Sherlock Holmes’ Birthday: The Case for Real Detection

A Birthday Doyle Never Wrote Down

Sherlock Holmes doesn’t have an official birthday. In four novels and fifty-six short stories, Arthur Conan Doyle never once mentioned the date. So fans did what fans do and filled in the gap. For decades, Sherlockians have marked January 6 as the great detective’s birthday.

The reasoning is clever. That fits the character. January 6 is the Feast of Epiphany, the day in the Christian calendar devoted to what was hidden being brought to light. That’s a fitting birthday for a man whose entire job is dragging the hidden into the open. It’s also the day after the twelfth day of Christmas, and Holmes quotes Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night twice across the stories, the only Shakespeare play he quotes more than once.

So the fans built a case for the date, the way Holmes would have. I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes growing up, and I always liked it, so I’m happy to mark the day.

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Who is Sherlock Holmes?

Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes in 1887. Over the next forty years he wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories about him, and built the template every detective since has been measured against. The setup is famous. Holmes is a consulting detective in Victorian London. Dr. John Watson is his friend, his roommate at 221B Baker Street, and the narrator who lets the reader stand a half step behind the great man and watch him work.

What drives every story is the same, and it never gets old.

Holmes notices the small things everyone else walks past. A scuff on a boot. Chalk on a sleeve. The exact way a man’s hands are calloused. From those details he reasons his way to conclusions that look like magic and aren’t. The famous moment in nearly every story is when he explains the chain, and the reader realizes the clues were all there in plain sight. That’s the whole appeal. He sees what you saw and reads it correctly.

The Thing the Screen Keeps Getting Wrong

Here’s my complaint, and I’ll stand behind it. Most modern screen versions of Holmes ruin him by handing him something close to a superpower.

The Robert Downey Jr. movies are the clearest case.

Downey was the only reason to watch them. He’s a tremendous actor and he’s fun in the role. The films are awful, and the core problem is what they do to Holmes. They turn him into a man with nearly psychic abilities. Slow-motion fight prediction. Leaps no human could make from the evidence shown. Everything around Downey is a mess, and the writing mistakes spectacle for detection.

The Benedict Cumberbatch series, Sherlock, is worse on the same count. Cumberbatch is a fine actor, but the show gives Holmes something that plays like telepathy, mind-reading dressed up as deduction. It didn’t capture Holmes and Watson for me. It captured a wizard and his assistant.

When Holmes reaches a conclusion, the reader has to be able to follow the logic backward to clues that were on the page, through reasoning that makes sense once explained.

That’s the contract, and the moment you make his ability a power instead of a skill, you break it. The audience can’t follow the logic because there’s nothing to follow. A detective who just knows is performing a magic trick, and magic tricks don’t reward a careful reader.

The Versions That Got It Right

The screen has done Holmes well, when it respected the deduction.

Basil Rathbone, who played Holmes in a run of films from 1939 to 1946, was especially good. He looked the part, he carried the intelligence, and the films trusted the detective work instead of replacing it with stunts. For a lot of people, Rathbone is still the face of Sherlock Holmes, and for good reason.

There’s a fun corner of this for science fiction fans, too. On Star Trek: The Next Generation, the android Data plays Holmes on the holodeck, with Geordi La Forge as Watson, in episodes built as a tribute to the Rathbone films. I enjoyed those. They’re some of the more entertaining holodeck stories, and they accidentally make my exact point.

In one of them, Data can instantly solve any real Holmes case because he’s memorized every story, which ruins the fun, so the crew has to generate an original mystery for him. A detective who already knows the answer is no fun to watch. The deduction has to be earned in front of you.

I’ll say, as an aside, that I never loved how much The Next Generation leaned on the holodeck.

They had the entire galaxy to explore and kept sticking the characters in a Victorian London simulation. It always felt claustrophobic to me. Why build a whole universe and then spend your evenings indoors. But the Holmes episodes themselves are good, and they treat the character with respect.

What can mystery writers learn from Sherlock Holmes?

If you write mysteries, thrillers, or anything where a character has to figure something out, Holmes is the model. The lesson is simple and hard. Play fair with the reader. (I get deep into fair-play structure in the Plot Handbook.)

Every clue your detective uses to reach a conclusion has to be on the page where the reader could have seen it too. The pleasure of a mystery is the reader racing the detective, catching some clues, missing others, and feeling the click when the explanation lands. That click only works if the information was available. Hide the key clue, or replace deduction with a hunch, and the reader feels cheated instead of impressed.

The second lesson is the value of a Watson, a character who exists to stand in for the reader.

Holmes needs someone a step behind him to explain things to, because that someone is standing in for the reader. Watson asks the questions the reader is asking. He’s amazed at the moments the reader should be amazed. A smart sidekick who’s not quite as smart as the genius is a hugely useful tool in fiction, and Doyle built the model.

I find Watson interesting enough that I named a character after him.

In my novel The Eternal War, an artificial intelligence calls itself Watson and makes a case I have a lot of sympathy for. Everyone always looked at Holmes, it says, and nobody looked at Watson, even though Watson was doing the real analysis and the real intellectual work the whole time. So the AI takes the name and prefers to operate unseen, the quiet mind nobody is watching.

It’s a small joke built on a real truth about the character, the supporting player is often where the actual thinking happens.

The third lesson is restraint. Holmes is brilliant, but Doyle never makes him omniscient. He’s wrong sometimes. He misses things. He gets surprised. That fallibility is what keeps him human and keeps the stories tense. A detective who’s never wrong is boring, because there’s no doubt. Give your genius limits, and the reader leans in.

So on January 6, raise a glass to the most famous detective who never lived. Then go read a couple of the original stories and watch how Doyle plays fair, every single time. That trick is worth learning, and there’s nothing psychic about it.

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