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from despair. We see in this story that Conan Doyle chose to make Holmes fulfill functions other than just avenging crimes. Here he takes on the role of priest, hearing a last confession before giving a secular absolution. By the time of this story, Conan Doyle was nearly seventy. Like most people, he grew sadder as he grew older. In addition to the usual woes that afflict us all, he suffered a few not everyone experiences. He lost his first wife in 1906 after a long illness, his son and his brother to World War I, and he saw the devastation that war wrought on a whole generation of young English men. He may well have come to think that gallivanting around the countryside peering at footprints and carriage tracks was ultimately a trivial pursuit for his fictional creature. If he were to continue to write stories about Holmes, Conan Doyle wanted him to serve some higher purpose than just putting away the odd criminal or two. Unfortunately, paragons of virtue rarely make good reading. While Holmes is out saving souls, he is not performing the feats most readers have come to expect of him, and many are left cold by this change of mission.

The Case Book brings to an end the development of a forty-year relationship between two of the most oddly paired characters in fiction. Most of that time the personal relationship between Holmes and Watson was unstated. Victorian men weren’t accustomed to express emotion, especially about their male friends. Before his resurrection, Holmes scarcely noticed Watson, save to chide him for placing the wrong emphasis on his accounts, or for bungling a reconnaissance on which Holmes has sent him, or for completely misdeducing some obvious string of inferences. We’ve seen a couple of scenes where that pattern was broken by a show of feeling by Holmes, but the ultimate epiphany of Holmes’s emotion for Watson occurs in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” after Watson has been shot by Killer Evans. The passage bears repeating in full.

Then my friend’s wiry arms were round me, and he was leading me to a chair.

“You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!”

It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation (p. 580).

This is the closest Holmes ever comes to expressing love for another human being. It’s all the more touching because he has been so aloof from ordinary human passions for most of his life. When we imagine him in his retirement, in proud isolation on Sussex Downs, tending his bees, creatures who are the very emblem of passionless, mechanical activity, do we not feel, mixed with our admiration, a hint of sorrow that his life has been largely untouched by love, that his remarkable personality never found its soul mate? Of course looking at the imagined life of a fictional character this way is clearly out of bounds for ordinary literary criticism. There’s always been something special about Sherlock Holmes, however, that has inspired this sort of speculation into his unwritten life. Early on, admiring readers and critics adopted the convention that Holmes was a real person, who never died. Naturally this is tongue in cheek, as we know that Holmes never really lived, and if he had, he’d be 150 years old now, a bit long for even his iron constitution to hold out. But in another sense, those admirers are right: Sherlock Holmes is still alive, and always will be as long as human affairs have mysteries at their center, and readers feel the impulse to identify with heroes who are braver, bolder, and more clever than they are.

Kyle Freeman, a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast for many years, earned two graduate degrees in English literature from Columbia University, where his major was twentieth-century British literature. He has seen almost all the