Sherlock Holmes fandom has always had a thing – lovable or annoying – for treating Holmes and Watson as real historical figures and not fictional characters. I’m not sure why this is, as the way the stories are presented, being the recollections of Dr. John Watson drawn from his contemporary notes on the cases, wasn’t something unique to the Holmes canon. But it’s still something you see a lot. It receives a nod here as well, with an About the Author(s) page with two bios: that of Watson (who, we’re told, died in 1940) and of Loren D. Estleman (who is, as of this writing, still alive).

These two pocket bios are only part of the textual apparatus that surrounds this novel. It was first published in 1979 and most recently republished as part of the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series. This latter is the edition I was reading. It starts with a Foreword written in 1978, where Estleman refers to the following book being “with some slight interference of my own . . . a chronicle of John Watson’s own words.” He spins a yarn about how the manuscript was sold to him by an American gangster who found it when he’d been serving in France in WWII (in a chateau Watson had been stationed at in WWI). This is then followed by a Preface by Watson, dated 1917, that says that Holmes had recently told him he could tell the full, true story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde now that enough time had passed since the events in question to not cause any scandal. Then, after the novel proper, there are Acknowledgments where Estleman continues to maintain the conceit that the story is authentic but which also references real sources and debts. And finally we get “A Word After,” which was first published in 2001, where Estleman talks a bit about the experience of writing the book.

Some of this is interesting, though personally I don’t like the conceit of treating fictional characters as real people. But like I say, it’s something that Sherlock fandom likes to indulge, and all these “further adventures” and spin-offs are a kind of fan service. It’ become a tradition. Now on to the book itself . . .

The Further Adventures series likes to mine late-Victorian literary thrillers for new-old villains. In addition to Dr. Jekyll, Holmes would also face off against Dracula (Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, an earlier book by Estleman), the Phantom of the Opera, Jack the Ripper, the Martians from The War of the Worlds, and other famous baddies. Going into this one, I actually thought there would be a twist where Holmes discovers that there were two different men involved and that Robert Louis Stevenson (who we meet at the end) made up all the business about chemical transformations. But instead it’s quite faithful to Stevenson’s original story and accepts the fanciful notion that someone can be not only morally and psychologically corrupted but physically transformed, instantly and in a dramatic way, just by drinking a potion. This means that as readers we already know everything that’s going on and we just follow Holmes and Watson around as they piece things together. If you know Stevenson’s novel well though you’ll have fun picking up all the minor references, like Watson calling Hyde his Mr. Fell, and while there are no twists it is a good yarn. Estleman is true to the characters and throws in one epic cab chase through the streets of London that was thrilling in a cinematic way.

Another point of interest is the link that’s come up already several times here between Holmes and Watson and Jekyll and Hyde. I previously noted how the author of the Introduction to the Penguin Classics A Study in Scarlet invoked the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in his argument about Holmes and Watson constituting a single “divided being.” I also talked about how the story “The Red-Headed League” related to the Jekyll and Hyde story in the way the pawn shop backs onto the high-street bank: a secret connection between high and low that’s very much in play in Stevenson. In this book Holmes himself accounts for his bond with Watson as being a case of “Opposites attract,” a point that Estleman expands on in his Afterword by contrasting the “ultra-conservative John H. Watson” and the “Bohemian Sherlock Holmes.” “How natural,” then, that they “should find themselves drawn into the two halves of Jekyll’s world.”

Holmes index

A simple story, and not deceptively simple either. Though things do begin with Holmes reminding Watson of his axiom that “The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring home.”

I don’t think the crime here was featureless or commonplace though. It’s apparent simplicity is that it seems an open-and-shut case, with a young man arrested for the murder of his father. But Holmes sees deeper into these things, and knows how circumstantial evidence can be “a very tricky thing” and lead you astray. “It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.”

What I mean by calling it a simple story is something different. I mean that as a mystery story, and in particular a Sherlock Holmes story, it doesn’t throw any curves. There’s only one suspect, and the plot follows what had already become a standard script pretty closely. There’s Holmes showing up the police by getting down on the ground with his lens and tracking clues (footprints, tobacco residue) like a bloodhound on the scent. There’s the exercise of his métier of “observation and inference.” There’s the usual backstory involving a crime in a faraway country (in this case Australia), and a pair of young lovers whose path to matrimony has to be made clear. There’s the guilty party who had his reasons, and who is going to expire soon anyway.

I raised an eyebrow at Lestrade calling himself Holmes’s “colleague,” not so much because he’s presuming a lot putting himself on an equal footing with Holmes but because they seem to actually have the same job. Lestrade has been called to Boscombe Valley by some of the locals who believe in the charged man’s innocence. Specifically, he is said to have been “retained.” I’m not sure how that works, or what makes it any different from Holmes’s role as consulting detective. Lestrade’s just not as good at it.

An annotation in the Baring-Gould edition though offers this:

Some have pounced on the word “retained” as used by Holmes to conclude that Lestrade had gone into private practice for a period, but that judgment is not necessarily warranted, for it was not uncommon for Scotland Yarders to aid the provincial police, and Holmes’ use of the word was purely conversational.

This suggests to me that there’s some wiggle room. The line between the police and private practice wasn’t as sharp in the nineteenth century as it is today, and Doyle himself might not have been clear on all the practical distinctions. And some of it can also be attributed to genre logistics. Fifty years later Miss Marple would be routinely given access to crime scenes and even be requested by authorities to conduct official interviews with suspects and witnesses. I just think the conjunction of “retained” with the later use of “colleague,” not to mention the way Holmes is usually employed (retained?) by the police, shows how fluid the boundaries were.

Holmes index

Things moved a lot faster when I was a young fellow. But today I think more chaste relationships may be the fashion. That is, if young people are finding their way into relationships at all. I hear they’re having a lot less sex than previous generations anyway.