THE MYSTERY OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
The originator of the books and TV series, writer David Pirie, describes the background to the series and the eternal mystery that surrounds the creation of Sherlock Holmes...
I always loved Sherlock Holmes. I wasn't a nit-picking devotee or anything. As a child, I just loved and devoured the atmosphere, the flavour, the world. A world that even when I read it was nearly a century old . Other great literary characters are loved of course. But what is it with Holmes that he has such an uncanny reality about him?
Plenty of other characters from his period have reached immortality. But so far as I know nobody actually writes to them. Their fictional homes have not become museums, surrounded by shops selling memorabilia, they are not the subject of innumerable discussion groups, who dwell endlessly on their habits and tastes. Nobody, that is, thinks of them as real.
Of course people argue that Sherlock Holmes has appeared real, because he was the first detective. But that is simply not true. Other skilled literary detectives preceded him, many more came after. But not one ever achieved anything like this kind of Elvis effect.
Reading the stories undoubtedly brings us closer to the truth, for they have an odd and unexpected intensity. There is a genuine emotion in Doyle's portrayal of Holmes and Watson, which explains some of its impact, but makes the creative origins of this emotion even more mysterious.
And Doyle's own account of its origins, written years after the event, is little help at all. There is no question that Doyle suppressed many aspects of his personal biography: his writing about his early life is often far more revealing for what it does not say than what it does. His account of the origin of Holmes is thin and uninformative, as unconvincing and bowdlerized in its way as Mary Shelley's account of the origins of Frankenstein.
THE MAKING OF HOLMES
But facts are now slowly emerging which shed a remarkable light on the making of the detective, and on Doyle's early creative life. These facts which make it easy to see why he was so anxious to distance himself from it in later accounts. Many secrets were kept to the end, and most of them were obviously extremely painful. It was on the basis of these secrets that I developed the idea of what became the first film and part of the first book.
Though based on fact with many factual characters, it was partly fiction. But as a result of my research I have, incidentally, begun to wonder if the answer to the Holmes puzzle has not been staring us in the face the whole time. It may at first seem startling. But could it be that Holmes seems real because, in certain respects we are only just starting to appreciate, he was real?
Of course it has long been known that the figure of Holmes was based on the charismatic teacher and physician Joseph Bell who taught Doyle in Edinburgh university from 1878. One of the few letters of Doyle's in the public domain was written to Bell and acknowledges the debt openly: 'It is certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes'.
This is about the only serious autobiographical clue to the detective's origins we have. Even now, the life of Doyle remains shrouded in a fog quite as thick as the ones that swirl through his stories. There have been many recent biographers, but not a single one of them has had access to Doyle's own papers and letters. For most of this century, these have been locked away, unseen by anyone at all because of some mysterious court case,which shows no sign of progressing. As a result the evidence is coming with painful slowness.
DOYLE'S FAMILY
It was always known that the Doyle family existed in great poverty and must have struggled to send Arthur through medical school. Charles Doyle's decline into alcoholism and madness was reaching a peak when Arthur returned from Catholic boarding school to live at home in Edinburgh in 1876. All this was bad enough for him but what may have been even harder was that Bryan Waller, a supercilious doctor--and by most contemporary accounts a vain, egotistical and arrogant man--seems at the same time to have moved both into the family home and the affections of Doyle's mother.
Doyle's only vague allusion to the whole chapter in his autobiography is as mysterious as it is hostile. 'My mother,' he wrote 'had adopted the device of sharing a large house, which may have eased her in some ways, but was disastrous in others.'
And so it was that Doyle started his early years at Edinburgh medical school with a father, who was deranged and whose condition had to be kept secret and now, in the same house, an arrogant older rival for his mother's affection, a man who had succeeded at the profession he was only just beginning. He seems at first to have been deeply alienated from the university. But at this critical time, when Doyle by his own admission, was feeling 'wild, full-blooded and a trifle reckless', someone else appeared: a teacher opposite in every way to these other troublesome 'fathers' And his name was Joseph Bell.
JOSEPH BELL
There is no question that this charismatic, skilled, caring, and (from all the photos) glamorous scientific pioneer, dazzled Doyle. Just like Holmes, Bell was the kind of teacher who could wow his audience, with tricks of observation and memory. He would startle his students by pronouncing the profession and origins of some patient even down to the colour of the two horses he drove. But he was also a remarkable scientist, a skilled doctor a social reformer and (as we shall see) a detective.
The relationship was cemented when, to Doyle's astonishment, Bell picked him out as the clerk, who would assist him in all practical duties. Given the combustible emotional circumstances, is it any surprise that something major came out this? In that awful time, Doyle had found not merely a teacher and an inspiration but a father-figure, just as surely as Watson found a guide and companion in Baker Street. Little wonder Watson often seems to regard Holmes as a haven of sanity and honour in a maelstrom of cruelty. Or that Robert Louis Stevenson when he saw the first story wrote excitedly to Doyle at once: 'Is this not my old friend Joe Bell'.
BELL AS DETECTIVE
But does the 'reality' of Holmes go even further?In 1878, the year Doyle met Bell and became his clerk, a notorious murderer called Eugene Chantrelle was hanged in Edinburgh for the murder of his wife. Bell's crucial part in this case is recorded in several memoirs by Bell's own pupils. And indeed as he stepped onto the gallows Chantrelle singled out Joseph Bell for his success in solving the crime. It seems inconceivable Doyle was unaware of this, for Bell's work as a forensic expert and his assistance to the police was widely known. Other doctors and pupils of the man allude to this work in several places, as Bell even did himself (though with a certain reluctance) in public, always making it clear that the detail of his employment for the crown must remain confidential.
Given these facts, and the letters Doyle wrote to Bell actually asking for material for the Holmes stories, it is quite extraordinary that Doyle studiously refrained from making any such connection in public, even while happily acknowledging Bell as his model for Holmes. The silence is suggestive, and I can see only two possible reasons for it.
One is that Doyle wished to diminish the connection. But if this was the case why so easily and publicly acknowledge it? The other is that he knew of Bell's criminal work but did not discuss it at all because, like so much else in these Victorian lives, he regarded it as confidential. Bell certainly appears to have wanted this to be the case.
If this is true then Bell may have supplied Doyle with some of the actual details of criminal investigation he later put to such good use. There are even rumours that a manuscript exists in which the young Doyle wrote accounts of some of Bell's work in criminal and forensic investigation. If such a book ever saw the light of day it would indeed be that holy grail, something that was once thought to be quite impossible: 'the true stories of Sherlock Holmes'.