For a character as ingrained in popular consciousness as Sherlock Holmes it's difficult to get death to stick. Batman, for example, was recently killed by Neil Gaiman, who was necessarily thrilled and honored to take part, but that death merely translated into Batman being sent back in time, setting up a story arc of him fighting his way back to the future and creating a league of crime-fighting sociopaths across the globe. Sensical? Clearly not, but like all good heroes, death rolls off like water off a duck's back. Arthur Conan Doyle despaired of ever truly ridding himself of Sherlock, and having once failed to make Reichenbach Falls as deadly as he intended, he couldn't bring himself to inflict mortality upon the character again. By the time of Doyle's death Sherlock still lived, retired and keeping bees in the south of England.
Sherlock marched beyond him, becoming bigger and stranger and brighter, rendered in new stories in silver, pastiche, fan fiction, shot into the future cel by cel, parodied, and shredded to bits, only to be reconstructed painstakingly by fans and actors, an object far beyond the few lines that describe the character's personality and build. It's an easy task, in a way, to flesh out Sherlock's character because there is so little there: a mind without a heart, a Babbage engine endlessly cranking away at problems, a machine who only showed a sort of animal lust when hunting for clues, only to stand up straight after discovering his object and speak with perfect composure, bloodless face, and abstract look. Jeremy Brett, the paradigmatic Sherlock of his era (80's and 90's, compared to Basil Rathbone in the 40's), became obsessed with creating an inner life for Sherlock so that he would have any hope of portraying him. He catalogued every line of every story that seemed to point to something in the character, manners of eating and dressing, like Sherlock himself would hunt for clues enough to recreate the conditions of a crime. These efforts feed the ever-present spirit of Sherlock Holmes, keeping it tethered to the English-speaking collective consciousness.
Michael Chabon, American Literary Fan-Boy (Geek, Amateur) Extrordinaire, tackled the decidedly thorny notion of the demise of Sherlock Holmes, in a novella titled The Final Solution. By the time I read it I had already entered into a very strange Sherlock Holmes jag, one strong enough to distract me from the anxieties of my work, yet unlike other jags (mostly televisual), it had a peculiar emotional element. ("jag" for the uninitiated is a term coined by my inestimable Uncle Garvin for a temporary but all-consuming occupation with a particular subject. Garvin on one of his jags subjected me, his captive audience, to his notions about a set of conspiracy theory videos he had spent all night watching. So I subject you to my ramblings). My interest in Sherlock Holmes burgeoned after seeing the 2010 BBC series starring a cold-eyed Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and comfortable everyman Martin Freeman as Watson. Sherlock Holmes stories are slight, amusing in their own way, about as compelling on average as a marathon of CSI on a Tuesday night, but I set upon reading them, about one every day. As enjoyable as they are on the surface, I had somehow created an air of tradgey around Sherlock. This melancholy originated with (or was perhaps brought out by) Jeremy Brett. The first time I saw any part of the '84-'94 series was when Brett's Holmes supposedly perished at the base of Reichenbach Falls, tangled in the arms of his arch enemy. My unle Ethan voiced his appreciation of Brett's Holmes, saying that his sickness near the end of his run gave some verite to the series, as if Holmes were wasting away from his addictions rather than a failing heart.
Youtube carries a small collection of Brett's Holmes episodes, which are spread fairly evenly over his decade long run. Here you see Brett in the first episode, as Holmes pursuing Irene Adler, curt, upright, and sharp eyed, a middle-aged rough face which is unthinkable in television today, sharp and appropriately aquiline, striking but not handsome, quick but not graceful. Later you see that the flesh around his sharp features has softened and deepened, his Holmes more manic, oscillating between violent laughter and glacial silence. Still later he disappears for entire episodes, saying that he'll be watching the procedings with his third eye. Finally he stands statuesque, wind whipping the trees outside, blue smoke curling endlessly around his yellowed features, again sunken to near their original gauntness, eyes caught by rainbows cast by a prism somewhere, granting little speech that is neither a shout nor a whisper. Finally, not a year later, gone.
Chabon's Sherlock is 94 years old. He's outlived his only friend and become an incorrigible hermit, tucked away in a cottage surrounded by fields of heather, a railroad, and a set of hives. He ignores the knocking at his door-- the only person who would ever be aware of his death is a housemaid who brings food and presumably keeps the cottage from becoming unsellably poisonous. Kept from a noble death at the Falls by a public that insisted upon more Holmes stories, Chabon's Sherlock sinks into a terrifying decrepitude, one which makes a potentially fatal obstacle course of his parlor, and which most strikingly wipes his field of vision of all meaning. We watch through his eyes as the intricate architecture of his mind is swept by a raging fire, leaving nothing but unrecognizable shapes, the look on his face becoming truly abstract, unfocused, and blank. Yet even beyond this the world makes less and less sense to Sherlock. He returns to London to see that, beyond his expectations, the City had survived the Nazi air raids, yet at the same time it is unrecognizable to him. He sees the mute Jewish boy and his parrot who repeats endless sets of numbers and cannot fathom the trauma behind it. He knows he is missing something but everything disintegrates around him, and he can only grasp feebly at it as it slips away forever. He sees a world that will march on without him, that can survive without his reasoning or intellect, that long ago decided that his service was not necessary. I fell into a sort of fog at that point, haunted by those dead and dying Sherlocks, unable to extricate the character or turn my thoughts from this morbid morass.
Yet eventually a vital Bohemian drug-using gentleman detective came striding through the dark forest I had ensnared myself in and led me out, unwittingly, as he followed some other trail, an indomitable, eager look upon his face, looking as always for his next clue.
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