Sherlock Homes Who Is Sherlock

Sherlock Homes

Who is Sherlock Holmes: The Greatest Mystery of All

Why does Sherlock Holmes still compel readers today? The "Adventures of the Red-Headed League" was originally penned as a popular newspaper detective story, printed in the London Strand magazine. Its author, Arthur Conan Doyle, did not mean it to be an eternal work of fiction, to live for all time. However, as with perhaps all detective stories, it is the character of Sherlock Holmes that continues to amuse and delight, despite the fact that the story is very much of its era. Holmes is cold, logical, and scientific, in a way that is still idealized today as the 'ideal' detective or sleuth. Holmes is supremely intellectual, and always one step ahead of the reader and Dr. Watson. What seems strange and impossible, such as a red-headed man named Jabez Wilson forced to endlessly copy the encyclopedia by hand in return for pay, becomes comprehensible after Holmes mulls it over as a "three-pipe problem."

Holmes is not simply the model for a modern detective in his scientific rigor. He disdains emotion in a fashion that we might all like to emulate, in some of our messier emotional moments. He is also charmingly eccentric, such as when he loses himself in a violin concert. Holmes is not only a crack sleuth but also a talented musician, and when he hears classical music he is a sight of "happiness, gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music, while his gently smiling face and his languid, dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes, the sleuth-hound, Holmes the relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive. In his singular character the dual nature alternately asserted itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and mood which occasionally predominated in him." As unrealistic as some of the plots and phrases of these 19th century Holmes stories might be, like the metaphor of the 'Napoleon of Crime,' and the symbolic image of a Moriarty as spider controlling a web of criminal activity and touching nothing in "The Final Problem," Holmes' psychologically complex dual nature, which neither the reader nor his best friend Dr. Watson can entirely explain, causes the reader to return again and again to the tales.

Detective stories may seem to be about plot more than any other work of genre fiction, but given the popularity of detective series, perhaps this is an error -- character, more than revelation might be the real reason readers return again and again to read about Holmes in action. By seeing Holmes deduce and explain the strangeness of something like "The Red-Headed League" or try to chase after Professor Moriarty, the reader seeks tantalizing clues about why Holmes is so driven, with a single-minded intensity, to solve crime, rather than to establish friendships, seek out love, or experience any other of the pleasures that complicate most of our lives.