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Sherlock Holmes

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Sherlock Holmes (right) and Dr. Watson, by Sidney Paget

Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective of the late 19th and early 20th century, created by British author and physician Arthur Conan Doyle. He is famous for his prowess at using logic to solve cases.

Warning: Plot details follow.

Holmes was said to have lived at 221B Baker Street (an upper-storey flat at 221 Baker Street; in early notes it was described as Upper Baker Street), where he spent many of his professional years with his friend and colleague Dr. Watson.

Sherlock Holmes describes himself as a "consulting detective", which means that people come to consult him about their problems, rather than him going to see them; we are told that he is often able to solve a problem without leaving home (although this aspect is somewhat lost in the stories themselves, which focus on the more interesting cases which often do require him to do actual legwork). He specializes in solving unusual cases using his extraordinary powers of observation and "deduction" (see below).

Conan Doyle credits the inception of Holmes on his teacher at the medical school of Edinburgh University, the gifted surgeon and forensic detective Joseph Bell, forensic science being a new type of science at the time. However, some years later Bell wrote to Conan Doyle: "you are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it" (Baring-Gould, p. 8). The 'Sherlock Holmes' name was derived from a pair of cricketers – however some early notes give his name as Sherrinford Holmes.

It is a popular myth that Sherlock Holmes gave rise to the entire genre of murder mystery fiction; however, the detective genre was alive before Holmes, if not one which followed a logical progression to the solution. Many fictional detectives have imitated Holmes' logical methods and followed in his footsteps, in many different ways. Some of the more popular fictional detectives to continue Holmes' legacy include Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Perry Mason, Columbo, Dick Tracy, and even the comic book superhero Batman. (See also Detective fiction)

Table of contents
1 Profile
2 Holmesian (or Sherlockian) deduction
3 The Canon
4 “The Hiatus”
5 Adaptations
6 Holmesian Speculation
7 Authors of new (i.e. Non-Doyle) Sherlock Holmes stories
8 Related media
9 References
10 See also
11 External links


In many of the stories Holmes is assisted by his only friend, the practical Dr. John H. Watson, with whom he shared rooms for some time, before Watson's marriage. Watson is not only Holmes's friend but his chronicler (his "Boswell"). Most of Holmes' stories are told as reports, by Watson, of Holmes' solutions to actual crimes; in some later stories, Holmes criticises Watson for his writings, usually because of Watson's decision to tell them as exciting stories rather than as objective and detailed reports. Holmes also has a brother, Mycroft Holmes, who appears in three stories—"The Greek Interpreter", "The Final Problem", and "The Bruce-Partington Plans"—and is mentioned in a number of others, including "The Empty House".

In three stories, including The Sign of Four, he is assisted by a group of street children or urchins he calls the Baker Street Irregulars.

In the very first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, something of Holmes's background is given. On March 4, 1881 he is presented as an independent student of chemistry with a variety of very curious side-interests, almost all of which turn out to be single-mindedly bent toward making Holmes superior at solving crimes. In another early Holmes story, "The Gloria Scott", more background on what caused Holmes to become a detective is presented: a college friend's father complimented him very highly on his deductive skills.

In A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson makes an evaluation of Sherlock's skills:

"Sherlock Holmes–his limits"

  1. Knowledge of Literature.—Nil.
  2. " " Philosophy.—Nil.
  3. " " Astronomy.—Nil.
  4. " " Politics.—Feeble.
  5. " " Botany.—Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
  7. Knowledge of Chemistry.—Profound.
  8. " " Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic.
  9. " " Sensational Literature.—Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
  10. Plays the violin well.
  12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

Holmes is also a competent cryptanalyst; he relates to Watson that he is "fairly familiar with all forms of secret writing, and am myself the author of a trifling monograph upon the subject in which I analyse one hundred and sixty separate ciphers." One such scheme is solved in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" which uses a series of stick figures, for example:
Dancing men ciphertext

Elsewhere Sherlock himself mentions that he has "some knowledge" of baritsu, "the Japanese system of wrestling", by means of which he escaped the death-grip of his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty.

In this same first story, Doyle presents a comparison between his debuting character and two earlier established and better known at the time fictional detectives: Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin and Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq. Dupin had first appeared in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", first published in 1841, and Lecoq in "L'Affaire Lerouge" ("The Lerouge Affair") in 1866. The brief discussion between Watson and Holmes about the two characters begins with a comment by Watson:

Sherlock seems convinced that he is superior to both of them, while Watson expresses his admiration of the two characters. It has been suggested that this was a way for Doyle to pay some respect to characters by writers who had influenced him, while insisting that his character is an improvement over them.

Holmes' arch-enemy, and popularly-supposed nemesis was Professor James Moriarty ("the Napoleon of Crime") who fell, struggling with Holmes, over the Reichenbach Falls. Conan Doyle intended "The Final Problem", the story in which Holmes and Moriarty fell over the cliff, to be the last that he wrote about Holmes; however the mass of mailings he received demanding that he bring Holmes back convinced him to continue. "The Adventure of the Empty House" had Conan Doyle explaining that only Moriarty fell over the cliff, but Holmes had allowed the world to believe that he too had perished while he dodged the retribution of Moriarty's underlings. Notably, Moriarty does not appear directly in the stories; Watson never encounters Moriarty, and so the encounters between Holmes and his nemesis are described by Holmes.

Irene Adler was always referred to by Holmes and his fans as "The Woman". She appeared only in "A Scandal in Bohemia", but she is often thought to be the only woman who broke through Holmes' reserve. More than once in the course of the stories, Holmes was engaged to be married; but in each case it was with the claimed motivation of gaining information for his cases. If he was able to turn on a certain amount of charm, as indicated by these episodes, there is no indication of a serious or long-term interest apart from the case of Adler. Watson states that Holmes has an "aversion to women" but "a peculiarly ingratiating way with [them]." His dislike may have stemmed from the fact he found "the motives of women... so inscrutable... How can you build on such quicksand? Their most trivial actions may mean volumes... their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin"; this resistance to his deductive processes may have annoyed him. It could be claimed that Watson was more averse to women than Holmes was; but Watson was the one who spoke favorably of some women and actually married one (two, according to Holmes).

However Holmes is not at all a stuffy strait-laced Victorian gentleman; in fact, he describes himself and his habits as "Bohemian". He apparently suffers from bipolar disorder, alternating between days or weeks of listless lassitude and similar periods of intense engagement with a challenging case or with his hobby, experimental chemistry, "extreme exactness and astuteness... [or a] poetic and contemplative mood", "outbursts of passionate energy... followed by reactions of lethargy". Modern readers of the Holmes stories are apt to be surprised that he is an occasional user of cocaine, though Watson describes this as Holmes's "only vice". Watson might not have considered as a vice Holmes's habit of smoking (usually a pipe) heavily, nor his tendency to bend the truth and break the law (i.e. lie to the police, conceal evidence, burgle, housebreak, but not, say, murder or rape) when it suited his purposes; in Victorian England these were probably not considered vices as long as they were done by a gentleman for noble purposes. Since a large portion of the plot revolved around doing such things, a modern reader must accept actions which would be out of character for a 'law-abiding' detective living by the standards of a later time.

Holmesian (or Sherlockian) deduction

"From a drop of water"—Holmes wrote in an essay described in A Study in Scarlet—"a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other." Holmes stories often begin with a bravura display of Holmes' talent for "deduction". It is of some interest to logicians and those interested in logic to try to analyze just what Holmes is doing when he performs his deduction. Holmesian (the British adjective; Americans say "Sherlockian") deduction appears to consist primarily of drawing inferences based on either straightforward practical principles—which are the result of careful inductive study, such as Holmes's study of different kind of cigar ashes—or inference to the best explanation. In many cases, the inference can be modelled either way. In 2002, Holmes was inducted as an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry—the only fictional character so honored—in appreciation of the contributions to forensic investigation.

Holmes's straightforward practical principles are generally of the form, "If p, then q," where "p" is observed evidence and "q" is what the evidence indicates. But there are also, as one may observe in the following example, often some intermediate principles. In "A Scandal in Bohemia", Holmes deduces that Watson had gotten very wet lately and that he had "a most clumsy and careless servant girl". When Watson, in amazement, asks how Holmes knows this, Holmes answers:



(Of course they could be used to remove anything from the shoe, or by someone wishing to damage the shoe.)

(But of course we only gather that mud was scraped off by the information above.)

(Which seems a very bad turn of speech. People would be likely to get wet often! Also the mud need not be placed there recently anyway.)


p: The sides of Watson's shoes are scored by several parallel cuts.
q1: Watson's servant girl is clumsy and careless.
q2: Watson has been very wet lately and has been out in vile weather.

But perhaps Holmes isn't giving a proper explanation—after all Holmes may be well aware of Watson's servant girl. As Watson is a doctor and it has been raining, it is likely he has been out in the rain.

In other instances of Holmesian deduction, it is more difficult to model his inference as deduction using general principles, and logicians and scientists will readily recognize the method used, instead, as an inductive one—in particular, argument to the best explanation, or, in Charles S. Peirce's terminology, abduction. That Holmes should have called this deduction is entirely plausible, however; in several stories, Holmes is said not to have known anything at all of philosophy.

The instances in which Holmes uses deduction tend to be those where he has amassed a large body of evidence, produced a number of possible explanations of that evidence, and then proceeds to find one explanation that is clearly the best at explaining the evidence. For example, in The Sign of Four, a certain man is found dead in his room, with a ghastly smile on his face, and with no immediately visible cause of death. From a whole body of background information as well as evidence gathered at and around the scene of the crime, Holmes is able to infer that the murderer is—not the various people that Scotland Yard has in custody (each of them being an alternative explanation)—but rather another person entirely. As Holmes says in the story, "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" This phrase has entered Western popular culture as a catchphrase.

In the latter example, in fact, Holmes's solution of the crime depends both on a series of applications of general principles and argument to the best explanation.

Holmes's success at his brand of deduction, therefore, is due to his mastery of both a huge body of particular knowledge of things like footprints, cigar ashes, and poisons, which he uses to make relatively simple deductive inferences, and the fine art of ordering and weighing different competing explanations of a body of evidence. Holmes is also particularly good at gathering evidence by observation, as well locating and tracking the movements of criminals through the streets of London and environs (in order to produce more evidence)—skills that have little to do with deduction per se, but everything to do with providing the premises for particular Holmesian deductions.

In the stories by Conan Doyle, Holmes often remarked that his logical conclusions were "elementary", in that he considered them to be simple and obvious. However, the complete phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" does not appear in any of the 68 Holmes stories written by Doyle.

It should be noted too, that our modern stereotype of police procedure—someone who looks for physical clues, rather than someone who examines opportunity and motive—comes from Holmes.

Readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories have often been surprised to discover that their author, Conan Doyle, was a fervent believer in paranormal phenomena, and that the logical, skeptical character of Holmes was in opposition to his own in many ways.

The word 'Sherlock' has entered the language to mean a detective or nosey person; it is also commonly used in American slang to mean a knowledgeable person, as in the sarcastic phrase "No shit, Sherlock", uttered when someone says something obvious.

Man or Machine

"So many regard him as a machine rather than a man." Watson describes Holmes a "desiccated calculating machine", "as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence", and states that "all emotions... were abhorrent to his cold, precise, yet admirably balanced mind."

In the era of Charles Babbage, Holmes may have been written as human computer. He treats all he finds as data, information to be interpreted, and does not proceed without all the facts. Like a machine, he doesn't have a social life and he doesn't seem to eat or even sleep (even when he is ill).

However, there are complications for this theory. Although a computer could possibly come with the idea of getting engaged to a woman to gain information from her, it couldn't come up with a way of doing this (i.e convince the woman). A computer would not stoop to disguise or acting as Holmes did. In fact if you consider Holmes's deduction principles above, it seems a very skewed logic. His bipolar nature, skill as a musician and composer, and occasional fondness for showmanship also count against this. While "his cold and pround nature was always adverse... [to] public applause" and "turned away with disdain from popular notoriety" but "for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause... from a friend."

The Canon

Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories about Sherlock Holmes. All were narrated by Dr. Watson, with the exception of two narrated by Holmes himself and two more written in the third person. The stories appeared in magazine serialization, notably in The Strand, over a period of forty years. This was a common form of publication in those days; Charles Dickens wrote in a similar fashion. The stories cover a period from around 1878 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914.

In addition to the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle's The Lost Special (1908) features an unnamed 'amateur reasoner' clearly intended to be identified as Holmes by his readers. His explanation for a baffling disappearance, argued in Holmes' characteristic style, turns out to be quite wrong - evidently Conan Doyle was not above poking fun at his own hero.


Short stories

(organized by collection)

Note: Frequently, "The Adventure of ..." is dropped from some story titles in current-day anthologies. However, in their original appearance in The Strand, this is how the titles were given.)

“The Hiatus”

Holmes fans refer to the period from
1891 to 1894—the time between Holmes's disappearance and presumed death in "The Final Problem" and his reappearance in "The Adventure of the Empty House"—as "the Hiatus". It is notable, though, that one later story ("The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge") is described as taking place in 1892.

For Conan Doyle, writing the stories, the period was ten years long. Conan Doyle, wanting to devote more time to his historical novels, killed off Holmes in "The Final Problem", which appeared in print in 1893. After resisting public pressure for eight years, Conan Doyle wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles, which appeared in 1901, setting it before Holmes's "death". The public, while pleased with the story, were not satisfied with a posthumous Holmes, and so Conan Doyle resuscitated Holmes two years later. Many have speculated on Conan Doyle's motives for bringing Holmes back to life, notably writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who wrote an essay on the subject in the 1970s, but the actual motives are not known. For whatever reason, Conan Doyle continued to write Holmes stories for a quarter-century more.



The stories were very popular as adaptations for the stage, and later film, and still later television.


The actor most associated with Holmes on stage was William Gillette, who wrote, directed, and starred in a popular play about Holmes while the stories were still being published. His version of Holmes, dressed in deerstalker hat and Inverness cape and smoking a large curved pipe, contributed much to the popular image of the character. (There are occasional hints of the deerstalker hat in Paget's original illustrations for The Strand, but it is by no means a regular accoutrement. Doyle's text is even vaguer, referring only to a soft cotton hat or a hat with earflaps in the passages with the relevant illustrations. He is also described as smoking at least two different types of pipe, varying pipes with his mood.)

A number of plays and also one musical have been written around Holmes.


Sherlock Holmes is the single most frequently filmed fictional character, with almost 200 film appearances to date; only Dracula comes close to matching his record. In film, two actors are most commonly associated with the role of Holmes: Eille Norwood (47 films) and Basil Rathbone (14 films (with Nigel Bruce as Watson) and 1 play). Rathbone somewhat resembled the Sidney Paget illustrations in the Strand. Many believe his portrayal of Holmes captures most faithfully the character of the Holmes in the original stories, although the scripts of the films were often travesties of the original stories.

Other films loosely based on the Sherlock Holmes series of books have been released.


John Gielgud played Holmes for BBC radio. There have been other adaptations as well.


There have been many television adaptations of the better-known Sherlock Holmes tales, notably The Hound of the Baskervilles, over the years. Many aficionados consider the Granada Television adaptation, with Jeremy Brett as Holmes, as the most faithful depiction of the stories ever produced. Initially with David Burke and subsequently Edward Hardwicke as Watson, all but nineteen of the Conan Doyle stories were filmed before the premature death of Jeremy Brett from a heart attack in 1995. Between 1984 to 1994, 36 episodes and 4 films were produced over 6 series. Many regard Brett's performance as a near-perfect portrayal of Holmes, although his portrayal of Holmes as neurotic and somewhat arrogant, masterly as it is, is seen by many as being at odds with Doyle's descriptions of Holmes as more suave and congenial. Brett and Harwicke reprised their roles as Holmes and Watson in 1988-89 in a West End stage play, The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, written by Jeremy Paul (the secret being that Holmes had "invented" Moriarty as a challenge to his investigative ability).

Other people who have played Sherlock Holmes in film, television, stage, or radio include:

An animated series, Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, brings Holmes into the future through the marvels of science.

Holmesian Speculation

A popular pastime among fans of Sherlock Holmes is to pretend that Holmes and Watson were real people, and Arthur Conan Doyle merely Watson's "literary agent", and to attempt to "discover" new facts about them, either from clues in the stories or by combining the stories with historical fact.

One influential player of the historical-Holmes game was William S. Baring-Gould, whose works on the subject included The Chronological Holmes, an attempt to lay out in chronological order all the events alluded to in the Sherlock Holmes stories; Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, an influential "biography" of Holmes; and Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street, a "biography" of Rex Stout's detective character Nero Wolfe which popularised the theory that Wolfe was "really" the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. Stout's own tongue-in-cheek contribution to the field was the theory that Watson was a woman. Baring-Gould also edited The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which combines in two volumes the complete canon and a hundred thousand words of additional explanation and illustration drawn from the Holmesian literature.

The Holmes family

One particularly rich area of "research" is the "uncovering" of details about Holmes's family history and early life, of which almost nothing is said in Conan Doyle's stories. In "The Greek Interpreter" Watson states: "I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his early life." But in that story, as well as introducing his brother, Holmes mentions the only facts about his family that are in any of the stories - "My ancestors were country squires... my grandmother... was the sister of Vernet, the French artist." Beyond this all familial statements are speculation. For example, there is a certain belief that his mother was named Violet, based on Conan Doyle's fondness for the name and the strong Violets in the canon.

The most influential "biography" of Holmes is Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street by Baring-Gould. Faced with Holmes's reticence about his family background and early life, Baring-Gould invented one for him. According to Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes was born in Yorkshire, the youngest of three sons of Siger Holmes and Violet Sherrinford. The middle brother, Mycroft, appears in the Canon, but the eldest, Sherrinford Holmes, was invented by Baring-Gould to free Mycroft and Sherlock from the obligation of following Siger as a country squire. (In reality, "Sherrinford Holmes" was one of the names Arthur Conan Doyle considered for his hero before settling on "Sherlock".) Siger Holmes's name is derived from "The Adventure of the Empty House", in which Sherlock spends some time pretending to be a Norwegian mountaineer called Sigerson. (This hardly qualifies as a clue about the name of Sherlock's father, but in the absence of any genuine clues it was the best Baring-Gould had to work with.)

Some other versions of Sherlock's parentage:

The Holmes family and the Wold Newton family

Based originally on the writings of
Philip Jose Farmer, the concept of the Wold Newton family is the construction of a giant genealogical tree which connects many fictional characters to each other and to a number of historical figures. Additions to this tree are based on the writings of the original creators, pastiche writers, and "Wold Newton scholars". Sherlock Holmes has been one of the central characters of this tree. The Holmes family and its various generations have been the subject of many Wold Newton articles. Sherlock himself has been described as born as William Sherlock Scott Holmes on January 6, 1854 to Siger Holmes and his wife Violet Rutherford. One of eight siblings, including Mycroft. The descendants of those siblings include many other characters. Sherlock himself has been given as the father of at least eight children, including Nero Wolfe. Sherlock is also an ancestor of Star Trek's Spock through Amanda Grayson.


Related media

1924, comedian Buster Keaton made Sherlock Jr

Disney's The Great Mouse Detective (1986), also known as Basil of Baker Street, was a relatively successful theatrical feature animated film based on the books of Eve Titus, featuring a miniature subworld of London with mice, rats and cats in the lead roles, with the title character being a mouse who lives in 221B Baker St and models his own detective career on Holmes.

In , a Sherlock Holmes mystery was one of the programs on the Enterprise-D's holodeck. In the episode Elementary, Dear Data, Data, after memorizing all of the Sherlock Holmes books, is challenged to use deduction in an original mystery created by Dr. Pulaski. However, the program goes awry and Moriarty (played by Daniel Davis) kidnaps Dr. Pulaski and takes over the ship's computer. In a later episode, Ship in a Bottle, the holodeck Moriarty again takes control of the ship, insisting that a way be found for him to experience life beyond the confines of the holodeck.

Sherlock Holmes is also an inspiration for the Japanese anime, Detective Conan, where the main character, Conan Edogawa, takes his psuedonym from two detective fiction authors, Edogawa Rampo and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sherlock is one of many fictional characters borrowed by Kim Newman's alternate-history novel Anno-Dracula, although only as an off-stage presence and never actually named; Mycroft and Moriarty play significant roles in this story.


Barring-Gould, William S. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., New York, NY. ISBN 0-517-502917

See also

External links