The Perils of Sherlock Holmes

by Loren D. Estleman

  (On what became of the “bull pup” that he told Holmes he kept, we can only speculate, and various conjectures about colonial slang for “bad temper” and the existence somewhere of a bastard son seem both unsatisfying and actionable. It was refreshing, in 2009’s enormously successful film Sherlock Holmes, to find Jude Law’s Watson in possession of a full-grown English bulldog: The researchers did their homework.)

  We become aware also, counter to the Oliver Hardy image projected by Hollywood, that at this time Watson is “as thin as a lath and as brown as a nut,” and although by the time of the morally unsettling “Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” he will be described as “a middle-aged, strongly built man—square jaw, thick neck, a moustache,” this early picture certainly challenges the common conception.

  What emerges, then, be he lean and tan or broad and brawny, is a figure both distinctive and arresting, more Nick Carter than Sancho Panza, and strongly attracted to women, who in turn find him attractive. Holmes makes note in “The Resident Patient” of his friend’s “natural advantages” in that department, and in The Sign of Four Watson himself uncharacteristically boasts of “an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents”—driving subsequent scholars into frenzied debate over which was the third continent. He is often observed admiring a clean feminine profile or a trim ankle, and his memory for the details of a handsome female client’s dress rivals Holmes’s more practical one. But he is no callous swordsman and commits himself willingly to the chains of matrimony when the lovely Mary Morstan beckons in Four.

  Which brings us to the other extreme: that brand of canard, born of supposition and sexual frustration masquerading as scholarship, concerning Watson’s marriage(s). We hear first of his bereavement in “The Adventure of the Empty House”; then, in “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” dated nine years later, Holmes alludes querulously to his friend’s desertion of him for a wife. The obvious conclusion is that he remarried; but this is not sufficient for some trash pickers who have published learned treatises in distinguished periodicals attesting to a third, fourth, and even a fifth marriage, including one before the seminal events described in Scarlet. I relegate all this into the same bin with the speculations regarding Watson’s drinking habits because he mixed up a few dates and references in a forty-year chronicle and wonder that the man who applauded his friend Sherlock Holmes for his intention to horsewhip a cad in “A Case of Identity” has not come out of seclusion before this to defend his name before a magistrate.

  Considerable sanctimony has been employed as well in denigrating his skills as a doctor. This is based on the evidence of emergency first-aid procedures that were quite rightly presented in layman’s terms to avoid overloading the narrative with scientific jargon, and a reference in “The Red-Headed League” to a practice that was “never very absorbing.” To this we need only respond that he never lost a patient in our presence who was not already beyond the reach of medicine. “Do you imagine,” says Holmes, in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” “that I have no respect for your medical talents?” His ethics have been called into question for his readiness to abandon patients on the slightest notice and run off with Holmes on some new quest. Admittedly, the energetic veteran of the bloody Afghanistan campaign was too adventurous for the staid life of office hours and regular rounds. But Drs. Anstruther and Jackson were close by and ever eager to assume his practice while he was away.

  Watson was a swashbuckler. There is no use denying it, even if denial were necessary. He braved poisoned darts in The Sign of Four, dispatched the devil-dog to save Sir Henry’s life in The Hound of the Baskervilles, scaled a wall with the police hard on his heels in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” and at the time of “His Last Bow,” when he was well past sixty, offered his surgical skills to his country on the eve of World War I. (That they were accepted should lay to rest once and for all any questions about their merit.) Notwithstanding his friend’s mastery of boxing and fencing, and sitting-room marksmanship that would quicken the heart of an Annie Oakley, when a pistol was necessary it was Watson who carried it, at Holmes’s request. A modern-day police officer could do far worse in a partner, and often does.

  Mind, the man had faults. Along with the standard Victorian irritability and a tendency, displayed as early as Scarlet, to dismiss those things about which he knew nothing as “ineffable twaddle,” the most destructive of these seems to have been his gambling. He confesses ruefully to Holmes in “The Adventure of Schoscombe Old Place” that he has paid for his knowledge of racing with “about half my wound pension,” and in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” we learn that his checkbook is locked safely away in Holmes’s desk, a self-protective measure familiar to compulsive gamblers who recognize their weakness.

  “Eureka!” exclaim supporters of the many-times-wedded theory; a clue at last to the cause of the dissolution of his marriages. Yet it should be noted that in that same adventure he has resisted the urge to invest in the “sure thing” of South African securities, and that by “His Last Bow” he has sufficiently conquered his problem to engage in the rich man’s sport, in 1914, of driving an automobile.

  The daily double, perhaps. But at its worst, the lure of games of chance appears to be a placebo for his adventurous soul—a substitute in quieter times, like Holmes’s own darker habit, for the adrenaline rush of hansom-cab chases through Soho and midnight stakeouts in Dartmoor. The vice is less insidious than cocaine addiction; and let us not forget that if Holmes helped out Watson by withholding his funds, Watson succeeded single-handedly in weaning his friend away from the needle.

  And Watson grew. While Holmes the rheumatic beekeeper on the South Downs is not significantly less idiosyncratic than Holmes the young criminologist at Bart’s, Watson is not the same person when we leave him as when we made his acquaintance. The roommate who scores verbally off a more than usually truculent Holmes at the beginning of The Valley of Fear could or would not have done so as recently as “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist,” when a withering evaluation of his research efforts near Surrey renders the detective piqued and quarrelsome. Although several of Watson’s conclusions regarding the identity and character of Dr. Mortimer based upon his stick in Hound are erroneous, as many are correct: The invalided surgeon in Scarlet who threw down “The Book of Life” because he found deduction based on analysis unacceptable would not have been capable of that.

  Watson at the end of the Canon is a father confessor, tolerant of human frailty, and well aware of his limitations, while Holmes’s consistent refusal to acknowledge his own reduces him to an oddity, albeit a fascinating and brilliant one. Which man you will invite for dinner depends upon the personality and temperament of the other guests.

  From the outset a man who walked with kings—the late Bohemian monarch springs to mind—yet never lost the common touch—yellow-backed novels and the sea stories of William Clark Russell remained among his reading pleasures—Watson was the ballast upon whose reassuring weight Holmes came to rely more and more as the gaslight era drew to a close. That was the basis of the partnership from March 1881 to August 1914, and those who suggest homosexuality, as they have of every other famous male team from Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to Batman and Robin, either are ignorant of the largely masculine character of late nineteenth-century English society or are unable to accept Holmes’s notorious misogyny at face value.

  The stories without Watson, or in which he plays a minor role, are arid and disappointing, lack humanity, and embarrass one with Holmes’s unchained narcissism. They are self-conscious and help to propagate the disturbing rumour that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson never existed, and that they were the creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote about the Boer War and Professor Challenger, introduced the sport of skiing to Switzerland, and conducted seances with Houdini’s ghost. This is never the case when Holmes and Watson are in their proper places as detective and biographer, or even during H
olmes’s absences, as when Watson gets his chance to play the bully hero in chapters 6 through 11 of Hound.

  I prize that story above all the others, in part because of Watson’s free rein. Delivered from Holmes’s shadow, this visitor to Devonshire is gallant, fearless, impeccably well-mannered, and a strong shoulder for the troubled young baronet to lean upon, emotionally and physically. He’s the perfect houseguest. Were the situation reversed, and Holmes in residence sans Watson, the detective might find his bags packed and waiting for him in the entrance hall after three days, mystery or no.

  Above all, Watson has the virtue of self-effacement. He allows himself to appear less astute than the reader, rendering himself more approachable than the aloof and awesome Holmes, without sacrificing respect for his native intelligence. The thinness of this particular highwire is best appreciated when someone falls off—a frequent occurrence among those who have attempted to duplicate the stunt. Said the detective, sorely missing his friend’s assistance in “The Blanched Soldier”: “A confederate who foresees your conclusions and course of action is always dangerous, but one to whom each development comes as a perpetual surprise, and to whom the future is always a closed book, is indeed an ideal helpmate.”

  In recent years, the best and bravest companion any detective ever knew has fared better on the big and small screens. Two different takes on Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper, 1965’s A Study in Terror and 1979’s Murder by Decree, gave us Donald Huston and James Mason, respectively, and David Burke and Edward Hardwicke took turns balancing out Jeremy Brett’s nervous, arrogant Holmes in the Thames Television series of the 1980s. In 1976, Robert Duvall, one of the best actors of his generation, immersed himself in a stirring, sympathetic role opposite a manic Nicol Williamson in The Seven-Percent Solution. These were intelligent and sensitive characterisations, involving bouts of heroism and masculine charm, and any of them could have sustained a long and loyal relationship with the eccentric sleuth. But it took a new century and a new kind of moviemaking to give us Watsonians what we’d craved from the beginning.

  Critics who had obviously been reared on Nigel Bruce dismissed Jude Law as “too pretty” for the role, unaware that until “Charles Augustus Milverton,” one of the last entries in the series, when the character was well into middle age, he had never been described in detail. Certainly, internal evidence regarding his popularity with women suggest dash, personality, and a pleasing figure and countenance: a hunk, in postmodern terminology. And he is a man of action, a fit partner for Holmes the fencer, prizefighter, and practitioner of martial arts. When we first see Law in Sherlock Holmes, he is seated in a Black Maria in full gallop beside Lestrade, buzzing the cylinder of a loaded revolver in the Wild West tradition; within moments, he’s flattening henchmen with his fists and coolly swapping lead with killers. More than once he saves Holmes’s life, when he isn’t sniping at his friend’s annoying eccentricities. This is no overstuffed geezer, ducking his head and smiling cherubically at a condescending pat on the head from his master.

  Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows followed in 2011, with all the same counters in place (as well as the delicious wrestling match between Holmes and Professor Moriarty atop the boiling Reichenbach Falls, accompanied by whole snatches of narrative and dialogue taken straight from the Canon). Both films were huge commercial successes, and more are promised.

  This first big franchise of the third millennium was advertised, and accepted by reviewers, as a “reimagining” of the Canon, but there is nothing here that was not there from the beginning. Holmes and Watson were the predominant action heroes of the horse-and-buggy era. When they were discovered by Hollywood, the “buddy picture” was born.

  If there is a Valhalla for superhuman sleuths and their all-too-human compatriots, it will allow them freedom at night to leap aboard a hansom in the fog and provide them a cosy cluttered place by day to feast upon cold fowl, whiskies-and-soda, and tales from Watson’s storied tin box. If the detective should suffer overmuch from the artistic temperament, and his fellow-lodger should dwell overlong upon the fairness of a wrist or the timbre of a feminine voice, so much the better, for us and them. Literature never produced a relationship more symbiotic, nor a warmer and more timeless friendship.

  WAS SHERLOCK

  HOLMES THE

  SHADOW?

  (A TRIFLE)

  There is nothing so important as trifles.

  —Sherlock Holmes

  This essay represents my sole contribution to The Baker Street Journal, the late great publishing organ of the Baker Street Irregulars. Named after Holmes’s unofficial spy network of street urchins, the BSI is a national organization whose members meet in regional groups throughout America and at an annual banquet in New York City to discuss and celebrate the lives and adventures of Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson, and whose pleasant conceit is that the pair are historical figures, not creatures of fantasy. The piece appeared in the March 1982 number. It’s an affectionate takeoff on learned discourse in general, which is a hallmark of the BSI. It has not been in print in thirty years.

  While paging through Walter B. Gibson’s fascinating potpourri, The Shadow Scrapbook (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), which recounts the career of that dark avenger who for twenty-five years kept audiences glued to their radio sets to find out “what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” I was struck by the resemblance of The Shadow as depicted by various illustrators to another avenger whom we all know and admire.

  Between the black slouch hat and cloak was that same hawklike profile which, reproduced in wax and cast upon a drawn blind, caused Colonel Sebastian Moran to expend both a bullet and his freedom in the spring of the year 1894. Equally as prominent were the piercing gray eyes, bushy brows, and tightly pressed lips so suggestive of a red Indian. Sidney Paget, the man whose pen-and-ink drawings in The Strand magazine set the pace for all representations of Sherlock Holmes to follow, and Tom Lovell, whose artistic talents graced the pages of The Shadow magazine for many years, might have been working from the same model.

  I thought little of this at the time. Similarity of features is hardly conclusive evidence, and wasn’t The Shadow a fictional character created by Gibson writing under the pseudonym of Maxwell Grant, later to find greater fame through the media of radio and the screen?

  But hold. What was this item reproduced from the very first story, “The Living Shadow”?

  This is to certify that I have made careful

  examination of the manuscript… as set down by Mr.

  Maxwell Grant, my raconteur, and do find it a true

  Account of my activities upon that occasion. I have

  therefore arranged that Mr. Grant shall have exclusive

  privilege to such further of my exploits as may be

  considered of interest to the American public.

  The Shadow

  Who was The Shadow? In The Shadow Unmasks, he is said to have been famed aviator Kent Allard, lost and presumed dead when his plane went down over the Yucatan Peninsula years before, although Grant made the same claim about millionaire Lamont Cranston, only to reveal later that Cranston was just another of the many guises The Shadow assumed to continue his war on crime. Accepting The Shadow’s existence (for who can prove a negative?), it seems probable that the chronicler’s subject supplied him with equally false information regarding Allard in order to protect his own identity.

  Physical appearance having been dealt with, what are the other “handles” by which we may hope to grasp the secret?

  Wrote Gibson/Grant, in Otto Penzler’s The Great Detectives (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1978): “The most inimitable of The Shadow’s features was his laugh, which could be weird, eerie, chilling, ghostly, taunting, mocking, gibing, sinister, sardonic, trailing, fading, or triumphant.” In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson, writing of his hero, stated: “He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter.… I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.”

 
The Shadow was a master of disguise, with “the ability to assume new identities with chameleon rapidity.” This talent enabled him to counterfeit the appearance and actions not only of financiers Cranston and George Clarendon, but also of various denizens of the underworld, so well that he could infiltrate their ranks without suspicion. Holmes’s felicity in this area is legendary, as his “very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed.”

  In his youth, The Shadow journeyed to the Orient, where he acquired, among other things, “the power to cloud men’s minds.” Holmes spent most of his Reichenbach-induced hiatus in the East, where he amused himself “by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama.… passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum.” Later, Watson made mention of his friend’s “almost hypnotic power of soothing,” and confessed upon more than one occasion to a sensation of dullness in the presence of the great man’s brilliance.

  An expert shot with either hand, The Shadow displayed his marksmanship time after time against overwhelming odds with an automatic pistol in each hand. Certainly it would have been no feat for him to accomplish Holmes’s “patriotic V.R.” in bullet-pocks on the wall of the sitting-room at 221B.

  Returning to physical description, a contest held among The Shadow’s many fans during the 1930s, in which clues to the identity of the Knight of Darkness were passed over the airwaves, established him as tall and slender: two of Sherlock Holmes’s most striking physical characteristics.

  Despite his spare physique, the great detective possessed exceptional strength, which allowed him to perform such stunts as the straightening of the fireplace poker twisted by the villainous Dr. Roylott in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” Holmes’s “grasp of iron” is mentioned in “His Last Bow.” In The Living Shadow, would-be suicide Harry Vincent was saved from a plunge off a high bridge by “an iron grip” that lifted him back onto a solid footing “as though his body possessed no weight whatever.”