it had not made his personal acquaintance but would certainly call upon him if ever it needed a mystery investigated.
Even after it was well known that Holmes was a fictional creation, a curious phenomenon developed that has no other parallel in literature. It has become a good-humored convention for Holmes scholars to treat the stories as historical events and the protagonists as real figures. Conan Doyle is often referred to as the literary agent for Dr. John H. Watson. Several biographies have been written about Holmes, and the current residents of Baker Street still get mail addressed to him. In October 2002 the Royal Society of Chemistry in Britain awarded an Honorary Fellowship to Sherlock Holmes, its first fictional inductee, on the hundredth anniversary of his coming out of retirement to solve the case of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
In addition to his own characteristics, Holmes is popular for other reasons. The plots and the atmospheres of the stories deserve no small credit for creating the Holmes appeal. Conan Doyle’s skill in vividly describing London has made countless readers feel they know the city. The inclusion of so many accurate details from daily life in the city—from train stations and schedules, concert series, real-life performers, streets and buildings they passed every day—gave contemporaneous readers a sense they might be reading an account from the newspapers. The inclusion of many real historical characters strengthens the sense that we are reading a personal memoir. The stories were also initially popular because of the novelty of the scientific method used by Holmes in solving his mysteries, something we can’t help but take for granted now.
Holmes profits enormously by having his exploits narrated by an admirer. Nearly as well known but much less appreciated, the good Dr. Watson provides not only a contrast as the Everyman to Holmes’s Superman, he also perfectly embodies the British man in the street. Conan Doyle himself has often been thought the model for Holmes’s friend and chronicler. Like Watson, Conan Doyle was a doctor. Also like Watson, who we learn was a rugby player in his youth, Conan Doyle was an avid footballer. He was also a boxer, cricket player, and golfer. He was an all-round sportsman, and like other sportsmen, then and now, he had an uncomplicated attitude toward the world. Conan Doyle was like Watson in another way that’s scarcely believable except for the testimony of people who knew him. He was apparently as little likely to deduce something about you as Watson was. Hesketh Pearson reports a conversation Conan Doyle had with Hugh Kingsmill: “‘ Arnold Lunn is a son of Sir Henry Lunn, is he not?’ asked Conan Doyle. ‘Yes.’ ‘And you are a brother of Arnold Lunn?’ ‘Yes.’ (After a minute’s pause for reflection) ‘Then you also are a son of Sir Henry Lunn?’ ”Yes“‘ (Conan Doyle: His Life and Art, pp. 183-184). The obvious difference between Conan Doyle and Watson is that Watson did not have the capacity to invent a character like Sherlock Holmes. Generations of readers have been grateful that Arthur Conan Doyle did, and that he used that capacity to enrich our imaginations by creating a hero who reassures us that even the most baffling mysteries can be solved by reason, and who challenges us to use our powers of observation.
If you are reading these stories for the first time or renewing your acquaintance with them after decades of fond but faded memories, I urge you, as other editors of these stories have urged their readers before me, to proceed directly to the sitting room at 221B Baker Street, where you may test your detective powers against the Master’s. Come back to the following essay after you’ve finished. We’ll have much to talk about.
—Kyle Freeman
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II
When in 1893 Sherlock Holmes tumbled to his apparent death over the falls at Reichenbach in Switzerland, locked in the embrace of the sinister Professor Moriarty, readers all over the world were stunned and saddened. Letters poured in to Arthur Conan Doyle and to his publisher, the Strand Magazine, urging the revival of the beloved detective. Conan Doyle was adamant that he wouldn’t do it. “I couldn’t revive him if I would, at least not for years,” he wrote to a friend, “for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté-de-foiegras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day”