Contrary to romantic assumption, the grave of Sherlock Holmes lies not at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, site of the detective’s fatal battle with his nemesis Professor Moriarty, the “Napoleon of crime”. Even Holmes’s biographer, the ever-faithful Dr Watson, took for granted the claim in The Final Problem that “deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam will lie for all time the foremost champion of the law of (his) generation.”
In reality, though, and not a lot of people know this, Holmes lies forever in Dean cemetery in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge, in the lowering shadow not of Alpine crags but the headquarters of the Balfour Beattie construction firm on the other side of the perimeter wall. In Sherlockian parlance, we could call this The Curious Case of the Forgotten Corpse.
It’s been a busy year for fans of the detective and his creator, the formidable Victorian polymath Arthur Conan Doyle, including within it The Vexatious Problem of the Controversial Auction and The Enduring Mystery of the Garrotted Scholar. They first saw £1m of irreplaceable Doylean documents dispersed among private hands; the second involved the death of the world’s most eminent Conan Doyle expert in mysterious circumstances. It culminated this week with speculation that at last Conan Doyle might be honoured with a statue in Edinburgh, the city of his birth.
Meanwhile, the incumbency of Holmes in his cemetery comes as news to Mark, its foreman, who had previously assumed his most famous resident to be the man who invented the steam hammer. There are 70,000 graves in the cemetery, so locating that of the great inquisitor proves a real three-pipe problem. He pulls from the office shelves a series of vast and ancient ledgers and begins cross-referencing names with the spaces in which they might possibly be. And then Mark makes a discovery. “Aha! ” he says, in a tone not dissimilar to that heard when Holmes solved the case of the Politician, the Lighthouse and the Trained Cormorant, “Section AA, plot 139”.
At this point, and in the interests of the veracity it was Holmes’s life’s work to establish, it should be pointed out that the grave in Dean cemetery is not actually that of Sherlock Holmes at all. It is the grave of Dr Joseph Bell, 1837-1911, former professor of medicine at Edinburgh University. To some, though, the difference is academic.
Bell, to be sure, never lived at 221b Baker Street, never wore a deerstalker or Inverness cape, never played the violin badly or (as far as we can know) injected himself with a 7% solution of cocaine when his nerves were bad. But in all the ways that matter, particularly his habit of deducting the truth from the tiniest of clues, Bell effectively was Holmes, or became Holmes, through the deathless art of Conan Doyle, Bell’s most famous pupil.
And, ultimately, it is on Conan Doyle that the obscurity of Bell’s grave reflects most. The author is a strangely neglected figure in the Scottish literary pantheon, a scribbled footnote after Burns, Stevenson and Scott. The Conan Doyle buff finds thin pickings in Edinburgh, amounting to a plaque on a childhood home at 23 George Square and a statue of Holmes opposite the house in which the author was born. “When I visited Edinburgh,” says Charles Foley, great-nephew of Conan Doyle and executor of his literary estate, “I was disappointed by the lack of acknowledgement for my great-uncle. There really isn’t very much at all.”
The National Library of Scotland admits it holds little in the way of original Conan Doyle papers, as does The Writer’s Museum, while the university holds only his medical thesis. In 2001 McDonald’s proposed opening a restaurant in a cottage Conan Doyle occupied on Gilmerton Road. The scheme was refused by the council though the house remains derelict. Another Conan Doyle residence is now a public toilet. The only lot coming to Scotland from the recent (and controversial) sale of Conan Doyle papers at Christie’s — a cache of letters from Conan Doyle supporting the convicted murderer Oscar Slater — was purchased by the library service in Glasgow. Most painfully of all, the finest collection of Holmes memorabilia in private hands went not to Edinburgh but Portsmouth, where Conan Doyle first practised as a doctor between 1882 and 1890 and where he wrote his first two Holmes books, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.
The collection — including a full-size replica of Holmes’s room in 221b Baker Street and the £100,000 volume in which the detective made his first appearance — was bequeathed by Richard Lancelyn Green, a prominent Doylean whose mysterious death in March proved the culmination of a series of long and acrimonious feuds around Conan Doyle and his literary legacy.
Back in Edinburgh, meanwhile, the Conan Doyle flag continues to be flown more innocently by the eponymous pub on York Place, opposite the writer’s birthplace. From the window, a portrait of Conan Doyle’s beneficent features gazes down Broughton Street. Inside, a reasonable stab has been made at approximating the study of a Victorian gentleman, though the effect is rather diminished by the customers’ long-standing habit of abstracting Conan Doyle memorabilia from the walls, including skis and cricket bats.
The most vocal advocate of Conan Doyle in the city is Owen Dudley Edwards, reader in history at Edinburgh University and author of The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of Arthur Conan Doyle. Edwards is adamant that the author is insufficiently recognised. “I’d never wish to make the city fathers feel they could relax when it came to commemorating Conan Doyle,” he says. “Nobody could do enough to honour this man. As with JM Barrie and Peter Pan, we are in danger of forgetting Sherlock Holmes ever had an author at all.”
Edwards proposes official recognition of other Conan Doyle homes in Sciennes Hill Place, Longdale Terrace and Argyle Park Terrace, and perhaps also a bust in the National Library, along with increased teaching of Conan Doyle’s work in schools.
“There’s no suggestion that Richard Lancelyn Green slighted Edinburgh in sending his collection to Portsmouth,” he says. “It’s a perfectly sensible choice — Doyle worked in Portsmouth for eight years, he wrote the first Holmes stories there, he played in the football team there.
