King’s
Sherlock Holmes
I was thirty-five years old before I came to know Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and then only indirectly, through my ongoing relationship with one Mary Russell. I admit that at first, I did not really take the man very seriously, and admired him more as a noble counterpart for the young lady than as a character in his own right.
As time went by, however, I became increasingly interested in the man and his times. I began to explore more fully the ways in which a man like him (Could any man be like Holmes?) would react to the stunning changes that took place in British society during the first two decades of the twentieth century. I began to suspect that Arthur Conan Doyle, brilliant though he was, had shortchanged his character by keeping him safely in the past and denying him a post-War England.
From time to time, people have asked me to comment on Sherlock Holmes, in ways other than the novels provide. The present collection finds eight of those documents, all of which have been published before, occasionally in slightly different versions. Some of them are straight nonfiction; others participate wholeheartedly in The Game,
that wildly imaginative edifice of Sherlockian scholarship built upon the solemn declaration that Holmes and Watson were absolutely real, that Conan Doyle was but their literary agent, and that the stories are absolutely factual—if only we lesser mortals can figure out the apparent flaws and omissions. The Game requires a degree of mental contortion that makes a Chinese Gymnastics show look like a collection of doddering arthritics. Many find The Game amusing, challenging, and competitive: others stare in bewilderment.
One piece of Sherlockiana not included here is the actual Holmes pastiche that came about when my editor suggested a story that combined my two series characters of Kate Martinelli, modern cop, and Mary Russell, amateur sleuth of the 1920s. That particular contortion was beyond me, but I did manage to discover (in The Art of Detection) a hitherto-unknown Holmes adventure that took place in San Francisco, which turned out to be suitably outrageous.
This collection includes the following essays:
Dr. Watson’s War Wound was delivered as a guest lecture to the annual Baker Street Irregulars meeting in January, 2007, two years before I was inducted into their august ranks. This annual lecture varies wildly with the speaker, from a psychiatric analysis of Holmes himself to gossip about television productions of the stories.
I decided that, for the occasion, I should solemnly play The Game, complete with footnotes. It is without a doubt the most formal paper I have delivered publically for many years, and I was incredibly relieved when the audience neither fell asleep nor stormed the podium in horror. A portion of the lecture appeared in The Grand Game vol. 2, eds. Klinger and King (New York: The Baker Street Irregulars, 2012). The lecture itself appeared in the Baker Street Journal, 57, no 1 (Spring 2007).
Sabine Baring-Gould and Sherlock Holmes came about when The Moor was published in the UK and the journal of the Sabine Baring-Gould Appreciation Society, politely amused at my effrontery, invited me to contribute an article. My essay turned out to be a touch rude towards Sabine’s grandson, W. S. Baring-Gould, author of Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: a life of the world’s first consulting detective, since I point out that W.S. largely plagiarized his grandfather’s memoirs. Still, compared to what I put old Sabine through in the novel, I don’t know that the grandson had reason to complain.
A Holmes Chronology is just that: an explanation why my
Sherlock Holmes isn’t an aged geezer when Mary Russell walks over him on the Sussex Downs in 1915. It is another example of The Game, and you will be pleased to know that my proposed chronology is not without controversy in Sherlockian circles.
Sherlock Holmes on Beekeeping was a gorgeous little booklet published by Heifer International as a fund-raiser in conjunction with the publication of The Language of Bees, a volume in the Russell memoirs that contains excerpts from the long-lost volume by Holmes on his research into bees. Beekeeping has long been a source of reflection and philosophical insight for the keepers, and Holmes’ remarks on apis mellifera offer a window into his mind—and into his attitudes towards homo sapiens as well.
Art in the Blood was commissioned by Penguin for their web site, an introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle. In it, my attempt to honor and explain the writer of the Holmes stories in the end becomes an extended admission that Conan Doyle was himself an enigma worthy of his character.
Textual, Higher, Radical, and Midrashic Sherlockian Criticism: an introduction to The Grand Game came about when Les Klinger and I were asked to edit a collection of a hundred years of Holmes scholarship, and I made the mistake of pointing out that I was, oddly enough, singularly suited for the job: …probably one of a handful of BSI members for whom these references are not, so to speak, utterly and completely Greek.
Indeed, I fear that few living human beings will be able to appreciate the true genius of this introduction. Still, one makes jokes for oneself and for the few who have ears to hear, and for the rest, it is a most readable document, if mildly incomprehensible. Ronald Knox would have got it, and maybe Dorothy Sayers: if you don’t, I really wouldn’t worry about it. Although if you have a friend who is both a New Testament theologian and a fan of Sherlock Holmes, you might hand the document over and watch his or her face.
The Grand Game—Textual, Higher, Radical, and Midrashic Higher Sherlockian Criticism
originally appeared in The Grand Game Volume One (New York: The Baker Street Irregulars, 2011).
Introduction to The Hound of the Baskervilles is my love-song to a fabulous story and my lament that never, ever will I be able to write anything half as gripping. It was originally published as the introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (New York: Modern Library, 2002) and is here reprinted with the kind
