The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes by Vincent Starrett

Author:Vincent Starrett
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781497690899
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

THE REAL SHERLOCK HOLMES

BUT ONE MUST DROP, AT LAST, THE HAPPY PRETENSE; admit that Sherlock Holmes is dead. And being dead yet liveth. The paradox is complete; the tale is ended. The greatest detective of the modern world has gone, at length, upon his final quest, the most mysterious of all his strange adventures.

He died upon the 7th of July, the year being 1930, at his home in Crowborough, Sussex—Windlesham, he called it—in the person of the man who had created him. For true as it may be that the model for the immortal detective was Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh, there can be little doubt that the real Holmes was Conan Doyle himself. In innumerable ways throughout his life of extraordinary service, the British novelist demonstrated the truth of the assertion. From first to last—as student, physician, writer, spiritualist, and prophet of war—he was always the private detective, the seeker after hidden truths, the fathomer of obscure mysteries, the hound of justice upon the trail of injustice and official apathy.

It was inevitable that the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories should often be called upon to enact the rôle of his imaginary detective, and not infrequently he accepted the implied challenge. Twice in his career he undertook fatiguing causes, because he believed that justice had not been done. The cases of George Edalji and Oscar Slater were notorious in their day. They shook all England, and the thunder of Doyle’s denunciations crossed the Atlantic. Twenty years and more have since elapsed, yet echoes of the famous cases still reverberate; and it was only recently that the convict Slater, championed by the indignant novelist, won his freedom from prison—and revealed his singular ingratitude.

There is a flavor of the Holmes tales in both episodes—that pinch of the bizarre, bordering on the fantastic, that marks most of the fictive adventures. Chronologically the Edalji case stands first. The facts are as follows:

George Edalji, a young law student, was the son of a certain Rev. S. Edalji, a Parsee, yet vicar of the Anglican Parish of Great Wyrley, whose wife was an English woman. The vicar was a kindly, intelligent man who performed his churchly duties with fidelity. His wife was an excellent wife. Their son, the half-caste George Edalji, was a young man of irreproachable character, and an admirable student who had won the highest honors in his legal studies. Nevertheless, the situation was unfortunate. “How the vicar came to be a Parsee,” wrote Conan Doyle, “or how the Parsee came to be the vicar, I have no idea. Perhaps some catholic-minded patron wished to demonstrate the universality of the Anglican church. The experiment will not, I hope, be repeated, for though the vicar was an amiable and devoted man, the appearance of a colored clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation.”*

The family became the target for considerable local malice, and was for a time subjected to a veritable broadside of anonymous letters, many of them “of the most monstrous description.

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