Sherlock’s ghostly resurrection

In addition to being the story of the ‘resurrection’ of Sherlock and the reconciliation of character and creator (later we will follow that track), this adventure of gothic horrorborn from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), embodies, like no other of those experienced by Holmes in the 56 stories and four novels in which he starred, one of the maxims of the polyhedral researcher: “When the impossible has been eliminated, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” to that application of logic and reasonaccompanied by an insightful observationa good pinch of intuition and the use of scientific method, connected his privileged network of neurons to “unravel the threads of the tangled skein” of the enigmas, quoting one of Watson’s favorite phrases, friend, confidant and narrator. Because, as Sherlock himself says, “my job is to know what others don’t know.”

Among ghosts

‘The dog of the Barkervilles’, published in installments between 1901 and 1902 in ‘The Strand’ magazine, is a clear example of ‘whodunit’ (English contraction of ‘Who has done it’), variety of the detective novel that would reach its zenith in the golden age of the genre in England, from the 20s. And it already showed this novel well the author’s obsession with the paranormal, accented by the death of a son in World War I, with whom he tried to contact in the afterlife. A Conan Doyle who believed in ghosts and fairiesdedicated to spiritualism and hypnotism sessions, trying, according to him, successfully, to talk to ghosts.

Returning to ‘The dog of the Barkervilles’, as collected by Peter Costello in ‘Conan Doyle, detective’ (Alba), the novelist wrote to his family about his pregnancy. “Here [en Dartmoor] Robinson and I are walking, in the highest city in England, exploring these moors for the Sherlock Holmes book. I think it will sell very well; By the way, I’ve almost written half of it. Holmes is in better shape than ever And the plot, Robinson’s idea, by the way, is really intriguing.”

Bertram Fletcher Robinson, journalist, friend and future director of ‘Vanity Fair’, was the one who had told him about the legend of a ghostly hound that since the seventeenth century, every anniversary of the death of Richard Cabell, who was believed to have sold his soul to the devil, howled over his grave and roamed the moor. And it was inspired by Conan Doyle: Holmes and Watson go to the Baskerville mansion to investigate the death of Charles Baskerville, whose body was found on the Devonshire moors next to some giant dog tracks, and to watch over the heir, You receive a threatening letter. The family saga seems cursed since two centuries before an infernal hound killed the evil Hugo Baskerville, who was abusing a peasant girl.

With this novel, the writer returned to Sherlock. He had finished so fed up with him that in 1893 he had killed him in ‘The final problem’, making him disappear in the Reichenbach Falls (in Switzerland) along with his eternal enemy, James Moriarty. But the anger of the fans was enormous and a decade later he gave in to the pressure, and to the temptation of a good financial compensation, and he took it up again with ‘The Barkerville dog’, the third novel starring the skinny detective, although chronologically before character death.

the ultimate resurrection would be in 1903, when in the story ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ (or uninhabited, according to the translations) reappeared after a lapse of three years (called ‘the great hiatus’ by the Holmesians) during which everyone believed him dead, both in fiction and in the real world.

“If I have ever tired of him, it is because he is a character without nuances. He is a calculating machine,” Conan Doyle noted in his autobiography. In Watson’s mouth: “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has ever seen”. But the reasons for the writer’s weariness were more mundane and had to do with jealousy. He had given birth to it in 1887, in ‘Study in Scarlet’, that he wrote while he was bored in the lonely ophthalmologist’s office that he opened after years spent as a doctor on whalers and ships from the Arctic to Africa. Sherlock came to captivate the readers of the time so much that they sent him letters as if he were flesh and blood. The son’s fame grew to outshine fatherwho wanted to be better known as a historical novelist (from his imagination would emerge, without going any further, ‘The lost World’) and not only as the creator of Holmes.

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Inspired by Professor Joseph Bell, whom Conan Doyle admired while studying Medicine at Edinburgh University, Sherlock is self-centered, vain and petulant, and addicted to injections of a 7% cocaine solution (something the order of the day in Victorian society), which, he says, help him in his reasoning. And, as the writer lists Pierre Lemaitre in his ‘Passionate Dictionary of Crime Novels’ (Salamandra), “hyperactive and complaining at the same time; aggressive; misogenic; cold; narcissistic and hermetic, he is a complex individual, and why not say it, extremely unpleasant”.

persona grata

All true, and yet, the master of disguise, educated and fond of boxing, fencing and the violin, “with a sharp and penetrating look, […] and nose, fine and aquiline”, as Watson describes it, has not ceased to fascinate the bulk of mortals equipped with his ‘deerstalker’ cap, his pipe and his magnifying glass. He already said it Guillermo Cabrera Infante: “Sherlock Holmes is to the detective novel what Hamlet is to the theater: so much has been said, written and admired about the character that he has become persona grata.”