Holmes's Father: When Is a Holmes Not a Holmes?

By Brad Keefauver

Having spent the better part of my days studying the work of Sherlock Holmes, I was not surprised that it was Holmes’s own methods that led me to locate his father. Those precepts of which he had reminded Watson time and again were of the utmost importance to the detective’s work, and with good reason: they work. Take, for example, that oft-quoted classic: “. . . when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Well, in the case of Holmes’s paternity, a legion of the detective’s fans have been busy eliminating the impossible for years now. They have searched every historical archive they’ve encountered for birth records, marriage records, anything at all showing what Holmes bloodline our dear Sherlock descended from. And what have they found? Nothing. At this point it seems impossible that Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes are related to any other Holmes on the planet. So we must, sad to say, finally eliminate that thesis, which leaves us with a new question:

Why would two boys grow up named “Holmes” if they were not truly Holmeses? Children hardly need assumed names, and this was long before witness protection programs became popular. The likeliest cause of two non-Holmes children living under the name “Holmes” is simply that their parents were falsely living under that name. And why would two adults be living under assumed names? Hiding out from a criminal past, you can be sure. Such an existence would have to be a poor one. But on the other hand, Sherlock and Mycroft seem to have almost certainly come from a somewhat moneyed origin.

What if Sherlock’s father was a successful criminal of good family? Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? It gives one child motivation to study crime itself, and another child motivation to make up for parental misdeeds by a life in the government service. The hard part, as in any investigation, is identifying that criminal.

Here, I think, we can benefit by using another of Sherlock Holmes’s teachings: “When you follow two separate chains of thought, Watson, you will find some point of intersection which should approximate to the truth.” One train of thought we shall follow is that of successful criminals of good family. The second we shall follow is that of the life of Sherlock Holmes himself. The first train of thought immediately takes us to the likes of Professor Moriarty, John Clay, and Baron Gruner . . . yet they don’t really intersect with the life of Holmes until they come in the role of criminals to his part as detective. Better to find such a criminal whom Holmes may have sought out for other reasons.

Following the path of Holmes’s life, one comes upon a curious incident at the very start. While in college, he is bitten on the ankle by a dog, and is bedridden for ten days. It seems a quite ludicrous series of events, for two reasons: first, that an active young Sherlock Holmes couldn’t avoid a rowdy pet, and second, that a nip on the ankle caused enough damage to keep the young Holmes off his feet for ten whole days. Yet it gains Holmes, as he tells it, the only friend he made in school. Now, if Sherlock Holmes did not wish to make friends while at school, it seems a bit ridiculous that a dog bite would bestow social tendencies upon him where none resided before. One can easily see Holmes turning Victor Trevor away time and again, and going back to reading, continuing the education he was at college for to begin with. Unless he wanted to make friends with Victor Trevor for some reason. We have seen Holmes use sham infirmities time and again to suit his purposes, and feigning injury from a dog bite to put himself on Victor Trevor’s social schedule does not seem unlike him.

But why would Sherlock Holmes try to put himself into the life of Victor Trevor, son of a country squire? Sherlock Holmes was a very tightly focused loner, even at that young age, the sort of person who does things only if they fit some specific purpose. What did Victor Trevor have that young Sherlock could want?

Well, we know of only two things that Trevor had, really. A bull terrier and a father who was a former criminal living under an assumed name. Which would seem to be more up Holmes’s alley? Holmes, of course, did not know that Trevor’s father had a secret past at that point . . . or did he?

If the father of Sherlock Holmes was a former criminal living under an assumed name, as we’ve previously considered, then maybe Papa Holmes was not quite as good at concealing his past from his family as old Trevor was. Or perhaps Papa Holmes had left his family at some point, leaving his more curious son to start hunting up that criminal past and any associations in it that might tell the son more about his father’s history. And if Holmes came to visit Victor Trevor’s father, the former James Armitage, in search of knowledge about a criminal associate of his of good birth and a successful criminal past, who does that suggest was the father of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes?

Why, a fine fellow named Jack Prendergast, that’s who.

“He was a young man with a clear, hairless face, a long, thin nose, and rather nut-cracker jaws. He carried his head very jauntily in the air, had a swaggering style of walking, and was, above all else, remarkable for his extraordinary height. I don’t think any of our heads would have come up to his shoulder, and I am sure that he could not have measured less than six and a half feet. It was strange among so many sad and weary faces to see one which was full of energy and resolution.”

Sound like the sort of fellow who could have fathered Sherlock Holmes? I think so.

Jack Prendergast was a man among men, just like his boys, Sherlock and Mycroft. From a good family and blessed with “great ability.” Prendergast had used an ingenious system of fraud to bilk leading London merchants out of almost a quarter of a million pounds — money that was never recovered. Even after some slip caused his capture and deportation, he not only engineered an escape from the prison ship Gloria Scott, but contrived a way for the less bloodthirsty of his fellow convicts to pose as shipwrecked seamen. And while it seemed that he stayed with the worst criminals of the prison ship, to meet his end in a massive explosion, the only living witness to that event was an untrustworthy sailor who could not have seen all that he said he had seen without being blown up himself. It’s extremely hard to imagine that such an ingenious plotter as Prendergast wasn’t simply using the explosion as a final cover of his own escape.

Interestingly like his son, Jack Prendergast also found a Watson in a man he was forced by circumstance to share close quarters with. James Armitage wound up writing up the narrative of Prendergast’s own “Final Problem,” but never made it to the Prendergastian “Empty House.” For if he had, I’m sure he would have found that house far from empty, filled with a whole brood of children named Holmes. But a wild spirit like that of Jack Prendergast was not the sort to be comfortable for long in the role of landowner, husband, and father. After eight or nine years, he was surely moving on again, leaving his family with land and money to live on, yet moving on to some new criminal enterprise to quench his own thirst for adventure.

Sherlock Holmes was only beginning his quest to learn of his father during the events of “The Gloria Scott.” As his life moved on, he would study his father’s great fraud in the records of Scotland Yard, and even make contact with his Prenderghast forebears, helping out his uncle, Major Prendergast, in the matter of the Tankerville Club card scandal, mentioned in “The Five Orange Pips.” Did he finally meet his father again, under whatever new name the gifted conman had assumed?

That, I’m afraid, is a story for another day.