sherlock holmes essay

Sherlock Holmes Essays

The well-known Sherlock Holmes was a detective character in a series of stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. All the stories go into great detail about life during the Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The specific stories I have been studying are titled ‘The Speckled Band’, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, and ‘The Copper Beeches’.

All of these stories have common themes and ideas which I will be discussing in my essay. One theme which is explored in all three stories is the idea of class. Sherlock Holmes often takes on cases which involve members of the upper class, such as in ‘The Speckled Band’, where an upper class woman approaches him for help.

The stories also often feature crime, and the various motivations for why people commit crimes. In ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, the criminal is driven by poverty, whereas in ‘The Speckled Band’, the criminal is driven by greed.

All three stories also feature detectives, both professional and amateur. Sherlock Holmes is the professional detective in all three stories, and uses his skills of deduction to solve the cases. In ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, Neville St Clair is the amateur detective, who uses his knowledge of human nature to help solve the case.

In all of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sherlock and Watson have play different roles. Usually, Sherlock is more intelligent and able to put together clues faster than we mere mortals can; he’s also quite mysterious and you never know what he’s going to do next. However, even though Watson is less intuitive than Sherlock, his role in the story is still important because he represents us normal folk who wouldn’t be able to connect all the dots like our great detective friend.

Another big difference between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson is that Doctor Watson is always getting himself into trouble and Sherlock Holmes always has to save him.

For example in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, Doctor Watson nearly gets himself killed a few times if it wasn’t for Sherlock Holmes he would have been dead.

This story is also a good example of how Sherlock Holmes is more intelligent than Doctor Watson he works out what is going on a lot quicker than Doctor Watson does.

Even though Doctor Watson doesn’t always understand what is going on he still helps Sherlock Holmes solve the mystery.

I think that Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to make Doctor Watson more like us so we could understand the stories better.

Another difference between these two characters is that Sherlock Holmes never really shows his feelings but Doctor Watson does, for example in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor” when Miss Hatty Doran got married and ran off with another man, Doctor Watson showed his feelings by saying “I never saw a woman so completely carried away by love” but Sherlock Holmes didn’t really say anything he just kept on talking about the case.

I think that Arthur Conan Doyle wanted us to see that even though Sherlock Holmes is more intelligent than Doctor Watson, Doctor Watson is still a very important character in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Arthur Conan Doyle is splendid at characterization, as he painted personalities of his characters with words in great detail. For instance, “Carriage driver: ‘he is a man of immense strength and absolute uncontrolled anger…” This quote was taken from ‘The Speckled Band’ describing Dr. Roylott. I think the author gave us a general sense of what kind personification the character has without delving too much into it so we can have a better understanding before going more in-depth about them later on.

Sherlock Holmes is the main character in the book and he is a very interesting character, he is what you would call a ‘high functioning sociopath’. He doesn’t seem to feel emotions like other people do and this makes him very good at his job, which is solving crimes. He is also extremely intelligent and can deduce things that other people wouldn’t be able to.

One of the things that I really like about Sherlock Holmes is that even though he isn’t a very emotional person, he does have a sense of justice and he will always try to help people who are in need.

For example, each story starts with an introduction that gets to the core of the plot. This is followed by development, where the story progresses and Sherlock narrows down his list of suspects. Finally, there is the denouement in which the crime is solved and everyone gets their just desserts. I think that how a story is structured can make or break it because some people might like knowing how it will end while others may not want to know that crimes always get solved in these stories.

The stories of Sherlock Holmes are all very similar in structure. They all start with an introduction, followed by the development of the story, and then the denouement where the crime is solved. This makes them very predictable, but some people may enjoy knowing that the crime will always be solved in the end.

What really makes or breaks these stories is the characters. Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant detective, and his sidekick Watson is always there to help him solve the case. The two of them have a great rapport, and their adventures are always interesting to read about.

If you’re looking for a good mystery story, then you can’t go wrong with Sherlock Holmes. With intriguing characters and exciting plots, these stories are sure to keep you entertained.

Descriptive writing allows the reader to see what the place, people, or object is like. For example, in “The Speckled Band,” one quote describing the house they are approaching says it was of gray stone with curling wings looking like claws of a crab. This particular description is great because not only can readers visualize what the house looks like, but also feel trapped–giving them a sense of how aggressive it may be.

Another example of description from the same story is “the window was closed and barred by heavy wooden shutters,” This again is another way of showing that the house looks aggressive because it has bars on the windows.

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Sherlock Holmes Essay

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The Life and Times of Sherlock Holmes: Essays on Victorian England by Liese Sherwood-Fabre

Latest Books Nonfiction

September 30, 2018

“I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Sherlock Holmes,” says Liese Sherwood-Fabre, author of THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES: ESSAYS ON VICTORIAN ENGLAND, a fascinating companion guide for anyone who can’t get enough of the legendary English detective, or that seemingly endless list of writers who insist upon resurrecting Holmes or some facsimile of him in their work.

“We were latchkey kids,” Sherwood-Fabre says, talking about her years growing up in Dallas, Texas. “And if we weren’t helping my father out in his micro-film business, we were home watching old black and white films on a local TV show called Dialing for Dollars. They never did call us, darn, but I remember watching those Basil Rathbone movies and that’s how I first got to know Sherlock Holmes.”

There are plenty of folks who have paid and continue to pay homage to Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective, but that’s not really what Sherwood-Fabre is all about. Instead, she’s fascinated by how the Victorian Age influenced Holmes and made him who he was. To that end, she’s produced an incredibly well-researched, easy to read, helpful book of short, illustrated essays.

At first, your reaction might be, Who cares? I mean, haven’t we had enough Sherlock Holmes? Obviously not. And with good reason.

“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle references many everyday Victorian activities and aspects that are lost on the 21st century reader,” Sherwood-Fabre says. She aims to remedy that by putting her academic background—a PhD from Indiana University—to work by researching the Victorian Age. Sherwood-Fabre took what she learned and began writing short essays that give modern readers greater insight and a deeper understanding of the references to the period that appear in the original Sherlock Holmes stories.

“His cases take on richer meaning when the reader grasps the subtleties of details such as the blue ribbon mentioned in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box , the doss houses Shinwell Johnson knew about, or how one contracted brain fever. These insights provide 21st century readers with context that has been lost over time.”

Once you get your hands on her e-book, a compilation of essays she’s published over the years in the Sherlockian E Times newsletter as well as other periodicals that offer all-things Holmes, you’ll get to know Holmes better than you ever thought possible by understanding the world in which he and Dr. Watson lived.

So, who is this woman who’s turned herself into an expert on Victorian England?

Liese (pronounced Lisa) Sherwood-Fabre was raised in Dallas, Texas. Her father ran a microfilm business and her mother, as well as she and her brothers and sisters, worked with him. “It was before computers and scanners and it was manual labor. There was a small camera and you had to run papers through by hand and photograph them.”

She now works for the federal government in health and human services, overseeing a grant program.

Sherwood-Fabre also writes fiction. Her novel, Saving Hope, is a thriller that takes place in Russia, where she worked for several years in the mid-1990s, a time when the Russian economy was not in very good shape. The novel centers on Iranians recruiting Russian scientists to work on their bio-weapons program. “I asked myself, what would cause a Russian scientist to go to work in Iran?”

That curiosity has served her well.

It was Sherwood-Fabre’s fascination with Sherlock Holmes that led her to want to learn more about him.

“One day, I started wondering what was it that made Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes? If you look into what Doyle wrote, he provides very little information about Holmes growing up. Essentially we know four things: his ancestors were country squires; he had a brother named Mycroft; his grandmother was the sister of a French portraitist; and he attended college for two years.”

Sherwood-Fabre realized Holmes did not spring full-grown from a vacuum.

“The most obvious answer is that Holmes learned most of what he knew from his family, and that he was probably trained by his father. But then I started to think—what if it wasn’t his father but rather his mother who really was the biggest influence on him? After all, Victorian women were expected to be in charge of the children’s education. What if she was this totally brilliant woman but she wasn’t allowed to do a lot of stuff, so she threw herself into her children’s education, and as a result her sons grew up to be these two brilliant young men?”

This led Sherwood-Fabre to an idea for a novel featuring a 13-year old Sherlock Holmes, who takes on the case of his own mother who is accused of murdering the village midwife. But before she began to write, she had some legwork to do.

“To be able to write a historical, you have to do research into the area. The first thing I looked at was the country squire. As I got into researching Holmes and Victorian England, I realized other people might be interested in this as well. I wasn’t involved in the Sherlockian world, but I knew there were newsletters and that they were probably looking for content. I asked myself, what if I write them and see if they’d like one essay a month, the first one being on country squires? They loved the idea. I wrote two years’ worth, and then realized that there were people who weren’t reading newsletters who might be interested in this material. So I published the first 24 essays in Volume 1, and now there’s a Volume 2.”

When asked for some of the more interesting facts she’s uncovered, she says, “Doyle writes about people who had brain fever. I wasn’t quite sure what they meant by that, so I started researching it and found that their concept of fever was different from ours. To us it means elevated body temperature, but for them, fever was a broader term for illness. I also found how the bicycle had a very large impact on women because it gave them mobility and freedom of movement they’d never had before. And the invention of the typewriter created an entire profession for women. Sherlock Holmes anticipated the use of analysis of the unique aspects of typewriter keys in one of his mysteries, prior to it ever being used in an actual legal case.”

She was also surprised to find that there was a shortage of men in the Victorian era, “partly due to war but also due to men going to seek their fortunes in other countries, like India.”

Sherwood-Fabre’s next project is contributing to an anthology of essays on the female characters in the canon. “It examines the concept of agency—independence and self-determination—and its impact in determining the character’s role in the story as villain, victim, or violet, a character who achieves some agency and maintains essential ‘goodness.’”

And yes, there will be a Volume 3 on the Life and Times of Sherlock Holmes in the Victorian Age.

To learn more about Liese, please visit her website .

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Little Essays on Sherlock Holmes: "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"

Olivia rutigliano close-reads the classic tale of family, blackmail, and australia.

In this series, our editor Olivia Rutigliano rereads every Sherlock Holmes story, and puts together a small close-reading. This week: “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892).

___________________________________

It’s humid today in New York City, where I live, so I read “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” a Sherlock Holmes story that is very much about barometric pressure. Holmes obsessively refers to a barometer while he is out and about in Herefordshire, investigating a local murder—he is checking the atmospheric pressure because he is concerned that, if it rains, the outdoor crime scene will be completely ruined. But the story’s omnipresent barometric readings also supply a handy metaphor; “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” is a story of long-simmering pressures between two men and how they finally, one day, burst into a storm.

The story’s muggy weather patterns and its central mystery are entwined. Right from the get-go, the case is rather hazy, to the point where most people (Dr. Watson, Inspector Lestrade, the press) insist that there are no ancillary clues to be found and therefore declare it to be (conversely) open-and-shut. They would rather zero-in on the few players in focus and try to bring clarity to their probable motives. Holmes insists that there are other clues, and even other players, out there in the fog.

The facts of the case are these: in Boscombe Valley, on one of the farms lent out by the region’s largest landowner, Mr. John Turner, a tenant named Mr. Charles McCarthy is found dead in the woods by a small lake. Witnesses reported that his own son James walked into the woods with a gun. Others overheard a loud argument between the two men. And shortly thereafter, a bewildered James ran back to the house, screaming that he had found his father dead on the ground. James didn’t have his gun then, and when the police came to investigate, they declared that Mr. McCarthy had died of head trauma, which might have been inflicted by a gun barrel. James was arrested. And if Alice Turner, the daughter of the landowner John Turner, had not insisted that the police contact Sherlock Holmes, the case would have been closed with James being convicted as the murderer.

Holmes, who has read all the press coverage of the case, sends Watson a telegram telling him to get to Paddington Station at once, and, at the urging of his wife Mary, Watson obliges. The two board a train headed for the country, with Holmes insisting that the case is both too murky and too concentrated for the police to have found the correct man. And when they meet Inspector Lestrade in the country, Holmes tells him as much. Lestrade, though, disagrees.

Holmes literally refers to the case as “fog”; when Lestrade suggests that the notion that anyone but the obvious suspect committed the murder is mere moonshine, Holmes makes a pun, joking that “moonshine is a brighter thing than fog.”

Holmes is curious about a few elements of the case, namely that James insists he did not know his father was in the woods when he headed there with his gun (he had just arrived home after a few days away and intended to hunt some rabbits), and ran into his father after hearing his father call out a particular sound: “cooee,” which had previously become a signal between them. Holmes reads the coroner’s inquest, in which James notes that he and his father did have a quarrel, presumably over Mr. McCarthy’s insistence that James marry Alice (Mr. Turner’s daughter). James says that he left his father then, and only came back to find the body after hearing sounds of a struggle. The coroner asks how his father could have made their particular call of “cooee” if he did not know James was in the woods. James doesn’t know the answer. Holmes is intrigued.

Holmes gradually exposes the complicated backstories of both the McCarthy men—that James is indeed in love with Alice (but won’t marry her because he secretly, foolishly wed someone else a few years earlier, who was herself a bigamist), and that Mr. McCarthy was meeting someone by the lake where he was killed, someone else he signaled to with the distinctive call of “cooee.”

Holmes is intrigued by this sound, which he notes is Australian in origin; indeed, both Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Turner had expatriated the Australian colonies for England. But he comes to the conclusion that Mr. Turner is the killer by visiting the crime scene—which has been tramped over and muddied up by the constables inspecting the area, but which is still valuable as long as there is no rain. Holmes keeps checking “the glass” to measure the pressure, and, worried his time is running out, heads to the area where Mr. McCarthy was found dead.

Here, Holmes transforms. Watson writes, “Lestrade showed us the exact spot at which the body had been found, and, indeed, so moist was the ground, that I could plainly see the traces which had been left by the fall of the stricken man. To Holmes, as I could see by his eager face and peering eyes, very many other things were to be read upon the trampled grass. He ran round, like a dog who is picking up a scent…”

Holmes does quite a bit of reading in the canon, but he does a hefty amount of it in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” He reads his pocket Petrarch on the train after he’s done with the newspapers, and in the evening at their lodgings, he begs Watson not to talk of the case but rather to discuss George Meredith’s novels with him. Holmes likes reading, and certainly he likes reading people. As we know, his greatest skill is studying the appearances of the individuals he encounters, and inferring things about them from tiny, almost imperceptible details. But the increasing pressure of the case—perhaps because the life of James McCarthy hangs in the balance, perhaps because the atmosphere is gathering a storm—transforms everyone’s normal reading abilities.

Holmes’s reading skills grow stronger, while everyone else’s grow weaker. Lestrade is completely off-base in his assessment, and so is Watson. Watson can’t even read proper reading materials. He says, “I lay upon the sofa and tried to interest myself in a yellow-backed novel. The puny plot of the story was so thin, however, when compared to the deep mystery through which we were groping, and I found my attention wander so continually from the action to the fact, that I at last flung it across the room and gave myself up entirely to a consideration of the events of the day.”

But Holmes’s skills grow exponentially, so much so that he is even able to read land—to track, like a dog. Watson notes how he nearly pops out of his own skin, crawling on the ground and running in circles, when examining the crime scene:

“Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognise [sic] him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn into two hard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick, impatient snarl in reply.”

Indeed, Holmes’s physical transformation suggests his own abilities pressurized to a new level of ferocity, much like the approaching rainstorm—much like the murderer himself, who turns out to be Turner. Turner, it turns out, was being blackmailed by the cruel McCarthy for decades, since they were both in Australia and McCarthy had once caught Turner completing a gold heist. Finally, after tensions simmered for years, they reached a final boiling point—after Turner came to the spot to meet the blackmailer McCarthy and overheard him yelling at his son about being dead-set on combining the two families forever, by forcing his son to propose to Turner’s daughter. In a rage, Turner fought back against the man who had long extorted him.

Holmes gets Turner to confess anonymously; he is dying anyway and has been sick with worry at the idea of accidentally framing James. Holmes uses the confession to free James, who intends to properly handle his affairs and ask Alice to marry him.

Watson notes, after the two men realize they have freed a family from McCarthy’s vice, that the “black cloud” that had hung over the families has passed over the younger generation now. Thanks to Sherlock Holmes, there will be sunny days ahead.

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Olivia Rutigliano

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English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

The Oxford Sherlock Holmes: A Review Essay

Edward S. Lauterbach
Volume 37, Number 4, 1994
pp. 502-508
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Sherlockian

The portal for the great detective, how to write a term paper, about term papers.

I'll assume that the topic of your paper has been settled. (Lower on this page there is a list of some topics related to Sherlock Holmes that I think would make good term papers.) The instructor may have assigned the topic, or you, the student, may be writing about Holmes out of interest, and have negotiated a manageable topic with your teacher or professor. Now you have a question to answer in a few thousand words of clear and interesting prose. It may not be phrased as a question, but in reality that's what it is.

As you begin to plan your work, realize that you are being asked a question that doesn't have a single, factual right answer. A number of answers to the question are possible. You are being asked to choose the answer that in your opinion is most defensible, and to state it, explain it and defend it with evidence.

Here are two examples of the sort of question that might be addressed in a term paper.

Was Arthur Conan Doyle the inventor of the detective story? -- You might say yes or you might say no. To defend your answer, you will need to consider the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which were written before Doyle's stories. Were they detective stories? If not, what were they? Multiple answers are possible. You will also need to consider detective stories that came after Doyle's work. Do they show characteristics that seem to have been invented by Doyle? Are those the essential characteristics of detective stories, or are the resemblances just coincidence? Are there other possible candidates for "the inventor" of the detective story? Was there really a single inventor, or is the genre one that developed gradually or by chance?
Is Sherlock Holmes an upholder of justice or of individual whim? -- First of all, does it have to be one or the other? What does "justice" mean, and could it be compatible with whim? You will want to read the Sherlock Holmes stories to see whether, in your judgement, Holmes upholds justice. Does he do so even when justice and law are in conflict? Or, in your view, is law the same thing as justice? Does Holmes act on whim, or out of a consistent philosophy, or as the result of external forces, or guided by some fate or God so that there is little scope for the exercise of his judgement? You will need to observe exactly what happens in many cases and form an opinion about what pattern is demonstrated.

Essays and Papers About Sherlock Holmes

I often receive questions that strongly suggest that someone is attempting to write a term paper or essay about Sherlock Holmes and doesn't know quite where to start. "I have a question about Sherlock Holmes," a brief e-mail message will say. "What were the characteristics of Holmes that made him a hero, and how is he different from modern heroes?"

That isn't a question that I can answer in a couple of sentences. It would take thought and imagination and time, which means it's a good question for a term paper. And the person who is supposed to be writing that term paper -- and learning something from it -- isn't me, it's the student who sent me the e-mail.

Very often, my reply is short and probably seems rude to the confused student who gets it. "Read the books," I will write. "I'm sorry, but I don't have time to do your homework for you."

I'm not the only scholar who takes this attitude, by the way. Margo Burns, a scholar of 17th century Americana, puts it very well in her FAQ page about the Salem witch trials and "The Crucible". The same attitude lies behind a web page explaining how to get an A writing about The Scarlet Letter .

Here are some slightly more extensive suggestions about how to approach a term paper or essay about Sherlock Holmes. They are particularly aimed at students in the final years of high school and the first year of university who may not previously have written a substantial paper in a humanities subject (literature or history).

I would be very grateful for any comments and suggestions from teachers or librarians who find themselves reading these paragraphs.

A Very Important Point

Sherlock Holmes is a literary character, created by Arthur Conan Doyle in four novels and 56 short stories published between 1887 and 1927. He is not a flesh-and-blood figure of history, and you will come to grief in your term paper if you assume that he really walked the rain-slicked streets of London at the turn of the the last century.

One complication is that if you have the opportunity to read much of what has been written about Holmes by enthusiasts over the past several decades, you will find many of the authors pretending that Holmes did in fact live. That's an enjoyable game, and I have often played it myself, but an academic term paper is not a suitable place for playing it.

Don't be confused by the customs of scholarly writing, the sort of thing you will find in academic books such as, for example, David S. Payne's very good book Myth and Modern Man in Sherlock Holmes . It is usual to write about literary characters in the present tense, saying, "Sherlock Holmes faces Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls." Even more confusing, Payne writes about Holmes as if he were in fact a human being with attitudes and thoughts:

Holmes is not un-Christian but non-Christian. Now and then he speaks of "the meaning of life" -- but in tones redolent of classical fatalism.

In your own writing about Holmes you will want to use the same tone, attributing ideas to Holmes (the character) but not making the mistake of assuming that Doyle (the author) shares Holmes's opinions.

You Can't Send Me Information?

No, I can't. What I am trying to make clear is that the "information" you thought you were asking for does not really exist. A term paper is not a recital of information. It's an assertion of your viewpoint, buttressed with examples and evidence.

Even if someone else had written a term paper or an academic essay on the exact topic you are now considering, that text wouldn't be "information", it would be a term paper. You might agree with what it said, or you might not. (If you should find such a paper and submit it under your own name, needless to say, that would be cheating -- "plagiarism" -- and put you in line for serious penalties.)

When you get to the stage of having your general ideas put together, and you find that you are lacking some crucial fact or piece of evidence to support your case, you are welcome to ask me for that detail. I will certainly help you if I can.

Reading the Stories of Sherlock Holmes

In preparation for writing a term paper about Sherlock Holmes, you will obviously need to read the original Sherlock Holmes stories. They are available on the Web, but it will probably be more comfortable to borrow The Complete Sherlock Holmes from the library and curl up with it.

Unless you are confident that your topic can be competently addressed on the basis of just a few stories (for example, if you have been asked to write a paper on the conflict between science and faith as demonstrated in The Hound of the Baskervilles ), you would be wise to read all the stories, the four short novels and five books of short stories. In an emergency, you can probably say some sensible things about Holmes based on reading The Hound , The Sign of the Four , The Adventures and The Memoirs , but if you take that shortcut, be very, very careful in making generalizations about all of ACD's writings about Holmes.

In many cases, depending on your topic, you will also need to read other fiction, which might include stories by Doyle, writings by some of his contemporaries, or other detective stories from various eras. There is no denying that a great deal of the literature that was popular in Doyle's time is rightly forgotten a hundred years later. But some isn't. For light, popular and still readable, you might try Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. For worthy and serious, there's always George Meredith. Do not fall into the trap of comparing Doyle with Dickens -- remember although they were both "Victorian", they lived two generations apart, in very different worlds.

In your reading you will probably be looking for general ideas about how some other character is similar to Sherlock Holmes or different from him, or how themes and techniques are the same or different in ACD's writings and in some other body of writing. You will need to make general statements about these similarities and differences and support your generalizations with specific details and facts in your essay.

Material From the Library

Finally, and most difficult, you will need to read "secondary sources": that is, books about ACD and his work, or about Sherlock Holmes in particular. Only a few such books will be easy to find, unless you have access to a large and well-stocked library, but it's certainly worth looking.

An evening with one of the better biographies of ACD (whether it's the very new one by Daniel Stashower or the fifty-year-old one by John Dickson Carr) is better than nothing for giving you some ideas about the meaning and shape of Doyle's work. There are several books of serious literary criticism about ACD, such as the one by David S. Payne that I have already mentioned; look for them. There are also books on the history of the mystery story, if that topic seems relevant to what you're writing about.

Here again, you are looking both for generalizations and for specific facts. Your factual statements are either right or wrong (yes, Doyle visited Canada in 1914; no, it would not be true to say that Abraham Lincoln was influenced by Sherlock Holmes, since he died before the stories were written). Your generalizations are good if you can provide evidence to support them, and bad if you cannot or do not do that.

(It would be a major mistake to look for the information you need only on the Web, ignoring books. Although there is starting to be some thoughtful, substantial literary history and criticism available on the Internet, it will be a good long while before the Web is a substitute for the products of thought and knowledge that appear in print on library shelves.)

Although I have referred to "books", you may find other kinds of library material useful as well. "Journals" are magazines of a scholarly kind that publish essays about literature (or other fields of study) and there are thousands of them. Only a few, however, typically publish articles that touch directly on Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, or the mystery genre. And unless you have access to a large university research library, you may well be very limited in your access to those few. The most important one specifically dedicated to Holmes is the Baker Street Journal , which has a mixture of mock-serious "Holmes was a real person" articles and genuine, useful literary essays. Like hundreds of other journals on all branches of literature, the BSJ is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography , the most important index to literary writings, which any good-sized library will have available.

As early as possible in your research, you should visit the library and see what resources you will be able to find. The library I use most often, the one at the University of Waterloo, publishes a series of handy brief guides, including one about "Doing Research in English." Of course it is directed specifically to people who have access to the resources of the library at UW; your local library very likely has something similar.

And you should not be hesitant to ask a librarian for advice -- but you will make better use of the librarian's time, and your own, if you explore a little first. At least, start out by seeing what books about ACD, or about other topics that may be useful to you, can be found on the shelves.

Possible Topics

Does Sherlock Holmes meet the modern definition of "hero", or even "superhero"?
Is Holmes presented as an impartial defender of justice, or is he an ally of just one socioeconomic class?
What are the characteristics of Arthur Conan Doyle's writing that makes it so difficult for modern writers to imitate successfully?
What do the Holmes stories say about the changing position of women in English society between the 1880s and the 1920s?
Is the friendship of Watson essential to the success of Sherlock Holmes?
Are the later Holmes stories more grotesque and violent than the early ones, and if a change is apparent, is it an improvement or a deterioration?
How and why does Holmes differ from Arthur Conan Doyle in his attitude to the supernatural?

Some General Resources

Here is a web site with general information about researching and writing essays and term papers.

A-Plus Research and Writing for High School and College Students

And here is the single best book about how to write good English: The Elements of Style , by William Strunk, jr., and E. B. White.

Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Sherlock Holmes — The Narrative Of Suspense In Sherlock Holmes

The Narrative of Suspense in Sherlock Holmes

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The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Essay Questions

By sir arthur conan doyle, essay questions.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Timothy Sexton

Sherlock Holmes is noted for his brilliant deductive reasoning abilities, yet of the dozen stories which make up the Memoirs, Holmes actually solves only two using those skills. With the primary evidence being that the last story in the collection is the one in which Sherlock is killed off, deduce the reasons that may explain this seeming paradox.

The first collection of Strand Magazine stories had been published just a few months before the stories that would make up the Memoirs began appearing. With a couple of novels and a dozen stories having turned Sherlock Holmes into a national sensation by the time Silver Blaze was published, it can be assumed that Doyle was already probably growing tired of the pressure to produce that Holmes was putting on him as well as the attention he was taking away from other projects of greater person interest. He was just a dozen stories away from taking the unprecedented and unthinkable step of killing off not just a beloved literary figure but a cash cow. Doyle was now starting to view Sherlock’s adventures as a thing he wrote for money rather than for enjoyment. That his mysteries were starting to get solved less by Holmes figuring everything out for himself and more by discovering a key element which stimulated confessions by those involved could be either the result of simply growing bored with his character and not wanting to spend as much time figuring out plots which showed off Holmes being brilliant or it could be that the public clamor for more Sherlock simply meant he no longer had the time to put in the effort to make Holmes look brilliant. Either case would certainly contribute strongly to a desire to end his second collection of short stories with the elimination of a problem which seemed to be revealing a deterioration of his writing skills.

Professor Moriarty has taken on a life nearly as expansive as Sherlock’s himself in the century-plus since his first appearance in the Holmes canon—which also happens to be the one in which he is killed. Moriarty has been elevated to the supreme position of nemesis and continually pops up in new adaptations. Does this so-called “Napoleon of Crime” actually live up to his reputation in the one and only story in which he appears?

Though Holmes does refer to Moriarty with a pejorative reference to Napoleon, he is never even mentioned or alluded to until the stories written after—but sometimes set before-- “The Final Problem.” It is only in the reference that Professor Moriarty ever assumes the level of evil genius to which the comparison to Napoleon applies. In his one and only showdown with this alleged criminal mastermind, he reveals none of the qualities of the Norwood builder, Jonas Oldacre, whose truly sinister plot Holmes will later describe “as a masterpiece of villainy.” Likewise, at no point in “The Final Problem” does Holmes display the kind of rare emotional repugnance toward Moriarty that, by contrast, he so cavalierly displays toward the master blackmailer Milverton by openly admitting to Inspector Lestrade that Milverton is the sort of criminal who “to some extent, justify private revenge.” The fact is that among the criminal opponents against which Holmes squares off over his long career, the Moriarty on display in “The Final Problem” would probably not even crack the top twenty. As nemeses go, he is staggeringly unfit to take on the immortality he’s enjoyed since going over those raging falls. It seems likely, therefore, that Doyle went to such great lengths to create the illusion of Moriarty being the criminal equivalent of Holmes simply to make it easier to accept Sherlock's death. Better to die at the hands of a Napoleon of crime than a Louis XVI of crime, after all.

Although the stories featured in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes are often faulted the notable absence of Holmes’ dizzying deductive powers, the collection is also often lauded for presenting the most “human” Sherlock. How do these stories show Holmes being less like a calculating machine and more like normal human being?

Needless to say, if you want to make a character who has been criticized as less than human seem fully human, there is absolutely no better way to go about that than to real his mortality. Merely through the act of dying, this collection makes Sherlock more human than any other. More to the point, however, is “The Yellow Face” which is singularly unique in the Holmes canon in that not only does he not solve a crime through any means of investigation, but his deductions which form the basis of his suspicions are proven to be utterly wrong. Next to dying, proving that you can make mistakes is another surefire way to prove yourself human. Likewise, does the extensive set-up to “The Reigate Squire” reveal a fully flesh and blood Holmes. The trip to the country which winds up turning into that particular case is actually intended to be a much-needed period of rest for a Holmes who has been left almost physically debilitated by the exhaustive effort put into bringing down an international conspiracy of high-stakes swindlers. Thus is Holmes shown to be capable of making mistakes in logic as well as incapable of solving crimes on a whirlwind basis without becoming every bit as physically and mentally fatigued as the average person.

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The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes study guide contains a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Summary
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Wikipedia Entries for The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Introduction
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Sherlock Holmes Films Analysis Essay

Introduction, brett jeremy and the holmes audience, betrayal of holmes, works cited.

Although we may not typically consider a trailer released months before the film’s debut or a quote from an interview as a part of an actual movie, these do serve significantly to shape how we approach our viewing of the film for the first time as well as how we reflect upon it while viewing, after viewing, or upon revisiting it.

To many diehards of Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch appears to be the definitive figure in this contemporary work. Playing Arthur Conan Doyle, Jeremy Brett complicates the detective in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes up to 1994. On the other hand, most viewers observe that Benedict has honored the great man who defined Holmes for the current generation.

Although Genette discusses the paratext in reference to literary works in particular, the concept can easily be applied to the filmic text. Cumber batch provides a writer’s eloquence in relaying Brett’s impression.

A literary paratext might include a book’s cover, title page, preface, or even reviews about a book, whether quoted upon its jacket or encountered by a potential reader in a magazine. In the analysis of this paper, a film paratext could be a movie trailer, DVD cover, title sequence, reviews from the press, or interviews with the writers, directors, and cast.

Sherlock’s creators, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, anticipated an international audience of newcomers as well as a homegrown Holmes fan base. This is amid Brett’s public battle with a bipolar disorder that almost ended his career in acting.

The first episode’s title is a variation of A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle’s 1887 novel that introduced Sherlock Holmes to readers; it is an appropriate choice for the episode that introduces 21st century Sherlock to television audiences in Britain. Brett’s death in 1995, after a heart failure, was a major blow to other members of the cast.

The murdered “pink” lady reflects not only a color and story connection with the original text but twists the tale into a modern commentary about eye-catching colors for women working in the media and the victim’s need to be perfectly groomed and color coordinated in order to be acceptable for her job and her lovers (Aumont 38).

Even her accessories, such as a mobile phone, are in, as Sherlock refers to them as being of an alarming shade of pink. In every version of this episode, whether broadcast in the U.K. or internationally, in edited or full format, the story begins not with Sherlock but with Jeremy Brett, who becomes the character with whom the audience is expected to identify and thus is an appropriate entry character to get viewers involved with the story.

Brett’s flashback to an Afghani war zone, also appropriate to the original Watson’s war record (another plus for traditional Holmes fans), makes him a sympathetic modern character who might be a returned veteran like someone viewers know in real life.

The news-style flashback modernizes Watson’s pre-Sherlock experiences, as does his visit with his therapist and comments about writing a blog.

His final line before the opening credits, “Nothing ever happens to me,” may be appropriate for the couch potatoes watching this episode; vicariously, their lives, too, are about to change as they enter the world of Sherlock’s adventures (Aumont 29). The opening theme immediately follows this line, overlaying the rush of London traffic and pulling Benedict Cumberbatch, and the viewers, into the story.

They, walking alongside Watson, become pulled into Sherlock’s world, learning a lot about the detective’s “science of deduction” as well as his personal history within the scope of the first episode. This Victorian setting in England brings forth Downey Robert Jr. as Holmes opens up to the 21 st Century tales of sensibility (Aumont 34). Beyond the television series, new viewers can also “play Watson” by visiting Sherlock’s website, The Science of Deduction, which appears the same as on television.

Appropriating Ritchie’s initial vision for the films, Downey has on multiple occasions promoted the adaptations as potentially homoerotic. During the first film’s production, his suggestion to the press that Holmes and Watson would wrestle and share a bed attracted critics’ and audiences’ attention.

On the other hand, Brett’s appearance in the 41 episodes of Holmes from 1984 to 1994 allows the audience to comment on his betrayal of Holmes. They observed that He would have continued with such line of action had he not died at the young age of 61 (Aumont 42).

Although Ritchie has never declared Holmes as gay-rather, he has elaborated “while these guys are sort of in love with each other,” they are “a hetero-sexual couple that at moments could seem gay” (Aumont 46). Downey’s inferences have dominated, serving as the defining paratext for the films.

Genette’s theory of paratextuality posits seemingly external materials as an inextricable part of a text, with the prefixpara- at Once denoting that which is “separate from or going beyond” while also serving as “analogous or parallel to,” according to the OED (Aumont 48).

Aumont James. L’Analyse des films/Analysis of Film . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Print.

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Bibliography

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Sherlock’s double: at william gillette’s castle, writers' houses.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Photograph courtesy of the author.

Anyone can lay a funerary GIF at one of the 238 million virtual tombstones at findagrave.com . A rose JPEG accompanied by the words “im sorry the world did not treat you well” is laid on Kafka’s grave page amidst various uploaded photos of tombstones; “Your statue was unveiled in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol today,” reads a post for Willa Cather. Someone leaves an update on Federico Fellini’s page that tonight they “will watch La Strada in your memory.” Many of these messages seem to have come after a pilgrimage to a physical site. They read like confirmations of an encounter: as though their writers, unsatisfied with what they’d found in the material realm, had taken to virtual channels to yoke a final closeness with the dead.

The playwright and actor William Gillette’s online grave is littered with notes from recent visitors to his house museum, updating him on his property: “Interesting man, a shame he did not have children to enjoy the castle and train ride,” or “when i vist [sic] i always notice something … deer in your yard, the fawn was nursing from its mother.” Another: “Went to your home today… You would be proud that it is in impeccable order.”

Gillette Castle lies up a coily road in East Haddam, Connecticut. I visit on the first hot day of May. An elaborate stone pathway leads me from the parking lot to a gray, cobbly estate that overlooks the Connecticut River. A rabbit passes the entrance sign and disappears into the forest.

I live nearby, and have developed a chronic wandering habit in my final semester at divinity school. The more direct and pursuant my inquiries of God have become, the greater my conflictual desire to roam has grown. Perhaps my proclivity to wander is a symptom of my frustration with the jigsaw splodge of academia, or of my desire for a single, quiet path of pilgrimage. It has become increasingly apparent to me that one of the key tenets of the spiritual life was imitation: of Christ, of the saints. And so, rather serendipitously, I show up to this castle made by a man whose life was defined so completely by imitation.

William Gillette looked exactly like Sherlock Holmes—a tall man with a smoking pipe and cape—or, rather, Sherlock, as we imagine him, looks like William Gillette. “The careers of the master detective, Sherlock Holmes, and the master actor-playwright, William Gillette, are inextricably combined,” writes Ruth Berman in A Case of Double Identity . Gillette is best known for adapting Sir Conan Doyle’s stories to the stage, then later playing and perfecting the part of Holmes in more than a thousand performances. “Elementary, my dear Watson” was adapted from a line of Gillette’s. The deerstalker hat was his invention. Gillette’s embodied adaptation was so successful that playbill images of Gillette became source images for subsequent book editions of Sherlock Holmes. Certain covers bear Gillette’s exact likeness. Gillette became Sherlock; Sherlock became Gillette.

Before the two became one, Gillette was a moderately popular playwright and actor from Hartford, Connecticut. An inventor as well, Gillette created a machine that perfectly emulated the sound of a horse’s hooves “approaching, departing, or passing at a gallop, trot, or any other desired gait,” as a way to heighten the realism of the stage. Much of his acclaim was thanks to two Civil War plays, Held By the Enemy (1886) and Secret Service (1895), written after his beloved wife, the actress Helen Nichols, passed away from a burst appendix at twenty-eight. Gillette withdrew to the woods. He never remarried, and spent six years away from public life.

Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes was dead. Sir Conan Doyle had killed him off in “The Final Problem,” when he falls into a gorge in Switzerland. Doyle himself wished to resurrect Holmes for the stage, but neither he nor other playwrights were able to get it right. It was Doyle’s agent who eventually recommended Gillette for the project. When the two men met in 1899, Gillette showed up dressed as his interpretation of Holmes and examined Doyle with a magnifying glass.

At the castle, which is open to the public for tours and surrounded by hiking trails, my tour group consists of eight children and three mothers, who at first regard me with enthusiasm, joking that I’ve joined a group of monsters. “Oh please, you go,” one mother insists, so I spill ahead, peering at the corners of the wooden staircase. The tour guide notes that Gillette owned fifteen cats. The children gasp. I inspect a Japanese tea set.

“Gillette was very concerned with what other people thought of him,” says the tour guide, pointing to a window that is actually a mirror, an apparatus that allowed for Gillette to see how his guests would act when he left the room. When peering into its reflection from the second-floor master bedroom, I can see what is happening downstairs at the bar—a boy in a Dartmouth sweatshirt stares into his phone while his date, dressed in velour, takes selfies. Stalin, too, had an intricate surveillance system in his home, in order to know who to kill, and though Gillette’s motives were less ideological, this self-surveilling house appears as an uncanny reflection of a person fully curled in upon themselves. Like a dog resembles its owner, a house can begin to mirror the neuroses of its inhabitants. “It is my business to know what other people don’t know,” Holmes declared in the story “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”

I pass what looks like a wooden dagger hanging from the ceiling, which I later learn is a fire-extinguishing device. In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay on “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery Story,” he stresses that Doyle never follows the dictum of Chekhov’s gun. Instead, “The gun that hangs on the wall does not fire. Another gun shoots instead.” The same logic applies to Gillette’s castle. Some of what you see becomes something else. Dead-end staircases, trick furniture, and intricate lock systems abound. Near the main entrance is a secret door that leads from his office so he could “escape unwanted guests.” The castle is thoroughly adorned with furniture pieces with double meanings, trick latches, reflections and deflections. Gillette even refused the word castle and often referred to it as “the pile of rocks.”

Gillette rarely did interviews, didn’t keep a journal, and kept most of his life secret—a pattern of behavior especially fitting for a man whose craft involved the grafting of much of his self into another man’s fiction. Walking through the great hall of the castle, made from white oak, I begin to feel that I am inhabiting an intercessory space between the man and his character; a place where a problem, puzzle, or personality was in the process of being worked out. Perhaps all houses serve this secondary function, an exercise in holding together what is meaningful; like Gillette, we sometimes prefer to obscure this process even to ourselves, in labyrinthine corridors and secret passageways.

The children at the end of the tour complain that they want to eat hot dogs, and I’m confronted with an unexpected emptiness. Perhaps I’d come to the castle expecting to glean something of Gillette, but I find him impossible to extract from the character who eclipsed him. Perhaps I’d secretly hoped for evidence that Gillette had returned to himself again, in the privacy of his own home. And maybe he had—after all, a man is not his materials. I think of the anonymous people who wander their digital way to findagrave.com in order to update Gillette on his estate. When they do so, do they imagine him as a man who spent his life on the stage, practicing his lines? Or do they imagine a detective in his silk robe and violin?

Nicolette Polek is the author of Bitter Water Opera and Imaginary Museums .

A Sherlock Holmes Story Handwritten by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Could Net $1.2 Million at Auction

The Sign of Four , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ’s second-ever Sherlock Holmes novel, is in the public domain and can be read for free. But if you want the original handwritten manuscript, you’ll need some substantial disposable income. Doyle’s personal draft could fetch more than $1 million at auction.

Sotheby’s is offering the significant piece of Holmes history at an upcoming June 26 auction featuring the collection of Dr. Rodney Swantko, a collector from Indiana of some renown who compiled an impressive selection of rare books , manuscripts, and even some original art . A drawing of Holmes for “The Final Problem,” ostensibly the last featuring the detective before Doyle changed his mind, could net $250,000 to $350,000. The auction house has estimated that a final sales price of The Sign of Four could be $800,000 to $1.2 million.

According to Smithsonian , Doyle wrote The Sign of Four (1890) at the behest of Lippincott’s magazine editor J.M. Stoddart, who was looking to bring his publication to the United States. (Another guest at the business dinner was Oscar Wilde , who went on to write The Picture of Dorian Gray for Lippincott’s .) Holmes had made his debut in the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet , and Stoddart rightfully anticipated readers wouldn’t be able to get enough of the detective.

The Sign of Four manuscript is written in cursive and is said to feature only minimal editing, some from Doyle and some from Stoddart, who wanted to use the American spelling of select words. The lot also includes letters written by Doyle detailing the dinner. Bound in a red cover, it features two of Doyle’s signatures.

“Whether Doyle spent a lot of time just thinking out in his mind before he put the words down [is uncertain],” Selby Kiffer of Sotheby’s told CNN . “But it seems to have sprung almost fully formed, from his mind to his pen.”

Doyle certainly found himself at ease with Holmes, his trademark character. After these two novels, the author set about writing a series of short stories featuring the detective. In all, Doyle penned four novels and 64 short stories, the latter of which is probably where Holmes found his greatest success.

“A number of monthly magazines were coming out at that time, notable among which was The Strand ,

under the very capable editorship of Greenhough Smith,” Doyle wrote in 1924. “Considering these various journals with their disconnected stories it had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine … Looking around for my central character, I felt that Sherlock Holmes, who I had already handled in two little books, would easily lend himself to a succession of short stories.”

Doyle enjoyed great success with Holmes, eventually finding a home for his short tales in The Strand . When he sent the character plummeting to his death in 1893, readers were so furious they canceled their subscriptions. Doyle eventually returned to Holmes in 1901 in the prequel novel The Hound of the Baskervilles . When one single page from the novel was put up for sale in 2021, it netted $423,000.