Talking of books
A suite in
Haker Street
Henny Green
1886 was a very good year for being a Publisher, especially of fiction of the less pretentious kind. Stevenson lay in a convalescent bed in Bournemouth writing Kidnapped, Kipling began formulating Plain Tales from file Hills, while a journalist called Jerome, labouring away under the odd delusion he ,Was composing a religious tract disguised as a nistory of the Thames, somehow ended up With Three Men in a Boat. Even the cricketer-utopian Henry Hyndman, who got hunself arrested that year in Trafalgar Square, made a few waves which were eventually to evolve into the bland ripples of Wodehouse's arnith. Most vital of all, in March 1886 a ,Inedical sportsman from Southsea called uoYie wrote on a sheet of paper the words "A Study in Scarlet," and, scribbling away between patients, produced a challenger for %lock, Romeo and Robinson Crusoe. That the Sherlock Holmes industry should 15e still burgeoning nearly a century later, that PUblishers should still find the need to issue new editions, that a major theatre should be Packing them in with an indifferent Holmes melodrama, that new recordings of Holmes Should recently have been issued, that lielevision companies should transmit oPelessly passe tales on the pretext of giving as the rivals of Sherlock Holmes when the yvhole point about him was that he had none, is a
phenomenon without literary parallel.
Llearly when he began that tale the Southsea doctor touched a raw nerve, and it is Interesting that three new introductions to the latest Holmes editions* thrash around unavailingly to locate where that nerve lies. 1;-en Deighton seems to think people care a fig for the claptrap of scientific jargon, and Graham Greene is excused for the honourable Mistake of confusing Holmes's prime with his oWn. The third investigator, Hugh Greene, being currently engaged in editing interminable volumes about hacks basking in Holmes's reflected glory, and thereby debasing the ,Comage of deductive reasoning, may perhaps 'De Passed over in silence, which brings me to Illy own explanations. When literary properties survive for as long as the Holmes tales have, the chances are that the reason for their popularity has been ,changing as the waves of readership change. g is certain, for instance, that what caused The Sign of Four, A Study in Scarlet, The zpund of the Baskervilles, The Valley of 4'ear. (Murray and Cape, £1.95 each). people to queue outside 'The Strand' offices in 1901 for the next instalment of The Hound of the Baskervilles, is not what inspires publishers to print new editions in 1974.
Doyle, who detested Holmes, would no doubt have detested him even more had he lived long enough to see that Holmes endures, not for what he took out of Doyle, but because of what Doyle unwittingly put into him, for although the parlour tricks of deductive logic retain their piquancy and the pace of the narrative holds up, there is something else built into the canon which encourages its atomic-age readership.
Probably it has something to do with the infallible Quixote-Panza duet. Dickens reversed it to give the worldly wisdom to the
skinny one in Pickwick; Wodehouse varied it by making the fool in the Wooster-Jeeves
tales aware of his own foolishness, and Laurel and Hardy had the brilliant idea of making both parties to the conspiracy halfwitted. We all long to find some alter ego through whose ears the world may receive intimations of our genius, which is why so many men get married; but finding the right receiver is very difficult, which is why so many men get divorced; in the Holmes-Watson arrangement is enshrined the perfect exegetical set-up.
But the deeper reason for the continuing good health of the Great Detective is the continuing bad health of his readers, who are fascinated no end by the immutable solidity of the world Holmes and Watson inhabit, although it would be wrong to assume that.
that world is a reflection of what Doyle saw when he gazed out of the windows of 1886. As The prospect was attractive enough in the 1890s, but how much more so to the modern reader, beleaguered inside the crumbling walls of the social citadel? In what is surely the most wonderfully goofy work of scholarship
ever compiled, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (John Murray £11.00), we find, at the very end of that Herculean labour, Vincent Starrett's words: ... the Detective and the Doctor, they still live for all that love them well; in a romantic chamber of the heart; in a nostalgic country of the mind: where it is always 1895.
And as Holmes rolls off the presses, spare a thought for the unknown but so perspicacious American agent who arrived in London in 1890 looking for likely authors for Lippincott's, got Doyle to dine with him and ex
tracted from him a promise to write The Sign of Four. There was, as it happens, another guest at that Symposium of a dinner, Oscar Wilde, who agreed to write The Picture of Dorian Gray. But that, as the man from Lippincott's was delighted to discover, was quite another story.
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