Sherlock Holmes: what is the secret of his success?

In 1887, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, there appeared a remarkable story called “A Study in Scarlet”. It was the first published work by an impoverished young Scottish GP living in the south of England – and the very first adventure of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.

The first page will strike many of us as extraordinarily modern. Watson, an army doctor, has been wounded while following the British forces’ exploits in Afghanistan. Invalided home, he needs lodgings in London and finds himself sharing with an eccentric amateur sleuth. He is astounded when Sherlock Holmes is able to deduce the facts of his life.

“I have my eye on a suite in Baker Street,” Holmes tells Watson, “which would suit us down to the ground. You don’t mind the smell of strong tobacco, I hope?”

And so the famous partnership was born. All of the star ingredients are already there in “A Study in Scarlet”: the pair of bachelors in the set of rooms in Baker Street; the foolish Inspector Lestrade requiring the “amateur” genius of Holmes to solve the case; Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning. There’s also his knowledge of the low life and poor districts of London – a knowledge shared by neither Watson nor by the author Arthur Conan Doyle, who was brought up in Edinburgh, attended a boarding school in Lancashire and barely knew London when he started the stories.

It’s true that many of Holmes’ characteristics evolved. In the first stories, Holmes has no general knowledge; by the end of the series he has become a know-all. The first paragraph of “The Sign of Four” has Holmes taking a syringe from his mantelpiece and injecting himself, “the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks”. But by the time Doyle was writing “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” for family audiences in the Strand magazine two years later, the drugs had been eliminated.

Meanwhile, more details of the domestic set-up at 221B Baker Street had fallen into place. The unnamed “housekeeper” of the first story, had emerged as our old friend Mrs Hudson, who has to put up with the plasterwork being used as target practice for Holmes’ revolver.

But what is the appeal of Sherlock Holmes? Why do we go back to the stories again and again in books, on TV or in films – the latest of which is Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law and Rachel McAdams?

One of the secrets of the Holmes magic is the suggestion that reasoning and cleverness will solve life’s difficulties. We all know that, if cleverness alone could overcome problems, the world would be run by clever people – rather than by often well-meaning but quite stupid people.

Doyle wrote the stories at a time when many thoughtful individuals had lost their religious belief and had switched their allegiance instead to something vaguely defined in their heads as “science”. Holmes’ “deductive reasoning” has the startling entertainment value of a conjuring trick, but it always gets to the nub of the matter – unlike proper science, which often just uncovers more muddle.

Holmes is also an example of a creation having more life, energy and power than its creator. Doyle wanted to write historical romances in the manner of Sir Walter Scott. But while his efforts are very charming, you feel he’s only firing on three cylinders – in nearly all the Holmes stories there’s a tremendous fizz. This comes from Holmes himself.

We do not feel that Doyle, any more than Watson, completely understands Holmes. It’s obvious to me, for example, that Holmes was a homosexual. His drug-fuelled prowls among the docks and opium dens of Wapping and Limehouse must have led to the encounters that his nature secretly required. We can see this, but Watson would surely be horrified – and so, I suspect, would Doyle. But look at the way Jeremy Brett so brilliantly evoked this side of Holmes (without a word being said) in his TV interpretations of the role.

One sure sign of Sherlock Holmes having a life of his own is the huge number of films based on him, with yet more to come. As well as Guy Ritchie’s new version, the BBC is set to make a modern-day take on his life this year.

We probably all have our favourite Holmes on screen. For some it’s the hyper – almost manic – Jeremy Brett; for others, Peter Cushing. But my own favourite is Basil Rathbone, with Nigel Bruce as a wonderfully dense Watson. The films they appear in seem oblivious to any chronological restraints – with Holmes and Watson foiling the Nazis in the 1940s, just as they put a stop to Professor Moriarty in the 1890s. Bruce, by making Watson a comic figure, is not false to the original conception. He brings to the surface something that’s actually there, while Rathbone lends the role a tremendous authority.

After all, Holmes is an oracle who is capable of answering all our secrets. Like the clients who climb the stairs at 221B Baker Street, we come to him to lay down the complexity of our own lives and find a mind of great brilliance put to the exclusive use of the ultimate good.

Holmes through the ages