October Newsletter

The Game’s Afoot

The International Exhibit of Sherlock Holmes is in Seattle at the Pacific Science Center now to January 8, 2017. I hope you’ll take the time to enjoy visiting this interactive exhibit where you’ll become Holmes’ eyes and ears, helping him to solve another baffling case.

For the general public, the mystery genre really got its start in 1887 when Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes. Here we have the archetypal detective. Detecting is his job, and something he does for intellectual amusement. He goes about it rationally. He’s quirky, but effective. Like a lot of modern detectives, Holmes is alienated from society and has an occasional problem with substance abuse.

Most significant, Holmes gives us the first example of the detective who is a little arrogant, with a taste for the darker side of human nature and an unrelenting determination to solve the case.

Sherlock Holmes is the subject of four novels, and fifty-six short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In a way, Holmes epitomized the times he was written in. The Victorian age was an age of great technological and scientific advancement, and this is reflected in the Holmes stories in many ways. It was an era not only of science but of the scientific method. Darwin had applied the method to naturalism and come up with his theory of evolution.

Although he didn’t particularly like the detective he had created, Conan Doyle had found a meal ticket that would allow him to write the serious literature he really desired. Throughout his career he returned to Sherlock Holmes when he needed money. Ironically, Conan Doyle came to feel that Holmes was in the way of him attaining the literary greatness he sought.

How can Sherlock Holmes be discussed without speaking of Watson? The two are inseparable. They complement and complete each other. They first meet because both of them are looking for someone to share a flat with. The most important fact of the relationship is that it’s through Watson’s eyes that we see Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes isn’t a very nice character on the whole. George Bernard Shaw once described him as “a drug addict without a single amiable trait.”

Just as Sherlock Holmes had a formula for discovering bloodstains, Conan Doyle had a formula for writing mysteries. All detective stories rely on a backstory. They usually begin with the discovery of a crime. The action on the page is the discovery of the facts of the case, but the action of the story itself has already happened. So actually mysteries start at the end and the detective reveals thestory to the reader as s/he learns it through investigation.

The Holmes stories are certainly mysteries, but some have other aspects as well. Some have aspects of horror. The Hound of the Baskervilles is closest to aspects of the supernatural.

When you visit the International Exhibit of Sherlock Holmes, or when you’re solving other mysteries, you may want to keep in mind Holmes’ admonishment, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”