The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [454]
The brute sank into a chair aghast. The other author did not turn a hair.
To A. Conan Doyle,
From his friend, J. M. BARRIE.
Dangerous Ground
This parody, the best of all the numerous parodies, may be taken as an example, not only of the author’s wit, but of his debonair courage, for it was written immediately after our joint failure, which at the moment was a bitter thought for both of us. There is, indeed, nothing more miserable than a theatrical failure, for you feel how many others who have backed you have been affected. It was, I am glad to say, my only experience of it, and I have no doubt that Barrie could say the same.
Before I leave the subject of the many impersonations of Holmes, I may say that all of them, and all the drawings, are very unlike my own original idea of the man. I saw him as very tall—“over six feet, but so excessively lean that he seemed considerably taller,” said A Study in Scarlet. He had, as I imagined him, a thin razorlike face, with a great hawk‘s-bill of a nose, and two small eyes, set close together on either side of it. Such was my conception. It chanced, however, that poor Arthur Paget, who, before his premature death, drew all the original pictures, had a younger brother whose name, I think, was Harold, who served him as a model. The handsome Harold took the place of the more powerful but uglier Sherlock, and, perhaps from the point of view of my lady readers, it was as well. The stage has followed the type set up by the pictures.
People have often asked me whether I knew the end of a Holmes story before I started it. Of course I did. One could not possibly steer a course if one did not know one’s destination. The first thing is to get your idea. We will suppose that this idea is that a woman, as in the last story, is sus-p ected of biting a wound in her child, when she was really sucking that wound for fear of poison injected by some one else. Having got that key idea, one’s next task is to conceal it and lay emphasis upon everything which can make for a different explanation. Holmes, however, can see all the fallacies of the alternatives, and arrives more or less dramatically at the true solution by steps which he can describe and justify.
He shows his powers by what the South Americans now call “Sher locholmitos,” which means clever little deductions, which often have nothing to do with the matter in hand, but impress the reader with a general sense of power. The same effect is gained by his offhand allusion to other cases. Heaven knows how many titles I have thrown about in a casual way, and how many readers have begged me to satisfy their curiosity as to “Rigoletto and His Abominable Wife,” “The Adventure of the Tired Captain,” or “The Curious Experience of the Patterson Family in the Island of Uffa.” Once or twice, as in “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” which in my judgment is one of the neatest of the stories, I did actually use the title years before I wrote a story to correspond.
There are some questions concerned with particular stories which turn up periodically from every quarter of the globe. In “The Adventure of the Priory School,” Holmes remarks in his offhand way that by looking at a bicycle track on a damp moor one can say which way it is heading. I had so many remonstrances upon this point, varying from pity to anger, that I took out my bicycle and tried. I had imagined that the observations of the way in which the track of the hind wheel overlaid the track of the front one when the machine was not running dead straight would show the direction. I found that my correspondents were right and I was wrong, for this would be the same whichever way the cycle was moving. On the other hand, the real solution was much simpler, for on an undulating moor the wheels make a deeper impression uphill and a more shallow one downhill, so Holmes was justified of his wisdom after all.
Sometimes I have got upon dangerous ground, where I have