Becoming Holmes by Linda Stratmann

I didn’t initially plan to write novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, but I have sincerealised that everything I did beforehand actually pointed me in that direction.

My first books were all non-fiction, mainly historical true crime, but my especial love was always the Victorian period.

When I started writing fiction it was to create the kind of books I wanted to read; historical crime mysteries with a Victorian setting. My first series is set in London and features a lady detective Frances Doughty and her loyal sidekick Sarah. I always thought of them as a kind of female Holmes and Watson, the cerebral sleuth, and a burly no-nonsense assistant.

My second series of six books has a Brighton setting, also Victorian also with a lady sleuth Mina Scarletti, who exposes fraudulent spirit mediums who are fleecing the vulnerable bereaved. Mina’s arch enemy, Arthur Wallace Hope is a powerful charismatic man, who will trample on those who oppose him. His unshakeable beliefs in spiritualism are inspired by those expressed by Arthur Conan Doyle.

I was working on the Mina books when I had an email from my publisher saying they would like to publish a series of novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, and would I be interested in writing them. And of course, I said yes. It was an honour; a challenge and I think a responsibility.

I have of course read all the Conan Doyle novels and stories – I refer to them as ‘the canon’, the foundation and the original source. I knew that my publisher trusted me not to depart from the canonical stories, and I didn’t want to. I want to respect them, and let my work evolve from them. Holmes is an icon, a universal enduring character, and there was no way I would change his basic identity.

So, what would my approach be? I didn’t know, so I decided to go right back to the start and re-read the original stories. But read them not as a reader but as a writer. Asking myself what Conan Doyle was telling us about Holmes, and what methods was he using to develop the character and his methods.

In the first story A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887, Holmes bursts upon the world fully formed. He is a mystifying and fascinating eccentric. He is already a professional consulting detective, with clients coming to see him, and even the police asking him for advice. Holmes meets Dr Watson, who like himself, is looking for a professional gentleman with whom to share an apartment. They are introduced by a young man called Stamford, who was once surgical dresser to Watson when he studied surgery at Barts some years before, and Holmes is conducting chemistry experiments at Barts. They meet, they move into 221b Baker Street, and the rest is history.

I read on, and then I saw it, the paragraph which lit my fire.  And I knew I had found the line I wanted to pursue.

In the Musgrave Ritual, Holmes is telling Watson about his early days in London.‘When I first came up to London I had rooms in Montague Street, just round the corner from The British Museum, and there I waited, filling my too abundant leisure time by studying all those branches of science which might make me more efficient. Now and again cases came my way, principally through the introduction of old fellow students, for during my last years at the University, there was a good deal of talk there about myself and my methods’.

In one of his earliest cases, the Gloria Scott mystery Holmes tells Watson that during his time at university he spent a vacation as the guest of a friend, Victor Trevor, and while there he solved a mystery. Trevor’s father was so impressed by this, he told Holmes that detective work ought to be his ‘line of life’ That was the first time that Holmes thought that what he had regarded as a hobby ought to be his profession.

Holmes abandoned his formal studies. He never took his degree, instead he came to London, not to be a detective, but to prepare himself to become a detective. And that is what I decided to explore.

We don’t know exactly when he came to London, but it was maybe autumn 1875. He would have been about twenty-one. He met Watson most probably early in 1881. Watson had been an army surgeon and returned to
England after being invalided out following a battle injury

(Precise dates are the subject of much debate between Holmesian scholars, but these are good estimates!)

Those first years in London are the ones when Holmes created himself and became the legend he is today. He took courses of study at Barts, which certainly included chemistry and probably some anatomy, he studied crime by reading sensational newspapers, but he must surely also have been a reader at the great library then housed at the British Museum. He would have made sure to become acquainted with the streets of London. And he must have kept up the sports of boxing and fencing which he took part in at university. He also acquired the kind of connections and recommendations in society which furthered his career.

But who was going to tell the story? Not Watson whom he has yet to meet. Not Holmes himself, as it is better to see the great man in action from another’s viewpoint. Not his only friend Victor Trevor who went abroad to
become a tea-planter.  The answer was already there in front of me. Young Stamford, the man who introduced Holmes and Watson, and then having performed that task, disappears from the canonical stories.

We are told nothing of what Stamford has been doing professionally since Watson last saw him. I decided to fill the gap. In my books, on the advice of Watson who saw some promise in the youth, he has been taking a course in surgery at Barts.

I am aware that there is a work of recent fiction in which Stamford appears and has rather gone to the bad. But that does not cause me any difficulty. Holmes is such an enduring character that I believe that if there are, as some science fiction writers state, multiple parallel universes, then all possibilities, all variations can be true at the same time.

I think it is refreshing to see Holmes through the eyes of someone who is not Watson and has his own perspectives. Stamford is a very different chap from Watson. Watson is a bold courageous type, who when faced with danger simply reaches for his service revolver and plunges in. Stamford is loyal, he believes that Holmes, despite his many flaws, has one of the finest minds he has ever known, and he hopes that by experiencing the dangers of being Holmes’s friend he will become a better person. I think Stamford is brave in his own way since he willingly faces situations which terrify him.

This has led me to create at least one horribly unpleasant experience for Stamford in each book. Something which will test him to the limit, put him in deadly danger, and shatter his nerves. I’m beginning to feel sorry for him. In fact, I wonder if he is beginning to suspect that there may be some mischievous entity causing him all this grief. I hope he doesn’t work out that it’s me.

There is another big difference in my approach.  Watson wrote his accounts of Holmes’s exploits fairly soon after they happened, but Stamford is a retired medical man writing his memoirs in 1924.  This means that he has read Watson’s stories and can write about the young Holmes through his knowledge of what he will become.

The first book in the series, the Rosetta Stone Mystery was suggested to me both by Holmes’ proximity to The British Museum, and my own interest in ancient Egypt. But what was the mystery? I had an idea that was so ridiculous and probably impossible, that I decided I had to write it.

The next book The Explorers Club starts with Holmes finding a coded message on the body of an accident victim, and on decoding it realises it is a deadly warning. But who wrote it, and who was being warned? A master villain is carrying out a series of killings in which the deaths do not appear to be suspicious.

The novel form gives me the opportunity of exploring areas that Conan Doyle in his short stories didn’t have the space to pursue. He told us that Holmes is an expert boxer, but we never see him in the ring.

In book three The Ebony Idol, we are in the world of boxing, and we see Holmes put on the gloves and fight.

We know that Holmes keeps his tobacco in the toe of a Persian slipper. But why does he do this? How did he acquire it? What happened to the other one? I had to write book four to find out.

One drawback is that as I am writing Holmesian fiction I feel I can’t read other people’s Holmesian fiction, much as I would like to. My fear is that I might absorb another author’s ideas and it resurfaces months later leading me to believe it is my own.

I am currently writing the fifth book in the series, the Legend of the Great Auk, which I am hoping to complete in the next few weeks and planning the sixth.

www.lindastratmann.com