The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

THE LITERARY WORK

A collection of l2 short stories set in England in the 1880s and earty 1890s; pyblished individually In London’s The Strand Magazine in 1691-92, and in book form in London in 1692.

SYNOPSIS

Using his unusual powers of deduction, detective Sherlock Holmes solves mysteries involving murder, blackmail theft and other crimes and misdeeds,

Events in History at the Time of the Stories

The Short Stories in Focus

For More Information

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where his father had moved from London after taking a job as a civil servant. In 1882, after studying medicine at Edinburgh University, he established a medical practice near the southern English city of Portsmouth. He had begun writing short stories to supplement his income while still a student, and he continued to do so while starting out as a doctor. Doyle’s first published novel, A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in the popular magazine Beetor’s Christmas Annual in 1887, introduced the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The story enjoyed only modest success in Britain, however, and Doyle continued work on what he considered more important projects, such as the historical novels Micah Clark (1889) and The White Company (1890). A second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four, appeared in 1890, but not until the 12 short stories later collected as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes did the fictional detective and his creator achieve sudden fame. Published in the new monthly magazine The Strand, the stories caused a literary sensation and contributed significantly to the magazine’s great success. Doyle himself went on to become one of the most successful writers of his age, ultimately producing over 30 books and 150 short stories, in addition to plays, poems, essays and pamphlets. While Holmes would ultimately feature in four novels and 56 short stories, it was the 12 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes stories that made him into one of the most popular and recognizable fictional characters of all time. Aside from catapulting him to fame, the stories reflect the anxieties of Doyle’s age as well as its optimistic faith in human reason.

Events in History at the Time of the Stories

Empire and anxiety in late Victorian Britain

The mid-Victorian period (c. 1851-1875) saw dramatic growth in almost every area of British life, from developments in science, technology and industry, to the consolidation of a worldwide British Empire. Although expansion continued in some areas during the late Victorian period (c. 1875-1901), it slowed or halted in others, particularly in agriculture and industry after the mid-1870s, when Britain suffered a major economic slump. London kept its place as the world’s banking and financial capital, and Britain remained the world’s leading power, but by the beginning of the 1890s a number of factors had combined to create an atmosphere of growing doubt and anxiety.

Britain scored vast new territorial acquisitions for the empire in Africa and Asia, but they were periodically offset in the public mind by severe and demoralizing defeats for the British imperial army. By the 1880s much of Africa (including South Africa and Egypt) had come under British colonial control, but British army expeditions had been either decimated or virtually wiped out at Isandhlwana (1879) in the Zulu War, at Ma-juba Mountain (1881) in the Anglo-Transvaal War, and at El Teb (1884) and Khartoum (1885) in the Sudanese War. In Asia the worst defeat came at the battle of Maiwand (1880) in Afghanistan, where the British sought to create a buffer zone that would protect British-ruled India (often called the jewel in the imperial crown) from Russian encroachment. The fictional Dr. Watson, Holmes’s friend and chronicler, is portrayed as having served in the imperial army and been badly wounded at Maiwand; his wound is mentioned several times in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. When the two initially meet in A Study in Scarlet, Holmes’s famous first line to Watson illustrates both his deductive powers and his knowledge of Victorian imperialism: “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive” (Doyle, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, p. 13).

The rise of other Western powers by the 1880s and 1890s, especially Germany and the United States, threatened Britain’s imperial and economic supremacy, also fueling British anxiety. The German Empire arose after Germany unified under Prussian leadership and won a decisive victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). Germany’s new colonies (in Africa and the Pacific Islands) supplied raw materials that promoted economic expansion, while her rapidly growing navy threatened the global naval superiority upon which British security traditionally rested. In one of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “The Engineer’s Thumb,” Germans are portrayed as sinister counterfeiters who kidnap and mutilate an English engineer. Germans would become more frequent villains in later Holmes stories, and as war between Britain and Germany grew imminent, Holmes would battle German spies.

The United States was also emerging as an economic and possibly an imperial rival to Britain. Inexpensive U.S. wheat flooded the British market, for example, contributing to the woes of British farmers from the 1870s. Anglo-U.S. cultural ties, however, made this rivalry a more ambivalent one than that with Germany. Reflecting that ambivalence, Holmes’s American adversary Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, is a ruthless opponent but an attractive one. America produces shadowy threats in many of Holmes’s cases. In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, for example, “The Five Orange Pips” features an American organization, the Ku Klux Klan, waging a secret terror campaign against a British family. Doyle, who himself had traveled in the American South, may have heard stories about the Ku Klux Klan and about how they threatened victims.

Like America, Australia was seen as a land of violence and opportunity. The British had gained this island-continent for their empire in the late eighteenth century. Until the 1830s they used it primarily as a penal colony, and the white population there consisted mostly of convicts sent over from Britain. Different British settlers began arriving in the 1830s, but it was the discovery of gold in the 1850s that brought prospectors and others flocking to Australia, creating a rough-and-ready frontier society similar to the American West. In the 1860s, thieves known as bushrangers held up and robbed a number of gold shipments; examples are the Eugowra Rocks Robbery (1862) and the Mudgee Mail Robbery (1863). Doyle based one of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” on these two incidents, which (like other such robberies) were well publicized in Britain.

Threats to social order

For the late Victorians, however, violence and the threat of violence was not restricted to foreign lands such as Germany, the United States, or Australia. It also originated closer to home. Victorian society was highly regimented, and (ideally, at least) each member of society was expected to know his or her place within the social order. Fundamentally different patterns of behavior were expected from men and women and from members of the three main social classes (upper-class aristocrats, middle-class professionals and other well-paid workers, and lower-class manual laborers). By the late Victorian period, however, these once rigid social distinctions were being successfully challenged.

For example, women were traditionally expected to defer to men of their class, and their ideal role was perceived to be that of a wife and mother. In charge of running the household, they ideally had little interaction with the outside world, which was seen as the province of men. People regarded women as naturally passive creatures who were ruled by their emotions, men as the energetic doers in society, practical and rational. Women were not allowed to vote, and their property and money were generally controlled by male relatives, usually their fathers or husbands.

By the middle of the century, the women’s suffrage movement had begun pressing for greater social freedom and political power for women. Acts of Parliament gave increasingly broad voting rights to women in 1869, 1870, 1880, and 1894, though the vote would not be extended to all women until 1918. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 gave married women control of their own earnings, while a similar act in 1882 gave them control of all other property, including inherited wealth. Unmarried women already had legal control of their own money, but social convention often dictated that real control be turned over to the father, as head of the family; similarly, social pressure often allowed husbands to exercise such control, even after 1882. Three of the 12 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes tales—that is, fully one quarter of the stories—hinge upon a father or stepfather wishing to prevent a young woman’s marriage in order to retain control of her independent income, which he exercises by virtue of his position as head of the family.

Other economic and social changes help comprise the stories’ more general background. At the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1831, the small upper class and the rapidly expanding middle class held virtually all political power. Stringent property qualifications prevented working-class men from voting. While the Reform Act of 1867 extended the vote to most male urban workers, and a similar act of 1884 did the same for male agricultural laborers, other issues—such as pay, hours, and working conditions—continued to cause strife between workers and employers. Also unemployment, which had escalated in the economic slump, remained high after the mid-1870s. The result was a series of unsettling protests and strikes in London in the late 1880s and early 1890s, supported by a growing socialist movement:

MASCULINE ANXIETIES

Critics have linked Holmes’s resonance with male readers to concerns about masculinity and manliness that arose in the turbulent 1880s and 18905. Many oí the stories deal with the question of what c&nstitytes appropriate male behavior, leading one critic to claim that the subject of the Adventures tales & masculinity (Kestner, p 81; emphasis original).

February 1886: Riots by the unemployed poor in London’s Trafalgar Square last several days and spread to other areas; panic spreads throughout the city.
November 1887: Further unrest is centered in Trafalgar Square; authorities respond with the infamous and violent police crackdown of Bloody Sunday on November 13, 1887.
1889: In the “Great London Dock Strike,” dock workers shut down the London waterfront.
1890: Police strike for higher wages and pensions (police had made similar demands in an 1872 strike).

Among other effects, such events undermined public confidence in the police as a force for order in society. Historians have suggested that the public associated such social agitation with crime, which in the 1880s loomed larger as a perceived threat to order than it had in earlier times. Faith in the police was furthermore shaken by the murder spree of the serial killer known to history as Jack the Ripper, who cut the throats of at least seven London prostitutes between August and November 1888. This still-unidentified killer terrified London residents and held the British public in thrall, sending taunting notes to the police, who seemed powerless. Public outcry over the failure to catch Jack the Ripper forced London’s police commissioner to resign. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes’s deductive prowess stands in stark contrast to the inefficiency of the police, who are represented primarily by the character of the slow and often bumbling Inspector Lestrade.

SCOTLAND YARD

Founded in 1829, at first the London Metro Police (called Scotland Yard after their location) were poorly trained and paid There was a police strike in 1872; then scandal rocked the organization’s Detective Department when three out of its four chief Inspectors were found guilty of corruption in 1878 In a reshuffle later that year, the Detective Department was reorganized as the Criminal Investigation Division (CMW, and in 1891, the year thai Doyle wrote the first Sherlock Holmes story, the London police moved to a site tailed New Scotland Yard, where they would remain until 1967,

The Short Stories in Focus

Plot summaries

The Sherlock Holmes that readers met in the short stories that appeared in The Strand Magazine differed in small but telling ways from the often antisocial hero of the earlier novels. In the very last sentence of The Sign of Four, for example, Holmes is pictured as reaching for his cocaine bottle, about to partake of the addiction that relieves him from the boredom of daily existence. In contrast with these early novels, Holmes’s cocaine habit is mentioned only once in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, at the beginning of the first story, “A Scandal in Bohemia.” And while Holmes is still clearly eccentric, the former characterization of him as an often brusque detective has changed. Holmes now smiles or laughs frequently and possesses an “easy courtesy” that makes his clients comfortable (Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, p. 32). Furthermore, while Holmes solved outlandish murders in the two early novels, his cases now tend to pose mysteries arising from more commonplace or whimsical situations (such as an attempt to return a lost hat and an abandoned Christmas goose to their owner in “The Blue Carbuncle”). In many of them, no actual crime is committed, though one may be threatened. Finally, in most of the stories Holmes and Watson no longer share rooms at 22IB Baker Street in London; Watson has moved out and married, and, as Holmes predicted at the end of The Sign of Four, he and Holmes have drifted apart. Yet Watson’s wife remains firmly in the background, and the reader only meets her briefly in two of the 12 adventures in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, many of which begin with Watson dropping by 22IB Baker Street to say hello to his friend.

A Scandal in Bohemia. The first story opens as Watson finds himself passing by 22IB Baker Street and is seized by a sudden urge to see how Holmes “is employing his extraordinary powers” (Sherlock Holmes, p. 6). Holmes has been engaged by the king of Bohemia, who is about to marry. He has employed Holmes because the king’s former mistress, an American opera singer named Irene Adler, possesses compromising letters that he wrote her along with a photograph of them together, which she threatens to use to cause a scandal and wreck the marriage. Disguising himself as an unemployed groom, Holmes manages to insinuate himself into Adler’s presence, and is even asked to be the official witness as she marries a man named Godfrey Norton. Using another disguise (this time as a clergyman), Holmes then infiltrates Adler’s house and discovers where she has hidden the documents.

The next morning Holmes and Watson accompany the king to Adler’s house, where Holmes expects to recover these documents. However, Holmes is startled to be told that Adler and Norton have left the country. She has, however, addressed a note to “My Dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” which relates how she had become suspicious of the clergyman and followed him to the detective’s famous address (Sherlock Holmes, p. 27). Now, happily married to “a better man” than the king (who, she says, “has cruelly wronged” her), she tells Holmes she no longer loves the king and will not bother him further (Sherlock Holmes, p. 28). She leaves behind the documents, along with the memory of “how the best plans of Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit” (Sherlock Holmes, p. 29).

A Case of Identity. A young woman named Mary Sutherland engages Holmes to locate her fiancè, a Mr. Hosmer Angel, who disappeared without a trace on their wedding day, minutes before the wedding was to take place. By comparing typewritten notes from Angel and Miss Sutherland’s stepfather, Mr. Windibank, Holmes proves that Windibank created the fictitious character of Hosmer Angel in order to retain control of his stepdaughter’s independent income, which the stepfather had access to while Miss Sutherland lived at home. Wearing a disguise, he had wooed his stepdaughter until she had fallen in love with him as Hosmer Angel. Then, just before his disappearance, in the character of Angel he had mysteriously asked her to wait for him whatever happened, claiming that if they were parted he would one day return. By abandoning her in that way, he counted on her love for Hosmer Angel to keep the hope of his return alive in her heart and thus to prevent her from ever marrying.

The Red-Headed League. Holmes is hired by Jabez Wilson, a redhead whose strange tale attracts Holmes’s interest. Wilson, who owns a small pawn shop, was hired by an organization calling itself the “League of Red-Headed Men.” The league purported to have been endowed by a redheaded American financier, who wished to support other redheads by paying them well to perform undemanding jobs. Accordingly, the league offered Wilson a good salary to come to its London office and copy the Encyclopedia Britannica by hand. Wilson left the pawnshop in the hands of his assistant, whom he had recently hired but who seemed responsible and capable. After performing the strange job for several weeks, he turned up one morning to find the office locked and a note saying that the league had been dissolved. The man who had hired him was nowhere to be found. Wilson had come straight to Sherlock Holmes that very morning in hopes of tracing the league and perhaps resuming his lucrative and undemanding job.

Holmes laughs at the tale, then tells Wilson that the case is “a most remarkable one” and that “graver issues may hang from it than might at first sight appear” (Sherlock Holmes, p. 60). Suspecting that the league was simply a ruse to remove Wilson from his pawnshop, Holmes establishes that the recently hired assistant is in fact the leader of a gang of bank robbers, who planned to tunnel from the pawnshop into the vaults of a bank across the street. The disbanding of the fictional league, he deduces, means that they are ready to strike. That night, when they attempt the robbery, Holmes, Watson, and the police are waiting in the vaults and the thieves are arrested.

The Boscombe Valley Mystery and The Five Orange Pips. These two stories are the only Adventures tales in which Holmes is called upon to solve a murder, and both murders turn out to be motivated by revenge. In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” Holmes and Watson travel to Boscombe Valley to investigate the murder of Charles McCarthy, for which McCarthy’s son James has been arrested. Holmes determines that the murderer is in fact an old associate of McCarthy’s, John Turner, who lives nearby. The two had known each other in Australia, where Turner had participated in the robbery of a gold convoy in which McCarthy had driven one of the wagons. Later, living off the proceeds in England under an assumed name, Turner had run into McCarthy on

THE MANY FACES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

A master of disguise, Sherlock Holmes is most recognizable peering through a magnifying glass, wearing his deerstalker hat and checked Inverness cape, clutching a curved calabash pipe in his teeth as he exclaims “Elementary, my dear Watson” In fact, of these famous Holmes trademarks only the magnifying glass appears in Doyle’s original stories. The deerstalker hat, cape, and pipe were added by illustrators, and while Holmes does say “elementary and refer to his friend as “my dear Watson” he never does both at the same time.

the street, and McCarthy had blackmailed him for years. Securing the innocent son’s release, Holmes agrees to let Turner go at the end of the story, saying that it is not up to him to judge the killer of a blackmailer.

The Five Orange Pips. In this tale, Holmes is engaged by John Openshaw, whose uncle and then father had both died, years apart, under similar mysterious circumstances: each had received in the mail an envelope containing five dried orange seeds (“pips” in British usage) shortly before his death and the letters K.K.K. written on a single piece of paper. The uncle, in his former years the owner of a plantation in the southern United States, had incurred the enmity of the Ku Klux Klan before returning to England. Holmes ultimately fails to protect his client from the long arm of the U.S. terror organization, and Openshaw is murdered.

The Man with the Twisted Lip. Holmes untangles the disappearance of Neville St. Clair, a London businessman. Though St. Glair’s body was never found, a deformed beggar named Hugh Boone had been apprehended with the businessman’s bloodstained clothes and arrested for murder. After examining the evidence, Holmes deduces that Boone and St. Clair are in fact the same man; St. Clair has been pursuing a career as a beggar in London, finding it more profitable than a respectable business career, to which he had only pretended to commit himself. He used theatrical make-up to give himself a deformed lip in his disguise as a beggar. Since no crime was committed, St. Clair beseeches Holmes and the police to keep his waywardness secret; they agree and St. Clair promises that Hugh Boone will never reappear. The implication is that St. Clair will resume his respectable Victorian life.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle. One Christmas morning, a man brings Holmes a hat and a Christmas goose that he has found on the street, hoping that Holmes can locate their rightful owner. The case takes a more serious turn when the finder, preparing to cook the unclaimed goose, discovers that it contains a famous gemstone (the “blue carbuncle”) stolen in a recent hotel robbery. Tracing the goose’s trail from wholesaler to retailer to customer, Holmes tracks down the thief, who had hidden the gem in the goose to elude detection.

The Adventure of the Speckled Band. A young woman named Helen Stoner comes to Holmes two years after her sister became engaged and then died in unexplained circumstances. The two young women lived in the country with their stepfather, a violent man named Roylott who served in the army in India and has a collection of exotic animals from there. Miss Stoner says she heard her sister scream in the middle of the night, then heard a low-pitched whistle. Her sister ran from her bedroom, gasping, “It was the band! The speckled band!” before she collapsed and died (Sherlock Holmes, p. 178). Miss Stoner, who now lives alone with Roylott, has just become engaged. Owing to work that Roylott ordered done on the house, she has moved into her sister’s old bedroom. The night before she heard the same low-pitched whistle, and so fears that the same fate awaits her as befell her sister.

Holmes and Watson travel to the house, where they foil Roylott’s attempt to murder Miss Stoner as he had her sister: by sending a poisonous Indian snake (the source of the whistle) into her room through a ventilator shaft and down a rope pull that hangs above the bed. Holmes, who has deduced the method by observing the room, drives the snake—which resembles a speckled band—back into Roylott’s room, where it kills him. The attempts on both sisters’ lives had been prompted when each of them had become engaged, threatening the debt-ridden Roylott’s control of their inheritances from their mother.

The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb. Dr. Watson is awoken early one morning by Mr. Victor Hatherley, an engineer who needs emergency treatment for an amputated thumb. When Hatherley tells Holmes how he lost his thumb, Holmes deduces that Hatherley has been unwittingly working for counterfeiters and, together with the police, goes to round up the gang. However, the criminals, who are headed by a “sinister German,” have escaped (Sherlock Holmes, p. 219).

The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor. Holmes is engaged by Lord Robert St. Simon, a British aristocrat who has recently married a young and wealthy American heiress, Miss Hatty Doran. Unhappily, Miss Doran disappeared shortly after the wedding and has not been seen since. Holmes’s investigation establishes that Miss Doran was in fact already married to an American who had been presumed dead but who suddenly appeared at her wedding to St. Simon. Holmes locates the couple and persuades the woman to explain her situation to an unforgiving St. Simon.

The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet. Holmes is asked to recover the fabled Beryl Coronet, a rare and historical piece of jewelry that has been stolen from the home of banker Alexander Holder. The police have arrested Holder’s son, but using footprints and other evidence Holmes establishes that Holder’s niece was manipulated by her crooked lover into acting as his accomplice in the theft.

The Adventure of the Copper Beeches. Holmes is engaged by Miss Violet Hunter, a resourceful and observant young woman who wonders whether she should accept a strange job offer. She has been offered unusually high pay to act as a governess at an estate called the Copper Beeches on the bizarre conditions that she cut her hair short, wear a blue dress, and, when asked, sit prominently in front of a large window in the house with her face turned away from the window.

Holmes and Watson journey to the country house when its owners, the Rucastles, are away. Holmes establishes that Rucastle, a widower who had remarried, had a daughter named Alice from his first marriage, to whom his deceased wife had left a substantial amount of money. While Alice was single, Rucastle could use her money, but then she became engaged to a local man named Fowler. If Alice married, Rucastle knew, her husband would expect to take over the money. Imprisoning his daughter in a locked room in the house, Rucastle had hired Miss Hunter to impersonate her, hoping to give the persistent Fowler the impression that Alice was no longer interested in him (so that he would stop courting her). Her father’s scheme is foiled, and Alice is freed. She marries Fowler, and Miss Hunter goes on to become the successful head of a private school.

Science, rationalism, and order

To many late Victorian middle-class men, the best hope for maintaining social order lay in the proper application of reason to society’s problems. Shaped by decades of scientific and technological progress, the middle-class male Victorian prized reason above all else as the key to improving the human condition. He furthermore viewed reason as a particularly male quality.

At the beginning of the first story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson describes Holmes as “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has ever seen” (Sherlock Holmes, p. 5). Holmes’s defining characteristic, his machine like use of reason, idealizes him by exaggerating the Victorian male ideal of rationality. Yet while Holmes’s reasoning abilities set him apart from society, those abilities also let him function as society’s protector in a way that the more conventional police cannot. They even justify his sometimes unconventional behavior, as when he lets John Turner, the murderer of a blackmailer, go free in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” Holmes’s superior intellect thus not only distinguishes him from other men—such as the middle-class male readership that made the stories a commercial success—but it also allows him to be both judge and jury in removing hidden threats to the Victorian social order. Critics have noted that these threats are posed not only by the criminal element in the stories, but also by a number of their male authority figures (such as aristocrats and fathers), whose greed has driven them to irrational or antisocial behavior.

For the late Victorians, a leading embodiment of reason was biologist Charles Darwin, whose work On the Origin of Species (1859; also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times) was the most important scientific publication of the nineteenth century. In it Darwin established the fact of biological evolution and proposed a theory, called natural selection, to explain how evolution occurs. To Darwin’s many followers, reason had evolved in humans alone and (in the language of the times) it alone separated “men” from “beasts.” Though controversial, Darwinism ultimately permeated late Victorian culture, offering a reassuring vision of human society in which evolution was taken as the equivalent of progress and was believed to have reached a pinnacle in human reason.

As a doctor and a man of science, Doyle stood squarely within this rationalist milieu. So do both of his leading characters: like Doyle, Watson is a doctor, and Doyle based many of Holmes’s mannerisms and techniques on those of his own former teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, a professor of medicine at Edinburgh University (to whom he dedicated The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes). Holmes mentions Darwin several times in stories other than those in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, in “The Five Orange Pips” he compares his deductive methods to a biologist’s, specifically to those of Darwin’s famous predecessor, French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832):

The ideal reasöner . would, when he has been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it, but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents, should be able accurately to state all the other ones, both before and after.
(Sherlock Holmes, p. 114)

Finally it is the pursuit of solutions through reason that matters most in these stories. Not always does Holmes solve a mystery or best an opponent (see Scandal in Bohemia and Five Orange Pips) but usually he does—through the use of reason.

Sources and literary context

While basing Holmes’s incisive rationality partly on that of his real-life teacher Dr. Joseph Bell, Doyle also had literary models for his detective. American author Edgar Allen Poe (1809-49) is credited with inventing the detective story, and his French hero, C. Auguste Dupin, clearly inspired Doyle’s portrayal of Holmes. Like Dupin, for example, Holmes frequently surprises and impresses bystanders with his prodigious feats of deduction. Poe’s Dupin appeared in three short stories published in the 1840s, best known of which is the first, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). The leisurely Dupin solved mysteries by reason alone—often from his armchair. A French writer, Emile Gaboriau (c. 1832-1873), enjoyed Poe’s stories so much that he created his own more active detective in the 1860s: Monsieur Lecoq, who as a policeman took a leading role in tracking down clues and criminals. Alternating between idleness at home and energy on the crime scene, Holmes combines both approaches.

A changing literary market also shaped the stories. Print media such as newspapers and magazines expanded rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s, developing new technologies, adopting fresh formats, and above all reaching new and larger audiences. In 1891 pioneer publisher George Newnes founded a monthly magazine called The Strand, after the London thoroughfare near its offices. While The Strand included brief sections for women and even children, its primary audience was men. Sold in city shops, bookstalls, and train stations, it was directed at middle-class urban workers such as clerks and businessmen—especially the new and growing class of businessmen who commuted by train between cities like London and their suburbs. Previous nineteenth-century magazines (for example Charles Dickens’s popular weekly Household Words) had generally been aimed at a family audience. In such journals fiction had taken the form of long novels, serialized in short installments that were designed to be read aloud to the family. This meant that one had to follow the entire series in order to fully enjoy a single issue of the journal. By contrast, The Strand—with its on-the-move male audience in mind—would specialize in short, action-packed stories that could be completely enjoyed on their own.

Note was made, however, of the fact that readers enjoyed developing familiarity with the characters in serials. Capitalizing on this pleasure, The Strand also pioneered the idea of a serial character who would return in story after story. Writing later, Doyle himself took credit for this new literary formula:

It had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine… . Clearly the ideal compromise was a character that carried through, and yet installments that were complete in themselves. . I believe I was the first to realize this and “The Strand Magazine” the first to put it into practice.
(Doyle, Memories and Adventures, p. 90)

Reception

With the publication of the 12 stories starting in July 1891, this marriage of character familiarity with self-contained installments of a series made Sherlock Holmes the most spectacularly successful serial character of all. The stories were collected and published by Newnes in 1892 in book form as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the collection garnered a positive critical response:

There is hardly any waste of time about subtle character-drawing, but incident succeeds incident with the most businesslike rapidity, and the unexpected always occurs with appropriate regularity. Of the dozen stories of which the book is made up, there is not one which does not contain a thorough-paced mystery … the reader is worked up to such a pitch of nervous excitement that he is ready for almost anything.
(The Athenaeum in Hall, pp. 215-216)

The Strand commissioned a second series of 12 stories in 1893, with Doyle—now worried that the famous detective would monopolize his literary output and reputation—killing Holmes off in the last one. However, public outcry over Holmes’s death was tremendous, and Doyle received many letters calling him a murderer. The Strand received more than 20,000 cancellations from subscribers upon Holmes’s death. People wore black armbands as a sign of public mourning; papers the world over reported Holmes’s demise as newsworthy. Indeed, Holmes felt so real to readers that Doyle constantly received letters asking Holmes to look into real-life mysteries.

Sherlock Holmes fan clubs still exist, and a number of books and articles have been written purporting to supply biographical details about Holmes and Watson. Bowing to popular pressure, Doyle produced another Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was serialized in The Strand beginning in 1901. Further stories and another novel, The Valley of Fear (1914) followed, with the last appearance of Sherlock Holmes taking place in 1927, a few years before Doyle’s death.

—Colin Wells