Simon Baker

The character who refused to die

issue 17 December 2005

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ It could be a fanciful tryst between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, but it is something far more auspicious: the first meeting between Sherlock Holmes and his chronicler, John Watson, MD, in 1881.

Their friendship spawned many things: worldwide societies, sightseeing tours, commemorative deerstalkers (though Holmes never wore one), theme pubs and comedy sketches are just a few. Amid all that, it’s easy to overlook the four novels and 56 short stories which constitute one of the great contributions to English story-telling.

The ‘Canon’ (as Sherlockians call it) was for a long time denied serious appraisal, possibly due to our snobbish disdain for genre fiction. Fortunately, things have improved. Novels such as Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution and Julian Barnes’s brilliant Arthur & George confirmed Doyle as this year’s deceased author of choice, much as Henry James was in 2004, and so the final volume of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes comes at a good time.

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