by Bruce Wexler
Vincent Starrett, a leading American authority on Sherlock Holmes, is pictured here in 1914, working as a war correspondent in Mexico.
Famous Sherlock Holmes fan Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a member of the Baker Street Irregulars club of New York City.
The recreated drawing room at The Sherlock Holmes Museet located in Nykobing, Denmark.
Europe is also fertile ground for clubs and societies that celebrate the great detective. Olaf H. Maurer founded the 221B: Deutscher-Sherlock-Holmes-Club in 1995, while the Societe Sherlock Holmes de France is very active. The Italian club, Uno Studio in Holmes, honors the great detective’s 1891 visit to the country on his escape from Switzerland. Denmark has its Danish Baker Street Irregulars (founded in 1951), whose prospective members must submit a Sherlockian article to the club’s newsletter, Sherlockiana. Elsewhere in Scandinavia, Sweden has its Baskerville Hall Club, and Norway its Sherlock Holmes Society. Lisbon, Portugal is home to The Norah Creina Castaways, while Barcelona, Spain has its Circulo Holmes. Madrid is home to The Amateur Mendicant Society of that city. Unsurprisingly, Meiringen in Switzerland has an especially active Holmes Society, the appropriately named Reichenbach Irregulars. In the wider European community, Israel has the Sherlock Holmes Society of Jerusalem, The Ural Holmesian Society is based in the Russian Federation, the Czech Republic has the Ceska spolecnost Sherlocka Holmese, and the delightfully named Seventeen Steppes reside in Kyrgystan.
The Japanese show their fascination with everything English with a cult following of the great detective. There are over twenty-five active Sherlock Holmes societies in Japan. These include the Baritsu Society, the Gacho Club, the Japanese Cabinet, the Men with the Twisted Konjo, and the Tokyo Nonpareil Club. Asia is also home to Malaysia’s Common Loafers (founded in 1998), and the Sherlock Holmes Society of India, which is based in New Delhi. The world of cyberspace boasts the Hounds of the Internet.
The web is also home to a fantastic range of Sherlockiana, forming a worldwide community of Holmesians. It is extraordinary that a character suspended in such a specific time and place continues to have such a magnetic appeal to the web generation. It would be impossible to catalog the vast and fluid number of Sherlockian websites, but some of the best are The Baker Street Blog, A Study in Sherlock, HenryZecher.com’s Sherlock Holmes, and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London website.
The worldwide fascination for all things Holmesian has led to issues of Collier’s Magazine featuring Dorr Steele illustrations becoming valuable collectors’ items.
As well as these conventional channels of admiration for Sherlock, there are also some more unusual tribute groups.
The Mini-Tonga Scion Society of New York’s Baker Street Irregulars is dedicated to celebrating the ‘‘world of Sherlock Holmes in miniature.’’ The Society is named for Tonga, the tiny but deadly native of the Andaman Islands in The Sign of Four. Mini-Tonga members create room box versions of famous scenes from the Canon in doll-sized miniature. The sitting room at 221B is the group’s most popular subject. Their work is fantastically detailed and authentic, and some of these diminutive room sets have taken decades to complete. As Holmes himself said, ‘‘To a great mind, nothing is little.’’
By contrast, The Irregular Special Players are a group of English actors dedicated to celebrating Holmes’s work by performing specially devised cases at Murder Mystery Events. Another ‘‘living’’ memorial to the great man is the Silver Blaze Sweepstakes, an annual horserace run at Denmark’s Aalborg Race Track.
A fantastic range of collectibles and artefacts has also grown up around the Sherlock Holmes legend. For the philatelist, there is now a wide range of postal stamps to collect. This tradition began in 1972, when Nicaragua launched a series of twelve stamps, commemorating the world’s most famous detectives to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Interpol. Several other countries went on to honor Holmes on their postal stamps, including Britain, Canada, Bhutan, Guernsey, and San Marino. South Africa was the most recent country to do so, in 2000.
Over the years, a great deal of Holmesian memorabilia has been launched, and this has spanned every degree of good and bad taste. As well as the usual gifts and novelties; Holmes teddy bears, Holmes and Watson cruet sets, tea towels, teapots, puzzles, t-shirts, cufflinks, walking sticks, statues, busts, letter openers, fridge magnets, tobacco, pipes, and matches… there are some more unusual novelties including a charming syringe pen, a complete detective kit, and a Professor Moriarty toilet seat. Britain’s Traditional Games Company retails a Holmes chess set, which features the great man as the white king, as well as Watson, Moriarty, Mrs. Hudson, Colonel Moran, Irene Adler, and the Hound of the Baskervilles itself (who plays as a knight).
The Sherlock Holmes Journal is just one of a plethora of periodicals devoted to the great detective.
The British Royal Mail issued a set of five commemorative Holmes stamps. Each celebrates a different case.
But perhaps the most surprising legacy of Holmes’s personality cult is the massive volume of literature that has grown up around him. Legions of books, pamphlets, periodicals, Holmes Society publications, and a huge body of apocryphal fiction have all been published about the great man.
‘‘There, upon a shelf was the row of formidable scrapbooks and books of reference which many of our fellow-citizens would have been so glad to burn.’’
DR. WATSON, ‘‘THE EMPTY HOUSE’’
‘‘Never has so much been written by so many for so few.’’
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, SHERLOCKIAN
The Traditional Games Company’s handsome chess set is based on characters from the Holmes stories.
A set of twenty-seven cigarette cards from the 1930s. Each is based on a different Holmesian character.
A great tradition of scholarship has grown up around Holmes and Conan Doyle’s writing, which can trace its heritage back to Vincent Starrett’s 1933 title, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. While Starrett makes gives us a fascinating insight into Holmes’s subtle and fascinating world, he is careful to avoid the wild speculations in which other writers have indulged; such as Holmes and Watson have a homosexual relationship, or Holmes is really Jack the Ripper… Famous American Sherlockian, William Baring-Gould continued in Starrett’s footsteps with some of the most highly regarded books about Holmes, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, and the excellent fictional biography of the great man, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective. Rather than making wild speculations about the aspects of Holmes’s life that are not revealed by the Canon, Baring-Gould makes educated guesses strongly based on the facts as revealed by Conan Doyle. More recently, Ronald B. De Waal has launched a web version of his massive project, The Universal Sherlock Holmes (1994). The book is the third ‘‘volume’’ in a series of bibliographies documenting the intricate world of Holmes and Watson.
Less erudite, but equally fascinating is the wealth of Holmes fiction that has kept Conan Doyle’s characters alive, even after the author’s death. There were two early instigators of post-mortem Holmes pastiches. These were Arthur’s son and literary executor Adrian Conan Doyle (1910-1970), and the (extremely prolific) American writer August Derleth (1909-1971). Derleth had corresponded with Conan Doyle, asking if, seeing that Doyle had abandoned the character, he could take over the job as Holmes’s ‘‘biographer.’’ Conan Doyle politely declined, but Derleth was undeterred, and despite the fact that he had never been to London, he decided to write a series of ‘‘homages’’ to the great detective he so admired. His first Solar Pons title, In Re: Sherlock Holmes was published in 1945. However, whereas Solar Pons is obviously based on Sherlock, (he shares his lodgings at 7B Praed Street with his companion Dr. Lyndon Parker and their redoubtable housekeeper Mrs Johnson, and also has an elder, gifted, brother, Bancroft Pons), he is not actually Holmes, who also appears in Derleth’s novels. Ironically, like his senior fictional partner, Pons has also inspired fervent admiration, and his own groups of followers. The Prae
d Street Irregulars was formed in 1966, and a British branch was also spawned, the London Solar Pons Society. The Solar Pons Gazette began publication in 2006. When Derleth died, the Solar Pons ‘‘franchise’’ was taken over by Basil Copper. Between them, the two writers produced far more stories about their hero than Conan Doyle ever had about his.
The author’s prized copy of Vincent Starrett’s 1933 classic, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.
August Derleth, an admirer of Holmes, created his own detective, Solar Pons, as an homage.
Adrian Conan Doyle’s stories, on the other hand, continue with the characters bequeathed to him by his father, including Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade. Not only did he work at the very desk at which his father had sat to write the Sherlock Holmes stories, but his ‘‘Aventures’’ are strongly referenced to cases mentioned in his father’s original work. Between 1952 and 1953, Adrian wrote a further twelve Holmesian stories, some with the collaboration of John Dickson Carr (the famous American mystery writer). These were collected and published in 1954, as The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes.
One of the more bizarre suggestions made by Holmesian scholars is that the great detective was Jack the Ripper. As the sketches on this Police News chart show, the Ripper was thought to be of respectable appearance. Certainly, several professional men became suspects. If not a surgeon or lawyer, why not a consulting detective?
Adrian, Sir Arthur’s Conan Doyle’s son, wrote a further twelve stories based on the characters and plots bequeathed to him by his father.
Derleth and Doyle were the forerunners of an extensive literary tradition that has grown to include the work of over a hundred writers, and over seven hundred titles, with various degrees of creative success. Several serious and highly respected novelists have taken up the baton, including Isaac Asimov, Colin Dexter, Michael Hardwick, Stephen King, and Dorothy L. Sayers, while many aspiring writers have used Holmes as their inspiration.
If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, then Conan Doyle has certainly been heaped with adulation.
Sherlock Holmes’s Paraphernalia
Of all the characters in fiction, Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the most closely identified with his personal paraphernalia. Of these, the most famous items are his pipe, costume of deerstalker hat and Inverness cape, magnifying glass, revolver, and his beloved violin, the “Strad.”
Strangely, although these accoutrements are now inextricable from our modern image of Holmes, Conan Doyle does not mention any of them (apart from the violin and magnifying glass) in the specific forms in which we now recognize them. Although several of Holmes’s key possessions are briefly mentioned in the stories, their significance has been greatly aggrandized with the passage of time.
The Pipe
Holmes’s iconic pipe, for example, is simply described by Conan Doyle as an “old and oily clay pipe.” But through the many illustrations and interpretations of the Holmes character, the great detective’s pipe has gradually transformed into an elaborate, exaggeratedly curved monstrosity. This is not to detract from the importance of smoking to Holmes. In the stories, Watson describes him as being a slave to tobacco, which he uses as both a stimulant and an aid to concentration. In fact, Holmes uses tobacco in all its forms, including cigarettes and cigars (for which he keeps a cigar-case). But he obviously favors the reflective quality of pipe smoking. He often measures the obduracy of a problem in pipe-lengths (i.e. the length of time it takes to smoke a pipe), as in “it is quite a three pipe problem.” Watson remarks on Holmes often being shrouded in “thick blue cloud-wreathes” and notes with some asperity that the detective is a “self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.”
Sherlock Holmes’s pipe evolved from the simple old oily clay pipe of the stories into an elaborately curved calabash. This example is on show at The Sherlock Holmes Museum.
A box of traditional “windproof” matches of the type favored by pipe smokers.
A curved briarwood pipe made by Petersons of Dublin. It is likely that, like many pipe smokers, Holmes had several pipes.
It was actually the original Sherlockian actor, the American William Gillette, who introduced a magnificent calabash pipe to the character. A calabash is an ornately carved and deeply curved pipe, whose tobacco bowl is made from a hollowed out gourd. Gillette quite deliberately chose this particular style of pipe as a prop for his “Sherlock,” as it can be smoked “hands free.” Many later Sherlockian actors adopted it for the same reason.
Holmes’s hypodermic syringe, used for the self-administration of cocaine and morphine.
Holmes kept his tobacco in a Persian slipper hung on the mantelpiece at 221b.
Sherlock Holmes’s engraved silver cigarette case.
For his own pleasure, Holmes smoked Black Shag, which he acquired by the pound from his tobacconist, Bradley’s. Watson’s taste was for “Ship’s” tobacco, which was blended in the Netherlands, and was the favorite of many sailors. Holmes notes that his friend also smokes an Arcadia blend (which he recognizes by its distinctive ash), and is familiar to him from Watson’s bachelor days.
Interestingly, Holmes’s passion for tobacco led him to compose a published monograph about the forensic properties of the substance, Upon the Distinction Between Ashes of the Various Tobaccos. In this paper, Holmes minutely describes the properties of 140 different tobacco ashes. Presumably, he was obliged to smoke all 140 varieties, which he probably enjoyed.
Holmes’s “Costume”
Although the deerstalker has also become synonymous with the image of Holmes, it was actually Sidney Paget, not Conan Doyle, who introduced both the famous hat and distinctive “Inverness cape” to the character. In fact, in his first ever Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” Conan Doyle describes the young Holmes as wearing an “ulster,” a loose overcoat popular at the time. The deerstalker first appeared in a drawing created by Paget to illustrate “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” and did not appear again for another nine stories, until his classic illustration of Holmes and Watson in a railway carriage for “Silver Blaze.”
While Holmes is seen equipped with his iconic “ear-flapped traveling cap,” the drawing shows Watson wearing his trademark headwear as well, a rather less flamboyant bowler.
Although Conan Doyle mentioned neither the deerstalker nor the cape, the combination of these two items of apparel would have been quite a la mode for the out-of-town Victorian gentleman. Typically, the versatile deerstalker was worn for country pursuits. It was highly practical; the brims (front and back) provided protection from the sun, the earflaps kept out the cold, and the checkered twill fabric afforded a measure of camouflage. The Inverness cape was both warm and water resistant, making it ideal for the British climate. It is a sleeveless coat with a cape attached, often fashioned from Harris Tweed and produced in the Scottish Highlands. But a fastidious man like Sherlock Holmes (Watson reflects on his “quiet primness of dress”) would never have committed the faux pas of wearing this hearty country garb in town. Paget fully understood this and only ever showed Holmes wearing the cape and hat in rural settings. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, for example, Holmes wears a tweed suit and cloth cap, which he certainly would not sport in London. Watson describes Holmes’s town attire as consisting of a frock coat, ulster, and, at home, a dressing-gown (variously described as mouse-colored, blue, or purple), while his usual country wear consisted of a tweed suit worn with a “long gray traveling cloak [and] traveling cap.” His town headgear would have been a top hat or bowler.
Although Paget invented Holmes’s signature costume, it was William Gillette’s interpretation of the role that cemented the Sherlock image in the public imagination (on both sides of the Atlantic). In May 1899, the actor traveled to England, where he was met by Conan Doyle.
Holmes’s deerstalker first appeared in Paget’s illustration for “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.”
A silver pocket watch owned by the great detective, now on display at The Sherlock Holmes Museum.
/> A waterproof black cotton Inverness Cape. Originally worn by Highland regiments, the cape was particularly useful for bandsmen, such as drummers and pipers, as the sleeveless design allowed free movement of their arms, which meant that they could play their instruments even in severe weather. The capes are also manufactured in Harris Tweed for extra warmth.
Gillette greeted the author dressed as Holmes complete with hat, cape, pipe, and magnifying glass, with which he proceeded to examine the creator of the great detective. “Unquestionably an author,” announced Gillette. Conan Doyle roared with laughter and the pair formed a lifelong friendship.
Ironically, Holmes’s supposed “patronage” of the deerstalker and Inverness cape may well have extended the fashionable life of both items. Indeed, they continue to be worn today. The freedom that the sleeveless Inverness gives to the arms has made it particularly popular with bagpipers, and it is now worn over kilts as part of the traditional Highland dress.
A framed photograph of Sherlock Holmes from the Museum’s collection. Queen Victoria gave Holmes the emerald tiepin on the left in gratitude for “services rendered.”
Two personal items from Dr. Watson’s room at 221B, his doctor’s bag and bowler hat.
