The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

by Zach Dundas

Overview

“Fascinating.” — Boston Globe

“Entertaining.” — Globe and Mail

“Impressive.” — Washington Post

“For all who enjoy the company of Sherlock Holmes, in any of his many forms, reading Dundas’s book will be hours well spent.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

More than a century after Sherlock Holmes first capered into our world, Arthur Conan Doyle’s peculiar creation continues to fascinate us, and in The Great Detective, journalist and lifelong Sherlock fan Zach Dundas sets out to learn why. Through sparkling new readings of the original stories, he unearths the inspirations behind Holmes and his indispensable companion, Dr. John Watson, and reveals how Conan Doyle’s tales laid the groundwork for an infinitely remixable myth. This investigation leads Dundas on travels into the heart of the Holmesian universe, from a Fifth Avenue mansion and the boozy annual gathering of one of the world’s most exclusive Sherlock fan societies; to a freezing Devon heath out of The Hound of the Baskervilles; to sunny Pasadena, where Dundas chats with the creators of the BBC’s Sherlock and finagles a cameo appearance by Benedict Cumberbatch himself. Along the way, Dundas discovers and celebrates the ingredients that have made Holmes go viral — then, now, and as long as the game’s afoot.

“[A] sprightly, riveting exploration.” — Mental Floss

“Incisive, well informed, and slyly witty (like Holmes himself).” — Shelf Awareness, starred review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544705210
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/14/2016
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

ZACH DUNDAS is co-executive editor of Portland Monthly magazine, a longtime journalist, and the author of The Renegade Sportsman.He is a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and the Diogenes Club.  

Read an Excerpt

1
 
Bohemia
 
A dark, cold night in March, circa 1890. Dr. John H. Watson rides through London in a hansom cab. Watson is a married man, a working medico weary from a busy day on the rounds. Truth be told, he’s bored out of his skull. He peeks out of the cab’s porthole, up at the second-floor window of a familiar house. In the window above he sees a skinny, hawk-nosed shadow pace behind a brilliantly illuminated blind. He orders his cab to stop, and he steps onto the gaslit pavement outside 221B Baker Street.
      Arthur Conan Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories and four novels set in the world of Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, and John H. Watson, his best friend and indefatigable chronicler. As Dr. Watson climbs the stairs to 221B, he sets in motion the first of the short stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which appeared in the Strand Magazine’s issue for July 1891. In the months that followed, one Sherlock Holmes adventure after another hit the bookstalls of Victorian Britain. The stories’ young author, just barely in his thirties and working a desultory day job as an eye specialist, had used these two intriguing characters — a beaky superdetective and his pal, an ex–army doctor with underappreciated storytelling gifts — in a couple of earlier novels, with mixed commercial results. With “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Conan Doyle truly (but accidentally) launched Sherlock Holmes and Watson into the literary cosmos.
      Watson opens the door to the Baker Street sitting room. The chamber is bright but shadowed in the corners, where the gaslight and coal fire’s glare dies away amid the startling array of detritus Sherlock Holmes accumulates in his adventures. Every corner overflows with crumpled newspapers, obscure and frightening books, strange chemical implements, and stray weapons. Sherlock is no mere cop grinding away in an office, but rather an exquisite self-creation who operates against the criminals that plague the world’s most powerful city. Well, let’s say he defends his own version of Victorian London — one besieged not by run-of-the-mill grifters and garden-variety psychopaths but by demented math professors, conspiracies of redheaded men, and cunning blackmailers who skulk about wearing astrakhan, whatever that is. Holmes doesn’t live in our reality. He lives in a more interesting (if sinister) dimension.
      Watson finds Holmes rampaging around the room, exuding his own personal, lurid atmosphere of tobacco funk and global intrigue. The good Watson has already warned his readers, in the second paragraph of “Scandal,” about Holmes, his “Bohemian soul” and irregular habits. Sherlock has been off in Odessa dealing with a murderous (or maybe murdered) Trepoff. He’s pondered a “singular tragedy” in Trincomalee (that’s in Sri Lanka), and sorted out some nasty business involving the Dutch royal family. The detective gives his old pal a cigar. Drinks in hand (at Baker Street, a glass is never far away), Holmes produces a letter, lately delivered, written in broken English on thick pink stationery. The letter informs the detective that a man will call at a quarter to eight. The visitor will wear a mask. Holmes and Watson deduce, based on the writing paper’s watermark and quick reference to a handy “European gazetteer,” that this missive comes from “Bohemia.” (That’s in the Czech Republic these days. Victorian readers would have known it as one swatch in the crazy quilt of the Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary.) The mystery guest then sashays across the threshold.
      The masked man is six feet six inches tall. As for the rest, we must defer to Watson:
      "Heavy bands of astrakhan were slashed across the sleeves and fronts of his double-breasted coat, while the deep blue cloak which was thrown over his shoulders was lined with a flame-coloured silk and secured at the neck with a brooch which consisted of a single flaming beryl. Boots which extended halfway up his calves, and which were trimmed at the tops with rich brown fur, completed the impression of barbaric opulence . . . he wore across the upper part of his face, extending down past the cheekbones, a black vizard mask . . ."
      Good Lord, is it the Marquis de Sade?

*
 
I discovered a thick, brick-red-covered, dog-eared book in my school library in Montana one suitably frigid winter’s day when I was about eleven years old. The volume bore some pre-gender-equity title like The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes. It smelled faintly of mold and many small hands. I opened to the first story, spied the exotic, very adult title “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and tumbled in. In some sense, I suppose, I was never seen again.
      I had heard of Holmes, of course, though the character was better known among my mid-’80s peers for the phrase “no shit, Sherlock” than as “the most energetic criminal agent in Europe.” But I proved more susceptible to old Arthur Conan Doyle than most boys and girls. Raised by a pair of avid readers, grandson of a librarian, offshoot of a clan full of writers and English teachers (I have often wondered why my lineage didn’t tend toward stock brokerage, electrical engineering, medicine, cobbling, or, really, anything more lucrative than literature), I read rather boldly for my age, as doting relatives and mildly alarmed teachers never ceased to remind me. I read the encyclopedia for fun. Furthermore, I was fascinated by the foreign — which in Missoula, at that time, meant just about anything with an accent — and the old-fashioned, which in the ’80s meant anything not dyed hot pink. “A Scandal in Bohemia” met all requirements.
      I sat, rapt, on the fraying shag carpet of the bedroom I shared with my younger brother, my spine riveted to the edge of our bunk beds, the Rocky Mountain winter in full howl outside a window insulated with a thick plastic sheet. I devoured one story after another: the Bohemian adventure, The Sign of the Four, “Silver Blaze.” In retrospect, I can’t say that I quite caught everything — and, in fact, I would soon discover that some 1950s bowdlerizer had weeded The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes (or whatever it was) of Holmes’s edgier moments. This caring editor had expunged the cocaine, toned down some bludgeonings. But that black mask! The astrakhan! The “flame-coloured” silk! The weird Victorian regalia, the secret worlds suggested by Baker Street’s riotous mess of newspapers and urgent letters on pink stationery — all inflamed my boyhood mind. People often describe the Sherlock Holmes stories as “cozy,” and I can see what they mean. It does feel snug there by the Baker Street coal fire. But I primarily think of these stories as exuberantly, beautifully strange artifacts — startling jewels set in gnarled brass, lit with the glow of a lost time. From the beginning, the Sherlockian saga has served me as an escape hatch into an intricately constructed alternate dimension.

Table of Contents

Prelude: 221B xi

1 Bohemia 1

2 The Science of Deduction 21

3 The Wilderness 48

4 Holmes & Watson 75

5 Moriarty & Friends 109

6 The Curse of the Baskervilles 144

7 Secret Histories 168

8 Black Mask 194

9 The Great Game 215

10 The Return(S) of Sherlock Holmes 242

11 Casebook 276

Acknowledgments 293

Notes & Comments 297

Source Notes 299

Index 307

Editorial Reviews

A LOS ANGELES TIMES summer reading selection "For even the casual fan, the history of this deathless character is fascinating. Dundas does a fine job of tracing the roots of Holmes … [and] writes in a jovial, casual way that invites the reader to take part." — BOSTON GLOBE "Find[s] fresh ground . . . [Dundas's] scholarship is impressive . . . He's an amiable guide, placing more than a century of Sherlockiana into an appealing, modern frame." — Daniel Stashower, WASHINGTON POST "[An] entertaining new cultural biography of Holmesiana." — GLOBE AND MAIL "Charmingly eccentric . . . Skillful . . . For all who enjoy the company of Sherlock Holmes, in any of his many forms, reading Dundas's account will be hours well spent." — Leslie Klinger, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS "Dundas weaves fascinating parallel histories of Holmes as literary creation, Holmes as broader cultural phenomenon, and the character's larger-than-life creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ... Incisive, well-informed, and slyly witty (like Holmes himself), Dundas's book provides entertaining and irrefutable evidence that the game is still — and is likely to remain — afoot." — SHELF AWARENESS  (starred review) "The author of this wonderful book has crammed it with enough research — Holmesean, Watsonian, Doylean — to bulge the seams ... [But] Dundas's matey writing style makes the details easy to absorb ... A delight for Baker Streeters." — BOOKLIST (starred review) "A lively look at the enduring detective ... A cheerful romp ... A bright read for Sherlock's fans." — KIRKUS REVIEWS "Sherlock Holmes means different things to different people: to die-hard readers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original (who cracked his first case in 1887); to older filmgoers, Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing; to children of the 1970s and pretty much no one else, Nicol Williamson and Robert Stephens; and to younger fans, Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch. All of them turn up in The Great Detective, in which Zach Dundas traces Sherlock's evergreen celebrity. Such is Dundas's enthusiasm that one almost forgets Doyle's wary role in the legend. The author's resigned response to an extraordinarily rich $45,000 offer from Collier's Weekly to resurrect Holmes in 1903: 'Very well.'" — VANITY FAIR "The game is afoot! Like Sherlock Holmes himself, Dundas's pursuit of his quarry spans centuries, genres, and continents — and it's a delightful journey into the mythology and meaning of an icon that everyone knows, many are obsessed by, and nobody has ever quite topped." — PAUL COLLINS, author of The Murder of the Century and NPR's Weekend Edition "literary detective" "The Great Detective is a moving study, capturing as I've never before seen our interest in the quintessential sleuth and his stalwart biographer. Sherlock Holmes will never fade, and this book proves it." — LYNDSAY FAYE, author of Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson "Sherlock Holmes is both immortal and immaterial — and the inspired deductions and ratiocinations of Zach Dundas bring us closer to understanding why we've spent over a hundred years trying to claim Doyle's detective from the fictional world and give him a home in our own. The best and wisest H —

From the Publisher

03/30/2015
Sherlock Holmes’s popularity prompted Dundas (The Renegade Sportsman) to investigate how and why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s hero and his sidekick, Dr. Watson, have endured for so long. Dundas strives to use the detective’s famed techniques to ferret out Conan Doyle’s influences—Poe, pioneering surgeon Joseph Bell—and chronicle the influence Holmes has exercised through parodies, tributes, plays, films, TV series, and even comic books and fan fiction. The work is admirably exhaustive, but it’s also exhausting. Despite a rigorous Sherlockian “commitment to the facts,” lengthy personal digressions, such as Dundas’s tour of Dartmoor, the setting for The Hound of the Baskervilles, with his family, seem more self-serving than illuminating. Dundas’s admiration for Holmes is never in doubt, and he unearths some interesting anecdotes about Conan Doyle: Holmes’s creator was an early auto enthusiast (who “collected speeding tickets”) and had an interest in spiritualism, and as a writer, Conan Doyle was amusingly “reckless about accuracy” and character consistency. But Dundas’s smug tone, strained attempts at humor with David Foster Wallace–like footnotes, and tendency to synopsize plots are wearying. If only Dundas, like Sherlock, had simply “seen and observed” his fascinating material. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Trident Media Group. (June)

Publishers Weekly

06/15/2015
Journalist Dundas (The Renegade Sportsman) has written an entertaining investigation into the enduring and ever adaptable character and world of Sherlock Holmes. A fan himself, Dundas takes readers on his search across London for evidence of Holmes. At the same time the author provides a tour through the history of crime fiction, the life of Holmes's creator, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), and the adventures of Holmes and Dr. John Watson. Along the way, we meet those who were the inspirations behind Holmes and his stories as well as the millions of readers affected by the characters—Dundas provides a glimpse into the annual meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars and the global network of fans. The book concludes with a discussion of the current incarnations of Holmes and Watson, particularly that of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in the BBC's Sherlock. Also included is a list of the 20 "essential" stories, source notes, and an index. VERDICT This quick-paced survey of all things Sherlock Holmes is best suited for fans who have not done much research on the stories or Conan Doyle. Well-written and fun, Dundas's enthusiasm for his subject is contagious.—Stefanie Hollmichel, Univ. of St. Thomas Law Lib., Minneapolis

Library Journal

2015-03-02
A lively look at the enduring detective.A Sherlock Holmes fan since childhood, Portland Monthly co-executive editor Dundas (The Renegade Sportsman, 2010) embarks on a cheerful romp through the conception, fame, and afterlife of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous sleuth. The detective story was still in its literary infancy when Conan Doyle invented a character based on one of his medical school professors, "a hawk-nosed, gray-eyed wizard radiating an air of command." Joseph Bell was a master diagnostician, making deductions from astute observations. "What if a detective did that?" Conan Doyle wondered. Dundas chronicles Holmes' evolution as Conan Doyle fleshed out his personality and appearance, beginning with A Study in Scarlet (1887). In The Sign of the Four (1890), Holmes emerged as "a magnetic figure, coiled in his armchair, wreathed in smoke: a gray-eyed whipcord of skinny muscle wrapped in a dressing gown." Watson, too, became deeper. Though "bluff and hearty," he seemed to harbor "inner pain and loneliness." Watson's regard for Holmes, Dundas writes, is "one of literature's great studies in devotion." Readers found the Holmes stories irresistible, but by 1893, Conan Doyle was tired of producing them and summarily killed off his hero. Watson was not the only one bereft; readers called the author a brute. Years later, offered substantial money by a periodical, Conan Doyle revived Holmes with a barely believable tale accounting for his survival. Dundas offers attentive readings of Holmes stories; traverses the bleak landscape of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902); investigates Conan Doyle's homes, haunts, and obsession with spiritualism; chronicles his visit to the cheesy museum at 221b Baker St. and his meetings with the Baker Street Irregulars, a "mother ship of a small, dedicated subculture of Holmes enthusiasts"; and recounts the work of the actors who have played Holmes, including Basil Rathbone, who felt the role consumed him, and Benedict Cumberbatch. A bright read for Sherlock's fans.

Kirkus Reviews