Sherlock Still Hounded Conan Doyle Despite ‘Final Problem’

MEIRINGEN, Switzerland —  In this the Sherlock Holmes centennial year, his fans flock to the Reichenbach Falls, where the world’s greatest detective grappled to the death with the only real enemy he ever had.

No, it wasn’t Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, who plotted the nefarious murder of Sherlock Holmes on that three-foot-wide path overlooking the thundering cataract.

It was his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Wimpole Street physician and budding author who wanted to get Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson off his back so that he could get on to serious historical novels and do for England what Sir Walter Scott had done for Scotland.

“Welcome to the Reichenbach Falls,” Fritz Immer, the attendant on the funicular railway, shouts to visitors cautiously making their way along the narrow ledge, which is dank and slippery from flying spray and resonant with the roar of the rushing river. “Isn’t this a fine place for a murder?”

Conan Doyle thought so when he first visited the falls in the early spring of 1893. “A sinister and terrible place,” he wrote in his diary. “One that would make a suitable tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my bank account along with him.”

Murder Most Foul

He already had written to his mother that he was contemplating the murder most foul of the only character in English literature now better known throughout the world than Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe or Scrooge. “I think of slaying Holmes in the last and winding him up for good and all,” he wrote. “He takes my mind off better things.”

Sherlock Holmes solved his first case in “A Study in Scarlet,” which appeared in Beeton’s Christmas annual of 1887 and brought the author the princely sum of 15 pounds, then worth about $75.

Six years later, one of Holmes’ “trifling experiences,” as chronicled by Dr. Watson, commanded $5,000. But Conan Doyle was “weary of him. The character admits of no light and shade. He is a calculating machine.”

In between dashing off two dozen short stories and a couple of novelettes about the doings at 221-B Baker Street, Conan Doyle wrote “Micah Clarke,” a historical novel widely praised by the critics, who continued to ignore Sherlock Holmes. The writer was also hard at work on “The White Company,” which was to become the best-selling adventure romance since Scott’s “Ivanhoe.”

The author felt that his “hand was being forced” by Holmes and Watson “into the lower stratum of literary achievement.”

Conan Doyle’s Irish mother (her name was Foley) was shocked when he sent Holmes careening over the falls at Reichenbach into that “creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth” in a death grip with Professor Moriarty. The dastardly deed was done in “The Final Problem,” which appeared in the December, 1893, issue of the Strand magazine.

“Killed Sherlock Holmes,” Doyle gloated in his diary. But the Empire was shaken. Londoners wore black armbands and wrote him letters addressed, “You brute.” Poet John Masefield felt “an indescribable sense of loss at the thought that Holmes would be no more.” Readers had not carried on like that since Charles Dickens let Little Nell die half a century before.

But Conan Doyle had no regrets. “If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would now be a commanding one.”

For nearly a decade he held firm against the lamentations of Holmesians everywhere and the increased rewards offered by his British and American publishers. He even tried throwing them a bone, “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” which Watson obligingly dug out of his journals for readers of the Strand in the fall of 1901. Then with a two-word postcard to his agent--”very well”--Conan Doyle finally gave in and dutifully wrote to his mother: “You will find that Holmes was never dead and that he is now very much alive.”

As “The Adventure of the Empty House” revealed in the October, 1903, issue of the Strand, Holmes in that deadly pas de deux with Moriarty on the slithery ledge above the falls had executed a little stutter step, thanks to his knowledge of baritsu , the Japanese system of wrestling. The maneuver sent Moriarty hurtling into that steaming caldron and enabled Holmes to go on to a couple of dozen other adventures before retiring to keep bees on the Sussex Downs.

Conan Doyle had come to the Halsi Valley, 75 miles south of Zurich, seeking a cure for his wife’s tuberculosis and instead thought he had found a final solution for his irksome detective. A century later, the good doctor would have been appalled to learn that there is an elegant Sherlock Holmes Hotel at the end of Baker Street Alley in Meiringen, the little town at the foot of the falls.

Hans Thoeni, the innkeeper who puffs on a curved pipe, ritually dons a deerstalker cap and Inverness cape to pick up guests at the railway station in his venerable London taxi. The hotel’s corridors, breakfast salon, chinaware and all 94 rooms are decorated with pictures of Baker Street from the turn of the century and huge blowups of Sidney Paget’s incomparable illustrations of the Holmes saga for the Strand.

A plaque near the reception desk proclaims that the title of “honorary citizen has been conferred on Sherlock Holmes with all extraordinary privileges” by the good burgers of Meiringen.

Guests from all over the world leave business cards identifying themselves as “A.J. Moriarty, Massilon, Ohio,” “Sherlock Evans, Albany, N.Y.,” “Ronald Burt de Waal, M.D., chief surgeon of Dr. Watson’s neglected patients, Fort Collins, Colo.”

When signing the register, as Holmes and Watson did at the fictional Enlischer Hof in Meiringen, many proudly proclaim their membership in the Baker Street Irregulars of New York, the Sherlock Holmes Society of London or such offshoot scion societies as the Boulevard Assassins of Paris, the Sons of the Copper Beeches of Philadelphia, the Baritsu Chapter of Tokyo and the Red Headed League of Sydney, Australia.

‘A Fearful Place’

Often entire chapters come on pilgrimage, turning up for cocktails in the hotel’s British-style pub with authentic Victorian regalia, faithful to the last detail of a Malacca-cane walking stick, like the one left behind in Baker Street by James Mortimer in “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

The faithful invariably trek off in awe and devotion to the 2,780-foot high falls, which are floodlighted by night and by day drown out the jangle of cowbells in the upland pastures with their incessant roar.

“That arrow there,” funicular attendant Immer said, pointing to a white mark on the coal black cliff, “is where Herr Holmes and the professor had their fateful meeting. Unfortunately you can’t go there now. An avalanche last week wiped out the narrow path. This is still, as Herr Dr. Watson said, a fearful place. The restaurant on top of the mountain is unreachable until repairs are made.”

Deborah Cohen of Boston peered timidly over the ledge through the mist and spray at the silver ribbon of the Aar River snaking through the gorge far below. “I am not a fanciful person,” she lovingly quoted the born-again Holmes, as if viewing the scene with his powers of observation, “but I give you my word that I seem to hear Moriarty’s voice screaming at me out of the abyss.”

True Sherlockians pride themselves on their ability to quote “the canon,” as they reverently refer to the 56 stories and four novels.

They pose for pictures at the monument near the lower funicular station, which tells visitors that in “this dreadful caldron occurred the culminating event in the career of Sherlock Holmes, the world’s greatest detective, when on May 4, 1891, (Holmesian chronology), he vanquished Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime.” It was erected by the “Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London.”

In the windows of the stationery store on Meiringen’s main street rise pyramids of “Der Hund Von Baskerville,” “Sherlock Holmes Und Die Spuren Im Moor” and other German translations of the tales, which are also available in English, French and Japanese on the book shelves in the hotel writing room.

Duel Re-created

Innkeeper Thoeni read them all as a boy, little dreaming that he would get to play the villainous Col. Sebastian Moran when a British camera crew came to the falls to film a recent TV series starring Jeremy Brett.

The cast stayed at the hotel, but the real celebrities around town were the two stuntmen who were winched out over the falls on slender steel wires to re-create the deadly duel between Holmes and Moriarty. The innkeeper proudly strides about the premises with one of the props, the sturdy Alpenstock that Watson found leaning against the sheer wall lining the right side of the path where Holmes vanished.

Because of the excellent skiing on the surrounding Alpine peaks, the Sherlock Holmes is designated as a “Sporthotel.” This would have pleased Conan Doyle. He gave his occupation as “sportsman” when he signed the register at the old inn in Meiringen, then famous for a dessert topping called meringue.

Like Holmes and Watson, who were both in many ways autobiographical creations, Conan Doyle was an educated man of action, a crack shot, adept at billiards, fencing and boxing, an expert mountain climber and a “demon bowler and batsman” at cricket.

Taught Kipling Golf

While coolly contemplating the murder of Holmes, he went zipping through the nearby 9,000-foot high Furka Pass on Norwegian skis. In an era when mountain climbing was all the rage because an Englishman named Edward Whymper had conquered the Matterhorn, Conan Doyle sought to convince his Swiss friends that their snowy slopes were ideally suited to this new sport that “might one day become a national asset.” His deduction of the tourist possibilities was elementary, to say the least.

Conan Doyle, who gave Rudyard Kipling golf lessons in America, even tried laying out what must have been Switzerland’s first golf course in a meadow west of town. But cows ate the red flags marking the greens.

No further clues are needed to deduce why the Swiss set aside all of April to celebrate the Sherlock Holmes centenary, with various events in Meiringen and at the 11th-Century Chateau de Lucens near Lausanne, where Conan Doyle, enriched by the return of Holmes, kept his collection of medieval armor and knightly weapons.

Now a museum dedicated to the writer, the old castle boasts perhaps the finest re-creation of the famous upstairs sitting room at 221-B Baker Street. Furnished with what Watson called “our humble boarding house mahogany,” the study is faithful in all those details that must have made life miserable for Mrs. Hudson.

Endless Mementos

The mementos are endless: the Persian slipper stuffed in the toe with shag tobacco, the coal scuttle filled with cigars, the deal top table stained from chemistry experiments, untidy piles of newspaper clippings, unanswered letters impaled on the mantelpiece by a jackknife, the syringe for Holmes’s thrice daily injections of a 7% solution of cocaine, his Stradivarius violin, the wallpaper perforated with the initials V. R. (Victoria Regina), Holmes’ practice pistol and Dr. Watson’s journals and seldom-used stethoscope.

Poor Watson is usually portrayed as a Falstaffian bungler, but what about poor Dr. Doyle? Success was the one affliction he never could properly diagnose.

Even his knighthood in 1902 (Holmes turned one down in the same year) was not for writing great literature but for penning a pair of propaganda pamphlets stoutly defending the Empire against atrocity charges in the Boer War.

Late in life, Conan Doyle embraced spiritualism, seeking some assurance of life after death. He never realized that Sherlock Holmes, whom he tried to kill off, had achieved immortality for them both.