The Great Defective

Last winter, The Red Pants of Justice got into a pleasing Sunday night routine. He and his girlfriend – the lovely Mata Hari, who refuses to be referred to as Mrs. Red Pants of Justice for some reason – would cook a big Sunday lunch, and then sit down to watch Sherlock Holmes on the telly. All very domestic, pipe-and-slippers stuff, but how we loved it. When the weather’s turned all misty and cold, it’s dark outside by four, and you’ve immobilised yourself with a helping of roast chicken that you could barely lift off the plate, there’s really nothing better than to sit down for an hour to watch Jeremy Brett gurn and twirl his way through another cryptic and thoroughly well art-designed Victorian mystery. Bliss.

So it was with some surprise that Mata read in the paper this morning that Arthur Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes. Resented him terribly. Wanted nothing more than to kill him off and be remembered instead for the epic historical novels that were his passion. The problem was, they weren’t very good. In fact, according to accounts by his publisher, they were terrible. Unpublishable. Pants.

Actually, the Red Pants of Justice was aware of this fact before, but I didn't realise the extent to which Doyle let it show in in his work. Brimming with frustration that his name had become synonymous with Holmes - especially after he was forced to resurrect him from the jagged rocks of the Reichenbach falls, to which the detective was briefly consigned in a fit of literary pique - Doyle often indulged in acts of petty sabotage towards his most famous creation. He kept churning out the stories, but over time they became riddled with small but often deliberate jibes and inconsistencies, in what amounted to an expression of contempt for his dedicated fanbase.

For example, although Holmes was meant to be a master chemist, Doyle neglected to back up the detailed scientific jargon attributed to him with even the most basic research; meaning that most of the time, his apparently authoritative pronouncements were, in fact, little more than gibberish. Meanwhile, poor old Dr. Watson seemed unsure of whether his name was John or James, and it was even implied from time to time that he was a polygamist, with several wives stashed away across London. Hardly the sweet and slightly bumbling old chap, more synonymous now with the gentle demeanour of Nigel Bruce or Edward Hardwicke.

Doyle would no doubt bristle at the fact that, 75 years after his death, he is remembered for little else but Sherlock Holmes. Even his notable contribution to the fledgling science fiction genre is eclipsed by the work of others, more readily associated with the tradition, such as H.G Wells. Indeed, it is open to question whether or not Doyle would be remembered for much of anything today, had his most famous creation been stillborn on the page. At the heart of Doyle’s neurosis was the fear that as long as he was inseparable from Holmes in the public imagination, he would never be taken seriously as an author during his lifetime. Maybe he had a point. Alfred Hitchcock would later complain that he was never fully accepted as an artist, in either his native or adoptive countries, because his films were so popular. For Hitchcock, as for Doyle, success became an albatross around the neck. Had Doyle been born fifty years later, the two might have got on famously.

So the Red Pants of Justice endorses Sherlock Holmes: most definitely not pants, even if his creator seemed to think so. In art, as in life, sometimes greatness needs a little maturity to shine.