THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES
edited by Leslie S KlingerNorton (two volumes cased) £35 pp1,280
What do Sherlock Holmes and Father Christmas have in common? Answer: they make people want to believe they are real. In this luxury edition of the short stories Leslie S Klinger lists 450 active Sherlockian societies (America and Japan have the most) who meet regularly to discuss the great detective, and add to the mountain of books and articles about him. The assumption behind their activities is that Holmes and Watson actually lived (or, some maintain, are still alive) and that their adventures truly happened. When fictional characters conquer our credulity to this extent, the likelihood is that they stand for some big idea that might, we think, make the world a better place. Holmes and Father Christmas both conform to this pattern. Father Christmas is total generosity; Holmes, total intelligence.
It matters, of course, that total intelligence, as represented by Holmes, is benign and decent, and implacably at odds with the other genius in the stories, Satanic Professor Moriarty. Holmes is a democrat. He stands up for little, wronged men like the clerk Cadogan West in The Bruce-Partington Plans. He champions the young American couple in The Noble Bachelor when they incur the wrath of an English aristocrat, and he looks forward, he says, to the day when the Union Jack will be quartered with the Stars and Stripes. He curtly refuses a bribe from the mighty Duke of Holdernesse in The Priory School, and in The Three Garridebs we learn that he has turned down a knighthood.
Despite his simulated dislike of women, he is clearly highly susceptible. He loses his heart to the opera singer Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia, and behaves chivalrously with female clients, especially the pretty ones, taking tender note of the bruises left on their arms by brutal husbands or guardians. Wronging a woman is the unforgivable sin in Holmes's book. The blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton, riddled with bullets by an avenging grande dame while Holmes looks on, and the serial seducer Baron Gruner, blinded with vitriol by a cast-off mistress whom Holmes brings to his house in The Illustrious Client, learn this to their cost. It matters, too, that Holmes's mind is not abstruse or mathematical. He notices ordinary things, as we all feel we could if we tried. He is total intelligence with a human face and a funny hat.
English readers will be able to skip at least half of Klinger's voluminous marginal notes that decode, for Americans, mysterious expressions such as "Rugby football" or "Scotland Yard". But the remainder are useful, especially when they draw attention to inaccuracies. It has always been apparent that Conan Doyle was an astonishingly careless writer. He cannot even remember from story to story what Watson's first name is, or whether his war wound was in his arm or his leg. An early essay by Stephen Jay Gould (which must be the only relevant item omitted from Klinger's colossal bibliography) pointed out that almost every reference to science in the Holmes stories is wrong. But the blunders spread far beyond that, and make some of the most famous stories literally impossible. There is no such snake as the "swamp adder", and if there were it would not be able to climb a rope or live in an unventilated safe, as the deadly reptile in The Speckled Band does. In the same story, Holmes advises Watson to arm himself with his "Eley's No 2", though Eley made ammunition not guns, and Dr Grimesby Roylott acquires a baboon from India, where there are no baboons. Roylott's stepdaughter could not possibly have got a train from Leatherhead to Waterloo and arrived at Holmes's Baker Street rooms by 7.15 am, as the story says she did. Indeed, research into Bradshaw's Railway Guides proves that there is only one correct train time in the entire Holmes canon.
Sherlockians relish such mistakes because they provide an excuse for rewriting the stories, pointing out what must have "really" happened. But, in fact, they just highlight the difference between Doyle and the folk hero he invented. Holmes was Doyle's opposite. Doyle is slapdash; Holmes, precise. Doyle became a fervent spiritualist and believed in fairies, Holmes is logical. Holmes reproves Watson for interspersing sober fact with grotesque details, but Doyle found them irresistible.The core of his stories is often a horror that defies reason. An inoffensive spinster in Croydon receives two freshly severed human ears through the post, packed in salt. A sister and her two brothers are found seated at a table where they have been playing cards, the sister dead from shock, the brothers raving mad. Holmes solves these mysteries, but he cannot disperse the hatred and terror that drive Doyle's plots.
What Holmes and his creator do share is an insatiable interest in people. The stories have one of the greatest casts of minor characters in literature. Imagine, Holmes says to Watson in A Case of Identity, being able to fly across London, removing the roofs and peering at the strange lives inside. His investigations have just that effect, and the trawl of weird individuals is phenomenal. Few are happy. They are haunted by criminal pasts, or fleeing from the tsarist police, or the Ku Klux Klan, or locked in wretched relationships. They stew in resentment like Jonas Oldacre, the Norwood Builder, or sink beneath misfortune like courteous Harry Pinner in The Stockbroker's Clerk, who asks his guests to excuse him before stepping into the next room and quietly hanging himself. We long to know more about them. What becomes of the emaciated Colonel Lysander Stark, with his deadly hydraulic press, in The Engineer's Thumb? Or Henry Baker in Doyle's matchless Christmas story The Blue Carbuncle, whose sad decline Holmes deciphers by close observation of his hat? When was pawnbroker Jabez Wilson in China, as Holmes deduces he was from the delicate pink fish tattooed on his wrist in The Red-Headed League? Doyle seems to have enjoyed teasing his readers with hints of more and more bizarre characters waiting in the wings — Parker in The Empty House, "a garrotter by trade, and a remarkable performer upon the Jew's harp", or Wilson "the notorious canary-trainer" in The Adventure of Black Peter.
With such personalities aboard, the danger was that the stories would float beyond the realm of probability altogether. Watson's flat style (avoiding fine turns of phrase and clever adjectives, as John le Carré notes in his Preface) helps to keep them realistic. For the original Strand Magazine readers, Sidney Paget's illustrations, reproduced in this edition, must have had the same effect. They are the dullest pictures ever to accompany a great narrative, consisting mostly of men in suits talking to each other. But their job was to be dull, and so make Doyle's fantastic imaginings believable. Fortunately, Klinger has also included some of the magnificent illustrations that Frederick Dorr Steele did for Collier's Magazine in America. These may just tip the balance if you are minded to give a sumptuous present to a Sherlockian near to you.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £28 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
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