Sherlock Holmes by Nicholas Utechin

Author:Nicholas Utechin [Utechin, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4463-5832-0
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2012-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Holmes is Critical

Watson’s writing analysed

‘The Copper Beeches’ was published in the June 1892 edition of The Strand Magazine as the 12th and last of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and is fascinating for one reason. Not the plot – although it is a very serviceable one, involving a governess who is obliged by her employer to have a very specific sort of luxuriant hair and always to sit at the same time of day in a very specific place – but for the way that the story is opened by Sherlock Holmes.

He and Watson are in Baker Street, and the detective is bored. So, most surprisingly, he criticises the doctor’s style of writing up his cases, becoming more and more critical: ‘[T]hese little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish’; ‘You have erred, perhaps, in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements, instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing’; ‘You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales’; ‘[I]n avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial.’

This was Conan Doyle being audacious in the extreme, almost turning against his own enormous success with the characters and tales by having the ‘hero’ figure (Holmes) castigate his biographer. It may have been an in-joke, or perhaps a deliberate ploy to show off a new Holmesian characteristic by building a tension between him and Watson. Or perhaps it was something more sinister, betraying in a clever way the very first stirrings of dissatisfaction with this popular success (‘bordered on the trivial’) that led Conan Doyle, 18 months later, to kill off his great creation.

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