Understanding IELTS: Reading

STEP 2.3 – EFFECTIVE READING

Sherlock Holmes, the world's most famous

literary detective
Why has Sherlock Holmes continued to captivate readers generation after
generation, while other fictional detectives of the Victorian period have been
forgotten? To investigate, Professor John Sutherland explores shilling shockers,
arch criminals, and forensic science.

‘Holmes takes my mind from better things’, Arthur Conan Doyle once complained. His mother
sternly objected.1 He did nothing better, she told him. Posterity has agreed with Mrs Doyle.
Sherlock Holmes is not merely the best thing the author did, but one of the best things any
author has done. The ‘unofficial consulting detective’, operating from his modest ‘digs’ at 221B
Baker Street, where the detective resides, Mrs Hudson, his dragonish landlady, keeps house,
and Dr Watson lodges, has joined that select of literary characters whose fame has soared
beyond literature – along with Hamlet, Don Quixote, Samuel Pickwick, Svengali, and Harry
Potter.

The Holmes enterprise began modestly with A Study in Scarlet, for which its impoverished
author, then a struggling physician, received the measly sum of £25. Now ‘Sherlock’ is a
television and film franchise, generating millions world-wide.

How did it happen? Why has Holmes continued to captivate generation after generation when
other fictional detectives of the Victorian period are forgotten? One can break the answers
down into a mix of elements. But first it will be useful to summarize the life of Holmes’s creator:

Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859, one of nine children of an alcoholic Irish artist who
was consigned, in later life, to a lunatic asylum. Young Arthur Doyle was educated at the
fee-paying Jesuit college, Stonyhurst. At 16 he spent a year in Austria before enrolling at
Edinburgh University’s medical school. In 1880 he spent seven months in the Arctic as ship’s
doctor on a whaler. The following year he graduated with a respectable degree, and made
another trip to Africa before setting up, less adventurously, in medical practice near
Portsmouth, in July 1882. His income had reached £300 a year by 1885, enabling him to

1
Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. John A.Hodgson (London: Macmillan,
1994), p. 10.

© British Council 2019

marry the sister of one of his patients. Doyle had long written on the side and in 1886 he
played around with stories centred on an ‘amateur private detective’, called ‘J. Sherrinford
Holmes’. The outcome was the Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887). No top
Drawer publisher would take it and it was eventually serialized as a Christmas giveaway in
a magazine and then as what was called a ‘shilling shocker’ – pulp fiction for the masses.

This mystery of double murder in Utah and London caught the public taste, and Doyle
followed it up with another Holmes adventure, The Sign of Four (1890). It too was well
received, but the Holmes mania took off early in 1891 when Doyle submitted six short
stories to the Strand Magazine. The editor realised ‘that here was the greatest short story
writer since Edgar Allan Poe’. These Sherlock Holmes stories were devised to correct ‘the
great defect’ in current detective fiction – lack of logic. The Strand Stories were illustrated
by the equally brilliant Sidney Paget, who supplied the detective with his trademark
deerstalker and aquiline profile.

Doyle’s heart was never really in detective fiction. Nevertheless the stories were
phenomenally popular in Britain and America and overshadowed everything else Doyle
would ever write. In 1893, he killed the detective at the Reichenbach Falls. The Strand
Magazine lost 20,000 subscribers overnight. There were protests from high places.

Much as he came to hate him, Holmes made Doyle rich, and by the end of the century he
was one of the wealthiest of British men of letters.

The growth of detective fiction

Detective Fiction evolved into a bestselling ‘genre’ in the 19th century. The establishment
of criminal investigation departments – such as the London CID (1878) – were historical
preconditions. So too were the pioneer short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, most famously the
‘locked room’ classic, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), centred on the detective
Auguste Dupin who, like Holmes, cracks cases entirely by ‘ratiocination’. It is immortalized
as Holmes’s iron rule, enunciated (twice) in The Sign of Four. ‘How often have I said to you
that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must
be the truth?’ Another pioneer, influential on Doyle, was the French author, Emile Gaboriau
(1832–1873), and his series hero, M. Lecoq.

The market for cheap fiction

As important was the growth of a mass market, ravenous for cheap fiction, stimulated in
Britain by the 1870 ‘Universal Education’ act. This created, by the time Holmes came on
the scene, a young, educated readership with little cash. It is significant that Doyle’s first
Holmes story was a ‘shilling shocker’ (5 modern pence) and the Strand Magazine, where
Holmes was sensationally popularized, sold for sixpence (2.5 modern pence). Holmes was
an affordable luxury – even for the impecunious teen-ager.

© British Council 2019

 Understanding IELTS: Reading

Doyle introduced a number of brilliant innovations into the genre. Taken as a whole, the
Novels celebrate (like the cricket Doyle loved) the British cult of ‘amateurism’. Holmes is
brilliant, but he has no profession and – although cleverer, we are informed, than his
professors – never troubled to finish his medical degree.

He is, as is proclaimed in A Study in Scarlet (Ch. 1), an ‘unofficial private detective’. This
places him in a different category from the Scotland Yard detective, first introduced
by Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket, in Bleak House (1852). Private detectives were
enlarged massively, as a profession, by the 1857 divorce (‘Matrimonial Causes’) Act. But
Holmes is a ‘gentlemanly’ sleuth. Not for him any key-hole peeping on adulterous
delinquency (then, as now, key evidence in divorce cases). ‘Not cricket’. His upper class
chivalry and ‘English’ decency are hallmarks. In the one love affair we know Holmes to have
had, that with (criminal) Irene Adler, in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891), he behaves with
impeccable, truly English, gallantry.

Idiot friends, arch criminals and forensic science

Doyle introduced three devices into detective fiction narrative which have become major
conventions in the genre. One is the so-called ‘idiot friend’, who must have everything
explained to him (thus informing, as well, the idiot reader). Dr Watson, of course, is such a
companion in the Holmes stories. And the good doctor is close kin to such figures as Major
Hastings, Poirot’s ‘idiot friend’, in Agatha Christie’s detective stories, and many others.

Another of Doyle’s innovations was the arch criminal, or ‘Napoleon of Crime’,2 who is far
too clever for the clod-hopping, uniformed, agents of law and order (‘flatfoots’), such as
Inspector Lestrade. In the Holmes stories the arch-criminal is ‘Professor’ Moriarty.

He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal
Mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial
theorem which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it, he won the mathematical
chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career
before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal
strain ran in his blood ... He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half
that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city ...
(‘The Final Problem’ (1893)).

2
The term ‘Napoleon of Crime’ was first applied to Count Fosco (a brilliant scientist), by Wilkie Collins, in The Woman
in White (1860). It is a rich line of characterisation culminating in Hannibal Lector.

© British Council 2019

The third innovation is ‘forensic science’ as a means of cracking cases. We first encounter
Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet (Ch. 1) investigating the properties of haemoglobin in his
Baker Street laboratory. He exclaims it to be (to a sceptical Watson):

‘It is the most practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don’t you see that it gives us an
infallible test for blood stains?’

In his second Holmes work, The Sign of Four, finger-prints are similarly introduced, as
essentials in the detective’s tool-kit.

Improbabilities and illogicalities

As has been said, Doyle did not rate detective fiction highly as a literary category. He felt
his densely researched historical fiction was what posterity would most value. He was
mistaken. But following his sense of what mattered most and least, he took a little care in
writing his Holmes stories. Thoughtful readers will detect any number of improbabilities,
illogicalities and at times sheer absurdities.

In one of the most loved, and filmed, of the adventures, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902),
For example, an aristocrat is frightened to death by a ‘demon dog’ which turns out to be a
mongrel bought from a dealer in the Fulham Road. The luckless beast’s eyes are daubed, to
create the necessary blood chilling luminosity, with phosphorescent paint (not, any dog lover
will testify, an easy operation). And what criminal, with the quicksands of Grimpen Mire handy,
would bother with such an unnecessarily elaborate modus operandi?

Doyle’s personal favourite among his Holmes stories was ‘The Speckled Band’. A locked room
mystery, its plot revolves around a trained snake (an Indian swamp adder – no such species exists)
which can, on order by a whistle, descend and ascend a servant bell rope in the room (a
physiological impossibility for snakes who rarely take orders). Error hunters have an easy time with
the Holmes stories.

They do not, time and popularity have proved, matter. Most readers, still millions strong, have no
difficulty at all in swallowing the flaws in probability, chronology, and detail in the 56 Holmes stories.
They are so much fun.

Used under Creative Commons Licence. Original article from The British Library:
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/arthur-conan-doyle-the-creator-of-sherlock-holmes-
the-worlds-most-famous-literary-detective

© British Council 2019