The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [10]
Holmes profits enormously by having his exploits narrated by an admirer. Nearly as well known but much less appreciated, the good Dr. Watson provides not only a contrast as the Everyman to Holmes’s Superman, he also perfectly embodies the British man in the street. Conan Doyle himself has often been thought the model for Holmes’s friend and chronicler. Like Watson, Conan Doyle was a doctor. Also like Watson, who we learn was a rugby player in his youth, Conan Doyle was an avid footballer. He was also a boxer, cricket player, and golfer. He was an all-round sportsman, and like other sportsmen, then and now, he had an uncomplicated attitude toward the world. Conan Doyle was like Watson in another way that’s scarcely believable except for the testimony of people who knew him. He was apparently as little likely to deduce something about you as Watson was. Hesketh Pearson reports a conversation Conan Doyle had with Hugh Kingsmill: “‘ Arnold Lunn is a son of Sir Henry Lunn, is he not?’ asked Conan Doyle. ‘Yes.’ ‘And you are a brother of Arnold Lunn?’ ‘Yes.’ (After a minute’s pause for reflection) ‘Then you also are a son of Sir Henry Lunn?’ ”Yes“‘ (Conan Doyle: His Life and Art, pp. 183-184). The obvious difference between Conan Doyle and Watson is that Watson did not have the capacity to invent a character like Sherlock Holmes. Generations of readers have been grateful that Arthur Conan Doyle did, and that he used that capacity to enrich our imaginations by creating a hero who reassures us that even the most baffling mysteries can be solved by reason, and who challenges us to use our powers of observation.
If you are reading these stories for the first time or renewing your acquaintance with them after decades of fond but faded memories, I urge you, as other editors of these stories have urged their readers before me, to proceed directly to the sitting room at 221B Baker Street, where you may test your detective powers against the Master’s. Come back to the following essay after you’ve finished. We’ll have much to talk about.
—Kyle Freeman
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II
When in 1893 Sherlock Holmes tumbled to his apparent death over the falls at Reichenbach in Switzerland, locked in the embrace of the sinister Professor Moriarty, readers all over the world were stunned and saddened. Letters poured in to Arthur Conan Doyle and to his publisher, the Strand Magazine, urging the revival of the beloved detective. Conan Doyle was adamant that he wouldn’t do it. “I couldn’t revive him if I would, at least not for years,” he wrote to a friend, “for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté-de-foiegras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day” (Baring-Gould, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1, p. 16; see “For Further Reading”). Then seven years later, after a young friend told him a legend from Dartmoor about a supernatural hound, Conan Doyle relented by writing The Hound of the Baskervilles. He was careful, however, to make it a reminiscence, not a resurrection, of his famous consulting detective. The story was set in 1889, two years before the Swiss misadventure. The resumption of writing about his most famous creation must have set into motion something in Conan Doyle’s soul, for in an interview quoted in the Harper’s Weekly issue of August 31, 1901, the month The Hound was first serialized, one can see his resolve starting