A Study in Scarlet

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

Now that I’ve covered some of the high points of our faithful chronicler, let’s move on to the star of our tour, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, soon to be of 221B Baker Street.

Much like how many people assume that Watson is an idiot, many also assume that Holmes is some kind of super-genius that knows everything. To be fair to both perspectives, those characters are often written that way in a variety of pastiches (and, to an extent, even by Doyle himself), but it’s still not entirely true. Once Watson and Holmes are settled into 221B, Watson becomes obsessed with Holmes¹ and writes a list of what Holmes does and doesn’t know, as well as what he can do and cannot do. Many points of this list turn out to be completely wrong,² but there are some key points that will resonate throughout the canon.

In fact, this list leads to one of my favorite scenes in the novel, the “brain-attic” speech where Holmes explains that knowledge of how the Earth rotates around the sun is completely irrelevant to him, and how he will try to forget it as soon as possible. I loved this scene as a kid because the idea of learning only what you need to know and nothing else made sense to me (although that logic drove my teachers mad), but as an adult I love it because it shows how Holmes is so quick to impress his new friend that he ends up taking perfectly sound theories and going just a little too far with them. I have gone back and forth, for example, on how much knowledge of art and going to the theater really related to the science of deduction – on the one hand, art does inspire crime, and Holmes has certainly used disguise and stagecraft to help him in his investigations, but on the other hand his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music of the time seems out of place with his own “brain-attic” theory. With careful reading, it’s clear that Holmes has developed a series of quotable maxims for his newly-developing science,³ but he isn’t as perfect of a practitioner of them as he thinks his is, or perhaps as much as he wants to be. It’s one of the things that make him such a fascinating character.

Let’s look back at Watson’s list, so I can touch on another ranty point about Holmes. One of the biggest criticisms I’ve heard about Robert Downey Jr’s version of Holmes in the 2009 movie was that Holmes wasn’t a fighter. That’s simply not true – Watson clearly lists Holmes as being an “expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman,” and this is not the first time it comes up in the canon. Granted, Watson is handier with a gun than Holmes is, but Holmes is by no means a shrinking violet or a sickly man living only in his mind – he is a formidable combatant in his own right. If anything, Watson’s military experience only seems to be helpful later in their career – with Holmes’ fitness and Watson’s illness at this early stage, Holmes is the more dangerous of the two.

Another commonly misunderstood point, but understandably so, is that Holmes is not a private detective, nor even the first one. He references that he is neither a government detective nor a private detective, implying that others of both stripes existed before him. Rather, he is a consulting detective, giving advice to both direct clients and other detectives, and only going to the scene of the crime when it is particularly interesting. I say it’s an understandably misunderstood point, though, because over time Holmes does take on more and more direct commissions, and becomes a private detective in deed, if not in name. But at this point, Holmes solves most of his cases in his sitting-room.

Finally, Doyle plants the seeds for the Great Game in these first two chapters. Not only do we have the conceit that Watson is transcribing actual events in his journal, but Holmes also disparages two fictional detectives that predated him – C. Auguste Dupin, who was created by Edger Allen Poe, and Monsieur Lecoq, written by Emile Gaboriau. Referring to other writer’s detectives caused many people to believe that Sherlock Holmes was real, even if Holmes did come down pretty hard on his predecessors. Interestingly, Holmes disparages Dupin’s “trick of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts,” but it is something that Holmes himself will later – again, Holmes’ words do not always match up with his deeds.