The Game Is Afoot

May 16, 2022
Historian Black (A Brief History of Portugal) aims to provide in this sloppy study “a history of England both from the perspective of the Holmes stories and so as to help in their elucidation.” The author explores the economics behind rebuilding sites in London as referenced in Conan Doyle’s stories, describes the political controversies of the late Victorian and early Edwardian era that inform Holmes’s motivations, explains Holmes’s relation to society given the times (with its “emphasis on individuals and their propensity to good or evil”), and breaks down how “empire is always present in the Holmes world.” But his historical analysis is marred by granular details that add little value (such as early 20th-century coal, lignite, and pig-iron production statistics). A baffling conclusion—that Holmes’s “most amazing characteristic, indeed, is not his prodigious intellect but, instead, his ability to bridge social groups in appearance and behaviour”—won’t resonate with most who’ve read the stories, and Black’s larger points are lost among some other strange conclusions—for instance his comment that since villain Moriarty is described as “very tall pale,” rather than “swarthy,” he “certainly” could not be Jewish. Readers interested in the political and social lives of Holmes’s contemporaries will be much better served by Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.