The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [14]
Conan Doyle conceived of his six stories as a series, to be run in sequence. Serialized works in the past had been chapters from a single continuous work, either a novel or a long story. But Conan Doyle felt that serializing long stories in magazines was a mistake, because a reader who missed one issue would lose interest. He saw that if he made each story independent, “while each retained a connecting link with the one before and the one that was to come by means of its leading characters,” it didn’t matter if a reader missed an episode or two. “In this respect, I was a revolutionist, and I think I may fairly lay claim to the credit of being the inaugurator of a system which has since been worked by others with no little success” (Tit-Bits, December 15, 1900).
The first Strand stories were published in 1891. It took Conan Doyle about a week to write each one. You may have noticed that “The Red-headed League,” published second, mentions a character who appears in “A Case of Identity,” which was published third. They were written in reverse order, but through either some slipup at the magazine or a calculation that “The Red-headed League” was the stronger story and the fledgling magazine needed a hit as soon as possible, they were published out of order. The first few stories were a smashing success, and the editors begged Conan Doyle for another set of six in October 1891. Already tiring of his detective, Conan Doyle refused. In a letter to his mother he wrote that he was not inclined to continue the series, but as a lark would ask the publisher for £50 per story, however long or short he wanted to make them, and see what they would say to that. To his surprise the Strand agreed in a flash.
While writing the next six stories, Conan Doyle wrote in a letter to his mother on November 11, 1891, “I think of slaying Holmes in the sixth & winding him up for good & all. He takes my mind from better things.” Madame Conan Doyle urged him not to do anything so silly. She even sent a suggestion for the plot of a new Holmes story. Dutiful son that he was, Conan Doyle modified her plot suggestion into “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” and let his creation live to detect another day.
The Holmes juggernaut got an important boost from the policy of the Strand to include illustrations with all its stories. To illustrate the Holmes stories, the editor chose Sidney Paget (1860-1908), probably by mistake; the editor had actually wanted his brother, Walter, who was already famous for illustrations in The Illustrated London News. Sidney, however, rose to the challenge. He based his drawings of Holmes on the features of his brother, Walter. He also included a couple of things not mentioned in the stories that nonetheless have come to be emblematic of the great detective. In his drawings for “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” and again in “Silver Blaze,” Paget drew Holmes wearing a deerstalker cap and a traveling cape. In fact, these items don’t exist in the stories; Paget added them because he himself liked to wear them. His drawings were very popular. They defined the image the English public associated with the name Sherlock Holmes. Later Ellie Norwood, who first portrayed Holmes in film, was popular to some degree because he resembled the Paget drawings.
Another feature strongly associated with Holmes that isn’t in the books is from America. The pipe with the long, curved stem that many of us think of as always drooping from Holmes’s jaw was unknown in England before the turn of the century. It first appeared because the American actor William Gillette, who made a career of playing Holmes on the American stage and then later in seven films, couldn’t keep a straight pipe in his mouth when he talked. He had better luck with a curved stem, so it was substituted for the kind Conan Doyle had described. Gillette’s films were popular, and his likeness was the one used by the American illustrator Frederic Steele for the Holmes stories published in Collier’s Magazine , so the image stuck.
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