-
Was It Morally Wrong to Kill Off Sherlock Holmes?
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
93 Was It Morally Wrong to Kill Off Sherlock Holmes? Andrew Terjesen The “Great Hiatus” is the term used by Holmes scholars to refer to the period of time between Holmes’s tumble off of Reichenbach Falls in the “Adventure of the Final Problem” and his resurfacing three years later (in the chronology of Doyle’s stories) in “The Adventure of the Empty House.” During those three years, Holmes was presumed dead and had gone deep undercover to trap all of Moriarty’s lieutenants. By the end of that story, he had succeeded in arresting the last member of Moriarty’s criminal organization who posed a threat. Holmes’s activities during those three years are never portrayed in detail in any of the Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle.1 We do get occasional references to what happened during the Great Hiatus in later stories, but there is a great deal of mystery surrounding them that other writers have tried to shed light on (such as in Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Percent Solution) without reaching any consensus. In reality, Holmes had been absent from the pages of the Strand magazine for much longer than three years. Holmes and Watson returned to the Strand in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901, but that serial seems to be set in 1889, before the events of “The Final Problem.” By his own admission, Conan Doyle had intended to kill off Holmes in “The Final Problem,” as he had grown tired of the character. Why Conan Doyle returned to writing Sherlock Holmes stories after so many years has never been satisfactorily settled, although we have some clues. According to Conan Doyle, he received many letters condemning his decision to kill off Sherlock, including one from an old woman which began, “You brute.”2 Supposing the woman meant her words, did Conan Doyle deserve this morally loaded condemnation of his actions as an author? 94 Andrew Terjesen Did he act immorally in killing off this beloved character simply because he was tired of writing about him? Clearly, many fans of Sherlock Holmes thought that Conan Doyle owed them more adventures featuring Holmes. Had Sherlock Holmes gone from being the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to a public good? Authorship and Ownership Sherlock Holmes was the intellectual property of Conan Doyle, but what does that mean? The philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) set forth a theory of property that has become the foundation of modern liberal theory. According to Locke, something becomes our property once we put our labor into it.3 Take, for example, a blue garnet stone. For a long time it sits in the earth and does not belong to anybody. The first person who finds it is now said to own the gemstone. From the example so far, one might be tempted to think that property is simply a matter of first possession, but this theory fails to explain what it is about first possession that gives one the rights over property. It seems too arbitrary because it seems to boil down to “finders keepers, losers weepers.” Locke’s labor theory has gotten far more attention because it offers an account as to why the first person to take possession has a right to continued possession. If someone were to take away the gem from the person who dug it up after he had gone to all that trouble, then the thief has also taken the labor that belonged to the person. To Locke, this seemed like a violation of a basic natural right to our bodies. To prevent this from happening, laws have been created that govern the disposition of property and enable people to enforce their property rights. The person who dug up the blue garnet now has the right to it and can only surrender that right by making the choice to do so. No amount of labor put into the gem after the initial discovery will transfer the property rights without the owner’s say-so. If the gem’s owner gives it to a jeweler to cut the stone into a more pleasing shape, the jeweler does not become the co-owner of the garnet through this process. Instead, the owner only parts with it if he or she decides to give it to someone, and that usually happens only after being offered a significant amount of money in exchange. That’s how the blue garnet at the heart of the mystery in “The...