modern impulse to subvert the power of the source text to
dictate who and what Sherlock Holmes is.
CITING THE TEXT

Sherlock uses a variety of text onscreen methods, alternately showcasing
John’s blog, Sherlock’s website, Sherlock’s deductions, his web
searches, etc. Throughout them all, episode titles and Doyle’s story
titles play key roles in citing the Sherlockian network on screen within
the TV show. For instance, season one’s “A Study in Pink” is a clear
reference to Doyle’s original novella, A Study in Scarlet. Seasons two
and three are even more referential in their titling: “A Scandal in
Belgravia” is Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Hounds of
Baskerville” is Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, “The Empty
Hearse” is “The Empty House,” “The Sign of Three” is The Sign of
Four, and “His Last Vow” is a reference to “His Last Bow.” In
addition, the show weaves in references to other tales within the
episodes themselves, often through John’s blog entries.11 For instance,
“A Scandal in Belgravia” references at least three different canonical
titles within the first fifteen minutes of the episode: “The Naval
Treaty,” “The Greek Interpreter,” and “The Speckled Band,” the last
two of which are shown as text on screen in John’s blog postings
(Figs. 6 and 7). While not integrated directly into “A Scandal in
Belgravia’s” storyline, the references firmly situate the episode within
a larger, Doylean textual network. By specifically quoting from and
citing many different Doyle stories within a specific episode, Sherlock’s
writers indicate over and over again that their goal is to create a
networked narrative out of the fragments of Doyle’s canon.
Interestingly, the more adaptive the episode, the more concrete is the use
of text on screen to allude to that primary relationship between the Work
and the adaptation. For example, two of the three episodes in season two
constantly reference their own episode titles within the shows themselves.
“The Reichenbach Fall” is self-referential in a few ways: Moriarty’s stage
18 A. MCCLELLAN
Fig. 6 “The Geek Interpreter.” (“A Scandal in Belgravia”). BBC, 2012. Author’s
screenshots
name of “Richard Brook” is a play on the German translation of

“Reichenbach,” and characters like Sally Donovan constantly refer to
Sherlock as the “Reichenbach Hero” (Fig. 8). But more importantly, the
word Reichenbach itself is repeated several times on screen during the
episode to reinforce the show’s connection to the canon. The main title
screen of the episode doubly invokes the original Work’s main plot element
(Fig. 9). This screenshot in particular reinforces the powerful role of the
Work in Sherlock. In this scene, the audience experiences multiple layers of
text on screen: first, there is the implied reference to the canonical story on
which this episode is based, at the heart of which lies Sherlock Holmes’s
death at the Reichenbach Falls. Second, the first visual image of the show,
Turner’s alleged painting with its title emblazoned on the poster, also
signals to the viewer that the falls (or what they represent) will be the center
plot point for the episode. Lastly, by imposing the episode title, “The
Reichenbach Fall,” on top of the previous “Falls of the Reichenbach”
text, the scene also symbolizes the layered approach the show-runners
take to the canon and adaptation. Combined, the three references to
Reichenbach in this single shot ensure viewers will not forget Doyle’s
authorial Work and its influence on the show.
Fig. 7 “The Speckled Blonde.” (“A Scandal in Belgravia”). BBC, 2012. Author’s
screenshots
“The Hounds of Baskerville,” in particular, puts significant effort into

reminding the viewer that the episode is based on Doyle’s 1902 novella,
using frequent onscreen allusions to the title. Throughout the episode,
viewers are teased with various versions of “hound” in handwritten notes,
in the reflections in headlights, in newspaper and media accounts. There
are several scenes during “The Hounds of Baskerville” where the word
“hound” literally appears on screen, either as peripheral evidence or as part
of Sherlock’s mind palace. In one scene where John is trying to decipher
alleged Morse code on the moors, the viewer sees the word “hound”
obscured through a particular lens flare (Fig. 10).
The blurred font and proliferation of lens flares give the impression that
the “real” hound, Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, is something that
infuses every aspect of this new story. The Work is literally embedded in
20 A. MCCLELLAN
Fig. 8 What next for the Reichenbach hero? (“The Reichenbach Fall”). BBC,
2012. Author’s screenshot
Fig. 9 “The Reichenbach Fall” Title (“The Reichenbach Fall”). BBC, 2012.
Fig. 10 Hound (“The Hounds of Baskerville”). BBC, 2012. Author’s screenshot
the light and texture of the show itself. Likewise, Sherlock’s all capitalized
acronym of “H.O.U.N.D.” in the churchyard similarly highlights the
source text’s importance (Fig. 11).
Like a primary noun, “H.O.U.N.D.” is capitalized, punctuated, and
emphasized to indicate the word literally refers to something else – in this
case, the canonical Hound of the Baskervilles source text underlying Mark
Gatiss’s adaptation.
“The Hounds of Baskerville’s” constant reiteration of the title seems to
imply that the show is heavily invested in its filiation with source text, and the
episode clearly wants to be viewed as an adaptation of Doyle’s Work.
However, when analyzed more closely, almost the entire episode is about
getting the audience to recognize the importance and “meaning” of the title:
that “hound” both does and does not signify Doyle’s The Hound of the
Baskervilles. In the original Arthur Conan Doyle novel, the Baskerville family
is allegedly being terrorized by a phosphorous-coated gigantic dog; however,
Gatiss’s hound is clearly something else altogether. Sherlock and John quickly
determine that there is no real hound on the moors terrorizing Henry
Baskerville and instead focus their attention on the suspicious activities of
the Baskerville Army Base. Throughout the episode, the audience is con-
stantly reminded of the episode title and source text, yet viewers must work
through everything “hound” is not before they can figure out what it is. The
22 A. MCCLELLAN
Fig. 11 H.O.U.N.D. (“The Hounds of Baskerville”). BBC, 2012. Author’s

screenshot
scenes highlighting Sherlock’s mind palace visually map out on screen the
mental processes viewers must make to solve the puzzle of the source text.
Sherlock breaks down each piece of the clue: “hound,” “liberty,” and “in”
during a climactic scene in the Baskerville labs. When the viewer gets to all of
the variations and significations of “hound,” he or she sees several different
images like Elvis Presley’s song title, “Hound Dog” and the image of a
wolfhound overlaying Sherlock’s face on screen before finally coming to the
deduction that “hound” does not refer to a dog at all but rather to a scientific
organization: H.O.U.N.D. Sherlock confirms his discovery by hacking into
the computer network at the lab. Reinforcing the networked relationship
between the layers of adaptation, Sherlock’s face is overlaid with digital images
from the computer screen. One in particular is highly reminiscent of Jim
Moriarty’s face superimposed over Sherlock’s, implying the affinity between
the two characters (Fig. 12a, b). Audiences frequently see the results
of Sherlock’s Internet searches as text on screen; however, this image of
Sherlock’s face embedded within the data from the computer implies
that Sherlock is directly tied into the digital network. The Internet is part of
his composition, literally and figuratively. Rather than being placed next to
him on screen, the (T)ext in/on Sherlock implies he is directly “wired into
some mysterious vast crime-solving mainframe” as well as wired into a vast
network of historical adaptations (Nicol 132–33). Ultimately, “The Hounds
(a)
(b)
Fig. 12a, b Hound project (“The Hounds of Baskerville”). BBC, 2012. Author’s
screenshots
of Baskerville” is all about what “hound” is not: not a wolfhound, not a hound
dog, not even a mad dog, and not even the original story. As the acronym
above testifies, “hound” is not any single thing; rather, it signifies the plethora
of signifieds embedded within the word itself. Moffat and Gatiss’s H.O.U.N.
24 A. MCCLELLAN
D. is not the “Hound” of the Doyle canon and yet H.O.U.N.D. only signifies
because of its relationship with the network of prior tales.
Sherlock uses various methods of text on screen to remind audiences of
the show’s affiliation with the original source text and with a larger net-
work of adaptations. At the same time, it tries to assert its independence
from such a network. Moffat and Gatiss explicitly connect the BBC version
to the Arthur Conan Doyle canon in the credits, and they frequently cite
titles from the original canon (often with slight variations) directly on
screen in text messages, references to John’s blog, and in other clues. Text
on screen also materializes Sherlock’s thought processes, allowing viewers
to get into his head to see how he solves crimes. Overall, these generic
onscreen texts seem, on the surface, to embed Sherlock within a broader
network of appropriations; each reference points to another intertext in
the broader Sherlockian canon. However, by constantly citing Doyle as
the author of Sherlock Holmes and repeating his canonical titles, the
show-runners risk undermining this network by reifying the importance
of Doyle’s Work to the modernized version.
MOBILE TEXTS
Not only does Sherlock’s text on screen effectively serve to highlight the
canonical Work on which the show is based, but it further reifies the very
idea of Text until it becomes literal; that is, Sherlock turns the conceptual
idea underlying Barthes’s Texts into actual mobile phone texts. Rather
than privileging and giving authority to a single source text, Texts func-
tion like Derridean différance. The Textual network implies a constant
deferral of reference; each Text refers to other texts until there are only
simulacra. Sherlock is made up of a medley of Doyle stories, Paget illustra-
tions, Rathbone incarnations, Stephens references, and more. Doyle’s own
Sherlock Holmes is likewise a series of echoes, ranging from Poe’s Auguste
Dupin to Vedocq. However, by literalizing this concept through its use of
SMS texts on screen, Sherlock ironically subverts the playfulness of
Barthesian intertextuality and literally locks it down to a single reference,
a single citation. Even though Moffat and Gatiss argue that “everything
was canonical” in Sherlock, the SMS texts on screen end up undermining
the show’s proclaimed intertextuality and reinforcing Doyle’s stories as the
origin. Thus, Text in Sherlock becomes the Work once again.
So, how does texting work in Sherlock? Texting plays a significant role in
the show, almost from the start of the very first episode. After being
Fig. 13 Press conference “wrong” (“A Study in Pink”). BBC, 2010. Author’s
screenshot
introduced to the character of John Watson, season one’s premiere,

“A Study in Pink,” starts off with a series of apparent suicides which
then cut to a press meeting at New Scotland Yard. Sergeant Sally
Donovan and Detective Inspector Lestrade are relaying the details of the
third serial suicide when the press conference is interrupted by a series of
mysterious texts implying that the police are wrong in their deductions
(Fig. 13). The writers use this first instance of SMS text on screen in three
different ways. First, it creates a paratextual layer of meaning directly
within the scene where we get an (absent) character’s point of view.
Relatedly, the text shows the audience what Sherlock Holmes is thinking
(even though we don’t yet know the texts are from Sherlock, the audi-
ence’s previous knowledge of the character makes his authorship likely).
Second, the SMS also works to undermine Lestrade’s authority as a police
officer while setting up Sherlock Holmes’s superior experience and
insight. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it is the audience’s first
introduction to Sherlock Holmes.
The audience’s first encounter with Sherlock Holmes, as a character, is
solely through (a) text. After the opening scene with the anonymous
“Wrong!” texts, Lestrade receives a private message simply stating “You
know where to find me. SH” (Fig. 14). Sherlock’s identity starts off the
series as a digital one: disembodied, abstract, and purely textual.12
Introducing Sherlock as (a) text reinforces the character as a fictional
26 A. MCCLELLAN
Fig. 14 “You know where to find me. SH” (“A Study in Pink”). BBC, 2010.
construct, one that is made up of a myriad of imaginings across the past

century. Like Barthes’s Text, mobile texts look like they have no author,
appearing as multi-colored dialogue bubbles in a digital screen. Often, the
author is indicated by the receiver’s phone number at the top (an imperso-
nal series of digits) or perhaps by the person’s name, but the screen itself
lacks any overt citation. However, this act of signing his initials in an
onscreen text alerts the audience to Sherlock’s presence as well as his author-
ship/authority. Sherlock becomes both Barthesian Text (a “network” of
“echoes citations, references” [Barthes 161]) and the literal text on the
screen: Arthur Conan Doyle’s infamous creation, Sherlock Holmes.
Looking at these two shots together reveals a shift away from anonymous
texting to sourced texts, indicating how audiences are supposed to read the
texts on screen: (the) texts are from Sherlock, i.e., from Arthur Conan
Doyle.
Like its use of John’s blog, the show similarly reifies the concept of text
by incorporating references to Doyle’s original titles within mobile texts
on screen. For example, in “The Great Game,” Mycroft contacts John to
see if he has any updates on the death of Andrew West, the man who was
found dead after top secret missile plans went missing (Fig. 15a, b). The
subject line of Mycroft’s email clearly references another Sherlock Holmes
story, “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” which is about missing submarine
plans and the death of Arthur West, a government clerk. Not only does
(a)
(b)
Fig. 15a, b Bruce-Partington plans text (“The Great Game”). BBC, 2012.
Author’s screenshots
28 A. MCCLELLAN
such a reference remind the viewer why Mycroft is texting John and what
case he is supposed to be working on in the episode (i.e., it is a way to keep
multiple cases and details clear for the audience), it simultaneously signals
the show’s fidelity to the source text. “The Bruce-Partington Plans” is
both a sub-plot of “The Great Game” and a reminder of Sherlock’s
relationship to the Doyle canon. Reiterations like this not only revive the
author’s authority but also extend that prestige to the adapters as well.
In other key scenes from season one, SMS texts work to connect
Sherlock’s modern-day appropriation to specific plot points in the original
Doyle canon. After John agrees to move in with Sherlock in “A Study in
Pink,” for instance, Sherlock co-opts him to send a text to Jennifer
Wilson’s murderer (Fig. 16). “Lauriston Gardens” is a specific reference
to chapter three of A Study in Scarlet (“The Lauriston Garden Mystery”)
and the scene of Enoch Drebber’s death. In the original tale, Holmes
receives a letter from Tobias Gregson, one of Scotland Yard’s top detec-
tives, informing him of the crime scene:
There has been a bad business during the night at 3, Lauriston Gardens, off
the Brixton Road. Our man on the beat saw a light there about two in the
morning, and as the house was an empty one, suspected that something was
Fig. 16 Lauriston Gardens (“A Study in Pink”). BBC, 2010. Author’s

screenshot
amiss. He found the door open, and in the front room, which is bare of
furniture, discovered the body of a gentleman, well dressed, and having
cards in his pocket bearing the name of “Enoch J. Drebber, Cleveland,
Ohio, U.S.A.” . . . We are at a loss as to how he came into the empty
house; indeed, the whole affair is a puzzler. If you can come round to the
house any time before twelve, you will find me there. (Doyle 26–27)
Audiences familiar with the Doylean canon will recognize this allusion to
the original tale and read it as affirmation of the episode’s fidelity to the
source text.13 So, even though the producers are clearly using various
Doyle stories to create a network of literary allusions (sometimes upwards
of seven different Doyle allusions are made per episode), by citing the
original text within an onscreen mobile text, the producers reaffirm the
Text as Work. Lauriston Gardens becomes another form of citation which
re-establishes Arthur Conan Doyle and his stories as the source for the
show.
Interestingly, Sherlock often appropriates and places canonical refer-
ences in the wrong text/adaptation, which simultaneously foregrounds
the ways in which the writers are trying to distance themselves from that
very same canon and Doyle’s authority. Near the beginning of “A Study in
Pink,” for instance, John meets with Mycroft in an abandoned warehouse
when he receives a series of mobile texts from Sherlock summoning him to
Baker Street (Figs. 17 and 18).
Sherlock’s texts to John in “A Study in Pink” are direct quotations from
a telegram Holmes sends Watson in “The Creeping Man,” but Sherlock’s
creators quote from this story in the middle of “A Study in Pink,” which
seems, on the surface, to be a clear adaptation of A Study in Scarlet. We
think, because the title “A Study in Pink” is so close to Doyle’s A Study in
Scarlet, that the episode must be a faithful adaptation of the source text,
but such assumptions of fidelity can be misleading and perhaps even
intentional on the part of Moffat and Gatiss. Placing these quotations
from “The Creeping Man” in the middle of “A Study in Pink” implies, on
the surface, that Sherlock is adhering to a Barthesian approach to appro-
priation; however, by turning it into a literal SMS text, the writers once
again reaffirm Doyle as the author and the Conan Doyle canon as the
Work on which Sherlock – and its success – is based.
Under director Paul McGuigan’s leadership, Sherlock’s first season
was rife with mobile texts on screen, many of which called attention
to the show’s affinity with the original Arthur Conan Doyle canon.
30 A. MCCLELLAN
Fig. 17 Baker Street. Come at once text (“A Study in Pink”). BBC, 2010.
Fig. 18 If inconventient, come anyway (“A Study in Pink”). BBC, 2010.

Interestingly, when one looks at the following two seasons (which

McGuigan did not direct), there seems to be a significant shift away
from the text on screen modality which brought the show so many
accolades from critics and audiences alike. In addition to reducing the
number of overall mobile texts, in particular, how those texts are utilized
in the next two seasons is also markedly different: in each, Sherlock’s
mobile texts always seem to revolve around his interaction with one
ambiguous character. There are only a few screenshots of SMS texts on
screen in “A Scandal in Belgravia,” for example, and they are all between
Sherlock and Irene Adler. After being drugged near the beginning of the
episode, Sherlock returns home to 221B to find his phone mysteriously
hacked with a moan-like caller ID from “The Woman,” Irene. As he is
recovering in his room, Sherlock receives the first of many texts from
Irene (Fig. 19). Sherlock only replies once to Irene’s fifty-seven messages
(“Happy New Year”); however, the record of their SMS correspondence
frames the penultimate scene of the episode where Sherlock has just
learned of Irene’s alleged relocation to a witness protection program in
America (Fig. 20).
Other than Irene’s numerous texts to Sherlock, most of which are never
seen in the episode, mobile texting plays little role in the episode. There is
Fig. 19 Till the next time, Mr. Holmes (“A Scandal in Belgravia”). BBC, 2012.
Author’s screenshots
32 A. MCCLELLAN
Fig. 20 “Let’s Have Dinner” (“A Scandal in Belgravia”). BBC, 2012. Author’s
screenshot
only one text in “The Hounds of Baskerville” from Mycroft asking what
Sherlock is up to when he and John illegally use Mycroft’s identification to
break into the Baskerville testing site, and the few texts that are included in
“The Reichenbach Fall” are between Moriarty and Sherlock near the end
of the episode. There are an assortment of texted threats to Mary regard-
ing John’s kidnapping at the beginning of season three, a few minor texts
from Sherlock to Lestrade at the beginning of “The Sign of Three,” and
no texts in “His Last Vow.” Viewers do see Sherlock using his phone in
interesting ways (to show how Moriarty breaks into the Tower of London,
the Bank of England, and Pentonville Prison in “The Reichenbach Fall”;
to look up John’s blog during his best man speech and to monitor his and
John’s alcohol intake during the stag night in “The Sign of Three”);
however, none of the SMS examples in the episodes include quotations
from Doyle’s original stories or references to the original titles.
So what does this shift away from citation in the mobile texts signify? One
could argue that the writers no longer need to reify the source text as much
for a few reasons. First, Sherlock has become an international success with
fans and critics, so the writers no longer need to justify their creative choices
or how their version fits into the wider network of Sherlockian adaptations.
Sherlock is an established and acclaimed postmodern adaptation. Second, the
content of the show itself has become more faithful to the original stories as
time passes. As mentioned earlier, the first season took a more bricolage
approach to the canon; episodes often had original titles and storylines that
interwove various aspects, quotes, and characters from several Doyle stories.
In these versions, perhaps audiences needed more indicators as to how
Moffat and Gatiss’s version fit into a wider network of Sherlockiana. These
are the episodes where we see text on screen grounding the episodes in
specific Doyle stories, whether this text takes the form of blog titles, text
messages, or outlines of Sherlock’s deductions and thought processes. As
the show became more successful and recognized as an adaptation, however,
the show’s content became more explicitly canonical. Virtually all of the six
episode titles in seasons two and three come from specific Doyle stories, and
the plotlines of each closely adhere to the original storylines. Sherlock con-
tinues to be an innovator when it comes to showcasing technology on
screen; however, perhaps it no longer needs text on screen to highlight its
adherence to the canon. Rather, the Text has become so reified in the text of
the show that it once again has become all about Doyle’s Work.
CONCLUSION
Sherlock’s text on screen, use of the Internet, and SMS texting all work to
foreground the ways in which digital technology is changing how audi-
ences experience literary texts and how we communicate. While texting on
screen was introduced as early as 2001 in South Korea (Take Care of My
Cat), there seemed to be a boom in 2010, the year Sherlock premiered;
however, most other TV shows and films at the time (Scott Pilgrim
[2010], Pretty Little Liars [2012], etc.) featured heavy-handed close-up
shots of actual mobile phone screens or slow-paced action shots of char-
acters typing directly on to their phones. In contrast, Sherlock’s texts float
independently of the phone, without a bubble around the message; they
remain consistent with font and color, and they don’t indicate the sender
which “increases our involvement” with the characters and plotlines
(Zhou). According to industry experts, Sherlock has established the “defi-
nitive style” for text on screen, a feature that is both “beautiful in itself”
and functional (Zhou). Now, hit shows and films like House of Cards
(2013), The Fifth Estate (2013), and The Fault in Our Stars (2014) all
incorporate onscreen texting styles similar to Sherlock’s innovations.
What is unique about the show, beyond its innovative and stylistic use
of text on screen, is the ways it uses text to signal its relationship to the
34 A. MCCLELLAN
original Doyle canon and other Sherlockian adaptations. Sherlock’s texts

are not just technological shorthand or showy stylistic gimmicks; they do
not work merely to forward the plotline or to provide modern modes of
communication between the characters. Rather, episode titles and mobile
texts become part of a broader network of references to the canonical
Text, a reminder to the viewer that they are watching an adaptation of a
classic story from the nineteenth century. And while the modernity of
mobile phone technology highlights the show’s twenty-first century set-
ting, the content reminds the viewer of the show’s older Victorian origins.
The significance of such a relationship is threefold. First, it highlights the
show’s postmodern, intertextual approach to adaptation and appropria-
tion. Second, Moffat and Gatiss are able to resist critiques about their
modern-day approach and reassert their authority as Sherlock Holmes
experts by constantly showcasing their in-depth knowledge of the canon
and various adaptations. And lastly, it ultimately reinforces Doyle’s
authority as the ultimate “author” of Sherlock Holmes.
Ultimately, Sherlock provides us with a new twenty-first-century meta-
phor for understanding postmodern adaptations: the network.14 Not only
is Sherlock embedded within a broader textual network of adaptations, but
it is also part of a wider web of technologically driven media. Many fans
experience Sherlock through streaming technologies on their computers,
tablets, or mobile devices. Others research Sherlockian references on the
web and through other adaptations and pastiches available on Amazon.
com and other websites. Still more actively engage in the show’s world-
building by writing fanfiction and creating fan art. The boundaries
between “official,” authorized adaptations and fan productions are being
eroded every day, thanks to networked technologies like the Internet,
online fan sites, mobile devices, and more. Sherlock’s interweaving of
textual references, mobile texts, and technology provide audiences and
critics with new ways to conceptualize and actualize contemporary the-
ories of adaptation, appropriation, and remix culture.
NOTES
1. Dr. Watson labels Holmes a “calculating machine” in the second Holmes
story, The Sign of Four (Doyle 99). Similarly, John accuses Sherlock of
lacking proper human concern when they learn Mrs. Hudson has been
allegedly shot in season two’s “The Reichenbach Fall,” calling him a
“machine.”
2. Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse’s “Introduction: The Literary, Televisual
and Digital Adventures of the Beloved Detective,” Francesca Coppa’s
“Sherlock as Cyborg: Bridging Mind and Body,” and Bram Nicol’s
“Sherlock Holmes Version 2.0: Adapting Doyle in the Twenty-First
Century” similarly address Sherlock’s technological and digital approach.
3. See works by Leitch, Cardwell, Kranz, Naremore, Andrew, Stam,
McFarlane, and MacCabe.
4. Critic Matt Hills labels this oscillation as a kind of “heretical fidelity” which
lets Moffat and Gatiss reassure traditional Holmesian audiences that the
“Canon remains as a sacred Ur-Text” (i.e., as the primary “Work” under-
lying the show) at the same time that they clearly depart from it to create
new, modernized stories of their own (35).
5. Another possible explanation for the change from “based on Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes” to “Based on the Works of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle” is legal/copyright issues with the Doyle estate; however, this
has not been confirmed with the show-runners or producers. I would argue,
however, that the contents of seasons two and three are much more adaptive
than season one, as I go on to explain, which reflects the shift in language in
the opening credits.
6. For example, “A Scandal in Belgravia” is a clear adaptation of Doyle’s “A
Scandal in Bohemia”; the BBC’s “The Hounds of Baskerville” is an even
closer adaptation of Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Season two’s
“The Reichenbach Fall” perhaps is the most obscure; however, the script
constantly invokes the original story title of “The Final Problem” through
Moriarty’s dialogue references to the conflict between him and Sherlock,
which he refers to as “their problem. The final problem.”
7. In the BBC show, John and Mary Morstan do get married, but most of the
embedded mysteries (other than Major Sholto’s and Jonathan Small’s
names) come from other Holmes stories.
8. In his analysis of “The Great Game,” Matt Hills astutely observed that
Sherlock has a complex relationship with media and mediation and, in
fact, “media texts are always meaningful” in Sherlock; “every bit of apparent
mediated background is actually the plot’s foreground” (31).
9. This kind of self-referential reflexivity reminds viewers that they are watching
an adaptation, and this, for theorist Linda Hutcheon, is precisely the plea-
sure to be found in adaptation as a genre. Hutcheon writes: “Part of this
pleasure . . . comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort
of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise. Recognition and remem-
brance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so
too is change” (4).
10. Several recent books have added important contributions to the history and
development of Sherlock Holmes pastiches over the twentieth century –
36 A. MCCLELLAN
particularly, how Sherlock’s creators incorporate various versions in their own

television appropriations. See Stein and Busse, Porter, Ue and Cranfield, and
Vanacker and Wynne.
11. Fans also read John’s blog entries in their entirety on the BBC’s tie-in
website, www.johnwatsonsblog.co.uk.
12. We see this digital identity again early on in “A Study in Pink” when John
looks up Sherlock’s text from the lab (“If brother has green ladder, arrest
brother. SH”) and when John decides to research Sherlock’s identity on the
Internet. The entire television screen in the second scene is filled with a
digitized image of the name “Sherlock Holmes.”
13. As theorist Linda Hutcheon explains, adaptation is always already “a form of
intertextuality: we experience adaptations (as adaptations) as palimpsests
through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition with
variation” (8).
14. Sherlock solves crimes with the help of his “homeless network”; he
researches clues on the mobile network. The “network” has become such
a symbol of the show that it is now the name of a popular mobile app,
“Sherlock: The Network,” available from The Project Factory.
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Andrew, Dudley.“Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000.
Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” Image, Music, Text. 1977. Trans. Stephen
Heath. London: Fontana, 1982. 155–64.
Cardwell, Sarah. Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002.
Coppa, Francesca. “Sherlock as Cyborg: Bridging Mind and Body.” Sherlock and
Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series. Ed. Louisa Ellen Stein and
Kristina Busse. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. 210–23.
Digital Spy. “Mark Gatiss on Sherlock. ” Online video clip. YouTube. 22 Jul. 2010.
Web. 1 Apr. 2014.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. London: Penguin,
2009.
Dyer, Richard. Pastiche. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Hills, Matt. “Sherlock’s Epistemological Economy and the Value of ‘Fan’
Knowledge: How Producer-Fans Play the (Great) Game of Fandom.” In
Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series. Ed. Louisa Ellen
Stein and Kristina Busse. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. 27–40.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Kranz, David L. “Trying Harder: Probability, Objectivity, and Rationality in

Adaptation Studies.” The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation. Ed.
James M. Welsh and Peter Lev. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. 77–104.
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ed. Ed. Charles Kaplan and William Davis Anderson. New York: Bedford/St.
Martin’s Press, 1999. 751–62.
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The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation. Ed. James M. Welsh and
Peter Lev. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. 15–34.
———. “The Ethics of Infidelity.” Adaptation Studies: New Approaches. Ed.
Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson
UP, 2010. 61–77.
MacCabe, Colin. “Introduction: Bazinian Adaptation: The Butcher Boy as
Example.” True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity.
Ed. Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2011. 3–26.
McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
Naremore, James, ed. Film Adaptation. London: Athlone Press, 2000.
Nicol, Bran. “Sherlock Holmes Version 2.0: Adapting Doyle in the Twenty-First
Century.” Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle: Multi-Media Afterlives. Ed.
Sabine Vanacker and Catherine Wynne. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013. 124–39.
PBS Masterpiece. “Sherlock: Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat Q & A.” Online video
clip. PBS. 2010. Web. 12 Apr. 2014.
Porter, Lynnette, ed. Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New
Adaptations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.
Rixon, Paul. “Sherlock: Critical Reception by the Media.” Sherlock and Transmedia
Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series. Ed. Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. 165–78.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006.
Sherlock: Complete Series 1–3. Writ. Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and Stephen
Thompson. BBC, 2014. DVD.
Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation.
Ed. James Naremore. London: Athlone Press, 2000. 54–78.
Stein, Louisa Ellen and Kristina Busse. “Introduction: The Literary, Televisual and
Digital Adventures of the Beloved Detective.” Sherlock and Transmedia
Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series. Ed. Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. 9–24.
———, eds. Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series. Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2012.
38 A. MCCLELLAN
Takenaka, Kellie. “Sherlock. 21st Century Boy.” The Sherlock Holmes Journal 30.1
(2010): 20–21.
“textile, adj. and n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, Dec. 2015. Web. 13 Feb. 2016.
The Woman in Green. Dir. Roy William Neill. Universal Studios, 1989. DVD.
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UK: Intellect, 2014.
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Gatiss, and Stephen Thompson. BBC, 2014. DVD.
Vanacker, Sabine and Catherine Wynne, eds. Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle:
Multi-Media Afterlives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
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clip. Vimeo. 15 Aug. 2014. Web. 13 Feb. 2016.
Ann McClellan is Professor and English department chair at Plymouth State

University in New Hampshire, USA. She is the author of How British Women
Writers Transformed the Campus Novel (2012) and numerous articles on British
women’s campus fiction and on Sherlock Holmes. She is currently completing a
monograph on Sherlock, world building, and fan fiction.
Clients Who Disappear and Colleagues
Who Cannot Compete: Female Characters
in the BBC’s Sherlock
Benedick Turner
Toward the climax of “His Last Vow,” the final episode of the BBC’s
Sherlock, season three, John tells his wife, Mary, that he has decided not to
pry into the secrets of her past and will accept her for who she is now.
Elated, Mary throws her arms around her husband, and they share an
embrace – until Mary faints, and her panicking husband has to lower her
into a chair. But then Sherlock pokes his head around the door to tell John
that he has drugged Mary’s tea; the audience soon learns that this is so the
two men can pursue the blackmailer Charles Augustus Magnussen, who
counts Mary among his many victims. Simply put, Mary is Sherlock’s
client as well as John’s husband, but while they work on her case, she is
kept out of the way: Mary, who played a major role in the season until
now, suddenly disappears from the narrative, only to reappear after her
case is resolved. This makes for a stark contrast with Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Sign of Four, in which Mary Morstan accompanies Holmes and
Watson on the first night of their investigation and draws Holmes’s praise
for the talents that she shows along the way.1
B. Turner (*)
Department of English, St. Joseph’s College, New York, USA
e-mail: bturner@sjcny.edu

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_3
40 B. TURNER
In this chapter I argue that when Sherlock is considered in the context of

Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, one of the most striking features of the
television series is the disappearance of female clients – by which I mean
not only that the modern-day detective seems less interested in accepting
cases from women than does Doyle’s original (whose praise for female
clients is not limited to Mary Morstan), but also that those particularly
powerful women whose cases he does accept are obscured or removed
from sight entirely as soon as they become Sherlock’s clients.2
Nevertheless, I cannot agree entirely with Carlen Lavigne when she writes
that “Sherlock has few prominent women; secondary recurring characters
such as Mrs Hudson and Sally Donovan hardly possess the same narrative
agency as Holmes, Watson, or even Lestrade or Mycroft” (17).3 While I
argue that female clients disappear from the BBC’s reimagining, important
roles are given to other female characters, in particular Sergeant Sally
Donovan and morgue technician Molly Hooper, whose professions
more closely connect them to Sherlock’s work as a detective and who
have no obvious origins in Doyle’s stories. So rather than primarily exam-
ining how the BBC series adapts certain characters from Doyle’s stories,
something that other critics have already done very well,4 I focus equally
on how Sherlock exchanges one set of female characters for another. I
argue that, for all their professional prowess, Donovan and Molly are, in
the first two seasons at least, limited as characters in a way that, considered
together with the disappearance of powerful and intelligent female clients,
suggests an anxiety about the possibility of female competition for
Sherlock. I nevertheless conclude that Donovan and Molly (the latter of
whom is more developed in the third season) play essential roles in the
narrative and in the construction of Sherlock’s character.
FEMALE CLIENTS IN THE DOYLE CANON

With the exception of Irene Adler, who has been the subject of several
good analyses,5 the women who appear in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
stories have not yet received the critical attention that they deserve. For
instance, after much thoughtful analysis of gender in other texts by the
author, Tabitha Sparks declares that Doyle “largely avoids ‘the woman
question’” in the Sherlock Holmes stories (160).6 But female clients figure
prominently, especially among the earlier stories.7 While some seem like
rather helpless creatures, others are quite formidable, and a few even help
Holmes catch the criminals who are threatening them.
CLIENTS WHO DISAPPEAR AND COLLEAGUES WHO CANNOT COMPETE . . . 41
Violet Smith, the client in “The Solitary Cyclist,” describes how a

strange-looking man followed her on the way to her job as a music
teacher; fortunately, rather than taking fright, she was “filled with curios-
ity” and “laid a trap” (Doyle 836). When Watson observes her make a
second attempt to confront the mysterious man, he is impressed with her
“spirited” character (839). Violet Hunter, the client in “The Copper
Beeches,” is perhaps even more impressive. After meeting her, Holmes
remarks that this governess “seems a young lady who is very well able to
take care of herself” (500). Watson makes note of Hunter’s “bright, quick
face” and her “brisk manner, [suggestive] of a woman who has had her
own way to make in the world” (494). In their second interview, Hunter
remarks upon her own “naturally observant personality” and describes
how her curiosity was aroused by the irregularities she noticed in her
employer’s home (509). What she describes as her “woman’s instinct”
led her to believe that some good would come from investigating, or to
use her word, “penetrating” the part of her employer’s home designated
as off-limits to her, where she indeed discovered several significant bits of
evidence (510). Violet Hunter, who identifies herself simply as “Hunter”
in her telegram, not only possesses the character traits of a hunter, but also
takes obvious pride in the fact. Holmes is sufficiently impressed to call her
a “very brave and sensible girl” and “a quite exceptional woman” (513);
he even charges her with obtaining the keys to the house and locking away
the servants so that he and Watson can get inside. In his postscript, Watson
explains that Hunter eventually achieved considerable success as the head
of a private school: this woman apparently maintained her independence
late into life.
Mary Morstan is likewise a governess when she seeks Holmes’s help in
The Sign of Four. Although not quite as mettlesome as Violet Hunter,
Morstan impresses Holmes with her abilities more than any other of his
other female clients after she details the evidence in her case and then
accompanies Holmes and Watson on the first night of their investigation.
The great detective goes so far as to postulate that, had Morstan not
accepted Watson’s proposal of marriage, she “might have been most
useful in such work as we have been doing. She had a decided genius
that way” (235).
However, those of Holmes’s female clients who lack a profession seem
much less intrepid. For example, although Helen Stoner, the client in
“The Speckled Band” shows herself to be quite savvy – she is aware of her
stepfather’s machinations and evidently has been so for long enough to
42 B. TURNER
develop an explanation for his deranged behavior (400–7) – she is also

presented as helpless (albeit no more so than several of Holmes’s male
clients). When she appears at Baker Street, she is in “a pitiable state of
agitation, her face all drawn and gray, with restless frightened eyes, like
those of some hunted animal” (398); she explains that she can no longer
bear the strain of her situation, and “shall go mad if it continues” (399).
Holmes takes her case, moves her out of harm’s way, and eliminates the
threat while Stoner sleeps. And the type of work female clients do seems
important, too: Mary Sutherland, the client in “A Case of Identity,”
works, but as a typist rather than a teacher or governess. While the reader
need not accept Watson’s description of this woman as “vacuous” (296),
the fact that she is fooled when her stepfather disguises himself as a
romantic admirer makes her seem less than astute.
In general, then, the female clients in Doyle’s canon seem to be defined
by their professions: those who have careers requiring an education are
courageous, curious, and resourceful; those who have less intellectual
careers or do not work at all are helpless and easily fooled or frightened.
Holmes appreciates the contributions to their own cases of the former
group, and he even laments that Mary Morstan will not be able to help
with future cases.
FEMALE CLIENTS IN SHERLOCK

In contrast to Doyle’s canon, female clients do not figure prominently in
the first two seasons of Sherlock (this changes to a degree in the third
season, as I explore in the second part of this section.) For that matter, few
of these episodes focus on cases brought to Sherlock by individual clients
of either sex: in three of the first six episodes, Sherlock’s client is the
Metropolitan Police. Of course, the Met is made up of police officers
both male and female, but the series makes it very clear that while DI
Greg Lestrade is quick to turn to Sherlock for help, his second-in-com-
mand, Sergeant Sally Donovan, is strongly opposed to this: so if Sherlock
can be said to have an individual client in these episodes, it is the male
police officer, not the female one. Only two episodes from the first two
seasons (“The Blind Banker” and “The Hounds of Baskerville”) can
definitely be said to revolve around cases brought to Sherlock by a private
client, and in both instances that client is male.
Of course, there is one former female client among the regular char-
acters – Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs). In the very first episode, Sherlock
tells John that the landlady is giving him a special deal on the flat at Baker
Street in return for ensuring that her murderous husband was sentenced to
death. But when set against her current sensibilities (“Ooh, it’s a bit rude,
that noise, isn’t it?” she exclaims when she hears Sherlock’s phone alert
him of a text from Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia”8), the details of
Mrs. Hudson’s case – she was an exotic dancer (“His Last Vow”) whose
husband operated a drugs cartel (“The Sign of Three”) – seem absurd, or
at least like something that must have happened a very long time ago.
Sherlock’s Mrs. Hudson gets quite a lot of dialogue, in marked contrast to
Doyle’s character, who almost never speaks in the narratives. But although
the twenty-first-century Mrs. Hudson gets a voice, she is also repeatedly
silenced for comic effect: in “A Scandal in Belgravia,” Sherlock chastises
Mycroft for telling Mrs. Hudson to “shut up,” only to say exactly the same
thing himself a moment later; in “The Sign of Three,” Sherlock orders
Mrs. Hudson to shut up without her saying a word, explaining that “it’s
physically painful watching you think.” There is no doubt about
Sherlock’s affection for his landlady: when Moriarty (Andrew Scott) threa-
tens to kill the detective’s friends in “The Reichenbach Fall,” Mrs.
Hudson’s is the first name Sherlock utters after John’s. But this episode
makes her a potential victim whose life depends upon her tenant’s deci-
sion, whereas in Doyle, she is never in such a position (indeed, in “The
Empty House” Mrs. Hudson helps to save Holmes’s life by periodically
moving the dummy detective placed in the window of 221B to make it
function better as a decoy). Sherlock may increase Mrs. Hudson’s role in
the narrative, but it also renders her a vulnerable, somewhat absurd
character.
“A Scandal in Belgravia,” however, introduces one, possibly two,
current female clients who seem considerably more powerful, at least
initially. This episode in a sense re-genders one of the more memorable
male clients from Doyle’s stories: instead of the King of Bohemia –
Holmes’s client in “A Scandal in Bohemia” – it is a “young, female”
member of the British royal family whose image has been captured in a
compromising photograph with Irene Adler, and it is strongly implied
that Queen Elizabeth II herself is the person actually employing
Sherlock’s services. But the Queen communicates with Sherlock
entirely through a male representative, and the viewer gets no more
than a partial glimpse of her young, female relation; in contrast, the
male client in the case of the hiker and the backfire gets much more
screen time, even though his case is only incidental to the plot of
44 B. TURNER
the episode. Until two-thirds of the way through, therefore, this episode
seems to suggest that even when Sherlock does accept a case from a
female client, he does not insist on communicating with her directly the
way he seems to do with his male clients.
But through a plot twist that does not resemble anything in Doyle’s
story, Irene Adler (Lara Pulver) herself employs Sherlock’s services, or at
least that is what Sherlock believes: “We have a client,” he tells John, and
soon the two men are interviewing Irene in their living room, just as they
do their regular clients. The conversation even begins in fairly typical
fashion, with Sherlock trying to ascertain the nature of Irene’s predica-
ment. But although Sherlock believes that he is helping Irene to evade her
pursuers, he is in fact supplying her with sensitive information, which she
immediately passes to Jim Moriarty. So although Irene seeks (and receives)
Sherlock’s help in solving a mystery, she is only posing as his client.
Yet what is most striking about Sherlock’s treatment of this character is
that by the end of the episode she is at the mercy of her enemies and must
be rescued by Sherlock. Doyle’s Adler, a retired opera singer, is one of very
few characters who outwits Holmes. Indeed, she beats him at his own
game: although she initially falls prey to Holmes’s talent for disguise and
consequently reveals the location of her hidden photograph, she soon
realizes what she has done and, making use of her professional experience
with costume, employs a disguise of her own to spy on Holmes, confirms
that he is on her trail, and absconds with the photograph before he can
return to seize it. Equally noteworthy is the fact that Doyle’s Adler does
not at any point act criminally: she has threatened to publicize her former
affair with the King, but since she has not made any demands, this does
not amount to blackmail. Indeed it is Holmes who acts criminally by
attempting to seize the photograph: in a sense, then, Doyle’s Adler is
both client and detective in this story: she realizes that her property is
under threat, but instead of taking her case to someone else, she solves it
herself.
Sherlock’s version of the character, in contrast, is both criminal and,
ultimately, completely vulnerable. When she first appears, Irene seems
more than capable of taking care of herself. This version of the char-
acter is a dominatrix, which is not so profound a transformation as
it might first appear (Garber notes that careers in European opera such
as that of Doyle’s Adler were often “socially liminal” for American
women [192]), but would seem to imbue the character with more
agency (Garber further explains that “retired from operatic stage”
[a description Holmes finds in his index entry on Adler: 246] is “a

plausible euphemism for ‘kept woman’”). And appropriately for a
woman who makes repeated references to having men tied up (or
suspended upside-down), the twenty-first-century Irene initially gets
the better of Sherlock: unlike Doyle’s Adler, she knows Sherlock is
on her trail from the beginning, and quickly exposes his feeble attempt
at disguise (this detective has nothing of the original’s genius in that
area). But although dominatrices usually wear corsets made from
leather, latex, or PVC, which protect against cuts and penetration,
Irene first appears in flimsy, conventionally feminine lingerie and
then, in her initial meeting with Sherlock, chooses to be nude, which,
although it prevents Sherlock from performing his usual visual analysis,
also suggests vulnerability. Indeed, while this scene ends with Irene
drugging Sherlock and taking back the phone that he had seized, her
position quickly becomes more precarious as the episode progresses,
until by the end she is reduced to a damsel in distress who has to be
saved by the male hero.
Not only does Sherlock’s Irene not measure up to Doyle’s original; she
may not even compare to Holmes’s professional female clients: she seems
to riddle out the case of the hiker and the backfire, but it is not clear
whether Sherlock is actually hearing her words through his drug-induced
torpor or simply hallucinating them, so the scene only teases the audience
with the idea that a woman might participate in Sherlock’s work. Sherlock’s
transformation of Irene Adler suggests that, in contrast to the Doyle
canon, female characters in this series – whether or not they are clients –
cannot be assumed to possess the resources that the audience might expect
given their professions.
At first it seems like female clients might receive the same short shrift in
the third season of Sherlock that they did in the first two. On his first day
back on the job in “The Empty Hearse,” Sherlock interviews two women,
both of whom, it turns out, are the victims of the men who accompanied
them to Baker Street – a detail that makes them seem foolish. The first
comes to Sherlock with her husband after their joint bank account was
drained; Sherlock see clues indicating that the husband is having an affair
and immediately identifies him as the thief. The second female client is
there with her stepfather, her complaint being that her online boyfriend
stopped emailing her without explanation. Again, Sherlock solves the case
in a flash: the stepfather had been posing as the online boyfriend so that he
could keep his stepdaughter from forming real relationships that might
46 B. TURNER
lead to her moving out of his home and taking her income with her. This,
of course, is the situation in Doyle’s “A Case of Identity,” just with
updated technology – even the stepfather’s name is the same; but whereas
Watson gives a detailed description of Mary Sutherland (the client in
Doyle’s story), and eventually makes her into an at least somewhat sympa-
thetic character, the victimized woman in this scene is only on screen for a
few seconds and is never named.
But it is not only the speed with which Sherlock solves these cases that
belittles them – and by extension the women who bring them to him;
what really denigrates them is that this scene is intercut with one in which
John sees a series of patients each of whom is suffering from a particularly
unsavory complaint: piles, thrush, an unspecified condition requiring a
prostate examination. And eventually both of these cases are forgotten
when Sherlock is called upon to prevent the destruction of Westminster
Palace, a threat brought to his attention first in vague terms by his male
sibling, and then in much more specific terms by a male employee of the
London Underground. The implication is clear: cases brought to Sherlock
by women are petty and easy to solve; those brought to him by men are
matters of national security.
During his best man speech in the following episode, “The Sign of
Three,” Sherlock briefly mentions several cases that he clearly considers
unworthy of greater attention. One is obviously another reference to “A
Case of Identity” and in particular the behavior of Mary Sutherland: a
flashback shows John looking out the window at Baker Street and describ-
ing a woman approaching the door, turning away, turning back, and
turning away again. Sherlock lazily remarks, “She’s a client. She’s boring.
I’ve seen those symptoms before. Oscillation on the pavement always
means there’s a love affair.” The last two sentences are almost the exact
words spoken by Holmes in Doyle’s story,9 but whereas Holmes seems
interested at the prospect of hearing out his female client, whose case
becomes the focus of the story, Sherlock’s first remarks indicate his dis-
dain, and this is the last that we see or hear of the case. Such a clear but also
dismissive reference to one of Doyle’s stories featuring a female client
suggests that the series might continue to avoid such cases. Sherlock
next mentions the case of a woman who wrote to complain that “my
husband is three people,” but this one gets dismissed almost as swiftly:
another flashback shows Sherlock telling John how he reached a solution –
the woman had married triplets, identical except for their skin blemishes –
without leaving the flat. In contrast, the case that Sherlock describes in
detail – that of the Bloody Guardsman – features a client who is not only
male but employed in the male-dominated world of the military. When he
gets to the end of the story, Sherlock reflects on this hyper-masculine case
as “the most ingenious and brilliantly planned attempted murder I’ve ever
had the pleasure to encounter, the most perfect locked-room mystery of
which I am aware.” By this point, there seems to be a direct correlation
between the masculinity of the client and Sherlock’s level of interest in
the case.
But Sherlock segues from discussing this case to describing the stag
night, during the course of which Sherlock is hired by a female client
whose case does interest him, at least once he is sober enough to recognize
it for what it is. A private nurse, Tessa, wants Sherlock to find a man who
took her out on one date and then disappeared. Still very drunk, Sherlock
falls asleep while looking for clues, or as an equally drunk John describes it,
“clueing for looks.” When he sobers up the next morning, Sherlock
exclaims, “that woman – Tessa – the most interesting case in months!
[A] wasted opportunity!” Pursuing this case, Sherlock will eventually
question four more women, but at first his inquiries go nowhere. It is
only at the end of his best man speech that Sherlock realizes, by remem-
bering something Tessa said, that the five women together hold the key to
the murder attempt on John’s former commanding officer, Major Sholto,
and sees that the Bloody Guardsman case was just a rehearsal for this
attack. Although Sholto is the focus of this case, Tessa is the one who first
alerts Sherlock to the existence of the Mayfly Man, and what she says
eventually allows Sherlock to deduce this villain’s target. But neither Tessa
nor any of the other four women Sherlock questions in association with
this case is developed as a character, let alone one as impressive as the
governess clients in Doyle’s stories. And perhaps more interesting in the
context of the following episode (“His Last Vow”) is that Sherlock never
really sees any of these female characters. Although it is initially suggested
that he questions them in person, all together in a council room, this
conversation is in fact taking place online, in an Internet chat room. Tessa
is the only one Sherlock actually meets, but he is too drunk to focus on her
properly: when he attempts to perform his usual visual analysis, instead of
details of her appearance producing a list of clues, all he sees is a blurry
double image, a few obvious facts, and a bunch of question marks.
This phenomenon of the invisible – or at least not clearly visible –
female client is further developed in the final episode of the third season,
“His Last Vow.” This episode actually revolves around a case brought to
48 B. TURNER
Sherlock by a female client: Lady Smallwood (Lindsay Duncan), the leader

of a parliamentary commission interrogating media magnate and black-
mailer Charles Augustus Magnussen. Smallwood is initially an imposing
figure: her leadership position is evident from her central spot at the
commission table (clearly shown by the camera in an overhead shot) as
well as from the way she talks over a male colleague who gets himself into
trouble with a poorly worded question. She certainly seems more impress-
ive than Lady Blackwell, the client in Doyle’s “Charles Augustus
Milverton,” upon which this episode is loosely based: whereas Blackwell
is a debutante whose indiscretion threatens her upcoming marriage,
Smallwood is a senior politician who, according to Magnussen’s files, is
entirely free of vices (an unrealistic notion that suggests that parts of this
female client’s life are invisible not just to the audience, but even to the
seemingly all-seeing Magnussen); instead, it is her husband who has
committed the indiscretion. But the audience first sees Smallwood from
Magnussen’s perspective, and since he has taken off his spectacles, she
appears in blurry double vision, similar to how Tessa appeared when a
drunk Sherlock looked at her in the previous episode. Although
Magnussen soon replaces his glasses and Smallwood is shown in clear
focus from many other perspectives, this initial blurring of her image
hints at her imminent departure from the screen. Two scenes later, we
see her making the decision to retain Sherlock’s services, and the two must
meet at some point since Sherlock, when he later smells Claire de la Lune
perfume in Magnussen’s office, mistakenly identifies it as Smallwood’s
scent. But this interview is never shown, and Smallwood disappears from
the narrative at this point. Smallwood is, along with Magnussen, the
center of attention at the start of the episode; but when the camera
assumes the villain’s perspective, her image is obscured, and then, as
soon as she decides to become Sherlock’s client, she’s gone completely.
Smallwood does not reappear until the end of the episode, despite the
fact that Magnussen’s blackmail is taking a terrible toll on her life. The
headline of a newspaper that Sherlock is holding at his family Christmas
informs the audience that Smallwood’s husband has committed suicide as
a result of his secret being exposed; apparently Sherlock failed Smallwood,
but if he met with her to apologize for his failure, this meeting, like the
original interview, is left to the audience to imagine. The audience sees
Smallwood again at the end – after Sherlock has killed Magnussen, ending
all possibility of further blackmail and thus putting an end to Smallwood’s
professional relationship with the detective. This reappearance only
strengthens the impression that this female character must be kept out of
sight during the specific period that she is Sherlock’s client. Sherlock is not
included in this scene, so he still has not been shown on screen with
Smallwood. It was no surprise that the Queen, the client in “A Scandal
in Belgravia,” only met with Sherlock through an intermediary (the mon-
arch would likely be kept as isolated as possible from such business, and
even if this were not so, it would be difficult to portray her convincingly),
but taken together, these two episodes suggest that Sherlock must be kept
away from powerful female clients, or at least not appear on screen with
them. And the fact that in her final appearance Smallwood is signing off,
albeit reluctantly, on Mycroft’s order to have Sherlock sent on what
amounts to a suicide mission, further suggests that this separation might
result from anxiety about the threat such characters pose to Sherlock.
Ultimately, the only current female client who is developed as a char-
acter is Mary Watson, a woman who, as a former secret agent, not only has
the potential to threaten Sherlock, but actually shoots him (“His Last
Vow”). Mary does not become a client by choice, of course: when
Sherlock learns that she is another of Magnussen’s victims, he tells her
that he will “take the case,” apparently whether she wants him to do so or
not. Unfortunately, John is listening in on the conversation, so the first
step toward Mary becoming a client comes when Sherlock tricks her into
revealing her secret to the person from whom she was most anxious to
keep it away.
In the first two episodes of the third season, Mary is allowed to appear
quite formidable, even as she is presented as nothing more exceptional
than a part-time nurse about to marry the doctor for whom she works. She
easily recognizes and deciphers a skip code in “The Empty Hearse”
(allowing Sherlock to save John’s life), and in “The Sign of Three” she
manipulates both John and Sherlock into going out on a case together.
Later in that same episode, she remembers Major Sholto’s room number
when Sherlock cannot, and, even though John tells her to stay behind, she
accompanies both men as they confront the suicidal soldier and helps
convince him to accept John’s medical help. When he meets Mary,
Sherlock’s visual analysis generates several deductions, including “liar”
and “secret” (although it is not clear whether the last is meant to modify
“tattoo,” which would render it much less significant), but Sherlock
apparently draws no conclusion from these. Also appearing, seemingly as
part of one phrase, are the words “part-time nurse,” not only identifying
Mary’s profession, but also suggesting that it helps define her. But
50 B. TURNER
although nursing is a profession that requires training and talent, that

Mary is only part-time suggests that she may already have begun to assume
a domestic role, even before she is married to John. Moreover, when she is
shown working, she appears more in the role of John’s receptionist: the
audience sees her announcing patients to him, but never treating any. And
several of the other phrases that pop up in Sherlock’s deduction – “cat
lover,” “bakes own bread,” “romantic” – suggest a somewhat stereotypi-
cal construction of femininity. In the first two episodes in which she
appears, therefore, Mary is presented as a rather conventional woman
who works part-time as a nurse (receptionist?) in her future husband’s
clinic, but also one who can decipher codes, has better recall than
Sherlock, and calmly takes action in emergencies even when told to stay
out of harm’s way. This combination of characteristics makes her one of
the most interesting and complex characters – of either gender – to appear
in the series so far.
But shortly after the third episode explains Mary’s extraordinary abil-
ities by exposing her past as a secret agent, Sherlock suggests that he will
accept Mary as a client; and almost immediately after that she is reduced to
a pitiful state, utterly dependent upon her husband’s acceptance. It is not
Magnussen who does this – Mary had Magnussen begging for mercy when
Sherlock and John broke into his office. But after Sherlock tricks her into
revealing her secret, John takes Mary back to Baker Street, where he orders
her into a chair. When she asks for an explanation, John tells her:
Because that’s where they sit . . . the people who come in here with their
stories. That’s all you are now, Mary. You’re a client. This is where you sit
and talk. And this is where we sit and listen. Then we decide if we want you
or not.
These lines reveal the vulnerability of Mary’s position: whether John will
take her back as a wife seems to depend on whether Sherlock and he will
accept her as a client. Whereas Doyle’s stories imbue their several female
clients with agency according to the nature of their profession, Sherlock
begins to strip Mary of her agency almost at the moment her former
profession as a secret agent is confirmed, which happens simultaneously
with the first suggestion that she will become a client.
Similarly, the final remnants of Mary’s agency seem to be removed at the
exact point that Sherlock and John ultimately resolve to take up her case in
earnest. John eventually decides that he will accept Mary and that he does
not want to know the details of her past; but when he burns the flash drive
containing those details, John is burning away Mary’s professional history,
the evidence of her life as a secret agent. A few seconds later, she appears to
faint, and John has to gently lower her into an armchair. The actual cause is
soon revealed to be the sedative Sherlock put in her tea, but in the moment,
the impression given is that John’s acceptance of her as his wife – and thus,
by his own logic, his and Sherlock’s acceptance of her as a client – has
drained the life out of her; this of course echoes Holmes’s suggestion in The
Sign of Four that Mary’s marriage to Watson will render her useless, the
difference being that in Doyle’s novel, this came after the closure of Mary’s
case. And as Sherlock and John rush away to confront Magnussen – that is,
to pursue Mary’s case – Mary essentially disappears. For the second time in
the episode, a resourceful woman is removed from the screen for the
duration of her time as a client. But in this instance, the difference between
the character as she appears in Sherlock and her original version in Doyle’s
text is much more conspicuous. Lady Smallwood’s absence in Sherlock can
be no greater than that of Lady Blackwell, since the latter never actually
appears in Doyle’s story. But in The Sign of Four, Mary Morstan, the
governess, accompanies Holmes and Watson on the first night of their
inquiries into her case and is a constant presence for four chapters, impress-
ing the detective and his friend with her intelligence and fortitude; in
Sherlock, Mary Watson, the former secret agent who can still shoot a hole
through a coin tossed in the air, might as well be comatose for the entire
time that Sherlock and John are pursuing her case. Mary reappears at the
end of the episode; however, by this point Magnussen is dead, so Mary
cannot be blackmailed and thus is no longer a client.10
Like Smallwood, Mary is pushed off screen while her case is underway,
only to reappear after its conclusion. In every instance, the female char-
acter who becomes Sherlock’s client is either kept out of sight entirely (the
Queen) or removed from sight during her time as a client (Smallwood and
Mary). All three are powerful women, and more specifically powerful
women who are in some way associated with the maintenance of order:
the Queen represents royal authority, Smallwood is a top politician, and
Mary a former CIA operative. Perhaps that is why they disappear. Doyle’s
stories show Holmes accepting help from several of his female clients, but
as governesses and music teachers none of them represent competition for
him as a detective. Sherlock’s female clients, however, certainly might have
been able to compete, but for the time that they are connected to Sherlock
as clients, they are kept safely out of sight.
52 B. TURNER
PROFESSIONAL WOMEN IN SHERLOCK

In this final section I argue that two other women in the series, Sergeant
Sally Donovan and Molly Hooper, while limited in their own development
as characters, are nevertheless very significant in the way they contribute to
the development of the narrative and of Sherlock’s character. Both are
shown to be skilled professionals who work alongside Sherlock in his
endeavors to solve crimes and catch criminals – they could thus be under-
stood as Sherlock’s colleagues. But, unsurprisingly given its treatment of
potentially competitive female clients, Sherlock initially imposes limits on
these female colleagues that make it difficult to consider them the male
detective’s competitors. Yet it does not do so by removing them from the
narrative; quite the contrary, in fact. Donovan emerges as the series’ most
enduring antagonist, and Molly is equally significant as a character whose
relationship with Sherlock at times represents that of the audience in the
way she observes and reacts to his behavior; furthermore, Molly plays a key
role in those moments that add depth to Sherlock’s character by revealing
that, contrary to the impression usually given, he can feel both remorse
and gratitude. Rather, the series limits Donovan and, in the first two
seasons at least, Molly by keeping their relationships with Sherlock at a
simplistic level and thereby presenting the two women as opposites:
Donovan hates Sherlock; Molly has a crush on him. In the third season,
however, Molly’s character and her relationship with Sherlock become
more complicated, as I explain at the end of this section.
Both these characters are introduced very early on – in the first few
scenes of the very first episode, “A Study in Pink.” The episode’s second
scene, of a Metropolitan Police press conference, quickly establishes
Sergeant Donovan as a representative of official law enforcement.
Although DI Greg Lestrade is the senior officer present and the one in
charge of investigating what at this point appear to be “serial suicides,”
Donovan is the first to speak, giving a description of the latest death. And
when Lestrade incautiously gives a sarcastic reply to a reporter’s question,
Donovan quietly reminds him the query came from the Daily Mail, a
tabloid newspaper that could and likely would create a scandal out of a
senior police officer’s flippant remark: this quickly establishes Donovan as
the more politically astute of the two officers. This scene is interjected with
cutaways showing the victims and hinting at the crucial connection
between them (in their final hours, all found themselves in need of a
taxi); besides this, it is notable for being the scene in which Sherlock
makes his entrance into the series, not in person, but through a pair of
anonymous texts to the reporters followed by another to Lestrade which
reads “You know where to find me. SH.” The way Donovan is shown
helping Lestrade deal with the press at the same time Sherlock offers to
help Lestrade solve the case suggests that the female sergeant is a signifi-
cant character who will compete with Sherlock for Lestrade’s attention.
Of course, significant characters are not always sympathetic, and this is
a case in point. Donovan is not merely present when Sherlock speaks – or
rather texts – his first word; she is also the first to respond when she twice
instructs the assembled reporters to ignore it. As the press conference
comes to an end, she tells Lestrade that he has to stop Sherlock from
sending such communications. So immediately Donovan is established as
not only antagonistic to Sherlock, but more specifically as intent on
silencing him. When Sherlock and John arrive at the scene of the fourth
apparent suicide, Donovan is reluctant to let Sherlock enter the peri-
meter and asserts that if she were heading the investigation, Sherlock
would have no part in it. Later, as John is leaving, Donovan makes it a
point to say that Sherlock is not a professional – that he does not get paid
for what she regards as his interference with police activity. She also tells
John that he cannot be Sherlock’s friend because the latter does not have
friends. Barely thirty minutes into the first episode, and already Donovan
has been shown attempting to disrupt both Sherlock’s involvement in
crime-solving and his friendship with John – the two central themes of
the series.
Donovan is thus in a sense Sherlock’s most consistent (and persistent)
antagonist throughout the series. She even goes so far as to tell John that
Sherlock is a psychopath who one day will move from solving crimes to
committing them. This evokes a comment made by Watson in Doyle’s The
Sign of Four: describing Holmes’s examination of a crime scene, Watson
writes, “So silent and furtive were his movements . . . that I could not but
think what a terrible criminal [Holmes] would have made had he turned
his energy and sagacity against the law instead of exerting them in its
defence” (161). But while this links Donovan to Doyle’s narrator,
Donovan’s idea about Sherlock’s criminal disposition has far more sinister
ramifications than Watson’s thoughts about Holmes. When Jim Moriarty
creates evidence to frame Sherlock in “The Reichenbach Fall,” Donovan
quickly convinces Lestrade of Sherlock’s culpability despite the inspector’s
apparent fondness for the consulting detective – an indication of
Lestrade’s professional respect for his sergeant.
54 B. TURNER
Sherlock’s reputation is cleared by the following season’s first episode,

but there is no evidence that Donovan regrets her mistake or feels remorse
for the role that she played in Sherlock’s supposed demise. When her co-
accuser, Anderson, becomes obsessed with the (seemingly fanciful) notion
that Sherlock is still alive, Lestrade tells him that this is his way of dealing
with the guilt he feels for his role in Sherlock’s suicide; Donovan is
conspicuously absent from this episode, however, meaning that we do
not see her reactions to Sherlock’s death. The beginning of the next
episode gives the impression that she was never bothered by it, even
after his reputation, which she helped to destroy, was restored: “The
Sign of Three” begins with a flashback to “Eighteen months ago” (i.e.,
not much more than six months after Sherlock’s supposed death), at
which point Donovan is shown maintaining her composure during the
Met’s lengthy pursuit of the Waters family bank robbers – in contrast to
Lestrade, who is reduced to kicking his car in frustration, and in even
greater contrast to Anderson, who has apparently lost his job.
Further flashbacks show that, as the Waters case drags on, Donovan
continues to keep her cool when Lestrade loses his, and in the end,
Donovan is the one who leads the arrest after Lestrade is called away by
another of Sherlock’s texts. Clearly, Donovan is a successful professional
woman, and as such she (together with Molly Hooper, as I argue below)
helps to fill the void left by the omission from Sherlock of such characters as
Violet Smith and Violet Hunter. This makes it somewhat problematic that
Donovan remains so unsympathetic: whereas Anderson’s remorse for the
part he played in discrediting Sherlock is so deep that he creates a club for
people who theorize Sherlock’s escape and anticipate his return – actions
that identify him with the series’ most devoted fans – Donovan’s animosity
toward Sherlock makes her a sort of anti-fan. Moreover, Donovan may be
despised by the audience not only for her own words and actions regard-
ing Sherlock, but also for Moriarty’s. The audience who loves Sherlock,
should, by a very basic logic, hate his arch-enemy. But Moriarty is brilliant,
slick, funny, and generally charming in so many of the same ways
as Sherlock (“You’re me,” Moriarty tell Sherlock just before shooting
himself in “The Reichenbach Fall”), that to love Sherlock is probably to
love Moriarty. And so Donovan may well absorb much of the antipathy
the audience would otherwise direct at the criminal mastermind.
But if Sergeant Donovan’s attitude toward Sherlock renders her unsym-
pathetic, Molly Hooper’s relationship with the detective endears her to
the audience. And whereas Donovan can be understood as an anti-fan,
Molly is quickly established as a proxy for the audience. Much as Donovan

is there when Sherlock’s first words show up on screen, Molly is present
when the detective first appears in person. Molly appears horrified when
she looks on as Sherlock beats a corpse with a riding crop, but whereas
Donovan’s objections to Sherlock’s participation in police investigations
seem petty, Molly’s reactions to Sherlock’s behavior in this moment are
what most viewers would experience if they witnessed such actions in real
life. Furthermore, Molly’s perspective in this shot – she is watching
Sherlock from the morgue’s observation room, looking at him through a
pane of glass – resembles that of the audience watching Sherlock on their
television screens. And of course Molly’s horror is tempered by her
obvious infatuation with Sherlock, something else she has in common
with quite a lot of Sherlock fans. So whereas Donovan is quickly established
as not only Sherlock’s antagonist but also a lightning rod for audience
disapproval, from its very start the series invites the audience not merely to
sympathize with Molly but actually to identify with her.
And while Molly might not be as poised on the job as Donovan (at least
not while Sherlock is around), she is clearly extremely talented in her
profession. Whereas Moriarty succeeds in discrediting Sherlock by playing
on Donovan’s suspicions about the detective, his scheme to destroy
Sherlock is ultimately derailed with the help of Molly’s skills as a morgue
technician: one professional woman almost gets Sherlock killed; the other
helps to save him. When Sherlock later tells Molly, “Moriarty slipped up.
He made a mistake. Because the one person he thought didn’t matter at all
to me was the one person that mattered the most. You made it all
possible,” it seems the audience is being warned not to overlook Molly’s
contribution (“The Empty Hearse”).
Not only does Sherlock go to Molly for help when he needs to fake his
death, he also creates a virtual Molly in his “mind palace” to help him
avoid a real death after being shot by Mary in “His Last Vow.” Since the
virtual Molly is joined by a virtual Mycroft and a virtual Moriarty, the
impression given is that Sherlock – subconsciously, at least – considers
Molly to be on a level with those two geniuses. Of course, it is Molly’s job,
as a morgue technician, to know about gunshot wounds, but the same
could be said for John Watson, the former army surgeon; yet it is a virtual
Molly, rather than a virtual John, that Sherlock’s mind calls upon for help.
Throughout the series, Molly is there not only when Sherlock is most
physically vulnerable, but also at those rare moments where his analytical
skills fail him. Indeed, one of these takes place in Molly’s office, when
56 B. TURNER
Moriarty makes his first appearance in the series, posing as Molly’s boy-
friend (“The Great Game”). But while Moriarty is fooling Molly by
“playing Jim from IT,” he is also fooling Sherlock by “playing gay”
(to quote his own words from the episode’s final scene): while Sherlock
thinks he sees Molly being deceived by a gay man posing as straight, he is
in fact himself being deceived by a (supposedly) straight man playing gay.
So although this scene initially seems to present Molly as easily fooled,
reflecting on it from the end of the episode allows the audience (and
perhaps Sherlock himself) to understand that Molly’s mistake actually
gives her something in common with the brilliant but, in this moment,
mistaken detective.
Molly is also at the center of an even more unusual scene in which
Sherlock not only comes up short in his analysis of visual clues but,
uncharacteristically, finds himself appalled by his own lack of social graces.
At Mrs. Hudson’s Christmas party in “A Scandal in Belgravia,” Sherlock
notices that one of the gifts in Molly’s bag is better wrapped than the
others and correctly deduces that it is for a romantic interest; but despite
clearly being aware of Molly’s feelings for him (as shown by the way he
uses them to manipulate her in “The Blind Banker”), he does not realize
that he is the intended recipient of the gift until he looks at the card, by
which point he has humiliated Molly in front of the whole room.
Immediately, Sherlock is mortified by what he has done and gives Molly
a rare apology – and an equally rare kiss. In “The Empty Hearse,” after
Molly has spent the day accompanying Sherlock and taking notes,
Sherlock gives her a second kiss, not as an apology this time, but as a
gesture of gratitude, an equally unusual sentiment for the detective.
Whether as a result of her actions or of Sherlock’s, Molly draws out
expressions of feelings from Sherlock that might otherwise remain hidden,
thus creating the impression that there is greater psychological depth to
his character.
Donovan and Molly are obviously at odds in their feelings for Sherlock,
but as I have shown, the oppositive relationship between them goes much
deeper than that. Donovan almost gets Sherlock killed; Molly helps save
his life (twice if we count the contribution of the virtual Molly in
Sherlock’s mind palace). Donovan falsely accuses Sherlock of a moral
failing; Molly is involved in one of the rare instances when Sherlock’s
analytical abilities fail him. Donovan accuses Sherlock of lacking empathy
(being a psychopath); Molly is the recipient of Sherlock’s most empathetic
gesture. Unfortunately, the way these two women occupy opposite ends
of a spectrum threatens to flatten them as characters: Molly’s undying

adoration, in the first two seasons, is as simple as Donovan’s utterly
antagonistic attitude toward Sherlock. By the first episode of season
three, however, Molly has reached a point where she is able to work
alongside Sherlock without more than the occasional blush, and by the
third episode she feels confident enough to demand (after delivering a
series of slaps to his face!) that he apologize to his friends for his drug use.
While their obvious professional success helps fill the void created by
the absence from Sherlock of the working women clients in Doyle’s origi-
nal stories (and the temporary disappearances from the screen of such
professionally successful female clients as the series provides), there is
something else that more problematically links Molly and Donovan to
Doyle’s Mary Sutherland, Helen Stoner, Violet Smith, and Violet Hunter.
As Barry McCrea notes, one of the most common crimes appearing in the
original Sherlock Holmes stories involves a father’s attempt to prevent his
daughter’s marriage and the subsequent transfer of control over her
inheritance (74). Sutherland’s predicament and Stoner’s are obvious
examples, but Smith’s and Hunter’s fit the pattern as well: Smith is forced
into a marriage with a man who covets her inheritance, a marriage that,
had it been lawful, would have prevented her union with her fiancé;
although Hunter has no plans to marry, her employer is using her to
prevent his daughter’s marriage. This pattern, in which a man attempts
to prevent a woman’s marriage, is reflected in Sherlock by the detective’s
relationships with both Molly and Donovan. Sherlock is aware that Molly
has a crush on him, and when he uses flirtation to manipulate her into
granting him access to her lab (“The Blind Banker”), he is encouraging
the infatuation. Unfortunately, this crush seems to get in the way of Molly
developing more reciprocal sexual relationships: although she claims to
have “moved on” when she starts dating Tom, this man is clearly a
Sherlock substitute Molly discards once it becomes obvious that he lacks
Sherlock’s intelligence.11 Sherlock likewise discourages Donovan’s sex life:
when they are first shown together, Sherlock attempts to humiliate
Donovan by crudely identifying the evidence of her sexual encounter
with Anderson (“A Study in Pink”). By deliberately prolonging Molly’s
crush and sexually shaming Donovan, Sherlock infantilizes both women
and thus fends off any threat they might pose as potential competition.
And although the “The Empty Hearse” shows that Molly has gained
sufficient confidence around Sherlock to spend a day working with him, it
only teases the audience with the idea that this could become a permanent
58 B. TURNER
relationship. While John is still reacting to the shock of his friend’s return,
Sherlock invites Molly to “solve cases” with him; when Molly accepts and
asks if she should take notes since that is what John does and she’s “being
John,” Sherlock corrects her and tells her that she is being herself – for a
moment, the audience can imagine that Molly is not just a stand-in, but
Sherlock’s new “colleague” (the term Sherlock used when introducing John
to Sally Donovan). Molly also demonstrates how useful she could be in
investigations when she determines that the skeleton in the Jack the Ripper
case is no more than six months old; however, this determination exposes
the case as a sham, undermining the significance of the whole scene. And
despite his assertion that Molly should be herself, Sherlock has been imagin-
ing John’s voice badgering him throughout the scene, and he even calls
Molly by John’s name as he is leaving. At the end of the day Sherlock tells
Molly, “You can’t do this again, can you?,” and clarifies that the whole
thing was simply his way of thanking her for helping him to fake his death.
John soon reassumes his old role: since his professional skills are not as sharp
as Molly’s (at least in Sherlock’s mind – as evidenced when it generates a
virtual Molly rather than a virtual John in “His Last Vow”), he presents no
threat as a competitor, and Molly is again safely confined to her lab.
I have shown how both the series generally and its main character impose
limits on female characters in ways that suggest an anxiety that they might
compete with the male detective. In light of this, Sherlock’s treatment of
Magnussen’s secretary, Janine Hawkins (Yasmine Akram) – he dates her and
even pretends to propose marriage as a way to gain access to Magnussen’s
office – which in isolation might seem shocking, even for Sherlock, instead
fits a well-established pattern. Instead of taking Janine into his confidence as
an accomplice, which might allow her to demonstrate detective skills of her
own, Sherlock manipulates and then discards her – once again, the threat of
female competition for the detective is averted. Nevertheless, Molly Hooper
and Sergeant Donovan affect the narrative trajectory and development of
Sherlock’s character in a way that few, if any, characters affect Holmes’s in
Doyle’s stories. However impressed Holmes (or the reader) is with Violet
Hunter or Mary Morstan, these characters have no more of an impact on
the detective than Mary Sutherland, Helen Stoner, or any of his male
clients: they simply provide him with interesting cases. In contrast, Molly
exposes capacities for remorse and gratitude in Sherlock, adding depth to
his character; moreover, she functions as a proxy for the audience. And after
Sally Donovan helps to ruin Sherlock’s reputation, Molly gives him the
opportunity to reclaim it.
NOTES
1. I refer to the detective and his doctor friend from Sherlock as “Sherlock” and
“John” respectively; I refer to Doyle’s characters as “Holmes” and “Watson.”
2. This chapter was completed prior to the original broadcast of Sherlock,
Season Four.
3. To be fair, Lavigne might have argued differently if she had been writing
after the third season of Sherlock was aired.
4. See, for instance, Elizabeth Jane Evans.
5. See especially Marjorie Garber (191–96).
6. Derek Longhurst does more to acknowledge the significance of Doyle’s
treatment of women in the Holmes stories, but he suggests that the more
impressive of the detective’s female clients are only the “few exceptions” to
the rule of passivity and gullibility established by the rest; however, even
though there are several characters to consider, Longhurst only gives one
example from each of his two categories, and omits mention of Holmes’s
own positive evaluation of Mary Morstan’s abilities. Nor does he seem to
take into account that many of Holmes’s male clients also seem passive and
gullible (63–65).
7. Holmes’s clients in the second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four, and
in five of the twelve stories in the first collection, The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes, are female.
8. Quotations from the television episodes were made with reference to the
transcripts by Ariane DeVere.
9. “‘I have seen those symptoms before,’ said Holmes, throwing his cigarette
into the fire. ‘Oscillation upon the pavement always means an affaire de
cœur’” (290).
10. Longhurst argues that, in Doyle, the male bonding between Holmes and
Watson “excludes and eventually kills off Mary” (63). The removal of the
twenty-first-century Mary from the climax of “His Last Vow” can also be
understood as allowing the relationship between Sherlock and John to reclaim
center stage after the intimate scene that just took place between the doctor and
his wife. The television episode at least brings back Mary at the end, but whether
Sherlock’s version of the character will outlive Doyle’s remains to be seen.
11. In her examination of Doyle’s “The Doctors of Hoyland,” Sparks argues
that the talented and dedicated female doctor in the story usurps and
emasculates the male colleague who falls in love with her (139–40).
Although neither Molly nor Sherlock are doctors, they have overlapping
skills and professional interests, so Molly’s infatuation with Sherlock (and his
total lack of romantic interest in her) might be read as a protection against
the anxiety expressed in “The Doctors of Hoyland.” See Balaka Basu for
more on how Sherlock manifests late-Victorian anxieties.
60 B. TURNER
WORKS CITED
Basu, Balaka. “Sherlock and the (Re)Invention of Modernity.” In Sherlock and
Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series. Ed. Louisa Ellen Stein and
DeVere, Ariane [Callie Sullivan]. “Ariane DeVere.” LiveJournal. 9 Apr. 2012.
Web. 9 Jun. 2016.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. 2 vols. New York: Barnes &
Noble Books, 2003.
Evans, Elizabeth Jane. “Shaping Sherlocks: Institutional Practice and the
Adaptation of Character.” Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the
BBC Series. Ed. Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2012. 102–17.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New
York: Routledge, 1992.
Lavigne, Carlen. “The Noble Bachelor and the Crooked Man: Subtext and
Sexuality in the BBC’s Sherlock.” Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays
on New Adaptations. Ed. Lynnette Porter. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.
13–23.
Longhurst, Derek. “Sherlock Holmes: Adventures of an English Gentleman
1887–1894.” Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure. Ed. Derek Longhurst.
London: Unwin-Hyman, 1989. 51–66.
McCrea, Barry. In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens,
Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.
Sparks, Tabitha. The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices. Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2009.
Benedick Turner is Associate Professor of English at St. Joseph’s College, New

York. He is the author of an article on female masculinity in Tennyson’s “Gareth
and Lynette,” and his scholarship focuses on nineteenth-century literature, gender,
Sherlock Holmes, as well as Sherlock and other film and television adaptations and
reimaginings.
“I, Too, Mourn the Loss”: Mrs. Hudson
and the Absence of Sherlock Holmes
Charlotte Beyer
INTRODUCTION: REIMAGINING MRS. HUDSON

In this chapter, I examine representations of Mrs. Hudson, Sherlock
Holmes’s landlady at 221B Baker Street,1 and the absence of Holmes in
recent televised and textual adaptations and recastings of Doyle’s work.2
My discussion centers on the portrayal of Mrs. Hudson in the BBC
Sherlock series, specifically the episodes “The Reichenbach Fall” from
series two and “The Empty Hearse” from series three, and a crime short
story by the contemporary American writer Margaret Maron, entitled
“The Adventure of the Concert Pianist.”3 Mrs. Hudson is the focus for
this examination of detection, femininity, and ageing in literature and
popular culture. The title quotation of this chapter, “I, too, mourn the
loss” from Maron’s story, reflects these topics. The phrase sums up Mrs.
Hudson’s feelings of ambivalence, as she deplores the absence of Sherlock,
yet admits to feeling liberated by his absence and empowered to take on a
detective role.4 The chapter argues that these contrasting dimensions of
absence and presence are central to the texts’ exploration of cultural
anxieties about detection, ageing, and femininity, focusing on the changes
C. Beyer (*)
School of Liberal and Performing Arts, University of Gloucestershire,
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
e-mail: cbeyer@glos.ac.uk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_4
62 C. BEYER
to the detective narrative and plot resulting from Mrs. Hudson taking the
role of detective or enjoying increased visibility. This investigation also
includes a consideration of the contrasting modes of film and fiction, and
connects with wider recent critical debates around the lack of representa-
tion of complex older female characters in popular culture.5 Josephine
Dolan and Estella Tincknell have argued for the need for a “recuperation
from invisibility” of “aging femininity” in literature, popular culture, and
the media (xxi). I argue that both Sherlock and Maron through their
differing modes of representation and contrasting use of historical settings
point to the continued diminution or invisibility of older female characters
in popular culture, a central issue in the unresolved tensions within con-
temporary recastings of Sherlock Holmes.6
MRS. HUDSON AND THE MARGINALIZATION OF AGEING

The examination of Mrs. Hudson’s character highlights gender-political
questions raised by contemporary revisions and adaptations of Holmes,
and problematizes the process of establishing a relationship – complex,
fraught, or ironic – with the canon of past Holmes representations by
Doyle.7 Sherlock and “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist” both posi-
tion themselves in relation to the Holmes canon, albeit using contrasting
strategies to negotiate that challenge. Sherlock has been immensely impor-
tant in underlining the continued allure of Holmes, his longevity as a
character, and the symbolic investment placed in him (Stein and Busse 3).
However, according to Bran Nicol, the Sherlock series also illustrates the
changes to and evolutions of the canon brought about by contemporary
reimaginings, changing canonical narratives “into a variety of ‘crime thril-
lers’” (125). Both Sherlock and “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist”
negotiate this complicated relationship to the canon and history through
the portrayal of the detective figure and the characters which surround
him. Commenting on the employment of historical settings and modes,
Cora Kaplan sees neo-Victorian echoes as “a discourse through which
both the conservative and progressive elements of Anglophone cultures
reshaped their ideas of the past, present and future” (4).8 Both BBC’s
Sherlock and Maron’s “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist” contribute
to this critical engagement with the past. The ways in which they do so
differ in setting and period but also in narrative emphasis. Sherlock features
a contemporary setting, which in many ways is crucial to its success and
appeal, rendering Sherlock Holmes current and up-to-date in his
“I, TOO, MOURN THE LOSS”: MRS. HUDSON AND THE ABSENCE . . . 63
methods, attuned to information technology, a twenty-first-century male

detective who appeals to a wide viewing audience and diverse fan groups.
In contrast, in Maron’s “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist” the
Victorian setting is used to emphasize the restrictive nature of gender
roles during that time, foregrounding the ways in which women were
trapped in patterns of dependence and marginalization.9 Those roles and
positions of subservience place women in situations of danger and exploi-
tation, and reinforce their dependence on men. In the BBC series,
Sherlock Holmes has been translated into a contemporary version reflect-
ing a current social setting through clothing, social media, and sexual and
cultural diversity, whereas in Maron, the Victorian period dimensions
highlight the damaging nature of gender stereotypes and their impact in
this story’s representations of detection. These pertinent gender-political
issues and contradictions converge upon the character of Mrs. Hudson,
and are signaled through her ambiguous position within the texts.
Both the Sherlock show and Maron’s story position themselves in rela-
tion to gender and the past through configurations of femininity and
ageing. This shared focus is important, as it draws attention to current
critical debates about the way in which we represent old age and agency in
contemporary Western culture. Debating the marginalization that ageing
brings, critics insist on the need to rethink conventional perceptions about
old age and femininity, particularly in relation to what Brian J. Worsfold
calls “Stereotypical perceptions of female beauty [and] ageist clichés about
elderly women” (xvi). Worsfold argues that the process of ageing impacts
negatively on conceptions of older women, individually and in society
more widely (xvii). Addressing media representations, Susan Hillier and
Georgia M. Barrow further observe that, “Television media consistently
underrepresent older women” (51). This underrepresentation is exacer-
bated by the way in which older female characters are trivialized when they
do appear in shows. This issue of trivialization is highlighted by the
authors of a recent BBC report, entitled “Serving All Ages: The View of
the Audience and Experts.” In this report, the researchers found that:
“The lack of representation of middle and older-aged women on television
was a key issue for audience participants” (White et al. 46). In their
discussion of the views of survey participants, the authors of the report
also stated that: “different ages are sometimes at best presented as slightly
humorous but exaggerated caricatures and at worst as negative stereo-
types” (63).10 Commenting on representations of ageing, Josephine
Dolan and Estella Tincknell speak of the motivation behind the study,
64 C. BEYER
namely: “the hiatus between the visibility of aging femininity in contem-

porary circuits of culture and its marginalisation in cultural theory” (ix).
This “hiatus” impacting on the representation of ageing and femininity
has also been noted by Imelda Whelehan, who states that the older woman
on television is “rendered invisible, not purely to the desiring male gaze,
but also to the eye of feminist critics” (170).
With the focus traditionally on the male central characters (Sherlock
Holmes and Dr. Watson) and their interaction, Mrs. Hudson is often
marginalized or diminished both in critical discourse and in recent adapta-
tions and reimaginings of Doyle. In some cases, this long-standing ten-
dency to trivialize her character has been aggravated. As Lynnette Porter
explains in her discussion of the cutting of Mrs. Hudson’s lines in scenes
from the American PBS televised version of Sherlock, the decision to cut
lines minimizes and trivializes Mrs. Hudson’s character and her contribu-
tion, thereby reinforcing her marginalization as a minor figure in the
show: “When her lines are cut from scenes in the PBS version, Mrs.
Hudson truly seems to be only a background character who is no more
useful than to make tea or periodically check on her tenants” (118). Such
trivial and domestic pursuits as tea making and housekeeping are identified
with traditional patterns of subservient feminine activity and erase auton-
omous agency from Mrs. Hudson’s character. Other critics too have
discussed the portrayal of Mrs. Hudson as an insignificant character. A
recent media studies handbook discusses the presentation of femininity in
Sherlock, and suggests that Mrs. Hudson is described in “minor character”
terms. The authors state: “The series has been criticised for perpetuating
gender stereotypes, as the central characters (Sherlock Holmes,
Dr Watson, Moriarty and Detective Inspector Lestrade) are male whereas
the few female characters tend to provide only comic relief (as with the
ditsy landlady Mrs. Hudson) or sex appeal on the whole” (Bateman et al.
148). Based on the Sherlock series, these observations about the margin-
alization of Mrs. Hudson are well-founded. However, as Bateman et al.
demonstrate, terms such as “ditsy”, “comic”, or “sexy” threaten to perpe-
tuate one-dimensional female stereotypes defined along the lines of age
and sexual attractiveness.
However, in the texts that I examine in this chapter, these assumptions
around privilege and visibility are scrutinized and challenged through the
figure of Mrs. Hudson. Using Mrs. Hudson as an alternative focal point in
the role of a Dr. Watson figure is a tactic some writers have employed in the
past, as Malcah Effron shows. She argues: “While the dominant method of
imagining Watson maintains Holmes’s single-sex pairing, some twentieth

and twenty-first century authors have re-imagined Watson, or at least the
Watson-figure, as a woman.” Erisman also examines the alternative casting
of Mrs. Hudson in recent reimaginings, stating that these may:
offer a woman’s-eye-view of the Baker Street ménage, and go on to postu-

late a range of female counterparts to the Holmes–Watson partnership.
From these works come alternative views of British society and human
relations that offer intriguing speculations about the elements that influence
general views of social roles and social issues. (Quoted in King and Klinger)
However, my specific concern in this chapter is to examine those repre-

sentations of Mrs. Hudson that question or challenge the Holmes–Watson
role pattern, rather than what Ann McClellan calls a “genderswap,” or
Watson taking Holmes’s part in detection processes.11 An utterly familiar
and instantly recognizable character to us, Mrs. Hudson is an established
part of the set-up in Sherlock. However, as James O’Leary states, “the fact
is she is barely in the Canon and we know next to nothing about her . . . she
is unnamed and unseen”12 (O’Leary 2014) and regarded as a minor char-
acter. Furthermore, Mrs. Hudson’s title serves as an indicator of her marital
and social status. This social status dimension would have been particularly
significant at the time of the publication of Doyle’s Holmes narratives.
O’Leary points out that: “she is Mrs. Hudson but nowhere is it stated she
was a widow or ever married. ‘Mrs.’ could have been an honorific.”
(O’Leary 2014) Thus, Mrs. Hudson poses particular challenges in terms
of the way in which we perceive her social and sexual status, embodiment
and overall contribution to the stories, especially in terms of agency and
detection.13 This is particularly pertinent in those contemporary texts which
explore canonical Sherlock Holmes narratives that center on his agency,
powers, and intelligence. Mrs. Hudson’s character serves as the prism
through which alternative expectations and possibilities can be perceived
and conceptualized in Sherlock and Maron and their portrayals of femininity,
detection, and crime.
SHERLOCK: “AT MY TIME OF LIFE”

BBC’s Sherlock has been instrumental in adapting Doyle’s stories and
reinventing the figure of Sherlock Holmes for the contemporary age.14
Sherlock has given impetus to fresh critical and popular debate on the
66 C. BEYER
representation of gender, sexuality, and representation, as seen in the work

of critics such as Stein and Busse, Ue and Cranfield, Nicol, Lavigne, and
Vanacker. According to these critics, the series itself, especially the char-
acter of Sherlock, has been devised to foreground and articulate those
aspects of his character that have previously been silenced, such as the
homoerotic element.15 Furthermore, Nicol demonstrates that the empha-
sis in the BBC production has been to foreground dimensions which,
according to the producer Mark Gatiss, had themselves slid into the
background in previous, overly “reverential” portrayals of Holmes
(125). In contrast, Nicol states that Gatiss’s Sherlock foregrounds “the
brilliance of the ‘Holmes method’, the relationship between Holmes and
Watson, and, most of all, the peculiarities of Holmes’s personality” (125).
However, although Sherlock’s re-envisioning in many respects has been
far-reaching, it has not been extended to include challenges to stereotypes
of ageing femininity, specifically those pertaining to Mrs. Hudson. Mrs.
Hudson is marginalized from the main detection plot in a number of ways,
due to her gender and age. This marginalization is reflected in the series’
depiction of location, financial status, sexual attraction, science, and detec-
tion. Mrs. Hudson drifts in and out of the main space – Sherlock’s space –
the role of landlady positioning her on the edge of the plot, admiring
Sherlock and John, the male heroes at the center of the narrative.
Commenting on the show’s focus on male relationships, Carlen Lavigne
finds that:
Holmes’ primary relationships are with men: his friendship with John
Watson, his collegiality with Lestrade, his feud with Mycroft, and his rivalry
with Moriarty. While he may maintain a soft spot for Mrs. Hudson, she is a
sideline mothering presence at best; she has no role in solving mysteries, and
her desires and needs are not what motivate him. (18)
This assessment supports my argument regarding the marginal nature of

Mrs. Hudson in relation to the central masculine detective heroes
Sherlock and John. The word “sideline” further emphasizes her margin-
ality, both within the relationship and in relation to detection and crime
solving. However, this position on the sidelines could also be seen as an
ambiguous one which allows Mrs. Hudson the ability to reclaim her own
space, in the midst of having it “invaded” by others.
Furthermore, Mrs. Hudson is overtly excluded from the sphere of
science which Sherlock, John Watson, and Molly share. Although Molly
is portrayed as an accomplished female scientist in Sherlock, the representa-

tion of science and gender remains a generational issue within the show. In
Sherlock, the closest Mrs. Hudson gets to the scientific dimension of
detection is when she looks into Sherlock’s refrigerator and finds a bag
full of human thumbs in “A Scandal in Belgravia” (Sutcliffe 2012). Her
horrified response is contrasted with Sherlock’s own propensity for
rational and analytical thinking, and his love of scientific discovery and
evidence-based detection. Thus excluded from romantic or scientific
engagements, Mrs. Hudson remains on the margins of the detection
plot in Sherlock, limited in her agency and ability to participate or con-
tribute to solving crimes or unraveling mysteries. Mrs. Hudson is clearly
aligned with the realm of tradition and British national character, and also
with conventional attitudes and the status quo, as O’Leary has also noted.
“Mrs. Hudson leave Baker Street? England would fall,” exclaims Sherlock
incredulously in “A Scandal in Belgravia.” Mrs. Hudson’s association with
the setting of Baker Street underlines her identification with permanence
and home, emphasizing her character’s pseudo-maternal role. The phrase
“England would fall,” furthermore, suggests the close alignment of the
character with the nation state, and traditional Englishness and values, an
association which her age demographic serves to underline. The ominous
motif of the “fall” is echoed later in the “Reichenbach Fall” episode,
posing a threat to the permanence Mrs. Hudson represents, proposing
that neither femininity nor Englishness are fixed constructions, hence the
symbolic investment in Mrs. Hudson as a signifier of permanence in the
face of flux.
The financial status afforded to Mrs. Hudson by her London property
ownership does not translate into actual authority being ascribed to her
within the narrative. The lack of explicit acknowledgment within the show
of Mrs. Hudson’s financial status suggests that age and gender remain the
determining factors in assigning her a marginal status within the show’s
detection plot. A Radio Times feature on Sherlock illustrates these pro-
blems very clearly. Dated January 2012, it examines the show’s female
characters, but through the lens and vocabulary of conventional female
heterosexual attractiveness, describing the female characters in Sherlock as
“the Baker Street babes” in its title. The use of the term “babes” has the
adverse effect of foregrounding the perceived sexual attractiveness of the
female characters while diminishing their stature and gravitas in the show,
while at the same time shoring up and embellishing the male detective
characters. Mrs. Hudson is included in the posse of “babes” because of her
68 C. BEYER
“love” for Sherlock (not her physical attractiveness) in the following

terms: “Meet the women who love Sherlock Holmes” (Radio Times).
The discursive construction of the women’s “love” as a one-way street
highlights the gender-political inequality innate in their relationship with
Sherlock. Mrs. Hudson’s position in Sherlock is further complicated by her
age (O’Leary 2014). These aspects are perceived to render her character
ineffectual or even invisible within the heterosexual romance plot sug-
gested by the “babes in love” discourse. Such media discourses continue
to govern the construction of the female characters and their positioning
in relation to Sherlock within the series.
Sherlock promotes these ideas through the physical appearance and
specific embodiment of femininity of Mrs. Hudson. In Sherlock, Mrs.
Hudson is depicted as a physically petite, non-threatening elderly
woman, who gives the impression – through her voice and intonation, as
well as her visual appearance – of being somewhat frail and vulnerable. She
is also portrayed as an ageing woman for whom sexual activity is no longer
relevant. Her sexuality is further diminished through the portrayal of her
reacting prudishly, an allusion to stereotypical conceptions of ageing
individuals. Mrs. Hudson protests when she overhears The Woman’s
sexually suggestive text message alerts on Sherlock’s phone, reminding
Sherlock of her age and presumed narrow-mindedness with the phrase “‘at
my time of life’.” Mrs. Hudson also employs this phrase to underscore her
(and the viewer’s) perception of herself as aged and uninterested in
detection. This reflects the assertion by Susan Hogan and Lorna Warren
that: “the limited images that are popularly available typically present older
people as either diminutive, dependent, and frail, or as ageing ‘positively’
and belying their physical age” (331). As Lynnette Porter argues,
although the BBC series presents Mrs. Hudson as “astute and discerning”
(118), she fundamentally comes across as unadventurous and risk-averse; a
“homebody” (118) who is uninterested in detection. These qualities all
serve to portray Mrs. Hudson in accordance with stereotypical assump-
tions about ageing women.
Sherlock constructs a particular visual focus on Mrs. Hudson’s face, her
body language and clothing, her looks and the fragility of her voice. These
visual clues shape the viewer’s expectations of her character and person-
ality. Mrs. Hudson’s physical frailty is foregrounded on several occasions
in Sherlock, a factor which renders her emergence as a detective figure in
her own right all the more implausible. In “The Reichenbach Fall,” an
episode from Sherlock series two, Sherlock uses danger to Mrs. Hudson as
an excuse to lure John Watson away from the hospital. In the episode,
John receives a phone call, telling him that Mrs. Hudson has been shot
and is dying. “Doesn’t she mean anything to you?” John asks accusingly.
Sherlock stays seated in his chair, stating he needs to think, and asserting:
“Alone is what I have. Alone protects me.” “No, friends protect people,”
John retorts, upon leaving the room and rushing off to see Mrs. Hudson.
The theme of absence is powerfully evoked in this exchange, and fore-
shadows later scenes featuring John Watson and Mrs. Hudson by them-
selves. After Sherlock’s fall and presumed death, we see Mrs. Hudson
accompanying John Watson to Sherlock’s grave, where they stand
together side by side, looking at his gravestone. She walks away, as John
remains at the grave, uttering those poignant lines, “One more miracle,
Sherlock, for me. Don’t be dead.” Her act of turning away is intended to
allow John some physical and mental “space” alone to grieve at Sherlock’s
graveside and it emphasizes the quality of emotional intelligence which is
associated with Mrs. Hudson’s character. However, as we shall see, this
quality is less pronounced in Sherlock, when compared to Maron’s story.
The replaying of Sherlock’s faked death at the beginning of the series
three episode, “The Empty Hearse,” deliberately toys with the viewer’s
expectations of Sherlock’s absence. The meticulous re-treading of spec-
ulations and details of how Sherlock faked his death further emphasizes
the status of the various characters within the narrative – with the primary
focus on Sherlock and John Watson, Molly playing a fleeting romantic
interest, and Mrs. Hudson absent. In “The Empty Hearse,” the first clip of
John Watson by Sherlock’s grave depicts him with a woman joining him
and standing by his side as they face the gravestone together. This image
further strengthens the experience of Sherlock’s absence, and suggests that
female figures are displacing him. Later in the same episode, John
Watson’s continued familiarity with 221B Baker Street is evident in the
way in which he lets himself in through the front door in “The Empty
Hearse,” creating continuity between the present moment, the past, and
the absent Holmes. This moment sets up John Watson’s encounter with
Mrs. Hudson. John Watson pauses outside her door, hesitant, sighing
deeply, evidently displaying all the signs of a guilty conscience. This, then,
prepares the viewer for an important scene featuring the two characters,
constructed around their shared grief at the absence of Sherlock, and their
attempt to rebuild their relationship following his death.
The episode “The Empty Hearse” most starkly emphasizes the effort of
detection in the absence of Sherlock. Through his absence, the character
70 C. BEYER
of Mrs. Hudson emerges more clearly, as she is observed having conversa-

tions with other characters and playing a greater part, initially at least. John
finally goes to see Mrs. Hudson following Sherlock’s death, and to deal
with his own inability to confront the home that they once shared. In the
episode, Mrs. Hudson opens the door, and looks at John quizzically. The
viewer realizes that John Watson’s newly grown moustache is the reason
for her quizzical look. Mrs. Hudson’s hurt and reproach is visually evident
in the next clip featuring the two in the kitchen having tea, when she
angrily slams Watson’s teacup down on the table in front of him, then
walks away. The filming and angle of this sequence is a central illustration
of the way her character is marginalized and her emotion trivialized. Her
anger about John Watson’s abandonment is treated comically. The slam-
ming down is filmed, not from the perspective of Mrs. Hudson, but from
that of John, and her face is left out of the shot. In this scene, John’s male-
identified perspective minimizes and trivializes female expressions of anger
by rendering them comical. Mrs. Hudson herself is invisible, and the
slamming of teacups is the only indication of her physical presence and
of her responses. This scene demonstrates the anxiety in Sherlock around
Mrs. Hudson and (in)visibility, highlighting the reluctance to portray her
as a complex character, and the continued inadmissibility of the ageing
woman and female anger. Mrs. Hudson and John have a tense conversa-
tion about forgetfulness and omissions. She reproaches him for his silence
and absence: “I’m not your mother, I have no right to expect it. But just
one phone call, John. Just one phone call.” She adds, “After all we went
through.” Mrs. Hudson’s pleading voice and visible emotional neediness
serve as a contrast to the feisty and capable Mrs. Hudson portrayed in
Maron’s short story. Mrs. Hudson is unable to even mention Sherlock’s
name, drawing attention to the unspoken and unspeakable shared burden
of loss and grief that they are both shouldering.
Without Sherlock there and haunted by his absence, the two characters
are left with only tea-drinking and regret, and nothing important to talk
about except John Watson’s impending nuptials. Answering John
Watson’s implicit question, Mrs. Hudson explains that she could not
face letting the flat again. No reason is provided; her emotional attach-
ment to her tenant provides the explanatory narrative supporting her
decision. Here, Mrs. Hudson’s emotional investment in Sherlock and
her need for his continued symbolic presence in the flat supersede any
financial incentive: the need to preserve the flat as a shrine to Sherlock in
his absence is the priority. In their conversation regarding John’s
intentions to marry, Mrs. Hudson is again consigned to a maternal role, as

she coos enthusiastically at John’s marriage plans as a mother might to her
son in traditional portrayals. Mrs. Hudson appears to have no interest in
undertaking detective work or in any of the information stored in
Sherlock’s archives. However, instead of interpreting Mrs. Hudson’s
seeming lack of interest in detection as an indication that she is “ditsy”
(Bateman et al. 148), her age, appearance, and attire render her incon-
spicuous or invisible. This invisibility allows her to observe events from the
margins, and to participate while guarding and withholding her own
private thoughts and personal history. Turning now to Maron’s revision-
ary tale, it is evident that Mrs. Hudson plays more than a background role.
She is the first-person narrator of the story and her perspective and
perceptions are central to its unfolding.
MARON: WHOSE “ADVENTURE”?

Maron’s “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist” presents an interesting
contrast to Sherlock. Firstly, Maron’s story demands a different, more
intensely literary language-focused engagement with its content and
representational strategies. Secondly, it is set in the Victorian age, reflect-
ing the historical time when Doyle devised the tales, as opposed to the self-
consciously contemporary setting of Sherlock. These dimensions also serve
to draw attention to Maron’s construction of Mrs. Hudson as the detec-
tive. Commenting on Doyle’s detective character and its historical setting,
Hadley notes: “Doyle’s creation of Sherlock Holmes in his stories of the
late 1880s formalized the genre conventions of detective fiction, most
obviously as related to the figure of the detective” (64). Hadley highlights
the idea and function of the detective as central to crime fiction. It is
exactly the centrality of this character and its gender-political construction
that makes the study of Maron’s recasting of Mrs. Hudson’s character so
compelling. Maron’s employment of a Victorian setting and narrative
mode introduces an element of period pastiche so often seen in adapta-
tions and reimaginings of Sherlock Holmes. The period setting and nar-
rative mode have wide-ranging implications for the portrayal of female
characters within that setting and its social and cultural context, in parti-
cular Mrs. Hudson. Maron’s Victorian setting enables the story to both
expose and critically assess latter-day restrictions placed on women’s lives
and conduct, thereby highlighting issues surrounding female agency and
ageing through the contrasts that it invites. As Hadley states: “Written in
72 C. BEYER
one period, but evoking another, historical novels always occupy a com-
plex position in relation to the present and the past” (5).16 Maron’s text
enables the contemporary reader to engage critically with the historical
dimensions of the Sherlock Holmes narratives, and to reflect on the past
and its social and cultural implications for women’s agency, including
detective activity. Thus, in “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist,” the
narrative strategy of role reversal highlights gender-political questions
raised by the portrayal of women in the canonical texts up to and including
recent adaptations such as Sherlock.
“The Adventure of the Concert Pianist” is predicated on absence,
specifically the absence of Holmes, and the opening of the story underlines
this motif, prompting a crisis scenario from the story’s outset that Mrs.
Hudson is required to negotiate while struggling to realize her own visi-
bility and agency. Arriving to see Mrs. Hudson following Holmes’s death,
in a scene that mirrors Sherlock, Dr. Watson is still visibly mourning his wife
Mary’s passing (Maron 233). However, absence also functions to initiate
alternative perspectives. Acknowledging the death of Sherlock Holmes,
but foregrounding her own emotional priorities, Mrs. Hudson recalls
how observant Holmes used to be of any decorative changes to her domes-
tic sphere, whereas Dr. Watson, upon walking into her parlor, only per-
ceives the lack of physical change.17 He fails to acknowledge the change in
her, merely stating that “nothing has changed here” (233). Mrs. Hudson
and her residence represent permanence and presence. However, com-
menting on the “emotional hardship” of losing Holmes, Mrs. Hudson
states: “I, too, mourn the loss, but turning my house into a memorial is
more than I can bear” (235). This important sentence demonstrates Mrs.
Hudson’s ambivalence about the figure of Holmes continuing to com-
mand such physical and symbolic significance in her space. Mrs. Hudson’s
insistence on the validity of her own emotional response, and on moving
beyond passive grief to reclaim her space, is central to her energy and sense
of personal agency. Mrs. Hudson’s comment is aimed at Mycroft Holmes,
whose continued insistence that his brother’s possessions and rented rooms
be left untouched conflicts with her wish to reclaim her personal living
space and identity without Holmes (235). The emphasis on Mrs. Hudson’s
intellectual and physical agency represents a notable contrast to the physical
frailty and non-threatening vulnerability of her character in Sherlock. These
mental and physical qualities are also central to the depiction of female
detective activity, as we shall see.
In Maron’s story, the absence of Holmes offers an opportunity for new

departures for the remaining characters, and, importantly, for detective
work without Holmes. This is when the important changes in Mrs.
Hudson become apparent. As Dr. Watson admits to “miss[ing] the adven-
turing” and confesses that “medicine is so much duller than detection”
(236), the pair are interrupted by the sudden and unannounced arrival of a
young woman, who turns out to be Mrs. Hudson’s niece, Elizabeth
(236). On seeing her again so unexpectedly, Mrs. Hudson recollects
how, once during her younger years, Elizabeth herself assisted Sherlock
Holmes in solving one of his cases. Mrs. Hudson’s recollections are
important in several respects. They introduce the reader to the theme
and practice of female detective activity, thereby establishing the story’s
central preoccupation and making this theme part of the storytelling and
personal experience of the main character. Furthermore, Mrs. Hudson’s
recollection serves the purpose of portraying female detective characters
from a range of age groups, notably girls and ageing women who are often
depicted as victims in crime fiction rather than detectives solving crime.18
However, as Dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson learn, having assisted Sherlock
Holmes as a girl, it is now Elizabeth who requires urgent help. Married to
a promising young composer and concert pianist, and traveling with him
on tour in England, Elizabeth has found herself suffering from some
unidentifiable but serious malady, and suspects poisoning. As Elizabeth
recounts her story, Mrs. Hudson begins to take on Holmesian manner-
isms, including his impatience with people rambling on. She requests of
her niece, “Please come to the point, Elizabeth” (239). This intervention
signals an important shift in the narrative, as Mrs. Hudson takes on an
active, inquiring, investigative role. Privately reflecting to herself on Dr.
Watson’s deductive powers, and her own assessment of the subtler and
more lucid insights of women in detection, Mrs. Hudson concludes: “I
would not be so bold as to tell him that in one or two of those accounts
Mr Holmes seemed to go around his elbow to reach his thumb whereas a
woman would have gone directly across the palm” (240). The private
nature of Mrs. Hudson’s reflection is signaled by the parenthesis sur-
rounding it, along with her acknowledgment that she would not have
the audacity to speak her mind on this matter. However, her subversive
personal thoughts on the mental adroitness and directness of women
constitute an important challenge to male authority, including that of
Holmes. Her subversive humor and astute assessment of her own
74 C. BEYER
strengths further underline her central role in the narrative and emphasize
her emergence as the authority and the real detective figure.
As in Sherlock, Maron’s story interrogates the role of science. The
murder plot foregrounds the function of science in Sherlock Holmes,
but furthermore uses the motif of science to explore the contrast between
scientific and affective discourses, and to expose the representations of
female victimhood in crime fiction. Dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson agree to
help Elizabeth who suspects her husband of trying to harm her (241).
Resorting to scientific measures, and in the absence of Sherlock Holmes,
Dr. Watson takes on the task of consulting his papers and notes on
poisons. These confirm suspicions that Elizabeth is a victim of cyanide
poisoning which is being carried out in a series of attacks to emulate the
onset of illness.19 As the pair set about solving the case, Mrs. Hudson is
struck by a sense of familiarity, but also notices the absence in their midst
where Holmes used to be. Dr. Watson spends the night in Sherlock
Holmes’s old rooms, which leads Mrs. Hudson to reflect: “It was almost
like old times” (249), the word “almost” drawing attention to the absence
of Holmes. When Elizabeth is taken to a Harley Street doctor for her
ailment, the marginal role of Mrs. Hudson in the “official” detection
process is emphasized, and the centrality of Dr. Watson and other male
authority figures is underlined (249). As in BBC’s Sherlock, the represen-
tation of science challenges the gendering of knowledge and scientific
discourse. Science is depicted as a privileged male discourse which works
by exclusion – the exclusion of the untrained Mrs. Hudson. Examining the
representation of science in Maron’s “The Adventure of the Concert
Pianist,” we thus observe a similar division of values across gender lines
as in Sherlock. However, emotional intelligence and intuition play a much
more prominent role in Maron. Behind the scenes, Mrs. Hudson carries
out the affective work of crime solving, employing her skills of intuitive
insight and emotional intelligence. Unbeknown to Dr. Watson and her
niece, Mrs. Hudson has already confronted the would-be murderer Mrs.
Manning, as she attempted to flee the country and escape criminal
charges. The story closes with Mrs. Hudson’s thoughts as she ponders
the reason why she did not hand in Mrs. Manning, the would-be mur-
derer, to the police. This reveals an ethical dimension, as Mrs. Hudson
admits to herself: “As a young widow, I too had once yearned for what I
could not attain” (251). Mrs. Hudson’s admission of the emotional
identification she felt reminds us that the female detective may feel a
sense of identification with the female criminal grown out of a shared
experience of gender oppression and marginalization. Furthermore,

within the Victorian society portrayed in the story, she remains dependent
on a male companion taking the lead in detection.
Two central textual and thematic concerns distinguish Maron’s story
from Sherlock – namely narrative perspective and sisterhood. In “The
Adventure of the Concert Pianist,” the focus on appearance and visual
markers of femininity and decency are absent in descriptions of Mrs.
Hudson, because she is narrating her own text. Rather than looking at
or observing Mrs. Hudson as in the Sherlock episodes discussed previously,
in “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist” experiences are mediated
through the older female character herself. This signifies a radical shift
which indicates a marked difference between the two texts and the way in
which they position Mrs. Hudson as an ageing woman and detective. My
discussion in the present chapter echoes the acknowledgment by Sabine
Vanacker, who comments on the revisionary tendency in some recent
adaptations and revisionings which “creat[e] a Holmesian world which is
no longer the homosocial late-Victorian environment but a recreated
fictional past now profoundly sympathetic to women and to a feminist
view” (99). The shift in narrative perspective is at the crux of Maron’s
story. Giving Mrs. Hudson a voice is key to this story’s perspective-chan-
ging dynamic and the threat that it poses to the conventional narrative of
male-orientated detection in Sherlock Holmes adaptations and represen-
tations. It is the absence of Holmes which creates space within the narra-
tive for this articulation of alternative perspectives. Using a first-person
narrative persona enables insight into Mrs. Hudson’s history, as we
encounter individuals from her past and explore her relationships with
them. Sisterhood and female solidarity in all its aspects is central to “The
Adventure of the Concert Pianist.” As we have seen, female characters and
their sharing of stories are at the center of the narrative and create the
dynamic which propels the story forward. Mrs. Hudson recognizes that
Mrs. Manning was a victim of patriarchal power dynamics as they manifest
themselves in relations between women, causing women to see one
another as rivals and to compete over the favors of men (Palmer 166).20
This changed perspective also impacts on the representation of female
agency. In “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist,” the part that Mrs.
Hudson plays in the unfolding crime plot is not merely shaped and defined
by her relationship to Holmes and Dr. Watson. Her contribution has
other significant external reference points, such as female relations and
bonds of solidarity. This focus proposes an alternative way of reading Mrs.
76 C. BEYER
Hudson as a detective character with intellectual powers and emotional

intelligence; someone who is capable of working out the criminal situation
unfolding and who plays a central role in the drama and the delivery of
justice. These two strategies foreground a specifically female perspective
and give voice to the character of Mrs. Hudson. This tactic has been
employed before, for example by the author Sydney Hosier who presented
a reimagined Mrs. Hudson in the 1996 novel Elementary, Mrs. Hudson,
taking the well-known phrase and changing its meaning. Commenting on
the tactics of Hosier’s novel, Ascari argues: “In turning the marginal
character of Mrs Hudson into a female equivalent of Holmes, the writer
offers an alternative view of Victorian detection” (11). Similarly, Rosemary
Erickson Johnsen explains that Laurie King’s short story from 1997, “Mrs.
Hudson’s Case,” casts Mrs. Hudson in the role of detective: “The plot
justifies the trio of intelligent, capable females . . . at the expense of the
meeker or misguided males” (104–5). However, where Hosier relies on
the added mystery of the supernatural to challenge “positivist rationality”
(Ascari 11), Maron’s story foregrounds the importance of intuition and
emotional intelligence, and validates these qualities.21 Through these
strategies, Maron’s story shifts its emphasis, from deploring the absence
of Holmes, to exploring the presence of Mrs. Hudson.
This dimension of the story invites us to reflect on and interrogate the
gendering of detection, and of roles and characters within the Holmes
canon and recent reimaginings which foreground and problematize those
dynamics. In Maron’s story, the dichotomy between the methods used by
Dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson invites the question of who occupies the
detective position within the text. The ending of “The Adventure of the
Concert Pianist” makes this question explicit. For as Mrs. Hudson returns
to Baker Street, a certain someone is waiting for her . . . and this point
echoes the scene in BBC’s Sherlock, of Sherlock Holmes’s return.22 The
ambiguity of the ending in Maron’s story invites further reflection on Mrs.
Hudson’s narration and detection. The reader assumes that Holmes’s
return will put an end to her detective efforts, and that she will return to
her previous position as a background character. The emphasis in the
story’s title on the word “adventure” hints at Mrs. Hudson’s longing for
agency, self-determination, and risk-taking, all aspects not commensurate
with a background character or a stereotypical representation of an ageing
female. As the reader ponders whose adventure the story is really about,
we await with anticipation more subversive asides whispered to the reader
by Maron’s Mrs. Hudson.
CONCLUSION: MRS. HUDSON – ABSENT OR PRESENT?

This chapter has examined the representation of ageing, femininity, and
absence through the character of Mrs. Hudson in two recent TV and
literary reimaginings of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The discussion of these
issues involved analyzing the gender-political dimensions of agency and
detection and their representation in these recent reworkings of Doyle.
Examining Mrs. Hudson’s character, it is evident that she forms a contrast
with both Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and the methods they employ
in the processes of detection, which are based on scientific principles and
rational approaches. We have seen how, in both the TV series Sherlock and
in Maron’s “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist,” Mrs. Hudson is kept
out of, and/or excluded from, scientific and expert discourses and activ-
ities. However, in “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist” we also see
Mrs. Hudson’s willingness to make decisions which challenge normative
modes of feminine behavior and conceptions of justice. Controversially, in
Maron’s story, female solidarity is valued more highly than those modes of
justice and punishment defined and circumscribed by patriarchal struc-
tures. The title quotation from Maron’s story – “I, too, mourn the loss” –
is both intriguing and suggestive in its insistence on the validity of the
speaker’s subjectivity and response, and on its emphasis invested in the
word “too” that the female voice should be heard in the absence of
Sherlock Holmes. In contrast, it is clear that in Sherlock, the developmental
narrative and voice of Mrs. Hudson is muted and inhibited by her
restricted role as a maternal housekeeping figure. Denying her the oppor-
tunity to carry out detective work and emphasizing her positioning within
the domestic sphere, serving up tea in the kitchen, Sherlock identifies Mrs.
Hudson’s ageing female character with the status quo. The scenes in “The
Empty Hearse” which portray John Watson and Mrs. Hudson without
Sherlock further underline this sense of one-dimensionality to her
character.
The challenge to the narrative status quo produced by focusing on an
older female character reflects the point made by Susan Hogan and Lorna
Warren: “Older women’s invisibility is being explored and challenged by
women both within popular culture and through academic work” (332).
This acknowledgment is central to my point that the absence of Holmes
can bring new dimensions to familiar characters. These findings also
suggest that sanctioned cultural narratives about and by older women
are not fixed or permanent, but may shift and are subject to change.
78 C. BEYER
Maron’s “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist” and the BBC Sherlock
series reflect the implications of challenging the canon and its portrayals.
Certainly, the emphasis in Maron on solidarity between women, and the
foregrounding of previously marginalized female characters, would seem
to underline the significance of feminist revision.23 O’Leary argues that it
is not just down to the writers themselves to give an enhanced presence to
Mrs. Hudson’s character. Rather, he concludes that scholars, readers, and
fandom play a vital part in contributing to the reimagining of Mrs.
Hudson: “It is, then, the Sherlockian scholars, the pasticheurs, the writers
of plays and screenplays, and the generation of readers who bring Mrs.
Hudson into the inner circle of Baker Street life” (O’Leary 2014). And it
would indeed appear that the writers of Sherlock have recognized the issues
surrounding Mrs. Hudson’s character. In the 2016 New Year’s special,
“The Abominable Bride,” Mrs. Hudson protested her trivialization in
conversation with Sherlock and John, stating: “I’m [ . . . ] not a plot
device!” However, although this acknowledgment is placed in the epi-
sode, the context is humorous, and ironically confirms the relegation of
Mrs. Hudson to a mere plot device. In both Sherlock and Maron, Sherlock
Holmes returns from the dead, to Mrs. Hudson’s great shock. Given that
Mrs. Hudson’s independent agency as a detective figure is premised on the
absence of Holmes, this raises questions regarding her continued visibility
as an ageing female character and as a detective. As we have seen, recent
adaptations and reimaginings of Sherlock Holmes thus confront us with
continued questions of how to represent Mrs. Hudson’s presence and
Holmes’s absence.
NOTES
1. An early version of this chapter was presented as a conference paper at “New
Directions in Sherlock,” UCL, April 11, 2014.
2. The quotation in the title is taken from Maron (235).
3. For the purposes of this chapter and my argument, my definition of the term
and practice of “adaptation” is broad and encompasses literary and media
reimaginings.
4. This chapter primarily concerns itself with Mrs. Hudson and the scope given
to her for taking on a detective role, and therefore an extended discussion of
her landlady status and property ownership is outside the scope of this
present examination.
5. See discussions by Dolan and Tincknell; Hogan and Warren.
6. Tom Ue and Jonathan Cranfield discuss the proliferation of twenty-first-

century Sherlock Holmes reimaginings and the growth of fan culture; see
Ue and Cranfield (5).
7. I have also discussed this topic in my 2014 article on contemporary literary
recastings of Doyle, entitled “Sherlock Holmes Reimagined: An Exploration
of Selected Short Stories from A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the
Holmes Canon.”
8. Cited in Vanacker (102).
9. Erisman also makes this point.
10. Also cited in Plunkett 2012.
11. A review in Kirkus Reviews states that Maron’s story “elevates Watson to the
role of detective . . . complete with Mrs. Hudson as his Watson.” My reading
of the story differs from this, focusing instead on the characters staying “in
character.”
12. See O’Leary for further commentary on the specifics of Mrs. Hudson’s
marginalization in the canon, and her textual appearances in Doyle.
13. The important theme of ageing and femininity is also taken up in recent
critical debates on contemporary culture by scholars such as Hogan and
Warren, Whelehan, and Dolan and Tincknell.
14. Other film adaptations for the big screen, such as Guy Ritchie’s, are not
included in this assessment, although the significance of Ritchie’s adapta-
tions should be stated.
15. See Lavigne (13).
16. Although Maron’s text is not a novel, Hadley’s point about the dual focus
still applies.
17. This exchange reveals Mrs. Hudson’s understandable preoccupation with
autonomy and the right to control her own space, an important feminist
theme within the text.
18. I also discussed the significance of the girl detective figure in my 2014 article
(11) (see note 7).
19. A poisoning plot is described in Dorothy Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930).
20. Although this specific reference pertains to Palmer’s discussion of academic
feminism and female rivalry, the point can be extended to female relations
more widely, as she demonstrates.
21. See also Erisman, and Effron.
22. In Maron, the description of the person waiting for Mrs. Hudson to return,
“an elderly deformed man with a curved back and old-fashioned white
whiskers”(251), bears close resemblance to the disguised Holmes in
Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House.” Holmes’s use of this dis-
guise in that story has been commented on by Don Fallis. Also see Jones.
23. See my earlier discussion of Vanacker’s analysis.
80 C. BEYER
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Charlotte Beyer is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of

Gloucestershire. She has published widely on contemporary literature, and on
crime and spy fiction. She has also published on contemporary women’s writing,
maternal perspectives, and postcolonialism. Dr. Beyer is currently co-editing a
book for Demeter Press entitled Mothers Without Their Children. She is also
editing a book for Palgrave on Teaching Crime Fiction, as well as editing the
2017 Special Issue on contemporary crime fiction for the journal American, British
and Canadian Studies.
The Trickster, Remixed: Sherlock Holmes
as Master of Disguise
Benjamin Poore
INTRODUCTION
The transformation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes into a
modern-day detective in the BBC television series Sherlock, and also in
the CBS series Elementary, is a process that is perhaps easiest to analyze in
terms of stories and plots. Indeed, one of the pleasures of Sherlock for
readers of Doyle is recognizing how canonical narratives have been
adapted, updated, and combined in new ways. However, Alec Charles
has recently attempted a more wide-ranging challenge in mapping out
patterns of adaptation. Charles traces the connections between Sherlock
Holmes, the Doctor in Doctor Who, and Dr. Gregory House in House M.
D., and their relationship with the archetypes of the flâneur and the
trickster (83–102). This chapter responds to Charles’s stimulating con-
tribution to our conception of how adaptation works across media and
genres by focusing on one area that his article does not consider in detail:
why does Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock disguise himself less, and so
much less effectively, than the canonical Holmes does? Are there changes
in cultural sensibility which have rendered Holmes’s use and enjoyment of
disguise more ethically or politically suspect? In comparison to the
B. Poore (*)
Department of Theatre, Film and Television, University of York, York, UK
e-mail: benjamin.poore@york.ac.uk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_5
84 B. POORE
empirical knowledge available when discussing the adapted story aspects of

Sherlock, my conclusions will be somewhat tentative proposals; neverthe-
less, I argue, in line with Ashley Polasek’s recent argument (390–92), that
modernized adaptations like Sherlock and Elementary are as attentive to
adjusting character behavior and ethics as they are to updating stories,
locations, and technologies, and so we as viewers and scholars should pay
attention to the process, too.
In attempting this identification, I take as my model of adaptation the
remix, an analogy which has been suggested by, among others, Eduardo
Navas and Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is concerned to promote the creative
possibilities of digital media, and his positive identification of a “Read/
Write culture” is useful here in that it takes account of the status of
Sherlock co-creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (and indeed Robert
Doherty, creator of Elementary) as both consumers of the canonical
Holmes stories, and producers of their own distinct fictional worlds
(28). For Navas, sampling in a social context is selecting and isolating
from “an archive of representations of the world,” be it music, photo-
graphy, or film; samples are then combined via the process of Remix (11–
12). The experience of moments of recognition within an unfamiliar
context (28) seems to me to be a useful description of how Sherlock
attracts audiences of Holmes aficionados. Like live DJs, Gatiss and
Moffat are foregrounding their own process of remixing, for part of the
show’s interest stems from their choices in modernizing the canon
(Watson serving in twenty-first-century Afghanistan, for example, or
Irene Adler being reinvented as a dominatrix).
DISGUISE IN THE CANON

As Ronald R. Thomas has suggested, Holmes “should be understood as
the literary personification of an elaborate cultural apparatus by which
persons were given their true and legitimate identities by someone else”
(656). Holmes is able to use small clues to establish whether someone is
who they claim to be. It therefore seems legitimate that Holmes should
have experience of the seamier side of London life, in order to be able to
make successful identifications. However, despite its necessity to his work,
in the canon, Holmes’s proclivity (we might say, his unseemly enthusiasm)
for disguise is one of the aspects of his personality that make him a
complex hero, and arguably an anti-hero. As Marinaro and Thomas
point out in discussing heroes in Sherlock, “the anti-hero is characterised
THE TRICKSTER, REMIXED: SHERLOCK HOLMES AS MASTER OF DISGUISE 85
by emotional detachment – from family, community, nationalism or patri-

otism”; he refuses to subscribe to social mores because he prefers to act
“based upon his own personal code of conduct” (74). Such behavior –
often interpreted as selfishness or egotism – is evident in Doyle’s canon
from which Sherlock so creatively samples, even if Holmes’s individualism
is ultimately tempered by his patriotism (Ue 227–28). As Leslie Klinger
notes, Sherlock Holmes in Doyle’s stories is described as disguising him-
self on at least seventeen occasions, including, most notably, as an old
woman in “The Mazarin Stone,” a very old opium smoker in “The Man
with the Twisted Lip,” a plumber with designs on a housemaid in “Charles
Augustus Milverton,” an elderly bibliophile on his return from presumed
death in “The Empty House,” and the spy Altamont in “His Last Bow”
(ii 978).
Sherlock Holmes’s ability to disguise himself, as Charles argues, links
him with Jung’s archetype of the trickster, a shape-shifter who can “trans-
form the meaningless into the meaningful”: as Charles also points out, this
is an appropriate summation of Holmes’s general detective method (94).
But the trickster, as his name implies, is not merely a benevolent magician;
he can be associated with both the Jungian old man (senex) archetypes,
and the eternal child (Puer Aeternus) who refuses to grow up (93). He is a
lounger, a loafer, an idle wanderer, essentially not to be trusted. This
trickster quality fits with the notion of the anti-hero as serving his own
agenda (as “an intellectual exhibitionist” [95]) and being detached from
others’ emotional needs. Also, as Andrew Stott notes in his discussion of
the trickster, this archetype “violates the most sacred of prohibitions. The
trickster . . . can cross lines impermeable to normal individuals” (49).
Holmes the trickster can dispense with respectability, and then reclaim
it. When Thomas Leitch, in his ground-breaking Film Adaptation and its
Discontents, titles his chapter on Holmes adaptations “The Hero with a
Hundred Faces,” he does so not only in reference to the many actors who
have played the role, but also to invoke Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a
Thousand Faces (218). In this influential work, Campbell refers to the
modern hero in terms which could be associated with Sherlock and his
many disguises; he is a shape-shifter (381) and Campbell warns that “[t]he
image of man within is not to be confounded with the garments” (385).
Considering the list of disguises given earlier in this chapter, we can see
that, while his sterling work in posing as a spy in order to deceive Von
Bork during the Great War might suggest that Holmes is sufficiently
connected to community and country to act heroically, in many of the
86 B. POORE
other instances Holmes seems to take a perverse delight in playing the

trickster; in fooling people above and beyond the needs of the case at
hand. His need to trick Watson one more time supersedes the importance
of letting his friend know that he has survived his ordeal at the
Reichenbach Falls in “The Empty House,” and so he appears as the
“elderly deformed man,” bumps into Watson deliberately in the street,
and even after calling on him at home several minutes later, continues to
play-act for a while before revealing his identity (Doyle 485). In “Charles
Augustus Milverton,” Holmes disguises himself as a plumber and becomes
engaged to one of Milverton’s servants, Agatha, in order to acquire
information on her master. Far from being sorry for the necessary decep-
tion, Watson tells us that Holmes “sat before the fire and laughed heartily
in his silent inward fashion” at his own actions (575). Curiously, Holmes
had witnessed similarly unchivalrous behavior from James Windibank in
“A Case of Identity”: Windibank had disguised himself as “Hosmer
Angel” in order to win the affections of his step-daughter and then to
leave her in mysterious circumstances, so as to ensure that she remained
single so that he could have access to her fortune. Yet in passing judgment
on him at the end of the story, Holmes mockingly threatens to whip
Windibank with a riding crop, and calls him a “cold-blooded scoundrel”
(201). If challenged, Holmes may well have argued that, with his own
behavior in the Milverton case, the ends justified the means, and may have
added that, by contrast, the ends were nefarious in “A Case of Identity.”
Nevertheless, there is something unsettling about Holmes regarding one
act of deception with amusement, and the other in terms of moral con-
demnation.1 Either Holmes is being quite the hypocrite about his own
behavior, or else he is a snob, who regards the deception of a young
woman of means as in a different ethical category from trifling with the
affections of a mere servant.
Furthermore, in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” as Audrey Jaffe has
explored, the “false beggar” at the center of the mystery, Hugh Boone,
whom Holmes discovers to be the former actor Neville St Clair in disguise,
is discomfitingly similar to Holmes. At the start of the story, Holmes
reveals himself to Watson in an opium den, disguised as an elderly addict.
Both Holmes and St Clair employ disguise in their professions. For both,
“disguise becomes a metaphor for profession,” and Holmes’s profession
“depends upon exactly the kind of indeterminacy he finds inappropriate
for St Clair” (Jaffe 103, 111). Holmes and Boone have in common “the
apparently effortless production of income,” and Holmes even “boasts, at
the end of the story, that he solved the case merely ‘by sitting upon five
pillows and consuming an ounce of shag’” (112). Holmes uses heated
rhetoric to pass judgment on Windibank’s use of disguise; Holmes speaks
to him of “treachery,” and remarks that “[t]he law cannot, as you say,
touch you . . . yet there never was a man who deserved punishment more”
(Doyle 200–1). By contrast, Holmes – recognizing, perhaps, a kindred
spirit, a fellow professional loafer with a love of disguise – speaks to St
Clair/Boone “kindly” (242). Holmes offers him a way out and assures
him, provided he makes a clean breast to the police: “I do not know that
there is any reason that the details should find their way into the papers”
(242).
In “Black Peter,” we learn that Holmes had “at least five small refuges
in different parts of London, in which he was able to change his person-
ality” (559). With this revelation, Holmes’s disguises now seem less like
momentary, larkish indulgences, and more like glimpses of a separate,
underground lifestyle in which Holmes becomes immersed. His attempts
to blend in with the working (and non-working) people of London place
him in the tradition of slumming, although it is difficult to precisely
categorize his activities within the range of motives and contexts for
slumming in the Victorian era. He is perhaps somewhere between an
undercover police officer or licensing inspector, setting out to catch
specific instances of transgression, and a police informant (albeit one
indulging in “cross-class masquerades,” as Seth Koven describes the
well-to-do who dress as the poor in order to go slumming [11, 25]).
Then again, his mission might be compared to the journalists who went
slumming in Victorian London, seeking to expose scandalous behavior, as
in the case of James Greenwood (Koven 19), since Holmes has no special
powers of arrest. While it seems unlikely, given what we know of him, that
Holmes is slumming for philanthropic or evangelical purposes, he might
conversely be classified alongside those gentlemen who considered spend-
ing a night slumming to be an exciting “dare” or something to do for a bet
(7–8): as we have seen from the canonical instances described, he enjoys
passing for that which he is not.
Something else happens in “Black Peter,” however, that seems to
contradict the idea of Holmes carefully maintaining a range of disguises
and changing in discreet locations. Posing as “Captain Basil,” he invites
sailors to be interviewed at 221B Baker Street, and in doing so quickly
tracks down the murderer, Cairns. Yet Holmes makes no attempt to
disguise his speech or appearance, and appears to have given away his
88 B. POORE
address and blown his cover to the two other sailors, Lancaster and Pattins.
Why go to such lengths in assuming an alias (one of many), only –
seemingly for convenience’s sake – to allow witnesses to discover that he
is an imposter and lives in comfortable quarters in Marylebone? Can he
really be so confident that no word of the sailors’ account will be believed,
or has his impersonation of “Captain Basil” been so lax that the sailors
would notice no difference between Basil and Holmes?
In addition to his own undercover exertions, the canonical Holmes can
also call on the abilities of the “Baker Street Irregulars,” who feature only
briefly in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, and the story “The
Crooked Man.” They add moments of light comedy and local color to
Holmes investigations; indeed, arguably they provide the same moment
across both the novels. In both cases, the band of “street Arabs” comes
thundering in, much to Watson’s consternation; they are told that next
time only their leader, Wiggins, should set foot inside 221B; they are paid
off, and dispatched (42, 126–27). Simpson, the Irregular who watches for
Henry Wood, the eponymous “crooked man” in that story, receives
nothing more than a pat on the head for his trouble (419). Holmes
could be said to be looking after these “street Arabs” by paying for their
labor and expenses. Street children were a fact of life in Victorian London,
and so the detective’s sponsorship of Wiggins and company would likely
have struck contemporary readers as an enlightened combination of altru-
ism and self-interest on Holmes’s part: he gets an unobtrusive spy net-
work, and they get to eat today. However, Holmes’s actions, benevolent
by the standards of the time, would be unlikely to play so well in a
modernized context, a point to which I will return later in this chapter.
DISGUISE IN ADAPTATIONS OF THE HOLMES STORIES

In the recent screen retellings of the Holmes stories, Sherlock’s taste for
disguise varies. Jonny Lee Miller appears to have no interest in changing
his appearance to solve cases, whereas Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes is
“fond of flagrantly bad disguises,” as one review of A Game of Shadows
noted (McCartney). In that film alone, Holmes dresses as a woman, as a
heavily bearded man in tinted spectacles and an overcoat, as a highly
theatrical representation of an elderly Chinese man, and as some furniture.
Somewhere between the two extremes, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock
in the BBC series attempts disguise on several occasions, but is comically
ineffectual; moreover, unlike the Guy Ritchie films, where Downey Jr.
carries off the most terrible disguises with a comic insouciance, Sherlock’s
failed disguises provide moments of awkwardness and pathos. In this
respect, the series is confronting the question of what it means to be a
hero in the twenty-first, as opposed to the nineteenth, century: as
Cumberbatch’s Sherlock provocatively says in a celebrated line from
“The Great Game,” “don’t make people into heroes, John. Heroes
don’t exist, and if they did, I wouldn’t be one of them.”
In the second part of this chapter, I want to revisit the canonical
incidents of disguise and deception as they are remixed by Sherlock in
order to demonstrate how the modern Sherlock’s failure at disguise
becomes a heroic quality that signifies a kind of awkward authenticity.
Where previously Holmes’s pursuit of opportunities for deceit, imposture,
and slumming was an anti-heroic quality, Cumberbatch’s modern
Sherlock acquires his anti-heroic traits from other sources, such as his
more explicit coldness and misanthropy, his arrogance, and from the
question of the extent to which his bad behavior is a conscious choice,
or the result of a mental or neurological condition or disability. What this
condition might be is left deliberately vague: Sherlock describes himself at
a very early stage in the series (possibly with deadpan irony) as being a
“high-functioning sociopath” (“A Study in Pink”), but Cumberbatch
himself has identified Holmes’s condition as bordering on “Asperger’s”
or “slightly mild autism” (“How to Be Sherlock Holmes”).
We can begin to look at the notion of disguise, remixed, through a
consideration of the eponymous detective’s return in Sherlock, in the
episode “The Empty Hearse” (based in part on the canonical story “The
Empty House”). There are occasions where Sherlock (re-)establishes his
trickster credentials in this episode: consider the very idea of his return
from the dead (a trick still not fully explained, even though various
solutions are proposed), and his pretended inability to find the “off”
switch on the underground bomb, forcing John to confess his feelings
about Sherlock’s return, since he thinks that they are about to die. But for
his much-anticipated reunion scene with John, Sherlock pretends to be a
waiter with an over-the-top French accent, as John and Mary dine alone,
John plucking up the courage to propose. One review noted that, “Unlike
in Arthur Conan Doyle’s famously breezy reunion . . . [the recognition]
scene walks such a beautiful tightrope between comedy and tragedy, with
an excited Sherlock very gradually coming to the realization that an
elaborate comedy disguise is not ideal when you’re informing a loved
one of your return from the dead” (Dibdin). It is also notable that
90 B. POORE
Sherlock’s disguise in this episode is spontaneous: he collects a smear of

soot for a moustache, a pair of purloined glasses, a bowtie, and a menu as
he walks through the restaurant. This impulsive quality, combined with
the difficulty that Cumberbatch’s Sherlock has in reading other people and
social situations (made manifest, and played upon, in his best man’s speech
at John and Mary’s wedding in “The Sign of Three”), makes him in this
respect a more sympathetic character than Doyle’s Holmes, with his cool
calculation and carefully prepared roles. The canonical Holmes knows
better, but amuses himself by behaving otherwise; Cumberbatch’s
Sherlock, on occasions like this, cannot help himself.
In “His Last Vow,” the final episode of season three, other elements of
the canonical “The Empty House” are replayed and adapted: the empty
house in question here is a façade on a Georgian terrace, and the switch
played on the would-be assassin is not between the real Sherlock and a
dummy in silhouette, as in the story, but between Sherlock and John in
silhouette. Sherlock lures Mary there after she has shot him, and while she
thinks that she is confessing to him alone, Sherlock has concealed her
fiancé so that he can hear her words too. Mary Watson’s shooting of
Sherlock in the TV series effectively recasts her in the role of Sebastian
Moran, Moriarty’s sniper in the canonical story, who had been fooled into
shooting at a dummy made to resemble Holmes. This inventively rede-
ployed sample in the Sherlock remix – which is predicated on the knowl-
edge that a section of the audience will recognize and enjoy the structural
repurposing of Mary Morstan/Watson into a complex character with
agency – moreover allows us to see Sherlock being fooled by someone
else’s imposture.
Furthermore, “His Last Vow” reveals that Sherlock does appear to have a
love life, but that, as in “Charles Augustus Milverton,” his romantic abilities
are deployed in the service of a case. In a careful remixing of Holmes’s
heartless seduction of Agatha in the canon, Sherlock attempts no physical
disguise, and very little concealment as to what his true intentions are.
Janine, a guest at the Watsons’ wedding in “The Sign of Three,” is shown
emerging from Sherlock’s bedroom and, we are led to believe, is about to
take a bath with him. Yet we later discover that, although he admits frankly
that he was only sleeping with her because she was series villain Charles
Augustus Magnussen’s PA, Janine is able to counter this revelation with the
news that she has sold sensationalized details of their affair to the red-top
press. While it seems clear that this twist was an attempt to rebalance the
situation to fit with contemporary gender politics and adjust the arguably
casual misogyny of the canonical story, the moral relativism of this solution
did not satisfy some commentators:
Turns out that while Sherlock’s been unconscious Janine’s been selling
made[-]up kiss-and-tells to the tabloids to get back at him while turning a
profit. She doesn’t seem too bothered about it all though. Apparently, it’s all
laughs when someone sleeps with you, proposes to you but then turns out
they just wanted you as a minor part in a sleuthing vendetta. (Wolfson)
Despite such understandable objections about the emotional tone of the

sequence, the significant factor for this chapter’s argument is that Sherlock
is again outwitted by more accomplished deceivers who pretend to be
what they are not. Indeed, the argument might be extended to propose
that Sherlock renders actual, physical disguises as silly and ineffectual
because its interest increasingly lies in the psychological manipulations
undertaken by imposters, and this renders actual disguise more and
more invisible. We see nothing of Mary’s past identity and aliases as a
hired killer, for instance, as John destroys the data stick carrying this
information without looking at its contents. Moriarty, of course, was the
arch-impostor in series one and two, able to convince the world of
Sherlock’s guilt in “The Reichenbach Fall” by pretending to be an inno-
cent actor, Rich Brook (the series never actually demonstrates that the
accusations orchestrated by Moriarty’s plot are untrue; by this stage, we
must trust the hero’s integrity). Furthermore, rather than Sherlock himself
attempting to fool us with wigs, theatrical make-up, and costume changes,
Sherlock’s own visual rhetoric has increasingly taken on the task of deceiv-
ing the viewer. In series three, digital information flashing up on screen in
“His Last Vow” was meant to convince us that the blackmailer Magnussen
gained access to his files of compromising information through “smart
glass” spectacles that he appeared to wear, but these are eventually
revealed to be quite ordinary. Similarly, we are shown Magnussen strolling
through his “vaults” at Appledore, his library of secret material, but only
later do we discover that there are no actual vaults, but rather that we have
been seeing “mind’s eye” images of Magnussen as he explores his mind
palace, the technique that he, like Sherlock, uses for memorizing large
quantities of information.
The beginning of “His Last Vow” also borrows from “The Man with
the Twisted Lip,” as John goes to a crack house in search of the son (rather
than husband, as in the canon) of a friend of Mary’s, and discovers
92 B. POORE
Sherlock in the adjacent bed. As with the restaurant reunion, what is

particularly notable is the sheer transparency of Sherlock’s disguise
(assuming it is meant to be a disguise); he simply has a rather dirty face
and is wearing baggy, shabby clothing. Sherlock does not even trouble to
disguise his voice or accent. This is reminiscent of the canonical incident in
“Black Peter,” discussed earlier, in that it is in high-stakes undercover
work – where maintaining a cover would seem to be paramount – that
both Holmes and Sherlock seem to make the least effort (although, to be
fair to Sherlock, he does have Wiggins ineffectually guarding the door).
Given the episode’s themes of press behavior and public accountability,
and given Sherlock’s mounting fame in the series, it is fitting that the
problem is switched, in subsequent conversations with John and Lestrade,
from the indeterminacy of Sherlock frequenting opium dens in disguise (as
in Jaffe’s reading of the canonical incident), to one of public image: the
prospect of tabloid headlines branding the consulting detective as an
addict.
Yet Sherlock’s apparent lack of a comprehensive disguise in this inci-
dent seems less incongruous than the lack of a proper “Captain Basil”
disguise in “Black Peter,” because it helps further to establish Sherlock’s
refusal to play Moriartyish acting games; it comes across as more of a
foolhardy, misplaced boldness than the lazy, rather arrogant oversight that
Holmes’s actions in the canon suggest. As Charles indicates, Sherlock
Holmes is an accomplished malingerer (95), but in Sherlock his arrogance
is somewhat redeemed by his malingering with purpose.
Finally, in place of the Baker Street Irregulars, Sherlock brings just one
character to prominence, Bill Wiggins, and makes him a tall – and, initially
at least – threatening adult. After the first encounter with John at the crack
house, we realize that Wiggins is something of a man-child, able to per-
form competent deductions about John’s shirt and cycling habits, and
appearing incongruously at Sherlock and Mycroft’s parents’ cottage at
Christmas, explaining, “I’m his protégé, Mrs Holmes,” but then, to
Sherlock’s instant denial: “When he dies I get all his stuff and his job.”
Wiggins is, then, a comic version of Sherlock, an apprentice who has even
fewer social graces than his mentor. Yet, with his angular frame and
occasionally wild facial expressions, Wiggins walks a thin line between
vulnerable and frightening. The character allows the show’s writers not
only to add more detail to the idea of Sherlock’s “homeless network” of
informants, but also to avoid making the homeless into objects either of
sentimental pity, or of atavistic fear. (Indeed, from January 2014, viewers
could purchase Sherlock: The Network for iPad and iPhone, a gaming app
in which the player is cast as a member of the homeless network.)
INTEGRITY AND THE ANTI-HERO

The use of a “homeless network” as an alternative to the trope of disguise
– something which is also a feature of Sherlock’s modus operandi in
Elementary – might be said to confer on both television Sherlocks a
cool, unflinching understanding of how their respective cities, London
and New York, function, but to avoid giving the impression that they are
simply loungers, loafers, and flâneurs, seeking diversion through cross-
class masquerades (Charles 95). Indeed – to develop the connection with
Elementary for a brief space – it can be argued that these two modern
iterations of Sherlock are cannily framed in order to make their resistance
of disguise an admirable trait, a guarantor on one level of the character’s
authenticity. The modern politics of identity – and the liberation move-
ments of the twentieth century with which they are intertwined – have
altered our perception of the act of disguise, of “passing” for someone
else. As Alcoff and Mohanty note, “identities are markers for history, social
location, and positionality,” which have political implications, even if these
are not “transparent or fixed” (6). As Michael Kenny observes, one
explanation of what links the variegated nature of modern identity politics
is that they “are united in the challenge they offer to established concep-
tions of what is political and what is not” (4). Hence, a contemporary
Sherlock’s propensity for disguise might be seen as politically naive at best;
it might be framed, in identity politics discourse, as an unsavory desire to
dip in and out of different “ascriptive identities” which “operate through
the logic of visibility” (Moyer 97).
As previously noted, the canonical Holmes exhibited patriotic tenden-
cies;2 and patriotism (or its more politicized relative nationalism) might be
regarded, taking the historical long view, as a form of identity politics
(Kenny 4). But what is interesting about the modernized Sherlocks in
both Sherlock and Elementary is that they are given traits that link them to
disadvantaged or vulnerable groups. As Polasek suggests, for both
Sherlocks, their genius is a burden; they both reflect the vision of
Holmes as “an acerbic social outcast . . . an out-of-control genius who
needs to be grounded and managed” by his respective Watsons (386).
And as Bran Nicol remarks, “Our culture instinctively finds the excessive
abilities and personality traits of a man like Holmes suspicious at best, and
94 B. POORE
dangerous at worst”; he furthermore notes, in relation to Sherlock’s self-

diagnosis as a “high-functioning sociopath” in Sherlock, that “it is a sig-
nificant departure for Sherlock Holmes adaptations to explicitly define
Holmes as pathological” (128). Cumberbatch’s reference to Asperger’s
syndrome in “diagnosing” Holmes, mentioned earlier in this chapter, also
implies a detective who is socially disadvantaged by others’ assumptions
that he is neurotypical.
In a similar way, Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock in Elementary is shown
from the series’ outset to be a recovering drug addict whose Watson, the
former surgeon Joan, was originally employed by his father as Sherlock’s
sober companion. As Polasek argues, “Conceptually, the whole series is an
interrogation of a single simple premise: What if, driven by his addition to
solve puzzles, manifested in an intense aversion to boredom, Sherlock
Holmes pursues all avenues to feed that addiction including drugs, until
he self-destructs?” (391). In both modernized television adaptations,
then, what is attractive about the character is his vulnerability; there
must be an ongoing struggle not to fall back down the rabbit-hole of
addiction (Miller’s Sherlock), or not to live up to the label of psychopath
(390). This personal integrity in modern Sherlocks would be threatened if
either character revealed a larkish enjoyment of disguise, of playing at
being a homeless addict, for example, or using “sociopathic” qualities to
brilliantly manipulate others through disguise and imitation.
Nevertheless, there are other explanations for Cumberbatch’s (and
Miller’s) lack of disguises which are less theoretical than those implied
by the logic of the anti-hero. Firstly, there is the highly pragmatic question
of the difference between publication in, say, The Strand Magazine, and a
weekly television broadcast or group of three ninety-minute episodes. The
canonical short stories can, in most cases, be read in any order; rarely is it
necessary to think about Holmes at a specific stage in his career to under-
stand the case (this is why, as Klinger has set out extensively, the consensus
on the chronology of the canon is far from settled [i 751]). Moreover, the
stories are almost all self-contained, with the mystery cleared up by the
story’s end (one exception might be “The Five Orange Pips,” where
several of the culprits evade capture, even if the mystery itself is solved).
And wherever Doyle does attempt to provide retrospective continuity for
the world in which his stories are set, this throws up notorious inconsis-
tencies (Dundas 170, 236). By contrast, in Sherlock and Elementary, every
apparently solved case remains subject to being reopened, and each solu-
tion reveals a deeper level of intrigue and a higher intelligence behind the
crimes. Thus, only in retrospect do the unexplained elements of Sherlock

series one connect and lead to Moriarty; the same is true of Magnussen in
series three, and of the revelation about Moriarty’s identity and Sherlock’s
lost love, Irene Adler, in the season climax of Elementary’s first series.
Unlike in the canon, where Sherlock’s position and credibility is never
seriously placed in doubt, the Sherlocks in Elementary and Sherlock are
under consistent scrutiny for their association with the police, leading to
misrepresentation by the tabloids under the orchestration of Kitty Riley
and Jim Moriarty in Sherlock, and to threats of Sherlock being stripped of
his and Watson’s consultancy with the NYPD in Elementary. This constant
institutional suspicion and reputational jeopardy – which is no doubt
necessary to a long-form story about a maverick detective – means that
the audience needs to be quite confident that the troubled anti-hero may
possess many faults, but is certainly not a fraud. Taking up once more the
analogy of the remix, the television adaptations of the stories and novels of
the canon create new works out of samples of the old, but with, necessa-
rily, a new tempo, creating pieces of longer duration.
As suggested above, a second additional reason for Sherlock’s lack of
disguise in modern adaptations is that it is the strategy employed by the
villains. Moriarty functioned as Holmes’s rival and opposite in the canon –
his “evil twin,” as Dundas has it (117) – and is, like Holmes, able to
disguise his true nature and intentions. In The Valley of Fear, Moriarty
assumes the identity of an army maths tutor, and fools Inspector
MacDonald into thinking he is “a very respectable, learned, and talented
sort of man” (Doyle 775). Moreover, the “master of disguise” motif has
been, during the twentieth century, comprehensively associated with the
screen super-villain. It was certain figures from late Victorian fiction who
led secret lives – including Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray, and Count
Dracula – who then became early subjects of silent film adaptation and
who have continued to have extensive screen afterlives. In Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1897) for example, the vampire comes to England planning an
invasion, buying up London real estate and storing boxes of Transylvanian
earth at key locations. He is a criminal mastermind with plans for national
domination, but with a respectable aristocratic veneer. In the early years of
the twentieth century, Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu novels provided a heav-
ily racialized variant on the master criminal as master of disguise, while
Norbert Jacques’s Dr. Mabuse can lay claim to being the first original
master criminal – and master of disguise – to make a lasting impression in
silent cinema, in Fritz Lang’s Doctor Mabuse the Gambler (1922). Film
96 B. POORE
scholar Guy Barefoot has noted that by the 1930s, Hollywood’s villains
had stopped wearing the top hat, moustache, and cape of the Victorian
melodrama villain, and instead there arose the model of the villain who is
not what he seems to be (Barefoot cites the examples of serial actor Noah
Beery Snr, and of Allain and Souvestre’s Fantômas, who appeared in
numerous books and films). The two very different Moriarties in Sherlock
and Elementary represent logical end-points of this long-term trend. They
are the actors, the experts in deception, operating right underneath
Sherlock’s nose, seemingly close enough to bring about his downfall.3
It is at this point that the analogy of the remix ceases to be useful, and
must be thrown off like a disguise that has outlived its purpose. For the
critical difference between Sherlock as an adaptation, and the remix, is that
the latter takes place in the same medium as its source, music. By contrast,
Sherlock is not only a modernization but an adaptation from prose fiction to
television. Where this is especially significant in the case of Sherlock is the fact
that the canon is narrated almost exclusively by Watson, but in Sherlock –
despite Watson being shown several times writing a blog – the stories
feature Watson as character but not as narrator.4 The series’ visual rhetoric
of omniscience allows it to step in and out of a subject’s consciousness,
showing Sherlock’s thought-processes (and later, those of Magnussen). The
stylistic innovation of the first series of Sherlock was to present this informa-
tion, like text messages and online searches, as writing appearing directly on
the screen. Thus the supposed objectivity of the camerawork is overlaid by
the subjective experience of the information that Sherlock sees or extracts.
By series three, this technique had evolved to allow for virtuoso
sequences like the journey into Sherlock’s mind at the moment of his
shooting in “His Last Vow,” or the theories of how Sherlock survives in
“The Empty Hearse,” which initially appear to be “genuine” flashbacks of
the show’s “real” storyline, but are then revealed as unconvincing theories
or fantasies. Given this armory of visual tricks and tics, the show can fool the
viewer into thinking that a mind’s-eye sequence is an objectively “real” one.
The most striking example to date of Sherlock itself as a trickster narrative is
the 2016 episode, “The Abominable Bride,” which was marketed as a one-
off episode set in the Victorian London of the canon (Walker-Arnott), but
which turned out to be an elaborate drug-induced hallucination experienced
by the contemporary Sherlock in the seconds after the close of the previous
episode.5 This technique has been a long-standing feature of prose fiction,
of course, with its ability to both describe the physical world and dive into a
subject’s consciousness. However, in Watson’s rendering of nearly all the
canonical Holmes stories, these fractured perspectives are not present: the
reader is only “deceived” by Watson’s narration when it is necessary, in
order for us to see how Watson himself was fooled by Sherlock’s disguises.
So, having discarded the mask of the remix, this chapter’s conclusion is that
in Sherlock, it is the show itself that is the master of disguise. In contrast to
Watson’s narration of almost all of the Holmes adventures, Sherlock’s story-
telling point of view is increasingly unreliable.6 Like the trickster straddling
two worlds, the perspective of Sherlock veers unpredictably between the
physical world and the world of the mind. Moreover, I have argued that
in the wake of modern identity politics, it has become more acceptable to
present Sherlock Holmes as the member of several vulnerable identity
groups (a non-neurotypical person, a recovering addict) than to have him
ruthlessly manipulate others’ ascriptive identities. Thus, responding to
Charles, Nicol’s, and Polasek’s work in this area, I have suggested that the
changing representation of disguise in modern adaptations can add further
nuance to our conception of how Holmes works as an anti-hero. By redis-
tributing the master-of-disguise trope from Holmes himself to Moriarty,
and to the series’ own narrative technique, Sherlock draws attention to its
own remixing strategies, even as it misdirects its viewers.
NOTES
1. Alistair Duncan, too, notes that by becoming engaged to Agatha, Holmes is
effectively committing breach of promise, the same offence for which he
threatened to thrash Windibank (124–25).
2. Indeed, the “patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks” on the wall of their Baker
Street rooms, as described in “The Musgrave Ritual,” is one of the canon’s
most enduring images (Doyle 386).
3. Steven Moffat acknowledges the influence of Moriarty on subsequent repre-
sentations of the villain: “With Moriarty, the original, Conan Doyle – in
another moment of genius – invents how to write every single supervillain
from then on” (quoted in Dundas 273).
4. The canonical stories narrated by Holmes himself are “The Blanched
Soldier” and “The Lion’s Mane”; as Klinger remarks, both stories employ
the device of the key to the mystery being knowledge that only Holmes
himself possesses (ii 1482), stacking the odds rather unfairly against the
reader’s powers of detection.
5. This revelation may, in turn, point to the possibility that Sherlock’s visit to
the crack house in “His Last Vow” – and the careless disguise he adopts, as
discussed earlier in this chapter – was not for investigative purposes. If so,
98 B. POORE
this double-bluff would be an instance of the show disguising the truth

about a character’s assumed lack of disguise.
6. This point owes something to Bran Nicol’s insight that watching detective
drama “puts the viewer in the position of the high-functioning sociopath”
since we are “coldly interested in getting to the bottom of the mystery”
(135). In my argument, it could be said that it is the series itself – and its
fiendish co-creators, Moffat and Gatiss – that manipulates audiences with
“sociopathic” ease.
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Princeton UP, 2004.
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the Passion of the Christ. 2007. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009.
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John’: (Re/De)Constructing the Detective as Hero.” Sherlock Holmes for the
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McFarland, 2012. 65–80.
McCartney, Jenny. “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Seven Magazine
Review.” The Telegraph, 19 Dec. 2011. Web. 9 Jun. 2016.
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the Multicultural Classroom.” Identity Politics Reconsidered. Ed. Linda Martín
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York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 96–117.
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100 B. POORE
Benjamin Poore is Lecturer in Theatre in the Department of Theatre, Film and

Television, University of York, UK. He has published numerous articles and book
chapters on the afterlives of characters from Victorian fiction, and his books
include Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre: Staging the Victorians
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Theatre & Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Ben’s forthcoming projects include a monograph on Sherlock Holmes in con-
temporary theatre and an edited collection titled Neo-Victorian Villains.
Holmes and his Boswell in Cosplay
and Roleplay
Lynn Duffy
In a survey undertaken in 2010, Nicolle Lamerich noted varied responses

by Sherlock Holmes fans to the BBC adaptation Sherlock. She concluded
that her small, diverse ethnographic sample of fans called upon their
familiarity with a wide range of detective fiction productions and transme-
dia adaptations of Holmes, as well as the canonical Sherlock Holmes
stories, to inform their interpretations and evaluations of the adaptation
of Doyle’s beloved characters in Sherlock. This chapter similarly seeks to
contribute to the understanding of the ways in which Doyle’s characters
are adapted and interpreted by fans, although in this case the focus will be
on the activities of cosplay and roleplay, both of which are popular within
Sherlock Holmes fan communities. Following the definition offered by
Paul Booth and Peter Kelly, cosplay involves adopting the dress and
personae of fictional characters by fans (63). The process attempts a
corporeal reproduction of the chosen fictional character, and an engage-
ment with the fictional character as if he or she were a living being.
Similarly, roleplay – the collaborative writing of narratives in which fans-
as-authors take on the roles of fictional characters – constitutes an adapta-
tion of fictional characters that is premised on inhabiting, and elaborating
on, those characters as if they were real people. The chapter is centrally
L. Duffy (*)
Independent Researcher, Cambridgeshire, UK
e-mail: Sherlock_events2012@hotmail.co.uk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_6
102 L. DUFFY
concerned with this “as if real” dynamic in its attempt to detail cosplay and
roleplay as activities that enable fans to adapt and develop characters from
Doyle’s canon in a range of contexts.
That Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are fictional characters
featured in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s canonical texts, is the position
adhered to by “Doylists.” By contrast, the Watsonian position is that
Watson wrote the biography of Sherlock Holmes just as The Life of
Samuel Johnson (1791) was written by James Boswell. Making reference
to Samuel Johnson’s travel companion and biographer, the term
“Boswell” is employed in “A Scandal in Bohemia” as a metaphor for
“friend, companion and biographer” when Holmes laments, in Watson’s
absence: “I am lost without my Boswell” (Doyle 120). Arguably, by
writing the canon with Watson as the biographer of Holmes, Doyle was
the originator of the practice of treating Holmes and Watson as if they
were real people. Doyle initiated this “as if real” dynamic, in an accepted
storytelling style of his day, in his first Sherlock Holmes story “A Study in
Scarlet” (1887), which he refers to on the title page as “a reprint from the
reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., late of the Army Medical
Department.”
The Doylian and Watsonian positions are both taken up by Sydney
Castle Roberts in his book, Holmes and Watson: A Miscellany. First giving
readers a bibliography of Doyle’s canon, Roberts then states that biblio-
graphy is not enough – for enthusiasts, biography is demanded. Roberts
draws from examples of existing Holmesian literary criticism and scholar-
ship, and then speculates from Watson’s narrative data, supplemented by
historical detail, about the detective’s ancestry, family, education, nature,
and emotional make-up; also offering insights into Holmes’s favorite
literature, and reproducing a scholarly paper about Holmes and his love
of music. Roberts applies the same standard of Holmesian scholarship to
the problem of the chronology of Watson’s narrative and the inner and
external lives of Watson and his wife – inferring, again using historical
resources, Watson’s likely date of birth and where Doctor and Mrs.
Watson may have married. Roberts not only adheres to the “as if real”
premise in his own scholarly investigation, but also provides examples of
this premise in action, such as a 1950 exhibition of Holmes’s and Watson’s
possessions in the context of the sitting room of 221B, created in Abbey
House on Baker Street (45). The activities of cosplay and roleplay would
likewise have been fitting examples for Roberts to point to: participants in
these activities within Sherlock Holmes fan communities, like Roberts,
HOLMES AND HIS BOSWELL IN COSPLAY AND ROLEPLAY 103
offer close readings of texts in which Doyle’s characters appear, and infer
plausible character biographies using textual clues and historical facts as
guidelines. Indeed, in Tom Ue’s interview with Michael Dirda, author of
the critical biography On Conan Doyle, Ue asks about “overlaps between
critical theory and the method behind the [‘as if real’] game that
Holmesians play” (“Conan Doyle and the Life of Writing” 247). Dirda
responds: “The methods of analysis, the use of historical resources, the
close attention to what is said or not said in the text – these are common to
both ‘the game’ and academic criticism” (247).
Despite this striking overlap, academic literature on cosplay – an activity
which exemplifies “the game” to which Ue refers – is scarce.1 In particular,
cosplay relating to Sherlock Holmes characters is entirely absent from
published academic literature. A substantial body of academic work on
the practice of role-playing games and role-playing exists, but until Ann
McClellan’s there was no published study examining fans of Sherlock
Holmes who play the characters on social media platforms. McClellan’s
study was limited to roleplaying relating to the BBC adaptation, Sherlock,
on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. This chapter takes a tentative step
towards narrowing the gap in the scholarship on cosplay and roleplay as
sites of consumption and (re)production of characters from Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes stories.
“Cosplay,” a portmanteau word combining “costume” and “play,” was
the term reportedly coined by a Japanese journalist to describe, for a
Japanese audience, the practice of costumed fandom at the Los Angeles
Sci-Fi Convention in 1984 (Winge 66). According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, cosplay is “the action or pastime of dressing up in costume,
esp. as a character from anime, manga, or video games.” Lamerichs defines
cosplay as a practice in which “fans create and wear costumes that allow
them to re-enact existing fictional characters from popular culture”
(“Costuming as Subculture” 113). In the final analysis, cosplay can be
defined as costumed play and also as the performative activity of “playing a
part” while dressed as a fictional character.
There was already an established British “Holmesian” tradition of dres-
sing in typical Victorian costume and performing in character prior to the
use of the term “cosplay.” For instance, photographic images of a 1968 tour
of Switzerland show two members of The Sherlock Holmes Society of
London in costume as Holmes and Moriarty, recreating their final con-
frontation at the Reichenbach Falls at a waterfall near the canonical location.
Roger Johnson, who was a member of The Sherlock Holmes Society of
104 L. DUFFY
London, has stated that the practice of dressing in character and traveling to
locations associated with Holmes and Watson became a traditional part of
the Society’s repertoire of activities (pers. comm.).
In a survey by Robin S. Rosenberg and Andrea M. Letamendi the
motivations of self-identified cosplayers have been detailed, with signifi-
cant numbers of respondents claiming that their cosplay followed from
their affection for particular fictional characters, while others stated that
cosplay constitutes a vehicle for artistic expression. Related to this, practi-
tioners have called attention to the creative process involved in cosplay as
an act of “performance” (Lotecki 1). This act of performing a fictional
character and inhabiting that character as if he or she were a real person
seems an appropriate method for the consumption and reproduction of
characters from Doyle’s canon, when one considers Sherlock Holmes’s
own relationship to disguise. For example, in “A Scandal in Bohemia,”
Holmes disguises himself twice as fictional characters which he has
devised. In Watson’s account:
It was close upon four before the door opened, and a drunken-looking
groom, ill-kempt and side-whiskered, with an inflamed face and disreputable
clothes, walked into the room. Accustomed as I was to my friend’s amazing
powers in the use of disguises, I had to look three times before I was certain
that it was indeed he. (Doyle 123)
In this instance, Holmes’s disguise is developed to enable him to blend in

with the stable staff employed by Irene Adler, in order to obtain informa-
tion about her. The second time Holmes disguises himself in this story,
the detective appears
in the character of an amiable and simple-minded nonconformist clergyman.

His broad black hat, his baggy trousers, his white tie, his sympathetic smile,
and general look of peering and benevolent curiosity were such as [the
skilled actor] Mr. John Hare alone could have equalled. It was not merely
that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul
seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine
actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in
crime. (126)
In an analysis of cosplay and roleplay, it is useful to consider this char-

acterization of Holmes in disguise as an instance of acting. Actor and
theatrical school tutor Lee Strasberg has called acting “[t]he ability to put
oneself into another character.” Cosplayers and roleplayers seek to per-
form this feat in two key ways. Firstly, inhabiting the fictional characters of
their choosing requires cosplayers and roleplayers to call upon their own
humanity and experiences of life and use these to approximate “truthful,”
recognizable, life-like reproductions of fictional characters. This requires
cosplayers and roleplayers, like Holmes in disguise, to draw on their
observations and insights regarding themselves and others in order to
convincingly project a character and to anticipate how it will be inter-
preted. Secondly, for cosplayers and roleplayers, putting themselves into a
character is achieved by behaving “In Character”: responding in ways that
the player believes the chosen fictional characters would, rather than
behaving in accordance with the player’s own identity. This involves,
amongst other things, communicating via the idiomatic speech patterns
and (in the case of cosplay) gestures associated with the chosen fictional
character’s repertoire – feats which make use of fans’ detailed knowledge
of their objects of fandom.
When selecting a fictional character to adapt and reproduce, cosplayers
typically choose one “that works with their bodies” (Taylor 38), but they
do sometimes accord less primacy to a match in bodily characteristics so as
to portray their favored character, so long as they are not entering a
competition. Participants in Sherlock Holmes cosplay who attend non-
competitive events or informal gatherings put together costumes, with
accoutrements, that are as accurate as their budgets and costume-making
or modifying skills allow – circumstantial constraints, together with artistic
license, thus ensure significant opportunities for divergence from canoni-
cal sources in cosplay adaptations of Doyle’s characters. For example, it is
almost certain that some Sherlock Holmes cosplayers will, in future, pre-
sent their characters in deliberately anachronistic versions of Victorian
dress as seen in Sherlock’s “The Abominable Bride.”
The critical and creative processes for Sherlock Holmes cosplay involve
closely studying the chosen character’s costume, personal property, verbal
and body language, roles in life, areas of expertise, personal preferences,
flaws, strengths, and habits. Ashley Lotecki’s study of North American
cosplayers from multiple genres and communities of fandom employs data
that was collected, in various ways, from 529 self-described cosplayers.
Amongst other things, the study considered the cosplayers’ emotional,
social, and behavioral processes “while interpreting and constructing their
characters, including the negotiation between fiction and reality, and the
106 L. DUFFY
place of temporary identity” (Lotecki iii). Lotecki found that 27.6% of

respondents had set out, via attention to the types of details mentioned
above, to produce a “recognisable” rendition; the goal of 42.2% was to
produce a replica that could be considered accurate; and 18.8% aimed for a
“complete replica including personality and traits” (45). Drawing on close
attention to transmedia texts in which their chosen fictional characters
appear, as well as historical guidelines and intertextual resources, cos-
tumed enthusiasts such as these are engaging in reproductions and adap-
tations of fictional characters (including those devised by Doyle) that quite
literally seek to “flesh out” these characters by conjuring them in corporeal
form, “as if” they were real people.
Roleplay is a similar, though distinct, activity whereby Sherlock Holmes
fan communities adapt and develop Doyle’s characters outside of their
canonical context. Since it is a relatively new field of study there is confu-
sion about an adequate term to use when referring to the activity of
roleplaying. McClellan defines the practice of playing the roles of
Sherlock Holmes characters on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr as a
narrative role-playing game (RPG), but also uses the word “role-playing”
in her study of fan texts (although she notes that RPGs, unlike fan texts,
involve a games-master or referee). Similarly, the Oxford English
Dictionary definition of a role-playing game is: “A game in which players
take on the roles of imaginary characters who engage in adventures,
typically in a particular fantasy setting overseen by a referee.” Heather
Osborne clarifies that a narrative RPG shares certain characteristics with
fan fiction:
The players write action, dialogue, and internal monologue, resulting in a

narrative that resembles fan fiction with two POV characters. Unlike fan
fiction, however, the game is not intended to reach a conclusion.
While the current chapter’s insights may have some bearing on these
kinds of role-playing activities, the version of Sherlock Holmes narra-
tive roleplaying which takes place on permanent platforms, and which
does share with fan fiction the intention for the roleplay to reach a
conclusion, is this chapter’s focus. The spelling used here is “roleplay-
ing” to distinguish the activity from an RPG, and from “role playing”
as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the acting out of the
part of a particular person or character.” The usage of the term “role-
playing” is also favored by fans.
A roleplay is engaged in by at least two individuals working in tandem

to create a written narrative while each author/player takes on the role of
one or more fictional characters. This type of collaboratively written role-
play tells a story but usually also explores, to some extent, the topic and the
character being performed. A major difference between cosplaying and
roleplaying is that costume serves primarily to indicate to an audience
which fictional character is being portrayed by a cosplayer. A roleplayer,
on the other hand, has no physical costuming needs because the character
being portrayed online is named, or the identity of the character is other-
wise explicated in the written narrative.
The roleplayer’s audience is primarily the person, or people, whom
that roleplayer writes with; however, the audience may also include
readers who follow the story as it is being written, or read the roleplay
when it is complete. On permanent roleplay message boards, each
“post” made by the roleplayers is arranged in linear time, and the
narrative constituted by the roleplay can be read by scrolling down
the “page.” A “post” is the contribution added by a roleplayer as a
response to that which has already been written and posted on the
roleplay message thread. Being able to track a roleplay in this linear
fashion is essential because the narratives may take between two
months and more than two years to complete.
To create consistent and recognizable “as if real” characters, roleplayers
engage in active research and critical selection from competing, often
contradictory, and perhaps ambiguously written, transmedia texts pertain-
ing to their chosen characters. In this regard, roleplayers are generally
aware that prospective writing partners may interpret the same source text
very differently to themselves, and attempts to reach consensus regarding
the perceived essence of the character under contention must ensue. This
makes roleplay a fertile site for engagement with criteria for valid inter-
pretations and adaptations of the fictional characters that the roleplayers
are inhabiting and elaborating on. The similarity with cosplay is that both
types of fan activities involve absorbing enough topical information to
enable a thorough understanding of the character that is inhabited and
adapted. The observational, critical, creative, and imaginative work that is
required for “putting oneself into character” – work that is interwoven
with the endeavors of cosplaying and roleplaying – is, quite appropriately,
also germane to Holmes’s practice of detection (Strasberg). It is not only
his penchant for disguise that is relevant here: in solving all his cases,
Holmes is famous for the ratiocinative method whereby he fills in gaps
108 L. DUFFY
and formulates logical conclusions based on details that he has observed

and specialized knowledge that he has acquired:
He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied his
immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in following out
those clues, and clearing up those mysteries which had been abandoned as
hopeless by the official police. (Doyle 117)
Like the detective character who inspires their activities, Sherlock Holmes
roleplayers who lean towards the tenets of detective novel writing typically
consider that the solution to a case should be logical and possible and that
all aspects of a case should be explainable (Gardner). Creating cases for the
purposes of roleplay narratives therefore usually requires research and
“reasoning backwards, or analytically” (Doyle 61). It would, however,
be erroneous to assume that this analytical, rational aspect of the activity
diminishes opportunities for creativity and artistry within instances of
roleplaying. While McClellan’s study of BBC Sherlock “role play” proposes
that players’ creative choices are “limited by the constraints of the original
show” due to the imperative to behave in “textually appropriate ways,”
permanent board roleplayers have a comparatively wide range of creative
options (143). Roleplayers who enjoy operating within the parameters
defined by the world of Sherlock may do so, but this can involve, for
example, introducing the roleplayer’s own entirely original character into
that world, perhaps as a client or as an antagonist. In this way, Sherlock
Holmes roleplay involves the reimagining of, and elaboration on, Doyle’s
fictional universe, in dialogue with intertextual resources provided by
existing transmedia adaptations such as Sherlock.
In order to realize their chosen characters, some roleplayers rely on
note-taking, a good memory, and a wide range of primary and secondary
sources (just like the biographer James Boswell, and by implication John
Watson). A Sherlock Holmes roleplayer’s research might examine topics
such as ciphers, map reading, medicine, forensic pathology, firearms, law,
or foreign languages; anything that enables players to place their charac-
ters in a wide variety of contexts and explore how those characters would
likely behave in them. In the ensuing act of roleplay, virtual and real
worlds intertwine and influence each other. More specifically, as readers,
viewers, and writers, roleplayers can reflect on what both they and their
characters would do, or ought to do, in specific scenarios, and where this
cultural directive to act in a particular way comes from. Roleplayers are
thus in a position to treat the real world constructs that inform the
progression of their narratives according to the same provisional, “as if
real” premise that underpins their interpretations of the fictional charac-
ters that are the focus of roleplaying endeavors.
Roleplaying fan communities are likely to be familiar with both Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes canon and the BBC’s Sherlock. Regardless of the world
that is being roleplayed within, by jointly developing a plot writing part-
ners call into play the “conductor of light” effect by bouncing ideas off of
each other and searching for holes or weaknesses in plot. The point of
roleplaying is to maintain fidelity to the Sherlock Holmes universe in
accordance with the “as if real” premise, while simultaneously exploring
outside the boundaries of that universe by placing characters in new
situations and working through events that could take place outside of a
character’s stipulated narrative arc. A roleplaying narrative could, for
example, return John Watson to his military days in Afghanistan.
Similarly, permanent roleplaying boards allow for conversations on an
open thread, where participants discuss, for example, how an original
character might contribute to the known narrative arc by affecting the
life of a younger Holmes or Watson.
While canonical adherence is necessary insofar as the “as if real” premise
demands it, a roleplayer’s imagination sets the limit for devising setting
and plots. Interestingly, a brief survey of Sherlock Holmes roleplayers
indicates widespread reluctance to stray from the bounds of the canon
regarding the protagonist’s morality. It likewise seems that murdering a
major character is not appealing to Sherlock Holmes roleplayers, but
placing Holmes in a romance is very popular. An early precedent for this
type of exploration of Holmes within alternative contexts can be found in
Doyle’s correspondence with the American playwright, and stage actor,
William Gillette, who asked permission for Holmes to be married in the
1899 play Sherlock Holmes. Doyle’s response was: “You may marry him,
murder him, or do anything you like to him” (quoted in Cranfield 75).
This might be taken literally to imply that the author was indifferent to his
creation. However, Ue has drawn attention to Doyle’s response to a
request to collaborate with W. Hornung on a Holmes and Raffles story:
It is worth doing; it is good enough to do . . . But I cannot overcome my

unwillingness. I’ll tell you what I will do, and Hornung shall do it too. You
have spent years on the plan and have brought it to where it is entitled to
recognition. I will give you Sherlock Holmes and Hornung will give you
110 L. DUFFY
Raffles. If you want to write it, it may be done by you, with our permission
and our good will. That is the last word. (Quoted in “Holmes and Raffles in
Arms” 223)
Ue proposes that this refusal was, for Doyle, a question of taking responsi-
bility for encouraging “correct social values” in his work (224). In support of
this reading, Ue quotes a statement made by Doyle in his autobiography,
Memories and Adventures, that “[one] must not make the criminal a hero”
(224) It is noteworthy in this regard that, while one request for a roleplay in
which a villain emerges victorious came to light during the survey of role-
players undertaken for the sake of this chapter, that request was not taken up.
However, one of the limitations of this ongoing study of roleplays on
permanent boards is that not all of the forty roleplays surveyed are complete.
Some are currently being written and a number appear to have been, at least
temporarily, abandoned. Nevertheless, of the completed roleplays dealing
with the topics of virtue, justice, and law and order these canonically
inscribed social values are ultimately triumphant. While Sherlock Holmes
roleplay is an activity in which the boundaries set up by the canon are
permeated, it seems that those boundaries are nevertheless not dissolved.
Michael Saler posits that virtual worlds can be safe spaces in which players
discuss contemporary world issues and socio-political concerns (199). This
is not to suggest that roleplayers spend all of their time in discourse on
world affairs, but that roleplayers do show their interest in engaging with
reality rather than writing purely as a form of escapism. Indeed, players are
adapting characters from Sherlock Holmes stories so as to explore them
within various different scenarios, including those pertinent to a roleplayer’s
own lived experience of contemporary reality. Roleplaying activities in the
twenty-first century show that Sherlock Holmes, as a vehicle for a story,
works equally well in Victorian fog, a Second World War setting, or a
twenty-first-century timeline. While Victorian fog is only mentioned in
fourteen of the sixty stories, the friendship between Holmes and Watson
is a thread that runs through the entire canon and transcends both place and
time. Like Doyle, Sherlock Holmes roleplayers generally write human
interest stories showing the progress of characters as they struggle to over-
come internal and external conflicts and obstacles.
Steven Moffat, the creator of Sherlock, pins down one reason why fan
authors write their stories: “What happens is – and I’m part of this – you see
something you love, then you start doing your own version of it” (“Sherlock
Not Influenced by Fan Faction”). Contrary to dismissals of roleplay as a
passively consumerist, escapist activity, it is as much a site of creative devel-

opment and production as other forms of fanfiction and adaptation, such as
Sherlock. For example, one of the completed roleplays that was read for this
study took three players two years and five months to write, and it amounted
to more than 115,000 words, the size of a commercially viable Sherlock
Holmes pastiche novel. Moffat’s proposal, that “it’s not an exaggeration to
say that [fanfiction is] the cradle of the next generation of television and
fiction producers,” is pertinent in this regard (“Sherlock Not Influenced by
Fan Faction”). Furthermore, Laurie Penny holds the opinion that “what is
significant about unofficial, extra-canonical fan fiction is that it often spins
the kind of stories that showrunners wouldn’t think to tell.” For instance, the
thrust of the “Punch Bowl” boxing ring fight scene in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock
Holmes is to show the mental purpose and physicality of Holmes while
neutralizing the threat of his opponent, according to the fight choreogra-
pher Richard Ryan (Wolf). However, Holmes’s own motivations for, and
experiences of, the fight are only briefly dealt with, due to the constraints
built into a commercial feature film, which always has limited time in which
to roll out the plot. By contrast, a roleplayer’s own patience, and that of his
or her co-writer, is the only real obstacle to constructing a narrative that
explores ostensible tangents and nuances such as these in meticulous detail.
In this way, roleplay adaptations of fictional characters allow for the
more thorough development of those characters and their backstories
within fan communities. In Sherlock Holmes roleplays any character can
be the main character, protagonist or antagonist, around whom the other
characters’ lives and fates revolve, and narratives may involve the detective
but, like Doyle’s stories, not always a crime. Roleplays often explore
changes in a character’s views as a consequence of actions and events
that the character has been involved in. This can offer, as Holmes often
offers the villain, an opportunity for redemption.
It is not insignificant that the BBC’s Sherlock, one of the more popular and
widely recognized contemporary adaptations of Doyle’s canon, makes refer-
ence to elements of fandom, especially the “as if real” dynamic that this
chapter has shown is common to both cosplay and roleplay. In the first
episode of the third series, “The Empty Hearse,” Anderson holds meetings
of “The Empty Hearse Club,” a group that discusses theories as to how the
detective might have survived the rooftop jump to his apparent death in “The
Reichenbach Fall.” Penny has called this a “conspiracy club,” but it could
easily have been a discussion among participants on a roleplaying board’s
message thread. Additionally, in the Sherlock “mini-episode” “Many Happy
112 L. DUFFY
Returns,” Anderson dresses up, as would a cosplaying fan, in a version of John

Watson’s iconic costume of blue jeans and a pale Aran knit sweater. Finally, in
“The Empty Hearse,” Anderson states: “I believe in Sherlock Holmes,”
thereby echoing John’s sentiments in “The Reichenbach Fall” and suggesting
that viewers could count this character among Sherlock’s fans (the “I Believe
in Sherlock Holmes” fan movement and campaign sprang into being after the
initial airing of “The Reichenbach Fall”). Indeed, Lacy Baugher has suggested
that “Anderson’s Sherlock Holmes fanclub/support group . . . [is] obviously
some sort of stand-in for Sherlock’s massive contingent of online fans.”
There is, then, more than one Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, each
having a set of canon-specific memories, experiences, and identities. If, as
Mark Gatiss suggested at the Edinburgh International Television Festival,
“everything is canonical,” the challenge for cosplayers and roleplayers is to
identify and select iconic attributes of characters and the essential features
of inter-character relationships from multiple, competing, and sometimes
intentionally ambiguous transmedia sources. Interpretations of fictional
characters are forged by individuals drawing on different intertextual
frameworks, so fans’ understandings and preferences about how a char-
acter should be reproduced or adapted are informed by those fans’ perso-
nal exposure to Sherlock Holmes within particular socio-politically and
culturally inscribed contexts. The activities of cosplay and roleplay neces-
sitate that participants critically address the constraints provided by con-
text, and reconcile the competing transmedia texts and different aspects of
any character that they choose to inhabit, so that they can create a stable
and cohesive three-dimensional version that they can confidently perform
in accordance with the “as if real” premise upon which these fan activities
both rest. In this way, cosplayers and roleplayers manage to create diver-
gent but coherent versions of characters from Doyle’s canon, and to
develop these characters convincingly within a multitude of scenarios.
Acknowledgement Thank you to Becky Simpson for the research, support and
insight into cosplay and roleplay and to Tom Ue for his part in bringing the
chapter into being.
NOTE
1. For notable exceptions, see works by Taylor, Lamerichs, Lotecki, Hogan,
Rosenberg and Letamendi, and Booth and Kelly.
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Visions. WETA, 20 Jan. 2014. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.
Booth, Paul and Peter Kelly. “The Changing Faces of Doctor Who Fandom: New
Fans, New Technologies, Old Practices?” Participations: Journal of Audience
and Reception Studies 10.1 (2013): 56–72.Web. 12 Feb. 2016.
“cosplay, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, Jun. 2016. Web. 14 Jun. 2016.
Cranfield, Jonathan. “Sherlock Homes, Fan Culture and Fan Letters.” Fan
Phenomena: Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Tom Ue and Jonathan Cranfield. Bristol:
Intellect Press, 2014. 66–79.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Original Illustrated ‘STRAND’ Sherlock Holmes: The
Complete Facsimile Edition. London: Wordsworth Editions, 1989.
Edinburg International Television Festival. “Sherlock: The Network MGEITF Joint
Session Masterclass.” Online video. YouTube, 30 Aug. 2012. Web. 15 May 2013.
Gardner, Judy. Teacher’s Guide to The Core Classics Edition of Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle’s Selected Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. N. pag: Core Knowledge
Foundation, 2003. Web. 5 May 2013.
Hogan, James Joseph-Westcott. “A Cosplayed Life: Subcultural Influences on
Racial and Heteronormative Structures in Everyday Life.” MA thesis.
University of Connecticut, 2012. Web. 15 May 2013.
“I Believe in Sherlock Holmes.” Fanlore. MediaWiki, 16 Jun. 2015. Web. 12 Jun.
2016.
Johnson, Roger. e-mail message to author, 2016.
Lamerichs, Nicholle. “All Dressed Up: Conceptualizing ‘Cosplaying’ as a Fan
Practice.” Under The Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer, Bedfordshire, 2010.
Wikidot, n.d. Web. 9 May 2013.
———. “Cosplay: The Affective Mediation of Fictional Bodies.” Academia.
Academia, n.d. Web. 18 Jun. 2013.
———. “Costuming as Subculture: The Multiple Bodies in Cosplay.” Scene 2.1
(2014): 113–25. Web. 12 Jun. 2016.
——— “Holmes Abroad: Dutch Fans Interpret the Famous Detective.” Sherlock
and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series. Ed. Louisa Ellen Stein and
———. “Stranger than Fiction: Fan Identity in Cosplay.” Transformative Works
and Cultures 7 (2011): N. pag. Web. 5 May 2013.
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Art through Play.” MA thesis. Ryerson University, 2012. Web. 5 May 2013.
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Sherlock. ” Journal of Fandom Studies 1.2 (2013): 139–157. Web. 12 Jun 2016.
Osborne, Heather. “Performing Self, Performing Character: Exploring Gender
Performativity in Online Role-Playing Games.” Transformative Works and
Cultures 11 (2012): N. pag. Web. 14 Jun. 2016.
114 L. DUFFY
Penny, Laurie. 2014. “Laurie Penny on Sherlock: The Adventure of the

Overzealous Fanbase.” New Statesman, 12 Jan. 2014. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.
Roberts, Sydney Castle. Holmes and Watson: A Miscellany. London: Oxford UP,
1953.
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Rosenberg, Robin S. and Andrea M. Letamendi. “Expressions of Fandom:
Findings from a Psychological Survey of Cosplay and Costume Wear.”
Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 5 (2013): 9–18. Web. 12 Jun. 2016.
Saler, Michael. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual
Reality. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.
Sherlock Holmes. Dir. Guy Richie. Warner Home Video, 2009. DVD.
“Sherlock Mini Episode – Many Happy Returns: Series 3.” Online video clip.BBC,
2 Jan. 2014. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.
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Jan. 2014. Web. 20 Feb 2014.
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Fandom.” MA thesis. The University of British Columbia, 2009. Web. 9 May
2013.
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Dirda.” Life Writing 12.3 (2015): 243–49. Web. 12 Jun. 2016.
———. “Holmes and Raffles in Arms: Death, Endings and Narration.”
Victoriographies 5.3 (2015): 219–33. Web. 12 Jun. 2016.
Winge, Theresa. “Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Anime and Manga
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Lunning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006.
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Holmes Fight Choreographer Richard Ryan.” The Bartitsu Society. Word Press,
25 Dec. 2009. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.
Lynn Duffy has a background in archaeology but is currently engaged in writing

a Sherlock Holmes pastiche thanks to being introduced at an early age to the foggy
television adaptations of Holmes. Lynn’s interests include Holmes-related social
events and painting with acrylics.
A “Horrific Breakdown of Reason”: Holmes
and the Postcolonial Anti-Detective Novel,
Lost Ground
Sam Naidu
INTRODUCTION
This chapter does not examine fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle, which is set
in South Africa and which features the character Sherlock Holmes
(although it is worth mentioning that Doyle’s first published story, “The
Mystery of Sasassa Valley”1 [1879], is set in South Africa). Rather, the
focus is on the literary legacy left by the Sherlock Holmes stories and how
it manifests in South African crime fiction today.2 In particular, the
chapter questions how the nineteenth-century ratiocinative tale, epito-
mized by the Sherlock Holmes stories, with its ostensible celebration of
reason,3 has been transplanted to a postcolonial setting. What does this
migration signify in terms of Holmes’s “science of deduction” – his
method of interpreting the evidence pertinent to a crime, which is adum-
brated in chapter two of A Study in Scarlet? Is it the case that South
African crime fiction requires new or distinct hermeneutic strategies which
are appropriate to its traumatic colonial and apartheid history? For pur-
poses of illustration, Michiel Heyns’s Lost Ground, an addition to a host of
S. Naidu (*)
Department of English, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
e-mail: s.naidu@ru.ac.za

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_7
116 S. NAIDU
other literary texts penned in the last 120 years or so which draw on the
unique and enduring resource offered by the Sherlock Holmes stories, and
which take the form of homage, parody, or pastiche,4 will be analyzed.
This postcolonial, anti-detective novel, set in contemporary South Africa,
is a meditation on the country’s past of colonial crimes and social injus-
tices, which impinge on the present, resulting in new crimes and necessi-
tating innovative forms of detection.
Lost Ground makes explicit and implicit references to Sherlock Holmes,
constituting what is partly literary veneration, and what can also be read as
postcolonial criticism. Holmes’s unique combination of the emerging dis-
courses of science in the late nineteenth century with a hermeneutic strategy
based on the laws of reason and logic is his method of arriving at the “truth.”
In the fictional world created by Doyle, rationality almost always triumphs in
the face of threats and anxiety symbolized by crime. Through the canny use
of narrative, Doyle presented the world with an icon of reason, a hero of
civilization and order, a character of enduring potency whose powers of
observation and interpretation result not only in the mystery being solved,
but in a neat and satisfying narrative. The reader, viewer, or gamer succumbs
to the romance of reason epitomized by Holmes. But what happens when
authors start to question Holmes’s reason and the reason for Holmes? How
does Holmes’s hermeneutic strategy stand up to postcolonial scrutiny?
To date, the main focus of postcolonial crime fiction studies has been to
describe and define, specifically, postcolonial crime fiction. In Matzke and
Mühleisen’s Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural
Perspective (2006), for instance, the editors are intent on interrogating the
“interrelation between colonial authority, crime and literature” (4) and the
result is a body of scholarship which convincingly shows how postcolonial
crime fiction, whilst demonstrating social as well as criminal detection, has
extended and reshaped the genre to address notions of community, beliefs,
race, gender, and socio-political and historical formations – what the editors
refer to as “postcolonial ‘genre-bending’” (5). The particular nub of post-
colonial crime fiction is identified by Pearson and Singer in Detective Fiction
in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (2009):
When we venture beyond the Anglo-American “clue-puzzle” or “cosy

mystery” traditions of abstracted ratiocination, we encounter figures
whose investigative practices challenge presumptions of objective policing
and deduction – and, potentially, the legal and social orders that are founded
on such presumptions. (2)
A “HORRIFIC BREAKDOWN OF REASON”: HOLMES AND THE POSTCOLONIAL . . . 117
Referring here to the detective figures who employ alternative and con-
text-specific detecting methods to investigate crimes in a postcolonial and
transnational setting, Pearson and Singer conclude that metropolitan
social norms and notions of law enforcement are contested by postcolonial
crime fiction.
According to Yumna Siddiqi postcolonial crime fiction takes the tradi-
tional crime or detective novel and “tweak[s] it or turn[s] it inside out in
what becomes a narrative of ‘social detection’ . . . a ‘vehicle for judgments
on society and revelations of its hidden nature’” (176). Examples of the
postcolonial detective novel are Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Amitav
Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason, and in South Africa, Michiel Heyns’s Lost
Ground and Ingrid Winterbach’s The Book of Happenstance, which display
some of the traits of the postmodern, anti-detective story, and can be
regarded as “writing back” to the classic tales of detection penned by
Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle in the nineteenth century.
These postcolonial detective novels draw on and subvert the heritage of
the classic tale of ratiocination in order to expose how “Western” dis-
courses of rationality, whilst limited in any context, are particularly inade-
quate when it comes to solving crimes in the postcolonial context. Quite
often their detectives fail to solve the mystery or crime and the reader is
instead offered a complex critique of the respective social settings. In
general, the rising diversity of and experimentation with crime fiction in
recent times, as it proliferates in wide-ranging geocultural locations and
mutates into transnational literary phenomena, exhibits a questioning not
only of reason, but also of reason’s relationship to authority, social order,
and notions of justice.
“NEGATIVE HERMENEUTICS” AND THE ANTI-DETECTIVE NOVEL

What Poe, and then Doyle with the Sherlock Holmes stories, established is
a short fictional form which allows the reader to identify with the detective
protagonist in his quest for “truth,” order, and justice. The reader is
invited to accompany the detective on this quest and is even pitted against
the detective in a bid to solve the mystery before the detective does with
some aplomb and a great deal of commendation from the detective’s
sidekick, also the narrator or chronicler of these adventures. This form
gave the author an opportunity to show off his ingenuity, while displaying
his detective’s analytical skills, and engaging those of the reader. The
intellectual, aesthetic, and psychological satisfaction of this form ensured
118 S. NAIDU
its lasting success. This is despite, or perhaps because of, numerous

attempts to interrogate, subvert, parody, and discredit the assumptions
or principles underpinning detective fiction, in particular, the valorization
of reason and the epistemological quest.
Laura Marcus explains in “Detection and Literary Fiction” (2003),
her comprehensive article on the relationship between detective fiction
and “the broader field of literature” (245), that postmodernist anti-
detective fiction is described generally in terms of “negative hermeneu-
tics.” By this Marcus means that it is widely held that in the postmo-
dernist, anti-detective novel “the quest for knowledge is doomed to
failure” and there is a tendency to focus on ontology and “not on the
problematics of knowledge (as in the epistemological field) but on
world-making” (246). Marcus does stress that “neither ‘modernism’
nor ‘postmodernism’ are fully stable categories, and the relations
between genre fictions and literature more broadly need to be under-
stood in a nexus of interlocking, competing and shifting relations”
(246). Holmes and his ratiocination, or rather the ethos of epistemo-
logical or hermeneutic certainty he represents, are thus put to the test
again and again in the anti-detective novel.
What the anti-detective novel reveals, amongst other things, is the
length and breadth of its pedigree. As Marcus points out, “[S]uch writ-
ings, marked by their intertextuality, often look back to precursors such as
Poe, Doyle and Chesterton while also establishing relations between one
another, as in the case of Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Pynchon, Eco and
Auster” (252). However, Marcus warns against a “radical break” between
“classical” detective fiction and postmodernist detective fiction, as authors
such as Doyle also “deployed not only many of the tropes but also the
strategies of self-reflexivity which we now identify with postmodernist
narratives” (252–53). Indeed, in chapter two of A Study in Scarlet
Watson mentions Poe and Dupin and then Émile Gaboriau’s Lecoq –
two authors and two fictional detectives who had achieved fame earlier in
the century. Holmes scoffs at these two fictional detectives and dismisses
them as inferior to him, thereby instating himself as the pre-eminent
fictional detective of the time.
Michael Holquist’s account of anti-detective or metaphysical detective
fiction involves showing how postmodernism exploits detective fiction in
order to critique modernist literature. He points out that authors such as
Robbe-Grillet and Borges “use as a foil the assumption of detective fiction
that the mind can solve all; by twisting the details just the opposite
becomes the case” (155). For Merivale and Sweeney a metaphysical

detective story
is a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective story conventions –

such as narrative closure and the detective’s role as surrogate reader – with
the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of
being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery
plot. (1)
This extrapolation, from the mystery of a crime in detective fiction to the

mystery of being in anti-detective fiction, is noteworthy. The crucial shift,
according to Merivale and Sweeney, is from an emphasis on knowing the
details of the crime and the identity of the criminal to asking ontological
questions. The anti-detective novel singled out by Marcus for explication
is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1984), an anti-detective novel
with modernist and postmodernist features whose detective hero, William
of Baskerville, fails in his epistemological quest. Eco’s ploy to have William
of Baskerville enact a “negative hermeneutics” is central to the novel’s plot
and themes:
“There was no plot,” William said, “and I discovered it by mistake . . . I have

never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has
with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was
the relation among signs . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of
order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the uni-
verse.” (491–92)
Holmes, like William, does not doubt the “truth” of signs, but where
William fails in the “science of deduction,” that is, in interpreting the
“relation among signs,” Holmes almost always triumphs. Brian McHale
sums up the significance of Eco’s strategy of “negative hermeneutics” by
asserting that William of Baskerville’s failure “undermines the basic
assumption of the detective story from Poe’s Dupin through Sherlock
Holmes to Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and beyond, namely the
assumption of the adequacy of reason itself, of ratiocination” (15).
Whilst undermining and critiquing “classical” detective fiction, authors
such as Eco pay homage to it, extending its literary influence well beyond
its putative generic boundaries. The postcolonial detective novel may be
120 S. NAIDU
seen to perform a similar function as the anti-detective novel, as Yumna

Siddiqi has contended.
But what sort of metatextual criticism does the postcolonial detective
novel perform? Wendy Knepper describes the mechanics of the postcolonial
detective genre as a “manipulation or subversion of generic conventions as a
purposeful, political activity” (36). With her definition Knepper introduces
the political dimension which is absent from Marcus’s account of the anti-
detective novel and, further, Knepper’s elaboration gestures toward the
overlap between postcolonialism and postmodernism: “[D]isrupting the
‘law and order’ of the literary genre is a means to question accepted truths
about ‘law and order’ in the postcolonial society” (36). For the postcolonial
detective novel, subverting the formal conventions of “classical” detective
fiction is a parallel strategy to the “negative hermeneutics” of its content.
THE LOSS OF REASON IN LOST GROUND

At first glance, Michiel Heyns’s Lost Ground (2011) resembles “classic”
detective fiction. On closer inspection, though, a somewhat different
narrative strategy emerges, one which employs the notion of “negative
hermeneutics” and which draws on postmodernism and postcolonialism
to create a text which is quintessentially anti-detective. Unlike the crime
thriller novel, an extremely popular sub-genre of crime fiction in contem-
porary South Africa, which, according to Chris Warnes, negotiates social
anxiety and the threat of crime by projecting “fantasies of legibility and
control” (984), this postcolonial anti-detective novel is primarily con-
cerned with laying bare that anxiety and exposing the ironies and tragedies
which arise in a society struggling, and failing, with transition on various
complex levels.
Set in a small Karoo town, this is a narrative with multiple strands, the
two most obvious being: the story of Peter Jacobs, a white South African
gay, investigative journalist who returns to his hometown of Alfredville
after twenty years of voluntary exile in the UK; and the story of the murder
of his cousin, Desirée Williams, the white woman who married a
“coloured” policeman, and whose murder has heightened racial tensions
in the town. Jacobs returns home to investigate the murder and to write a
story about it for “western” consumption. He discovers that his childhood
friend, Bennie (also white), has been having an affair with Desirée, and he
accuses Bennie of her murder. When accused by Jacobs, Bennie commits
suicide. Thereafter, Bennie’s wife, Chrisna, confesses to Jacobs, who then
realizes how he has bungled the investigation with his arrogant and pre-
sumptuous approach to detection. Clearly and self-consciously, Heyns
references “classic” detective fiction in which a gifted detective sets out
to solve a mystery, but equally deliberately, Heyns subverts these tradi-
tional detective fiction elements, and rather presents the reader with a
philosophical, psychological, and political narrative about loss, identity,
betrayal, and metafictionally, about narrative and writing.
Lost Ground is a novel which entices the reader to detect with Peter
Jacobs and thus to identify with him as the protagonist. But the desire to
detect is frustrated. Where Dupin and Holmes were exemplary analysts
whose powers of reason mostly ensured their success, Jacobs is a mis-
guided, displaced, emotionally naive investigator whose dubious motives
for writing his story and ad hoc detection methods cause him to interpret
the clues falsely and fatally.5 Jacobs’s epistemological quest fails spectacu-
larly and the novel is actually a story about a dismal failure of a detective
whose errors result in tragedy and the “horrific breakdown of reason”
(294). Most readers of Lost Ground will deviate from the protagonist in
the detection process, having vital clues and obvious red herrings laid
before them by the author, but they are otherwise persuaded to identify
with his suffering – the loss and sense of annihilation he feels at having so
profoundly botched the investigation:
And then the shell cracks, my time-hardened carapace, defence against

feeling too much and showing too much, and I am left exposed on some
desolate shore, delivered over to the furies that attend on human misfortune
or misdeed . . . I feel the relentless pull of loss, of the losses I have caused and
the losses I have suffered, the drift towards annihilation that nobody and
nothing can stay. (297)
Jacobs’s existential ruminations and nihilistic visions here are reminiscent

of both modernist and postmodernist texts. Also, although not a murderer
(in the conventional sense) but a detective figure, Jacobs resembles the
criminal-as-artist figure of nineteenth-century aestheticized crime fiction,
because of his moral or ethical quandaries, much more than he resembles
the rational Holmes. Despite its protracted portrayal of the tragic con-
sequences of crime, the nineteenth-century crime novel often offered
some hope of redemption. In the case of Raskolnikov in Crime and
Punishment it is suggested that his redemption is possible through religion
or Sonia’s love for him. In Lost Ground, the young black woman who
122 S. NAIDU
befriends Jacobs, Nonyameko Mhlabeni, plays the role of sidekick. Like

Watson to Holmes, she questions Jacobs’s methods and pricks his con-
science, and she also comes to symbolize the possibility of redemption at
the close of the novel: “But I hold onto Nonyameko’s hand, for all the
world as if I could thus anchor myself to some saving vestige of identity, as
if her grasp could keep me from being swept away into oblivion” (297).
Although ultimately offering no help with the solving of the crime, the
pragmatic Nonyameko plays the role of confidante and audience to whom
the anti-detective addresses his final confession.
Another reason to view Jacobs as an anti-detective is based on reviewer
Finuala Dowling’s theory that Jacobs is in fact investigating his own
murder:
His cousin is his doppelganger: in beauty, glamour, and witting or unwitting

sexual manipulation (“very lovey-dovey one day, very fuck-you the next”),
she is his twin. She was murdered in the very house where Peter lived as a
boy. Like Desirée, Peter has lived for the last several years with a partner who
is a black man.
Indeed, Bennie (Jacobs’s childhood friend with whom he shares adoles-

cent stirrings of love and sexual desire) replaces the exiled Jacobs as object
of desire with Desirée, and Chrisna (Bennie’s wife) is just as jealous of
Jacobs as she was of Desirée. Moreover, a number of references are made
by various characters about the striking physical resemblance between
Jacobs and Desirée. It is therefore plausible to read Jacobs and Desirée
as doppelgangers or twin characters. In metaphorical terms this investiga-
tion of the murder of the self makes sense. Jacobs is in Alfredville to
recover a lost self, a past self who loved, and was loved by, Bennie:
And yet that is what I have found: that I lost something years ago that I
haven’t been able to replace, and if that something isn’t altogether Bennie, it
is what he represented to me then, though I had no idea of it at the time: the
unfettered exploration of life, the life of the senses, the unexamined joy of
daily companionship in that exploration. (274)
In this extract from an email to his ex-partner, James, a few days after
Bennie’s suicide, Jacobs laments his ignorance and belated realization that
he should have been investigating himself and his relationship with Bennie,
rather than Desirée’s murder. This blurring of lines, such as the one between
detective and victim, is a common feature in postmodernist anti-detective

fiction. This blurring can also pertain to the distinction between the mur-
derer and the detective, as seen in Borges’s short story “Death and the
Compass” (1942) in which the detective Erik Lönrot is mirrored and then
slain by his arch-enemy, Sharlach. Absurdly, Jacobs’s detecting leads to
Bennie’s death and the ensuing tragic revelations cause Jacobs to “drift
towards annihilation that nobody and nothing can stay” (297).
The “negative hermeneutics” which replace the “science of deduction”
in this novel are signposted by a number of direct intertextual references to
the Holmes stories. The cliché of “the curious incident of the dog in the
night-time,” derived from “The Silver Blaze,” and complicated here by
there being two dogs, one belonging to the victim and one belonging to
the murderer (109), is in fact the vital clue which is misinterpreted or
overlooked by Jacobs. In the original, the observation that the dog did
not bark is the clinching piece of evidence for Holmes. He infers that the
dog knew the criminal and thus the identity of the criminal is confirmed: “I
had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference
invariably suggests others . . . Obviously the midnight visitor was someone
whom the dog knew well. It was Straker who removed Silver Blaze from his
stall and led him out on to the moor” (“Silver Blaze,” 248). In Lost Ground,
Desirée’s Maltese, Cedric, did not bark when his owner was murdered and
Kerneels, a wire-haired mongrel belonging to Bennie and Chrisna, was
spotted at the scene of the crime. Ironically, in an early discussion about
the case, Nonyameko challenges Jacobs about his inability to gather positive
clues and Jacobs responds with an intertextual question “‘Wasn’t it
Sherlock Holmes who solved a crime on the basis of a dog’s not barking
in the night?’” (109). Jacobs wrongly identifies the murderer whom Cedric
did not bark at, and even though he is shown repeatedly that Kerneels
follows both Bennie and Chrisna closely, he infers that Kerneels was at the
scene of the murder because he accompanied Bennie (thus leading to his
false deduction that Bennie is the murderer).
But Jacobs cannot shoulder all the blame for this false reasoning.
Vincent, the car-guard, tells Jacobs that Kerneels was seen outside the
victim’s house and it is Vincent who first makes the wrong inference and
who, using Voltaire, pressures Jacobs into doing his duty by disclosing this
false “truth” (230–31). Jacobs does not have the skills to synthesize his
many observations and although acquainted with certain facts, he lacks
knowledge of his own and other key characters’ emotional turbulence to
deduce that Chrisna, and not Bennie, is the murderer. It is necessary for
124 S. NAIDU
Jacobs to fail in this way – if he performed the “science of deduction”

perfectly, read all the clues and arrived at the conclusion that Chrisna
murdered Desirée, then Jacobs would simple be a hero-detective who
solved a small-town crime of passion. But as a postcolonial anti-detective
he inadvertently uncovers other knowledge about the repercussions of
exile, about the corruption of the police, about stubborn racism and
xenophobia, and about a society so riven by past brutalities that gross
injustice in the present, such as Vincent’s murder, is met with noncha-
lance. It comes as a shock to Jacobs when he discovers that Desirée’s
husband, Hector Williams, has been convicted of the murder based on
evidence which was fabricated by two white, racist policemen. Most
importantly he discovers how he is implicated in these social dynamics
and how his attempts to escape South Africa’s history have been futile.
There are various other allusions to detective fiction throughout the
novel. In a conversation with Nonyameko, Jacobs says, “I’m not here to
write a whodunit” (110). Later he explains to her that he intended his
story for the New York Times “to be an analysis of racial attitudes in a
democratic South Africa, as highlighted by the murder of a white woman
by her black husband” (208). If the traditional detective is meant to
unravel the knot of the mystery and construct a coherent story in which
the details of the crime and of the detection process are complementary,
then what Jacobs manages is “a sorry tale of a stuff-up” (294) which is also
a stuff-up of a tale. He abandons the investigative story, the notion of
which is satirized by Heyns, mainly through Jacobs’s metropolitan mis-
conceptions and initial arrogant assumption that he, armed with his
Othello-inspired hypothesis, is able to solve a crime in postcolonial South
Africa. Heyns, however, does manage to write a postcolonial anti-detective
story which reveals the details of the murder of Desirée and, in the process,
exposes Jacobs’s shortcomings, in particular his failure to understand the
quagmire of “racial attitudes in a democratic South Africa.” Early on in the
novel the reader is given a glimpse of Jacobs’s transnational perspective of
Africa. Having spent just over half of his life in England, and as a white
male of privilege, Jacobs’s view is shot through with “western” assump-
tions about the excesses, the exoticism and exigencies of Africa:
But then, welcome back to Africa where a bit of excess is the norm. For
moderation there’s England, there’s Holland, there’s Scandinavia, the safe,
mature, spongy, cheese-producing Northern democracies who’ve made
their bargain with history and now have nothing to fear . . . This is Africa,
still negotiating its bargain or settling its score with history, dealing with
heat and drought, flood and famine as stoically and inefficiently as with all its
other tribulations. (45–46)
Jacobs’s neo-colonial view that Africa is young, incompetent, and unsafe,

is of course not entirely misinformed, as his experience of a recently
democratized South African society shows. What is worrying about this
view is how easily Jacobs reverts to colonial binaries. His simplistic belief
that Europe has “nothing to fear” and his generalizations about the vast
continent of Africa are indicative of a limited, liberal view. The rest of the
novel indicates that this view informs many of his assumptions about the
investigation. Therefore, Lost Ground derives its strength as a postcolonial
anti-detective novel from this direct critique of Jacobs and from its oblique
appraisal of racial attitudes in contemporary South Africa.
When Jacobs falsely accuses Bennie of murdering Desirée, and presents him
with his interpretation of events which exonerates Hector, Bennie retorts “No
shit, Sherlock, and you know better?” (270). Jacobs believes that his simplistic
understanding of racism in South Africa has uncovered the “truth,” that he has
discovered that Desirée’s husband, Hector, is an innocent man, a man who has
been unjustly convicted because he is black, and that the real murderer is
Bennie. This false accusation is not just an example of the failure of reason; it
also signifies Jacobs’s failure as a friend, as a human being. His traitor’s heart is
partly responsible for Bennie’s suicide a few minutes after this exchange. Later,
Jacobs tells the police that Bennie murdered Desirée, thus effecting the
exoneration of Hector but even this achievement is besmirched by the fact
that Bennie remains wrongfully indicted.
THE POSTCOLONIAL SETTING OF LOST GROUND

In detective fiction of the nineteenth century and more especially, in the
first half of the twentieth, following the chaos and trauma of World War I,
the British whodunit became a firm favorite amongst genteel readers.
Made famous by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, these novels
were usually set in a small town or village, or what is now a cliché, the
country manor setting. Similarly, Lost Ground is set in a small provincial
town and Heyns offers the reader a finite cast of colorful local characters or
suspects who form a community with a shared, albeit tense, past. Besides
nodding to detective fiction, the setting of Lost Ground serves as a micro-
cosm of South African society, a veritable hotbed of racial, political, and
126 S. NAIDU
sexual tensions which erupt in the violent act of murder, not once but
twice. Desirée Williams is not the only murder victim. Vincent, an advo-
cate from the DRC, now a car-guard in Alfredville, is also the victim of a
xenophobic murder. Heyns also successfully evokes the mood and atmo-
sphere of the setting (intrinsic elements of detective fiction), quite delib-
erately replacing the charms of the English countryside (referred to below
as “conventional ideas of beauty”) with the desolate beauty of the Karoo:
I spit on the ground and run on. Just beyond the school the tarred road
turns into a dirt track leading to farmland. The landscape is starting to
shimmer in the heat, the sheep clustering under the few trees for shade.
It’s a stony landscape, making few concessions to conventional ideas of
beauty: some hills, shading off into distant mountains, a riverbed almost
dry at this time of year; the great blue bowl of sky already blanching under
the rising sun . . . Now, running through the empty morning, I feel a certain
appeal in the very emptiness, something melancholy in its meagreness
and yet comforting in its permanence . . . It’s not a landscape that
conforms readily to a formula: it refuses to be reduced to a cliché or even
meaning . . . Could I return to its stony comfort? (62; my emphasis)
With this valorization of setting, Heyns not only draws on conventions of

twentieth-century detective fiction, but also points to one of the major themes
of the novel – that of loss. Jacobs has lost the ground he spits and runs on, the
ground he has forsaken for the anodyne existence he has in London. This
evocation of place also emphasizes the local; it literally anchors this text in the
Karoo, in contemporary, postcolonial, semi-rural South Africa.
PETER JACOBS, THE ANTI-DETECTIVE

In the ratiocinative tale and in the whodunit, the detective generally embo-
dies moral authority and eventually restores order when the puzzle is solved
and the murderer arrested. The reader thus enjoys an escapist fantasy through
reading about the detective’s triumph. The denouement takes the form of
the detective recreating the story of the crime and his/her ratiocinative
process for a fictional audience. There are numerous examples of Holmes,
ensconced in his armchair, retracing his steps for Watson, or of Hercule
Poirot, spinning a melodramatic tale for the principal characters gathered
for the revelation scene. In Lost Ground, Peter is reluctant to take up an
ethical position or even an overt investigative stance. He arrives in Alfredville
with the vague and unrealistic intention of finding “out what the facts mean,
what they tell us about the possibilities or impossibilities of a non-racial South
Africa” (103). He is cagey about his journalistic story and emotionally
detached from the people he meets or investigates. It is only when he is
charged by various characters (Nonyameko, Henk, Cassie, Vincent and
Sarah, even Bennie) to put the information that he has gathered to good
use, that he assumes a moral responsibility and actually involves himself in the
lives of others. For a tantalizing moment the reader believes that Jacobs will
fulfill his potential as a “good man” (231), an epithet conferred on him by
Vincent the last time the two speak, and then repeated by Bennie (253) and
Nonyameko (254).
Jacobs, however, does not solve the mystery nor does he behave
honorably, although he does try to uncover the “underlying truth”
and uphold justice (150). Jacobs’s detective exploits lead to death,
disorder, and tragedy: the murderer goes free and there is only a
partially satisfactory denouement for the reader. Instead there is a
false revelation scene at Kanonkop in which Jacobs wrongly accuses
Bennie of murder. Then there is another moment of revelation in
which Chrisna confesses to the murder but this scene too is inverted
when Chrisna turns around to heap moral guilt on Jacobs for setting
off a chain of events which led to Desirée’s murder (288). Most
significantly, there is no escapism for the reader as the conclusion of
the novel, a parody of the traditional denouement in which Jacobs
recounts not his ratiocinative process but the story of his “horrific
breakdown of reason” (294), forces the reader to acknowledge that
the story of the murder in the sleepy Karoo town is also that of
Jacobs’s irrevocable loss and that of South Africa’s unrelenting crimes
against itself. The reader of Lost Ground is denied perhaps the most
satisfying element of “classic” detective fiction: narrative closure.
With the ratiocinative tale Doyle was able to show off his own intellectual
and creative virtuosity through Holmes’s hermeneutic prowess. In Lost
Ground Heyns accomplishes a similar celebration of the intellect by precisely
the opposite means. By creating an anti-detective protagonist who also loses
faith in his ability to write a story – Jacobs’s story becomes a “labyrinth”(294)
in which he loses his way – Heyns is able to display his ability not only to create
a murder mystery story, but also to undercut it and send-up (or extol) his own
writing endeavors. Through various postmodernist strategies such as intertex-
tuality Heyns adds another dimension of self-reflexivity to his narrative. Could
it be that Heyns, by referring to J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Diary of a Bad
128 S. NAIDU
Year, Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, and Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart is

attempting to position himself favorably within South Africa’s literary canon?
Of course, this literary maneuvering and cheekiness is not absent from the
Holmes stories as seen in the offhand references to Poe’s Dupin and
Gaboriau’s Lecoq in “A Study in Scarlet.”
The layering does not end there. Lost Ground also contains a covert gay
narrative which could be read as an exploration of the source of Jacobs’s
many displacements. Jacobs keeps his sexuality a secret in Alfredville and
his youthful homoerotic relationship with Bennie, which is cut short when
he leaves for the UK aged eighteen, is the point of origin for the series of
events which leads to Desirée’s murder and Bennie’s suicide. But this
subtext also constitutes Heyns’s socio-political comment, which reviewer,
Dowling, praises for tracing “the secret gay history of the Karoo.” It is
possible that Heyns is responding to the increasing attention in recent
years to what is described as the latent homosexuality of Holmes and
Watson, both by scholars6 and in popular reinterpretations of the relation-
ship, as seen in the most recent BBC series, Sherlock, in which frequent
lame jokes are made about Holmes’s and Watson’s cozy domestic arrange-
ments. This added dimension of identity politics and cultural comment is
not necessarily anti-detective but its presence in Lost Ground affirms the
fecundity of detective fiction, recognized by Gertrude Stein whom Marcus
attributes with a sense of the “radical possibilities of detective fiction,
intertwined with her foremost preoccupation, the question of identity
and its displacement” (251).
To some readers Lost Ground may well read as a highly unsatisfying
detective story. After all, Heyns has littered the narrative with red herrings
in the form of easily recognizable conventions of the genre: a murder
mystery or puzzle, the gradual unveiling of clues, the build-up of suspense,
a crime of passion with the usual motives of jealousy and desire, the
reconstruction of past events through analepsis, stake-outs, the closed
setting, a line-up of suspects, interviews, theory testing with a sidekick,
actual red herrings and false clues. But the key element, reason, fails! What
to read from this carefully structured confounding of the readers’ expecta-
tions? Perhaps the answer lies in Jacobs’s obsession with stories and the
author’s with irony. At the end Jacobs seems to survive his ordeal by
acknowledging irony and by narrating:
The thin line, I tell myself is irony. Cling to it like Theseus clinging to
Ariadne’s clue in the labyrinth of the Minotaur, conscious of the terrible fate
that awaits you if you let go. So I recount the events of the morning as I
imagine Joseph Conrad would have told it, or Henry James, the horror kept
in abeyance by the effort of lucid narration . . . I cling to the thin line of
irony, and methodically plot a course through the labyrinth of my story,
steering clear of the monsters of the mind. (294)
This passage suggests, with its modernist references to James and Conrad
and “horror,” that irony and narration are what enable Jacobs’s survival in
his moment of distress and dissolution. Irony is the hermeneutic tool
which helps him negotiate his way through his bewildering narrative.
One may conclude then by recognizing that Heyns’s ultimate aim in this
anti-detective novel is to show that although the detective may fail to solve
the crime, the narrating of the detective’s attempt to solve the crime is
what holds profound value. Again, this feels a little self-congratulatory,
but Heyns does precisely this – he uses irony to write back to nineteenth-
century detective fiction and to create a postcolonial anti-detective novel
about the failure of reason and about the triumph of narrative. Perhaps the
real irony is that Lost Ground is not too dissimilar, in terms of deep
thematic preoccupations, to the ratiocinative tale or the whodunit which
are also narrative projections of our shared fear of contingency and inevi-
table loss, and of our perpetual desire for order, justice, and “truth.”
CONCLUSION
Heyns is not alone in using detective fiction to ask questions about mys-
teries of being and knowing in postcolonial South Africa. In this socio-
political and cultural context authors of crime fiction have come to recog-
nize that the ratiocinative process is hermeneutically inadequate. Solving
the crime neatly does not solve the problem of crime. The feats of reason
epitomized by Holmes – who uses logic: abduction, deduction and induc-
tion, to identify the criminal – do not necessarily address the issue of the
criminal’s poverty or psychological state. Nor do they necessarily address
national crises to do with the economy, corruption, education, infrastruc-
ture, and law enforcement. It is only by shifting the emphasis from a
narrative of ratiocination to a narrative of social detection that South
African crime fiction can function as a “vehicle for judgments on society
and revelations of its hidden nature” (Siddiqi 176). With Heyns’s subver-
sive use of Sherlock Holmes and the valorization of reason he epitomizes,
an antithetical, post-apartheid anti-detective is born. Peter Jacobs, as well as
other fictional detectives such as Benny Griessel, Eberard Februarie, Helena
Verbloem, and others, ask many questions about a specific crime, about
130 S. NAIDU
crime in general, about contemporary South African society and its many
challenges. They also demonstrate the failure of reason, and crime fiction’s
exploration of alternative hermeneutics for a country which continues to
grapple with injustice and disorder of the past and the present.
NOTES
1. This story is about two destitute English settlers in the Cape Colony in the
nineteenth century who overcome local superstition about the Sasassa Valley
in order to find a legendary diamond. This is not a crime or detective story
but rather a colonial tale of exotic adventure and mythical good fortune,
which evinces a stereotypical colonialist discourse about the white settlers
and the “kaffirs.”
2. Some aspects of this chapter have been published previously in “Fears and
Desires in South African Crime Fiction.” Journal of Southern African
Studies 39.3 (2013): 727–38; “Crime Fiction, South Africa: A Critical
Introduction.” Current Writing 25.2 (2013): 124–35; with Beth Le
Roux in “South African Crime Fiction: Sleuthing the State Post-1994.”
African Identities 12.4 (2015): 283–94; and “Sherlock Holmes: Evolving
Cultural Icon, Adaptations, Personhood, and Fan Communities.” The
Human: Journal of Literature and Culture 4 (2015): 4–19.
3. Of course, the notion of Holmes embodying reason and being infallible in
his method of detection has been problematized extensively by scholars such
as McCrea (2011), Kerr (2013), and Ue (2015).
4. See Watt and Green.
5. Though it can be argued that Jacobs does resemble Dupin and Holmes in
that he is socially isolated and emotionally reserved/detached, i.e., lacking in
sensitivity which proves to be his tragic flaw.
6. See, for example, Robb (13–14).
WORKS CITED
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Death and the Compass.” Labyrinths. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970.
Dowling, Finuala. “The Novel that Heyns was Always Going to Write.” Slipnet.
Stellenbosch University, 13 Dec. 2012. Web. 4 Jun. 2013.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. London: Ward Lock & Co., 1887.
———. “The Adventure of Silver Blaze.” Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Illustrated
Short Stories. London: Chancellor Press, 1892. 229–50.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York:
Harcourt, 1983.
Heyns, Michiel. Lost Ground. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2011.

Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective
Stories in Post-War Fiction.” New Literary History 3.1 (1971): 135–56.
Horsley, Lee. “From Sherlock Holmes to the Present.” In A Companion to Crime
Fiction. Ed. Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010. 28–42.
Kerr, Douglas. Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2013.
Knepper, Wendy. “Confession, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of
Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from
a Transcultural Perspective. Ed. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen.
New York: Rodopi, 2006. 35–57.
Marcus, Laura. “Detection and Literary Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion
to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
245–67.
Matzke, Christine and Susanne Mühleisen, eds. Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime
Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. New York: Rodopi, 2006.
McCrea, Barry. In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens,
Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.
McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Merivale, Patricia and Susan Elizabeth Sweeny, eds. Detecting Texts: The
Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: U of
Pennsylvania P, 1999.
Pearson, Nels and Marc Singer. Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and
Transnational World. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
Robb, Graham. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. New York:
Norton, 2004.
Siddiqi, Yumna. “Police and Postcolonial Rationality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle
of Reason.” Cultural Critique 50 (2002): 175–211.
Ue, Tom. “Holmes and Raffles in Arms: Death, Endings and Narration.”
Victoriographies 5.3 (2015): 219–33.
Warnes, Christopher. “Writing Crime in the New South Africa: Negotiating
Threat in the Novels of Deon Meyer and Margie Orford.” Journal of
Southern African Studies 38.4 (2012): 981–91.
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Parodies and Copies. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.
Sam Naidu is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rhodes

University in South Africa. Her main research and teaching areas are: postcolonial
crime/detective fiction; transnational literature; African literature; the poetry of
Emily Dickinson; monstrous, grotesque, and abject bodies in literature; and the
oral–written interface in colonial South Africa.
Sherlock Holmes and the Fiction
of Agency
Martin Wagner
The function of fiction, the American critic Peter Brooks tells us at the
outset of his study Realist Vision, lies in supplying us with a world that
we can understand, manage, and master. Comparing fiction to children’s
games, Brooks writes:
Play is a form of repetition of the world with the difference that the world
has become manageable. We are in charge, we control its creatures and
things. The mode of “let’s pretend” immediately transports children into
a world of their own making. It is a world that can be wholly vivid and
“real,” though there can be a coexisting consciousness that it is only
pretend. And surely that continues to be true of all forms of adult play,
including that form of play we call literature, the creation and consumption
of fictions. (2)
The comparison of fiction to games is appealing. Like children’s games,

fictional texts can supply us with a controlled set of circumstances, rules,
and events in which individual actions are possible.
M. Wagner (*)
School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures, University of Calgary,
Calgary, Canada
e-mail: martin.wagner@ucalgary.ca

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_8
134 M. WAGNER
There remain, however, important differences between games and

fictional texts. In contrast to children’s games, fictional texts have the
potential to reflect explicitly on their own fictionality. They can raise
the question of what it means that the fantasy of a world that we can
master coexists with the knowledge that we only pretend that this
world exists. Through the stories that the texts tell, they can ask how
the awareness of a mere fictionality of mastery affects this very mastery;
and conversely, how the fiction of mastery potentially impacts on our
actual shortcomings.
Such reflections about the nature of fiction, I argue, are crucial to
Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. An exemplary close reading of
Holmes’s subtle mistakes in the early story “A Case of Identity,”
which I present in the first part of this chapter, reveals that the story’s
subtext exposes as flawed and imaginary the detective’s supposed
powers to disclose the world’s mysteries and crimes – even in places
where Holmes’s reasoning seems fully successful. Holmes’s vulnerabil-
ity to failure extends, in other words, far beyond the more manifest
and well-known cases in “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Yellow
Face.” It is not insignificant, however, to stress that Doyle included
with these latter two cases in each of the first two volumes of Sherlock
Holmes stories one story in which the detective unambiguously fails.1
My reading of Holmes’s subliminal fallibility has important ramifica-
tions for our understanding of the way in which Doyle’s detective
stories relate to the hopes and fears of the Victorian era. Critics often
claim that Doyle’s Holmes stories were so popular in the late nine-
teenth century because they served an escapist, conservative agenda.2
Sherlock Holmes is thought to have supplied Victorian readers with the
comforting feeling that crimes, which seemed to threaten not only
the individual’s safety, but also society’s established structures, could
be solved. The stories showed, moreover, that acute reasoning was able
to penetrate an increasingly complex, industrialized world, which was
changing at a fast pace. As Agnès Botz claims: “Haunted by doubt and
fears, the Victorian readers of detective stories like those involving
Sherlock Holmes could . . . relish in a fictional world in which no ques-
tion was left unanswered” (94).3 Properly read, however, Sherlock
Holmes can hardly serve as the cultural anesthetic that critics claimed
it to be: numbing Victorian readers’ anxiety in a world in which, as the
Communist Manifesto famously phrased it around the middle of the
century, “all that is solid melts into air.” The repeatedly failing Sherlock
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE FICTION OF AGENCY 135
Holmes cannot be the personified agent of the power of reason and

science to master the world.
Stressing Holmes’s fallibility and the markers of his merely fictional
agency, I do not suggest that Doyle’s stories completely deny the
reader ideas of agency and of a mastered world. But the stories
expose the ways in which the mere imagination of agency and mas-
tery contributes to its production. If Holmes appears as successful
it is not least because Watson and his readers believe him to be
successful.4
The heavy reliance of Holmes’s agency on the imagination of this
agency is especially foregrounded in Anthony Harvey’s 1971 Sherlock
Holmes comedy They Might Be Giants, which I discuss in the second
part of this chapter. The film, which tells the story of former New York
judge Justin Playfair, who believes himself to be Sherlock Holmes,5
stresses the power of assumed agency. Acting as the imaginary detec-
tive, the mentally disturbed judge actually acquires some of the detec-
tive’s skills. Harvey, in other words, leads the viewer to understand that
Holmes’s agency relies on fiction. Interestingly, however, his agenda is
not to expose Holmes’s merely imaginary skills; instead, Harvey wants
us appreciate the productivity of fiction. This is what makes Harvey’s
film so fascinating: it perceptively recognizes the discourse on fiction-
ality in Doyle’s original stories, and it simultaneously makes an inde-
pendent argument about the nature of fiction. Reading Doyle against
the grain, the film does not want to stress that Holmes’s agency is
merely imaginary. Quite to the contrary, it shows how fiction can
produce agency. This intellectual twist has been much ignored in pre-
vious discussions of They Might Be Giants. In fact, the film is likely one
of the most underrated in the long history of Sherlockian cinematogra-
phy. Vincent Canby from The New York Times called the film a “mushy
movie with occasional, isolated moments of legitimate comedy.”
Barnes’s judgment in Sherlock Holmes on Screen is somewhat more favor-
able. In the end, however, he finds it “hard to disagree with Vincent
Canby’s assessment of They Might Be Giants as ‘a mushy movie’” (Barnes
217). My analysis of Harvey’s film in this chapter is meant also as
an invitation to reconsider the validity of these overly critical reviews of
They Might Be Giants and to discover in the film an important contribu-
tion to our understanding of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, and our
understanding of the potential of fiction more broadly.
136 M. WAGNER
A CASE OF IDENTITY
Doyle’s relatively early Sherlock Holmes story “A Case of Identity”6
stresses from the outset the ways in which the detective’s powers of
observation and deduction are intertwined with the mere imagination
of such powers:
“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on either side of the fire,
in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which
the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things
which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that
window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs,
and peep in at the queer things which are going on . . . it would make all
fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and
unprofitable.” (190–91)
Consider Holmes’s strategy in arguing for the powers of observation over

imagination. In order to prove observation’s supremacy, Holmes imagines
a flight over London and the possibility to lift the roofs of the city’s
houses, such that he could observe the interior events. In arguing for
the strengths of observation over imagination, Holmes falls back into
imagination. In fact, he evokes a fairly well-established model of fiction
that was inaugurated by Alain-René Lesage’s 1707 Le Diable boiteux – a
novel in which a devil takes a student on a flying trip over Madrid and
makes the roofs of the houses disappear (Fig. 24).7
Strikingly, Peter Brooks cites Le Diable boiteux in his study Realist
Vision as an important early example of a fictional text that produces an
understandable and manageable world (3). For Brooks, the gesture of
Lesage’s devil embodies what fiction always tends to do: it provides us
with an approachable “modèle reduit” of the complex real world (2).
Fiction promises overview, intelligibility, and potential mastery.
It is important to add here, however, that Doyle, in alluding to the
tradition of Lesage’s novel, does not simply produce another such man-
ageable world in Brooks’s sense. Instead, through the literary reference,
this manageability itself is immediately exposed as (only) fictional.
I take Holmes’s remarks at the beginning of “A Case of Identity,”
which reveal the extent to which his observatory powers rest on their
imagination, as an important programmatic statement about the Sherlock
Holmes series in general. After the publication of the initial two novels,
Fig. 24 Dubercelle, The Devil upon Two Sticks. 1726. Le Diable boiteux. By
Alain-René Lesage. Vol. 1. Paris: Veuve Pierre Ribou 1726, 25. (Copied from
Meglin 1994: 265; Meglin takes the image from a 1779 edition of the novel [Paris:
Chez Musier], but the engraving appeared first in 1726)
138 M. WAGNER
“A Case of Identity” was only the third short story about the Baker Street
detective. It seems plausible that Doyle sought to reintroduce at this early
point important themes of his detective series to the audience of
The Strand Magazine, in which only the two other stories had been
published so far – the initial two novels had appeared in other venues.8
The beginning of “A Case of Identity,” with its fiction of the flying
observers, prepares us to read all subsequent incidents of observation in
this story – and indeed in all subsequent fifty-three stories and two
novels9 – also as possible products of the imagination, even if what
follows is not a flying tour over London, but the fiction of the possibility
to reconstruct every hidden story through the smallest traces still visible
to the outside observer.10
The fundamental fictionality of Holmes’s power of observation and
deduction is, in the rest of the story, primarily evoked by a series of
inconsequential flaws and missing links in Holmes’s reasoning. Holmes
errs without Watson or anyone else in the story directly registering his
mistakes.11 The fact that the narrator Watson rarely makes Holmes’s
flaws explicit, suggests that Holmes’s detection hinges more on the
imagination of its possibility than on any sustained proof. The guiding
imagination of Holmes’s powers blinds Watson to Holmes’s actual
fallibility.
Early on in “A Case of Identity,” Holmes shows what his imagined
observation is capable of. When his client Miss Mary Sutherland comes to
consult him, Holmes “looked over her in the minute and yet abstracted
fashion which was peculiar to him” (Doyle 192). As happens so often,
we are not immediately told what exactly Holmes is seeing when looking
at his client in this manner. As a result, we are just as surprised as
Miss Sutherland when Holmes, after completing his initial examination,
starts the conversation by inquiring of his client: “‘Do you not find,’
he said, ‘that with your short sight it is a little trying to do so much
typewriting?’” (192).
Miss Sutherland is completely caught off guard. She answers Holmes’s
question directly, instead of inquiring how Holmes knows so much about
her in the first place. “‘I did at first,’ she answered, ‘but now I know where
the letters are without looking’” (192). Only after this initial reply does
Miss Sutherland realize how strange it is that Holmes knows of her
employment and physical shortcomings: “Then, suddenly realizing the
full purport of his words, she gave a violent start and looked up, with
fear and astonishment upon her broad, good-humored face. ‘You have
heard about me, Mr. Holmes,’ she cried, ‘else how could you know all
that’” (192).
At this point in the story, it is unclear how exactly Holmes knew about
Miss Sutherland’s myopia and typewriting. Instead of explaining
Holmes’s insights, the story continues with Miss Sutherland’s relating
her affairs. Doyle keeps the observations that led to Holmes’s remarks
from the reader for some time. Rather than being shown how Holmes’s
conclusions are possible, the reader is, from the outset, invited to indulge
in the fiction that Holmes’s conclusions are possible. Even when Holmes
explains to Watson, after Miss Sutherland has left, just how he came to his
remarks, his reasoning is not as inevitable as his success in the matter
might suggest.
“As you observe, this woman had plush upon her sleeves, which is a most
useful material for showing traces. The double line a little above the wrist,
where the typewritist presses against the table, was beautifully defined. The
sewing machine, of the hand type, leaves a similar mark, but only on the left
arm, and on the side farthest from the thumb, instead of being right across
the broadest part, as this was. I then glanced at her face, and, observing the
dint of a pince-nez at either side of her nose, I ventured a remark upon short
sight and typewriting . . . ” (197; my emphasis)
All minute observation and logical reasoning notwithstanding, Holmes’s

conclusions remain “ventured,” as Holmes himself admits, and are not
beyond doubt.12
Considering the information we are given, it is, for instance, unlikely that
Miss Sutherland actually wore the dress with the plush sleeves when type-
writing. We learn from Watson’s description that this plush is purple (196).
Miss Sutherland at one point mentions “my purple plush that I had never so
much as taken out of the drawer” (193, my emphasis) when explaining why
her step-father’s argument that she does not have the proper dress to go to a
ball was wrong. We also learn that Miss Sutherland has dressed up for her
visit in Baker Street. She wears “a heavy fur boa round her neck, and a large
curling red feather in a broad-brimmed hat which was tilted in a coquettish
Duchess of Devonshire fashion over her ear” (192). If we assume that the
dress with the purple plush that she is wearing when in Baker Street is the
“purple plush” kept in her drawer for special occasions, it seems odd that
Miss Sutherland would have worn this valuable dress so extensively during
her work that it would bear the traces Holmes describes.
140 M. WAGNER
Although Holmes’s observations and conclusions are possible, the

inevitability of their success is a matter of fiction. Believing Holmes
means that we actively ignore the possibility of his failure.13
This possible failure is apparent not only in the blind-spots of
Holmes’s deductions, but also in subtle hints to Holmes’s actually
wrong assumptions. For Holmes is not completely correct when he
“venture[s]” his remark about Miss Sutherland. Contrary to what
Holmes suggests, Miss Sutherland finds it not even “a little trying to
do so much typewriting.” Apparently, Holmes did not foresee or did
not care about the possibility that shortsighted Miss Sutherland, like
any other professional typist, has memorized the location of the letters.
Neither Holmes nor Watson – nor even Miss Sutherland – comments
on Holmes’s failure. Admittedly, this failure may be negligible – a
rhetorical flourish through which Holmes can display his knowledge
about Miss Sutherland’s typewriting – and whether Miss Sutherland
finds typewriting difficult may be of little importance. Nevertheless, it
remains remarkable that the display of Holmes’s superior qualities is
embedded in a question whose main assumption – that typewriting is
difficult for Miss Sutherland – is wrong. Admiring the ingenuity of
Holmes’s observation, as Watson and Miss Sutherland do, is based on
disregarding his failures, which are nevertheless conserved in Watson’s
narration.14
While critics have long been aware of the fact that Sherlock
Holmes’s reasoning is “far from air-tight” (Clausen 109),15 they have
largely ignored the consequences of these deficiencies. Consider, for
instance, how Christopher Clausen plays down the importance of
Holmes’s flaws: “It would be possible to pick many holes in both his
[i.e., Holmes’s] methods and his conclusions. The important point,
however, is that he is conceived – and conceives of himself – as a
man who applies scientific methods to the detection of crime, and
that his success is due to those methods” (109). Clausen has to insist
on the negligibility of Holmes’s flaws, because he is one of the propo-
nents of the thesis that Sherlock Holmes served to appease the late
Victorian readers about the threat of crime. If Doyle’s stories would
too openly admit that they rely on an imagined possibility of Holmes’s
abilities and that many of his deductions are questionable at best, no
one could seriously feel more secure after reading them. This, however,
is precisely the consequence one has to draw. The power of an
individual’s superior reason to solve crime and disclose the world is
simultaneously posited and exposed as imaginary. To fully believe in

Holmes’s superiority we have to actively ignore the detective’s actually
existing fallibility.
They Might Be Giants

One especially lucid analysis of Holmes’s imagined detective skills is con-
tained in Anthony Harvey’s 1971 Sherlock Holmes adaptation They Might
Be Giants.
In Harvey’s film, which looks at Sherlock Holmes through the lens of
Cervantes’s Don Quixote, former New York judge Justin Playfair (played
by George C. Scott) insanely believes himself to be Sherlock Holmes
and chases an imaginary Moriarty through contemporary Manhattan.
Playfair’s real antagonist, however, is his brother Blevins (Lester
Rawlins). Blevins is being blackmailed and is therefore in need of
money, and he plots to have Playfair committed to a psychiatric clinic
and take over Playfair’s estate. To this end, Blevins needs the signature of
the clinic’s doctor, Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward). Watson, how-
ever, soon becomes infatuated with Playfair. And half by her own will,
half forced by Playfair, she assumes the role of the imaginary detective’s
assistant.16 Together, Playfair and Watson hunt for Moriarty, whose
illusory existence overlaps at times with the actual existence of the
brother’s blackmailers.
On their journey, Playfair and Watson almost accidentally overturn the
strongholds of modern bureaucracy and consumerism in New York’s mass
society. The film includes scenes in a psychiatric clinic, where Playfair
converses with a patient (Oliver Clark) who previously refused to speak;
in a telephone company’s operating room, where Playfair helps a young
woman (Kitty Winn) in recuperating her beloved’s phone number; and in
a 24-hour supermarket, where Playfair distracts his pursuers by advertising
an imaginary sale on all groceries.
The idea that Playfair’s imaginary assumption of a potent agency could
actually supply him with real agency is stressed throughout the film. The
most explicit formulation of this agency-creating aspect of fiction occurs
when Playfair explains to Watson his love for Western movies: “Look
closely down there, Watson. You can see principles, you see the possibility
of justice and proportion. You can see men move their own lives. There are
no masses in Virginia City, only individuals whose will for good or bad can
bring them to the ends they ought to have.”
142 M. WAGNER
The Western heroes of Virginia City are another figure for the possi-
bility of fiction to create a world in which one can act. One may wonder
here why Harvey chose to show a Western movie and not a detective
film – why Virginia City and not Victorian London? One might be
tempted to think that Harvey missed at this point the most obvious
chance to insert a moment of explicit self-reflection in his film. In this
scene, Harvey could have explained to the audience what the fiction of
Sherlock Holmes stands for. But, in the end, Harvey’s film is not merely
about Sherlock Holmes, or even about detective fiction; instead Harvey’s
concern is with the relation between fiction and agency in general. The
character of Sherlock Holmes is one important figure that allows us to
think about this relation, but it is not the only one. And Harvey reminds
us through the scene in the cinema of other genres of fiction in which,
different as they otherwise may be, the question of agency is likewise
at stake.
They Might Be Giants is romantic and possibly, as some critics claimed,
sentimental (Barnes 217, Canby) in its sympathy for Playfair’s insane
attempt to conjure up a world in which he can be a master-detective or
Western hero – an individual who successfully combats the forces of
evil. Harvey’s film even allows Playfair’s assumption of an imaginary role
a considerable productivity, for the hero indeed develops astonishing
skills. At no point, however, does Playfair’s insanity attest to any funda-
mental reality – Moriarty remains imaginary, the supposed clues to his
existence random. Playfair’s insane assumption of the role of Sherlock
Holmes and his belief in a real-world Moriarty are never supported as
factually justified. His effective acts – helping the woman in the call center,
and speaking to the patient in the psychiatric clinic – are merely side
products during his absurd search for Moriarty.
This does not even change at the end of the film when Watson starts to
long for a sign of Moriarty’s real existence, which could vindicate her
beloved hero’s quest. In the final scene, Playfair and Watson stand at the
end of a tunnel, waiting for the long-expected appearance of Moriarty.
We see Watson anxiously gazing into the dark, hoping that Moriarty is
real, which would allow her to fully believe in and share Playfair’s world.
From what we hear her say, it seems that she is granted this wish. The
film’s spectator, however, is deprived of any view of Moriarty. The camera
focuses on Playfair and Watson as they describe the approaching Moriarty.
We hear a noise that might come from the horse that, according
to Playfair, Moriarty is riding. But this is all left to the spectator’s
Fig. 25 Final scene of They Might Be Giants: Justin Playfair (George C. Scott)
and Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward) awaiting Moriarty’s arrival. Universal,
1971. Author’s screenshot
imagination. The only clear picture that exists for the spectator is the
expectant look on the faces of Playfair and Watson (Fig. 25).
Believing in a world in which Sherlock Holmes fights Moriarty
demands a leap of faith. The film romanticizes this leap in a discomforting,
anonymous world, and it shows the agency that Playfair produces almost
accidentally on his imaginary mission. But when the film’s surrogate-
spectator Watson in the end performs this leap and believes in Moriarty’s
existence, this step remains questionable. There is no agency without
Playfair’s belief in his existence as Sherlock Holmes and without the
fantasy of Moriarty. But that does not mean that it is not insane to believe
that he is Sherlock Holmes or that Moriarty exists. They Might Be Giants
makes us susceptible to the agency of fiction, but it also suggests that
the agency that is thus created remains uncannily out of touch with the
objective world in which it acts.
Harvey’s film strongly emphasizes the question of the fictionality of
Holmes’s agency, which also permeates Doyle’s stories (as especially the
programmatic opening lines about the imaginary flight over London in the
early story “A Case of Identity” suggest). In doing so, however, the film
144 M. WAGNER
directly reverses the dynamic of Doyle’s stories. While the careful reader of
Doyle’s stories learns to pay attention to the subliminal flaws in Holmes’s
deductions and the unstable ground of mere imagination on which Holmes’s
detective powers rest,17 the faithful spectator of Harvey’s film will over time
appreciate the actual agency that is created through Playfair’s insane assump-
tion of the role of the master-detective. If Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes primarily
reveals the fictionality of agency, They Might Be Giants attests to the agency of
fiction. The film and the stories thus present the two flipsides of the same
phenomenon. They stage and unfold, each in their own way, the intricate
interdependencies between the worlds in which we coexist when dealing with
fiction – a fictionally mastered world and a world that knows about the
former’s fictionality.
NOTES
1. “A Scandal in Bohemia” appeared in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
(1892); “The Yellow Face” in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894).
2. See especially Botz and Clausen.
3. See also Symons (10). Catherine Belsey motivates the stories’ affirmation of
the powers of reason and science not as a social need, but, instead, as
reflecting “the widespread optimism characteristic of their period concern-
ing the comprehensive power of positive science” (383). Belsey concedes,
however, that the belief in reason is not unequivocal (386). Uwe Wirth has
shown the various forms of guesswork and lack of knowledge that are crucial
to Sherlock Holmes’s detective work. In the end, however, Wirth remains in
line with the tradition of scholarship quoted above. Wirth claims that the
Sherlock Holmes stories serve to propagate the then new scientific dogma of
deduction (303–4).
4. The limits of Holmes’s reasoning powers and Watson’s attempts to cover
these limits are a central topic in the recent film Mr. Holmes (2015).
5. The film is based on the play They Might Be Giants by James Goldman, who
also wrote the screenplay. The play premiered in the Royal Theatre Stratford
East in London where it “was not a success, running only for the scheduled
four weeks” (Barnes 216). Alan Barnes points out that Harvey’s film is “by
no means the first film to present a ‘fantasist’ Sherlock Holmes” (217).
Earlier examples include Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) and Karl
Hartl’s Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war (1937).
6. “A Case of Identity” was published in The Strand Magazine in September
1891, following only “A Scandal in Bohemia” (July 1891) and “The Red-
Headed League” (August 1891). In the subsequent year, “A Case of
Identity” appeared as the third story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
the first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. Prior to these stories, Doyle
had already published two Sherlock Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet
(1887) and The Sign of Four (1890).
7. Lesage’s novel, which is itself already modeled on Luis Vélez Guevara’s
1641 novel El diablo cojuelo, was taken up repeatedly throughout the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries in satirical novels and plays. See Meglin
(294); for a review of nineteenth-century writers who allude to Le Diable
boiteux in their work see Saint-Amour.
8. A Study in Scarlet was first printed in Beeton’s Christmas Annual; The Sign of
Four was initially published in Lippincott’s Magazine.
9. “A Case of Identity” is the third of a total of fifty-six stories.
10. For the history and cultural context of this method in the late nineteenth
century see Ginzburg (7–10, 22–23).
11. There are, of course, several incidents in the canon where Watson points
directly to Holmes’s failures, most prominently in A Scandal in Bohemia
(see Caprettini, who possibly overstates the exceptional character of
Holmes’s failure in this story) and The Adventure of the Yellow Face.
12. Jim Barloon, in contrast, maintains that Holmes’s conclusion in this case is
“based on minute observation and iron reasoning” (39).
13. It has repeatedly been noted that Holmes’s deductions are not nearly as
inevitable as they are made to appear. See Wirth and Eco (217).
14. Holmes fails a second a time in the same conversation with Miss Sutherland.
Again, Miss Sutherland doesn’t notice Holmes’s wrong prediction. When
Holmes says to his client “Your opinion is, then, that some unforeseen
catastrophe has occurred to him [the fiancé]?” (Doyle 195), Miss
Sutherland answers in the affirmative, although she subsequently tells
Holmes that she was not thinking of an “unforeseen,” but eminently fore-
seen catastrophe: “Yes, Sir. I believe that he [the fiancé] foresaw some
danger, or else he would not have talked so. And then I think that what
he foresaw happened” (195).
15. Ronald Knox listed some striking inconsistencies both between the different
stories and within the individual stories already in 1910 in his famous
“Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” See also Belsey and
Hodgson.
16. We may remember that Rex Stout argued already in 1941 for a female
identity of Watson.
17. In his essay on “The Speckled Band,” John A. Hodgson discusses the
detective work that is required of the readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Disregarding the fact that snakes are deaf and cannot climb ropes, the
murder of Julia Stoner in “The Speckled Band” is committed, as Hodgson
points out, precisely by a venomous snake that is – or so Holmes explains it –
lured by music to climb on a rope out of its victim’s room. Hodgson
146 M. WAGNER
interprets these factual flaws in the storyline as a literary “crime,” deliber-

ately committed by the writer so that the reader can detect it. The story thus
restages the detective work that is its content – Holmes detects a crime – in
the relation between reader and text. See Hodgson (345).
WORKS CITED
Barloon, Jim. “The Case for Identity: Sherlock Holmes and the Singular Find.”
Clues 25.1 (2006): 33–44.
Barnes, Alan. Sherlock Holmes on Screen. Updated edn. London: Titan Books,
2012.
Belsey, Catherine. “Deconstructing the Text: Sherlock Holmes.” Sherlock Holmes:
The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. John A. Hodgson.
New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. 381–88.
Botz, Agnès. “‘Cut the Poetry Watson’: Science and Fiction in the Sherlock
Holmes Stories.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 46 (1997): 91–102.
Brooks, Peter. Realist Vision. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.
Canby, Vincent. “Zany Role for George Scott: They Might Be Giants Opens at
Beekhan.” Review of They Might Be Giants. Dir. Anthony Harvey. The New
York Times, 10 June 1971. Web. 13 Jun. 2016.
Caprettini, Gian Paolo. “Peirce, Holmes, Popper.” The Sign of Three: Dupin,
Holmes, Peirce. Ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1983. 135–53.
Clausen, Christopher. “Sherlock Holmes, Order, and the Late-Victorian Mind.”
The Georgia Review 38.1 (1984): 104–23.
Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1981.
Eco, Umberto. “Horns, Hooves, Insteps: Some Hypotheses on Three Types of
Abduction.” The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Ed. Umberto Eco and
Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983. 198–220.
Ginzburg, Carlo. “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific
Method.” History Workshop 9 (1980): 5–36.
Hodgson, John A. “The Recoil of the ‘Speckled Band’: Detective Story and
Detective Discourse.” Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary
Critical Essays. Ed. John A. Hodgson. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. 335–52.
Knox, Ronald A. “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” New Blackfriars
1.3 (1920): 154–72.
Lesage, Alain-René. Le Diable boiteux. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1984.
Meglin, Joellen A. “Le Diable boiteux: French Society Behind a Spanish Façade.”
Dance Chronicle 17.3 (1994): 263–302.
Saint-Amour, Paul K. “The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the
Colonial Metropolis.” European Joyce Studies 21.1 (2011): 224–49.
Stout, Rex. “Watson was a Woman.” The Saturday Review of Literature 23.19
(1941): n.p.
Symons, Julian. Mortal Consequences: A History from the Detective Story to the
Crime Novel. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
They Might Be Giants. Dir. Anthony Harvey. Universal, 1971. DVD.
Wirth, Uwe. “‘His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.’ Weiß Sherlock
Holmes, was er tut?” Literatur und Nicht-Wissen. Historische Konstellationen
1730–1930. Ed. Michael Blies and Michael Gamper. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2012.
289–304.
Martin Wagner (PhD, Yale University, 2014) is an assistant professor of German

at the University of Calgary. His publications include articles and book chapters on
Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Freud, Sebald, and Pamuk.
The Savage Subtext of The Hound
of the Baskervilles
David Grylls
The popular view of Sherlock Holmes is that he is a rational, scientific

detective whose cases are neatly and completely solved. The critical view of
the stories in which he appears was traditionally that they comprised genre
fiction – limited, rule-bound, lacking the complexity looked for in more
serious works of literature (in Conrad, for example, or James or even
Stevenson).1 Although both views are partly true, they fail to accommo-
date aspects of Doyle’s work that transcend rationality or the limits of
genre. This chapter uses The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) to contend
that the power of the Sherlock Holmes canon does not arise purely from
rational deduction or the pleasures of formulaic fiction. It argues that this
novella deploys themes and tropes that link it firmly to acknowledged
masterpieces of fin de siècle fiction.
The literary evolution of Sherlock Holmes as a particular type of
detective is a topic that has been comprehensively studied. Doyle was of
course acutely aware of the classic precedents in detective fiction, especially
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), which influenced not only The
Sign of Four (1890), in which the plot turns on pearls stolen from India
plus a murderous campaign of revenge and reparation, but also a novel
that he published a year earlier, in 1889, The Mystery of Cloomber (in which
D. Grylls (*)
Kellogg College, Oxford, UK
e-mail: gryllsd@gmail.com

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_9
150 D. GRYLLS
a trio of Indian assassins stalk their prey in England). Even more influential
than Collins, though, were the American writer Edgar Allan Poe and the
French journalist Emile Gaboriau. Poe’s pioneering detective Auguste
Dupin anticipates many of Holmes’s characteristics. An expert in decipher-
ing clues, he uses methods of close observation (often noticing the most
unusual features of a case) and of carefully reasoned deduction (often
stretching the reader’s credulity). Like Holmes, he has an awestruck
simple friend who chronicles his astounding feats. And like Holmes, he
works independently of the police, for whom he expresses lofty contempt.
In The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) the very first page reminds you
of Holmes: here we have a closed-room murder mystery (the murderer
turns out to be an orangutan), an enigmatic and charismatic detective, and
a series of significant clues. Emile Gaboriau followed Poe in several
respects but offered more by way of suspense and intricate, sophisticated
plots.
Doyle was fascinated by both Poe and Gaboriau. But he wanted to
bring something new to the genre. As he wrote later, “Gaboriau had
rather attracted me by the neat dovetailing of his plots, and Poe’s master-
ful detective M. Dupin, had from boyhood been one of my heroes. But
could I bring an addition of my own?” (Doyle, Memories 74). What he did
was put his doctor’s training to good use. Doyle had graduated from
Edinburgh University in 1881 as Bachelor of Medicine and Master of
Surgery. When he started to write, he recalled the dictum of his old
professor, Joseph Bell, that the basis of all successful medical diagnosis
was “the precise and intelligent recognition and appreciation of minor
differences.” Remembering Bell’s “eerie trick of spotting details,” he later
recalled: “if he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but
unorganised business to something nearer to an exact science. I would try
if I could get this effect” (74–75).
Science was therefore the new element that Doyle brought to the
detective story. Holmes is pre-eminently a scientific detective. He first
appears in A Study in Scarlet (1887) running towards Watson with a test-
tube in his hand, shouting, “I’ve found it, I’ve found it . . . I have found
the re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin” (Complete Sherlock
Holmes 17).2 He is the author of numerous scientific and scholarly
monographs – in The Hound of the Baskervilles he draws attention to
his monograph on the dating of old manuscripts and his study of 75
different perfumes (673, 765). In other stories he mentions monographs
on the 140 different types of tobacco ash, on different types of tattoo
THE SAVAGE SUBTEXT OF THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 151
marks, and on varieties of the human ear (written for the Anthropological
Journal).3 He also mentions at various times his attention to distinctive
typewriter imprints and the importance of classifying individuality in
pipes, watches, and bootlaces.4 His astoundingly detailed deductions
became the stuff of legend.
Doyle knew enough about science to create Sherlock Holmes but he
was not a scientist himself nor was he even particularly accurate about
scientific facts. As a sample of his casual way with facts, one might take
“The Speckled Band,” in which the sadistic Dr. Grimesby Roylott has a
collection of sinister exotic animals, including an Indian baboon (a tribute,
perhaps, to Poe’s orangutan) and also a swamp adder, which he uses to
commit murder by feeding it secretly on milk and training it to come at
the sound of a whistle by sliding down a bell-pull and biting its victim. As
it happens, there are no baboons in India and no such snake as a swamp
adder. Further, snakes are deaf and dislike milk, they cannot slide up or
down ropes, and a snake-bite would be easily detected by a coroner
(Green 361–67). Even in The Hound of the Baskervilles, as sticklers have
meanly pointed out, Cornish tin mines have been transported to Devon
and Neolithic huts wrongly given roofs.5 Actually Doyle did not care too
much about errors, for he wrote very quickly and saw the stories as
romances.6 Even between his first two novellas, Watson’s Afghan war
wound has traveled from his shoulder to his leg (15, 90).
Sherlock Holmes is scientific and precise. Doyle was by no means
always precise and indeed not wholly committed to science. As is well
known, in the latter part of his life, he became increasingly interested in
Spiritualism. As early as November 1893, about the time he attempted to
kill off Sherlock Holmes in his story “The Final Problem,” Doyle joined
the Society for Psychical Research, but it was another twenty-three years
before, in 1916, he announced his belief in Spiritualism. He toured
America and Australia, expounding the doctrine to vast audiences. He
believed the dead were in constant communication with him and brought
him news of the afterlife. Notoriously, too, when two girls from
Cottingley in Yorkshire claimed they had photographed fairies (one
admitted later it was a hoax), he believed them and sat in the woods
near his home with a camera, hoping for a similar breakthrough.7
One can only imagine what Sherlock Holmes would have said. Holmes
is a rationalist and materialist – or is he? In fact what is so powerful about
The Hound of the Baskervilles is the tension it sets up between science and
superstition. This involves not only explanations of the “spectral” hound
152 D. GRYLLS
but the different types of effect in the story. On the one hand are the
quasi-scientific elements: the story is a masterpiece of rational method,
involving skillful plotting and suspense, carefully positioned clues, and
detailed explanations. On the other, it activates sub-rational terrors by its
use of atmosphere, setting, and description and its invocation of primitive
myth. Let us take a close look at the narrative to examine this central
tension.
On the face of it, The Hound of the Baskervilles seems to endorse
rationality and materialism at the expense of the supernatural. It seems
to set up a conflict between the superstitious past and the scientific pre-
sent. It starts with the ancient legend of the Hound of the Baskervilles,
with its references to profane passions, moonlight, the number thirteen,
the appearance of “a hound of hell,” and warnings about “those dark
hours when the powers of evil are exalted” (675). All of this taps into the
kind of archetypal fears provoked by myths about monsters (Beowulf, for
example). Holmes initially dismisses the legend as only interesting to a
collector of fairy tales (somewhat ironically, perhaps, in view of Doyle’s
later interests). But then the first installment of the story concludes with
Mortimer’s dramatic declaration: “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of
a gigantic hound!” (679).8 Discussion ensues between him and Holmes as
to whether a trained man of science could possibly believe in the super-
natural. When Sir Henry joins the discussion, he says to Dr. Mortimer:
“You don’t seem quite to have made up your mind whether it’s a case for a
policeman or a clergyman” (689).
Now the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles arranges not only for the
apparently supernatural effects to be explained (right down to the dog’s
phosphorescent muzzle) but for superstition to prove suicidal: the death
of Sir Charles, after all, is due not merely to his weak heart but also to his
superstitious fear regarding the family legend, which Stapleton exploits.
Having succeeded with Sir Charles, Stapleton tries the same ploy with Sir
Henry. Credulity, we gather, is potentially fatal. Since Holmes dismisses
the legend as a fairy tale, it might seem that he stands wholly for science
and rejection of the supernatural. But in fact a close reading of the text
does not entirely back this up. When Sir Henry asks him: “Do you mean
danger from this family fiend or do you mean danger from human
beings?” Holmes replies: “Well, that is what we have to find out”
(689). And at the end of the story he declares that he only concluded
that they were dealing with a real hound when he heard about the second
boot.
Occasional moments of this kind might imply that the novella is not
unequivocally dismissive of the supernatural: parts of it, in fact, are sug-
gestive of a debate within Doyle himself. But in any case, the tension
between rational control and supernatural horror goes beyond the argu-
ment about the nature of the hound. It controls the whole structuring of
the story, particularly the contrast between plot and atmosphere. The plot
is a masterpiece of skillful control, something constructed by the scienti-
fically trained side of Doyle. From the compressed handling of time in the
third chapter (the interview with Dr. Mortimer)9 to the dexterous place-
ment of red herrings (especially the Selden–Barrymore subplot)10 to the
mapping of moments of suspense onto the serialization structure,11 the
plot offers the pleasures of logic, timing, and carefully phased exposition.
It offers a feast for the rational mind. And of course some parts of the
descriptive writing enhance the element of ratiocination by using meta-
phors that remind us of the emergent conventions of the detective story –
conventions of pursuit, inquiry, and inference and the notion of an intel-
lectual contest between a dazzlingly intelligent detective and a ruthlessly
ingenious villain. And so we get images taken from chess and fencing
(Holmes senses a “foil as quick and supple” as his own) or from combat on
the battlefield (“a foeman who is worthy of our steel”) (698). Even more
pervasive are metaphors of hunting: the centrality of the spectral hound
leads to endless talk of people being “dogged” or “tracked” or putting
each other off the scent (693, 696, 705, 727). Stapleton’s butterfly net is
turned back on him when Holmes says, “My nets are closing upon him
even as his are upon Sir Henry” (739) and the metaphor is elaborated to
include fishing nets.12 In all these ways the descriptive writing draws
attention to the carefully controlled plotting on the part of both characters
and author.
However, there are other kinds of description in the story that operate
on a quite different level: not offering satisfaction to the rational mind but
provoking primitive fears and horrors. These are the descriptions of the
Dartmoor landscape, especially of the fearsome Grimpen Mire. As soon as
we leave London for Devon, a creeping horror is powerfully emphasized.
And of course this apparently coincides with Holmes being left behind in
London: this story is highly unusual in the oeuvre in that Holmes is absent
for six consecutive chapters, or for roughly 40% of the narrative. And
during his absence the novel elaborates the terrors, suspicions, and chilling
uncertainties that lie beyond the reach of his rational mind. The effect of
this change of atmosphere can be seen in Sir Henry: after talking hopefully
154 D. GRYLLS
of how he will “have a row of electric lamps up here inside of six months,
and you won’t know it again, with a thousand candle-power Swan and
Edison right here in front of the hall door” (702), he is increasingly
overshadowed by the horror of the legend and eventually, after his ordeal
with the hound, has to go on a round-the-world trip to recover his health.
Let us look at one or two descriptive passages that build up these
sinister effects. The first is from chapter six, “Baskerville Hall,” and it
describes the view from the carriage as Watson, Mortimer, and Sir
Henry arrive: “Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of
a wood there rose in the distance a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange
jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic land-
scape in a dream” (700).
The word “fantastic” is used twice more (730, 738). It signals a move
from the world of facts and science to a realm of fantasy and fear.
The moor is treacherous and deceptive; it can suck people in. Doyle
makes extensive use of the pathetic fallacy to make descriptions of the
moor relevant to the mystery story. This is from near the end of chapter
seven:
“Please, please, be frank with me, Miss Stapleton, for ever since I have been
here I have been conscious of shadows all round me. Life has become like
that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which
one may sink and with no guide to point the track.” (711)
Or consider the phantasmal description as Holmes and Watson wait for Sir
Henry to emerge:
As we watched it the fog-wreaths came crawling round both corners of the

house and rolled slowly into one dense bank, on which the upper floor and
the roof floated like a strange ship upon a shadowy sea. (756)
And when they go looking for the doomed Stapleton:
We left her standing upon the thin peninsula of firm, peaty soil which
tapered out into the widespread bog. From the end of it a small wand
planted here and there showed where the path zigzagged from tuft to tuft
of rushes among those green-scummed pits and foul quagmires which
barred the way to the stranger. Rank reeds and lush, slimy water-plants
sent an odour of decay and a heavy miasmatic vapour onto our faces,
while a false step plunged us more than once thigh-deep into the dark,
quivering mire, which shook for yards in soft undulations around our feet.
Its tenacious grip plucked at our heels as we walked, and when we sank into
it it was as if some malignant hand was tugging us down into those obscene
depths, so grim and purposeful was the clutch in which it held us. (759–60)
In one sense this is a description of nature, but in another it is almost

supernatural, animating nature in so sinister a fashion as to recall the
murky horrors of the legend (“those dark hours when the powers of evil
are exalted” [675]). “Foul,” for instance (repeated twice shortly after-
wards), harks back to the “foul passions” (674) and “foul” beast (675)
described in the eighteenth-century manuscript. “Malignant hand,”
together with “grim and purposeful,” credits the quagmire with quasi-
human malice. “Miasmatic” is not simply nature description, since
“miasma” (from the Greek for “defilement”) has long carried connota-
tions of both physical and moral pollution.
The Hound of the Baskervilles, then, is built on a contrast between
science and superstition, the rational and the pre-rational parts of the
mind. An important aspect of this contrast is the treatment of the past,
and more specifically the treatment of atavism – the unwelcome return of
the past. The moor is not only treacherous and evil: it is also prehistoric. As
Watson says in chapter seven:
When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern
England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of
the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you
walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge
monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at
their gray stone huts against the scarred hill-sides you leave your own age
behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the
low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would
feel that his presence there was more natural than your own.13 (712)
Later, of course, Selden does emerge in this way:
Over the rocks, in the crevice of which the candle burned, there was thrust
out an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile
passions. Foul with mire, with a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair,
it might well have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the
burrows on the hillsides. (725)
156 D. GRYLLS
Selden is a throwback, an atavistic reversion to primitive, pre-civilized

man. And he is not the only example in the story. We are alerted to the
importance of atavism very early in the novel when Holmes and Watson
read about Dr. Mortimer:
Mortimer, James, M.R.C.S., 1882, Grimpen, Dartmoor, Devon. House-

surgeon, from 1882 to 1884, at Charing Cross Hospital. Winner of the
Jackson prize for Comparative Pathology, with essay entitled “Is Disease a
Reversion?” Corresponding member of the Swedish Pathological Society.
Author of “Some Freaks of Atavism” (Lancet 1882). “Do We Progress?”
(Journal of Psychology, March, 1883). Medical Officer for the parishes of
Grimpen, Thorsley, and High Barrow. (671)
“Some Freaks of Atavism”: the title of Mortimer’s paper applies not only
to Selden but also to Stapleton, who turns out to be a direct descendant of
old Sir Hugo. Just as Sir Henry has the fiery temperament of the
Baskervilles, so Stapleton has inherited their viler passions. One of the
key revelations in the story is the moment in chapter thirteen when
Holmes recognizes his features in the portrait of old Sir Hugo: “The
face of Stapleton had sprung out of the canvas” (750). As Watson marvels,
Holmes coolly comments:
“Yes, it is an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both

physical and spiritual. A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man
to the doctrine of reincarnation. The fellow is a Baskerville – that is evident.”
(750)
It is interesting that here Holmes should equate the modern scientific

doctrine of atavism with the ancient religious doctrine of reincarnation. It
perhaps suggests once again that he is not wholly committed to the
scientific perspective and it fits the dualistic nature of the story. Indeed,
given the novel’s double focus on the scientific and the prehistoric, mod-
ern rationality and primitive instinct, one can see why atavism was a
tempting theme for Doyle. Considered as a scientific theory, atavism
represents a triumph for the human mind and its systems of control and
classification. But considered as a natural phenomenon, it shows how the
mind can be in thrall to savagery. Dr. Mortimer, like Holmes, is a student
of atavism; Stapleton, like Selden, is an instance of it. The presence of both
kinds of character in the story is a proof of its mixed appeal.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is a highly imaginative fantasy written in

an era of scientific prestige. In this respect it resembles a number of other
fin de siècle novellas that combined Gothic horror with scientific trappings,
for example Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or H. G. Wells’s The Time
Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau. One obvious feature it has in
common with such works is its exploitation of Darwinian theory. The
imaginative use of evolution in the romances of Wells,14 who studied at
the Normal School of Science under T. H. Huxley, is well established. The
Time Machine, published in 1895, in effect fuses Marx and Darwin by
envisaging a future society in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
have evolved into two separate species, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The
Island of Doctor Moreau, published in 1896, centers on a megalomaniac
scientist who accelerates the process of evolution by turning animals into
humans, only to be confronted by the problem of reversion.15
Stevenson’s debt to Darwinism is less well documented but he too was
alert to theories of atavism.16 In 1887, for instance, he published an essay
called “The Manse” in which he speculated about his “minister-grand-
father”: “as he sat there in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented
gentleman,” his mind must have contained “tree-top memories,” as mon-
key-like ancestors “gambolled and chattered in the brain of the old divine”
(quoted in Mighall xxxvii). In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published just the
year before, in 1886, the concept of reversion runs all through the story.
Hyde is constantly described in animal terms. He strikes one observer as
“hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say?” (Stevenson 16). In
the course of the novella Hyde cries out “like a rat” (41), screeches in
“mere animal terror” (44), develops an increasingly hairy hand and begins
to “growl for licence” (65). Most suggestive of all are comparisons with
primates. Jekyll’s butler describes Hyde as jumping “like a monkey” (42)
and the compound adjective “Ape-like” appears three times in the story
(22, 69, 70). In the context of post-Darwinian panic all such references
seem significant, but Stevenson takes care to strengthen the notion that
submission to evil is a form of reversion. Just before the crucial moment
where Dr. Jekyll undergoes an involuntary transformation into Hyde, he
talks of sunning himself on a bench, “the animal within me licking the
chops of memory” (66). The next morning, returned to Jekyll once again,
he hates and fears the thought of “the brute that slept within me” (68). In
view of these allusions, the human evil in the story seems not so much
theological as biological. Its explanation lies less in original sin than in the
origin of species.
158 D. GRYLLS
There is no doubt that in many respects Doyle shared the concerns of

his post-Darwinian contemporaries. His first book, The Narrative of John
Smith, written in 1883 but not published until 2011, features a protago-
nist who applies Darwin’s theories even to questions formerly reserved for
religion. He argues, for instance, that “original sin” must have an evolu-
tionary explanation and that barbarous behavior might therefore be mod-
ified by later evolutionary developments (John Smith 31–32). But the links
between The Hound of the Baskervilles and other works of fin de siècle
fiction go further than the use of Darwinism. There are two further forms
of similarity: the use of doubling and hints of sexual horror.
A curious feature of much late Victorian and Edwardian fiction is not
only that it concentrates on savagery beneath the surface (often treated in
Darwinian terms) but that it brings together the savage and civilized, often
by a form of doubling. In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Hyde and Jekyll are twin
aspects of a single person, the former the dark double of the latter. In
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous hero, both murderer
and socialite, feels keenly “the terrible pleasure of a double life” (167). In
The Time Machine the Eloi and the Morlocks are branching forms of a
single humanity, while in The Island of Doctor Moreau, the hero-villain,
who uses vivisection to make creatures in his own image, is both a merci-
less torturer and an analogue of God.17 The theme continues in many
other works of the period. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in
1898, Kurtz is both an imperial idealist (an “emissary of pity, and science,
and progress” [30]) and a murderous voluptuary presiding over “unspeak-
able rites” (60). In James’s The Turn of the Screw, serialized in the same
year, the evil Peter Quint, who terrifies the governess, first appears in the
clothes of the handsome Master, the object of her wistful dreams.
Despite the obvious differences between these novels, in all of them
doubling is used to suggest the linked nature of good and evil, either by
pairing embodiments of each or by fusing them in a single person. In The
Hound of the Baskervilles the use of doubling is much less radical. The
most literal instance of a double in the story is Stapleton’s resemblance to
his forebear Sir Hugo, a resemblance that sharpens our understanding of
the nature of Stapleton’s cruelty. Stapleton is also paired with Selden:
both, as already seen, are savage throwbacks, examples of hereditary
criminal types; both are familiar with Dartmoor, where they have lairs
and someone to assist them; both are wantonly violent. But there is of
course a third person hiding out on the moor, a black figure silhouetted
against the tor, who “might have been the very spirit of that terrible place”
(726). This is Holmes who, as often in the canon, is paired throughout

with his villainous antagonist. An early pointer to this pairing comes when
Stapleton gives his name to the cabman as “Mr Sherlock Holmes” (697).
Holmes, momentarily amazed, immediately frames their contest as a duel.
“I feel a foil as quick and supple as my own,” he says, adding: “this time we
have got a foeman who is worthy of our steel” (698) – a phrase he repeats
later (747). Like Holmes, Stapleton thinks ahead, manipulates others to
his advantage and remains cool under pressure. Like Holmes, he has areas
of specialized knowledge (he is a “recognised authority” on entomology
[762]). But just as Stapleton’s butterfly nets take on sinister connotations,
Holmes metaphorically turns his weapons against him. “My nets are
closing upon him, even as his are upon Sir Henry,” he declares (743)
and, as his counter-plot ripens: “I dare swear that before tomorrow night
he will be fluttering in our net as helpless as one of his own butterflies”
(750). However, despite this reciprocity, nothing in the use of doubling in
the tale undermines the distinction between good and evil, as it does in the
other novellas mentioned. It goes no farther – perhaps not as far – as the
earlier pairing of Holmes and Moriarty, pre-eminent exponents in their
contrary fields.18 Morally, it is no more subversive than when Selden is
found dead in Sir Henry’s clothes – a moment that, unlike Quint being
seen first in his employer’s clothes, is purely one of visual misperception.
Nevertheless, there is one verbal echo in the text that hints, if only for a
second, at a sinister link between Holmes and Stapleton. As Holmes bends
over the body he thinks is Sir Henry’s, he suddenly cries out and is
“dancing and laughing.” He has of course realized that the corpse is
Selden’s but Watson’s temporary shock is instructive: “Could this be my
stern, self-contained friend? These were hidden fires, indeed!” (745). That
last phrase echoes Watson’s earlier account of Stapleton, who, he has said,
“gives the impression of hidden fires . . . There is a dry glitter in his eyes
and a firm set of his thin lips, which goes with a positive and possibly harsh
nature” (713). Holmes was not in fact gloating sadistically over the
smashed body before him, but the parallel suggests such potential in
Stapleton. And this raises the final topic of this chapter: the implied sexual
subtext of the novel.
Among the novellas already mentioned, there is not only a common
theme of savagery beneath a civilized surface and, in some cases, hints of
atavism. There is also, in several of them, a murky implication of sexual
malpractices that are never clearly specified. In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for
instance, the reader’s imagination is made to work overtime fleshing out
160 D. GRYLLS
the “monstrous” but inexplicit pleasures of Hyde (60). What did Hyde
actually do? Enjoy prostitutes, commit murders, desecrate corpses? Part of
the power of the text is the way that – unlike the various film versions – it
leaves readers to wonder, conjecture, and extrapolate. Likewise with The
Turn of the Screw, which famously creates an atmosphere of sexual corrup-
tion by employing strategic ambiguity. As James remarked in his 1908
preface:
Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough . . . and his own
experience, his own imagination . . . will supply him quite sufficiently with all
the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and
you are released from weak specifications.19 (128)
Similar intimations, achieved by similarly oblique methods, can also be

found in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Heart of Darkness.
One reason why the Sherlock Holmes stories would not normally be
placed in such company is that they operate within generic conventions at
odds with the complexity and indeterminacy now recognized as character-
istic of modernist and proto-modernist fiction. By the end of The Hound of
the Baskervilles, for instance, all mystery, all ambiguity, is removed – or at
least this is suggested by Holmes’s final statement: “I have had the
advantage of two conversations with Mrs. Stapleton, and the case has
now been so entirely cleared up that I am not aware that there is anything
which has remained a secret to us” (761). No one speaks like this in Heart
of Darkness and certainly not in any work by James. Yet just as The Hound
of the Baskervilles shares certain preoccupations with contemporary clas-
sics, so too does it have a sexual subtext that leaves a penumbra of doubt.
Consider, for example, the crimes of Stapleton and especially his former
career as a teacher. Stapleton, as Holmes says, is “an interesting instance of
a throwback,” both physically and morally: that is, he not only resembles
his ancestor Sir Hugo physically but has inherited his criminal tendencies.
Sir Hugo’s crime was undoubtedly sexual. As the eighteenth-century
manuscript says, “Learn then from this story not to fear the fruits of the
past, but rather to be circumspect in the future, that those foul passions
whereby our family has suffered so grievously may not again be loosed to
our undoing” (674). Hugo “came to love (if, indeed, so dark a passion
may be known under so bright a name) the daughter of a yeoman” (676).
Thwarted in his attempt to rape her, he set the dogs on her and died for his
crime. Old Sir Hugo was a sexual sadist.
The same seems to be true of Stapleton. Resembling in appearance his

prim-looking ancestor, he also harbors dark passions like Sir Hugo. As Dr.
Watson notes, he is “a creature of infinite patience and craft, with a smiling
face and a murderous heart” (742). His wife, whom he met in Costa Rica,
is an exotic creature as completely pinned down by him as the butterfly
specimens in the room in which she is eventually discovered, gagged by a
towel and bound to a beam, with “the clear red weal of a whiplash across
her neck” (758). Later it is confirmed that he had intimidated her with
blows and controlled her with “a fear founded upon brutal ill-treatment”
(763). Yet she continued to love him and declined to leave him or to
betray him openly. That their relationship was sexually passionate is sug-
gested by Stapleton’s violent jealousy when Sir Henry pays attention to
her, despite the fact that luring Sir Henry was part of Stapleton’s plan.
Clearly in some sense Beryl Stapleton has participated in an abusive and
sadistic relationship. When she is found tied to the post, her two dark eyes,
above the confining towel, stare out “full of grief and shame and a dreadful
questioning” (758). As she says, “It is my mind and soul that he has
tortured and defiled” (759). She adds: “I could endure it all, ill-usage,
solitude, a life of deception, everything, as long as I could still cling to the
hope that I had his love, but now I know that in this also I have been his
dupe and his tool” (759). Holmes is acute on this ambivalence. In his
review of the case, he says: “There can be no doubt that Stapleton
exercised an influence over her which may have been love or may have
been fear, or very possibly both, since they are by no means incompatible
emotions” (765–66).
Stapleton’s sexual manipulation of his wife is not an isolated instance of
abuse. He has also deceived and exploited Laura Lyons, the unhappily
married woman “of equivocal reputation” (731) who declares in words
that anticipate Beryl’s, “But now I see that I was never anything but a tool
in his hands” (753). Like Beryl, she too is isolated and vulnerable (she has
been rejected by her father [731]). She too is exploited by Stapleton with a
mixture of seductive promises and threats. As Holmes says, “both of them
were under his influence, and he had nothing to fear from them” (763).
All this is clearly established in the text and suggests that Stapleton’s
form of sexual cruelty was subtler than that of his murderous ancestor. But
what it might prompt speculation about is the nature of Stapleton’s failed
school. Stapleton has run a school in Yorkshire, a county likely to be
associated in this context with the Dotheboys Hall of Wackford Squeers,
Dickens’s sadistic schoolmaster in Nicholas Nickleby (1839). According to
162 D. GRYLLS
Stapleton, “A serious epidemic broke out in the school and three of the
boys died” (710). He lost most of his capital but he could have borne this
were it not for what he calls “the loss of the charming companionship of
the boys” (710). Given his later proven propensity for sexually exploiting
the lonely and vulnerable, one wonders what might lie behind this remark.
Holmes’s formal investigations show that the “school had come to grief
under atrocious circumstances” (742). This could refer to the epidemic or
to appalling sanitary conditions. But in Holmes’s final summing up he
adds that it was only after an able tutor called Fraser had died of con-
sumption that “the school which had begun well sank from disrepute into
infamy” (762). This seems a very strong statement to make about a school
that closed simply for medical reasons (it is in fact the only use of “infamy”
in the whole of the Holmes canon). So infamous in fact was Stapleton that
he was forced to change his name. What also seems significant is a detail
that Holmes adds at the end of the story when he states his conviction that
a number of unsolved burglaries in the West Country were probably the
work of Stapleton: “The last of these, at Folkestone Court, in May, was
remarkable for the cold-blooded pistolling of the page” (764). Cruelty to
boys as well as women appears to be part of Stapleton’s pattern. The
sinister backstory about the school lingers on after Stapleton himself has
been sucked down into what the story calls the “obscene depths” of
Grimpen Mire (760).
Was Doyle aware of such implications? It is impossible to say – though it
is worth noting that a murky sexual subtext occurs in other Holmes
stories, for example in the late story “The Veiled Lodger,” in which a
Mrs. Merrilow has a bestial husband who abuses her: “When I became a
woman this man loved me, if such lust as his can be called love, and in an
evil moment I became his wife . . . He deserted me for others. He tied me
down and lashed me with his riding-whip when I complained” (1100).20
In The Hound of the Baskervilles Holmes suggests that even if Stapleton
had survived, his doom would have been sealed by his jealous wife. What
she might have done can perhaps be glimpsed from Mrs. Merrilow’s
vengeance in “The Veiled Lodger”: “I heard the crash as the club smashed
my husband’s skull. My heart leaped with joy at the sound” (1100).
Doyle’s stories have darker depths than their surface rationality might
suggest – something that links them powerfully with other great works
of the period. Of course the larger question for literary historians is why so
many classics of late Victorian fiction should deal with buried horrors, with
atavism, with evil doubles, and with sexual crimes that are never made fully
explicit. Many possible answers suggest themselves: contemporary fears

about Darwinism; anxiety about the abuses of empire (Doyle, like Conrad,
denounced the atrocities in the Congo [Lycett 315–17]); even newspaper
exposés of sexual scandals, especially those described at Oscar Wilde’s trials
in 1895.21 But these are inquiries for another essay. For now, it is sufficient
to suggest that Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles be included in the list
of such classics.
NOTES
1. The inclusion of Doyle among “purveyors of romance” (1501) in Albert C.
Baugh’s (ed.) A Literary History of England is echoed, for example, by
Michael Wheeler in English Fiction of the Victorian Period (162).
2. All page numbers given in the text and footnotes to Holmes stories and
novellas are to The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. is echoed, for exam-
ple, by Michael Wheeler in English Fiction of the Victorian Period (162).
3. These references occur in The Sign of Four (91), “The Red-Headed League”
(177), and “The Cardboard Box” (896).
4. These references occur in “A Case of Identity” (199) and “The Yellow
Face” (352).
5. See Mark Campbell’s The Pocket Essential Sherlock Holmes (39).
6. As David Cannadine has noted, even the accounts of London in the Holmes
stories are “littered with descriptive and topographical errors” (18), Doyle’s
image of the metropolis being “every bit as selective and impressionistic as
Manet’s contemporary canvases” (25).
7. See Andrew Lycett’s Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes
(384, 389). See also the excellent account of the Cottingley case in Douglas
Kerr, Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice (234–49).
8. The novella was serialized in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to
April 1902.
9. During a conversation with Holmes that occupies no more than a page, Dr.
Mortimer explains that Sir Henry Baskerville is due to arrive at Waterloo
Station “in exactly one hour and a quarter,” “in one hour and five minutes”
and “in fifty minutes” (681, 682).
10. A witty account of this feature of the plot occurs in Mark Haddon’s The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, in which the fifteen-year-old
narrator, solemnly listing the “Red Herrings” in The Hound of the Baskervilles,
writes: “Selden, the Notting Hill murderer – This is a man who has escaped
from a prison nearby and is being hunted down on the moors, which makes
you think that he has something to do with the story, because he is a criminal,
but he isn’t anything to do with the story at all” (91).
164 D. GRYLLS
11. For example, as noted above, Dr. Mortimer’s awed whisper, “Mr. Holmes,
they were the footprints of a gigantic hound” (679) came at the end of the
first installment in The Strand Magazine, while the tremendous description
of the emerging hound, culminating with the phrase, “broke upon us out of
the wall of fog” (757), completed the eighth installment.
12. Chapter thirteen is called “Fixing the Nets.”
13. Compare the descriptions of the “flint knives” (180) and “stone arrow-
heads used by the old tribes on Egdon” (342) in Thomas Hardy, The
Return of the Native.
14. In the 1890s Doyle exchanged ideas with Wells, who also wrote for The
Strand Magazine. Later, they became competitive, Doyle declaring to an
unnamed correspondent that, “much as I admire Wells, I am not conscious
of being at all in his debt” (Lycett 243, 350–51). Nevertheless, as Russell
Miller points out, The Lost World (1912) was influenced by Wells’s The War
of the Worlds (1898) and The First Men in the Moon (1901) (Miller 304).
15. On the centrality of Darwinian theory in the work of H. G. Wells, see Peter
Kemp’s H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape. On Doyle’s imaginative use
of science in the Challenger narratives, especially The Lost World (1912), see
Kerr’s fourth chapter, entitled “Science” (80–132).
16. As Lycett notes, Stevenson was Doyle’s literary “role model” (140) and
“one of his literary heroes” (100); in January 1890 he expressed his admira-
tion for the older man in an article entitled “Mr Stevenson’s Methods in
Fiction” in the National Review (461 n.). See also Miller (96–97, 175). In
1907 Doyle told Bram Stoker that Stevenson had been “a strong influence”
on his style (Orel 160).
17. Compare McArdle’s description of Professor Challenger in The Lost World:
“In my opinion he’s just a homicidal megalomaniac with a turn for science”
(17).
18. Moriarty first appears in “The Final Problem,” 1893, in which the “personal
contest” between “the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion
of the law of their generation” ends with them apparently dying, “locked in
each other’s arms” (480).
19. In 1894 Doyle told an interviewer, Robert Barr: “James, I think, has had a
great and permanent influence upon fiction. His beautiful clear-cut style and
his artistic restraint must affect everyone who reads him” (Orel 112).
20. Holmes himself sometimes uses a riding-crop – described in “The Six
Napoleons” as “his favourite weapon” (591) – but never against a woman.
21. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (409–49).
WORKS CITED
Baugh, Albert C., ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge, 1948.
Campbell, Mark. The Pocket Essential Sherlock Holmes. Harpenden: Pocket
Essentials, 2001.
Cannadine, David. “A Case of [Mistaken?] Identity.” Sherlock Holmes: The Man
Who Never Lived and Will Never Die. Ed. Alex Werner. London: Penguin,
2014.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 2007.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Memories and Adventures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2012.
———. The Lost World and Other Thrilling Tales. Ed. Philip Gooden. London:
Penguin, 2001.
———. The Narrative of John Smith. London: British Library, 2011.
———. The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. London: Penguin, 1981.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987.
Green, Richard Lancelyn. “Explanatory Notes.” The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes. Ed. Richard Lancelyn Green. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 297–389.
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. London:
Jonathan Cape, 2003.
Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. London: Macmillan, 1965.
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. 2nd edn. Ed. Deborah Esch and Jonathan
Warren. New York: Norton, 1999.
Kemp, Peter. H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape: Biological Themes and
Imaginative Obsessions. London: Macmillan, 1982.
UP, 2013.
Lycett, Andrew. The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007.
Mighall, Robert. “Introduction.” The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. By
Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. RobertMighall. London: Penguin, 2002. ix–
xxxviii.
Miller, Russell. The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle. London: Harvill Secker,
2008.
Orel, Harold, ed. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Interviews and Recollections. London:
Macmillan, 1991.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Ed. Robert
Mighall. London: Penguin, 2002.
Wheeler, Michael. English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830–1890. London:
Longman, 1985.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin, 2011.
166 D. GRYLLS
David Grylls is a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford and a tutor at Oxford

University’s Department for Continuing Education, where until 2013 he directed
the programs in literature, creative writing, and film studies. He is a specialist in
nineteenth-century literature but teaches a range of courses from Shakespeare to
the present day.
Holmes into Challenger: The Dark
Investigator
Douglas Kerr
Sherlock Holmes, that confirmed bachelor famously immune to Cupid’s

darts, has had many children. Polyphiloprogenerative, he must be sus-
pected of fathering a good proportion of the population of modern crime
fiction, as well as hundreds of instantiations of himself in many narrative,
dramatic, and pictorial forms. And we can suppose that Holmeses yet
unborn are already queuing up in some hyperfictional waiting room, like
the apparitions of Banquo’s heirs vouchsafed by the witches to Macbeth.
My subject in this chapter is one of the earliest adapters of Sherlock
Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Apart from Holmes and Dr.
Watson, Doyle’s next best-known serial character is Professor George
Edward Challenger, explorer of the Lost World and hero of four other
tales. I intend here to explore the kinship between the two, and some of
the ways that Challenger is both a continuation and a criticism of what was
embodied in Holmes. To give away the plot in a way Doyle would never
have done, this chapter will examine these two figures in their role as
knowledge-men, researchers and discoverers, and I will argue that in
them, and the popular fictional genres that contain them, we can find
D. Kerr (*)
Department of English, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
e-mail: kerrdw@hku.hk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_10
168 D. KERR
Doyle’s complex and serious response to the Victorian knowledge

revolution.
There are many ways we might account for the popularity, producti-
vity, and fascination of Sherlock Holmes.1 One of these is his remarkable
ability to function as a portmanteau of a number of the most compelling
social themes of the Victorian imagination – not just to embody these
things, but somehow to act as a sort of dialectical synthesis of what seem
on the face of it to be irreconcilably antithetical ideals. In the popular
imagination, as in the unconscious, there are no irreconcilable differ-
ences. Holmes is, for example, as he never tires of boasting to Watson,
a scientific detective. He is a materialist in an uncompromising late
Victorian mould – proclaiming, in “The Sussex Vampire”: “This agency
stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain” (Doyle,
Complete Sherlock Holmes 1034) – with a rigorous methodology, deter-
mined to purge the personal and emotional element from his cases,
frankly and often rude about Watson’s efforts to render his case histories
in literary form. The results of Watson’s romanticism produce, Holmes
complains in The Sign of the Four, “much the same effect as if you worked
a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid” (90).
And yet at the same time Holmes is an incorrigible dandy and an
aesthete – the Baudelaire of Baker Street as I have called him elsewhere
(Kerr 132) – a prince of subjectivity, prone to substance abuse and lolling
on the sofa for weeks on end, but practicing the art of detection for its
own sake, indifferent to monetary reward, a virtuoso of style, devoted to
his work as the only way of staving off the ennui of belatedness and his
bourgeois surroundings.
Holmes is also an instance of two very significant nineteenth-century
inventions: in his detective work he is both an amateur and a professional.
Again, he is uncannily intuitive, solving problems by those unaccountable
flashes of superhuman brilliance which the Romantics imagined were the
working methods of genius. But at the same time he is a positivist, a
thoroughly materialistic and practical processor of data, unable to theorize
in advance of the facts, and similar to those cybernetic inventions with
which his contemporaries were starting the mechanization of intellectual
work.2 In The Sign of the Four, Watson accuses him of being “an auto-
maton, a calculating machine” (96). Then, in token of the beginning of
the long love affair between the public and the show business and its stars,
Holmes is an exhibitionistic showman, parading his skills like a conjuror,
master of the coup de théâtre, with a devoted fan club of at least one. Yet he
HOLMES INTO CHALLENGER: THE DARK INVESTIGATOR 169
is also anti-social and misanthropic, almost friendless, a depressive drop-

out and a Tennysonian melancholic.
All these myths – or you can call them stereotypes if you like – jostle
within the person of Holmes, making him in an over-determined way very
much a man of his time. It is a repertoire that could take us in almost any
direction. Here, however, I am interested in Holmes the scientifically
principled investigator in single-minded pursuit of knowledge, avatar of
the age of modern scientific research and expertise. It is this aspect of him
that links him to Challenger: both are, in my terms, dark investigators.
We know Holmes’s methods, of course. Both the first two Holmes
books have a chapter entitled “The Science of Deduction,” and he is quite
happy to give a demonstration of his skills, inferring an entire career from
Dr. Watson’s pocket watch, for example, or from Dr. Mortimer’s walking
stick. In both these cases, as well as in his brilliant reading of crime scenes,
Holmes produces a narrative from a relic – something left behind. He is
participating in what T. H. Huxley was to call “backtelling” (6). The
backteller practiced a scientific discipline with a historical dimension –
like geology, archaeology, historical linguistics, or evolutionary biology –
reconstructing the past from partial evidence, in confidence that the laws
of nature were infallibly uniform. Such scientists had reading and inter-
pretative skills beyond the powers of common readers, skills that enabled
them to construe a total narrative from fragmentary relics, as Darwin had
famously described the geological record as an imperfect history, of which
we possess only scattered lines from a few pages of randomly surviving
chapters of a single volume, written in a changing dialect (315–16).3
The case of Watson’s watch, from the first chapter of The Sign of the
Four, is not only a good example of Holmes’s working method of back-
telling, but is offered as such, a pedagogic demonstration of the investi-
gator’s powers. His brilliant analysis of the clues offered by this object
unlocks the story of the life and death of Watson’s alcoholic brother, its
former owner. But this hermeneutical virtuosity is a performance, a kind of
party piece. After all, Watson does not need to be told his own brother’s
story. Since in this case nothing is at stake epistemologically, it is not hard
to see the darkness, as well as the brilliance, of the investigation. To
demonstrate his intelligence is inevitably to show up the relative intellec-
tual dullness of Watson, and everyone else, and Holmes almost never
bothers to palliate this. His investigations are without exception stagings
of competitive egotism, often enhanced by a childish enjoyment of keep-
ing his companion or his fellow-professionals in the dark until the last
170 D. KERR
flourish of revelation. In this way Holmes plays the mysteriously gifted

shaman or magician, vested in a kind of awesome personal authority that
Max Weber was to theorize as charisma operating within a structure of
domination.4 Charisma, in an increasingly bureaucratizing age, is a bit of a
throwback. But Holmes’s charisma is entirely modern, his methods bound
by scientific protocols, as he always insists, and therefore properly
detached, disinterested, having in theory no personal investment in the
results of the investigation, other than the enhancement of his professional
reputation. The combination of intellectual detachment with competitive
self-regard and charismatic egotism produces results that can sometimes
be little short of monstrous. In the case of the watch, it is a matter of the
crass and wounding disregard of Watson’s feelings for his unfortunate
brother and the reputation of his family. Ignorance for Holmes cannot
be an excuse: the identity of the watch’s former owner was the first thing
he deduced. It simply does not occur to him that the watch had, as the
cliché goes, a sentimental value, or that an exposition of its history would
cause his friend distress. Brilliant in his reading of material symptoms,
when it comes to affect Holmes can be a dangerous illiterate or worse, a
man willing to inflict deliberate torment for theatrical effect.
Here we can begin to home in on the place of Holmes in the history of
the Victorian knowledge revolution. The nineteenth century invented the
expert, the knowledge-man specializing in a single domain of expertise,
consulted in difficult and challenging cases beyond the powers of the
generalist. Holmes is a consulting detective, and so far ahead of his time
as to be probably the only one in the world. His highly specialized self-
education has entailed a refusal to interest himself in domains of general
knowledge – such as whether the sun goes round the earth or vice versa –
which is of no use to him. This narrow and mechanical specialism belongs,
clearly, to an age of industrial manufacture, but it was also being enshrined
in the structure of the professions as these evolved in the nineteenth
century, including that best known to Arthur Conan Doyle, the profession
of medicine. Here, words like “consultant” and “specialist” had their own
meanings.5
In nineteenth-century Britain, developments in the institutions of med-
icine had produced a professional structure consisting of a minority of
specialist consultants, at the top of the pyramid, and a majority of general
practitioners, the “subordinate grade” of family doctors, working in a
locally-bound practice. Specialists were expected to be up-to-date with
the latest international research, and were brought in to advise on
challenging cases where an expert opinion was required. General practi-

tioners, less expert, often relied on local knowledge of the community and
a good bedside manner. Consultant specialists and general practitioners
were interdependent, however, united by the institution of referral: nor-
mally, a specialist would only see a patient who had been referred to him
by the local doctor. Like George Eliot’s Dr. Lydgate or Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Dr. Harrison, the GP lived among the community he served, his patients
were his neighbors, and he was often familiar with several generations of
their families. The specialist, in contrast, received patients in his clinic or
consulting rooms, preferably in Harley Street in London, removed from
the patient’s own environment, or else he might be parachuted in to visit a
specially interesting or lucrative patient, before returning to his own
professional space.6
To the general practitioner, the specialist could appear an overpaid
arrogant show-off, more interested in the case than in the patient, and
unlike the family doctor, not obliged to live with his mistakes. To the
specialist, the GP must often have seemed provincial, unscientific, and
bumbling, a shirker of responsibility. The specialist was expected to be
modern and scientific in his knowledge and methods, an expert technician,
while the general practitioner tended to practice a much more social form
of medicine, where empathy and interpersonal skills might be the best he
had to offer. This was the structure of the profession Doyle joined when he
put up his plate as a physician in general practice in Southsea, and it had
very important implications for his fiction. He was familiar with it for years
from the point of view of the subordinate grade.
The relationship between specialist expertise and a more general and
local knowledge is reproduced in the fictional partnership between
Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective, and John
Watson, an army doctor who goes into general practice. Tensions within
the structure of the medical profession – and, I will argue, within the
broader domain of scientific knowledge – can be felt in the somewhat
sadomasochistic friendship between these two men, in Holmes’s narrow
focus, intellectual dominance and arrogance, and his insistence on scien-
tific method, and in Watson’s relative ineptitude, but consistently more
humane responses to the cases that they investigate. Holmes has a profes-
sional network – consultants could not begin to operate without one – but
his manners are alienating and, apart from Watson, he has no friends at all.
In some Holmes stories too, the role of the local man is taken by a
policeman such as Lestrade, though the police also had a professional
172 D. KERR
structure of local practice – the “manor” or “beat” – and a consultant

elite based in Scotland Yard. Lestrade is the professional superior of
the neighborhood constable on his beat, and is brought in as an expert
to take over serious cases. But Lestrade in turn is happy, or grudgingly
willing, to call in the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes on parti-
cularly baffling problems. Athwart this professional hierarchy of
authority and technique (and Weberian structure of domination) runs
another line, differentiating between the uniformed branch and the
plain-clothes officer (plain clothes could be an investigative conveni-
ence but also seems to have signaled a class difference), and between
the professional police detective and the amateur gentleman sleuth,
whose investigation is often motivated more by sporting instincts than
by the obligations of paid employment. Both professionals (like
Holmes) and amateurs (like Holmes) were inventions of the
Victorian age.
Sherlock Holmes’s first case, recounted by Watson in A Study in Scarlet
(1887), is a good place to observe the drama of investigation performed by
this new culture-hero, the expert. Holmes is brought in to the Jefferson
Hope case by means of a classic referral from Gregson, the Scotland Yard
man, asking for his help. Holmes is satisfied that this invitation from the
subordinate grade is couched in appropriately respectful language – “He
knows that I am his superior, and acknowledges it to me” (27) – and
agrees to go to investigate the crime scene.
While making his own swift and penetrating examination of the death
room at Lauriston Gardens, Holmes speaks patronizingly and sarcastically
to the police investigators and ridicules their ham-fisted deductions. After
some brisk and expert observations, he tells an admiring Watson that his
mind is already entirely made up on the case, though some details remain
to be filled in. But at this stage he will not share his knowledge with the
police or with Watson (32). This is an indication of Holmes’s competi-
tiveness and might be considered unprofessional behavior: it is hard to
imagine a medical or legal consultant, for example, keeping his conclu-
sions secret from those who have commissioned them. This withholding
of information undoubtedly prolongs the police investigation as the offi-
cers are left to bumble around after false clues. But Holmes has no interest
in helping the police to close the case. Indeed in many Holmes stories
the great detective is scandalously uninterested in “police procedure,” the
apprehension, examination, trial, and punishment of wrongdoers, the
process of dealing with transgression which is supposed to underwrite
the ideological reassurances of the detective genre. Holmes’s refusal to

disclose what has come to his knowledge till it can be revealed in an
impressive coup de théâtre will be, of course, habitual. He has, we might
say, his own timetable for the publication of his research findings.
All this is of course enjoyable, and impressive in its way. What we are
witnessing is an early triumph of Holmes’s scientific method – a method
which incidentally was acknowledged by its Victorian practitioners to
include a measure of what C. S. Peirce called abduction,7 and John
Tyndall in a famous lecture titled “The Scientific Use of the
Imagination.” But already we may discern shades of darkness encroaching
on this investigation, shades adumbrated in the first information we were
given about Holmes, concerning his flogging of corpses to research post-
mortem bruising, which caused Watson’s friend Stamford to opine that
Holmes was “a little too scientific for my tastes – it approaches to cold-
bloodedness” (17). Holmes is certainly brilliant, and we never doubt that
he is right. But already in his first outing he is displaying many of the
qualities – arrogance, snobbery, lack of feeling – which Doyle may well
have met in the consultants retained by his Southsea patients to give a
second opinion on his own diagnoses, and which, according to Owen
Dudley Edwards, he had first encountered in “the inhumane attitudes
towards patients” of the lordly medical panjandrums at Edinburgh
University (200). And after all these were just the qualities which inclined
laypeople to be resentful and even fearful of the growing army of expertise,
including medical consultants, even while acknowledging a need for their
help. Lofty, aloof, and indispensable, vested with an arcane knowledge,
experts were the aristocrats and beneficiaries of what Harold Perkin
entitled The Rise of Professional Society. Impersonality might be a principle
of scientific methodology, but there were times when it looked like a
deficit of humanity. “It is of the first importance,” Holmes has already
lectured Watson, “not to allow your judgement to be biased by personal
qualities. A client to me is a mere unit, a factor in a problem” (96).
When Watson – who, we should not forget, has risked his life and seen
men die in battle – enters the room at Lauriston Gardens where Enoch
Drebber lies dead, he does so, he says, “with that subdued feeling at my
heart which the presence of death inspires”; he describes the scene with his
usual dependable realism, but he adds that never had death appeared to
him in a more fearsome aspect (28, 29). These are conventional pieties,
perhaps. Holmes’s feelings about the corpse, however, are not so much
subdued as non-existent. He is in the presence not of death, but of data,
174 D. KERR
and appears quite unmoved by what he has come to inspect. Here is how
he goes to work on the body.
As he spoke, his nimble fingers were flying here, there, and everywhere,
feeling, pressing, unbuttoning, examining, while his eyes wore the same
faraway expression which I have already remarked upon. So swiftly was the
examination made, that one would hardly have guessed the minuteness with
which it was conducted. Finally, he sniffed the dead man’s lips, and then
glanced at the soles of his patent leather boots.
“He has not been moved at all?” he asked.
“No more than was necessary for the purposes of our examination.”
“You can take him to the mortuary now,” he said. “There is nothing
more to be learned.” (29)
The procedure is more like an autopsy, of course, than the examination of

a living patient. Still, there is something predatory about the way Holmes
plunders the body for information, in a manner both highly intimate and
quite lacking in feeling or respect. This is the affect-free expert at work, in
all the abstraction and distance intimated in that faraway look, his mind
concentrated on the accumulation of knowledge which we can call the
“case,” apparently careless of the human implications of his actions or their
consequences. Holmes, as I said before, is a figure of the artist as well as a
scientist, and we may be reminded of his dexterous skills as a violinist. So a
slight shift of angle enables us to watch Holmes performing on the body of
Drebber, those expert fingers extracting information from him as they
might extract music from the instrument. The faraway look shows this
artist not in the grip of some great emotion, but abstracted and absorbed
in his own amazing technique. He practices an art for its own sake, the
other human figure in the scene entirely objectified and indeed instru-
mentalized to enable this performance of virtuosity.
The abstraction, the coldness and carelessness of affect, and of course
the virtuosity, are qualities that reappear in the incident of Watson’s watch.
My contention is that these were qualities that were becoming recognized
as the dark side of scientific expertise, and that for Doyle they were most
familiarly associated with the figure of the medical specialist. There are
plenty of other examples of this noted deficit of human feeling among the
many other scientific materialists who appear in Doyle’s fiction. One is Dr.
Horace Selby, a successful specialist in the story “The Third Generation,”

in the collection of medical tales titled Round the Red Lamp, whom we see
examining a young patient in his consulting room, inspecting first a rash,
then his teeth.
“Now your eye.” He lit a lamp at the patient’s elbow, and holding a small
crystal lens to concentrate the light, he threw it obliquely upon the patient’s
eye. As he did so a glow of pleasure came over his large expressive face, a
flush of such enthusiasm as the botanist feels when he packs the rare plant
into his tin knapsack, or the astronomer when the long-sought comet first
swims into the field of his telescope. (53)
The allusion to Keats’s figure of the astronomer, “some watcher of the

skies, / When a new planet swims into his ken” (in the sonnet “On First
Looking into Chapman’s Homer”), does nothing to dispel the uncanny
and frankly creepy tone of this moment, and after all the investigator here
is directing his instrument not at the uninhabited cosmos but into a
human being’s eye (Keats 9–10). There is a similarity to Holmes’s reading
of the corpse at Lauriston Gardens, except that here it is a living patient
who is objectified and disarticulated under the concentrated Foucauldian
gaze of the examiner, deploying his expert knowledge to glean data from
the helplessly docile body as if it were a specimen for his collection and
professional advancement. What Dr. Selby has seen in the young patient’s
eye, to trouble his cold blood with that slightly sexualized glow and flush,
are the early signs of an incurable syphilis, inherited from a dissolute
grandfather. Furthermore the patient, himself sexually innocent, is shortly
to be married. These are the circumstances that lie behind the case that
brought the specialist his involuntary gratification. The next morning he
will read in his breakfast newspaper that his patient, upon leaving his
consulting rooms, took his own life. It seems unlikely this regrettable
outcome will stop the great venereologist from including this interesting
case in the monograph he is writing on the subject.
It would hardly be surprising if a suspicion that medical specialists
tended to care more for the case (and their own reputation) than for the
patient was a prejudice quite widely entertained in the ranks of the sub-
ordinate grade, the general practitioners like Doyle himself. Before widen-
ing my focus, let me give one more example of this reading of consultant
behavior in the person of Sherlock Holmes. The Hound of the Baskervilles
is perhaps his most famous case. It also marks his reappearance in print
176 D. KERR
after the hiatus that followed “The Final Problem,” though its events
predate the encounter with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Since A
Study in Scarlet, Holmes had had moments when his cold heart had
seemed to warm up, and when he showed definite signs of obedience to
ethical imperatives: we can attribute these to the good influence of his
companion Watson. But when he returns in The Hound, Holmes seems to
have reverted to his earlier dark-investigator ways, a narrow-minded mate-
rialistic egotist with poor social skills.
The Hound is a classic consultancy case, beginning with a conventional
referral when Dr. Mortimer, a country physician, calls on the great man to
take up the case of Sir Henry Baskerville, the patient and friend whose life,
Mortimer believes, may be in danger beyond his powers to understand or
combat. Holmes immediately and rudely dismisses Mortimer’s own theory
of the case as hopelessly unmodern and unscientific, but he agrees to bring
his expertise to bear in Sir Henry’s interest. Holmes gathers information,
“taking the patient’s history” as physicians put it, and asserts his authority
by getting Sir Henry Baskerville to promise that he will obey his instruc-
tions (similar to the well-known “doctor’s orders”). But when Sir Henry is
to travel from London to Dartmoor to take up his patrimony at Baskerville
Hall, Holmes unaccountably declines to travel with him. Instead he
entrusts Sir Henry to the day-to-day care of his subordinate, Dr.
Watson, who is instructed to send regular reports on the progress of the
case to Holmes in London. Like the general practitioner he actually is,
Watson can now observe the patient in his local environment, and he and
Sir Henry become friends, sharing the domestic life of Baskerville Hall,
while Holmes remains aloof in his metropolitan base. Or so Watson
believes. As a matter of fact, and unknown to Watson, Holmes has traveled
to Devon, in disguise as a tourist, and he takes up residence in an old
abandoned hilltop hut from which vantage he can observe all the sur-
rounding countryside. This eccentric and under-motivated course of
action (“my presence would have warned our very formidable opponents
to be on their guard” [741], is his later unconvincing explanation) is
entirely consistent with the consultant’s aloofness, self-mystification, and
taste for looking down on everybody. Holmes’s tendency to appear dra-
matically against the skyline, surveying his grim surroundings from some
commanding crag, gives a most Gothic image of the dark investigator in
the isolation, superiority, and inscrutability of his great powers.
Holmes’s strange and reckless aloofness makes a fool of Watson, and
endangers Sir Henry Baskerville, but Holmes as usual is thoroughly
focused on solving the mystery of the case, and he is equally indifferent to

the welfare of the man whose life has been entrusted to him, and to the
feelings of the companion he is unable to consider an equal. At his own
pace again, he meticulously moves toward a position of complete knowl-
edge. “Our case becomes rounded off,” he will later tell Watson, “I shall
soon be in the position of being able to put into a single connected
narrative one of the most singular and sensational crimes of modern
times” (753). The case approaches completion, but what of the safety of
the man at risk? This brings to mind the old medical joke – the operation
was a complete success: unfortunately the patient died. Sir Henry does not
die. But he nearly dies, and Holmes is responsible, as he will later admit
(757). The human consequences of the consultant detective’s fastidious
delay are nearly fatal, for a sudden fog rises (the London specialist, of
course, lacked the local knowledge to predict this), disarranging his plans,
and Sir Henry is attacked and badly wounded by the hound, and suffers a
nervous breakdown in consequence. In the final chapter Sir Henry, a
broken man, departs to try to recover his health in the care of the faithful
GP Dr. Mortimer, after visiting Holmes in the consulting rooms at Baker
Street to express his thanks, though it is not entirely clear what for. Holmes,
needless to say, is “in excellent spirits” over his success in this and other
cases (761). For him, the case has been an unambiguous triumph.
It is no doubt the case that Doyle, like the public opinion he so often
seemed to embody in the society of his time, worried about scientific
investigation’s tendency to abstraction and what I have called a deficit in
humanity because he was temperamentally inclined to idealize science as
the principal agent of change and progress in modernity. Like many
thousands of others of his generation, the young Doyle had turned to
science to supply what religion was no longer able to offer him, and he had
a great and lifelong respect for scientific methods and scientific men. (He
was to insist repeatedly that his psychic investigations and beliefs had a
solid scientific basis.) Much of the most significant scientific research in the
earlier decades of the nineteenth century had been accomplished by
investigators of a kind for which there is not really a satisfactory name –
freelance, amateur, or gentleman scientists. But by the latter part of the
century much research was both institutionalized and nationalized.
There was, for example, in the decades after the Franco-Prussian War of
1870, a famous rivalry between two celebrity scientists, Robert Koch in
Germany and Louis Pasteur in France. Such men were carriers of national
prestige. As much scientific research was literally becoming invisible to the
178 D. KERR
naked eye, the scientist himself was increasingly visible, indeed spot-lit, as a
paladin of knowledge who was also a culture-hero, with a large team of
assistants, and supported by increasingly impressive funding from universi-
ties, foundations, and the state, which his work (and occasionally hers)
required. Since Galileo pointed his telescope at the moons of Jupiter, scien-
tific knowledge had been moving out of the reach of laypeople, steadily and
then, late in the nineteenth century, rapidly. With the professionalization of
science, and the gathering of scientific communities in universities, institutes,
and clinics, there also developed of course an increasingly specialized lan-
guage of sciences which excluded anyone who was not trained and up-to-
date in it. Meantime, it was increasingly difficult for the amateur scientist to
produce cutting-edge research without the kind of expensive facilities and
equipment, requiring constant modernization, that only institutional fund-
ing could supply. The laboratory scientist went about his business in his
arcane way, and his findings, reported in technical language in specialist
journals and unverifiable except by other experts, had to be taken on trust.
In a literal sense, his work could not really be questioned by the layman.
In the late decades of the nineteenth century, medicine was an inter-
national affair, and important knowledge events, such as the unveiling of
Robert Koch’s so-called cure for tuberculosis in Berlin in 1890, which
Doyle attended as a reporter, attracted medical men from all over the
world, and the attention of the world’s press. The vaunted cure for
tuberculosis, a disease responsible for one in every seven deaths in the
mid-nineteenth century, was in several ways a paradigm moment in the
nineteenth-century knowledge revolution. It was also a significant turning
point in the career of Arthur Conan Doyle.
When he went to Berlin in 1890, Doyle was an obscure 31-year-old
provincial general practitioner, with a second-string career in literature.
He was somewhat overawed by the busy international stir created by the
news of the cure, but was not nearly important enough to secure an
interview with Koch himself, and was rudely rebuffed by Koch’s mighty
colleague Professor Ernst von Bergmann, when he begged the great man
to let him attend the lecture demonstrating the cure. (Bergmann himself
had two years before been in a furious public dispute with the English
physician Sir Morell Mackenzie over the latter’s misdiagnosis of the
German crown prince Friedrich, and was ill-disposed to English doctors.)
While he remained somewhat overawed by Koch himself, Doyle began to
form in Berlin a more skeptical view of the profession of science, for which
he had previously nurtured a thoroughly romantic esteem.
The profession’s tendencies to abstraction, self-mystification, car-

eerism, and a neglect of ethical responsibilities were crystallized in
Doyle’s several reports on Berlin in terms of the representation of
character, just as they had been in the character of Holmes.8 He
witnessed the rudeness and egotism of Bergmann, the political pres-
sure on Koch which went with his promotion as a national hero, and
the insulation of the great men of knowledge from ordinary people.
It was an open secret that the German authorities, seeking to steal a
march on their French rivals, had obliged Koch to make a public
announcement of his findings prematurely, and the cure for the
scourge immediately became an international media sensation, with
claims being made for it which a proper scientific caution would not
have advanced at this stage. Sure enough, Koch’s tuberculin treat-
ment proved not to be a cure for tuberculosis, but not before, as
Doyle recalled in Memories and Adventures, “a wave of madness had
seized the world,” and thousands of consumptives from all corners of
the earth had flocked to Berlin hoping to be cured, “some of them in
such advanced stages of disease that they died in the train” (90).
Doyle says he saw the delivery at Koch’s Berlin address of sacks full of
letters from all over the world, “a sign of all the sad broken lives and
wearied hearts which were turning in hope to Berlin” (Memories 89).
The trumpeted consumption cure, developed by a world-class scien-
tist, fueled by arrogance and forced by institutional and national
rivalry, was an ethical disaster which bore down most cruelly on the
weak and helpless. Koch survived this setback, and became one of the
first Nobel prizewinners in medicine, in 1905. Doyle returned from
Berlin determined to devote himself to a career in literature.
His second best-known serial character is another instantiation, cele-
bration, and critique, of this essential Victorian and modern figure, the
expert investigator. When we meet Professor Challenger he is not a
practicing physician (he may not even be a professor), but a research
scientist.9 He is not a cruel man, but he cares for nothing but knowledge
and his own reputation, and seems oblivious to the fact that science lives in
a world of human power and responsibility. As in the case of Holmes, here
too the pleasurable proceedings of popular fiction contain intimations of
the egomania and irresponsibility that expertise is heir to, when new
knowledge is pursued for its own sake and heedless of its human implica-
tions. Challenger is an enjoyable grotesque, but he contains (and fails to
contain) an anxiety that scientific expertise might be getting out of
180 D. KERR
control. In this respect he is a twentieth-century Frankenstein. And so his

monomaniacal scientific expedition to the Lost World, in Doyle’s scientific
romance of 1912, is a geographical project that ends in genocide, indeed
species extinction, for the coming of these modern adventurers to the lost
South American plateau has a direct result in the liquidation of the
indigenous ape-men. At the same time, the discovery of diamonds in the
swamp of the pterodactyls has the unintended but inevitable consequence
of leaving the no longer lost world open for future spoliation in the name
of material interests, on the model not just of Costaguana in Conrad’s
Nostromo (1904) but of the appalling exploitation of central Africa that
Doyle himself had recently condemned in The Crime of the Congo (1909).
This terminal damage to a unique environment and its inhabitants seems a
stiff price to pay for an advance in scientific knowledge, but once again it is
a price not paid or even heeded by the scientist himself, who returns to
London as a celebrity, in as excellent spirits as Holmes upon his return
from Dartmoor, undaunted and untainted by the catastrophe he has left
behind to run its course. The investigation is heroically accomplished. The
consequences are not his concern.
There is a further dimension to this question. If knowledge was
entrenched as a secular profession in the Victorian age, it was definitely a
masculine one, with an agenda to control and dominate a natural world
traditionally conceived as feminine.10 When Francis Galton surveyed the
profession in 1874, he published his findings in a book entitled English
Men of Science (naturally enough), and argued that there was something
inherently masculine in the business of research:
The female mind has special excellencies of a high order, and the value of
its influence in various ways is one that I can never consent to underrate;
but that influence is towards enthusiasm and love (as distinguished from
philanthropy), not towards calm judgement, nor, inclusively, towards
science. In many respects the character of scientific men is strongly anti-
feminine; their mind is directed to facts and abstract theories, and not to
persons or human interests. The man of science is deficient in the purely
emotional element, and in the desire to influence the beliefs of others . . . In
many respects they [scientists] have little sympathy with female ways of
thought. (206–7)
If this is a good description of the woman-averse investigator Sherlock

Holmes, it is an even better fit to the hypermasculine Professor
Challenger, as we may see in the penultimate Challenger story, “When the

World Screamed,” published in the Strand in 1928, and collected in The
Maracot Deep and Other Stories (1929).
This tale is the story of another scientific research project. It is nar-
rated by a rather colorless engineer, named Peerless Jones. Jones is
summoned by Professor Challenger to be the junior co-investigator or
research assistant in a project to test the great man’s belief that “the
world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed . . . with a
circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its own” (Maracot
Deep 268). Jones’s first reaction is to think Challenger a madman, but
the engineer is soon overborne by the great man’s charismatic vision and
domineering personality: he is incapable of embodying the moral coun-
terweight that Watson could sometimes supply to Holmes. In order to
test his hypothesis, Challenger has begun the epic labor of sinking a great
shaft eight miles deep into the earth’s crust, at a site on the Sussex
Downs. As the culmination of the experiment, his intention is to drive
a sharp drill, a hundred feet long and powered by an electric motor, deep
into the body of the earth. Here we can see the ancient trope of Mother
Nature made literal: Challenger is out to prove the earth not only life-
giving but itself (or herself) a living being. The method that recommends
itself to him for this operation is the infliction of pain. The egregious
violence he is set on offering to the earth itself can be read as a satire on
the phallic rapacity of science, the darkness of scientific investigation
when it has broken loose from its responsibilities to the human and
natural environment. (It is related of course to the distress Holmes can
inflict on Watson and others in his demonstrations of his own masterful
methods.) Challenger himself, needless to say, is entirely unaware of
these considerations, and this is indeed the point. As ever, he acts like a
spoilt and anarchic infant – here getting ready to act out a fantasy which
would hold no surprises for Freud – and a Nietzschean Übermensch
exercising the will to power over nature to which he feels his superiority
entitles him.
While Jones somewhat reluctantly constructs the drill to his master’s
specifications, Challenger makes his final preparations. He does not neglect
the public relations appropriate to his celebrity, and summons an audience
of thousands to witness the event. At the site, the nerves of the earth are
exquisitely exposed, as in an anatomical drawing. As Jones queasily describes
it: “A dark purple fluid appeared to pulse in the tortuous anastomoses of
channels which lay under the surface. The throb of life was in it all” (304).
182 D. KERR
At the apogee of the research project, as Jones recounts, “my iron dart shot
into the nerve ganglion of old Mother Earth and the great moment had
arrived” (305). It is an appropriate climax to the age of the dark investiga-
tor. This maternal rape results in an explosion, expelling the penetrating
instrument, and this is immediately followed by a great spray of foul fluid, a
“gush of putridity” (308). The voice of violated nature, a sounding cataract
now become the anti-matter of the Wordsworthian sublime, is heard in a
terrible, indescribable scream – “No sound in history has ever equalled the
cry of the injured Earth” (306) – a scream of pain and protest simulta-
neously uttered by every volcano around the world. The experiment has
been a resounding success. Challenger’s hypothesis is proved, and he is able
to bask in the admiration of the throng of onlookers, overawed by “the
mighty achievement, the huge sweep of the conception, the genius and
wonder of the execution” of what they have witnessed (309).
This repulsive triumph over a feminized nature is the crowning achieve-
ment of the phallic investigator, the supreme embodiment of research
excellence – “Challenger the super-scientist, Challenger the arch-pioneer,
Challenger the first man of all men whom Mother Earth had been com-
pelled to recognize” (309–10) – and on the site, reports the awestruck
Peerless Jones, the Royal Society have, appropriately, erected an obelisk.
The decades that have passed since Doyle wrote “When the World
Screamed” have provided enough instances of what irresponsible or reck-
less scientific experts, however disinterested, can do to the natural world if
unchecked by the humane consideration and commonsense thoughtful-
ness we might associate with the plodding and prosaic Watson rather than
the mercurial and dangerous Holmes and Challenger. But if this late
Challenger tale is prophetic, it is also entirely consistent with Doyle’s
earlier objections to a ruthless pursuit of scientific discovery, a battening
on the prizes of knowledge without counting or estimating their cost, and
the unchecked arrogance of experts. Doyle was himself proud to be a
trained scientific investigator. The penultimate Challenger story is perhaps
the extreme version in his fiction of the myth of the dark investigator, the
story of what can happen if scientific knowledge is pursued without proper
and humane thought about its context and consequences. As such, a
strand of fictional genetic material twists back from the drill that pene-
trated the earth eight miles beneath the Sussex Downs, to the wounding
insensitivity of a man showing off what knowledge he can produce from an
investigation of his friend’s pocket watch.
NOTES
1. References in this chapter to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories
are to the Penguin edition.
2. For example, the adding machine patented by William Seward Burroughs in
1888, the year after the first appearance of Holmes in print.
3. In A Study in Scarlet Holmes expounds his own theory of interpretative
backtelling in his article “The Book of Life,” which speaks of inferring an
Atlantic or a Niagara from a drop of water (23).
4. “Rationally regulated association within a structure of domination finds its
typical expression in bureaucracy . . . The charismatic structure of domina-
tion rests upon individual authority which is based neither upon rational
rules nor upon tradition” (ii 954).
5. For a more detailed exposition of the relation of Doyle’s life and writing to
cultures of knowledge, see Kerr (41–122).
6. Masculine pronouns seem appropriate for generalizations about Victorian
doctors. See Digby, Loudon, Porter, and Perkin. Women were utterly
debarred from the profession until the 1870s, and began to practice in
very small numbers thereafter. See Dixon Smith, and Doyle’s story “The
Doctors of Hoyland” (Round the Red Lamp 256–72).
7. See Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok.
8. He wrote about what he saw in Berlin in a letter to the Daily Telegraph
(Letters to the Press 35–37), a commissioned article for W. T. Stead’s Review
of Reviews (“Dr Koch”), and later in the memoir Memories and Adventures
(87–91), in which he details Bergmann’s bullying and unprofessional bad
manners as he “rushed on with his court all grinning at the snub which the
presumptuous Englishman had received.” Doyle was less critical of Koch,
while suggesting, and in later tellings confirming, that Koch’s tuberculin
treatment was not an effective cure for the disease. He later claimed his
Telegraph letter was “the very first which appeared upon the side of doubt
and caution” about the cure (90). See also Kerr (79–99).
9. Challenger does not appear ever to have held a university position, and
finances his work by private means. His title may be simply honorific, as
seems also to be the case with his irascible exact contemporary, Professor
Henry Higgins in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912). It appears later, in The
Land of Mist (278–79), that Challenger did practice as a doctor in his youth.
10. This is a trope that goes back to Aristotle, but had also figured in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which scientific research is consistently repre-
sented as a stripping and penetration of feminized nature.
184 D. KERR
WORKS CITED
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo. Ed. Jacques Berthoud and Mara Kalnins. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2009.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Ed. J. W. Burrow. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968.
Digby, Anne. The Evolution of British General Practice 1850–1948. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1999.
Dixon Smith, R. “Feminism and the Role of Women in Conan Doyle’s Domestic
Fiction.” ACD: Journal of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society 5 (1994): 50–60.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “Dr. Koch and his Cure.” Review of Reviews 2.12 (1890):
552–56.
———. Letters to the Press. Ed. John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green.
Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1986.
———. Memories and Adventures. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
———. Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life. Fairfield,
IA: First World Library, 2004.
———. The Crime of the Congo. Honolulu: UP of the Pacific, 2004.
———. The Land of Mist. London: Hutchinson, 1926.
———. The Maracot Deep and Other Stories. London: John Murray, 1929.
———. The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1981.
Edwards, Owen Dudley. The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of
Arthur Conan Doyle. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
Galton, Francis. English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture. 2nd edn.
London: Frank Cass, 1970.
Huxley, Thomas H. “On the Method of Zadig.” Collected Essays. Vol. 4. London:
Macmillan, 1911. 1–23.
Keats, John. “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” The Major Works. 1990
Ed. Elizabeth Cook. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 32.
UP, 2013.
Loudon, Irvine. Medical Care and the General Practitioner 1750–1850. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986.
Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. 1989.
London: Routledge, 1990.
Porter, Roy. Disease, Medicine and Society in England 1550–1860. 2nd edn.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993.
Sebeok, Thomas A. and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, “‘You Know My Method’:
A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes.” The Sign of
Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983. 11–54.
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 2003.
Tyndall, John. “The Scientific Use of the Imagination.” Scientific Addresses. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. 33–74.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society. 2 vols. Ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1978.
Douglas Kerr is Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong, and author
of Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2013).
His other books include Wilfred Owen’s Voices (Oxford University Press, 1993),
George Orwell (Northcote House, Writers and their Work series, 2003), A Century
of Travels in China (co-edited with Julia Kuehn, Hong Kong University Press,
2007), and Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (Hong Kong
University Press, 2008).
Modernizing Holmes: Location
and Bringing Sherlock into the Twenty-First
Century
Emily Garside
“The name is Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221B Baker

Street” – when Sherlock Holmes utters these words in the first episode
of the television series Sherlock, he and Arthur Conan Doyle’s much-loved
detective creation become one in the eyes of the viewer. At the same time,
the statement ties Baker Street, the home which Sherlock Holmes and
John Watson share throughout much of Doyle’s canon, to Sherlock’s
identity. This chapter will consider the important function performed by
location in transposing Doyle’s Victorian stories into twenty-first-century
narratives. The Sherlock Holmes stories are pervaded by several locations
that have achieved iconic status due to their narrative significance, from
the famous Baker Street address to the moors that hide the infamous
Hound of the Baskervilles. In the BBC adaptation Sherlock, location is
pivotal in solidifying the television series’ relationship to the canon,
while also enabling characters and stories from that canon to be reima-
gined in a contemporary context.
Location in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and literary tourism associated
with this, is hardly a new topic of scholarly inquiry.1 In the introduction to
E. Garside (*)
Creative Industries Research Institute, University of South Wales, Cardiff, Wales
e-mail: emilymgarside@gmail.com

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_11
188 E. GARSIDE
his guide to locations in Sherlock Holmes, Alastair Duncan has noted that
“one of the greatest aspects of the Sherlock Holmes stories is that [the
detective] operated in a world that to a certain extent still exists” (Duncan
vii). Sherlock, the particular contemporary adaptation considered by the
current chapter, has been described as a desire to “free Holmes from his
heritage-industry prison” (Jeffries). Having lost “the deerstalker and
tweeds and gain[ed] nicotine patches and a smartphone” the locations
that Holmes inhabits must similarly take on contemporary aesthetics
(Jeffries). Series creator Steven Moffatt has commented that “London is
like another character” in Sherlock (Jeffries), and the city has similarly been
described by fan site “Sherlockology” as “the silent main character” of the
series (Ames).
The shift to a contemporary location was a gamble. As Virginie Sélavy
notes in World Film Locations: London, “Victorian London has proved an
enduringly popular cinematic setting” (26). This popularity, as Sélavy
comments, rests on the atmosphere that a Victorian London setting
evokes: “cobbled streets shrouded in fog or dripping with rain, hazy
gaslights, hansom cabs, and gentlemen in top hats and black capes conjure
up the image of a city full of mystery and intrigue” (26). Victorian London
is therefore an excellent companion to the narratives of the Holmes
stories, and removing the detective from such a setting is risky, not least
because the kind of city Victorian Holmes inhabited is an ever more
distant memory for contemporary Londoners – one that many may hope
to preserve. The London of today, stereotyped as a playground for the
rich, is increasingly fulfilling the description that Doyle once gave it, as
“that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire
are irresistibly drained” (11). While Sherlock and John’s lives in modern
London are in many ways far removed from their Victorian counterparts in
terms of the city around them, their stories are equally entwined with
carefully chosen locations.
The stories of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson are tied to Baker
Street from the first pages of A Study in Scarlet, in which Watson locates
his second meeting with Sherlock Holmes: “We met next day, as he had
arranged, and inspected the rooms at No. 221B Baker Street, of which he
had spoken at our meeting” (14). In Sherlock the location of Baker Street
is quickly established in “A Study in Pink” as a central facet of the series’
identity. In Sherlock the detective’s name is revealed with a wink as he tells
John Watson, upon exiting the laboratory in St Bart’s Hospital, “The
name is Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221B Baker Street,” a
MODERNIZING HOLMES: LOCATION AND BRINGING SHERLOCK . . . 189
statement which sets up a relationship between the detective’s identity and

the London location that he inhabits; the location that also visually
dominates the opening credits of each episode.
The first view of Baker Street itself in Sherlock is established via a
sweeping shot of the street in London: the viewer sees Baker Street from
above, taking in the views of London indicated by a London bus in the
distance, and a London taxi traveling toward the camera. The street is
clearly a Victorian terrace, echoing the era of the original stories, but the
contemporary buildings in the background and the skyscraper skyline
indicate the London of the present, which encroaches upon the historic
buildings of Baker Street. Sherlock and John are framed standing outside
the door, the “221B” framing them and visually wedding them to their
iconic Victorian counterparts.2 The viewer’s attention is directed by
Watson, the viewer’s cipher in this as in the original stories, to the door,
thus homing in on the location. Sherlock meanwhile looks everywhere
except at John and the house, taking in the whole street and every passer-
by. Visually and narratively, this shot weighs the two characters and their
relationship to Baker Street.
The imagery of Baker Street therefore weds character with location and
subsequently gives Sherlock and John identities entwined with their lit-
erary ancestors. Sherlock is an odd figure encountered in a mortuary and a
chemistry laboratory: we know him as Holmes because the title suggests as
much. But merging him with his address is as significant a moment as a few
minutes earlier in the episode when he and Dr John Watson first meet.
This moment in the program, only minutes into the first episode, provides
a visual link to Doyle’s original: “This was a lofty chamber, lined and
littered with countless bottles. Broad low tables were scattered about,
which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps with their
blue flickering flames” (Doyle 13). At this stage Sherlock onscreen follows
Doyle closely, albeit with modern equipment in the chemistry laboratory.
The scene travels upstairs with Sherlock opening a closed door to reveal
221B for the first time – the only time we see this door close in the whole
series. He opens the door into an apartment cluttered with all manner of
debris, prompting the following exchange between Sherlock and John:
JOHN: Well, this could be very nice. Very nice indeed.

SHERLOCK: Yes. Yes, I think so. My thoughts precisely.
(He looks around the flat happily.)
SHERLOCK: So I went straight ahead and moved in.
190 E. GARSIDE
JOHN (simultaneously): Soon as we get all this rubbish cleaned

out . . . Oh.
(He pauses, embarrassed, as he realizes what
Sherlock was saying.)
JOHN: So this is all . . .
SHERLOCK: Well, obviously I can, um, straighten things up
a bit.3
As the exchange occurs the camera takes in the flat, which is filled with a
ramshackle collection of furniture and cluttered with a wide variety of
items, from books to science equipment. As Sherlock says that he can
“straighten things up a bit,” he stabs a pile of mail with a penknife, a
canonical reference to Watson’s descriptions of their home in “The
Musgrave Ritual.”4 Establishing character through location, it becomes
apparent through their comments that Sherlock and John have different
attitudes toward the home space. John, used to army life and the sparse
apartment that we see him in at the start of the episode, takes a different
domestic view to Sherlock, who appears to collect and curate clutter that is
associated with his work. That John accepts the new type of space and that
Sherlock, sporadically at least, attempts to placate his flatmate with at least
a nod to keeping a more ordered household, is as indicative of their
developing relationship as it is of the narrative backdrop.5 Furthermore,
the objects we see around Sherlock and John’s flat have narrative signifi-
cance, constituting various references to the canon or, as the series pro-
gresses, hearkening back to previous episodes as objects related to former
cases take up space in their home.
The Baker Street backdrop therefore becomes a visual narrative refer-
encing the show’s Victorian origins, and elucidating the characters of both
John and Sherlock.
The shot takes in the room, its layout and its furniture, the combined
effect of which is to echo the Victorian original while allowing for mod-
ernization. The flat’s clutter, while serving to link the television series to
the Victorian stories, is also reflective of contemporary living: the viewer
sees John and Sherlock’s laptops and modern science equipment, for
example. In time the pair acquire a flat-screen television and CD player.
This reflects the twenty-first-century men that Sherlock and John exem-
plify. However, adapting these characters into men of their time arguably
serves to reinforce, rather than sever, Sherlock’s link with Doyle’s canon.
As Mark Gatiss says: “at the time, Sherlock wasn’t a period piece, he was a
modern man. So we [the creators of Sherlock] have done exactly the same
thing. Benedict [Cumberbatch is] playing a modern man who’s comple-
tely obsessed with his gadgets.” Sherlock as an adaptation thus supplements
its visual links to the Victorian stories on which the series is based with a
visual narrative that functions to modernize the story and, in doing so,
achieves an authentic link with the spirit of the canonical Sherlock Holmes
stories.
The use of location, both as a backdrop to the narrative and as a central
“character” within it, allows for this. 221B Baker Street functions as space
that is in some sense outside of time, as it houses both the Victorian
Holmes and Watson of the canon, and the contemporary Sherlock and
John, with all of their twenty-first-century gadgets. This location therefore
acts as a crucial nexus that unites these temporally disparate fictional
worlds. The Baker Street apartment is also where the pair meet the clients
that drive the narrative, and it is where Sherlock and John’s own domestic
story arc is grounded. One example of the Baker Street location function-
ing as the root of narrative is found in the introduction of Henry in “The
Hounds of Baskerville.” Later on, this chapter elucidates how this parti-
cular episode’s narrative is extensively tied to locations outside of London,
but the domestic Baker Street location still crucially sets this narrative up,
in its ongoing capacity as the locus for introducing Sherlock, John, and the
audience to the mysteries that clients bring to the detective.
When considering location in Sherlock, the deliberate adaptive choice to
update from the Victorian world to the contemporary (a manor house to a
military base in “The Hounds of Baskerville” for example) is significant,
both in terms of where scenes are filmed and where they are fictionally
located.6 The approach taken to modernizing the Baker Street location,
internally and externally, is microcosmic of the show’s attitude to the
adaptation of physical locations generally. Throughout, the imperative is
to hint at Doyle’s original stories and in so doing maintain the characters’
and stories’ integrity, while simultaneously situating the narrative in pre-
sent-day contexts by making use of locations with contemporary aesthetics.
Sherlock does not aim to faithfully replicate all of the canonical stories as
did the Granada series of the 1980s. Loosely based on a key Sherlock
Holmes story, each episode uses only fragments of that story, so “A
Scandal in Bohemia” becomes “A Scandal in Belgravia” and the infamous
Irene Adler is still protecting a photograph, albeit as a dominatrix protect-
ing compromising images of an altogether different nature. The other
episodes in the series take this same approach, loosely adhering to, while
192 E. GARSIDE
simultaneously modernizing, Doyle’s stories. For example, “The Hounds

of Baskerville” takes the iconic story of the same name and reimagines it in
a world of military experiments; and “The Reichenbach Fall” takes “The
Final Problem” and likewise adapts it to a contemporary context. Other
episodes, such as “The Blind Banker” and “The Great Game,” take more
of a compilation approach, each drawing on aspects from several Sherlock
Holmes stories. For instance, “The Great Game” uses elements of “The
Bruce-Partington Plans” and “The Five Orange Pips” while also drawing
on “The Final Problem.” This compilation effect serves as a game wherein
the show’s creators entice fans into spotting the various references to the
Doyle text present in the modern compilation. As Linda Hutcheon
explores in her work on adaptation, “We retell – and show again and
interact anew with stories over and over; in the process, they change with
each repetition, and yet they are recognisably the same” (177). This is the
process seen in adapting Sherlock into the present day. By compiling and
conflating Doyle’s stories, Sherlock stretches its ties to its canonical pro-
genitor and therefore has more room to develop enduring and iconic
characters or narratives in novel ways.
This approach allows for the modernization and exploration of the
Sherlock Holmes stories beyond the restrictions of Doyle’s text, but
maintaining the essence of the canonical stories remains a priority. In
“The Hounds of Baskerville” the country mansion of Baskerville Hall
becomes Baskerville Military Base, and it echoes the existing, name-
checked military location of Porton Down. Subtle nods to locations that
are outdated or redundant are peppered across the series for the enjoy-
ment of the attentive fan, or the amusement of the series creators and self-
confessed “fan-boys” Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. For example, John
Watson and Mike Stamford meet at the Criterion restaurant in Doyle’s
stories; in “A Study in Pink,” they drink from take-away cups marked
“Criterion.” Holmes’s wielding of a blood-soaked harpoon – after alleg-
edly harpooning a pig and then traveling on the tube – is a jokey allusion
to “The Black Peter.” This tapestry of visual references to the Holmes
canon builds up Sherlock in relation to Doyle’s creation in the minds of
fans, while the use of London as a shared backdrop supports this for fans
and non-fans alike. For example, the transport location of the tube plays a
pivotal role in the narrative at various points,7 but also functions as short-
hand for the contemporary world in which the adaptation is situated.
While canonical references proliferate throughout Sherlock, the show’s
use of location ensures that these references take contemporary – not
Victorian – form. In the case of the Criterion, which would be an outdated

type of restaurant for John and Stamford to take their lunch at, the more
plausible modern equivalent of the take-away coffee shop is used. In one
small adaptation to location, combined with an allusion to the original
story, modernization is integrated into the visual narrative of Sherlock.
Similarly, moving away from the horse and carriage transport that char-
acterized Doyle’s stories as well as Granada’s period-piece adaptation
(which even featured carriages heavily in the opening credits), Sherlock
and John’s transport in Sherlock is a combination of the tube and London’s
black cabs. Like their equine counterparts, these modes of transport serve
as shorthand for their time period and an indication of a London setting,
situating the characters as those of contemporary London, thereby pro-
viding an important part of Sherlock’s visual narrative.
London then becomes the tapestry into which Sherlock is woven. From
sweeping establishing shots in the opening credits where Piccadilly Circus,
the Thames, and the “Gherkin” skyscraper are visible, contemporary
London is firmly established. Across the episodes, vistas of London
segue between scenes; from sweeping aerial shots to taxi-eye views of the
streets, all highlighting the presence of the contemporary city in this
adaptation. These visuals reflect the passing references to London used
across Doyle’s texts, which include similar entrenchments of London as a
narrative backdrop. An example of this weaving of London into the back-
drop is seen in “The Resident Patient,” when Holmes invites Watson on
“a ramble through London,” following which Watson describes how “for
three hours we strolled together, watching the ever changing kaleidoscope
of life as it ebbs and flows through Fleet Street and The Strand” (388).
This excerpt exemplifies Doyle’s practice of establishing London as a
presence in the Sherlock Holmes stories, much like the sweeping camera
shots do in the television adaptation.
The sense of location is asserted, then, in Sherlock’s visual narrative.
Sherlock also incorporates key locations from London into the narrative
to cement this sense of place. These include the recognizable backdrop
of places like Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, which appear in
key scenes.8 These locations quickly replace the “gas lamp and smog”
imagery of previous onscreen incarnations of Holmes that Gatiss and
Moffat aspire to dissipate and supplant. The original stories, themselves
infused with images of London, give a living backdrop to Doyle’s
fictional creation. In the remainder of this chapter, two locations in
particular will be considered to illustrate how geography plays a
194 E. GARSIDE
substantial part in Sherlock’s endeavor to render a contemporary adap-

tation of the Holmes stories: Baskerville, from “The Hounds of
Baskerville,” and the replacement of the Reichenbach Falls with St
Bart’s Hospital in “The Reichenbach Fall.”
The use of the moors as a setting in Doyle’s classic novella The Hound of
the Baskervilles was described as “essential” by “The Hounds of
Baskerville” episode writer, Mark Gatiss.9 Although in this version the
narrative is drastically different from the original story, the physical land-
scape of the moors remains an integral element to the storytelling, and as
with the show’s contemporary London locations, has a role to play in
adapting Sherlock Holmes to the present day. In the episode, the moors
themselves are largely unchanged from the visual narrative provided by
Doyle. The windswept landscape and looming expanses of rock create the
moody, mysterious, and foreboding landscape that could be lifted directly
from the Victorian era. The episode actually plays with audience expecta-
tions via the juxtaposition of adhering to the visual identity of Doyle’s
narrative through the moors, while markedly altering the narrative that
plays out on these moors. Again, location is clearly a key component in this
dynamic.
As in the original The Hound of the Baskervilles, renamed “The Hounds
of Baskerville” here, Sherlock and John’s sleuthing is relocated from
London to the moors of Dartmoor. Doyle’s Baskerville Manor is replaced
by Baskerville Military Base, not unlike the real British military base
Porton Down.10 In the episode, Porton Down is name-checked, giving
informed viewers a contemporary frame of reference against which to
interpret Baskerville Military Base, which is a rumored site of secret
experiments. The military base is a gray industrial complex, filled with
ephemera of military life – Jeeps and other machinery litter the back-
ground of shots, while soldiers in camouflage, at times with weapons,
pass by. Internally, the base presents a stark laboratory environment; it is
bright white in contrast to the soft and dark hues of the moors, and it
therefore sets up a glaring juxtaposition between the synthetic and natural.
This juxtaposition also penetrates the episode thematically: as in Doyle’s
original, what appears to be a natural threat in the form of the hound turns
out to be a far more sinister, synthetic threat.
In this episode, the plot diverts from the original, driven by the impetus
to render a convincingly contemporary Sherlock Holmes – the idea of a
menacing hound loose on the moors seems unlikely to stir the modern,
urban detective. Changing Baskerville Manor into a military base is key in
providing Sherlock with an alluring mystery to unravel, one that is bound

up with a larger political conspiracy. The original plot would not stand up
to contemporary adaptation: the claim to a country estate fortune and the
alleged mystical dog would seem discordant with a purportedly contem-
porary narrative. However, Gatiss’s use of location in the form of the
military base, and the associated military conspiracy, makes the story
more plausible. The physical locations in this episode serve to convincingly
modernize the narrative in this way, but they are also important in atmo-
spherically recreating elements of Doyle’s nineteenth-century story. The
gloominess of the moors on screen, and a final showdown in the dark of a
forest, provide atmospheric allusions to the Victorian canon while the
military location, as noted, drives the story into a twenty-first-century
context.
Given the importance of London both to the character of Sherlock and
to the identity of the show, instances when the narrative is relocated
outside of London – such as it is in “The Hounds of Baskerville” – are
clearly noteworthy. In this case, the use of the original setting of the
Devonshire moors provides, as does the backdrop of London explored
above, a link to Doyle’s canon through location. In Sherlock, the moors
function in much the same way as in the original story, that is, to engender
mystery and intrigue: “Over the green squares of the fields and the low
curve of a wood there rose a jagged summit, dim and vague in the
distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream” (480). The visual
contrast between the natural landscape – itself at odds with the rest of
Sherlock with its urban settings – and the stark industrialism of the military
base are striking to the viewer. The location also functions as a narrative
device, taking the quintessentially urban Sherlock out of his natural habitat
and into the mysterious world of the moors. In London, with his mind-
map and intimate knowledge of the city, Sherlock is at home in every
respect; by inserting him into the harsh, hostile natural landscape of the
moors, the character is taken well and truly out of his depth. A crucial
function of the moors, which are reminiscent of Doyle’s sinister novella
and of the horror films that writer Gatiss also draws on, is to ensure that
the viewer, like Sherlock, is ill at ease due to location. Because it is the site
of the mystery that Sherlock investigates, and it is always at the fringes of
the character’s physical location, the moor remains prominent even when
not on screen. The sweeping establishing shots give the viewer a sense of
the moors’ vastness, and the darker shots of the opening scene imbue the
moors with a sense of danger and foreboding.
196 E. GARSIDE
The visual identity here is key: the rugged and often dark depictions of
the moor contrast with the brightly lit sterile laboratory or industrialized
exterior of Baskerville Military Base. In Doyle’s writing, the unknown
wilderness embodied by the moor provides a backdrop to fearful moments,
thereby fusing together the narrative and the location in which it unfolds. In
Sherlock, the atmospheric visuals retain this sense of fear, which is clearly
evoked when the darkness of the moors envelop Henry Knight and, later,
Sherlock and John as they search for the hound. This indicates that the
wilderness of the countryside retains its ominous edge in contemporary
contexts. Meanwhile, the military base hidden within the moors takes on
an additionally menacing characteristic – although contrasting aesthetically
with the moors, the base acts as the threatening creature that is lurking
within them; like Doyle’s old-fashioned “haunted” manor house in its harsh
rural setting. While the physical characteristics of the locations have been
modernized, their narrative functions remain the same.
Although the atmospheric moor is not a surprising location and plot
device, given that The Hound of the Baskervilles has penetrated popular
culture, juxtaposing this with the harsh sterile world of Baskerville Military
Base makes for an unexpected addition. Of course, it is actually within the
clinical, modern interior of the military base that the real horrors of the
moors are being created. Having already paid homage to the original
stories by drawing on the old mysterious world of the moors, Gatiss
proceeds to use the military base location to point out the horrors that
are kept away from the public in contemporary life. In this episode,
location allows for the adaptation of what Gatiss has called “the closest
thing Conan Doyle wrote to a horror story,” into a present-day horror,
where the final act of violence on the moors is instantiated by modern
military technology in the form of a landmine (Adams 133).
In modernizing The Hound of the Baskervilles, the canonical location of
the mysterious moors remains, although it is enhanced by the inclusion of
the Baskerville Military Base. In Doyle’s “The Final Problem,” the key
location is Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes meets
his untimely “death” at the hands of Moriarty. In Sherlock, this unlikely
location for a deadly rendezvous is done away with entirely, and the
encounter is relocated to the roof of St Bart’s Hospital in London.
In the original story Holmes and Watson travel to Switzerland to pursue
Moriarty when, en route to the falls, Watson is called back to the hotel to
attend to an apparent medical emergency that proves to be a false alarm. In
Sherlock, John is called away by a false report that Mrs. Hudson is ill. Both
cases leave the detective to face Moriarty alone. In the canon, Watson learns
of his friend’s apparent death via a note left at the falls. In Sherlock’s neatly
modernized echo of this in “The Reichenbach Fall,” Sherlock uses his
mobile phone to contact John from the rooftop and says “this phone call,
it’s my note. It’s what people do, don’t they, leave a note,” before jumping
off the roof. The mobile phone, a technology often used in Sherlock to
indicate the characters’ location in the present, replaces the pen and paper
used by Sherlock’s Victorian counterpart. The Victorian letter takes time,
and endures as a physical reminder of the detective’s death, whereas the
phone call is immediate and leaves no physical trace. However, the modes of
communication are the same in their dramatic effect: in Doyle’s Victorian
narrative, Watson is delayed in receiving the news of Holmes’s death and is
powerless to take action; and in the contemporary adaptation, although the
news is immediate, it leaves John equally powerless to intervene. By refer-
ring to his phone call as his note, Sherlock both evokes the original story
and draws attention to the ways in which that story has been altered by its
placement in a contemporary setting: unlike his Victorian counterpart, John
will not have a record of his friend’s “final” words, due to the modern mode
in which they were communicated.
St Bart’s as a location set piece serves many purposes in Sherlock. Firstly,
it allows for a simple modernization that diverts from, but alludes to, the
canon. If Sherlock is to maintain its relationship to the canon by having
Moriarty and Sherlock potentially fall to their deaths, for a present-day
Holmes the obvious logical location is a skyscraper’s roof. Although, given
the free rein Moffat and Gatiss take with the canon in other respects, there
may be more to the selection of St Bart’s than simply echoing the manner
of Holmes’s “death.” In the contemporary adaptation, Sherlock and John
meet for the first time at St Bart’s Hospital, and so locating their “final”
communication there adds a neat circularity to the narrative. A tidy parallel
to the original meeting place of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson in both
the canonical stories and in Sherlock, St Bart’s as a location for Sherlock’s
ostensible death offers both a poetic conclusion – in the fraught phone call
between the friends – and a modernization of the detective story.
By using the building and this particular set-up, the makers of Sherlock
have also been able to create the contemporary, urban equivalent of a
cliff-hanger, and provide viewers with a “Sherlockian” puzzle to solve.
Having seen Sherlock’s fall from the building and his apparent death, fans
spent the interval between series two and three speculating on how the
detective may have survived. In this postulating, familiarity with the St
198 E. GARSIDE
Bart’s location and knowledge of the building is extensively drawn on, and
this is encouraged by Moffat who asserts that there is a clue “everyone has
missed” (Jeffries). The familiar St Bart’s location has thus allowed the show’s
creators to shape and foster fans’ “Sherlockian” speculations. By filming the
hospital from certain angles, and making use of surrounding locations,
Moffat and Gatiss have been able to hide details of Sherlock’s survival that
they will subsequently reveal in season three, and this approach is much in
keeping with Sherlock’s use of onscreen clues which indicate to the viewer
how Sherlock solves puzzles. In this final puzzle piece, the creators of
Sherlock have twisted this, using the familiar contemporary location to
provide viewers with a puzzle of their own to work out between series.
The locations used in both “The Hounds of Baskerville” and “The
Reichenbach Fall” are integral to the modernization of Doyle’s original
stories in the adaptation Sherlock. By exploring in detail the use of contem-
porary locations, this chapter has revealed how significant such locations are
to the narrative and visual identity of Sherlock as a television drama. Sherlock,
the chapter has shown, draws on and adjusts the original settings within
Doyle’s canon, transposing those locations to a contemporary context. The
BBC adaptation therefore uses location to pull Doyle’s fictional creations
firmly into the present day. As Hutcheson notes, “[a]n adaptation is not
vampiric: it does not draw the life-blood from its source and leave it dying
or dead, nor is it paler than the adapted work” (76). Instead the BBC
adaptation Sherlock harnesses physical location to enable Doyle’s characters
to endure in contemporary fictional contexts.
NOTES
1. Three main texts deal with location and Holmes: Arthur Alexander’s Hot on
the Scent, Thomas Bruce Wheeler’s Finding Sherlock’s London, and Alistair
Duncan’s Close to Holmes.
2. The modern Sherlock and John have since been re-Victorianized in the
Sherlock episode “The Abominable Bride” (2016) which takes them back
to their original incarnations; creating a self-referencing and self-fulfilling
narrative, and narrative backdrop. When the modern Sherlock and John are
sent back to the Victorian age they are forced to reference the Victorian
elements that are usually referenced by their modern counterparts, in this
case as Victorian versions of themselves. The result is furthering the pastiche
of Holmesian and Victorian tropes that Sherlock had already crafted over
three series.
3. This transcription of “A Study in Pink” is my own.
4. In “The Musgrave Ritual” Watson describes Holmes as: “a man who keeps
his cigars in the coal scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper
and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very
centre of his wooden mantelpiece” (354).
5. The Granada series did its best to recreate the locations of the stories as
described. This involved a combination of studio recorded sets and some
location filming.
6. For seasons one to three and the special “The Abominable Bride” Sherlock
was filmed at the BBC’s Upper Boat Studios near Cardiff. From series four
the filming moved to the BBC’s newer Cardiff studios, Upper Boat being
decommissioned. BBC Wales shares filming space across three main shows:
Doctor Who, Casualty, and Sherlock, while also sharing space with Welsh
language broadcaster S4C and housing various shorter term productions.
Therefore, the filming soundstages operate on a rotational basis for these
three flagship shows, as do the real-life locations across Cardiff which are
subject to various local filming restrictions.
7. In “The Empty Hearse” there is a terrorist bomb on the tube line.
8. During “The Great Game” Sherlock and John walk across Trafalgar Square
en route to the National Gallery, and one of Moriarty’s victims is trapped in
the middle of Piccadilly Circus until Sherlock solves the cryptic clues.
9. See Sherlock series two DVD extras.
10. Porton Down Military Base is a government science park, near Salisbury,
Wiltshire. Occupying 7,000 acres and being surrounded by signs indicating
“Danger” both physically and on maps, it is the site of much intrigue and
speculation. Porton Down is believed to house a variety of top-secret
military projects which have been reported in the popular press, including
speculation from the Daily Mail that it was the site of research into alien
landings in Britain.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Guy. Sherlock: The Casebook. London: BBC Books, 2012.
Alexander, Arthur M. Hot on the Scent: A Visitor’s Guide to the London of Sherlock
Holmes. Ashcroft, BC: Calabash Press, 1999.
Ames, Nick. “Sherlock’s Survival Secret Already Filmed.” Kent News. KM Group,
June 27, 2012. Web. June 10, 2016.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Original Illustrated ‘STRAND’ Sherlock Holmes: The
Complete Facsimile Edition. London: Wordsworth Editions, 1989.
Duncan, Alistair. Close to Holmes. London: MX Publishing, 2009.
Gatiss, Mark. “Mark Gatiss Talks Who, Sherlock.” By Neil Wilkes and Nick Levine.
Digital Spy. Hearts Magazines UK, April 17, 2010. Web. June 10, 2016.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.
200 E. GARSIDE
Jeffries, Stuart. “‘There’s a Clue Everyone’s Missed’: Sherlock Writer Steven

Moffat Interviewed.” The Guardian. Guardian Media Group, January 20,
2012. Web. June 10, 2016.
Sélavy, Virginie. “Victorian London: A Painterly Vision of the City Divided.” In
World Film Locations: London. Ed. Neil Mitchell. Bristol: Intellect Books,
2011. 26–45.
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Granada Television Series. Writ. John
Hawkesworth. MPI Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.
Sherlock: “The Abominable Bride.” Writ. Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. BBC,
2016. DVD.
Wheeler, Thomas Bruce. Finding Sherlock’s London: Travel Guide to Over 200 Sites
in London. New York: Universe, Inc., 2004.
Emily Garside wrote her PhD on American AIDS theatre in Britain (Cardiff
Metropolitan University, 2015). Following an undergraduate degree in History
(Nottingham, 2004) and a Masters in Performance Studies (RADA, 2007) her
work combines historical reflection with performance studies. She is currently
working for the Creative Industries Research Institute at the University of South
Wales. Her research interests include HIV/AIDS in theatre/performance, Queer
Performance, The National Theatre and British musical theatre.
INDEX
Notes: Page numbers followed by “n” denotes notes.
A BBC Sherlock, 39–40

“The Abominable Bride”, 78, 105, “The Adventure of the Concert
198n2, 199n6 Pianist”, 62
Adler, Irene (Lara Pulver), 40, 43–45 “at my time of life”, 65–71
“The Adventure of the Concert contemporary version, 63
Pianist”, 61–63, 71–78 female clients; Doyle, Arthur
Alcoff, Linda Martín, 93 Conan, 40–42; Sherlock, 42–51
Anti-detective novel, 115–117 Hudson, 61
Jacobs, Peter, 126–129 issue of trivialization, 63
Lost Ground, 120–126 London, 4
“negative hermeneutics”, 117–120 McClellan’s study, 108
“At my time of life”, 65–71 professional women, 52–58
Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1
Bell, Joseph, 150
B Belsey, Catherine, 144n3
221B Baker Street, 4, 15, 29, 30, 42, Beyer, Charlotte, 3, 61–79
43, 45, 46, 50, 61, 65, 69, 76, 87, “Black Peter”, 87, 92
102, 136, 138, 139, 168, 177, Blackwell, Lady, 48
187–191 “The Blind Banker”, 42, 56
“The Baker Street babes”, 67–68 Bloody Guardsman, 47
Baker Street Irregulars, 1, 88, 92 Brook, Rich, 91
Barloon, Jim, 145n12 Brooks, Peter (Realist Vision),
Barthes, Roland (From Work 133, 136
to Text), 7, 9 “The Bruce-Partington Plans”, 26–28
Basil Rathbone films, 15 Busse, Kristina, 35n2

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3
202 INDEX
C scientific expertise, 174

Canby, Vincent (The New York Victorian imagination, 168, 170
Times), 135 Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial
Cannadine, David, 163n6 and Transnational World, 116
“Captain Basil”, 87, 88, 92 Digital Spy, 10–11
Cardwell, Sarah, 8–9 “The Doctors of Hoyland”, 59n11
“A Case of Identity”, 42, 46, Dolan, Josephine, 62
136–141, 144–145n6 Donovan, Sally, 40, 52–58
They Might Be Giants, 141–144 Dowling’s theory, 122
Charles, Alec, 83 Duffy, Lynn, 3, 101–112
“Charles Augustus Milverton”, 86, 90 Duncan, Alistair, 97n1
Collins, Wilkie (The Moonstone), 149
Cosplay and roleplay
“The Abominable Bride”, 105 E
adaptations, 111 Eco, Umberto (The Name of the
BBC’s Sherlock, 111–112 Rose), 119
On Conan Doyle, 103 Edinburgh International Television
fan communities, 109 Festival, 112
Holmes and Watson: A Miscellany, Effron, Malcah, 64
102–103 “The Empty Hearse”, 45, 49, 55, 57,
“Holmesian” tradition, 103 69–70, 89, 96, 111–112
Lamerich, Nicolle, 101 “The Empty House”, 86, 90
Memories and Adventures, 110
Oxford English Dictionary, 103, 106
Cranfield, Jonathan, 79n6 F
“The Creeping Man”, 29 Female characters
The Crime of the Congo, 180 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 40–42
“The Crooked Man”, 88 professional women, 52–58
“Cross-class masquerades”, 87 Sherlock, 42–51
Fiction of agency, 133–135
“A Case of Identity”, 136–141
D They Might Be Giants, 141–144
Dark investigator Film adaptations, 9
discern shades, 173 “The Final Problem”, 151, 164n18, 176
Franco-Prussian War, 177–178
Gothic image, 176
The Hound, 176 G
Jones, 181–182 Galton, Francis (English Men
myth of, 169, 182 of Science), 180
nineteenth-century, 168–171 A Game of Shadows, 88
phallic rapacity of science, 181 Games vs. fictional texts, 134
polyphiloprogenerative, 167 Garside, Emily, 4, 187–199
INDEX 203
Gatiss, Mark, 10–11, 15, 17, 24–25, “A Scandal in Belgravia”, 56

84, 112 Sherlock: “at my time of life”, 65–71
Genette, Gerard, 4n2 Una Stubbs, 42–43
Goldman, James (They Might Be Hunter, Violet (The Copper
Giants), 141–144, 144n5 Beeches), 41
“The Great Game”, 26–28, 35n8, 56, Hutcheon, Linda, 8
89, 192, 199n8 Huxley, T. H., 169
“The Greek Interpreter”, 17, 18
Green, Joseph, 2
Greenwood, James, 87
J
Gregson, Tobias, 28
Jacobs, Peter (Lost Ground), 126–129
Grylls, David, 4, 149–164
Jaffe, Audrey (The Man with the
Twisted Lip), 86, 92
H
Hartswood Studios, 11
Harvey, Anthony (They Might Be K
Giants), 135 Kaplan, Cora, 62
Hawkins, Janine (Yasmine Akram), 58 Kenny, Michael, 93
“The Hero with a Hundred Faces”, 85 Kerr, Douglas, 167–183
Heyns, Michiel (Lost Ground), Klinger, Leslie, 85
115–116, 120–126 Knepper, Wendy, 120
Hills, Matt, 35n4 Knox, Ronald, 145n15
“His Last Vow”, 12, 13, 17, 32, 39, Koven, Seth, 87
43, 47, 49, 55, 58, 59n10,
90–92, 96, 97n5
Hodgson, John A. (The Speckled L
Band), 145–146n17 Lamerich, Nicolle, 101
Holquist, Michael, 118 Lang, Fritz (Doctor Mabuse the
“Homeless network”, 92, 93 Gambler), 95
Hooper, Molly, 40, 52, 54–58 “The Lauriston Garden Mystery”, 28
“Horrific breakdown of Lavigne, Carlen, 40, 66
reason”, 115–130 Leitch, Thomas, 85
“The Hounds of Baskerville”, 17, 19, Lesage, Alain-René (Le Diable
21–23, 32, 35n6, 42, 149–164, boiteux), 136, 137, 145n7
175–176, 187, 191–192, Lessig, Lawrence, 84
194–196, 198 Lestrade, DI Greg, 25, 32, 42, 52–54,
Mrs. Hudson, 61–62, 77–78 64, 66, 92, 171, 172
Donovan, Sally, 40 Letamendi, Andrea M., 104
marginalization of ageing, 62–65 Longhurst, Derek, 59n6, 59n10
Maron (The Adventure of the Lost Ground, 116, 120–126
Concert Pianist), 71–76 Lycett, Andrew, 164n16
204 INDEX
M P
Magnussen, Charles Augustus, 48 Pearson, Nels, 116, 117
Marcus, Laura (Detection and Literary Peirce, C. S. (abduction), 173
Fiction), 118 Perkin, Harold (The Rise of
Marinaro, Francesca M., 84 Professional Society), 173
Maron, Margaret, 61–62, 79n22 Playfair, Justin (George C.
absence of Holmes, 73 Scott), 141–144
“The Adventure of the Concert Polasek, Ashley D., 84, 93, 94, 97
Pianist”, 71–78 Poore, Benjamin, 3, 83–98
Kirkus Reviews, 79n11 Porter, Lynnette, 68
narrative perspective and Postcolonial anti-detective
sisterhood, 75 novel, 115–117
Sherlock, 62–63 Jacobs, Peter, 126–129
Victorian period dimensions, 63 Lost Ground, 120–126
McClellan, Ann, 2, 7–36, 65 “negative hermeneutics”,
McGuigan, Paul, 29 117–120
Memories and Adventures, 179 The Private Life of Sherlock
Metropolitan Police, 42, 52 Holmes, 15
Miller, Jonny Lee (Elementary), 88,
94–95
MILVERTON, 12, 13 Q
The Misadventures of Sherlock Queen Elizabeth II, 43
Holmes, 2 Queen, Ellery, 2, 4n1
Mobile texts, 24–33
Moffat, Steven, 10, 11, 15, 17, 24–25,
84, 97n3, 110–111
R
Moriarty, Jim, 93, 95
Radio Times, 67
Morstan, Mary, 41, 42, 51
Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment),
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 150
121–122
The Mystery of Cloomber, 149–150
“The Reichenbach Fall”, 12, 14–15,
18, 20, 32, 34n1, 35n6, 43, 53,
N 54, 61, 67–69, 86, 91, 103, 112,
Naidu, Sam, 1–4, 115–130 176, 192, 194, 196–198
Navas, Eduardo, 84 “Reichenbach Hero”, 18
“Negative hermeneutics”, “Richard Brook”, 18
117–120, 123 Riley, Kitty, 95
Network metaphor, 9 Roberts, Castle (Holmes and Watson:
A Miscellany), 102–103
Roleplay, see Cosplay and roleplay
O Role-playing game (RPG), 106
O’Leary, James C., 78, 79n12 Rosenberg, Robin S., 104
Oxford English Dictionary, 7 Round the Red Lamp, 175
INDEX 205
S Siddiqi, Yumna, 117

Saler, Michael, 110 The Sign of Four, 39, 41, 51, 53,
“A Scandal in Belgravia”, 11, 15, 17–19, 168, 169
31, 32, 35n6, 43, 49, 56, 67, 191 “The Sign of Three”, 43, 46, 90
“A Scandal in Bohemia”, 43, 104 Singer, Marc, 116, 117
“Science of deduction”, 123, 124, 169 Smallwood, Lady (Lindsay
Sélavy, Virginie (World Film Locations: Duncan), 48, 49
London), 188 Smith, Violet (The Solitary
Sherlock Holmes, 1–4, 8, 10–12 Cyclist), 41
adaptation and appropriation, 8–10 SMS texts, 8, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 33
anti-detective novel, 115–117; Sourcing and fidelity, 10–17
Jacobs, Peter, 126–129; Lost Sparks, Tabitha, 40
Ground, 120–126; “negative “The Speckled Band”, 41, 151
hermeneutics”, 117–120 “The Speckled Blonde”, 17, 19
“at my time of life”, 65–71 Stam, Robert, 9
BBC’s Sherlock, 2, 3 The Stand Magazine, 15
citing the text, 17–24 Stein, Louisa Ellen, 35n2
disguise, 83–84; Stoker, Bram (Dracula), 95
adaptations, 88–93; Stoner, Helen, 41
canon, 84–88; integrity and Stott, Andrew, 85
anti-hero, 93–97; The Strand Magazine, 94, 138,
patriotism, 85 144n6
distinctive feature, 2 Strasberg, Lee, 105
female characters, 40–42 “Street Arabs”, 88
location, 187–188, 191; Baker “A Study in Pink”, 10, 12, 15, 17,
Street, 188–190; St 25, 26, 28–30, 36n12, 52, 57,
Bart, 197–198; Hound of the 89, 188
Baskervilles, 191–192, 194, A Study in Scarlet, 1, 28, 145n8, 150,
196; London, 193, 195; 183n3, 188
modernization and “The Sussex Vampire”, 168
exploration, 192; Porton Down Sutherland, Mary, 42
military base, 194–195,
199n10; “The Reichenbach
Fall”, 192, 194, 196–198; T
sense of, 193–194; Texts and adaptations, 7–8
Switzerland, 196–197 appropriation, 8–10
mobile texts, 24–33 citing role, 17–24
PBS in the U.S, 12–13 mobile texts, 24–33
role of science, 74 Sherlock (sourcing and fidelity),
sourcing and fidelity, 10–17 10–17
A Study in Scarlet, 1 Thomas, Kayley, 84
textual theory, 7–8 Thomas, Ronald R., 84–85
206 INDEX
Tincknell, Estella, 62 Watson, John, Dr., 34n1, 41, 55,

Title credits, 10 64–66, 69, 70, 72–77, 96, 102,
Turner, B., 39–59 109, 112, 161, 167, 169, 171
Tyndall, John (The Scientific Use 221B Baker Street, 69
of the Imagination), 173 “The Musgrave Ritual”, 199n4
Playfair, 141–143
The Sign of the Four, 168, 169
U “A Study in Pink”, 25
Ue, Tom, 79n6 A Study in Scarlet, 172
The Universal Sherlock Holmes, 2 Watson, Mary, 49, 51, 90
Watson, Mildred (Joanne
Woodward), 141–143
Watt, Ridgway, 2
V Weber, Max (charisma), 170
Valladon, Gabrielle, 15 Westminster Palace, destruction, 46
The Valley of Fear, 95 Wiggins, Bill, 92
Vertue, Sue, 11 Wilder, Billy, 15
Virginia City, 142 Windibank, James (A Case
of Identity), 86
Wirth, Uwe, 144n3
W The Woman in Green, 15
Wagner, Martin, 133–146 Women, professional, 52–58
Warnes, Chris, 120 Worsfold, Brian J., 63

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

“All that Matters is the Work”: Text and Adaptation in Sherlock 7

Clients Who Disappear and Colleagues Who Cannot Compete:

The Trickster, Remixed: Sherlock Holmes as Master of Disguise 83

Holmes and his Boswell in Cosplay and Roleplay 101

A “Horriﬁc Breakdown of Reason”: Holmes and the

Sherlock Holmes and the Fiction of Agency 133

The Savage Subtext of The Hound of the Baskervilles 149

Holmes into Challenger: The Dark Investigator 167

Modernizing Holmes: Location and Bringing Sherlock

Fig. 1 “Season One Credits (‘A Study in Pink’).” BBC, 2010.

Fig. 13 Press conference “wrong” (“A Study in Pink”).

This collection of essays provides an overview of the evolving cultural icon,

© The Author(s) 2017 1

critical approaches. As far back as 1944, Ellery Queen1 noted in the

Doyle’s nineteenth-century ﬁction. Then, in a chapter on gender politics in

Sam Naidu is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rhodes

© The Author(s) 2017 7

and between all different kinds of sources; it is the “text-between of another

ADAPTATION AND APPROPRIATION

Cardwell, and Robert Stam have reoriented the conversation toward

Film adaptations can be seen as a kind of multi-leveled negotiation of inter-

Stam’s focus on the “network” of “intertexts” is reminiscent of the

communicate in fragments through texts and tweets, which frequently

SHERLOCK’S SOURCING AND FIDELITY

series is credited as being created by Steve [Moffat] and myself. Obviously,

(“Unlocking Sherlock”; emphasis added). Steven Moffat argues that the

I remember Mark thinking, he [John Watson] wouldn’t write a journal now;

In a sense, Moffat seems to be arguing that updating Sherlock and appro-

CITING THE TEXT

name of “Richard Brook” is a play on the German translation of

“The Hounds of Baskerville,” in particular, puts signiﬁcant effort into

Fig. 10 Hound (“The Hounds of Baskerville”). BBC, 2012. Author’s screenshot

Fig. 11 H.O.U.N.D. (“The Hounds of Baskerville”). BBC, 2012. Author’s

introduced to the character of John Watson, season one’s premiere,

construct, one that is made up of a myriad of imaginings across the past

Fig. 16 Lauriston Gardens (“A Study in Pink”). BBC, 2010. Author’s

Fig. 18 If inconventient, come anyway (“A Study in Pink”). BBC, 2010.

Interestingly, when one looks at the following two seasons (which

original Doyle canon and other Sherlockian adaptations. Sherlock’s texts

particularly, how Sherlock’s creators incorporate various versions in their own

Kranz, David L. “Trying Harder: Probability, Objectivity, and Rationality in

Ann McClellan is Professor and English department chair at Plymouth State

© The Author(s) 2017 39

In this chapter I argue that when Sherlock is considered in the context of

FEMALE CLIENTS IN THE DOYLE CANON

Violet Smith, the client in “The Solitary Cyclist,” describes how a

develop an explanation for his deranged behavior (400–7) – she is also

FEMALE CLIENTS IN SHERLOCK

[a description Holmes ﬁnds in his index entry on Adler: 246] is “a

Sherlock by a female client: Lady Smallwood (Lindsay Duncan), the leader

although nursing is a profession that requires training and talent, that

PROFESSIONAL WOMEN IN SHERLOCK

Sherlock’s reputation is cleared by the following season’s ﬁrst episode,

Molly is quickly established as a proxy for the audience. Much as Donovan

of a spectrum threatens to ﬂatten them as characters: Molly’s undying

Benedick Turner is Associate Professor of English at St. Joseph’s College, New

INTRODUCTION: REIMAGINING MRS. HUDSON