Why was Arthur Conan Doyle’s scientific detective so wildly beloved?
The former is the novel that introduced the scientific detective Holmes to the world. The latter is the one that came nearly a decade after Conan Doyle’s apparent killing off of Holmes. When “The Hound of the Baskervilles” came out, readers waited outside the offices of, where the novel appeared serially, and reportedly offered bribes for advance copies. But the Holmes we meet in the 1887 novel is notably different from the Holmes of the 1902 novel.
What characterizes Holmes in his earliest appearances? “A Study in Scarlet” begins with Watson, who, having returned from war service in Afghanistan, finds himself in London with “neither kith nor kin,” living on “eleven shillings and sixpence a day.” He is looking to rent a room. A friend mentions that he knows someone looking for a roommate: “A fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital.
Watson meets the potential roommate in a lab crowded with test tubes, bottles, and Bunsen burners. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” Holmes says, in one of his first lines of dialogue. Holmes’s powers of deduction make this scientific man seem magical. Also menacing. He is celebrating having developed a test that can detect even the faintest traces of blood. He asks Watson if he would be O.K.
When Conan Doyle came up with Sherlock Holmes, he modelled him in large part on Joseph Bell, a medical-school professor Doyle studied under, worked for, and greatly admired. Like Holmes, Bell used careful observation to make deductions about his patients and stressed how much could be known even before a patient spoke. “Cobbler, I see,” he would say, taking note of the worn spot on a patient’s trousers which corresponded with the lapstone a cobbler uses to stretch and hammer leather.
Doyle had been sending out stories before he created Holmes, but “they came back to me as straight and true as homing pigeons,” he said. Why was his scientific detective so wildly beloved? The literary scholar
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