The Fan

By Brad Keefauver

Even after twenty some years of poring over Dr. Watson’s records of Sherlock Holmes, I occasionally still get taken by complete surprise. Whether it’s in my own studies, a chance comment on the Internet, or a full-fledged article by one of my Sherlockian colleagues, a previously harmless quotation suddenly springs forth with a whole new significance, sometimes giving whole new meanings to an array of Canonical events. Sometimes this is a happy occasion. Sometimes it is a been frightening. An example of the latter occurred this May as Ron Kritter posted a bit of top ten fun to the Hounds of the Internet based on the following quote from “The Dying Detective”:

“I walked slowly round the room, examining the pictures of celebrated criminals with which every wall was adorned.”

Even though I enjoyed Ron’s top ten list, something about that quote, seen apart from the whole text for the first time, gave me shivers of dread. Watson is walking slowly around a room whose walls are covered with pictures of famous criminals — a scene that eerily echoes a movie lead’s discovery of a stalker or serial killer’s lair, in which obsession is suddenly revealled by an overabundance of photos plastering walls like some sort of bizarre shrine. The most eerie aspect of Watson’s statement, however, comes when one remembers exactly where he is during that passage from “The Dying Detective”: Sherlock Holmes’s bedroom.

Like some teenaged girl infatuated with the latest singing hearthrob, Sherlock Holmes has decorated his bedroom walls with photos. And not of Wilhemina Norman-Néruda or Irene Adler, or some other talented beauty whose charms a man would not mind staring at, but of famous criminals.

“Mr. Mac, the most practical thing that you ever did in your life would be to shut yourself up for three months and read twelve hours a day at the annals of crime,” Sherlock Holmes tells a Scotland Yard man in The Valley of Fear. Holmes seems to be encouraging Inspector MacDonald to follow the same course that he himself has taken, and when putting those words together with the pictures upon Holmes’s bedroom walls, we suddenly see a different Holmes: not the criminal expert due to his choice of law enforcement specialty, but the expert who became that way as a fan first.

“You know, Watson, I don’t mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal,” Holmes says in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” “This is the chance of my lifetime in that direction.”

He gets very excited about playing the burglar, just as any fan does when given the chance to emulate his object of affection. And that’s not the only instance in which we find Holmes playing the make-belive criminal. Take this passage from “The Gloria Scott,” for example:

“You know my methods in such cases, Watson. I put myself in the man’s place, and, having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances.”

In his classic work of filmed Sherlockian scholarship, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Billy Wilder theorizes that Sherlock Holmes remained a bachelor because the only women he was attracted to were criminals. (Remember his words from The Sign of Four? “I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money.”) While Wilder’s theory was on the right track, it is entirely possible that it just didn’t go far enough. What if Holmes admired not just female criminals, but all criminals . . . and perhaps a little too much at that.

Nowhere does this admiration become as plain as in Sherlock Holmes’s intense fascination with Professor Moriarty, the greatest criminal Holmes ever met. Moriarty is mentioned in more of Watson’s cases than any other person who is not directly involved in those particular cases. He is lamented upon long after he is gone, and certain conflicts in Watson’s accounts of “The Final Problem” and The Valley of Fear would seem to indicate that Holmes had much more to do with Moriarty than we were originally told. But why should Watson be so shy about revealing Holmes’s complete campaign against the evil professor to the world?

Were Holmes’s fannish behaviors finally crossing the line into true fanaticism in his pursuit of Moriarty?

“My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill,” Holmes admits, and it has to make one wonder: If Moriarty’s crimes were gruesome enough to inspire horror in a normal person, just how much admiration would it take to blind one to those horrors? Too much.

And how obsessed must one be to make a master criminal actually come to your house and ask you to stop stalking him?

“You crossed my path on the fourth of January,” Professor Moriarty finally tells Holmes at 221B. “On the twenty-third you incommoded me; by the middle of February I was seriously inconvenienced by you; at the end of March I was absolutely hampered in my plans; and now, at the close of April, I find myself placed in such a position through your continual persecution that I am in positive danger of losing my liberty. The situation is becoming an impossible one.”

We Sherlockians have long thought, as Watson obviously intended, that Moriarty was referring to Holmes’s interference in his criminal activities. But what if Moriarty was simply talking about his everday life and social committments, and the fear of having to stay in his house all the time just to avoid this crazed fan?

There have perhaps been more interpretations of Holmes and Moriarty’s final confrontation at Reichenbach Falls than any other scene in the Canon. The one thing that students of Holmes have yet to take into account, however, is the actual physical evidence. We are told that Sherlock Holmes was fleeing for his life from the pursuit of the master criminal. Yet where are the guns? Where are the knives? Something has never been quite right about the business at Reichenbach, but all we have to do is look at the true physical evidence for the real situation.

No guns were at the falls. No knives or weapons of any kind. Just three things remain at the scene of the crime when Watson comes upon it at the last: Holmes’s Alpine-stock, his silver cigarette-case, and three pages torn from his notebook. The Alpine-stock was obviously acquired when Holmes and Watson got to the mountains. The cigarette-case was Holmes’s constant companion to soothe his nicotine addiction. The only thing Sherlock Holmes was really taking to his final confrontation with the man he was stalking was that little “notebook” . . . or as we would refer to it in fan terms, his autograph book.

We can’t be sure exactly what happened when Holmes approached Moriarty for his autograph. Things apparently went badly enough that the detective felt he needed to leave Watson a cover note and head for the hills. Perhaps he had heard of illustrious criminals in Mecca or Lhassa whose autographs he also wanted to get before returning to London. Whatever the result, we can be sure of the name of at least one celebrated criminal whose smiling face beamed down from Sherlock Holmes’s bedroom wall — that of Professor Moriarty.

Though given Holmes’s apparent problems with getting autographs, it probably wasn’t signed.