Holmes, Sweet Holmes
Murchison, William
"Holmes, Sweet Holmes" A certain distinguished beekeeper on the Sussex Downs finds himself achieving celebrity once again. Not that Mr. Sherlock Holmes has been dwelling in obscurity, even at the age of something...
...What has happened to our great men...
...The canon itself is being extensively reprinted these days...
...Out of a sense of justice, he sometimes lets confessed murderers off scot-free, realizing that, as it were, thevictim had it coming to him...
...For all his reasoning power—in which he is exceeded only by his sedentary brother Mycroft—Holmes is no mere calculating machine...
...but the chances are slim...
...A most untidy housekeeper he is: once he decorated his wall with a "VR" done in bullet pock marks...
...Think of poor Sir Henry Baskerville, trudging across the moor as the hound pads after him...
...More yet: It is a success...
...Deduction follows upon deduction...
...Far the better the ordinary, the average, which is lessfrightening, more predictable...
...There seem to be so few around...
...All very well for Holmes and Watson to be waiting with revolvers, but they might have mentioned this to Sir Henry...
...Put aside Solzhenitsyn, and whom do we have...
...But Holmes, like so many great men, is more human than lesser men...
...And of course there* is his drug-taking...
...no bumbler, as Nigel Bruce portrayed him—never escapes Holmes...
...Holmes' opinion of Freud, though unrecorded, is likely a low one, the good doctor having been too much hung up on the subliminal, not the factual...
...And it should not be forgotten that Holmes is no woman-hater, really...
...Greatness is suspect...
...He is used to this sort of depreciation...
...He is shockingly ignorant on certain topics...
...He does not care for women...
...There is Bond with his karate chops, for example...
...If he does not choose to marry, he chooses to admire the remarkable Irene Adler, who has soundly foxed him in the matter of the king of Bohemia...
...Readers are apt to find Holmes something of a straight-laced misogynist...
...If so, then perhaps we turn to Holmes, a man vain enough to know he was great, great enough to justify his vanity...
...but then he smokes his pipe or plays his violin...
...The greatest detective who ever lived would be a minor civil servant, subject to displacement under the quota system...
...It was simply that the dog did nothing...
...In Nicholas Meyer's novel, The Seven-and-a-Half Per Cent Solution, he finds himself working hand-in-glove with Sigmund Freud...
...The bullet Holmes saw her bestow on Milverton was merely blackmailers' wages...
...No late-Victorian Bond is Sherlock Holmes...
...Nor can Holmes be happy that in John Gardner's The Return of Moriarty it is not Holmes but a lowly Scotland Yard inspector—not Lestrade or Gregson, fortunately—who foils the Napoleon of crime...
...Soon inspiration dawns...
...What a fool he has been not to see...
...Yes, a great man, Sherlock Holmes...
...Nor is there anything irresolute or indecisive about Holmes once he has resolved his problem...
...So soon as Holmes emerged, Harold Wilson, the master egalitarian, would probably nationalize the private investigation profession...
...Holmes shrugs, but only a little wearily...
...But deep down, do we not really fret, however fitfully, at the loss of our great men...
...Bond!—a brute and a voluptuary...
...His sharp and burnished mind cuts cerebral Gordian knots at nearly a single stroke...
...he knows exactly what to do...
...How, simple it all seems now...
...Doyle learned them from observing a medical professor of his...
...Well, of course...
...Which makes him sort of a musty relic, like some overstuffed ottoman dragged down from the attic, yet a relic on which to gaze is to be strengthened, stirred...
...Holmes had noticed...
...He is ofttimes indolent, not a little vain...
...Such a man as we seldom encounter these days...
...The man can examine a battered hat or a walking stick and deduce everything worth knowing about its owner...
...Alas, he has a penchant for keeping his design from everyone else...
...Ability is what counts with him...
...Vonnegut instead of Hardy...
...Not necessarily an unusual fate for great men these days, but hardly one that his admirers will wish for Sherlock Holmes...
...Here was Charles August Milverton, the king of blackmail, threatening a perfectly blameless lady over some silly, indiscreet love letters...
...What was so curious about the behavior of the dog in the night...
...Omne ignotum pro magnifico...
...He did not know, until Watson told him, that the earth travels around the sun, the matter being one of complete indifference to the investigator of crime...
...He is in charge...
...But only consider the spate of Holmesiana which lately has deluged the bookstores—a Sherlock Holmes scrapbook, a novel about the villainous Moriarty, even an American novelist's presumptuous attempt to supplement "the canon ' (as Sherlockians call it) of sixty A. Conan Doyle short stories and novelettes...
...he will not marry "lest I bias my judgment...
...Indeed he has...
...Harold Wilson instead of Churchill...
...It would be pleasant to coax him out of retirement in Sussex...
...Sherlock Holmes has been dwelling in obscurity, even at the age of something like 120...
...Of course Holmes is not at all your overbearing Victorian aristocrat...
...The hunter is in full cry, the quarry as good as caught...
...Lord Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion, the aristocratic brain children of Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, respectively, are infinitely his social superiors...
...The heroes, the idols of the present age—such heroes and idols as there are—are mostly physical types...
...And there is more: William Gillette's ancient stage play, Sherlock Holmes, has been revived on Broadway...
...Holmes' methods are hardly spurious...
...If Holmes has his faults, he has his amiable side...
...Lestrade would become Home Secretary...
...Holmes is pure intellect...
...Now and then, of course, Holmes is stumped...
...One couldn't venture to guess that Holmes is uniformly pleased with the character of the attention being focused on him...
...Over supper, Holmes explains his train of reasoning...
...That is no doubt a major reason for his recrudescent popularity...
...I have my methods, Watson," says Holmes...
...Still, such attentions gratify plenty of Sherlockians, who do not like to see upstarts like James Bond commanding center stage...
...and to his ability there seems no limit...
...He is soundly middle-class...
...no computer, spitting out flawless conclusion from flawless data...
...Carl Albert instead of Taft...
...How different from Holmes, who is not just an ascetic, not just a keen reasoner—no, he is a great man...
...It worries even Watson, who obviously knows a thing or two about drugs...
...But that is not to say he is in any way preposterous...
...Warhol instead of Monet...
...But Holmes is unintimidated by rank or wealth...
...We are hellbent on equality, we denizens of the late twentieth century...
...That which escapes Watson—who is an intelligent layman...
Vol. 8 • May 1975 • No. 8
