Who was the real-life Sherlock?
A well-researched look at the detective’s origins lacks drama, says Robert Eustace
Arthur and Sherlock by Michael Sims 256pp, Bloomsbury, £18.99, ebook £8.96
In November 1887, the publishers Ward Lock & Co ran an advert for that year’s edition of Beeton’s
Christmas Annual: “Just ready, in picture covers, one shilling… the leading feature of which is an original thrilling story entitled, ‘A Study in Scarlet’ by A Condon Doyle.”
Arthur Conan Doyle, whose struggling medical practice on the outskirts of Portsmouth left him idle enough to write, had been paid a desultory £25 for the copyright to that story, the privilege of seeing his name misspelt and a minimum of polite comment on his talents before “A Study in Scarlet” disappeared into obscurity. He reflected: “If the secret history of literature could be written, the benighted hopes and heart sickening disappointment… would be the saddest record ever penned.”
At the time, Conan Doyle’s hopes – temporarily dashed – extended little further than wishing for a degree of financial security. But the character of Sherlock Holmes, who had had his first outing in “A Study in Scarlet”, was by the end of the decade to become a sensation – and a torment to his creator. Arthur and Sherlock, a fearsomely detailed new book by the American Michael Sims, whose previous works include studies of Thoreau and EB White’s Charlotte’s
Web, leaves aside Sherlock Holmes’s eventual success and concentrates instead on the origins of this young
“consulting detective” with the “thin, hawk-like nose”, in height “rather over six feet and so excessively lean that he seemed taller”.
Holmes may be the most filmed human character of all time – only Dracula surpasses him in cumulative screen time – so it’s unsurprising that Sims’s subject is not a new one. As early as 1912, Ronald Knox published Studies in the Criticism
of Sherlock Holmes, and there is no great mystery to Conan Doyle’s sources and influences. Indeed, tempting as it might be to investigate the legendary detective’s origin in a fittingly Holmesian manner, the simplicity of the case better suits Conan Doyle’s other great creation, the swashbuckling Brigadier Gerard, who replaced Holmes as The Strand magazine’s serial, and had a more straightforward outlook: “You cannot see the lettuce and dressing without suspecting a salad.”
Conan Doyle’s charismatic medical professor at Edinburgh University, Dr Joseph Bell, was so clear a model for Holmes that Robert Louis Stevenson, a fellow student, wrote to Conan Doyle from his self-imposed exile in Samoa to ask if he was right to recognise “my old friend Joe Bell…” Stevenson went on, rather cattily, to describe Holmes’s adventures as precisely “the class of literature I like when I have the toothache”, but Conan Doyle wrote back to say that he was right in his supposition; that Holmes was, indeed, “a bastard between Joe Bell and [Edgar Allan] Poe’s Monsieur Dupin”. Monsieur Dupin, the hero of Poe’s
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, is often cited as the earliest literary “detective”, but as Conan Doyle himself put it: “no writer is absolutely original. He always joins at some point on to that old tree of which he is a branch”. Sims is keen to point out Dupin’s own fictional lineage, descending from Dumas’s d’Artagnan and Voltaire’s Zadig. (It could go all the way back to the biblical Daniel.) From Dupin comes Holmes’s almost aristocratic aloofness, his coldness and that hint of the bohemian, which escalated beyond morphine injections as the character developed.
From Bell, however, came Holmes’s most popular trait: his wonderful deductive reasoning. It was Bell’s favourite trick to diagnose from sight, asking patients about whom he knew nothing how their work at the linoleum factory was coming along, or telling them what town they were from before they had opened their mouths. His enraptured students thought him something of a magician, but the reality fell some way short of the almost superhuman Holmes. On one occasion, when Bell diagnosed an alcoholic by sight, his students were disappointed to learn that the clincher had been the large bottle of whisky emerging from the poor man’s pocket. Evidently charming, brilliant and modest, Bell wrote later in life: “Dr Conan Doyle has, by his imaginative genius, made a great deal out of very little… he owes much less than he thinks to yours truly.” Arthur and Sherlock is impressively researched, but it cannot find a drama worthy of Holmes in the tale of his creation. You sense Sims’s dissatisfaction with the prosaicness of it all: Conan Doyle’s two sea voyages, undertaken in a spirit of adventure, passed off largely without incident. (There’s more mileage in the intrepid doctor drinking the poison Gelsemium to record its effects – an experimental habit he would pass on to his detective.)
In the absence of revelatory material, Sims wears his research a little heavily. Extraneous colour has some value, but it’s surely superfluous to hear that the lighthouse on the Isle of May “had been warning shipmasters since 1816” and was “updated 20 years later with a refractor lens”. (To Sims’s credit, he never goes as far as one predecessor, who trawled through the census for the entirety of Southsea to find spurious attributions for the names of minor characters in “A Study in Scarlet”.)
Those with a real fondness for Sherlock Holmes will find much to enjoy. But it all sits uncomfortably alongside Holmes’s own injunction that “a man’s brain is like a little empty attic, and you stock it with such furniture as you choose… It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”