Sherlock Holmes - a Decadent Detective?

It's hard to believe that a hundred and thirty years have now passed since a young doctor living in Southsea with time on his hands due to a less than thriving practice put pen to paper and introduced Sherlock Holmes to the reading public! It's also hard to believe, in the era of Sherlock and Guy Ritchie's 'bromance' movies, how outraged the mainstream media was by the publication of my short, non-explicit romance My Dearest Holmes a mere thirty years ago!

1987 marked the centenary of the first publication of A Study in Scarlet, and the bookshops were full of Holmesiana – spin-offs, scholarly analyses, scrapbooks, shiny new editions. Jeremy Brett was camping it up in the Granada TV adaptations, and I was as hooked as everyone else. I bought myself The Complete Sherlock Holmes and got stuck in to the original stories. The homoerotic subtext between Holmes and Watson, so immediately apparent to me and yet so ignored by every mainstream study of the 'Holmes Phenomenon', was inspiration enough: I set out to write 'the story behind the stories'.

A year or so later, courtesy of The Gay Men's Press, I found myself in print. I also found myself on Page Three of the Sun, next to the lady with the boobs: 'Sherlock Homo!' screamed the headline, 'He's gay in new book!' Captain Bill Mitchell, then Secretary of the Sherlock Holmes Society, was positively apoplectic: 'Just because two chaps share digs, doesn't mean they're queer!' 'So dangerous, this urge to update the past!' warned A N Wilson in a page-long Daily Mail rant, complete with illustration of an outraged-looking pair of geriatric old buffers in tweeds. How dare I interfere, I was asked, with Conan Doyle's original representation of the relationship between Holmes and Watson? What gave me the right to present them as potential lovers? Doyle, I was assured, must be turning in his grave.

Well, if he is, I thought, it's more likely to be because his iconic creation has been well and truly interfered with already by the twentieth-century media. The healthy, square-jawed hero striding purposefully around London with pipe clenched between his teeth beloved by film makers from the 1930s onwards bears no more relation to Doyle's languid, ennui-ridden, cocaine-using original than his senile, slow-witted sidekick does to the handsome, soldierly, energetic Dr Watson of the Canon. I found myself driven to question and explore, if only for my own satisfaction, how the character of Sherlock Holmes would have been viewed by his contemporaries, in his own late Victorian context. What would The Strand's readership have made of him, and how does this differ from what we have made of him since? What sort of character did Doyle originally mean to present to the world, and what conclusions did he expect his readers to draw about him? I wrote an essay entitled 'Sherlock Holmes – Some Points Of Interest', laying my out findings. Unpublished, the typescript lay mouldering in a drawer until 2015, when an updated, spruced-up version appeared in 'The Baker Street Journal' under the title I've used for this blog.

It's important to recognise, I began, that Holmes had his predecessors. As regards real-life influences, Doyle admitted to endowing him with the gifts of observation and deduction he'd observed in Dr Joseph Bell of Edinburgh University as a young medical student. But there were literary precedents too.
'You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin', says Watson in A Study in Scarlet; 'I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.' 'No doubt you think that you are complimenting me', responds Holmes; '… in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow … he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine'.
'Have you read Gaboriau's works?' asks Watson; 'Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?' Here Holmes' reaction is even more scathing: 'Lecoq was a miserable bungler … that book made me ill … I could have done it in twenty-four hours, Lecoq took six months or so!'
Obviously Doyle anticipated the comparison of his character with Auguste Dupin in Edgar Allen Poe'sThe Murders in the Rue Morgue and Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq, and wished his readers to be left in no doubt as to Holmes' superior powers (to say nothing of his superior arrogance!)
Like Dupin, Doyle's detective displays startling eccentricities. His devotion to his profession is obsessive; he pours over crime reports and agony columns, and owes the solution of many cases to the ease with which he is able to put himself in the place of the criminal, and imagine what he would do in similar circumstances. He alternates between feverish activity when engaged upon a case and black depression when he is not. He lounges on the couch in his dressing gown in the middle of the day. He uses cocaine (not at that time illegal, but certainly viewed askance by mainstream society). He smokes to excess – not only pipes and cigars, but also cigarettes, viewed at the time as a rather foppish method of consuming tobacco. He keeps this commodity in the toe of a Persian slipper! He plays the violin – an instrument traditionally favoured by the Devil (a view gleefully exploited by Holmes' hero Paganini, whose abandoned virtuosity on the instrument was viewed by many as proof of supernatural and unsavoury antecedents). He indulges in obscure chemical experiments, which ever since the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein some seventy years earlier had been regarded as rather worrying. His rooms at Baker Street, in true Bohemian fashion, are untidy, littered with papers, overflowing ashtrays and discarded syringes. He has small regard for the social niceties; indeed he 'loathes all forms of Society with his whole Bohemian soul'. He is tall, thin and pale, with dark hair and hawk-like features, piercing grey eyes, nervous, long-fingered hands; he is clean-shaven at a time when a moustache at least was de rigeuer. He is not a churchgoer; he does not even possess a Bible. What did Doyle mean to imply by all this?

By endowing him with the traditional qualities of the Victorian anti-hero – pallor and thinness, dark hair, black depressions and a drugs habit – Doyle liberates Holmes from the limits set by the respectable sphere. Readers of Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelly would have recognised aspects of the Gothic villain who was still sending a pleasurable shiver down the spine of many a late Victorian reader. And remember: the earlier stories of the Canon were written, and most of the later ones still set, in the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century – a period when the cult of Decadence was unravelling the frayed edges of Victorian society with its pursuit of social, spiritual and sexual ambiguity. Holmes is a child of the 'fin de siecle'. At the end of The Red Headed League he complains of that must-have Decadent affliction, 'ennui'; and his listless pose, so perfectly captured in Sidney Paget's original illustrations, is reminiscent of that champion of Decadence, Oscar Wilde.

Bearing in mind that The Sign of Four was commissioned from Doyle by Lippincotts magazine at the same time as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, it's interesting to compare the opening paragraphs of these stories.
'Dorian Gray' opens with Lord Henry Wotton lying on 'a divan of Persian saddle-bags' conversing with Basil Hallward 'through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whirls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette'. He throws himself down upon the sofa and complains of ennui.
'The Sign of Four' opens with the famous description of Holmes taking cocaine: 'With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.'
Watson, the medical man, tries to remonstrate with him: 'Which is it today?' I asked, 'morphine or cocaine?' He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. 'It is cocaine', he said, 'a seven per cent solution. Would you care to try it?'

Mention of Watson leads, of course, to the all-important relationship between the great detective and his Boswell; but this is a subject for another blog! Watch this space, and I'll catch up with you all again in a couple of weeks …