Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle

Hound of the Baskervilles – An Introduction

Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle

A.P. ENGLISH LITERATURE & COMPOSITION

Archbishop MoellerHigh School, Mr. Rose

Who is Sherlock Holmes?

Sherlock Holmes, the world's first consulting detective, was bornJanuary 6, 1854, the descendant of country squires. He spent two yearsat university before taking rooms in Montague street around the cornerfrom the British Museum. While at university he spent the long vacationwith a friend, Victor Trevor, at Trevor's family home where Trevor’s father suggested Holmes make a profession out of his ability to observe.

It was at St. Barts' Hospital sometime during 1882 that a mutualacquaintance introduced Holmes to Dr. John H. Watson, who was later tobecome Holmes' biographer and closest friend. The two would share roomsin Baker Street throughout most of Holmes' long career, save for thosetimes that Watson was married.

Holmes investigated close to a thousand cases by 1891 when he wassupposedly milled by Professor Moriarty (the most dangerous andformidable criminal mind Holmes would ever encounter) down the falls of Reichenbach.

Resurrected in 1894, after a hiatus during which Holmes traveledthroughout Europe and Asia under various pseudonyms, Holmes returns toLondon and again takes up residence in Baker Street. He solvesmany hundreds of cases until he retires to Sussex sometime during 1903-04, where he lives out his days raising bees.

Who is Dr. John H. Watson?

Born in Hampshire, Dr. Watson is a few years older than his great friendSherlock Holmes.He had studied medicine at the University of London Medical Schooland then proceeded through a course at Netley to later become anassistant army surgeon attached to the 5th Northumberland fusiliers.

During the Second Afghan War he was attached to the Berkshires withwhom he served at the Battle of Maiwand. Watson was wounded in the shoulder. He certainly would have been captured as well if not

for his faithful orderly, Murray, who threw him onto a packhorse andled it back to the British lines.

During his recovery he was struck down with disease and his healthbecame bad enough for him to be returned to England.

Needing to economize, Watson mentions to an acquaintance that he,Watson, desired to share expenses with another. Stamford introduced Watson to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. They entered into partnership sharinglodgings at 221B Baker Street. This hailed the beginning of a friendship that would last forever.

Who Are Other Sherlock Holmes Characters?

• Mrs. Hudson: his landlady
• Irene Adler: the only woman Holmes ever had any affection for
• Professor Moriarty: his nemesis, responsible for the death of Sherlock Holmes
• Mycroft Holmes: his brother
• Inspector Lestrade: a Scotland Yard detective
• Wiggins: head of the band of street urchins Holmes called the Baker Street Irregulars

Who is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 22nd, 1859, Arthur ConanDoyle was the son of watercolor artist Charles Altmont Doyleand Mary Foley Doyle, and the nephew of Dickie Doyle, famous for his political cartoons in Punch magazine. Arthur was schooled atStonyhurst, a Jesuit preparatory school, and at Feldkirch inAustria, and received his Doctor of Medicine degree fromEdinburgh University. It was here that two events occurredwhich would shape his life.He met Dr. Joseph Bell, whoastounded students with his ability to deduce details of patients'lives from minute clues in their appearance; and here that hewrote "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley," his first published work(he was paid three guineas by Chamber's Journal for it).

Aftergraduation, while trying to build up his medical practice inSouthsea, Doyle occupied his abundant free time andaugmented his income by writing more short stories. He conceived the idea of a series of tales with a central character, modeled on Dr. Bell and his skill at logic anddeduction. Sherlock Holmes was born.

From the publication of "A Study in Scarlet" in Beeton'sChristmas Annual of 1887, Holmes and Watson were a runawayhit. Doyle wrote four full-length novels and 56 short storiesaround these characters, as well as historical novels ("TheWhite Company, Micah Clarke"), science fiction (the ProfessorChallenger tales), humorous sketches ("Brigadier Gerard") andtravel stories.

The Holmes stories placed Conan Doyle at the center of a cult but, partly because he worried he would be forever typecast as the author of Holmes, and because he badly wanted recognition for his historical novels, he decided to kill off Holmes. Against his mother’s advice, he devised Holmes’ death alongside his old adversary, Professor Moriarty, in “The Final Problem” (published in The Strand, 1893). Conan Doyle simply recorded in his diary “Killed Holmes,” not realizing that his creation was already indestructible.

After Holmes’ demise, his fans expressed their disappointment by writing angry letters and wearing black armbands, and The Strand lost 20,000 subscribers. Conan Doyle had hoped he was free, but public demand was insistent and, in 1902, he published The Hound of the Baskervilles, supposedly an overlooked Holmes adventure from before his death. But then an offer (with considerable financial incentive) to revive his detective, arrived from Colliers Magazine in the United States.

It was too good to turn down. In the first story, “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Conan Doyle revealed that Holmes had not died at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland with Moriarty, and by 1905, a collection of thirteen new stories, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, appeared after serialization in the Strand Magazine and Colliers. The return was partly prompted by the success and return of the gentleman criminal, Raffles, who had been created by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law E.W.WillieHornung.

There were plenty of Holmes imitators by this time, and perhaps Conan Doyle wasn't entirely comfortable with the thought that his detectives throne was in danger of being usurped. For various reasons, he continued to write Holmes stories for another quarter of a century.

As a writer, Doyle was ahead of his time in many ways. To theusual whizz-bang dazzle of science fiction, he added concern forthe ethical use of technology (as Gene Roddenberry did with Star Trek). Sherlock Holmes described fingerprinting and theuse of plaster casts for footprints and tire tracks before they werecommon police procedure. Doyle even anticipated Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October in "Danger," a tale of German submarinespublished just before the First World War. When "Danger!" was

published, the public ridiculed Doyle's idea of a German submarineblockade, but when the war came, the blockade happened, and acaptured U-Boat officer told the press that Doyle's novel was usedas a textbook in the German U-Boat school. There was a publicoutcry, and Doyle was almost tried for treason; fortunately, clearerheads prevailed.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a kind of Renaissance Man; a doctor (inaddition to his general practice and later specialization inophthalmology, he served as ship's surgeon on a whaler and in aSouth African field hospital during the Boer War), a sportsman whoexcelled at games from boxing to billiards, a member of the RoyalAutomobile Club's racing team which won the Price Henry Race in 1911, an inventor, a lecturer, a dramatist, poet and author, aninvestigator of real-life crimes (he freed George Edalji from jail byexposing a racially motivated frame-up), a leader of men whoorganized volunteers during the war, a hard-headed business man,a spiritualist (which put him at odds with his good friend HarryHoudini, who exposed false mediums), and a loving husband andfather. He was knighted in 1902 for exposing the scandalous andinhuman treatment of natives and prisoners in the Boer War withhis book "The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct."

At the age of 71, his health began to fail. On July 7th, 1930,Conan Doyle sat with his family in the rose garden of his house atWindlesham, looked out over the South Downs, and went to theafterlife in which he so fervently believed. On his headstone iscarved a simple testimonial to the kind of man that he was

-- "Steel True, Blade Straight."

Sherlock Holmes’ Methods

Originally inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s French detective, C. AugusteDupin, Conan Doyle set Holmes up in the cozy, cluttered interior of 221B Baker Street, London. The close friend and anonymous narrator of Poe stories became John H. Watson MD, a retired army doctor who shares Holmes apartment. Holmes’ intellectual prowess, his scientific attention to detail, and his skilful deductive powers are offset by his eccentricities (cigars in the coal scuttle, tobacco in the toe of a Persian slipper) and his sense of alienation from the rest of humanity. He is a sufferer from spleen and ennui, who alleviates the deadly boredom of existence with injections of cocaine and morphine; an aesthete, a music lover and amateur violinist who, during the intervals in the action, will drag the philistine Watson to concert hall and opera house.

Holmes's primary intellectual detection method is deductive reasoning of the solution to a crime. "From a drop of water," he writes, "a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other." Holmes stories often begin with a bravura display of his talent for "deduction." (as with Dr. Mortimer’s walking stick in Hound of the Baskervilles.) It is of some interest to logicians and those interested in logic to try to analyze just what Holmes is doing when he performs his deduction. Holmesian deduction appears to consist primarily of drawing inferences based on either straightforward practical principles—which are the result of careful inductive study, such as Holmes's study of different kinds of cigar ashes or inference to the best explanation. One quote often heard from Holmes is, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Holmes's straightforward practical principles are generally of the form, "If 'p', then 'q'," where 'p' is observed evidence and 'q' is what the evidence indicates. But there are also, as may be observed in the following example, intermediate principles. In "A Scandal in Bohemia" Holmes deduces that Watson had got very wet lately and that he had "a most clumsy and careless servant girl." When Watson, in amazement, asks how Holmes knows this, Holmes answers:

It is simplicity itself ... My eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavery.

In this case, Holmes employed several connected principles:

• If leather on the side of a shoe is scored by several parallel cuts, it was caused by someone who scraped around the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud.
• If a London doctor's shoes are scraped to remove crusted mud, the person who so scraped them is the doctor's servant girl.
• If someone cuts a shoe while scraping it to remove encrusted mud, that person is clumsy and careless.
• If someone's shoes had encrusted mud on them, then they are likely to have been worn by him in the rain, when it is likely he became very wet.

By applying such principles in an obvious way (using repeated applications of modus ponens), Holmes is able to infer from his observation that "the sides of Watson's shoes are scored by several parallel cuts" that: "Watson's servant girl is clumsy and careless" and "Watson has been very wet lately and has been out in vile weather."

Deductive reasoning allows Holmes to impressively reveal a stranger's occupation, such as a Retired Sergeant of Marines in A Study in Scarlet; a former ship's carpenter turned pawnbroker in "The Red-Headed League"; and a billiard-marker and a retired artillery NCO in "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter." Similarly, by studying inanimate objects, Holmes is able to make astonishingly detailed deductions about their owners, including Watson's pocket-watch in "The Sign of the Four" as well as a Dr. Mortimer’s walking stick in Hound of the Baskervilles.

Yet Doyle is careful not to present Holmes as infallible—a central theme in “The Adventure of the Yellow Face.” At the end of the tale a sobered Holmes tells Watson, “If it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.”

Inspiration for Hound of the Baskervilles

In March of 1901 Conan Doyle vacationed in Norfolk with his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson. While the men played golf and relaxed they spoke of many things. Robinson told Conan Doyle about growing up in Devon and the local legends. Conan Doyle was especially interested in the tales of ghostly hounds that roamed Dartmoor.

Conan Doyle knew that the ghostly hound would make a good starting point for a novel. However he needed a strong central character. He decided that it made no sense to create a new character when he already had one in Sherlock Holmes. While he wasn't ready to bring Holmes back to life, Conan Doyle decided that he would write a novel that happened in an earlier time period. A time period before the incident at Reichenbach Falls. The knowledge that the public would go wild over another Sherlock Holmes novel must have also helped Conan Doyle in his decision. Later that month Robinson took Conan Doyle on a tour of Dartmoor. They visited Brook Manor, Grimspound, Child's Tomb and Fox Tor Mires.

There were some initial thoughts that Robinson would actually coauthor the book. However in the end, most experts agree that the book was written by Conan Doyle. However he did dedicate the book to Robinson and probably paid him something for his troubles.

Did the Baskerville family really exist? Harry Baskerville, a driver employed by Robinson, was thought to have provided the inspiration for the name. In fact, Robinson gave Baskerville a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles that was inscribed, "To Harry Baskerville, with apologies for using the name."

The Hound of the Baskervilles was first published in The Strand magazine in August of 1901. The public was indeed ready to hear more about Sherlock Holmes. The magazine's circulation instantly rose by thirty thousand copies. The novel that Conan Doyle described as "a real creeper" was an instant success.

1 Sherlock HolmesMr. Rose