![]() ![]() The detective’s darker side, made explicit in the drug–taking of the second Holmes novel, The Sign of Four (1890), contradicts the cosy deerstalker image. ![]() “I have ample evidence,” Holmes tells his client Sir Henry Baskerville, “that you are being dogged in London.”Ĭomplete with pipe, Stradivarius and magnifying glass (though not deerstalker: the hat was added by the Strand magazine illustrator Sidney Paget), Sherlock Holmes was hooked on cocaine and injected himself with morphine in order to stave off fears of boredom. ![]() Instead, the novel is enlivened by marvellous corny humour. Had he dabbled seriously in mediums and moonshine before The Hound of the Baskervilles appeared in 1902, the fire-breathing beast of Grimpen Mire might really have come from the beyond, as we are led at first to believe. A mishmash of new age mysticism and low church gloom, the pseudo-religion flourished amid the bereavement of the first world war and its aftermath Conan Doyle had lost his adored son Kingsley to the flu epidemic of 1918. T he best Sherlock Holmes stories were written before 1916, when Arthur Conan Doyle officially converted to spiritualism and took to table-rapping. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |