The Art of Manliness - #590： The Creation of Sherlock Holmes

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast sherlock holmes

00:00:11.480 is one of the most widely recognized figures of literature and pop culture but how did the

00:00:15.360 creator sherlock holmes sir arthur conan doyle come up with a character who's become the universal

00:00:19.680 archetype of the independent detective in his book arthur and sherlock conan doyle and the

00:00:24.160 creation of holmes my guest today explores the biography of the fictional detective by looking

00:00:28.420 at the life of the real world author his name is michael sims and we begin our conversation with

00:00:32.560 the early life of conan doyle and his experience in medical school studying under a renowned

00:00:36.640 diagnostician who helped inspire the character of sherlock holmes michael then walks us through the

00:00:41.140 culture world of victorian england and how is the perfect environment for character like holmes to

00:00:45.340 be birthed he shows us how writers like charles dickens and edgar allen poe laid the groundwork

00:00:49.480 for detective fiction how the sherlock stories differ from theirs and how they were initially

00:00:53.100 received we then delve into the characterization of holmes and his crime-solving methodology before

00:00:57.660 ending our conversation discussing conan doyle's intense interest in spiritualism and why holmes

00:01:02.680 is such a captivating figure even in the 21st century after the show's over check out our show

00:01:07.220 notes at aom.is slash sherlock all right michael sims welcome to the show thank you very much i've

00:01:20.420 been looking forward to it so you are the author of a book called arthur and sherlock conan doyle and

00:01:25.160 the creation of holmes so what's the story behind the book why did you feel you needed to write a

00:01:29.460 biography of not only conan doyle but sherlock holmes well i felt that for most people they're very much

00:01:35.080 joined into the same story and conan doyle wrote pioneer science fiction such as the lost world

00:01:40.820 he wrote historical stuff that he himself thought was deeper and more important you'll know of course

00:01:46.240 that robert downey jr is not rushing to make movies of the white company and so sherlock holmes is

00:01:52.640 the character that caught the global imagination and is still being reinterpreted now and i wanted

00:01:58.720 to write about the origins of that character and whether i'm writing about scientists or children's

00:02:03.580 authors such as b white or whatever henry david thoreau i'm always looking at to me the the origins

00:02:10.780 of creativity and so for conan doyle what interested me most is what about his era his upbringing his own

00:02:17.500 psyche his own bent played into the creation of this iconic detective it was great fun oh yeah and

00:02:25.040 it was a lot of fun to read so let's talk about conan doyle did he have ambitions from like a young

00:02:30.400 age to be a writer or was that something that he kind of fell into as he became an adult he i don't

00:02:37.860 think as a child there's any indication that he was fantasizing about being a writer very very young

00:02:42.840 but then he discovered a certain skill for it when he was at boarding schools in austria and elsewhere

00:02:49.240 and in england at sandhurst and he was one of those kids who later talked about how he would learn to

00:02:56.740 tell stories to his classmates and stop in the shahrazad manner of at the key moment and make them give him

00:03:03.900 a snack or something you know so he learned early how freelancing works and so he then wanted to write

00:03:10.880 i think not out of grand ambitions but out of the most basic and wonderful that what led dylan thomas

00:03:18.440 and ray bradbury and many other people to write which is he wanted to live in a certain space in his

00:03:24.040 mind and he wrote the kinds of things he loved to read so he was telling stories as a young child he

00:03:30.840 didn't go into writing right away in fact he became a doctor what was that career like for him and how did

00:03:36.340 it influence him as a writer later on i think it influenced him greatly he had the this sort of

00:03:43.260 enlightenment excitement about what could be learned and how much was happening in the world in scientific

00:03:49.820 terms he was very interested in the paranormal increasingly so over the years and he famously

00:03:56.260 became an active spiritualist and he even believed in the cottingly fairies the two girls who claimed they 0.84

00:04:02.540 had seen fairies and claimed they produced photographs of them which were clearly figures cut out of a book

00:04:09.060 illustrations but he was passionate in that regard but he also at the same time had a strong

00:04:14.880 enlightenment sort of passion for evidence and science and justice and evidence-based thinking

00:04:22.400 and so he wanted to write in the fields he knew such as fields he loved such as crime and adventure

00:04:32.160 fiction but he was influenced by his own training as a doctor and then he met he famously worked under

00:04:39.160 a famous diagnostician in edinburgh who later about eight or ten years later inspired sherlock holmes

00:04:45.560 well tell us about the guy his name was dr bell right yes joseph bell and he met him

00:04:51.580 doyle met him at a perfect time in about in 1876 doyle was 17 coming home to edinburgh from boarding

00:04:59.040 schools and he was very much in search of a father figure his own father was a very sad alcoholic who was

00:05:06.340 doing the edinburgh victorian version of breaking into his children's piggy banks and in drinking

00:05:12.200 furniture polish practically he was in bad shape and doyle needed someone to turn to and to emulate and 0.90

00:05:20.860 joseph bell was a legendary diagnostician and this was an era in which diagnostics was sort of coming of age

00:05:28.420 as a profession because there was very little diagnostic technology so it had to be the physician as scientist

00:05:37.080 as detective reading the physical signs and behavior of each patient very quickly to do a quick diagnostic

00:05:44.340 tentative biography of the patient and what was going on inside the patient and so doyle saw that every day

00:05:52.000 and joseph bell was legendary then and there were other diagnosticians at the time in austria germany and

00:05:58.680 elsewhere who were doing this kind of thing and and bell was famous even among them very influential

00:06:06.220 teacher and scientist and and physician and he would do all those things that we now all associate with

00:06:13.160 sherlock holmes no one can give that to a detective character now without it looking like sherlock holmes

00:06:17.500 but a patient would come in bell would glance at the coat she was carrying realize it was too large for the

00:06:24.560 child who was holding her hand and say where did you leave the other baron he would look at the mud on

00:06:29.780 their shoes and say did you enjoy your walk down from leith and on and on and on and he was very very good

00:06:36.460 at it and it and doyle was not the only one who wrote about these techniques that we now call sherlockian

00:06:42.900 so there's confirmation bell himself became famous as doyle talked about him in interviews and bill

00:06:50.460 credited doyle's imagination for most of it but he then was asked to talk about his own techniques

00:06:56.860 and so there's a lot of firsthand primary information fascinating wonderful funny stuff

00:07:02.760 about how bill behaved toward patients you're talking you know one of the goals of your book was

00:07:08.540 to see how the time that conan doyle grew up in or was raised in influenced his writing this is i

00:07:14.800 thought it was a great the history of of medicine at this time this was changing before medicine was sort

00:07:19.620 of i don't know it was more art than science you know doctors kind of oh i think this will work and

00:07:24.160 give it to you but as you said dr bell was able to see exactly or or at least try to use the scientific

00:07:29.840 method to figure out what's wrong with patients and then treat them with the scientific method yes it

00:07:35.160 was it was wonderful a wonderful era and part of why i keep returning to the victorian era to write

00:07:40.860 about and to anthologize stories from is that so much was happening at the same time

00:07:46.280 in conan doyle's lifetime anesthetics anesthesia were was invented the telegraph was invented

00:07:52.740 photography was invented all of these things just during his lifetime well just shortly before his

00:07:57.960 lifetime they came of age and really flourished during his lifetime he was born in 1859 so they

00:08:03.180 were a little bit prior to him and so those the ways that those played in the history of medicine

00:08:10.160 was almost medieval until some kind of anesthesia came along and the note and then the germ theory of

00:08:17.580 disease was late in the century so conan doyle became a doctor first what was his career like as a doctor

00:08:24.060 was he a good doctor was he able to do what you know dr bell did and be able to look at somebody and

00:08:28.640 say this is what's wrong with you or did he kind of do okay not not that great at it i think he was

00:08:34.980 doing okay at it we have mostly his own account but he didn't have time to pursue it very far because

00:08:42.480 he became successful he had perhaps a decade of trickling short stories into magazines and at the

00:08:49.580 time they were published anonymously and that had become the norm at a time when it protected

00:08:55.660 writers from government explosions in response to his opinions expressed but it had remained the norm

00:09:03.940 even when in an era when the same writers were developing something like the publishing culture

00:09:10.200 we have now with the kind of fame attributed to authors for their novels and their names would be

00:09:16.220 on there and so conan doyle kept thinking i have to have my name on the book i have to write a novel

00:09:21.080 and that's when he thought i should consider writing a detective story but he had been not terribly

00:09:27.560 successful as a physician not as poorly received as he himself joked in later interviews because

00:09:35.440 there's enough factual physical documentary evidence that he was making a living in portsmouth

00:09:42.820 as a physician but his success in writing just snowballed so quickly and so dramatically that he

00:09:52.560 he soon just abandoned medicine completely so you talked about he had he wanted to write a novel that

00:09:58.240 was get his name out there get him famous and so he said i'm going to write a detective novel

00:10:02.720 where did he get that idea i mean were there such things as like real live detectives in london who

00:10:07.900 were solving crimes or was this something he kind of made up on his own well he had read about detective

00:10:14.020 stories it was a genre it wasn't very much like what we imagine now but it was a genre and it had been

00:10:20.580 only in 1829 that a real first metropolitan police force had been formed in london and only in 1842 i think

00:10:28.900 the detective force was was founded and so even police detectives came along only what is that 17 years

00:10:36.580 or so before doyle was born so real police force at the time was getting organized and established

00:10:44.740 and detectives were a phenomenon and just before doyle was born charles dickens was writing articles

00:10:53.700 about the new detective force and so dickens later wrote about one of them in bleak house and so it

00:11:02.340 became a genre that was catching on there had been a lot of allegedly true crime like now allegedly true

00:11:08.000 crime stories being published in newspapers and magazines and that was fueling interest in the real

00:11:13.820 police real detectives and wilkie collins and numerous other writers were writing about the era

00:11:19.560 writing about london and detectives at the time and so conan doyle found a flourishing genre and soon

00:11:26.440 practically owned it right and you also talk about this i thought the the history of of the detective or

00:11:33.540 mystery genre in literature you know you saw it a little bit in london with dickens writing about it

00:11:38.700 but you also talk about uh edgar allen poe played a big role in the development of mystery slash detective

00:11:44.760 fiction yes poe when he wasn't writing you know someone being walled up in a tomb or a cat being

00:11:52.940 accidentally buried with a murder victim he founded the detective genre as we think of it now with three

00:11:58.900 short stories especially the first one the murders in the room org in 1841 published in an american

00:12:05.980 magazine that he was himself at the time editing which is i'm sure a very handy writer and he created

00:12:12.540 c august dupin and it was it was posed so it was filled with gothic trappings but this was a character

00:12:19.540 who was an amateur and it launched this whole notion that you see all the way through miss marple and 1.00

00:12:26.480 everybody else this very curious notion that somebody who lives in a little village in england or in this

00:12:32.180 case dupin and paris happens to have is almost born with a genius level ability to solve crimes

00:12:37.920 which is a ludicrous fantasy but often very entertaining and dupin was a character who was

00:12:44.380 holding forth a lot and his about his intelligence and his ability in reading people and the nameless

00:12:51.240 narrator was very admiring he he made watson look cold-hearted by comparison because he was so

00:12:58.220 admiring of the detective but poe had not witnessed what conan doyle had poe was making this up as an

00:13:05.400 in a sense a kind of extension of notions of logic into crime and everyday life and he hadn't seen

00:13:13.500 anyone do this and so when conan doyle decided he wanted to do this he thought of joseph bell

00:13:19.400 and he thought how can i he didn't consciously do this but he what he wound up doing was combining

00:13:25.680 dupin and other detectives of the era and joseph bell and so conan doyle had examples he showed us

00:13:33.120 very convincingly again and again how sherlock holmes was making these observations and we'll

00:13:39.160 talk about this deductive process used by sherlock holmes it's famous so let's talk about how

00:13:44.700 doyle conan doyle decided to make sherlock holmes different so he combined a bunch of different

00:13:50.040 detectives that were sort of famous and bell but what set what set sherlock holmes apart from

00:13:55.580 everyone else why did sherlock holmes like capture the imagination of not only england but the world

00:14:02.080 really fast really quickly i think in part that he's very protean sort of character he has lots of

00:14:08.820 different factors playing into him and you can see that i don't mean to jump way ahead but you can see

00:14:13.540 what appealed to people then and how he's been represented in our own era that elementary the tv

00:14:19.020 show would emphasize addiction benedict cumberbatch's version would emphasize the autistic aspect

00:14:25.860 robert downey jr emphasizes the physicality the running the chasing the the the barehanded

00:14:31.460 bare knuckle fisticuffs and so all of those factors were in there and he was very much an enlightenment

00:14:38.300 hero in that he believed in justice above and beyond the legal system he so he had a strong sense

00:14:45.340 of that he knew best and i think a lot of readers wanted that in a hero and identified with it he was

00:14:52.080 courageous and he was brilliant he was he was very much detective as scientist and it was an era that

00:14:59.540 believed very strongly in science and the progressions and the the ability of science to help us understand

00:15:05.220 the world to help us reduce the thousand natural shocks the flesh is there to to maybe a manageable

00:15:10.220 hundred and so on and on science was in that era it wasn't yet creating atomic bombs and and mustard gas

00:15:19.840 which was around the corner in world war one and two but it was still very much an optimistic force

00:15:28.780 and conan dual saw it that way in many ways and sherlock holmes i think embodied that

00:15:34.700 yeah he's almost like a superhero today like a marvel comic character he really is and i think he is

00:15:41.360 very often even an informal survey of my friends indicated that he's perhaps most popular with

00:15:48.480 people who also love superhero movies and things like that and it's interesting that robert downey jr

00:15:55.520 portrays one of the most popular superheroes and the most popular detective in alternating movies for a

00:16:01.400 while there so uh he gets the idea for sherlock holmes what was the first novel that he published

00:16:06.520 or you know was it a short story that came out first or did he go right to a novel with sherlock holmes

00:16:10.740 he first did a novel a study in scarlet and at the time a study in a certain color was a kind of style

00:16:19.420 of title used by rather more decadent modern kinds of writers and so there was a little bit of a

00:16:27.380 a whiff of decadence in the title and then and then how i mean what was the response what did it gain

00:16:34.380 like a lot of critical acclaim was it popular right away the first two novels were a study in scarlet and

00:16:40.680 the sign of the four and those the first one got some notice not as much as one might imagine now

00:16:48.900 the second one got more but what really caught on is when he was commissioned to write a series of a

00:16:56.180 dozen short stories the ones that now are published as and were then published as the adventures of

00:17:00.720 sherlock holmes and that's the title of the the very first collection of 12 and those caught on now

00:17:07.420 they were a little bit of a hard sell in the u.s at first because they weren't the standard periodical

00:17:14.000 length and in a sense it's as if the magazines and newspapers at the time were like the tv programs

00:17:20.600 of say the 1970s and 80s prior to other options that we have now cable and digital and everything

00:17:27.200 else and so they were the primary form of entertainment and conan doyle wanted to write

00:17:33.580 for that market but he didn't usually write within exactly the specifications and so editors had to be

00:17:40.140 talked into trying these trying to syndicate them and reprint them in their periodicals and

00:17:47.100 gradually they caught on editors themselves became enthusiastic enthusiastic readers and

00:17:52.260 enthusiastic in promoting them and it gradually grew into a phenomenon in which the which led arthur

00:17:58.080 conan doyle to famously write a letter to his beloved mother i think sherlock is catching on

00:18:02.820 the great understatement in literary history and another thing i didn't know about the holmes

00:18:08.940 series was that there wasn't a lot of continuity between the stories right it was each story was sort of

00:18:15.680 like a self-contained world and sometimes you wouldn't even he wouldn't even reference things

00:18:20.400 that happened in previous stories or he'd like contradict something that happened in a previous

00:18:23.560 story but for some reason that for some reason that worked for him yes he was again i think that's

00:18:31.160 and this is hardly an iconoclastic view i think the sherlock holmes work is very much his best work

00:18:37.720 and he did not think it was deep enough but what he was doing was writing out of his true essential

00:18:42.320 self which from my point of view in reading a vast amount about him and writing about him his

00:18:47.220 essential self was adolescent he was basically he remained it seems to me pretty much a 14 year old

00:18:53.440 boy who wanted to read about an adventure and he wanted to write about an adventure and so he was

00:19:00.260 doing i think a lot better with sherlock holmes than he realized but he wasn't one to take them

00:19:04.340 seriously so that famously infamously or whatever notoriously he forgot where watson's war wound was

00:19:13.540 and it might be in his shoulder in one story and in his leg in the next watson's name was from the very

00:19:18.700 first page established as john but in one of the short stories his wife calls him james and on and on a number

00:19:26.380 of things like that and the lack of continuity was kind of a great idea because there had been a lot of

00:19:32.720 serialization of novels which most famously dickens had been had built his whole reputation on that and

00:19:38.620 his worldwide fame and so magazines would have to commit to the entire novel they'd have to sign a

00:19:45.300 contract they couldn't run a piece of it and so there were lots of things and the idea was if you're caught

00:19:50.740 up in this story you will go and get the next issue but if you're not there's nothing to attract you

00:19:58.160 and so doyle was very smart about let's have self-contained stories and we see this the effect

00:20:04.720 of this and and the value of this all the way through tv series until our own era when tv series

00:20:11.260 usually evolve characters tend to grow and change and evolve and in a 1970s like when i was 12 a tv show

00:20:20.260 what was on then i don't know uh colombo it was hardly going to evolve from episode to episode

00:20:24.720 or manix or something like that and so that was a kind of stroke of genius and it became the norm in

00:20:33.160 detective stories that each one is like a modular unit that can be inserted into your brain at any

00:20:39.800 point it's a great idea no if there were like literary forms or blogs back then i bet it'd be

00:20:46.180 driving people nuts to be like what is what is canon what is watson's real name they'd have debates

00:20:51.380 about it like people have debates about stuff now oh yes and it would be all over twitter and

00:20:56.140 it would be non-stop and even now among the baker street irregulars who are many of my friends are

00:21:01.820 baker street irregulars i'm not actually a member i've been their guest speaker and so on and a lot

00:21:07.200 of my friends are there and they remind me that the word fan is a shortened form of fanatic

00:21:12.000 that the baker street irregulars to this day are arguing about those things what are the baker

00:21:17.540 street or there's just fans of sherlock holmes oh yes that's the international organization of

00:21:21.940 fans of sherlock holmes in england there's the sherlock holmes society but both are really

00:21:25.640 international and the baker street irregulars was holmes's nickname in the second novel i think it is

00:21:32.600 for the street urchins that he used to gather information on people because they were invisible 0.52

00:21:38.980 on the street and he said this is the baker street irregular force regular police force and so

00:21:45.380 the fans as early as about right about 100 years ago the fans began forming this organization the

00:21:52.840 baker street irregulars to study and celebrate sherlock holmes in the many incarnations we're

00:21:59.520 going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the show so let's talk

00:22:04.920 about his detective process so you mentioned he had his his sources that he would go to but the thing

00:22:09.720 that made him famous was that he would actually walk people through walk the reader through how he

00:22:15.360 came to his conclusion and we we typically call this like the deductive process of sherlock holmes

00:22:19.760 but it was this really deduction or was this induction i'm always confused by that i think it was

00:22:25.100 technically induction most of the time he would do both deduction is inferring a general law from

00:22:30.940 particular instances and so that you might look at all the little clues and build up a larger picture

00:22:37.180 and particular instances that you observe can lead to a general law or principle in induction and so the

00:22:43.640 two are very related and there's also a version called adduction that is the merging of them and

00:22:52.380 the whole idea that all of these forms of observing are playing into each other and are tentative

00:23:01.480 in their assumptions that have to be constantly refreshed by incoming facts and that's what i love

00:23:08.380 most about i think detective stories aesthetically and it's the respect for adjusting your theories for

00:23:15.400 incoming facts and it's what i like most about the scientific method as a way of thinking it's or even

00:23:21.660 politics or anything else it's like how about some evidence-based decision making and you realize how late

00:23:27.000 that came along as an idea in history before that it's like whatever and it's amazing this thing

00:23:33.040 you know this sort of i guess you can call it we call it a trope that you know conan doyle used of

00:23:36.520 like holmes explaining how he came to his conclusion like you see this through the rest of the detective

00:23:42.020 genre you see it in movies today like i mean clues like remember that movie clue from the 80s yes it's

00:23:47.720 at the end they explain everything that goes like everything is tied up with a nice bow and that you can

00:23:52.480 trace that all the way back to sherlock holmes and i think that's part of the great aesthetic pleasure

00:23:57.620 of the detective genre is you have a tentative narrative that you're reading you're witnessing

00:24:06.640 it as it unfolds and then you realize there are several tentative narratives being tossed around

00:24:10.260 but at the end everything that you have experienced gets reconfigured into what we'll call the actual

00:24:17.120 story and so there's a great pleasure in that on a literary critical kind of level but there's so

00:24:25.340 many versions of it as you said about sherlock holmes going out and finding out everything he was very

00:24:30.180 much someone who did it all himself and then agatha christie could come along with ericule farro

00:24:34.700 and i think the first one was in 18 in 1920 and he's sort of decrying this kind of scurrying around

00:24:43.180 on your knees with a magnifying glass and saying it's about the little gray cell is hastings

00:24:46.800 and then nero wolf comes along and sends archie goodwin out to do the legwork but someone still

00:24:53.760 has to do the legwork and nero wolf can sit at home theorizing and so i love that sherlock holmes

00:24:59.680 has to me the three sexiest words in the english language i work alone the sexiest phrase in the

00:25:04.720 english language and sherlock holmes very much did and he he just did everything himself and i think

00:25:10.460 that combining of what he had seen in joseph bell the notion of a sort of romantic action hero

00:25:18.040 and an enlightenment thinker i don't think conan dole had any idea he was merging three vibrant

00:25:25.160 strands of literary history into one thing right there and part of the process of holmes being able

00:25:30.360 to do his deduction or induction was observing observing things that other people's people didn't see

00:25:36.140 and in fact you know sherlock holmes like conan dole have sherlock holmes say things like that like i

00:25:41.320 i actually observe what other people merely see like he made a distinction between those two things

00:25:46.940 yes and i think that's very helpful for example i think about it when i'm driving around on a street

00:25:52.780 i'm i see the other cars but my mind is on sort of radar mode of i simply am avoiding large objects i

00:26:00.760 don't really observe the other cars the way my brother does who knows a lot about cars and so i think

00:26:05.900 holmes demonstrates that kind of thing again and again and he says well i've written a monograph

00:26:10.620 on cigar and cigarette ash really nothing is more helpful than being able to tell them apart and now

00:26:15.940 of course we have specialists for all those things even on vera the wonderful tv series vera if they

00:26:21.580 need that kind of information they just cut to a 45 second scene with an expert and so there weren't

00:26:28.680 specialists in these corners at the time and so sherlock holmes did it all himself and when in the very

00:26:33.500 first part of the first book a study in scarlet watson is recently invalided from the afghan war he is

00:26:41.140 looking for an inexpensive place to stay in london and he for a mutual friend introduces him to sherlock

00:26:49.060 holmes who is a medical student at the time and is doing it was well he's doing special research at the

00:26:54.840 medical school on how far bruises can be shown in a body after death so he's doing his own forensic

00:27:02.880 pathology experiments in other words he's just about the creepiest guy you could ever imagine

00:27:07.800 actually meeting in the real world well let's talk about watson like what role did watson play

00:27:12.860 in the home stories like did he was he an important character i think watson was a great invention and

00:27:20.080 again to contrast edgar allen poe his narrator of the dupin stories was nameless and existed entirely

00:27:26.920 to do variations on gee whiz you're a genius and watson is skeptical he says reader i think of all men i

00:27:37.160 must be the most long-suffering i mean he sort of complains like a roommate or a husband or a wife

00:27:43.120 he serves as the bridge between our skepticism about genius and the genius and so that gives us

00:27:52.580 a sense of okay yeah i'm not just painting superhero here i understand this is weird and it gives

00:27:58.200 sherlock holmes a reason to hold forth and so i think those are great and in the early movies like

00:28:03.720 basil rathbone nigel bruce's dr watson was sort of a bumbling lapdog almost at times and in the stories

00:28:13.700 watson is actually quite sharp very skeptical of holmes and very loyal and quick to put a gun in his

00:28:20.840 pocket if they need to run out to do something and so i think watson in that regard is almost as

00:28:26.800 protean a character as holmes by which i mean that he can be represented through many different

00:28:31.200 aspects and so you see you know martin freeman's version on sherlock versus jude law's version and so

00:28:38.520 all of those things are in there that in the original stories watson is smart loyal active he was

00:28:45.000 a soldier until 10 minutes before sherlock holmes met him practically and so these are the kinds of

00:28:49.800 things that make watson an ideal narrator and of course doyle himself had a very quick lively style

00:28:57.380 filled with texture and detail and atmosphere and without realizing it he created a time machine

00:29:02.800 a time capsule of the late victorian era so one of the things that one of the reasons why sherlock

00:29:09.000 holmes has become such an iconic figure he's got a cool uniform at least what we think is his uniform

00:29:14.060 which is yeah right it's the skinny guy usually it's a skinny guy with a magnifying glass

00:29:18.840 wearing the deer stalker hat smoking a pipe now here's the question did conan doyle ever describe

00:29:23.980 his home looking like that he did he did not describe the deer stalker an illustrator added that

00:29:30.820 early on and the illustrator didn't understand that the deer stalker was a country thing so

00:29:35.340 some illustrators would can would show sherlock holmes wearing it at a pub in london where he would

00:29:41.160 just look like a rube and so those are little things that gradually were added on the skinniness

00:29:48.200 is several factors playing into that i think one is that he smoked constantly a 221b baker street was

00:29:55.460 constantly filled with smoke and he famously kept his fierce turkish tobacco in a slipper on the mantle

00:30:03.340 and so he was also he whenever he was bored he would inject himself with a cocaine solution

00:30:12.480 and so that was a very common notion at the time that various opium dens were no more illegal than

00:30:20.380 you know the nearest bar here at the time and they were seen as decadent epicenters of exploitation but

00:30:28.680 they weren't illegal and so i think all those factors play into it and also something we forget

00:30:34.660 and something the movies tend to not pay much attention to conan doyle was in his 20s when he

00:30:41.640 created charlotte holmes and dr watson and all the evidence in the stories the original stuff indicates

00:30:47.960 that he conceived the detective and his sidekick as pretty much in their late 20s or no more than 30

00:30:55.960 years old and that's not how they're usually portrayed no yeah they're always portrayed older

00:31:01.460 and speaking of the drug use that's something i always forget about the home stories that you know

00:31:05.980 he would shoot up cocaine but that again it's as you talked about the influence of the 19th century

00:31:11.400 the victorian area had had on these home stories that was a common thing people did they did heroin

00:31:16.580 they did cocaine this was like the rise of like pharmaceuticals and drugs like this that are no longer

00:31:22.640 pharmaceuticals yes and again throughout history each individual human being has always been

00:31:29.340 physician's guinea pig i mean we're we're all that a doctor will say to you well let's try this for

00:31:34.960 two weeks and the unspoken thing is if it doesn't kill you we'll we'll raise the dosage or try something

00:31:39.880 else and if it does kill you well you know i'm insured and so i think the cocaine aspect is interesting

00:31:46.340 i picked up i don't collect in any serious way the sherlock holmes stuff but i usually if i see a

00:31:52.200 different edition i'll pick it up and look at it i picked up one from the 70s that was a children's

00:31:57.440 book edition of the second book the sign of the four and it opens with the book normally opens with

00:32:03.960 sherlock holmes stabbing himself with a needle with a cocaine solution and that was completely taken out

00:32:12.160 of the 70s children's book version and it's just not something we wanted to associate with heroes at the

00:32:18.660 time right yeah that would be funny if they left that in there yeah he's like okay so you mentioned

00:32:23.960 earlier conan doyle famously got involved with spiritualism i think there's an aspect of i guess

00:32:30.520 19th century history and in england as well as in america that often people forget about can you tell

00:32:36.640 us about the spiritualist movement and then how did conan doyle get involved with it and did it

00:32:40.820 influence his work at all conan doyle very much got involved with it and the spiritualist movement

00:32:45.460 it doesn't seem this way to us now but originally at the time it was seen as rather scientific

00:32:51.360 evidence of an afterlife it wasn't just belief it was spirits are communicating with us and we can take

00:32:58.940 these ectoplasmic spirit photos we can communicate with them through knocking out a table or whatever in

00:33:04.980 the dark and this is was gullible figures such as doyle who very much missed his mother when she died who

00:33:12.600 lost his son in world war one and was desperately eager to remain in touch with both of them

00:33:21.020 spiritualists were via seances and other things preying upon the gullible and the grieving and as 0.97

00:33:29.360 someone said about conan doyle in this regard regarding spiritualism he was no sherlock holmes and it's

00:33:35.940 really one of the weird contradictions between author and character there's even a story in which

00:33:41.300 sherlock holmes says no ghosts need apply watson this agency stands with its feet planted firmly on

00:33:47.680 the ground and to the very end sherlock holmes remains an icon of rational investigation and all the

00:33:57.000 time conan doyle is steadily becoming more and more obsessed with and preoccupied with spiritualism and it

00:34:03.640 began in the 1840s with the fox sisters in upstate new york and the idea that spirits were communicating

00:34:11.840 with them and really one of them had a very flexible toe joint frankly i mean there's tons of evidence for

00:34:16.800 this and she would tap it on the hollow floor underneath the table and it would resonate throughout the room

00:34:22.140 and her most commercial minded sister said let's take this toe snap and show on the road basically 1.00

00:34:28.020 and they began to make a lot of money and they became the headliners and the launchers of the

00:34:34.640 spiritualist movement and so it was very well established form of con game by the time that

00:34:39.660 conan doyle was was involved in it and everyone was saying this is clearly crap and conan doyle was

00:34:46.000 saying this is clearly a channel to the afterlife but then this is kind of interesting this is how

00:34:50.840 different things can connect during this time so conan doyle was actually friends with houdini harry

00:34:55.520 houdini the magician but harry houdini was like the great debunker of spiritualism yes there's a

00:35:01.460 wonderful uh encounter between them they became friends and conan doyle was so by this time besotted

00:35:11.060 it seems to me and i admit i'm beyond skeptical with spiritualism he actually said to houdini why do

00:35:18.560 you pretend this is all a matter of gimmickry when clearly you dematerialize and rematerialize somewhere

00:35:23.920 else and houdini is offering to show him how he does this and conan doyle is going i don't know

00:35:28.440 why you have to pretend you don't have this deep spiritual power so it's part of the fun of my book

00:35:35.260 was concentrating on the creation of sherlock holmes and i carry the book only to where sherlock is really

00:35:41.280 hugely successful i don't carry it on through to home to doyle famously getting tired of holmes and

00:35:47.300 killing him off the reichenbach falls and all that sort of thing and i don't go into the spiritualism

00:35:53.040 other than the very beginnings of it and that's fun for me because i find there are many great

00:36:00.400 full-length biographies such as andrew lycett's about arthur conan doyle but i would find exploring

00:36:06.620 his spiritualism in depth maddening frankly because it just wouldn't make sense to you like it'd just

00:36:13.520 be too much like how can you have this character sherlock holmes and then how could you be like this

00:36:17.360 yes yes it just seems so gullible and it's demonstrably false in a in so many directions again

00:36:24.860 and again things that he would praise such as those fairy photos that those girls did at the little

00:36:30.820 village of conningly and doyle just once he made up his mind it was like i once had a an uncle who

00:36:38.460 could find a biblical prediction for absolutely anything that had happened anywhere in the past

00:36:43.720 hundred years thousand years of the last week and well of course he could he just didn't need any

00:36:48.820 evidence he had his belief grew like as hardy as a weed it could grow in any environment and i think

00:36:54.320 arthur conan doyle's credulity and gullibility in this corner were the same he didn't use the same

00:37:00.980 kind of thinking for those at all so why do you think this like 19th century character from england

00:37:07.060 still like captivates people today like we're making movies about him there's a tv show about him

00:37:12.980 that's popular like what is it about sherlock holmes that people still want to like read stories

00:37:19.220 or watch movies about him i think in part and of course i don't mean to be the i'm not an expert on

00:37:25.700 this kind of phenomenon i'm interested in those aspects of celebrity culture that play into a

00:37:34.080 fictional creation becoming a household name but i'm by no means an expert in it and i think

00:37:40.780 that holmes himself again is such a protean figure one who has so many facets that different incarnations

00:37:50.680 can emphasize different aspects of it and he's also and the notion i think once people started the idea

00:37:57.560 that let's just let's modernize homes let's recreate homes let's do this let's do that was it

00:38:02.220 steven spielberg who did the young sherlock holmes movie 30 years ago or when it was yeah and it's

00:38:07.580 just everywhere and so now there's a whole in a sense a giant universe there's a small community

00:38:17.080 of like an asteroid that's actually the stuff arthur conradale wrote about sherlock holmes and

00:38:22.540 there's an entire solar system of everything else the movies the pastiches of every kind and some of

00:38:29.700 those are good some are funny some are very smart some are in a sort of an attempt just a pure homage

00:38:34.840 to resurrect the style and conradale was a very good writer he was very lively very vivid and holmes

00:38:43.200 is a heroic figure who is this is important to me and it may be in just my own personal bent i'm very

00:38:50.500 skeptical of authorities and of legal entities and the notion of the state and all these things

00:38:56.820 and sherlock holmes was also so that even growing up i was always interested in the private eyes not

00:39:03.620 in the cops and sherlock holmes is skeptical about the police force as many londoners were at the time

00:39:11.260 when they were first founded in 1829 people were worried about how this would manifest itself they

00:39:18.120 had seen the french military police across the channel cause all kinds of trouble and invasions of

00:39:26.260 privacy and everything else and so i believe people were skeptical about that but they realized they

00:39:30.900 needed a metropolitan police force of some kind around early 1840s when the detective bureau was formed

00:39:37.540 there was a huge uproar that these plain clothes people were intended to spy on everyday citizens

00:39:45.920 and more than anything else and so there's had been long been suspicion and mockery

00:39:52.180 about these kinds of characters and so conan doyle played into that with a very sarcastic sherlock holmes and

00:39:59.940 he even doyle loved emile gavro the french writer who created monsieur lecoq a wonderful character

00:40:06.500 that conan doyle imitated a lot and he admired so many of these people but he deliberately had sherlock holmes

00:40:14.820 mock them in the stories well you know this is the art of manliness podcast and i think one of the reasons why

00:40:20.260 holmes is such a popular figure and he's sort of become like an icon of manliness as well as with

00:40:24.580 other detectives that point you talked about like they work outside of the system right they're like

00:40:29.620 they're almost like an outlaw but they're trying to do good yes and i think that everybody every man

00:40:37.020 has to form his own definition of what strikes him as manly or whether he needs that definition

00:40:42.520 but to me that independence and that notion of a higher justice than the organization that's just

00:40:52.640 speaking to you or the organization that has all kinds of built-in biases or whatever that that in

00:40:59.460 itself is about as strong and independent a move as anyone can make and you see it i see it enacted in

00:41:08.560 politics right now that the strongest and freest place to be is activism slightly outside the

00:41:15.500 political circle so that you know it from the inside but you're not controlled by it and sherlock

00:41:19.880 holmes was that way he knew all the cops he knew the the some of the burgeoning diagnosticians that the

00:41:27.080 notion of pathology that was beginning to develop but he himself was free of all of it and he defined

00:41:32.220 himself as the world's first independent consulting detective so the people with their problems would come to

00:41:37.860 him not to an institution well michael this has been a great conversation thanks for your time it's been a

00:41:43.400 pleasure thank you very much it's been great fun my guest today was michael sims he's the author of the book

00:41:48.760 arthur and sherlock it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can also check out our show

00:41:53.140 notes at aom.is slash sherlock where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic

00:41:58.340 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at artofmanliness.com

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00:42:42.020 until next time it's brett mckay reminding on your list in the aom podcast put what you've heard into action

00:42:56.880 you

00:42:59.120 you

00:43:00.120 you

00:43:02.660 yeah

00:43:06.020 you

00:43:06.920 yeah

00:43:08.340 yeah

00:43:10.480 yeah

00:43:12.940 yeah

00:43:14.420 yeah

00:43:15.380 yeah

00:43:17.400 yeah

The Art of Manliness - March 04, 2020

#590： The Creation of Sherlock Holmes

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