Arthur Conan Doyle was studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and during his spare hours – which were few – he wrote short stories, composing snippets here and there whenever he could, and collecting them in notebooks that piled up alongside his anatomical engravings and medical textbooks. Once his studies were completed, he decided to partner with one of his friends to open a surgery in Portsmouth, on the southern coast of England. Time passed, but patients were few and far between. In an effort to stave off boredom, Arthur Conan Doyle began writing again, and soon the pen came to occupy him more than the stethoscope. When, on occasion, a patient did knock on their door and Arthur Conan Doyle was obliged to attend to their needs, the interruption forced him to abandon the plotlines and characters that occupied him for most of the long day. Still, such interruptions were infrequent, and Arthur Conan Doyle had plenty of time to develop and perfect the stories he had begun writing at university. One man had inspired him during his studies, a man of rare intelligence and atypical obsessions, yet elegant in appearance. This man had been his professor, and was named Joseph Bell. Bell was exceedingly tall, and always came to the lecture hall wearing a hat and an old-fashioned black trench coat, smoking a pipe. His posture, his gesticulations, his eloquence and his impressions would inspire Arthur Conan Doyle. Joseph Bell had a unique talent for cutting to the quick, illuminating the most opaque of concepts and unravelling the most complex hypotheses. His was the approach of a detective, of a painstaking researcher, with the keenest of eyes for every clue, drawing connections, both instinctive and inspired, between nebulous strands of cause and effect.
In 1880, the city of London teemed with life, and was the global centre of the Industrial Revolution. The rich kept company with the destitute, working men rubbed shoulders with the bourgeoisie, and brigands and prostitutes mingled in the lowest depths of the capital of Victorian England. In this simmering broth of existence, one man committed a series of crimes that would earn him the name Jack the Ripper. They caused a sensation in the press, and the police drew upon their every resource in their attempts to solve the riddles and catch the criminal. London was abuzz with the rise in crime, and networks of informants quickly formed. Arthur Conan Doyle created a character of this age; a character capable of bringing the most evasive of criminals to justice. Sherlock Holmes was tall, and so lean that he seemed even taller. His beak-like nose and black hair gave him a singular appearance. His tweed suit and hat had the elegance of a dandy. To solve his cases, Sherlock Holmes relied up the networks of informants that had sprung up all around London. He had no compunction about calling upon the most crooked of men, and dealing with persons of every social sphere, clashing with even the most powerful. Sherlock Holmes was also a drug addict and an insomniac, a man of razor-sharp intelligence and eccentricity. He was pedantic, haughty and unpleasant. And yet Doctor Watson held him as a dear friend; a friend whom he admired. He took part in the detective’s games and his life became a grand adventure. The sworn enemy of Sherlock Holmes was Moriarty, a criminal mastermind with ambitions far surpassing Jack the Ripper. He was the first evil genius to appear in literature, a compelling enemy forcing Sherlock Holmes’ admiration. An enemy who could compete with Holmes. Moriarty came from a good family, had received a first-rate education and was prodigiously gifted at mathematics. He was even a professor of mathematics at a university. He might have had a brilliant career, but his criminal instinct had propelled him toward evil. Sherlock Holmes took pleasure in untangling the webs so carefully spun by his enemy, the evil whose genius would forever haunt him.
“It is to you, no doubt, that I owe Sherlock Holmes,” wrote Arthur Conan Doyle to his anatomy professor, Joseph Bell, a few years later.
Alan Alfredo Geday
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