The Game Is Still Afoot

By Stefan Kanfer

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."

We may also set aside any notions of fine writing. Dr. Grimesby Roylott, villain of The Speckled Band, has "a large face, seared with a thousand wrinkles, burned yellow with the sun, and marked with every evil passion." Not one or two evil passions, not 20 or 30, but every one.

Nor is credible narrative Doyle's long suit. Consider the tragedy of Isadora Persano, "the well-known journalist and duellist who was found stark mad with a matchbox in front of him which contained a worm said to be unknown to science."

Holmes' ego is as large as metropolitan London: "I cannot agree," he likes to say, "with those who rank modesty among the virtues."

If we eliminate elegant prose, narrative subtlety, believable scenarios and a warm protagonist, what is left? For one thing, there are lines of dialogue that generations have read once and recalled forever: "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" Or this sequence: "Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time." "That was the curious incident."

Then there is the cast of characters: Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, the ferrety Inspector Lestrade, the families with ancient rituals so hypnotic that T.S. Eliot stole one wholesale for Murder in the Cathedral. The openings are yet another enticement. Who can resist reading about the governess hired on condition that she cut her long hair and wear a certain blue dress? Or the red-haired man paid to copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica in longhand? Or a spectral hound who appears after centuries, demanding the life of an innocent American? Holmes, of course, will find the solutions because he believes, with Architect Mies van der Rohe, that God is in the details. He will understand that RACHE scrawled in blood is a clue not that the killer's name is Rachel but that the word means "revenge" in German. He will be drawn to a case by noticing how deep the parsley has sunk into the butter. Watson will marvel at his deductions until Holmes shows why they are elementary.

And therein lies the key to longevity. The foe of Victorian malefactors does not rely on force or technology. He needs no Q to equip him with lethal gadgetry, no frantic car chases, no parish of adoring women. As Holmes insists, his conclusions are simply the result of work and cogitation. Watson could have reached them himself, if only he had looked a little closer and thought a little harder.

Doyle's genius was in creating a person not so different from ourselves -- then splitting him in half. One part is a fallible, well-meaning soul who works at a job, wages the battle of instincts vs. ethics and sometimes goes wrong. The other is the person we would aspire to be: morally correct, financially independent and underweight. One feels; the other knows. One is real; the other ideal. Many labels adhere to this classic combination: ego and superego, desire and conscience, Watson and Holmes.

P.G. Wodehouse remarks, "The tragedy of life is that your early heroes lose their glamor . . . with Doyle I don't have this feeling." All Sherlockians would agree. After all, they are looking at their own dreams. That is why the detective and the doctor can never go out of style. And why, in 2087, they will still be as quotable as the day they were born in 1887: "Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot!" And why they will still be the subjects of criticism and appreciation 100 years from now. For Holmes, every reference is a boost. As he wrote in The Adventure of the Six Napoleons: "The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it."