Sherlock Holmes and The Adventure of The Cold-Served Revenge

Afterword Holmes before the Battle

That Sherlock Holmes is probably the most famous literary character of all time (at least in English letters) is thanks in large part to the measured judgment of his chronicler Dr Watson and editor Arthur Conan Doyle[26]. After all, fate and insatiable curiosity ceaselessly compelled him to leave his beloved chemistry and violin - and the quietly burning fireplace in Baker Street - to pursue cases so wide-ranging, that prudence was necessary when publishing them. Not all of them were terrifying or devastating. Many were simply too intimate or their publication incompatible with the spirit of the age or the interests of the British Empire. Doyle knew that Watson could not yet publish them, despite the fact that he had recorded them. That they really happened is testified only by cursory mentions in several published cases.

The “good giant”, as the French nicknamed Doyle, generously gave his successors the opportunity to write what he had not yet had the chance to publish. In addition to the gaps in time between the various stories, which are being gradually filled in thanks to the unrelenting zeal of his “pupils”, the works contain exciting references to an entirely unknown world of other Holmes cases, which Watson, despite the clamour, in his devoted zeal simply had to record. An unexpected legacy of Watson’s manuscripts is therefore constantly being discovered in suitcases and boxes found in attics or bank safes. The wind of time has spread many of his stories throughout the world. The sheer number of stories makes one wonder when he found time for his medical practice. Let us leave the answer to the researchers, the men and women who love Sherlock Holmes.

Their approaches are of course very diverse. This is best seen in the anthologies of stories, such as the now nearly classic Murder, My Dear Watson: New Tales of Sherlock Holmes, Murder in Baker Street and The Ghosts in Baker Street by the trio of John Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Martin H. Greenberg. Indeed, in the foreword to the first of these we learn why the approach of some of the authors towards the Great Detective borders on the disrespectful and sometimes even the sacrilegious. I do not mean all of the parodies which appeared in Doyle’s lifetime (and which amused him greatly), but those stories in which Holmes is expropriated by the author for other purposes. Their raison d’être derives from Doyle’s capacity for measured judgment.

But he also knew how to make provisions, and so around 1899 he entrusted Holmes into the care of the most famous American actor and playwright of the day, William Gillette. With Doyle’s blessing Gillette used parts of various Sherlock Holmes stories to piece together an excellent melodrama, which became a Broadway hit and then a nationwide sensation. The play enjoyed similar success in England and after performances in London toured the British Isles and Europe. At one point while writing the script Gillette sent Doyle a telegram asking whether it would be all right if Holmes married. The author’s reply would give future writers of Holmes stories practically unlimited freedom: “You can marry him, kill him, whatever you wish.” Thus Gillette ended his play with a certain Alice Faulkner in Holmes’s arms. If today we do as we wish with the character of Sherlock Holmes, it is, with all due respect, Arthur Conan Doyle himself who is to blame.[27]

Although the original Holmes cases were often precisely set in a certain era or were at least classifiable[28], they nevertheless existed in a kind of timelessness without social weight, in the pleasant comfort of a politically indifferent jolly old England, despite Doyle’s well-known civic activism. Holmes’s only directly political engagement in His Last Bow (published in The Strand Magazine in September 1917) was a mere, albeit sincere, patriotic demonstration by its author. Doyle for good reasons wished his readers to believe in an ideal justice, a non-partisan Sherlock Holmes. As we said, he knew had to exercise measured judgment, and did not want to risk compromising his publishers or endangering his civic activities and reputation. Therefore his later stories often take place in the past, in the nostalgic atmosphere of an extended Victorian era. From today’s point of view, he wished himself, his readers and England peace in which to do their work.

From this point of view the most provocative Holmes adventures are not the new ones that deal with the figure of the Great Detective (such as David Stuart Davies in Double Game on Baker Street or Petr Macek in The Golem’s Shadow), but those that locate Holmes in the present day. Donald Thomas thus in his The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes and in Sherlock Holmes and the Running Noose had Holmes solve real criminal cases of that time. Imagine how exciting a portrayal of the sad trial of Oscar Wilde would be under the pen of Dr Watson! Perhaps one day such a text will be discovered. Or a confrontation between Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper, described more satisfactorily than by William S. Baring-Gould in Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A life of the world’s first consulting detective.

Of course, these are cases involving just historical individuals. In the book which you have just finished reading, Mackenzie Peterson has had the audacity to pit Holmes against a political movement. This is, at least to my knowledge, a fundamental breakthrough. Holmes, despite his reputed aloofness with regards to women (with the exception of Irene Adler) and to society generally, here comes up against the limits of his iron-like determination. He was not much impressed by Marx following a chance encounter with him in the British Museum Library in 1877, even though he acquainted the detective with the London group of Russian anarchists[29], but now Holmes could not avoid discussion of the accuracy or even the legitimacy of his actions in investigating the strange case.

Where did the trail, leading initially to the Reichenbach Falls, actually go? He marched to it with a purpose, towards a battle for life and death, knowing, however, that it would be a battle against one man. Now he stands against the interests of a socially deprived group, whose demands, he must admit, are just. Better our modern recognition that the suffragettes employed means on the borders of the law not only out of fanaticism, though they are sometimes comic and sometimes dangerous, but also from true desperation over the rigidity of society, and even more tragically, their position, as in their misery they were manipulated by the personal psychoses of one woman hell bent on revenge. Fortunately, however, this revenge was not properly chilled. The mind of Holmes’s charming counterpart flickered with the mad flame of entrepreneurial megalomania, and when she was swallowed by the waters of Loch Ness, the Great Detective could be congratulated for extinguishing, at least for a time, a much more frightening flame - the flame of war.