Holmes’ final mystery solved

THE world’s first “consulting detective,” the enigmatic Sherlock Holmes, died in 1929, but his reputation -- along with numerous wonderful spinoff books -- is alive and well. Nick Rennison, who has been fascinated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sleuth since childhood, has contrived a marvelous fiction: Holmes’ biography, complete with footnotes, select bibliography and index. It looks quite like the real thing.

Rennison’s fanciful thesis -- that Holmes was not an imaginary creation of Dr. John Watson, but a real man -- gives the book a pseudo-scholarly appeal. “At the time of his death,” Rennison explains, “Holmes was, paradoxically, both a forgotten man and one of the most famous people in the world. The great days of his prime -- the days when he had solved mysteries for the crowned heads of Europe, roamed the world as an unacknowledged ambassador for the British Empire and combated the greatest criminals of the age -- were long past.”

To remedy that obscurity, Rennison begins in June 1854, when William Sherlock Holmes was born to Violet and William Scott Holmes in Hutton le Moors on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. A “difficult and worrying child,” some suggest he might have been autistic. He was home schooled, unlike his more outgoing older brother, Mycroft, whose facility for mathematics led him to a brilliant university career followed by a lifetime of undercover intrigue in government. The exact nature of this involvement remains hazy, yet until Mycroft’s death of influenza in 1918, he would often rely on his younger brother to investigate mysteries of private delicacy or international scandal.

Rennison’s quick-paced, informative prose takes readers through Sherlock Holmes’ lonely, isolated childhood that would make him “fiercely independent,” a boy whose mother died when he was 7. His father was a typical “eccentric and erudite scholar,” a Victorian parent, distant and uninterested in his troubled son.

Choosing boxing and fencing rather than team sports for exercise, and music and theater for spiritual solace, Holmes left the family estate at 19. A misfit at Cambridge, he didn’t complete a degree, but in 1874, began acting at London’s Lyceum. Mycroft soon yanked Holmes from his “romantic dream of life on the stage,” and, after a three-year disappearance, Sherlock Holmes, the detective, surfaced in 1878.

Rennison, a travel writer and longtime London bookseller, describes Holmes’ chance 1881 meeting with Watson, which led to lifelong friendship and literary chronicles. He also introduces the infamous James Nolan Moriarty, an Irish-Catholic professor at the University of Durham who, when asked to resign in 1878, moved to London where he took up the cause of Ireland’s independence; Doyle, who became Watson’s literary agent; and many others, including Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud.

Describing Holmes’ work on the Jack the Ripper murders, Rennison notes a theory claiming the culprit was the deranged Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, the arch villain in David Pirie’s mystery series featuring narrator Doyle as a sidekick to Dr. Joseph Bell of the University of Edinburgh Medical School. The third of Pirie’s detective thrillers, “The Dark Water,” was published in September.

Rennison also introduces Mary Morstan, whom Watson married in 1888, forever changing his relationship with Holmes. And he discusses opera singer Irene Adler, a woman some believe won Holmes’ “misogynist” heart. Not so, Rennison argues. “It is impossible to rescue from oblivion any sexual relationships that Holmes may or may not have had.” Similarly, Rennison rejects any hint of homosexuality with just as little evidence.

By contrast, American novelist Laurie R. King has linked Holmes to Mary Russell, a teenage orphan of means and intelligence, in another ongoing series. Eight books later, King’s couple is happily married and constantly busy, with their most recent escapades described in “The Game” and “Locked Rooms.”

Rennison’s biography proceeds chronologically, examining recorded events as well as those Watson overlooked or suppressed. A complex picture emerges. Although Holmes was “incapable of genuine intimacy,” prey to depression, self-doubt and drug abuse, he was a passionate violinist, loved disguises, had a wicked sense of humor, and no appreciation of nature yet published a beekeeping treatise, which has become “exceptionally rare.” Rennison does a marvelous job of overlaying his own extensive research on clues from Doyle’s tales of Watson and Holmes, deciphering much for this complex, engaging portrait.

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Irene Wanner is the author of “Sailing to Corinth.”