Meet the Main Characters

In this section we will examine the factors which led to Sherlock Holmes becoming such a recognizable literary figure. Several factors contribute to this. After describing his physical characteristics and his personality, we look at the most important feature of his fame, his brilliant deductive abilities. It is in this that Arthur Conan Doyle is somewhat indebted to his mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell, as described in chapter 1. In A Study in Scarlet (STUD), the very first Holmes tale, Dr. Watson describes Sherlock Holmes as being more than six feet tall, very lean, with piercing eyes and a thin hawk-like nose. Holmes’s voice was high and occasionally strident. We learn later that his eyes were gray and he had a narrow face and black hair. Most illustrators over the years have faithfully reproduced this picture of the great detective (see figure 2.1). Very little about Holmes’s background is revealed to us. Most of what we do know is told in The Greek Interpreter (GREE). In this tale, the twenty-fourth of the sixty, Watson is shocked to learn that Holmes has a brother named Mycroft. It turns out that neither of the roommates has told the other that they have a brother. We also learn that the Holmes brothers are from a family of country squires. The family traces itself back to the Frenchman Horace Vernet (1789–1863), a noted painter of military scenes. Clearly there was enough money in Holmes’s background for him to attend college. We know from The “Gloria Scott” (GLOR) that he did attend for two years. In The Musgrave Ritual (MUSG), Watson describes Holmes as very untidy. Apparently he kept his cigars in a coal scuttle and his tobacco in the toe of a Persian slipper. His correspondence was affixed to the mantel by a jackknife. In what is considered a patriotic gesture (Tracy 1977, 379), he honored his queen by using a pistol to shoot the letters VR, for Victoria Regina, into the wall of the Baker Street rooms.