Sleuth’s Centennial : Sherlock--Myth Blurs the Reality

Answering 40 letters a week is hardly unusual for an office secretary, especially one whose boss is widely known.

What is unique about Sue Brown’s job is that her boss is the famous but entirely fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Although Victorian author Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his unique character into a life of leisurely retirement in the English countryside more than 60 years ago, mail still arrives daily for Holmes at 221B Baker St., the London residence from which he and his close friend, Dr. John H. Watson, tracked criminals through four novels and 56 short stories.

Today, one century after Holmes made his debut in “A Study in Scarlet,” a British financial house called the Abbey National Building Society occupies the address and employs Brown to answer the sleuth’s correspondence in addition to her other duties of writing corporate press releases.

From Young and Old

Mail arrives from the young and old in Western countries, the Third World and the Communist Bloc, reflecting one of the most curious, enduring myths of English literature, a myth so powerful that it has blurred the borders of reality.

Holmes, for example, rates his own entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an entry longer than many of those about real persons.

An American writer, Vincent Starrett, chronicled Holmes’ life in a volume that many public libraries classify as biography rather than fiction, while commemorative plaques in London mark the location of important events in the detective’s life with no hint that both the characters and the incidents were fictional.

Stamps honoring Holmes have been issued by governments as far-flung as Cameroon, San Marino and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Several years ago, Nicaragua graced a stamp honoring Interpol with the sleuth’s silhouette, replete with the trademark deerstalker hat and curved calabash pipe.

‘A Splendid Game’

“It’s become a splendid game, but I don’t how long it can last,” noted John Murray, chairman of John Murray Ltd., publisher of Doyle’s works since 1917.

If the small global army of avid Sherlock Holmes followers has any say, the “game” will be afoot for many more years.

Thousands of these Sherlockians, mainly from Britain, the United States and Japan, engage in a kind of Holmes mania, mulling over the deeper meanings of minor details from the detective’s adventures and re-enacting the significant events.

Every 10 years, for example, a group travels from Britain to the Reichenbach Falls near Lucerne, Switzerland, to re-enact one of the best known of all Sherlock Holmes scenes, the life-and-death struggle between the detective and his archenemy, Prof. James Moriarty, along a narrow ledge above the falls.

This year, many Sherlockians plan expanded activities to mark the 100th anniversary of their hero’s debut.

In London last week, the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, with about 800 members, held its annual dinner in the august surroundings of the main House of Commons dining room to hear former Home Secretary Merlyn Rees draw similarities between crime now and in Holmes’ day.

A few days later in New York, the Baker Street Irregulars, named after the street urchins that Holmes occasionally employed, held its own annual celebration.

And in Southern California, local devotees, about 50 or 60 members of the Non-Canonical Calabashes, gathered Saturday, some of them in deerstalkers and tweeds, in the infield at Santa Anita to watch the 16th running of The Silver Blaze, a race named for a kidnaped racehorse that Holmes helped recover in the story of the same name.

Curved for Actors

(The group is so named because the Holmes stories, known to devotees as the Canon, never say that a calabash was among the pipes that Holmes smoked, said the group’s founder, Sean Wright of Los Angeles. The stories do specify clay, briar and cherrywood pipes, but actors in plays about Holmes introduced the curved calabash because pipes with straight stems wiggled when the actors spoke their lines, Wright explained.)

Other special events are planned throughout 1987 by groups in several countries.

“It’s going to be a very busy year,” predicted Stanley MacKenzie, an actor who has assembled one of the most comprehensive reference collections on Holmes.

Heightened interest surrounding the centennial activities has already increased the detective’s mail, which routinely includes wedding invitations and Christmas and birthday cards in addition to letters.

Wants His Lost Toys

“Some write out of curiosity to see if they’ll get an answer; some want to express admiration for Holmes, and others want help,” secretary Brown said. A recent letter from a Tacoma, Wash., boy, for example, sought help in tracking down the person who took his toys.

“My mom will pay any fees if you just take my case,” the letter concluded.

Another recent letter from a Texan asked if Holmes and Watson could “help my government to find out where the millions of dollars from the Iran arms deal went.”

Brown normally responds to such correspondence with a brief letter explaining that Mr. Holmes is now retired, keeping bees at his home on the Sussex Downs, and so will be unable to help.

Armed with Jack Tracy’s “The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana” and the Penguin edition of “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” she answers specific questions as best she can. Occasionally she redirects mail to the Sherlock Holmes Society, whose members have access to more detailed references concerning the detective’s life.

Receiving a letter, even from the secretary of The Master, as fans of the detective reverently refer to Holmes, is often an exciting event.

A resident of Papua New Guinea wrote to thank Brown for responding to his request: “When I saw Sherlock Holmes’ name, I jumped out of my bed and was shouting to others in our village. . . . “

Certainly, Holmes is not alone as a fictional detective who captured the public’s imagination.

Other Famed Sleuths

Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple, Georges Simenon’s Parisian policeman Jules Maigret and Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason all have generated a following.

Indeed, the response to Perry Mason’s successful quest for truth and justice aroused such an interest in real-life cases of alleged injustice that Gardner established a Court of Last Resort in the 1950s composed of eminent criminal investigators and lawyers who gathered evidence to overturn death sentences.

But none of these have achieved the universal appeal of Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures have spawned about 200 film and television productions and over 40 major stage plays. Exactly what has made Holmes one of fiction’s most vivid, enduring characters remains as much a mystery as the cases that preoccupied his fictional existence.

With almost no sex, relatively little violence and an acknowledged cocaine habit, he would hardly seem to be a hero for late 20th-Century tastes.

‘Quiet Logic, Deduction’

“He’s unique and eccentric,” MacKenzie, the actor, noted. “He could sit back in his chair and solve crimes with quiet logic and deduction, not with wild road chases. Young people regard him as mentally superhuman.”

Others see the attraction as Doyle’s simple yet compelling writing style and the backdrop of a Victorian England with pea-soup fogs, horse-drawn hansom cabs and urgent cross-town telegrams.

“Under Victorian influence, the Japanese abandoned kimonos for suits, rice for bread and futons for beds and adopted a European living style,” said Japanese university professor Tsukasa Kobayashi, who founded the Japan Sherlock Holmes Club a decade ago. “Without doubt, some Japanese read Sherlock Holmes today in an effort to know their cultural roots.”

Doyle’s longtime publisher, Murray, has his own theory: “These stories had superb readability, a swiftly moving plot that included a doctor and a crime. These four ingredients almost ensure immortality.”

Doyle was born, raised and studied medicine in Edinburgh, and the primary inspiration for the Holmes character was the impressive diagnostic skill of a respected medical professor, Joseph Bell. Other characteristics were borrowed from Henry Littlejohn, a police surgeon in the Scots capital.

When patients failed to materialize at his newly established practice near Portsmouth, Doyle occupied his time by writing, and in November, 1887, Holmes made his debut.

“I thought I would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat crime as Dr. Bell treated disease and where science would take the place of chance,” Doyle once wrote. “The result was Sherlock Holmes. . . . “

‘Hound’ Most Popular

Of all the adventures, “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” published in 1902, is viewed widely as the best--or at any rate the most popular--of the adventures.

The instant success of the Sherlock Holmes stories ignited grander literary goals within Doyle, who yearned for acceptance as a serious historical novelist.

Several of these efforts were published but made little lasting impact.

Gradually, Doyle began to resent Holmes, viewing him as a character too mundane for his literary talents.

After only five years, Doyle decided to throw Sherlock Holmes and Prof. Moriarty, his infamous anti-hero, over the Swiss waterfall to their death in the short story “The Final Problem,” which stunned the sleuth’s large and loyal following.

It was 10 years before a shrinking bank balance and mounting public demand forced Doyle to resurrect Holmes by revealing that the sleuth had not fallen to his death after all.

Doyle wrote another 32 short stories and one novel before the last adventure was published in 1927.

‘Never Quite the Same’

Many Sherlockians argue that these latter adventures are inferior, and there are hints that Doyle himself agreed. A Cornish fisherman is quoted in one story that Holmes was “never quite the same man” after his recovery from the waterfall incident.

Rather than killing his hero a second time, Doyle dispatched him to a leisurely old age keeping bees in the rolling hills of Sussex, close to where Doyle himself spent his later years.

Although Holmes would be 133 years old today, his fans regard any talk of their hero’s death as heresy. When a columnist writing in the influential Times of London a few years ago described a criminal investigation as one worthy of “the late” Sherlock Holmes, the paper was peppered with letters of protest.

“How could he have died?” demanded one die-hard reader. “His obituary has not appeared in the Times.”