Holmes has been a continuous hit since his creation, and he was the first fictional character that fans really took ownership of — after Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill him off, they refused to accept his death and wrote their own Holmes stories.
Part of Holmes's undying appeal is due to his being the perfect example of what E. Forster called a flat, as opposed to a round, character. Round characters are fully developed. They imitate real people, insofar as they are changeable and unpredictable, while maintaining continuity. Flat characters are static and don't change much, if at all.
If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it — life within the pages of a book. Sherlock Holmes is not like a real person. He has intriguing attributes: his cocaine addiction, his love of the violin, his expert pugilism, his pipe and his hat and the other aspects of his costume. But he doesn't surprise. He doesn't develop, not over the course of the novels, and certainly not over the course of the short stories.
Not that his lack of development is a problem. Quite the opposite. It's a major benefit to the stories. We don't have to worry about who he is, or whether he's going to be the same at the beginning as at the end. Instead, he serves a clear narrative function. He allows us to enter the problem of criminal deduction, a fun puzzle with a pretend murder as its stake. The original Sherlock Holmes stories, with their cryptography, wordplay, and manageable solutions "Did you figure it out before the end?
I did" , are the direct predecessors of crosswords and acrostics and sudoku. Holmes's emptiness serves the story, but it also calls to mind another music-loving cocaine addict who loved mysteries: Sigmund Freud. Holmes represented the triumph of scientific criminology, the idea that if you were to investigate minutely with your looking glass and chemical experiments, you can get much further than the police do with their traditional methods.
The London police by then already had a lot of failures to their credit—failures to make the appropriate arrest, partly because the police mainly responded on knowing who was doing what in the London underworld. Holmes is the one who gets to the bottom of these matters. He studies the history of crime, looking for parallels to each new one. They just go on again and again.
Look for the parallels and you will find the perpetrator. He is moody. He is a violinist, as well as a cocaine addict who falls into depressions between cases and then comes surging up again. Watson himself, the bumbling but plucky sidekick, is a masterpiece, and much of the fun of the story comes out of the conversations between the two of them. Learn more about the art and music of Victorian Britain.
This is the era in which fingerprinting was developed, and Holmes himself is a great advocate of fingerprinting, which became a standard police method. Conan Doyle was delighted by the success of Sherlock Holmes.
At the end of the second series, he killed off Holmes altogether. Holmes is wrestling with Moriarty at the edge of the Reichenbach Falls, and they both plunge into the river and are lost. That is the first principle of a great story. Bell was a forensic scientist at Edinburgh University, and Doyle worked as a clerk for the doctor at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. Bell was especially good at paying attention to minor details and drawing conclusions based on his observations. These powers of deductions would also become a defining trait for the Holmes character.
But Sherlock Holmes is more than just his deductive powers. The detective is knowledgeable in many subjects, including anatomy, chemistry, mathematics, law, and sensational literature, just to name a few. He also has a deep appreciation for music and plays the violin. Additionally, Sherlock Holmes is a physically imposing character, standing at six feet tall and being proficient in boxing, fencing, and singlestick.
While Sherlock Holmes has a sharp wit and many physical strengths to match, the detective is by no means perfect. Sherlock Holmes is logical to the point of being cold and dispassionate. Sherlock Holmes has no interest in romance or romantic relationships.
Holmes also has an obsessive personality. When he gets stuck on an idea, he has trouble thinking of anything else. So with all of his faults and character flaws, why are people so obsessed with this one detective character? Holmes also has his vices, and while readers might not share the exact same vices as the detective, most of us understand those impulses.
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