The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [6]
In one of his best cases he said to a civilian patient: ‘Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.’ ‘Aye, Sir.’ ‘Not long discharged?’ ‘No, Sir.’ ‘A Highland regiment?’ ‘Aye, Sir.’ ‘A non-com officer?’ ‘Aye, Sir.’ ‘Stationed at Barbados?’ ‘Aye, Sir.’ ‘You see, gentlemen,’ he would explain, ‘the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is Elephantiasis, which is West Indian, and not British’ (p. 330).
That could well be Sherlock Holmes interrogating a visitor at 221B Baker Street. Bell’s reasoning powers made so strong an impression on Conan Doyle that he turned to those memories when he decided to write a detective novel. When the first twelve stories were published in book form as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle asked Bell if he might dedicate them to him. Robert Louis Stevenson, who also knew Bell, wrote to congratulate Conan Doyle on “your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” At the end of the letter Stevenson asks, “Only one thing troubles me: can this be my old friend Joe Bell?”
Dr. Bell wasn’t the only model, though. Some aspects of Holmes were derived from George Budd, a fellow medical student Conan Doyle met on the school’s rugby team. Brilliant but mercurial, Budd could talk expansively on subject after subject, then lapse into moody silence. The life of the party at one moment, he could turn violent the next. The two were friends at medical school, but they lost track of one another when Budd moved away after graduation in 1881. In 1882, after Conan Doyle had spent some postgraduate time at sea, Budd summoned him to Plymouth, England, to start a practice there.
Budd had made a tremendous success of his practice by flouting every rule of medical etiquette. He yelled at his patients, pushed some against walls, cursed others, told many they ate too much, drank too much, and slept too much. Sometimes Budd refused even to see them, proclaiming to an anxious clutch in the waiting room that he was going to spend the day in the country. Despite this bizarre behavior, or perhaps because of it, his consulting services were enormously popular. No doubt a contributing reason was that he charged no fee for his diagnoses. It was no coincidence, however, that Budd prescribed medicine for every patient. Their pills could be conveniently purchased down the hall, where Mrs. Budd typed up the labels for the bottles and took the patients’ money. Budd earned a fortune from this dubious practice. He made a point each day on his way to the bank to carry his earnings in a big bag through the doctors’ quarter of the city, jingling it as he went, just to rankle his fellow practitioners. He was convinced that the rules of medical ethics were a con game to keep young, energetic doctors subservient to their elders.
Conan Doyle was both appalled and amused by this display. When Budd offered to take him on as an assistant, however, he accepted. Budd furnished Conan Doyle with a consulting room in his clinic, then flooded him with advice on how to run his life. One suggestion was to start a novel that very day. Although he had already published one short story, Conan Doyle hadn’t considered writing anything as ambitious as a novel. But because he had no patients as yet and thus plenty of time on his hands, he gave it a try.
There is no evidence that Sherlock Holmes was born out of this circumstance, or that Budd contributed anything more to the character than his energy, range of interests, and black moods. But he contributed something else essential that runs throughout Conan Doyle’s work. Through Budd, Conan Doyle experienced deception and betrayal for the first time. Of course Conan Doyle knew, as we all do, that people can lie and