“You know my methods, Watson.”
"You know my methods, Watson," is an oft-used line that appears in The Adventure of the Crooked Man (1893) and in several combinations across The Sherlock Holmes Memoirs that Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle published during the late 19th and the early 20th century. Holmes seems to be telling his friend, Dr. Watson that his methods of solving a crime were not unknown to him. Indeed, the readers know it just as well. Some logicians call it abductive reasoning, the tendency to form the most likely hypotheses based on the evidence at hand. Yet, Holmes is not a character whom we admire only for his observational skills. It is his persona - the long trench coat clad decadent, rude genius - which makes him one of the most popular fictional detectives over the last century. However, we must acknowledge that the character of Sherlock Holmes has undergone a dramatic change over time to metamorphose into Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘high functioning sociopath’, Sherlock - transforming the character itself into a modern myth. To study the same, we must follow the ‘scarlet thread’ of its origins to the 19th century itself.
Walter Benjamin points out in his essay The Flaneur, that the figure of the flaneur, literally meaning a ‘stroller’ in French, was like an ‘unwilling detective’ in the middle of the 19th century in cities like Paris. He was ‘asocial’ and could conveniently shield himself in the phantasmagoria of city life. His keen observational skills set him apart from the rest of the people although it seemed like he was indolent and idle among the busy city crowd. This crowd became a part of the crime setting and the flaneur, with his ability to ‘catch things in flight,’ received a boost to his self esteem and enabled him to dream like he was an artist. One of the first persons to give life to this flaneur in detective fiction is Edgar Allen Poe’s in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) through his protagonist C. Auguste Dupin. In fact, Dupin was the primary fictional inspiration behind the characterization of Sherlock Holmes. In A Study in Scarlet (1887), Dr. Watson literally compares Homes with Dupin (although Holmes is quick to brand Dupin as an inferior fellow).
Holmes is charmingly spoken, a master of all trades, and often comes off as a dandy. Watson is in awe of him, like all the readers, because of his genius at solving crimes, especially when we see Inspector Lestrade as a foil to him. Holmes just seems to be capable of using his intelligence and deduction skills to solve the crime puzzles faster and better than everyone else around him, especially the police. His constant egging of Watson to think better and branding him as a ‘genius’ whenever he did a good job inevitably makes one think of Feluda, Satyajit Ray’s fictional bourgeoisie Bengali detective, and how he appreciated Topshe, his nephew, everytime he did a good job at joining the dots.
Following the character’s popularity, 20th Century Fox Studios decided to bring Holmes’ popularity to the silver screen with the production of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939). This movie depicted him as a typical Victorian man of fashion and technology. This standardised the image of the subsequent adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, and the same continues to remain distinct even through BBC’s Sherlock and CBSs Elementary (the dark suits, long trench coats and dressing gowns help to picture Holmes as a man out of time). Another TV show, House, M.D. (2004 - 2012) lifted the rudeness and reasoning genius out of Holmes’ character and drove the cause for an anti-hero Holmes prototype that quickly captured the fans’ imagination, so much that the Warner Brothers found it safe to further drive this image home in the viewers’ mind by producing a successful film, Sherlock Holmes (2009), starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes.
Therefore, Sherlock Holmes has become a modern myth. Following Barthes in his Mythologies, it can be agreed that the mythology surrounding Holmes has managed to transform him into a perennially contemporary character through a series of retellings. In this, each new adaptation of the Holmes character feeds the evolutionary model of the mythology. However, I believe that the curious singling out of the character of Holmes as it exists today has been furthered by the need to situate him in real space and time, allotting a real address on a real London street and upholding him, like the apartment itself, as a real entity. When we do not have the flaneur’s crowd or the pages of a magazine or a TV screen separating the everyday from the character, what makes him distinct as the Sherlock Holmes? The answer is pretty simple— a genius beyond the common man’s grasp. He is now a cosmopolitan cocktail of fiction, history, fans’ discourse, and time itself. We have robbed him of his natural deductive and forensic capabilities, and fictional geopolitical space. His character has undergone a Victorian English remodelling, acquired an anti-hero strain, become synonymous with a Cumberbatch-ian makeover, and has, most importantly, been allotted a permanent, human address (even an app!). Like all myths, the myth of Sherlock Holmes is still evolving, and only time shall tell if all the signs still lead to the chemist who Dr. Watson first met at the 221B Baker Street apartment eager to show him the experiment about haemoglobin in A Study in Scarlet (1887).
(cover picture courtesy: britannica.com)
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