#590： The Creation of Sherlock Holmes
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
174.43552
Summary
Sherlock Holmes is one of the most widely recognized figures of literature and pop culture. But how did the creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, come up with a character who s become the universal archetype of the independent detective? In his book, Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes, my guest explores the biography of the fictional detective by looking at the life of real-world author, Michael Sims.
Transcript
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
00:42:10.240
where you find our podcast archives over almost there's almost 600 episodes there as well as
00:42:14.680
thousands of articles we've written over the years and if you'd like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the
00:42:18.060
aom podcast you can do so in stitcher premium head over to stitcherpremium.com sign up use code
00:42:22.320
manliness for a free month trial once you're signed up download the stitcher app on android or ios and
00:42:26.880
you start enjoying ad-free episodes the aom podcast and if you haven't done so already i'd
00:42:30.620
appreciate if you take one minute to give us review an apple podcast or stitcher it helps out a lot
00:42:34.860
if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the show with a friend or family
00:42:38.700
member who you think would get something out of it as always thank you for the continued support
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