Case 003: The Persistence of Sherlock Holmes

I didn't read my first Sherlock Holmes story until I was twelve years old. By that age I had exhausted the library's collection of Nancy Drew and was knee-deep in Agatha Christie. I had, of course, seen a plethora of references to the character and adaptations in other media. I had a vague understanding of who the character was, a fuzzy caricature wearing a deerstalker cap, heavily inspired by that episode of Wishbone I'd seen at some point. As a class assignment, we read The Speckled Band, and while I enjoyed the story I didn't immediately consume every story I could get my hands on. Leisurely, I read a couple more over the next few years, and then I read A Study in Scarlet. And that's when I got hooked.

I was fascinated. In the opening pages of Sherlock Holmes's introduction, he is known to have been "beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick.... to verify how far bruises may be produced after death" (Doyle, A Study in Scarlet). I was used to detectives solving difficult cases and only explaining their brilliant deductions after the fact. I was not used to them beating corpses in the name of science. Nor was I used to them mouthing off to Scotland Yard, frequenting opium dens, or winning boxing matches in between cases.   

When it came time to write my final essay for my high school British Literature course, I was delighted to find The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on the approved reading list. I couldn't wait to read analysis on Doyle's eccentric consulting detective. I immersed myself in research about Holmes's personality and the effects of various drugs to explain Holmes's behavior. Even after the paper was turned in, I continued reading and rereading the canon stories, and I kept coming back to the same question: Why do we like Sherlock Holmes?

I was baffled. I loved Sherlock Holmes. And I had no idea why. Objectively, he's not a particularly likable character. He's a condescending, selfish drug addict. He investigates crimes - and sometimes just unusual happenings that aren't criminal at all - to help uncover the culprit, but any societal benefit is just a byproduct of his need to stimulate his mind. He has no allegiance to any external system of ethics or legality. He appoints himself as judge in most cases, particularly when he is engaged privately, and not by the police.

These thoughts stayed with me until eventually, I was assigned Milton's Paradise Lost in one of my college courses. As we discussed the characterization of Milton's Satan, I thought, "This is Sherlock Holmes." Here was a story told from the perspective of the devil himself, and Milton made him sympathetic, if not likable, to the audience. The university offered a thesis program for honors students, and I immediately picked up the informational packet, even though I wouldn't be eligible to enroll for another two years. I made an appointment with my professor, and we discussed Satan, Sherlock Holmes, and the literary archetype for the Victorian antihero.

Over the next few years, I devoured all the research the university library had to offer, not just about Holmes, but about Milton and the antihero archetype. I was also frantically consuming the recent media adaptations of Sherlock Holmes -- the BBC series Sherlock, the Guy Ritchie films starring Robert Downey Jr., the Frogwares videogame series (which had recently expanded from PC to consoles as well), and even House, M.D. Yes, House, M.D. Don't worry, I'll get to that.

So by the time I was ready to write my thesis, I had come up with a more complicated question. Not just Why do we like Sherlock Holmes? but Why do we keep adapting Sherlock Holmes, and what does each of these media formats offer to the narrative of Sherlock Holmes? And so I wrote. And I wrote. Each time I had a class assignment that could reasonably be pitched as a contribution to my Sherlock Holmes project, I wrote about Sherlock Holmes. 

In graduate school I used my coursework to play with the idea of transforming my project into a multimedia interactive format. I developed a prototype but didn't do anything more with it for a while. Last year I started working on a complete website dedicated to publishing my project in a way that would allow readers to see adaptations alongside discussions of them, or easily click on a citation to view information about the source, or even browse a gallery of sources referenced in my project. 

And so, on International Sherlock Holmes Day, and the birthday I share with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I am publishing the project that started with a twelve-year-old, Wishbone, and a class assignment to read The Speckled Band.