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The world was not ready for J Sherrinford Holmes, “reserved – sleepy eyed young man – philosopher – collector of rare Violins”, and his faithful companion Ormond Sacker from Sudan.
But the 27-year-old GP, sitting at his desk in a Hampshire seaside resort and trying his hand at short stories in his spare time, then changed the name of his hero to Sherlock Holmes, his companion became Dr Watson from Afghanistan, and Arthur Conan Doyle had created an immortal.
Inside a display case at the Sherlock Holmes exhibition which opens this week at the Museum of London, a single tattered sheet of paper contains Conan Doyle’s first thoughts about his characters – he noted of Holmes, “I have four hundred [pounds] a year – I am a Consulting detective”.
Alex Werner, lead curator of the show, described it as “the holy of holies for true Sherlockians.” Beside the sheet lie the priceless Southsea Notebooks, three cheap shabby notebooks with red marbled covers, the earliest containing the first lines Conan Doyle wrote of a Sherlock Holmes story. It was originally called A Tangled Skein, but that is neatly crossed out and the new title, one of his most famous, substituted: A Study in Scarlet.
Below that, Conan Doyle sketched his scene: “The terrified woman rushing up to the cabman. The two going in search of a policeman. John Reeves has been 7 years in the force, John Reeves went back with them.”
“I wasn’t quite sure we were really going to get these until they arrived and actually went into the case,” Werner said reverently.
Conan Doyle constantly drew on his medical and scientific training in Edinburgh, and wrote to Joseph Bell, a professor at the university whose analytic method he admired. “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes,” he told him.
Appropriately the Southsea Notebooks, and one of a handful of surviving copies of the 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual, where A Study in Scarlet first appeared, belong to a New York cardiologist, Constantine Rossakis.
Some very rare survivors of the hundreds of original pencil and watercolour illustrations by Sidney Paget for the Strand Magazine, where his images of the long, thin, pale man set the pattern for every actor who has ever played him on stage or screen, are also on display. Some have been loaned by Rossakis, the others by a rival and equally passionate collector on the West Coast, Glen Miranker, former chief technical officer at Apple, and a member of the Speckled Band of Boston, one of the oldest societies of Sherlock Holmes fans.
Jon Lellenberg, former literary agent of Conan Doyle’s daughter Jean, and author of 22 books on Sherlock Holmes, thinks Rossakis and Miranker share a type of intelligence and mind set common to many Sherlockians, a love of problems and puzzles. Lellenberg formerly worked in the US defence department, and his equally Holmes obsessed wife is a specialist in financial and banking law.
The loans to the exhibition, the first big UK museum tribute to the great detective since the Festival of Britain in 1951, include a glorious Turner watercolour of the Reichenbach falls – whence Sherlock miraculously returned when fans refused to accept his death – and a beautiful Monet painting of Charing Cross bridge wreathed in fog. It also features the only known filmed interview with Conan Doyle, recorded in 1927.
However for a new generation of Sherlockians the most popular object may be a sweeping greatcoat, made by the English firm Belstaff. The clue is in the crimson embroidered button hole on the lapel: it is indeed the very coat worn in the BBC series by Benedict Cumberbatch, which to the great relief of the fans survived his still unexplained death fall from a high rooftop at the end of the second series.
Werner has put some puzzles into the exhibition for visitors. One is to find a particularly significant postcard amid scores in a floor to ceiling case. Clue: it was sent to Conan Doyle’s son, and the message reads, “this is where the hounds were”.
