Understanding Sherlock

‘I play the game for the game’s own sake.’

‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE BRUCE-PARTINGTON PLANS’

Dear old Sherlock has rather acquired a reputation over the years as an anti-social, unfeeling machine with a fearsome streak of arrogance. Such

a description is not entirely unjustified. Even faithful Watson – in one of his more exasperated moments – described him as ‘a brain without a heart,

as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence’. Then, in a more considered moment, Watson called him ‘the best and

wisest man whom I had ever known’.

In truth, Holmes nestled somewhere uncomfortably between these two descriptions. The ordinary, everyday world largely bored him, which could

make him seem distant, disinterested and even callous. This was an unfortunate side effect of his on-going quest for excitement, for the unusual, for

the sort of problem that could only be solved by his particular type of mind.

‘I know, my dear Watson,’ said Holmes in ‘The Red-Headed League’, ‘that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions

and humdrum routine of everyday life.’ It was this desire to rise above the mundane that so often drove him, sometimes onwards and upwards,

sometimes into extreme danger and sometimes toward the terrible black dogs of his depression.

What cannot be in doubt is that the Great Detective took on all his work wholeheartedly, risking his own wellbeing in pursuit of his chief goal:

defeating the worst criminal minds in the land. It was work that imperilled his life but which fulfilled a deep-seated need within him for intellectual

challenge and heart-stopping adrenalin rushes. Take this short extract from ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, which exquisitely captures Holmes as

the thrill of the chase takes him over:

Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker

Street would have failed to recognise him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn into two hard black lines, while his eyes

shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips compressed, and the veins stood

out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely

concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick,

impatient snarl in reply.

There were many counterpoints to these moments of exhilaration. In the absence of suitable cases to invigorate his soul, Holmes displayed classic

signs of depression and resorted to such unsavoury outlets for his energies as cocaine abuse. ‘I get in the dumps at times,’ he told Watson in A

Study in Scarlet, ‘and don’t open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I’ll soon be right.’

Equally destructive was his inability to consider his own basic physiological requirements when faced with an unresolved conundrum. In these

circumstances, Watson memorably recorded how he ‘would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over, rearranging his facts,

looking at it from every point of view until he had either fathomed it or convinced himself that his data were insufficient’. Had he been a fan of those

signs one sometimes finds in a certain kind of office environment, he might well have had one on his desk at 221B Baker Street that read: ‘You

don’t have to be mad to work here. But it helps!’

All of which is to say, being Holmes was no easy option, and to follow in his intellectual footsteps is not a journey for the faint-hearted. Holmes

went about his work because he had no other choice – it was what made him who he was. Without it, there was little to define him. He alluded to his

enormous sense of duty in A Study in Scarlet: ‘There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to

unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.’ Meanwhile, Watson would say of him that ‘like all great artists’ he ‘lived for his art’s sake’.