The big day for Sherlock fans

A Sidney Paget illustration of Sherlock

Holmes in his deerstalker cap from The

Boscombe Valley Mystery,  1891.

This Sunday marks the start of the third season of the TV series Sherlock where Sherlock Holmes will (apparently) come back from the dead after the modern adaptation of Holmes' dive over the Reichenbach Falls. Much harder to solve than the original resolution, quite a number of words have been spilled (here and there) about the possible solution. Just in case one of them is right, and if you don't like spoilers, perhaps check after the show to see if anyone nailed it!

I rewatched the last episode last night, and I don't have an answer but I saw a few things that I think were intended to be clues or perhaps that we are supposed to think are clues. A friend wondered if it might all have been a dream. I seriously doubt that such a hackneyed solution would be used -- the scripts have all been far too clever for that and have captured the essence of the Conan Doyle stories brilliantly. The closest to anything like a dream in the original stories was the poisonous fumes from the lamp in the The Adventure of the Devil's Foot where hallucinations preceded death. Besides, if the solution does not have the cleverness of the original stories, the ratings will plummet faster than Holmes did in the last episode.

So lets abandon the show now and get postmodern about everything. What is it about Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories that capture people? There has to be at least two types of answers: Why just about everybody likes them, and what drew anyone to the stories in the first place? I have given some thought to the first one. Detective stories are sometimes called "whodunits" but, having read most of the stories many times, I find that I often do not remember the perpetrator. What I remember most is how Holmes solves the problem. So I can reread some of them and still get the effect of the "whodunit". As to the second answer, it will always be personal, of course, so I can only tell you how I became a fan. I will recount that story at the end of this post.

For now, though, let's engage in a little very easy detective work about the Holmes stories. One of Holmes' hallmarks is his deerstalker hat. Why does he have such a thing? None of the stories actually mention it, but it is implied (by talk of ear flaps) in Silver Blaze, and some people have thought this might be its origin. That is not so, however, as the in the lead picture, above, Holmes is wearing a deerstalker. That story was published in 1891, and Silver Blaze was published in 1892. The latter is one of the most popular stories for the following:

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

This is very clever and true to life. My own dog barks when anyone approaches my place. Now, if one of my neighbors hears someone walking across my back garden path in the middle of the night, and my dog is not barking, then he or she -- if they had some powers of deduction, would not phone the police; they would know it was me. Tristan knows the sound of my feet on the path and never barks when I approach.

The Holmes stories illustrator, Sidney Paget,
wearing his deerstalker cap

The photo on the left depicts the illustrator Sidney Paget in his deerstalker cap, so it seems likely that Conan Doyle mentioned ear flaps after Paget had Holmes wearing such a cap in the publication of the previous year. While Conan Doyle modelled the Holmes character, to a degree, after Dr Joseph Bell, it would seem that the image of Sherlock Holmes was modelled somewhat after that of the artist, himself. Perhaps it was the illustrations that had inspired the mention of the ear flaps. I doubt that Conan Doyle had told Paget to depict Holmes in a deerstalker, and then Paget had thought "I should get one of those". Certainly, the artist's daughter did not think so.

Kettlebrook Cottages near Steep, Hampshire

(Geograph.org)

 © Copyright Martyn Pattison and licensed for

reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

The first Sherlock Holmes story I remember reading, as a boy, was The Hound of the Baskervilles, and it was behind the right-side gable window in the photograph to the right where I read it -- by gaslight at night just before I drifted off to sleep listening to the Ashford Stream gurgling past the cottage. The stream had once been called "the noisy stream", but each night it lulled me to sleep. I would awake more refreshed by sleep than I have experienced since then. The house had settled over the centuries and was absolutely silent. The beams, I was told, were taken from captured Spanish galleons and you could still see the shipwright's numbers cut into them. It was called Kettlebrook Cottage back then. Nowadays, the name has been pluralized. Would you like a quick tour? The house has been modernized since but when I was there the last renovations were in Queen Victoria's time. Gone is the hand pump above the sink and the gas lighting. Things with which Holmes would have been familiar (if he had existed).

I went there for a week's holiday with David, my best friend at that time. It was his grandmother who owned the house. We brought our bikes as the buses did not go there -- transporting them on the train from London. We also brought our fishing tackle -- nothing tasted better than the pink-fleshed trout we caught outside and had for breakfast one day. Although a ham that Mrs. Dale had got from a nearby farm came very close. She also had a netted berry garden at the side of the house and her elderberry wine was sublime. David and I also found a large, and old, bottle of cider in the cellar -- the rest of the evening is a blur. One morning, I was standing on the bank to the left of the photo with my fishing rod. A couple of young girls were standing by the fence laughing at me. I think they believed that such a narrow stream could have no fish in it -- at least big enough for breakfast. But most of them were just of perfect size. They hid in holes near the bank by tree roots and not far away was a deeper and wider pool just past the Georgian house next door. I was told that the stream was a tributary of the River Test, and we could not afford to fish there! I like to think that our trout were native, and not restocked like the Test. There was one really big trout that went by at about 10.30 every morning, we called him "Burlington Bertie" and we never managed to get him interested at all.

Shadows on the Kettlebrook Path (Geograph.org)
photo: Basher Eyre

One morning, I explored the path that went past the cottage alone. I think that David had wanted to sleep in that morning (it might have been the cider). After I had passed the back of Sir Alec Guinness' house, I came across what appeared to be a small disused quarry and I decided to climb up its face. The loose stones made it hard going and just before I got to the top I felt the ground give way beneath my feet. I decided to run to the edge. I almost made it. I came sliding down the face and landed near a large rock, relatively uninjured. As I lay there, I saw a fragment of an old and dried-out hoof fungus (Fomes fomentarius) inches from my face. I took it. It was the perfect thing to dry trout flies. I used it for quite a while afterward. Squeeze such around a trout fly for a second and the fly becomes bone-dry.

I wanted something to read in bed, and looking through Mrs. Dale's library I came across the second edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. "That book might give you nightmares!" she said, but it didn't. Instead, reading it by gaslight each night in that old house put me right back in Conan Doyle's time.  I have loved the Sherlock Holmes stories ever since and they have greatly affected the way that I think about things.