The Philosophy of Sherlock Holmes

The Grim Reaper on Baker Street

181 The Grim Reaper on Baker Street Elizabeth Glass-Turner Long before CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and other murder mystery shows, people gathered around—and under—the guillotine to watch the bloody spectacle of death, and even, as The Scarlet Pimpernel describes, to collect hair from the fallen heads. Centuries before that, crowds roared around the ultimate reality series at the Coliseum, watching contestants literally fight to the death. Most of the denizens of history have had close contact with mortality. Disease, battle, and starvation used to be the norm around the world. Longer life expectancy and low mortality rates haven’t diminished interest in death. If anything, as the specter of death has left our day-to-day lives, our need to encounter it through the arts has only grown. From the burgeoning vampire genre to television comedies and drama, the dead—and undead—have never been so popular. Death is certainly on display front and center in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He introduces his readers to the forensics of detective work through his colorful creation of Sherlock Holmes (and his loyal Watson). What insights might we glean from them about this biggest mystery of all, the puzzle of death itself? The Metaphysics of Death in Fiction Death in fiction is not something that is confined to mystery novels. Trace the morbid and macabre back far enough, and you find it littering Greek tragedies with abandon. Beowulf continues to entertain high school students with a thirst for blood. More recently on the human scene, Shakespeare probed the mysteries of life and death with Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Flannery O’Connor autopsied the function of violence in fiction in terms of acceptance of death. And it is easy to find examples of a 182 Elizabeth Glass-Turner character’s death revealing a philosophy of life, meaning, and dying. Rarely is a corpse ever just a corpse. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales about Sherlock Holmes, there are robberies , conspiracies, suspense—and sometimes death, though not always murder. The great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) once wrote that death has no need of an explanation and certainly has never requested any thinker to be of assistance. But the living need the explanation —and why? In order to live accordingly. Death does not need the explanation, Kierkegaard concludes, because death remains inexplicable. Death might as a matter of fact be incomprehensible because it represents a certain otherness, a certain unknowing. Any explanation of death is necessarily indirect in the sense that it returns to the reader as a question, as a challenge, as a fundamental otherness questioning the being and acting of the explainer. “The earnestness lies in just this, that the explanation does not explain death but discloses the state of the explainer’s own innermost being.”1 One may ask whether Sherlock Holmes ever moves from unraveling evidence and explaining the cause of death to “disclosing his own innermost being.”Certainlythecharacterisknownmoreforhis strictreasoningthanhis midnight confessionals, but we might begin by asking why Sherlock Holmes engaged in his assiduous detective work. Why did Holmes hunt the Reaper? House and Holmes It is perhaps little surprising that one of the most memorable television characters in recent memory is based, at least in part, on one of the most memorable fictional characters ever conceived. Dr. Gregory House, the protagonist of David Shore’s critically acclaimed medical TV show House, is a misanthropic curmudgeon, a sardonic genius often insufferably bored by life and the niceties it habitually imposes. He’s a doctor who, like Holmes, is unconventional, brilliant at solving puzzles (medical ones, in House’s case), and adept at formulating accurate diagnoses with remarkable rapidity. The parallels between House and Holmes (including their names) don’t stop there. By Shore’s own admission, the similarities were intentional; both play music, live at 221B Baker Street, experience ennui, have few friends, and are only engaged by sufficiently interesting cases. The prosaic and commonplace aren’t enough to capture their imaginations. After Watson gave Holmes high praise for solving a perplexing case, Sherlock answered, “It saved me from ennui,” yawning. “Alas! I already feel The Grim Reaper on Baker Street 183 it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.”2 In part...