(Re)Presenting Sherlock Holmes

Abstract

Though the figure of Sherlock Holmes has been revisited by many crime writers, not until Carole Nelson Douglas’s Good Night, Mr Holmes in 1990 was there a feminist re-vision of the canonical detective. Douglas’s series features Irene Adler, known to Holmes as the woman because she outwitted him in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” At the end of Doyle’s story, Adler and her attorney, Godfrey Norton, elude Holmes by eloping to the continent. Douglas adds Penelope Huxleigh, impecunious parson’s daughter, to serve as Irene’s amanuensis and social/intellectual foil; in short, as Irene’s Watson. The three central figures enjoy high-spirited adventures across Europe, and both Holmes and Watson make periodic appearances.

The veritist chooses for his subject not the impossible, not even the possible, but always the probable.

Hamlin Garland, Forum

If every discourse enters into a relation of verisimilitude with its own laws, the murder mystery takes verisimilitude for its very theme; verisimilitude is not only its law but also its object. An inverted object, so to speak—for the law of the murder mystery consists in establishing an antiverisimilitude.

Todorov, The Poetics of Prose

With Holmes and Watson, however, Conan Doyle achieved something closer to the ageless if not the transcendent. The two men can be ranked fictionally with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Jeeves and Wooster, and (since many people subconsciously refer to them as if they were, in fact, real) with Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.

Christopher Hitchens, “The Case of Arthur Conan Doyle”

Now, the process has become complete: Watson’s stories, those feeble evocations of the compelling personality we both knew, have taken on a life of their own, and the living creature of Sherlock Holmes has become ethereal, dreamy. Fictional.

Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice