The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [7]
During his time in Budd’s clinic, Conan Doyle’s mother wrote him letters expressing her displeasure at his involvement with Budd, whom she considered an unscrupulous character. Budd apparently read them without Conan Doyle’s knowledge, and developed a bitter resentment against his friend. At some point he complained that his own practice was dwindling because of Conan Doyle. As Conan Doyle, unlike Budd, really was a man of honor, he immediately went to his office door with a hammer and pulled off his nameplate.
This display of character softened Budd’s resentment, at least for a while. He proposed to lend Conan Doyle a pound a week to help him set up a practice in Portsmouth. Once Conan Doyle moved to that city to restart his medical career, Budd reneged on the payment. He wrote to Conan Doyle, quoting what he considered slanderous passages from a letter of Conan Doyle’s mother, which he claimed the maid had found torn in pieces under the grate. This kind of back-stabbing carried on under his roof was a betrayal he couldn’t forgive, said Budd. He would have nothing more to do with Conan Doyle.
Conan Doyle was stunned. Upon thinking it over, he couldn’t remember ever tearing up any of his letters. Searching through his pockets he found the very one from which Budd had quoted. He realized Budd was lying and must have been reading his mail surreptitiously. He wrote back to say he had seen through the clumsy plot, thanking Budd for removing the only disagreement between himself and his mother by confirming her low opinion of Budd. He assured Budd that any attempt to harm him had backfired.
The incident left a haunting memory. Conan Doyle wrote later, “It was as though in the guise and dress of a man I had caught a sudden glimpse of something subhuman—of something so outside my own range of thought that I was powerless against it” (The Stark Munro Letters, p. 271). He was also powerless to explain it. Whenever he depicts some descent into the abyss of vice, it is inevitably without any insight into how a soul makes such a journey: It is always taken as merely a fact of existence.
It was a few years later, in 1886, after he had set up a mildly profitable medical practice of his own, that Conan Doyle first turned to the idea of a detective novel. In addition to his Edinburgh models, Sherlock Holmes had literary sources, too. Conan Doyle had read and admired the detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the creator of the genre, as well as the detective novels of Émile Gaboriau, whose Monsieur Lecoq solved some baffling crimes. Holmes’s methods are similar to those of Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, and the stories have a structure reminiscent of Gaboriau’s work, but his personality owes nothing to either of those Parisian detectives. And ultimately it is his personality that makes Holmes so compelling.
Just what is it about Sherlock Holmes that has captivated people for so long? It’s easy to see some of the reasons for his popularity. His intelligence, his self-assurance, his mastery of every situation, and his unerring judgment are all enormously appealing. We are also attracted by Holmes’s sense of humor. From the very first Holmes not only sprinkles the stories with his dry retorts and ironic asides, he also laughs, chuckles, smiles, and jokes throughout. This quality goes a long way toward humanizing him, making it easier to feel affection for a character whose abilities could well make him seem more machine than human.
His eccentricities add to his appeal. An unwritten rule says that every commentator must mention the tobacco he keeps in the toe end of his Persian slipper, the cigars he keeps in a coal-shuttle, and the unanswered correspondence he transfixes by a jack-knife into the very center of his wooden mantelpiece. But his odd qualities extend further than these surface details. They are really only shallow tricks that add some local color, perhaps, to his characterization,