Holmes

Holmes's straightforward practical principles are generally of the form, "If p, then q," where "p" is observed evidence and "q" is what the evidence indicates. But there are also, as one may observe in the following example, often some intermediate principles. In "A Scandal in Bohemia", Holmes deduces that Watson had gotten very wet lately and that he had "a most clumsy and careless servant girl". When Watson, in amazement, asks how Holmes knows this, Holmes answers:

It is simplicity itself . . . my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey.

• If leather on the side of a shoe is scored by several parallel cuts, they were caused by someone who scraped around the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it.

• If a nineteenth-century London doctor's shoes are scraped to remove crusted mud, the person who so scrapes them is the doctor's servant girl.

• If someone cuts a shoe while scraping it to remove encrusted mud, that person is clumsy and careless.

• If someone's shoes had encrusted mud on them, that person has been very wet lately and has been out in vile weather.

By applying such principles in an obvious way (using repeated applications of modus ponens), Holmes is able to infer from

p: The sides of Watson's shoes are scored by several parallel cuts.

q1: Watson's servant girl is clumsy and careless.

q2: Watson has been very wet lately and has been out in vile weather.

In other instances of Holmesian deduction, it is more difficult to model his inference as deduction using general principles, and logicians and scientists will readily recognize the method used, instead, as an inductive one—in particular, argument to the best explanation, or, in Charles S. Peirce's terminology, abduction. (That Holmes should have called this deduction is entirely plausible, however; in several stories, Holmes is said not to have known anything at all of philosophy.)

The instances in which Holmes uses abduction tend to be those where he has amassed a large body of evidence, produced a number of possible explanations of that evidence, and then proceeds to find one explanation that is clearly the best at explaining the evidence. For example, in The Sign of Four, a certain man is found dead in his room, with a ghastly smile on his face, and with no immediately visible cause of death. From a whole body of background information as well as evidence gathered at and around the scene of the crime, Holmes is able to infer that the murderer is—not the various people that Scotland Yard has in custody (each of them being an alternative explanation)—but rather ... well, we don't want to give away the story, but you get the idea. As Holmes says in the story, "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

In the latter example, in fact, Holmes's solution of the crime depends both on a series of applications of general principles and argument to the best explanation.

Holmes's success at his brand of deduction, therefore, is due to his mastery of both a huge body of particular knowledge of things like footprints, cigar ashes, and poisons, which he uses to make relatively simple deductive inferences, and the fine art of ordering and weighing different competing explanations of a body of evidence. Holmes is also particularly good at gathering evidence by observation, as well locating and tracking the movements of criminals through the streets of London and environs (in order to produce more evidence)—skills that have little to do with deduction per se, but everything to do with providing the premises for particular Holmesian deductions.

In the stories by Conan Doyle, Holmes often remarked that his logical conclusions were "elementary", in that he considered them to be simple and obvious. However, the complete phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" does not appear in any of the 68 Holmes stories written by Doyle.

It should be noted too, that our modern stereotype of police procedure-someone who looks for physical clues, rather than someone who examines opportunity and motive, comes from Holmes.

Readers of the Sherlock Homes stories have often been surprised to discover that their author, Conan Doyle, was a fervent believer in paranormal phenomena, and that the logical, skeptical/sceptical character of Holmes was in opposition to his own in many ways.

The word 'Sherlock' has entered the language to mean a detective or nosey person.

• A Study in Scarlet (serialized 1887)
• The Sign of Four (serialized 1890)
• The Hound of the Baskervilles (serialized 1901-1902; original illustrations by Sidney Paget)
• The Valley of Fear (serialized 1914-1915) (features Professor Moriarty)

Short stories

(organized by collection)

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (stories published 1891-1892; original illustrations by Sidney Paget)
  • "A Scandal in Bohemia"
  • "The Red-Headed League"
  • "A Case of Identity"
  • "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"
  • "The Five Orange Pips"
  • "The Man with the Twisted Lip"
  • "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"
  • "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"
  • "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"
  • "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"
  • "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet"
  • "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"

• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (stories published 1892-1893; original illustrations by Sidney Paget)
  • "The Adventure of Silver Blaze"
  • "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box"
  • "The Adventure of the Yellow Face"
  • "The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk"
  • "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott" (Holmes's first case, described to Watson)
  • "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" (another early case, told by Holmes to Watson)
  • "The Adventure of the Reigate Squire"
  • "The Adventure of the Crooked Man"
  • "The Adventure of the Resident Patient"
  • "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"
  • "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty"
  • "The Final Problem" (Watson reports the death of Holmes)

• The Return of Sherlock Holmes (stories published 1903-1904; original illustrations by Sidney Paget)
  • "The Adventure of the Empty House" (the return of Holmes)
  • "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder"
  • "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"
  • "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist"
  • "The Adventure of the Priory School"
  • "The Adventure of Black Peter"
  • "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton"
  • "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons"
  • "The Adventure of the Three Students"
  • "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez"
  • "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter"
  • "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange"
  • "The Adventure of the Second Stain"

• The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (stories published 1921-1927)
  • "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client"
  • "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier"
  • "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone" (told in third-person)
  • "The Adventure of the Three Gables"
  • "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire"
  • "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs"
  • "The Problem of Thor Bridge"
  • "The Adventure of the Creeping Man"
  • "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" (narrated by Holmes)
  • "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger"
  • "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place"
  • "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman"

• His Last Bow (stories published 1908-1913, 1917)
  • "The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles"
  • "The Tiger of San Pedro"

    (the above two stories are usually combined in the anthologies as "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge", but their original appearance bore no such title)

  • "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box"
  • "The Adventure of the Red Circle"
  • "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" (Mycroft appears)
  • "The Adventure of the Dying Detective"
  • "The Disappearance of Lady Francis Carfax"
  • "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot"
  • "His Last Bow" (told in third-person)

"The Hiatus"

For Conan Doyle, writing the stories, the period is ten years. Conan Doyle, wanting to devote more time to his historical novels, killed off Holmes in "The Final Problem", which appeared in print in 1893. After resisting public pressure for eight years, Conan Doyle wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles, which appeared in 1901, setting it before Holmes's "death". The public, while pleased with the story, were not satisfied with a posthumous Holmes, and so Conan Doyle resuscitated Holmes two years later. Many have speculated on Conan Doyle's motives for bringing Holmes back to life, notably writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who wrote an essay on the subject in the 1970s, but the actual motives are not known. For whatever reason, Conan Doyle continued to write Holmes stories for a quarter-century more.

A number of plays have been written around Holmes and also one musical.

Other people who have played Sherlock Holmes in film, television, stage, or radio include:

• Hans Albers
• Tom Baker
• John Barrymore
• Clive Brook
• Michael Caine
• Peter Cook
• Peter Cushing
• John Gielgud
• Stewart Granger
• Charlton Heston
• Ronald Howard
• Christopher Lee
• Raymond Massey
• Clive Merrison
• Roger Moore
• John Neville
• Peter O'Toole
• Reginald Owen
• Christopher Plummer
• Robert Powell
• Robert Rendel
• Ian Richardson
• Richard Roxburgh
• George C. Scott
• Robert Stephens
• Nicol Williamson
• Douglas Wilmer
• Arthur Wontner

Holmesian Speculation

One influential player of the historical-Holmes game was William S. Baring-Gould, whose works on the subject included The Chronological Holmes, an attempt to lay out in chronological order all the events alluded to in the Sherlock Holmes stories; Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, an influential "biography" of Holmes; and Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street, a "biography" of Rex Stout's detective character Nero Wolfe which popularised the theory that Wolfe was "really" the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. Stout's own tongue-in-cheek contribution to the field was the theory that Watson was a woman. Baring-Gould also edited The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which combines in two volumes the complete canon and a hundred thousand words of additional explanation and illustration drawn from the Holmesian literature.

The most influential "biography" of Holmes is Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street by William S. Baring-Gould. Faced with Holmes's reticence about his family background and early life, Baring-Gould invented one for him. According to Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes was born in Yorkshire, the youngest of three sons of Siger Holmes and Violet Sherrinford. The middle brother, Mycroft, appears in the Canon, but the eldest, Sherrinford Holmes, was invented by Baring-Gould to free Mycroft and Sherlock from the obligation of following Siger as a country squire. (In reality, "Sherrinford Holmes" was one of the names Arthur Conan Doyle considered for his hero before settling on "Sherlock".) Siger Holmes's name is derived from "The Adventure of the Empty House", in which Sherlock spends some time pretending to be a Norwegian mountaineer called Sigerson. (This hardly qualifies as a clue about the name of Sherlock's father, but in the absence of any genuine clues it was the best Baring-Gould had to work with.)

Some other versions of Sherlock's parentage:

• Ian Charnocks's Watson's Last Case names his father as Sherlock Holmes, Sr.
• Robert D'Artagnan's Sherlock Holmes's Last Case names his father as Mark Moriarty and gives Sherlock's true name as Joseph Moriarty, explaining that he was adopted at age four by Gregory C. Holmes and his wife Lydia Mycroft Holmes. This would make him a younger brother of Professor James Moriarty.
• Michael Harrison's I, Sherlock Holmes names his father as Captain Siger Holmes of the British East India Company.
• Cass Lewis's Dead Man's Confession names his father as Robert Holmes and his mother Carla "Violet" Holmes.
• Mona Morstein's The Childhood of Sherlock Holmes names his father as David William Holmes and his mother Catherine Simone Lecomte-Vernet.
• Fred Saberhagen's The Holmes-Dracula File gives his true father as the lover of Mrs Holmes. The vampire Radu the Handsome, a younger brother of Vlad III Dracula, who had succeeded him as a ruler of Wallachia. This would make Sherlock Dracula's nephew.
• Christopher Leppek's The Surrogate Assassin named Sherlock's father as a younger brother of Mary Ann Holmes, a historical figure better known as the mother of John Wilkes Booth. This would make Sherlock a first cousin of Booth.

The Holmes family and the Wold Newton family