Tag Archives: short stories

Why Does Sherlock Holmes Endure?

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For the past few weeks, I’ve reported here the thoughts of some of today’s leading authors of Sherlock efforts to reproduce his world. These authors care passionately about the Holmes/Watson legacy. They demonstrated this through their contributions to the anthology, Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885, edited by Richard T. Ryan. It’s one of a series filling in the years 1881-1886, when almost no Holmes cases were reported. Contemporary writers, not content to assume the duo temporarily retired during that period, have enthusiastically created adventures to fill in the gap.

One last question I asked them was why Holmes and Watson have had such enduring reader appeal. (People who’ve seen these posts in social media have also weighed in on this question!) Author DJ Tyrer says that, for him, the attraction lies in the rapport between Holmes and Watson. Shelby Phoenix terms it their “genuine fondness for each other.” Tyrer says “There’s a depth to their relationship, their friendship, and their investigative partnership that is more than the sum of its parts.”

George Jacobs says that friendship helps anchor the sometimes aloof and calculating Holmes—“ultimately unknowable” says Katy Darby. Yet, Jacobs says, they’re both very likeable heroes, with Watson “the classic everyman,” so brave and loyal readers keep rooting for him, and with Holmes’s strong sense of morality—even when it contradicts that law or social convention. As Paul Hiscock points out, literature has many great detectives, but far fewer memorable sidekicks. “Readers can respect Watson, just as Holmes does. His relatability allows Holmes to be exceptional without alienating the reader.” (The duo of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock comes to mind.) Frequent Holmes/Watson pasticher David Marcum finds the pairing an “amazing narrative device to show a brilliant person—someone always two steps ahead of what’s going on—from the perspective of the everyman narrator.”

Add to all that the strength of Doyle’s writing, especially his characterizations, says Hassan Akram: “His characters live and breathe.” Also, Doyle focuses on the crime, Phoenix points out, not on tension and distrust between characters, as many writers do today. Darby points out that, because the stories “are easy and fun to read, they’re often underestimated as the highly skilled work they are,” in terms of plot, action, and character development.

Author George Gardner believes that our continued exposure to these personalities and their world has made the stories “readily imaginable to the reader.” We instantly recognize the names of Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, and Baker Street, but they are remote enough in time to give “an air of the fantastic to the stories.” Holmes is “the epitome of a detective” for many, many people, says Gustavo Bondoni, and readers have found his fog-covered streets a most evocative time and place. Even people who read his adventures in the World War I trenches, like Kevin Thornton’s grandfather, eagerly introduced them to later generations.

Developing and writing a story in the late-Victorian London setting, “is even more immersive than reading one,” says Akram. So, let’s see how he did with his story, generously larded with wry wit, “The Return of the Buckinghamshire Baronet.”

Here goes: A partially burned telegram is a clue to the distant town where Holmes believes a bank robber has hidden his loot. Holmes and Watson’s old acquaintance, a Baronet, lives there and is about to be married. He appears at Baker Street with the astonishing proposal that Holmes perform his “deducing” act at the wedding. (Holmes, not surprisingly, declines.) Still, the Baronet offers a week’s invitation to stay at his manor house before the ceremony, and there, another species of financial pandemonium soon erupts.

I asked Akram about his use of humor in this story, and he thinks “it’s more difficult to use humor to good effect when the characters are so familiar.” Thus, most of his story’s humor comes from their slightly dim friend and other minor characters. The personas of Holmes and Watson having reached “almost mythical” status, he says, requires that they be treated with complete respect. Doyle’s own sense of the absurd “has been underrated in the face of his more serious elements, though it’s clearly visible in a story like ‘The Red-Headed League,’ when Holmes and Watson burst into laughter on hearing the client’s story.”

The popularity of Holmes and Watson endures, regularly refreshed by the work of the authors mentioned above. Their stories in Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885 are:
D.J. Tyrer – “The Japanese Village Mystery”
Shelby Phoenix – “Sherlock Holmes and the Six-Fingered Hand Print”
George Jacobs – “The Mystery of the Cloven Cord”
Katy Darby – “The Adventure of the Lock Hospital”
Paul Hiscock – “The Light of Liberty”
David Marcum – “The Faulty Gallows”
George Gardner – “The Adventure of the Damaged Tomb”
Gustavo Bondoni – “The Burning Mania”
Kevin Thornton – “Tracks Across Canada” and “Tracked Across America”

Behind That Clever Mask

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Quite a few contemporary short story writers look to Victorian England—and the Great Detective—for their inspiration. Yet there are aspects of Holmes’s erudition, personality, and behavior that Conan Doyle leaves discreetly unstated. Most notably, libido. We’ll get to how authors of several stories in Belanger Books’ recently published Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885, address that gap.

Readers can miss some of the more subtle aspects of the Great Detective’s character, as well, if they focus too intently on his cleverness. Author Shelby Phoenix believes that focus obscures “the full richness of Holmes’s character”—eccentric, complex, yes, but also compassionate. Holmes keeps “the full colors of his personality” to himself, she says, showing them only in flashes and cracks. Holmes has a strong moral sense and can admit when he’s wrong, George Jacobs says. DJ Tyrer believes his occasional fallibility allows for a more well-rounded character than readers may imagine.

Prolific Holmes pasticher (is that a word?) David Marcum, among other authors in this collection, emphasizes the humanity that hides beneath the façade, “in the way that Mr. Spock insisted that he was Vulcan, denying and covering his human side,” while “some of his best scenes were when the mask slipped.” One of Marcum’s favorite aspects to the stories is the long, healthy friendship between Holmes and Watson, built on loyalty and, yes, a sense of humor.

When readers merely wait for Holmes to solve a crime, says George Gardner, they miss seeing his thought process and logical reasoning, as in “The Adventure of theDancing Men,” which lays out the detective’s code-breaking methods. Holmes’s conclusions aren’t magic; his cleverness is earned. But Holmes isn’t just a thinking machine, as Paul Hiscock points out, he’s always up for adventure. He cares for his clients and enjoys his work. If a Holmes pastiche overlooks this sense of excitement, he says, they “end up cold and lifeless.”

As Phoenix aptly summed up, “To focus only on what his mind is capable of doing is falling into his trap.”

In this Volume
Authors Gustavo Bondoni and Kevin Thornton commented that Holmes fans shouldn’t overlook the whole fascinating Victorian world with its atmosphere and its fog, its bright spots and blind spots. One of those Victorian blind spots is the bifurcated treatment of women (saint versus sinner). The three women authors in this collection took treatment of women as their theme.

Two of their stories key off of a major real-life debate in 1885 England: reform of the Contagious Diseases Acts. These laws were intended to counter the high rate of venereal diseases in the military, blamed on the prostitutes who camped out near army bases and navy ports. Dr. Watson, being both a doctor and former military man, had seen this problem up close, and had thought the laws were appropriate. That is, until in Katy Darby’s “The Adventure of the Lock Hospital,” an ex-soldier clergyman and Watson’s old friend bring to his attention the plight of a falsely accused young woman headed for a “lock hospital.” She was a former street-walker whose life turned around after the clergyman brought her into the church and found her a respectable job. Now she’s been misdiagnosed with syphilis, and her future is precarious.

(Under English law at the time, police could pull aside any woman they merely “thought” was a prostitute, forcibly examine her, and send her to a “lock hospital” for a period of months without trial. Available treatments were ineffective, even dangerous. The women lost their jobs, if they had them, and had to abandon their families.)

In Darby’s story, Holmes must identify the machinations behind the young woman’s arrest, while Dr. Watson strives to arrive at a correct diagnosis. And the pair isn’t above using some unorthodox, if dubiously lawful, methods—living up to the word “Adventure”!

In my story, “A Brick through the Window,” which I’ve written about previously, Holmes and Watson help crusading journalist William T. Stead. In real life, Stead not only fought the contagious disease laws, but also campaigned against the poverty leading London families to sell their young daughters into prostitution. Quite a spicy scandal at the time, as you’d imagine.

Shelby Phoenix’s “Sherlock Holmes and the Six-Fingered Hand Print” takes up the issue of female trafficking, in an atmospheric story of murder in a lowly Japanese pottery shop. Lord Byron Keeper, well-known gambler and man-about-town, has been entranced by the shopkeeper’s Japanese wife and is the chief suspect when the shady shopkeeper is murdered by someone who leaves behind a bloody six-fingered handprint. Only Holmes recognizes that two women’s survival is at stake. As Phoenix says, the satisfying outcome of this story is more evidence of Holmes’s deeply ingrained, if idiosyncratic, moral sense. And, she says, it reflects his wry remark in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”: “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies.” The authors mentioned above expertly portray Holmes’s many facets. Their stories in Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885 are:
George Jacobs – “The Mystery of the Cloven Cord”
D.J. Tyrer – “The Japanese Village Mystery”
David Marcum – “The Faulty Gallows”
George Gardner – “The Adventure of the Damaged Tomb”
Paul Hiscock – “The Light of Liberty”
Gustavo Bondoni – “The Burning Mania”
Kevin Thornton – “Tracks Across Canada” and “Tracked Across America”