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