‘L’homme c’est rien — l’oeuvre c’est tout’: The Sherlock Holmes Stories and Work

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the late Victorian detective genre’s most famous and canonical incarnation — Sherlock Holmes.¹ Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories are now so well known, so frequently studied and so often reimagined in popular culture that it perhaps seems there cannot be much new to say about them. In fact, despite the stories’ popularity and mythic status, the Holmes of the popular imagination is often little more than an agglomeration of vague (and sometimes inaccurate) details gleaned from later adaptations — hansom cabs, fog, Baker Street, murder, deerstalker hats, drug addiction, and ‘bromance’ with Watson.² The stories, however, are ‘more lively, more varied, and interesting than the usual remembered model’ and they still offer much to consider (Knight, Form and Ideology 75).