FOREWORD

In 1946, almost 70 years ago, Edgar W. Smith pondered in an editorial in the Baker Street Journal, “What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?” Nearly 130 years after Holmes first appeared, subsequently embedded in the hearts of millions, it is appropriate to reconsider this question.

First, Smith wrote, “we love the time in which he lived.” When Smith wrote these words, that golden era, when it was “always 1895,” was only a half-century earlier, and well within the living memory of Smith (who was born in 1894) and his contemporary readers. Now it is an alien country, as mythical and foreign as the era of the Roman empire, the battlefields of Napoleon, or the court of Elizabeth I. While it may be true that we do love the Victorian era, we love it as we love the Old West or the countryside of Arthur’s Camelot, only as it exists in our imaginations, not in our memories. Even Smith knew that the late nineteenth century was no paradise but instead a time of great changes, for people of color, for women, and for the middle class. In the world of 1946, just righting itself from the cataclysms of war and the horrors of the Holocaust, how could Smith justify a love for a character as out-of-date as Sherlock Holmes?

Smith’s answer was emblematic of 1946, when the world could still believe in heroes: “[Holmes] stands before us as a symbol,” he wrote, “a symbol…of all that we are not but ever would be… We see him as the fine expression of our urge to trample evil and to set aright the wrongs with which the world is plagued…. [He] is the personification of something in us that we have lost or never had… And the time and place and all the great events are near and dear to us not because our memories call them forth in pure nostalgia, but because they are a part of us today. That is the Sherlock Holmes we love—the Holmes implicit and eternal in ourselves.”

Those were stirring words for a world on the brink of peace and prosperity. The Allies had fought a terrible war, the last “good” war, and the madmen were defeated, by common men and women—heroes—from many lands. But if Holmes was only a hero, as Smith implied, he failed us, for he did not slay the dragon, at the Reichenbach Falls or later. Seventy years later, we can see that the spirit of Moriarty did not die in a bunker in Berlin or in a palace in Tokyo. His hand is clear after 1946, in the wars in which so many died, in Korea, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Even today, his minions continue to foment crime, corruption, hunger, and poverty, in a world with factions no longer easily divided into good or evil.

And yet we return to Holmes. Smith was right in saying that Holmes appeals to us for “all that we are not but ever would be.” But it is not Holmes’s heroism that calls to us, for he was not a hero (or perhaps not just a hero). Rather, he was an individual, in an age when individuality seemed lost in the teeming masses of the Empire. Heroic or not, Holmes always did the right thing. Some have pointed out that he was arrogant, cold, high-handed, misogynistic, unfeeling, manipulative—and these are difficult charges to deny. Yet those are all merely facets of his single-minded character, unswerving in his pursuit of justice, without regard for the conventions of law or society. Holmes is what we dream of and yet hesitate to be: a man apart from the crowd. While he had only a single friend, Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes was very much a part of his world, as comfortable with the grooms and street urchins as with the bankers and nobility. In an age bound by rules and rituals for social circumstances of every sort, even death, Sherlock Holmes followed only his own rules.

The mystery writer Raymond Chandler, writing many years after the death of Conan Doyle, had little liking for the Holmes stories. His ideal detective, he said, lived up to a simple credo: “[D]own these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” Yet these words could not more accurately describe Holmes. Unafraid, untarnished, focused on his fixed goal, Holmes inspires all of us to believe that we need not be heroes; rather, we can make the world a better place by doing the right thing.

Leslie S. Klinger