Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.
—“221B”, Vincent Starrett.

Eighteen ninety-five is an ideal year for Vincent Starrett to end his famous sonnet with.[1] Not only does it rhyme with “survive”, but it is also the year after Sherlock Holmes’s return from the Great Hiatus, i.e. his three-year disappearance after the Manichean confrontation with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. The Apologistic, Interpretive and Sensationalist schools of Sherlockian criticism have conflicting views on what exactly took place during those three years, and their views range from trying to show that poor Watson was being lied to (for the Head “one-l Lama”[2] did not receive Europeans, nor were they in fact allowed to enter Tibet) to proving that Holmes and Moriarty were one and the same person (perhaps the most famous proponent of which viewpoint would be P. G. Wodehouse). Some modern heretics, like Charles J. Rzepka[3] of Boston University, playfully contend (with four-syllable words) that Holmes’s three-year disappearance, ostensibly caused by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s frustration with having to write the damn stories, are actually part of the hagiographic tapestry that places the world’s first consulting detective smack dab in the middle of the hermeneutics of Detective Fiction— as Christ.

They all, however, stress on the verb survive. This is 2004, and the myth of Sherlock Holmes has well survived Dr. Johnson’s hundred-year test of fame. In the past two months, I have received news of three brand new radio productions, two television serials, two movies and a video game— all featuring the greatest champion of justice to have ever come out of England. If the poet Nash were alive today, he might have pastiched Andrew Marvell and pointed out that

A hundred years have gone to praise
His wisdom, and on his sloping forehead gaze;
Two hundred will go to the phonograph
(With which he foiled Count Sylvus in The Mazarin Stone), and thirty thousand to his monographs.

The question that begs to be asked is: why is it that these stories are still so popular? Why do they still occupy the collective consciousness of a world that has long since abandoned every trapping and value of the Sherlockian universe?

A blasphemer might point out that Doyle’s plots are weak, his facts inconsistent, that ACD doesn’t play fair according to the Golden Age rules of detective fiction, and that Watson is a polygamous idiot whose first name we still don’t know for sure. However, strengthening the question does not kill the answer. It only makes it stronger.

The truth outs in our emotional engagement with the Canon (as Sherlockians call the Holmes oeuvre) as opposed to an intellectual one. One of the main reasons for the popularity of the stories in their time, it is also perhaps the most significant reason why they are among the best-loved of all human tales.

This central quality of the Sherlock Holmes stories, which also happens to be one of the rules that dictated Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own life, is justice. The Canon offers an ethos where justice, not necessarily the Law’s, or Man’s, but what we might falteringly and possibly inaccurately call divine justice, prevails. This justice, or Justice, is almost impossible to define. The OED makes more than one doughty attempt:

justice, n.

I. The quality of being just.
1. The quality of being (morally) just or righteous; the principle of just dealing; the exhibition of this quality or principle in action; just conduct; integrity, rectitude. (One of the four cardinal virtues.)

We get a little closer to the meaning with the theological definition:

2. Theol. Observance of the divine law; righteousness; the state of being righteous or ‘just before God’. Obs.

Finally, another tertiary definition rounds out our concept:

4. Exercise of authority or power in maintenance of right; vindication of right by assignment of reward or punishment; requital of desert.

Combining all four of these definitions, we might begin to grasp at the Sherlockian mythonarrative of justice. However, before we move on to the books and their upholding of this justice, we must talk a little bit about the artist.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once said[4] of his own writing that “the doll and its maker are never identical.” He was dead wrong. All his works have embodied the “steel true, blade straight”[5] code of honor that he lived by; the Canon is just the most popular example. Doyle’s ethics were almost too noble to be true. He was perhaps the last true gentleman of the grand English tradition, respecting verity, courage, and British sportsmanship. His values were such that in his mental landscape, Brigadier Gerard could conceivably stray from into enemy territory and, spurred on by his love of the chase, participate with his foes in a fox-hunt and win.[6] The British would allow Gerard to escape because that is what gentlemen did. For ACD, it would be perfectly feasible for the leonine Professor Challenger to admit publicly to his spiritual deficiencies once he had been proved wrong. Doyle’s sense of kindness allowed even a Hindu ghost to be reunited with its body’s severed limb in The Brown Hand. Even during the hardest struggles of his psychomachia, he had enough faith in divine justice that a bullying pugilist who murdered a dog is punished posthumously.[7] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a man who waited for twelve years to marry his love because he refused to divorce his sick wife.

Given this general backdrop, it is no surprise that the Sherlock Holmes stories embody such a strong sense of divine justice. Longfellow[8] would have said that when looking with Doyle’s eyes, we see better than with our own. But we also see a better world than our own—a world where divine justice exists and prevails. I will therefore, by a few signature examples, illustrate the ethereal, praeter-natural quality of justice as it should exist in the best of all possible worlds,[9] and at its best, defended by the greatest detective of all time.

To the stories, then. The eventual attainment of justice does not preclude the existence of evil. To deny that people like Charles Augustus Milverton, “the worst man in London,” live and function successfully in any society (most of them as respected politicians in today’s), would be naïve. Justice in the Sherlockian universe does not lie in God’s disallowing such characters, or characteristics, to prosper. Justice lies in a fine balance of good and evil where the Milvertonian elements of society are vanquished, thereby allowing the ineffable force of good to flourish.

We must remember, however, that the Canon is not the Faerie Queene. Doyle is not obtuse enough to have the Champion of Justice, i.e. Sherlock Holmes, directly defeat the Incarnation of Evil, i.e. Charles Augustus Milverton,[10] in one-on-one combat. Furthermore, jail and the possibility of atonement is too graceful an end for Milverton. It would not be poetically just for Holmes to turn Milverton over to the bumbling Lestrade,[11] especially with the possibility of Milverton blackmailing his way out. Doyle has an unknown woman, a “regal and stately lady” with a “noble head,” kill Milverton for revenge. It is most divinely just that Charles Augustus Milverton should be killed by one of the many he had wronged, and the apparatus of his blackmail destroyed.

But every memorable Holmes villain, and they are all memorable, has a sportsmanlike spirit.[12] Some of detective fiction’s later protagonists like Mike Hammer (to cite the genre’s favorite whipping-boy) are worse persons than Doyle’s villains. Even celebrated detectives like Philip Marlowe or Chester Himes’s Coffin Ed and Grave Digger duo play “less fair” than, for example, the Napoleon of crime— Professor Moriarty.[13] But Moriarty is not the most evil of Canonical villains.[14] Nor, in fact, is the contemptible Milverton. The vilest of all of Doyle’s criminals, and perhaps the only one without any redeemable quality whatsoever, would be Grimesby Roylott of Stoke Moran.[15]

Grimesby Roylott, the “Tiger of San Pedro”, is evil on Cenci levels. His wife dies under possibly suspicious circumstances, “in a railway accident near Crewe.” During the course of The Speckled Band, the reader finds out that he “hurled the local blacksmith over a parapet”, murders one of his step-daughters and is foiled while attempting the murder of another. He is a financial failure, a Tyrrell with a wrecked life. Weird Asiatic beasts crawl through his landscape, including a cheetah and a baboon. It is also strongly implied[16] that he rapes his daughters.[17] Nowhere else in the Canon do we encounter such a cloying atmosphere of evil, such dark undertones of the terrible whispered secrets that seep through walls in Poe, refusing to be shut out by 19^th century propriety. Roylott is Milton’s Satan, raping his daughter, and with his agent, Death, appearing as a snake.[18]

Roylott’s death, like Milverton’s, happens beyond Holmes’s control. The snake, his vehicle of greed and murder, blindly turns upon its master before Holmes can drive it off. Sherlock Holmes is not much bothered by his participation in Roylott’s death. He says at the end of the story: "I am no doubt indirectly responsible for Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s death, and I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience." I would argue, however, that it is not Holmes or even Doyle who bears the responsibility for Roylott’s death— it is Roylott himself, and God’s own divine justice, that causes the death. Would it be just for Roylott to be carted off to prison, sent to Australia or even executed? The latter, perhaps; but not nearly as fitting as the manner of his dying that we are given.

But I am dwelling on the bleakest stories in the Canon, and there is justice to be found in the “lighter” stories as well. In the first and arguably the finest of the short stories—A Scandal in Bohemia— Sherlock Holmes crosses his client, Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, and hereditary King of Bohemia. Irene Adler, she whose face launched a thousand pastiches,[19] was wronged by the King and achieves happiness and domestic bliss in the face of half of Europe’s detective forces and Victorian propriety.[20] Divine justice wins out over the era’s transient ideals.

In The Three Students, Gilchrist, son of a failed gambler, succumbs to a moment of temptation and cheats in an exam. With some of the finest deductive reasoning in the Canon, Holmes solves the mystery using only two mounds of mud and a nearly finished pencil. While the ratiocination is worthy of any Golden Age mystery, however, the story’s moral is purely about redemption and justice. Even before he is found out, Gilchrist decides not to sit for the exam. Because he is a man of conscience and not a criminal (although criminals frequently have consciences in the Canon), he preserves his honor. Holmes’s last words to him could echo the end of Paradise Lost: For once you have fallen low. Let us see, in the future, how high you can rise."

My work is complete, save for some final examples of the two extreme facets of justice. One is agape, without which[21] justice cannot exist. We find the most wonderful evidence of agape, and its manifestation in the human heart, in The Yellow Face. Grant Munro’s simple nobility should serve as a reminder not only to Sherlock Holmes,[22] but to us all, of the God’s essential goodness.

And yet, justice is not only “more happy, happy love!” The Almighty is just, but also vengeful; and retribution the sum of those qualities. The first two Holmes novels feature criminals with varying degrees of innocence. Jefferson Hope, the American in A Study in Scarlet, is portrayed as almost an avenging angel. Even though the law necessitates that he must be jailed, he answers to a higher court and dies in peace before Man’s law might interfere with divine justice. Jonathan Small, one of the Four from The Sign of the Four, is a criminal who acts horribly out of loyalty.[23] He lives to pay for his crimes, but nobody benefits from Major Sholto’s theft— the treasure sinks to the sea.

Doyle’s attitude to justice, which so overarchingly dominates the moral landscape of the Holmes Canon, can be summed up by the plot of The Resident Patient. Blessington or Sutton, the resident patient, is a bank robber and murderer who informs on his fellow gang-members to avoid the British law. However, once his old associates are released from jail, they perform a trial and hang him. A thrilling detective story no doubt, and one that could serve as a textbook for the Egyptian Police,[24] but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, speaking through the voice of the Great Detective, makes sure that the reader does not forget that justice will be served. As Sherlock Holmes says to the nameless police inspector at the end of the story:

“Wretch as he was, he was still living under the shield of British law, and I have no doubt, Inspector, that you will see that, though that shield may fail to guard, the sword of justice is still there to avenge.”