When Arthur Conan Doyle sold A Study in Scarlet for only £25 in 1886 to publishers Ward and Locke they wrote to him that they "could not publish it this year as the market is flooded at present by cheap fiction" (Symons 13, my emphasis). It was to become the feature piece in Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887. With this inauspicious beginning, followed by an American publisher's commission of The Sign of Four and the newly established Strand Magazine's appetite for the Holmes short stories (at the nice commission of £35 per for the first six of what would become The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), the collection of 56 stories and four novels about the figure who has become the most recognized character in world literature was begun. Yet, by the end of the second series of short stories, Doyle had seemingly sent Holmes to his death at the Reichenbach Falls, clutched in mortal combat with his nemesis Moriarty. Doyle wrote to a friend:

I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pate de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day. (Symons 15)

   But few today would doubt that the best things that Doyle had to offer are part and parcel of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories. And it may well be the case that these stories, often disparaged as less than "serious" literature (along with most of the rest of their genre and of the other genres of imaginative, "popular" fiction), offer us some insight to key and essential qualities of literary art. Perhaps, as will here be contended, a master storyteller has created and successfully mythologized a character who epitomized the ideals of his own age and nation and who, quite possibly, derives from the ageless, from the universal, and from the essentially immutable human condition.

   The detective story -- like most imaginative fiction and much of the romantic literature of the past century -- has been criticized as mere "popular literature," disparaged by such critics as Q.D. Leavis as "low-brow." fit for a reading public seeking "mental relaxation," but by no means close to "high-brow" literary art which seeks to "enrich the quality of living, by extending, deepening, refining, [and] co-ordinating experience" (Leavis 43-50). I will contend that the Sherlock Holmes stories do these things and more.

   None have pronounced more eloquently on the value of the form than G.K. Chesterton (whose Father Brown stories fit the classical mold defined by Poe and refined by Doyle) In stark contrast to Leavis's notions of the "low-brow" character of the reading public, Chesterton maintains:

It is not true ...that the populace prefer bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because they are bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does not make a book popular.... The trouble in this matter is that many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil (3-4).

   With any work in any genre that accomplishes transformation instead of mere emulation a creative synthesis occurs between the writer's intention, on the one hand, to adhere to and fulfill the conventions of the tradition [and -- as a corollary -- to fulfill the expectations of the intended receivers of the work]; and the writer's aspiration, on the other hand, to both excel at and transcend the tradition [and, in so doing, to surprise the intended receivers of the work]. This dual ambition--to fulfill, yet to reform; to satisfy expectation, yet to pleasingly surprise--is what makes a successful literary work in any genre a redefinition of that genre.

   A literary genus is a much more malleable thing than its biological counterpart. Through what we might call "The Pegasus Potential," the power of the human mind to create viable hybrids -- the recombinative imagination -- is almost boundless.

   Some will argue that a great deal of the fame of Holmes comes from the fortunately great illustrations of the artists of the day -- especially those of Sydney Padget -- who helped immortalize the hero, together with the early and repeated success of the character on both stage [William Gillette, et. al.] and screen. It is certainly true, as Howard Haycraft notes, that "Two solid external factors that have contributed to the unequalled fame of Holmes are the illustrations and the numerous stage and screen plays made from the stories" (Murder 60). But there must have been great reasons for these stories to have been caught up so eagerly by illustrators and dramatists.

   In his general defense of detective fiction, Ross MacDonald makes an important observation by noting that it is a form of popular art. Indeed, it is one of my theses that the various genres of popular and imaginative fiction arising and developing over the past century and a half are the literary equivalent of "illiterature," of folk literature, the cultural lore of the modern age. As MacDonald writes:

Popular fiction, popular art in general, is the very air a civilization breathes.... Popular art is the form in which a civilization comes to be known by most of its members. It is the carrier and guardian of the spoken language. A book can be read by everyone, a convention which is widely used and understood in all its variations, hold a civilization together as nothing else can.

   It reaffirms our values as they change, and dramatizes the conflicts of those values.... It describes new modes of behavior, new versions of human character, new shades and varieties of good and evil, and implicitly criticizes them. (in Winks 186-187)

   Kenneth Rexroth maintains that, "...Conan Doyle would not have been so successful if he had not believed almost all the myths of Victorianism" (in Shreffler 42). In a note in The Criterion, T.S. Eliot comments, "Sherlock Holmes reminds us always of the pleasant externals of nineteenth-century London. I believe he may continue to do so even for those who cannot remember the nineteenth century. . ." (in Shreffler 17). Indeed, almost all of Holmes's cases begin in the Empire's hub city of London and at the imaginary hub of criminal detection in that city -- 221B Baker Street.

   Erik Routley notes that the Holmes stories differ from traditional tales of epic, romance, and adventure in the comparative lack of exotic settings. He points out that, "It is not in spatial travel that romance is really situated. . ." (45). The relative familiarity of London is a stark distinction from the elsewheres and otherworlds of much of the nineteenth century's adventure fiction [nothing like the far-flung places of Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling].

   But this familiarity of setting is, I contend, precisely one of the great sources of positive reader reception. It literally "brings home" high adventure and danger to the familiar gotham of London and the familiar contours of the English countryside. The great ghost story writer, Montague Rhodes James, has suggested this same contemporaneity and geographical proximity as essential ingredients for the setting of the effective ghost story. James reasoned that readers will not be as frightened of things long ago and far away . But bring those things home and it is another matter. I believe it is much the same with adventure. Doyle captures the "here and now" of adventure with his settings.

   The people in Doyle's immediate and obvious audience were composed of an odd and almost paradoxical blend of humours. The Romantic Spirit was still lingering in the face of an age of rationalism, pragmatism, science, and technology. It was a time of both poetry and progress -- perhaps the last we shall see. Ross MacDonald sees Holmes's character as appealing to this time and place in various ways:

Holmes had other ancestors and collateral relations which reinforce the idea that he was a portrait of the artist as a great detective. His drugs, his secrecy and solitude, his moods of depression (which he shared with Dupin) are earmarks of the Romantic rebel then and now. Behind Holmes lurk the figures of nineteenth-century poets .... But Holmes' Romantic excesses aren't central to his character. His Bodelairean spleen and drug addiction are merely the idiosycrasies of genius. Holmes is given the best of both worlds and remains an English gentleman, accepted on the highest social levels. Permeating the thought and language of Conan Doyle's stories is an air of blithe satisfaction with a social system based on priviledge. (in Winks 181)

For the detective himself I demand that he be an amateur. In real life, no doubt, the best detectives are the professional police, but then in real life the best criminals are professional criminals. In the best detective stories the villain is an amateur, one of ourselves: we rub shoulders with him .... It is the amateur detective alone who can expose the guilty man.... For this is what we really come to: that the detective must have no more special knowledge than the average reader. The reader must be made to feel that, if he too had used the light of cool inductive reasoning and the logic of stern remorseless facts (as, Heaven bless us, we are quite capable of doing) then he too would have fixed the guilt. (x-xi, my emphasis)

   Another Victorian value was the growing belief in Individualism. Martin Priestman argues that much of what Holmes succeeds in is the "individuation" of particular facts, particular people. Holmes is able to particularize from general details [which of course is what "deduction" is all about]. (316)

   Naked science could itself appear to be a disorderly force. Doyle avoided such a bad aura by making the second major value of his great detective that equally potent contemporary force--individualism: the essence of humanity as it seemed to many then, and now. Holmes isn't only a man of objective science: he's also aloof, arrogant, eccentric, even bohemian. His exotic character humanises his scientific skills: a lofty hero, but crucially a human one. (Knight 176)

   Another appeal to readers of The Strand was the manliness, hardihood, staunch loyalty, and camaraderie exhibited in the stories. According to Erik Routley, Doyle "re-masculated" fiction for the Victorian. The predominately middle to upper class male reader of The Strand was given a culture-hero worthy of attention. As Routley puts it, "A generation brought up to believe that reading fiction was women's work but in men a sign of degeneracy was presented with a literature of which it need not be ashamed" (58)

   Yet another appeal of the stories was, of course, the vicarious adventure offered by the tales. But this may have been vicarious adventure of a particular type. Routley suggests that the success of the Holmes stories was the Victorian reader's need for "adventure within a circle of security" (Puritan, 36). He contends that the Victorian reader:

...wanted not only adventure but the strict circumscribing of adventure. He was not yet ready for bizarre anti-adventures of the kind he now asks for. He was reading for relaxation, and for the relaxation of a not too enterprising mind which set strict limits to the demands it would tolerate. He was satisfied when he got a strict counterpoint between adventure and security .... In meeting this demand Doyle succeeded so resoundingly because he knew how to steer down the centre, to maintain the required balance. (36-37, my emphasis)

"Sherlock Holmes... appeared as the great protector of bourgeois society, and he was made more attractive by the fact that his personal life in some respects outraged bourgeois standards" (24).

   Other paradoxes existed in Victorian society. It was a time of excess kept hidden, of lip-service to strict moral convention but great and secret abuses of those conventions, a time of proprieties all too often unobserved.²

   The Victorian perception of crime itself included tamer things than many today would consider worthy of detective fiction or even reportorial comment. Much more clearly to the Victorian, crime was another name for sin -- a concept with which our century has grown less and less familiar.  As Knight maintains:

...the great detective is an effective figure. But what is he effective at? One of the crucial features of crime fiction is that different periods, different audiences, see different crimes as being disturbing. Just as the detective's aura embodies values that the audience holds to be important, so the crimes and criminals realise what the audience most fears....

   We are so used to crime novels dealing with murder, it's a real surprise to many people to find that in the early Holmes stories murder is a rare crime. Stranger still, crime itself is relatively rare, especially in the first twelve stories which were reprinted in one volume as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. These established the fascination of the great detective.... (179, my emphasis)

Doyle was well aware of the lack of crime as such in the stories. At the beginning of "The Blue Carbuncle," the seventh story, the authority of Holmes is used to justify that pattern. Watson reports what Holmes has said, about his London cases:

"Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events ...will be presented which may be striking and bizarre without being criminal. We have already had experience of such."

   "So much so," I remarked, "that, of the last six cases which I have added to my notes, three have been entirely free of any legal crime."

   ...What then were the crimes, the problems in the early stories? Broadly speaking, they deal with disorders in the respectable bourgeois family. There are various threats to established middle-class order, but they come from within the family and the class, not from enemy criminals. One major force is a selfish greed .... the greedy crime is in the past and it comes back to haunt what seems a respectable family--but their peaceful prosperity was based on the past crime that is revenged in the present. In three other stories greed leads to a breach of trust just outside family relations....

   The remaining two stories of the first dozen are a little different. In them a prospective marriage and a past love affair are shown in ruins. (180-81, my emphasis)

   
These crimes of "disorder in the respectable bourgeois family" are perhaps pale by modern standards, yet were of great concern to Doyle's immediate audience.

   Certainly one of the great appeals of the Holmes canon to Victorian readers was the detective's utilization of technology and science -- seen by many Victorians as the road to societal advancement, perhaps to societal perfection. As Knight notes:

In the first place [Holmes] stands for science, that exciting new nineteenth century force in the public mind. Doyle said in his memoirs that contemporary crime fiction disappointed him, because it depended so much on luck for a solution: the detective should be able to work it all out. So the overttechniques of science, the careful collection and rational analysis of information, were realised in Sherlock Holmes. (175-6, my emphasis)

   Peter Nordon echoes the importance of science to the success of the Holmes stories:

The fictitious world to which Sherlock Holmes belonged, expected of him what the real world of the day expected of its scientists: more light and more justice. As a creation of a doctor who had been soaked in the rationalist thought of the period [that Watson (Doyle) is a man of medical science is also important], the Holmesian cycle offers us for the first time the spectacle of a hero triumphing again and again by means of logic and scientific method. (247, my emphasis)

   This leads us to another important aspect of the Sherlockian appeal. Some scholars have contended -- rightly, I beieve -- that Holmes stands as a model practitioner of the "popular theology" of the day, what one critic has called "secular Puritanism"

Detective novels reflect the society to which they are addressed [and are, thence, excellent for sociological, historical, and anthropological research], and in a way that the public must generally approve as a true picture of that society, its ethics, its values, and its basic rationality. But crime in its social context and the puzzle it presents force detective fiction, albeit in a relatively painless way, to reflect on such heavy assumptions as an ordered universe, the nature of truth, the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, and the importance of justice for a civilized society. All these ideas are ultimately grounded in theology, or in what serves as theology in a professedly secular society. (Paul 7, my emphasis)

   One of the most detailed defenses of the deeper significance of detective fiction and the underlying reason for its popularity is that of Robert Paul who summarizes the theological fundaments of the form quite nicely:

...many of detection's presuppositions are fundamentally theological, such as (1) a belief that our universe is structured on the basis of rational laws; (2) the conviction that 'truth' is real and can be discovered rationally by weighing the evidence; (3) the assumption that if all the facts are known, we can discover meaning in them; (4) the perception that there is real distinction between right and wrong conduct; (5) the assumption that human life is of very great, even of supreme value; (6) the recognition that although people are always capable of goodness, there is also within them an innate capacity for evil; (7) the conviction that we must strive to achieve justice for the sake of society. (Paul 14)

Doyle's prodigious success is not primarily due to any calculated effect, but to the kind of coincidence which really shapes nine-tenths of all outstanding successes.... What he may have been only half- conscious of was the hospitality that the English bourgeois, because of its puritan background, was waiting to give his offerings. Holmes satisfied a craving which had emerged from the puritan background .... I mean in this context what ought to be called secular puritanism. The positive principle in the English puritan tradition (which is, as I believe, not wholly or even primarily a religious movement) has three basic constituents: intellectualism, moralism, and the acceptance of the values of the city. (55, my emphasis)

   As both Paul and Routley contend, we may view Holmes (and Doyle as well) as being theistic, but theistic in that commonly humanized and rationalized and even tarnished belief of the age of both Darwin and electricity, theistic in a strained way of belief of many Victorians who had begun to see many reasons to question.

   In "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman," Holmes comments on the human condition after Watson has called one specimen "a pathetic, futile, broken creature":

"Exactly Watson. Pathetic and futile. But is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not his story amicrocosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow -- misery." (my emphasis)

Further proof of Holmes's theism may be found in The Hound of the Baskervilles, this by way of a form of negative evidence, the personification of good implicit in the personification of evil: "In a modest way I have combated evil, but to take on the Father of Evil himself would, perhaps, be too ambitious a task."

   Yet Holmes also digresses on occasion in much more optimistic and positive ways. One of his few direct comments on religion occurs in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty" and is worth examining:

He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.

   "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers." (my emphasis)

   It is curious that Darwin, whose description of the process of natural selection is now accepted as scientific truth, could not see that any orderly and universal process is, in itself, a defense of universal order. Doyle and his detective both assert that order and, in so doing, assert a universe in which neither chance nor chaos reign.

   Jacques Barzun sees a related importance in the objective view of reality that underlies detective fiction. He writes, "What happens in modern detective fiction is that objects -- and more than one in each tale -- are taken literally and seriously. They are scanned for what they imply, studied as signs of past action and dark purposes. This search for history in things is anything but trivial .... Bits of matter matter" (in Winks 145, 150, my emphasis). Put another way, we may declare that fiction based upon the notion that truth can be detected is necessarily predicated upon the belief that there is Truth to be found in the first place -- that Truth is. It is an affirmation of the commonly held human belief that signs can and do signify, whether they be objective material clues or referential testimony, or the written words of a narrative.

   As Joseph Wood Krutch points out in his fine 1944 defense "Only a Detective Story," "Detective stories commonly provide that particular happy sort of ending which is the most perfect of all and which may be described as 'justice triumphant.'" (in Haycraft, Art184). In his important essay, "On Fairy Stories,"³ J.R.R. Tolkien [although admittedly addressing the values of fantasy fiction] mentions the consolation of the "eucatastrophe" (77)—of the happy ending as a virtue. It could also be said to be the normal virtue and consolation of the Holmes detective story. Virtue and justice are triumphant.

   Probably the greatest appeal of the Sherlock Holmes stories and likely the primary appeal of the genre of detective fiction is the triumph of order over chaos and the notion left by these tales that everything can make sense in the end, that there are patterns to existence, that there are objective truths. Erik Routley states that "The detective story reader is not a lover of violence but a lover of order" (in Winks 176).

   As Robert Paul maintains, "the whole body of detective literature ...is concerned with "setting things right" .... It is about characters like Conan Doyle's sage of Baker Street who were convinced that they had a vocation to engage in this enterprise..." (8).

   Margery Allingham asserted that the genre arose not from a love of violence, but rather as "a sign of a popular instinct for order and form in a period of sudden and chaotic change" (quoted in Paul 9, my emphasis).

   In the famous ending passage of "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box," Doyle has Holmes summarize this position:

"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever." (my emphasis)

But not only the crimes in Doyle are structural to his society: so are the controls that fictionally operate against them. The detective's central values, rationalism and individualism, are themselves authentic to that world. The crimes and their controls realise the fears and the hopes integral to what was then, and still largely is, modern society. The ideological, rather than truly investigative, nature of the stories lies in this intimate relationship between the threats and the values that foreclose them: both have the same determining conditions.

   I hope this doesn't suggest that Doyle sat down with some graph paper and took one axis for detective methods and the other for the audience's central anxiety. It's conceivable to compose fiction like that and it may well become a viable method in the future. But Doyle did it the old-fashioned way: his imagination created issues that were of importance in his perio. (Knight 182, my emphasis)

   For his period, Doyle caught in the Holmes stories an ensemble of attitudes, of fears and hopes. For anyone interested in seeing how dominant social groups use their literature to state and control fears, the Holmes stories are a fascinating source. They provide a means of recreating the structure of feeling in a complex period, one which has both continuities and contrasts with our own period. (185, my emphasis)

   G.K. Chesterton sees the "first essential value of the detective story" in that it is "the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life" (4).

   Julian Symons accounts for the popularity of the stories then and now by drawing an important distinction. He notes that:

"For those who first read the tales ...the life represented was very much what they saw around them.... For us the stories are very different. What attracts us is their period charm.... The distinction is that for Victorian and Edwardian readers Homes's world was, more or less, the one they knew ...for succeeding generations it is and will be a society in some ways ...remote ...yet in its motives and its actions in many respects little removed from our own. (30)

   There was something Bohemian about Doyle himself who, in many respects, blended Watson and Holmes -- both of whom held residence in his mind and character more truly than they did at 221B Baker Street. When Doyle first realized that his practice of fiction could be his life and livelihood much more successfully than his practice of medicine, he wrote in his memoirs:

I should at last be my own master. No longer would I have to conform to professional dress or try to please any one else. I would be free to live how I liked and where I liked. It was one of the great moments of exultation in my life. (Symons 51, my emphasis)

   Doyle was a fervent patriot which is amply attested by both his words and his actions. At the age of 40 he went to the Boer War to, as he wrote to his mother regarding his influence over the "young, athletic, sporting men" of England, "give them a lead" (Symons 61). He wrote the pamphlet, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, which generally put down the anti-war upsurge in the English press which had been accusing the British forces of attrocities and various breaches of military conduct. He stood (unsuccessfully) for Parliament as a Unionist (Conservative) candidate in both the 1900 and 1906 elections. He was later knighted for his patriotic service. He went to France as an observer in 1916, and his oldest son Kingsley died in the war. (Symons 66-70).

   When Doyle read in the press that Lord Nelson's old flagship, Foudroyant, had been sold to the Germans to be broken up for scrap, he wrote a poem to the newspapers which concludes:

What for the sword that Cromwell drew?
What for Prince Edward's coat of mail?
What for our Saxon Alfred's tomb?
They're all for sale! (Carr, Life 75)

   In short, he was an involved citizen of the Empire, one who would agree with Tennyson's lines from "Ulysses," a certain evocation of Victorian order and progress: "and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrow...For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset." Doyle was a believer in civilization and progress and the idea that society could "by slow degrees" be subdued to "the useful and the good."

   He lived by the code of the period and never looked far outside it, but "within that code he tried always to behave honourably" (Symons 123).

   His epitaph reads "Steel True, Blade Straight," and that is an apt summary of his life, at least insofar as he was a man who lived without hypocrisy, practicing the codes in which he believed. "In his work and in his personality he is the ideal representative of the Victorian era to which he belonged" (Symons 123).

   It was his mother also who convinced him to accept the knighthood (which he at first planned to refuse) by pointing out that it would be "an insult to the king" to refuse it (Carr, Life 160). His contemporaries joined the Crown in the praise of Doyle. A dying W.E. Henley wrote his regards, and H.G. Wells wrote, "I think the congratulations should go to those who have honoured themselves by honouring you" (Carr, Life 161).

   It is important to note that Doyle was himself the model for his famous detective. He admitted this to one of his sons late in life. As Howard Haycraft notes:

...Bell [Doyle's former teacher] may have been the model from which Holmes was drawn, but the real detective was Doyle himself. In appearance, with his beefy British frame and walrus mustache, he was much closer to Watson than Holmes. Ruggedness was his predominant characteristic. He had the Englishman's traditional fondness for sports of all kinds and an equally typical partisanship for the underdog. He was an unusual combination of the militant and the gentle, a dauntless fighter in any cause he believed to be right, and an adversary to be feared; but in his heart, said his friends, there was no room for malice. (Murder 53)

Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied his immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in following out those clues, and clearing up those mysteries, which had been abandoned as hopeless by the official police. ("A Scandal in Bohemia")

   Probably the most intriguing aspect of Holmes is his intellectual adroitness and genius. This marks him as, perhaps, the world's first mental rather than physical hero. His prowess is in mind over the matters at hand. As Jacques Barzun said of him, "...Holmes is a great man, but I should say that he is a character in a special sense. He is unique in fiction. He is the only genius in fiction who is successful. I don't mean whose work is successful, but who comes off as a genius" (Shreffler 22).

   Mark VanDoren sees Holmes as a character who "moves under his own power" (in Shreffler 23). Marshall McLuhan sees him as "the type of the intuitive genius" and sees his popularity in the resultant antithesis, "the natural enemy" to the procedural bureaucrat (Shreffler 40). Kenneth Rexroth sees him as a symbolic character, epitomizing Victorian paradoxes:

If Sherlock Holmes adventures truly reflect life between 1885and 1905, then life was haunted by a dangerous insecurity. But so, in fact, it was. And the symbolic detective is natural law discovering and healing that insecurity, solving the mysteries and absolving the anxiety.... There are no better records of the profoundly normal oddity of Victorian England...(in Shreffler 43, my emphasis).

   Parallel to his compatriot Watson, Holmes may also be viewed as a doctor who cures the ills of society. "Holmes was a brilliant physician to the body politic, the disease of which is crime" (Sebeok and Sebeok 47).

   Martin Priestman notes a seeming inconsistency.

Holmes is routine incarnate. It is a paradox of these stories that the great and unique Sherlock Holmes, penetrator of all that anonymous London fog, master of the singular detail and the specific identification, represents in his infinite reproducibility (in stories which resemble each other as closely as the houses of a London terrace) the very spirit of endless sameness against which he seems eternally to battle. (Priestman 319, my emphasis)

   Watson is the perfect complement and chronicler for this great man. "Excellent" and "Elementary" are words often used in the series. In a way, we may view these two inhabitants of 221b Baker Street as epitomizing these terms. Holmes is the man of sheer mental excellence, he goes beyond the norm toward the mythically heroic. Watson is the solid, steadfast, loyal, trustworthy, courageous [the Boy Scout Oath would be appropriate] elementary Englishman -- elementary in the basic sense that he comprises the elements to which most of "his" readers aspire.

   But some critics have suggested that his central role is as the slower-witted "straightman" to Holmes. Nigel Bruce's Watson became the buffoon to Rathbone's Holmes in the most famous cinema versions. But this view of Watson is unfair. Watson is certainly, in part, a foil to Holmes's brilliance, but it is precisely the fact that Watson is a man beyond normal intelligencethat makes Holmes mental virtuosity that much more amazing. Watson is a Doctor of Medicine, a well-read and highly educated man.

   Many conversations between Holmes and Watson are reminiscent of a Socratic dialogue in which the student does not know how to proceed correctly without the continuous help and suggestions of the master, and has a tendency to put forth wrong opinions each time that he works by himself. We get to know, even if only partially, the right principles applied by Holmes just because of Watson's mistakes. (Caprettini 332, my emphasis)

   Knight argues for Watson's average respectability as a key:

Watson who represents so plainly the average respectable man, so often puzzled, so often in need of heroic assistance to explain crime and disorder. (Knight 177)

The choice of Watson as narrator, and as foil to Homes's acute intelligence, was masterly. For those early readers the doctor was reassuringly like themselves, honest, likeable and determined, conventional enought to be surprised and a little shocked by new ideas, yet always ready for adventure, and prepared to do what seemed to him extraordinary and even ridiculous things in obedience to the commands of his genius friend. (Symons 25)

   Ultimately, as Symons maintains:

Holmes and Watson are truly complementary figures. One could hardly exist without the other, and they set a pattern of the genius joined to the commonplace which was followed by other detective story writers for more than half a century. (25, my emphasis)

   W.H. Auden has suggested that there are many elements in common between Greek tragedy and the detective story. It has been observed by many that the Oedipus Tyrannusof Sophocles may be the world's first true detective story, that it may be viewed as a tale of murder (and worse) and detection—with that amazing irony of the detective turning out to be the killer. But Auden sees definite critical parallels, making use of Aristotelian views on the theater:

As in the Aristotelian description of tragedy, there is Concealment (the innocent seem guilty and the guilty seem innocent) and Manifestation (the real guilt is brought to consciousness). There is also peripeteia, in this case not a reversal of fortune but a double reversal from apparent guilt to innocence and from apparent innocence to guilt. (in Winks 16)

   T.S. Eliot also had high praise for Doyle's "dramatic ability."⁴ While Doyle's "detective ability" and believability may often be strained, "it is a dramatic ability applied with great cunning and concentration; it is not spilt about" (in Shreffler 18). Eliot concludes his only critical commentary on Doyle's masterpiece of characterization:

   But every writer owes something to Holmes. And every critic of The Novel who has a theory about the reality of characters in fiction, would do well to consider Holmes.... I am not sure that Arthur Conan Doyle is not one of the great dramatic writers of his age." (Shreffler 19)

   Another appeal of the stories in the notion of Escape. But we should note that this often disparaging word -- as used by critics -- is abused from its primary sense. J.R.R. Tolkien distinguishes between the negative escape -- "The Flight of the Deserter" -- and the positive escape offered by the best fantasy [and I will contend the best imaginative fiction in general], which Tolkien calls "The Escape of the Prisoner" (78). In other words, if a better world can be invisioned -- and travelled to in fiction and vicariously experienced -- why is it wrong for us to suppose that our own world might eventually be made more like the one of our dreaming and wishing.

   W. H. Auden suggests that one appeal of the detective story in general is that it allows a brief escape into a world of renewed innocence where guilt is found out and expelled. Auden writes, "I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin" (in Winks 23). So, the escape fantasy of the lover of detective fiction might be a temporary respite, a brief restoration of a simpler, Edenic state.

   The Holmes stories are romances in a way but we should note that they include rationality and intellectualism into the mixture. Jacques Barzun has called detective fiction "the romance of reason" (Winks 145).

   According to Freeman, "at its best, the detective story fully develops the distinctive qualities proper to its genus [emphasis added], and is, in addition, satisfactory in diction, in background treatment, in characterization, and in general literary workmanship is probably the rarest of all forms of fiction" (9). But he believes its distinctive feature to be its intellectual appeal:

The distinctive quality of a detective story, in which it differs from all other types of fiction, is thatthe satisfaction that it offers to the reader is primarily an intellectual satisfaction. This is not to say that it need be deficient in the other qualities appertaining to good fiction: in grace of diction, in humour, in interesting characterization, in picturesqueness of setting or in emotional presentation. On the contrary, it should possess all these qualities. It should be an interesting story, well and vivaciously told. But whereas in other fiction these are the primary, paramount qualities, in detective fiction they are secondary and subordinate to the intellectual interest, to which they must be, if necessary, sacrificed. The entertainment that the connoisseur looks for is an exhibition of mental gymnastics in which he is invited to take part; and the excellence of the entertainment must be judged by the completeness with which it satisfies the expectations of the type of reader to whom it is addressed [emphasis added] (Freeman 11).

   Gavin Lambert quotes Browning's lines from "Bishop Blougram's Apology" in an epigram to his interesting essay on the impact of detective fiction:

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things
The honest theif, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist...

   Interestingly, it has been suggested that the detective story may be a narrative about narrative itself in usually subconscious metanarrative ways. Seen this way, the writer is "plotting" a puzzle to be solved. The reader becomes the detective, digging at "clues" for meanings and significance.

   Holmes himself makes the comparison of detection to reading. As we find in the famous passage from "The Crooked Man":

"Excellent!" I cried.

   "Elementary," said he. "It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction.

   The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands somefactors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader. Now, at present I am in the position of these same readers, for I hold in this hand several threads of one of the strangest cases which ever perplexed a man's brain, and yet I lack the one or two which are needful to complete my theory. But I'll have them, Watson, I'll have them!" (my emphasis)

   Hodgson has further suggested that this analogy may be the primary interest in the detective story:

There are two vitally balanced relationships central to the detective story. The first , central indeed to an even larger range of literature, is that obtaining between detective and criminal, pursuer and pursued. Opposed though they may be, these characters have, as is widely recognized, much in common....

   The second vital relationship of the detective story exists in a curiouus equilibrium with the first. This second relationship is that obtaining between the author and the reader. As writers, readers, and critics of classic detective fiction have generally agreed, the detective story is a veritable game between two players, the author and the reader: hence the widespread interest in "the rules of the game".... --where it is, however, a model for the relationship of the criminal and the detective. But the transition to the second relationship is a natural one, for reading is itself a form of detection. (340, my emphasis)

Dorothy Sayers drove her Omnibus of Crimeat this point when she noted that the seasoned reader of detective stories, "instead of detecting the murderer ...is engaged in detecting the writer" (Sayers 1946 [1929]: 108); Tzvetan Todorov similarly implies it in observing that "we have no need to follow the detective's ingenious logic to discover the killer--we need merely refer to the much simpler law of the author of murder mysteries" (Todorov 1977 [1971]: 86). As Dennis Porter notes,criminal and detective "stand in relation to each other as a problem maker to a problem solver and thus repeat inside the novel the relationship that exists between author and reader" (Porter 1981: 88). The analogy insists on the author's being a type of the criminal. (341, my emphasis)

   Eco and Sebeok maintain that, "What makes Sherlock Holmes so successful at detection is not that he never guesses but that he guesses so well" (22). But these "detections" by Holmes strike much more deeply to the reader because they are excellent examples of the way in which Peirce maintains we know any "truths," make any discoveries about our world. As Peirce observed:

"...according to the doctrine of chances it would be practically impossible for any being, by pure chance to guess the cause of any phenomenon," [so he therefor surmises that there can be] "no reasonable doubt that man's mind, having been developed under the influence of the laws of nature, for that reason naturally thinks somewhat after nature's pattern" (Peirce 1929:269). [Thence] "...it is evident that unless man had had some inward light tending to make his guesses...much more often true than they would be by mere chance, the human race would long ago have been extirpated for its utter incapacity in the struggles of existence..." (Ms. 692) Eco and Sebeok 17, all emphases mine)

   Thus, Holmes is a reinforcement for us of our belief in our ability to understand and interpret and derive truth itself. He epitomizes our own potential to make sense out of it all. By solving his cases, he symbolizes our power to solve our own "case," the potential to solve -- or at least make inroads of understanding and progress toward solution of -- the greatest of mysteries. In an essay included in Eco and Sebeok's book, Gian Paolo Caprettini considers the detective story to be a "universe of clues" (135). This is exactly the parallel that explains one appeal of the Holmes stories, for our existence outside the world of the text is clearly within another and more intricate clue-filled universe.

   The most obvious and most simplistic -- albeit perhaps the most accurate -- explanation of the Holmes canon's great appeal is the assertion that Doyle was a master storyteller who understood the essentials both of narrative and of the human soul. He was one of those few who could quite put it into words, one of those writers who had the potential to -- as Walt Whitman wrote in "Song of Myself" -- "...act as the tongue of you [the reader], tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosened."

   In The Strand Magazine for June of 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle contributed a short piece entitled "How I Made My List" which was a sidebar to the competition the magazine had announced in which readers were asked to name their dozen favorite Sherlock Holmes stories, the winner(s) to be those who came closest to Doyle's own favorites. There are several interesting points we might derive from this short note concerning Doyle's own beliefs about the qualities of his stories. ⁵

   Doyle includes "The Final Problem," "A Scandal in Bohemia," and "The Empty House" in the top six of his favorite dozen (after listing "The Speckled Band" as his favorite). Thus, Doyle includes "the only foe who ever really extended Holmes [Moriarty, "The Final Problem"],"Also, I think the first story should go in ["A Scandal in Bohemia" with "The Woman," Irene Adler], as it opened the path for the others, and as it has more female interest than is usual, and also "the story which essays the difficult task of explaining away the alleged death of Holmes ["The Empty House"]." So Doyle includes the important stories which begin, seemingly end, and begin again the Holmes series.

   Doyle then selects some stories because of what he calls, "dramatic quality," "high diplomacy and intrigue," "dramatic moment," and "historical touch" in choosing the others of his dozen "favorites." All of these criteria are interesting in that they represent what reader's and critics, then and now, commonly acknowledge to be among Doyle's great appeals.

   He adds, "Whatever their merit -- and I make no claim for that -- they are as good as I could make them" (Doyle and McDiarmid, xx-xxi). And this is the way they have been received.

   Interestingly, the poll of readers in 1927, and subsequent ratings in 1944 and 1954 showed great agreement between reader's estimations and Doyle's estimations. This, I contend, is clear indication that Doyle had a good insight and a true index as to what was most appealing about his stories. They were crafted to please -- and they succeeded.

   Julian Symons also notes another index to what, I believe, should be the estimation of the quality of the stories -- aside from continuing fame and admiration -- namely, their "re-readability":

What matters is that the twenty best of the sixty short stories can be read again and again[Rereadableness] with pleasure for particular details, ...for particularly felicitous turns of phrase andneat pieces of characterization, and for the zest with which the tales are told. Of those who wrote crime stories in Conan Doyle's lifetime only G.K. Chesterton came within measurable distance of him, and this was because Chesterton, like Doyle, was primarily concerned not with planning a puzzle but with telling a tale. (Symons 29, my emphases)

I would argue that his real distinctiveness lies in his development of the "series" mode which is only rudimentary in his predecessors. Poe's three Dupin stories certainly suggest the possibility of an infinite series of further cases, but he takes it no further, and Gaboriau's five loosely linked novels featuring Tabaret and Lecoq do not induce the same sense of insistent formulaic repetition as the extended short story series which was really Doyle's invention. (Priestman 314)

"...considering these various journals with their disconnected stories, it had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attentlon of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine." (Doyle, Memoirs 95)

   The formulaic nature of much imaginative fiction -- certainly of the detective story -- has been much maligned by the advocates of "serious literature." But the fact remains that formulaity is an ancient and often integral element of much of the world's great literature. Indeed, it could be successfully argued that all literature is formulaic and that the various motifs and types of stories are finite; that genres are defined by patterned elements.

   The genre-definitive formulae and conventions of the classical detective pattern -- the Poe/Doyle or Dupin/Holmes Detective Story -- have been the subject of sporadic study since H. Douglas Thomson's Masters of Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story (1931), the first book in English on the history and aesthetics of the type. Most scholars have seen a distinct pattern, defined by Poe and refined [and I will contend -- perfected -- by Doyle.

   Formulaic structure is not merely a handy device to make the poet's or author's task easier, as C.S. Lewis says, " The language must be familiar as well as expected" (34) -- often, as with Sophocles play goers, the story is known, it is the skill at unwinding the tale with specific moving lines that is the art of poetry--of eliciting responses from the audience.

   I will argue that all genres are formulaic to a degree, all dependent on adherence to or extension of established convention. Furthermore, this is true of both form and content, both structure and substance. Readers come to expect certain conventionalities and tend to gravitate toward certain types of art according to personal tasts. Readers seek both continuity and freshness in their reading of favorite genres. Finding the expected both gratifies expectations and proves to them that they are perceptive. Finding the new and variant adds, if you will permit me, the "spice" of reading.

   Sayers also points out that, while [as Doyle himself freely admits] Holmes owes a great debt to Dupin [Doyle to Poe], Holmes is the perfection of things only begun with Poe's detective formula. Holmes is a better follower of detail, a man of action as well as thought, a "master of the epigram," an enricher of the language. Watson is a well-defined person compared to the formula original, the no-name narrator of the Dupin stories. (in Winks 70-72).

   In his important study, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, John Cawelti discusses the importance of formulae to both culture and literary art. Cawelti maintains that:

Formulas are cultural products and in turn presumably have some sort of influence on culture because they become conventional ways of representing and relating certain images, symbols, themes, and myths. The process through which formulas develop, change, and give way to other formulas is a kind of cultural evolution with survival through audience selection. (20, my emphasis)

   Cawelti argues that "When we have successfully defined a formula we have isolated at least one basis for the popularity of a large number of works" (21).

   Later, he writes:

What, then, can be said of the cultural functions of formulaic literature? I think we can assume thatformulas become collective cultural products because they successfully articulate a pattern of fantasy that is at least acceptable to if not preferred by the cultural groups who enjoy them. Formulas enable the members of a group to share the same fantasies. Literary patterns that do not perform these functions do not become formulas.... Therefore, allowing for a certain degree of inertia in the process, the production of formulas is largely dependent on audience response. (34, my emphases)

1. Formula stories affirm existing interests and attitudes by presenting an imaginary world that is alligned with these interests and attitudes.... By confirming existing definitions of the world, literaryformulas help to maintain a cultures ongoing concensus about the nature of reality and morality....

2. Formulas resolve tensions and ambiguities resulting from the conflicting interests of different groups within the culture or from ambiguous attitudes toward particular values....

3. Formulas enable the audience to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to experience in a carefully controlled way the possibility of stepping across this boundary....

4. Finally, literary formulas assist in the process of assimilating changes in values to traditional imaginative constructs.... (36-7, my emphasis)

   But what is the Holmes Formula?

   Ronald Knox sees the classic Holmes story formula following the same strict division into formulaic parts as the classical rhetorical delivery, according to an eleven part movement:

1) invariably present, is "the Prooimion, a homely Baker Street scene, with invaluable personal touches, and sometimes a demonstration by the detective";

   2) almost always present, is "the Exegesis ...the client's statement of the case, followed by..."

   3) almost always present, "the Ichneusis, or personal investigation, often including the famous floor- walk on hands and knees. Nos. 4, 5, and 6 are less necessary: they include

   4) "the Anaskeue, or refutation on its own merits of the official theory of Scotland Yard,

   5) "the first Promenusis (exoterike) which gives a few stray hints to police, which they never adopt,and

   6) "the second Promenusis (esoterike), which adumbrates the true course of the investigation to Watson alone ...

   7) "is the Exetasis, or further following up of the trail, including the cross-questioning of relatives, dependents, etc. of the corpse (if there is one), visits to the Record Office, and various investigations in an assumed character.

   8) "the Anagnorisis, in which the criminal is caught or exposed...,"

   9) "the second Exegesis, ...that is to say the criminal's confession,

   10) "the Metamenusis, in which Holmes describes what his clues were and how he followed them, and

   11) "the Epilogos, sometimes comprised in a single sentence, invariable, and often contains a gnome or quotation from some standard author." (in Shreffler 94-95, my emphases)

"Let me call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

   "The dog did nothing at all in the night-time."

   "That was the curious incident," said Sherlock Holmes.

"I was following you, of course."

   "Following me? I saw nobody."

   "That is what you must expect to see when I am following you," said Sherlock Holmes.

   I will also maintain that stock figures and formulae are perfect for eliciting stock responses from the reader. This is not a far-removed notion from [and may subsume] Eliot's famous concept of the "objective correlative." If we do not have stock responses upon which writers may call, why then do we have stock and generic names for them: Anger, Sorrow, Happiness, Jealousy, Elation, Astonishment, and so forth.

   C.S. Lewis noted what he saw as a decline in logical ability and the preference of the particular to the universal and notes the difference between the pretence of a response and the organization of a response--many actions are premeditated, yes, but genuine and true in import and not deceitful.

   The point is, that if the poet can conjure up any sort of real response in a work of the imagination, he has at least partly succeeded in an artistic sense. Like a painter blending stark colors on a palate, the so-called "stock" responses can be blended into infinitely various shades of subtlety and complexitity by the reorganization of the primary material by the true artist in any art. All colors come from the primaries. As Tolkien has noted about artistic creativity, man is the:

"Sub- creator, the refracted Light
Through whom is splintered from a single white
To many hues, and endlessly combined
In living shapes that move from mind to mind
....
We still make by the laws in which we're made " (74).

   But what happens when a follower of tradition enlarges upon a genre is necessarily a blend of the old with the new, often a metamorphosis of the original into a larger and more pleasing shape. Doyle perfects what Poe had begun. Holmes epitomizes what Dupin had only exemplified. As Symons writes: "Conan Doyle acknowledged his debts, particularly to Poe, but like Shakespeare he transformed everything he borrowed" (21, my emphasis).

   Joseph Wood Krutch points out in his "Only a Detective Story" that:

Two arguments are sometimes advanced to prove that the detective story must be sub-literary: its authors are sometimes very prolific; and the stories themselves "follow a formula." But neither of these arguments will hold water. Copious productivity has often been one of the most striking characteristics of the great writers of fiction.... As for "following a formula," it would be more accurate to say that certain conventions tend to be followed, and it would certainly be pertinent to ask whether this fact is as damning as it is sometimes assumed to be. No inconsiderable part of the great literature of the world has been written within the limitations of an established tradition, and so written not because the authors lacked originality but because the acceptance of a tradition and with it certain fixed themes and methods seems to release rather then stifle the effective working of the imagination. (in Winks 42).

   As Monseignor Knox perceptively notes in the introduction to his half-serious, half- satirical [of criticism itself] "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes":

If there is anything pleasant in life, it is doing what we aren't meant to do. If there is anything pleasant in criticism, it is finding out what we aren't meant to find out. It is the method by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental.... There is ...a special fascination in applying this method to Sherlock Holmes, because it is, in a sense, Holmes's own method. "It has long been an axiom of mine," he says, "that the little things are infinitely the most important." It might be the motto of his life's work. And it is, is it not, as we clergymen say, by the little things, the apparently unimportant things, that we judge a man's character. (in Shreffler 89, my emphasis).

To become a best-seller like that a writer of crime stories has to embody in the detective a set of values which the audience finds convincing, forces which they can believe will work to contain the disorders of crime. (175)

"I glanced over it," said he. "Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid." (The Sign of Four)

I have often had occasion to point out to [Watson] how superficial are his own accounts and to accuse him of pandering to popular taste instead of confining himself rigidly to facts and figures. "Try it yourself, Holmes!" he has retorted, and I am compelled to admit that, having taken my pen in my hand, I do begin to realise that the matter must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader. ("The Blanched Soldier," emphasis added)

...the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who quard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates.... The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight errantry (5-6, my emphasis).

   This is one key point regarding the immediate and widespread popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories: the association—perhaps unknowingly, but nonetheless correctly identified by G.K. Chesterton—of the commonly held beliefs of his fellow countrymen in the rule and protection of law, the fight against chaos, the establishment of "civilization" of the British Empire. The British indeed saw themselves as "the unsleeping sentinels" who guarded the outposts of the world. Empire-building was done in the name of morality (the Christian mission), order (British governmental efficiency), and protection (Kipling's "far-flung battle line").

   William Bolitho said of Holmes, "He is more than a book. He is the spirit of a town and a time" (in Haycraft, Murder 57). Another this location of the stories in a "town" as well as a "time" is significant. This important source of appeal is noted by Chesterton in his vision of the detective story as the romance for modern times and the romance of the rising and developing city. Chesterton maintains:

Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious the detective story is certainly the 'Iliad.' ...in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland, ...in the course of that incalculable journey the casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship. The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively signalling the meaning of the mystery...[Chesterton continues] "A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol--a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card" (Chesterton 4, my emphasis)

"A rude, popular literature of the romantic possibilities of the modern city was bound to arise. It has arisen in the popular detective stories, as rough and refreshing as the ballads of Robin Hood" (Chesterton 5).

"It was the combination in Holmes of the great thinker with the man of action that appealed to his first readers, near the end of the nineteenth century. Their own lives were humdrum and intensely respectable [on the surface, it might be argued]. They longed for romance and excitement, and found them in the Holmes stories, together with the reassuring thought that one of the great intellects of the world was on their side, opposed to the forces of crime" (Symons 24).

...the Holmes stories are in a way the distillation of romantic literature: romantic literature brought to a special eminence by the injection of a non-romantic element. Holmes is what he is because of the counterpoint between the character of cold logical reasoner and the romantic remoteness of this character from the ordinary run of fictional heroes. This produces a transformed or revived romance which, after the exaggerations of the popular Victorian melodrama, proved to be a much needed refreshment for the devotee of light reading. (42)

1) dangerous adventure, 2) the marvellous and mysterious, 3) the cult of titanic and more than life-size character, 4) indulgence in anti-natural and abnormal moods, 5) eqoism and subjectivity, 6) a revolt against convention and any given 'civilisation,' and 7) sensibility to natural objects of a solemn and enthusiastic kind (87).

   Doyle's descriptions of his settings possess the stirring and evocative qualities of romance. As Routley points out (45), vivid depictions of the weather often begin the Holmes stories. In "The Golden Pince-Nez" we have the introductory :

It was a wild, tempestuous night towards the close of November ...Outside the wind howled down Baker Street, while the rain beat fiercely against the windows. It was strange here in the very depths of the town, with ten miles of man's handiwork on every side of us, to feel the iron grip of nature, and to be conscious that to those huge elemental forces all London was no more than the molehills that dot the fields.

It was in the latter days of September, and the equinoctial gales had set in with exceptional force. All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beat against the windows, so that even here, in the heart of great, hand-made London, we were forced to raise our minds for an instant from the routine of life, and to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilization, like untamed beasts in a cage. As evening drew in, the storm grew louder and louder, and the wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney.

   What has happened all too often in so-called "serious" literature is a sacrifice of action on the altar of import.

   As Joseph Wood Krutch maintains, "...it might be argued that a hopeless decline in the art of writing fiction began when the novelist willingly acquiesced in a distinction between the important and the interesting.... Two millenia and a half ago, Aristotle pointed out, first, that the "fable" is the most important element in a work of fiction, and, second, that the best fables are "unified" (in Winks 44-45).

   The detective story, epitomized by the Holmes sequence, follows both of these principles. It is a tale that has not lost the name of action.

   Thus, we may turn to the many aspect of adventure in the Holmes canon.

   In his interesting book, Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre, Martin Green defines, discusses, demonstrates by example, and defends what he contends are the basic varieties of the adventure genre. Interesting for our present purposes, we can see how Green's types all have applicabilities to certain and several of the stories and to typical plot elements of the Holmes stories. After identifying the form generally as including the elements of danger, the unexpected, and -- often -- the inexplicable (1-3). Green identifies the seven types as:

1) The Robinson Crusoe Story
2) The Three Musketeers Story
3) The Frontiersman Story
4) The Avenger Story
5) The Wanderer Story
6) The Sagaman Story
7) The Hunted Man Story

   Each of Green's seven types is in some way used by Doyle in the course of the Holmes stories -- most of which are called "adventures" as is the first collection of short stories.

   The Robinson Crusoe type is perhaps not clear at first. But if we consider the importance of companionship found in Friday/Watson, consider the often amazed and out-thought reaction of Friday/Watson to Crusoe/Holmes's "elementary" achievements, consider the steadfast devotion of Friday/Watson to his mentor- friend, consider their joint battle against hostile and dangerous forces, we may see the connection. We may see it also in the theme of individualism and pride in personal achievement demonstrated by both Crusoe and Holmes.

   In other ways, Holmes and Watson are the "two" musketeers, defenders of the Queen and the Empire, compatriots (in the true sense of that word) and champions of the right. They are fast friends, steadfast, loyal, and true to themselves and to their cause.

   While the Frontiersman Story is decidedly not clearly applicable to Holmes, Watson has been abroad in service in Afghanistan and has seen "three continents" as he himself declares. He has fulfilled the typical duty of the Englishman in the age of Victoria. He has served on the fringes—the frontiers—of the Empire. Additionally, many of the stories have characters—clients as well as criminals—from a great diversity of far-away places. The very first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, has a whole digressive section,"The Flower of Utah," in which we are transported by frame narrative to the American frontier and the excesses and abuses of the Mormons who have, by their misdeeds, set the revenge story in motion.

   The Avenger Story is included in the Holmes canon in this same indirect way. It is neither Holmes nor Watson who become involved in revenge, but several of the stories —including the abovementioned first—evolve from and revolve around the element of a wrong (or supposed wrong) to be righted—often by bloodshed. This is the case in The Sign of Four, "The Dancing Men," and "The Resident Patient" to name three.

   The Wanderer at first might seem the least applicable of the adventure types to the Holmes canon. There is no doubt that Holmes and Watson ramble about all of London and much of England—even travelling together as far as the Falls of Reichenbach. Furthermore, frame narratives in the stories include all sorts of wanderings and recounted adventures  Then there is the fact that there is a brief mention in "The Empty House" (in which Holmes returns from "the dead") that he had travelled widely and been as far as Tibet!   The various expeditions of Holmes and Watson to such diverse country settings as Dartmoor (The Hound of the Baskervilles) and other rural settings away from the "civilized" heart of the Empire in London are the Sherlockian equivalent of the picaresque. In "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" we have this important exchange between Watson and Holmes:

"Good heavens!" I cried. "Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?"

    "They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

    "You horrify me!"

    "But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

   With the Sagaman Story, the Holmes canon has almost nothing in common. The Victorian works of William Morris (in his heroic fantasy: Sigurd, The House of the Wolfing, etc.) and Rider Haggard (Eric, Bright-Eyes) are typical of the form as Green defines it as derived from the heroic sagas of the North. Doyle comes closest to it in The White Company, but the Sherlock Holmes stories touch it, perhaps, only in the family intriques of The Hound of the Baskervilles and "The Musgrave Ritual." Doyle saves this form of adventure for his other fictions.

   The Hunted Man Story figures into Holmesian adventure most clearly in "The Final Problem" and "The Empty House" in which Holmes is marked for death by Moriarty and Col. Moran, respectively. Another story with some elements of this might be "The Dying Detective" in which Holmes has been poisoned and must trick the poisoner into supplying the antidote. Several of Holmes's clients are hunted—often combined with the revenge motif noted above. Of course the classic novel of this type is Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps.

   What should be clear from this overview of adventure types is that Doyle was indeed writing adventure as well as detection fiction. His Holmes is far more physical and mobile than Poe's nocturnal and comparatively inactive Dupin. There is lively -- and deadly -- action in many of the Holmes stories; frequent travels and quests for adventure abound. Indeed, Holmes needs the stimuli that these adventures of mind and body provide, he yearns for the mental and physical excitement of the next interesting case -- just as his readers yearned and yearn for the vicarious near-equivalent that they provide.

   As Robert Paul maintains, we may look at Holmes not only as defender of good, and champion of justice. He sees Holmes as being a demi-god or divine figure:

There is something awesomely godlike in the character of the central figure that is conveyed to the readers. The character of Sherlock Holmes seems to be too intense, too committed, too unfailingly correct in his reasoning to be described as a personality -- or even to be regarded as human in any of the ways lesser mortals recognize humanity in themselves or in others. (57)

   This mix of the abovementioned "popular theology" and the innate sense in Doyle of the constituent elements of the mythic superhero, Paul sees as precedent to our deification and hero-worship of later fictional heroes.

   The vicarious assurance that later generations might get from Spiderman and Superman were here to be found her and first in Doyle's great detective. "It was fiction, and the public knew it, but it could still be comforting. In this way the classic tradition of the great detective, whose omniscience was revealed in the discovery of sin, and whose in fallible rationality ensured that it would be punished, was born, baptized, and flourished" (Paul 58).

   Specifically of Conan Doyle, Lambert sees the Sherlock Holmes stories as stories that "go beyond the mechanical puzzle to the creative puzzle of life" (in Winks 51). Doyle finds "enumrable variations within a precisely structured world" (52). These qualities of finding relevance to the greater "puzzles of life" and of playing variations on a successful character, plot, and theme are Doyle's crowning achievement in the stories of Sherlock Holmes.

   My final contention will be that Holmes's appeal is in no small part due to Doyle's perception -- both innate and developed -- of the essential elements of the universal mythical hero tale. Part of his popularity derives from his ability to sound resonances and common chords deep within us, within our "collective unconscious" -- or within our psyches if one prefers Freud to Jung in these matters.

   And both Holmes and Watson fit interestingly into the mythic pattern. Stories of the hero and friend -- in our case the sleuth and sidekick -- abound in the myths and legends of the world. This aspect of the stories, the motif of the "helper" on the adventurous quest joins Doyle with excellent company. His choice of Watson as helpful and subservient companion is some proof that Doyle has touched upon the universal story. We have only to list some of the important pairs in the mythic, traditional, legendary, literary, and even historical background of our culture to see the significance. Holmes and his Watson correspond to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Achilles and Patrocles, Moses and Aaron, Arthur and Lancelot, Quixote and Sancho, Johnson and Boswell, Huck and Jim, Frodo and Sam. The legend of the questing hero accompanied by the devoted friend is legion and ubiquitous and is perhaps motivated by another of our basic human needs -- the need for friendship, the need to know that we are not alone.

   Many scholars have seen remarkable similarities and consistencies—even constancies— of pattern [of formula] in both character and plot of the world's great heroic myths and legends. It can be demonstrated that Holmes as a character and his actions in the formulaic plots fit many of the criteria recognized by such mythologists as Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, and Joseph Campbell.

   As early as English anthropologist Edward Tyler's pioneering work in 1871, the similarity of hero myths has been recognized and delimited through meticulous study. Tyler observed that many mythic heros are exposed at birth, saved and nurtured by other humans or animals, and mature to become a national heroes (281-82). But beyond this, Tyler gives us an excellent foundation for comparative and methodical mythic and literary analysis with a lucid premise:

The treatment of similar myths from different regions, by arranging them in large compared groups, makes it possible to trace in mythology the operation of imaginative processes recurring with the evident regularity of mental law; and thus stories of which a single instance would have been a mere isolated curiosity, take their place among well-marked and consistent structures of the human mind. (282, my emphasis)

   It is proper to briefly summarize the important studies of the hero pattern before attributing that "well marked and consistent" pattern to the character of Sherlock Holmes and that "imaginative process" to the mind of Conan Doyle.

   In 1876, Austrian scholar Johann Georg von Hahn established his criteria for the "Aryan" hero and detailed a more elaborate "exposure and return" formula for the hero tale. This is echoed later by Joseph Campbell and others in the notion of the hero tale being an adventurous, danger-filled journey and return.  Indeed, "adventure" has the etymological sense of "going forth."

   Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp, who greatly influenced the formalist and structuralist critical stances of the later twentieth century, published his important Morphology of the Folktale in 1928 and identified consistent "dramatis personae" of the tale and plot functions which they enact, also seeing a consistent sequence of motifs and arrangement of plot incidents ⁶ also noting a successful adventure sequence of a calling and going forth and a triumphant return.

   While these early scholars observed a pattern, it remained for others to try to analyze that pattern and interpret its significance. Otto Rank in 1909 in his Myth of the Birth of the Hero studied Freudian and psychological significances to the pattern, Lord Raglan in 1928 with his study The Hero, insisted on connections of all myths to ritualistic activities, and Joseph Campbell—especially in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1956)—provides yet another clear analysis of the heroic pattern.

   A fine comparative overview of the patterns recognized by von Hahn, Rank, and Raglan appears in American folklorist Alan Dundes's "The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus" which can be found in his own collection Interpreting Folklore and in Robert A. Segal's fine collection, In Quest of the Hero (188-89). Von Hahn identifies 16 consistent motifs, Rank 12 and, Raglan an amazing 22!  Of these, there are many that relate interestingly with what we know of Sherlock Holmes.

   All three scholars agree on the royalty and demi-divinity of the parents. While we cannot go so far as this [nor did Doyle], it is interesting that Holmes's background is cloaked in mystery and we know little more than a possible descent from the artist Vernier and a general aristocratic background. Admittedly different from the ackowledged normal pattern [Oedipus, Arthur, et. al.] of abandonment or attempts on the life of the newborn hero and fostering in a far place by adoptive parents, the detectives early life is, however, never portrayed. Certainly von Hahn's point about the hero being "high spirited" may be applied to Holmes, as can Raglan's assertion that we are given "no details of childhood."

   It is interesting that Doyle decides to kill off Holmes in a far place (Reichenbach Falls) and then decides to resurrect him, because the pattern --variously emphasized by von Hahn, Rank, Raglan, Propp, and Campbell -- includes a questing journey full of danger and adventure, often accompanied by helpers on the quest, frequently out of this world to some otherworld (often through Death itself) allowing for a:

   1) "triumphant homecoming" [vonHan] ("The Empty House" or at the end of almost any one of the adventures);

   2) the "slaying of original persecutors" [von Hahn] (Moriarty), "victory over a king [of crime]"[Raglan] (Moriarty);

   3) "extraordinary [supposed] death" [von Hahn] or "meets with a mysterious death" [Raglan], "often at the top of a hill" [Raglan], "his body is not buried" [Raglan] (Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls);

   4) "achieves rank and honors" [Rank];

   5) "his children, if any, do not succeed him" [Raglan] (there are none in the stories and none outside of them except the many immitators of Holmes, none of whom are worthy —by common critical consensus—of true succession).

   Joseph Cambell defines "the monomyth" by declaring that:

The standard path of mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented by the rites of passage: separation-- initiation -- return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.

   A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." (30, my underline, italics in original)

   The argument is as follows.

   Holmes is superhuman in his powers of observation and perception. He performs amazing feats of mental adroitness. He is called forth by some summons to action. He is assisted by a helper on a journey which can only be considered a form of quest. He overcomes all obstacles and adversaries along the way. He wins a great victory, often over adversaries who are usually human monstrosities, the children of disorder, chaos, and crime. He returns home (in one instance even after seeming death, in many instances after brushes with death) to great honors and rewards, having proven that the seemingly insoluble is within the scope of human reason and endeavor.

   This going forth on a quest and triumphant return is the pattern of the archetypal journey of Life and the rites de passage of human existence. It is the yearning for mastery over—at least understanding of—our lives. Perhaps it is our yearning for immortality. It is echoed in our myths, folktales, and fiction because it is the central and essential story of our being. In the final analysis, Doyle transmutes the archetypal to the settings and symbols and significances of Victorian England, thus achieving a moving series of stories that have the power of myth upon us. Holmes becomes a superhero for the modern age. 

   1 Doyle had aspirations of surpassing Walter Scott [although he achieved a body of fiction far beyond his Scottish forbear and -- for his greatest character, if not for himself -- a name recognition far beyond anything accomplished by Scott]. Because he considered Holmes to be trivial compared to his "serious" fiction [The White Company is probably the best and best-recieved of this ilk], he decided to "kill off" Holmes. He wrote to his mother:

   I think of slaying Holmes ...+ winding him up for good + all. He takes my mind from better things" (facsimile letter in Carr, Life, plates between 148 and 149).

   His mother was greatly opposed to the idea, and replied that it would be a"beastly" thing to do. Other readers agreed.

   The demand for Holmes's reincarnation was such that it led an offer which Doyle couldn't refuse:

   A figure of such dialectic force was not easily disposed of, not even by death. In 1901 Doyle published a new Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles--not a total surrender, as he carefully set it back in time, before Holmes had died. But this wasn't enough. In 1903 Newnes offered the stunning sum of £100 a thousand words, perhaps equivalent to as much as $20,000 a story now, and so Doyle resurrected Holmes in an adventure with the glum title "The Empty House." Doyle never did rid himself of the albatross he felt Holmes to be. In later life he was a busy public man--politics, patriotism, spiritualism, individual rights were all issues he spoke about a lot. But whenever he spoke, people always wanted to know about Sherlock Holmes. (Knight 183-4)

   2 Stephen Knight has some interesting comments on this Victorian ambivalence and inconsistency: That path to disgrace and disaster is not just Doyle's concern; it is a major topic in the period. Tennyson called this process "reeling back into the beast." Others, including Doyle, talked about plunging into "the abyss," a measureless chasm where reason, self-control, respectability, the bonds that hold society together, are all loosened, even lost. This fear is so insistent because it is structurally related to the positive values of Victorian society: its evil is a reflex of Victorian good. Total self- indulgence, uncontrolled individualism, moral anarchy, they are no more than unfettered developments of the much praised Victorian, and modern, virtues of self-help, independence and the legitimate practices of acquiring money, pleasure, comfort. You've just gone too far; self-help has become helping yourself to everything. (Knight 182)

   3 Tolkien's essay was originally an Andrew Lange lecture, delivered at St.Andrews College. I believe it to be one of the best discussions of the creative imagination and the power of fiction in modern criticism. It applies to far more than fairy tales and fantasy as a fictional moder -- although those are its focus.

   4 While T.S. Eliot later denied having ever written about Doyle or Holmes, he was himself the editor of The Criterion in April of 1929, and there is no doubt that the review is bylined "T.S. Eliot." (Hall, Creator, 44-45). The short critical note is entitled "Sherlock Holmes and His Times" and begins on page 97 of that issue.

   5 In a brief promotional blurb about two of his recently published stories (from The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, the last of the collections, and now generally regarded to be inferior to the first two collections if not to all precedent collections), he comments on "The Lions Mane" in part:

   "The first of these is hampered by being told by Holmes himself, a method which I have employed only twice, as it certainly cramps the narrative." (Doyle and McDiarmid, xx).

   This is proof in Doyle's own words acknowledging the technical superiority of the Watson narrator.

   6 Important folklore texts on the use of motifs and the distinction of tale or story types are Stith Thompson's Motif Index of Folk Literature(6 vols.) and Annti Aarne's Types of the Folktale. Both are available from Indiana University Press.

   Anon. "Review of Detective Fiction" in the London Saturday Review for 5 May 1883.

   Auden, W.H. "The Guilty Vicarage." in Winks 15-24.

   Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Bollingen Series XVII (2nd ed.). Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968.

   Caprettini, Gian Paolo. "Peirce, Holmes, Popper" in Eco and Sebeok (135-153).

   Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949.

   Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977.

   Chandler, F.W. "The Literature of Crime Detection" in The Literature of Roguery. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907.

   Chesterton, G.K. "A Defence of Detective Stories" from The Defendant. London: R.B. Johnson; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902.

   Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Criticial Essays. ed. John A. Hodgson. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1994.

   Doyle, Pj and E.W. McDiarmid. The Baker Street Dozen: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Thirteen Favorite Sherlock Holmes Stories. New York: Congdon & Weed, 1989.

   Eco, Umberto and Thomas A. Sebeok, editors. The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983.

   Eliot, T.S. "The Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories: A Review." The Criterion(April 1929) in Shreffler 17-19.

   Freeman, R. Austin. "The Art of the Detective Story" orig. pub. in Nineteenth- Century and After (London), May 1924. (also in Haycraft)

   Gilbert, Elliot L. The World of Mystery Fiction: A Guide. San Diego: U of California/Del Mar, 1978.

   Green, Martin. Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991.
 

   Hall, Trevor H. Sherlock Holmes and his creator [sic]. New York: St. Martin's, 1977.

   Hall, Trevor H. Sherlock Holmes: Ten Literary Studies. New York: St. Martin's, 1969.

   Haycraft, Howard. Murder For Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1968.

   ......... The Art of the Mystery Story. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1974 [1946].

   ......... The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946. 

   Hodgson, John A., editor. Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Criticial Essays. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1994.

   Knight, Stephen. "The Case of the Great Detective." in Hodgson. orig. publ. inMeanjin 40.2 (1981): 175-85.

   Knox, Ronald A. Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes. London: Sheed and Ward, 1928 (in Shreffler 89-102).

   Krutch, Joseph Wood. "Only a Detective Story." in Winks 41-46.

   Lambert, Gavin. "The Dangerous Edge." in Winks 47-52.

   Leavis, Q.D. Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965.

   Lewis, Clive Staples. A Preface to Paradise Lost. Oxford UP, 1942.

   MacDonald, Ross. "The Writer as Detective Hero." in Winks 179-187.

   McLuhan, Marshall. "Sherlock Holmes vs. the Bureaucrat" in Shreffler 39-40.

   Nordon, Pierre. Conan Doyle: A Biography, trans. by Frances Partridge. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967.

   Paul, Robert S. Whatever Happened to Sherlock Holmes: Detective Fiction, Popular Theology, and Society. Carbondale: Sourthern Illinois UP, 1991.

   Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott. Publications of the American Folklore Society Biographical and Special Series, vol. 9. Austin: U of Texas P, 1968 [1928].

   Raglan, Lord. The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama. London: Watts & Co., 1936.

   Rank, Otto. "The Myth of the Birth of the Hero" from In Quest of the Hero, ed. Robt. A. Segal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.

   Rexroth, Kenneth. "Never As Odd Again" in Shreffler 41-43.
 
 

   Routley, Erik. The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story. London: Gollancz, 1972.

   Sayers, Dorothy L. Preface to The Omnibus of Crime. in Winds and Haycraft.

   Sebeok, Thomas A. and Jean Umiker-Sebeok. "You Know My Method," in Eco and Sebeok (11-47).

   Segal, Robert A., ed. In Quest of the Hero. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990,

   Shreffler, Philip A., editor. The Baker Street Reader: Cornerstone Writings about Sherlock Holmes. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1984.

   Steinmann, Martin. "Superordinate Genre Conventions," Poetics 10, 1981, 243-267.

   Symons, Julian. Conan Doyle: Portrait of an Artist. New York: The Mysterious Press, 1979.

   Tolkien, J.R.R. "On Faerie-stories," Tree and Leaf. New York: Houghton Mifflin,1983.

   Tyler, Edward B. Primitive Culture, 5th ed., vol. 1 (The Origins of Culture). New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958 [1871].

   Van Doren, Mark, Jacques Barzun, Rex Stout, and Elmer Davis. "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: A Radio Discussion." in Shreffler 21-31.

   von Hahn, Johann Georg. Sagwissenschaftliche Studien (Jena: Mauke, 1876), Trans. Henry Wilson in John C. Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction, London: Bell, 1888.

   Winks, Robin W., editor. Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980.

   Wrong, E.M. "Introduction" to Crime and Detection. London and New York: Oxford U Pr., 1926. (also in Haycraft).

   ......... "The Case Against the Detective Story." in Winks 161-78.