Holmesian Myths.

“…Any truth is better than indefinite doubt…”

– The Yellow Face.

As with any great person, there have been all kinds of myths and legends and suppositions about Holmes. How many of them are actually true? Here are some of the more common ones:

1. Holmes took drugs.

Yes he did. Holmes did occasionally take morphine and cocaine. Don’t forget, when Doyle was writing these stories in the 1880s and the 1890s, cocaine was legal. You could buy it over the counter at a chemist’s shop just as easily as Panadol today.

2. Holmes was a drug-addict.

No. Holmes was never a drug-addict, per-se. At least, not in the sense that most people would understand the term. Holmes shot himself up with cocaine because he required an artificial stimulus when he had not his natural one (which was of course, a case, to keep his mind occupied).

3. Holmes wore a deerstalker hat.

No. No stories mention Holmes ever wearing such a hat. The hat was the invention of Sidney Paget, the illustrator that The Strand Magazine commissioned, to illustrate the Holmes stories. In one publication, he read of a hat, to which Doyle had given no specific name, and imagined it to be a deerstalker.

4. Holmes smoked a calabash pipe.

No. Holmes never smoked such a pipe in his life. He smoked cigars, cigarettes, clay pipes, briar pipes…but not calabash. This was an invention of Hollywood.

5. 221b Baker Street really exists!

Yes and no. Certainly, it never existed in Doyle’s time. Doyle deliberately exaggerated or falsified addresses in his stories, because they were set in (then) contemporary London, and he couldn’t risk having people knocking on actual doors, looking for his detective. He originally had Holmes living at 21 Baker Street, but when he realised that that particular address was occupied, he changed it to ‘221b’, an address which, in his lifetime, did not exist. Later, when Baker Street was lengthened and the houses were all renumbered, there did come into existence, a ‘221 Baker Street’, which still exists today.

6. Holmes & Watson were gay lovers.

You’d be surprised how often this one pops up. They were flatmates, colleagues, friends, partners…but not lovers. Holmes was so detatched and at times, inhuman, it’s nearly impossible to think of him loving anyone at all. In Watson’s case, he was constantly jumping from one wife to another, ending up, as some believe, with the grand total of six wives, throughout the run of the canon.

7. Holmes once said: “Elementary, my dear Watson!”.

No. Never once in all of the sixty original publications that he appears in, did Holmes ever say that line. While he certainly said “my dear Watson!” dozens, if not hundreds of times, and “Elementary” just as frequently, the phrase never appears in its entirety throughout the entire Sherlock Holmes canon. It did appear at the end of a 1929 film called “The Return of Sherlock Holmes”.

8. Holmes owns a Stradivarius violin.

Yes. Holmes does own, and play, a violin, and he mentions it as being a Stradivarius worth at least “five hundred guineas”, and which he bought from “a Jew broker in Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings” (The Cardboard Box).