The truth is more unlikely than the tales. To beguile his off-hours, a young British physician invents a new kind of detective, a "thinking machine" who reconstructs a crime from minutiae much as a paleontologist builds a dinosaur from fossilized toes. The sleuth is accompanied by a general practitioner who respectfully annotates each case. Almost overnight the pair rise from obscurity to international renown. In an attempt to get on with "serious" works about history and spiritualism, the author decides to murder his invention by dropping him from a precipice. But the detective refuses to die. By public demand he is resurrected in new stories; in the end, he and his companion totally eclipse their creator. Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson, M.D., pass directly from popularity to immortality.
At a time when fame has the durability of a rock song and when real crime catches the eye and the heart, these eminent Victorians should be as obsolete as the hansom cab. Instead, they keep rising in stature and value. In this, the centenary year of their debut in Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887, Holmes and Watson will receive some 5,000 letters at 221B Baker Street, even though the place now houses the Abbey National Building Society. Groups on four continents regularly meet to study the canon (56 stories and four novels), as well as some 12,000 books about the sacred writings. The familiar lean figure with Inverness cape, deerstalker and underslung pipe regularly appears in the headlines. Speculating two weeks ago on who laid the mines plaguing U.S. convoys in the Persian Gulf, David Mellor, a British Foreign Office official mused, "Sherlock Holmes wouldn't take too long to resolve that one."
The world's first consulting detective remains a welcome figure in countless cartoons, advertisements and late-show reruns. He can currently be seen in a fresh, over-the-top interpretation by Jeremy Brett in a new PBS series. The well-stuffed Watson, for all the adventures, scarcely looks a day over 45. Not bad for a chap of 100-plus.
What keeps the two so fit? Certainly not romance. The doctor has an eye for the well-turned ankle ("Now, Watson, the fair sex is your department") but marries respectably. The lifelong bachelor Holmes has neither chick nor child. "Women are never to be entirely trusted," he believes, "not the best of them."
Steadiness may be a characteristic but not consistency: Watson's war wound, sustained in Afghanistan, wanders from shoulder to leg, depending on the plot. Holmes has a "catlike love of personal cleanliness," yet he keeps his "tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper," and unanswered letters "transfixed by a jerk-knife into the very center of his wooden mantelpiece."
In fact, the enduring affection of the public for Holmes and Watson appears to be quite a conundrum. But, as the master says in The Red-Headed League, "as a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be." Let us examine the evidence. We may eliminate any lobbying by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to win public esteem for his creations. He once confided to his mother, "I am in the middle of the last Holmes story, after which the gentleman vanishes, never to return. I am weary of his name."