Essay Questions

Sherlock Holmes is noted for his brilliant deductive reasoning abilities, yet of the dozen stories which make up the Memoirs, Holmes actually solves only two using those skills. With the primary evidence being that the last story in the collection is the one in which Sherlock is killed off, deduce the reasons that may explain this seeming paradox.

The first collection of Strand Magazine stories had been published just a few months before the stories that would make up the Memoirs began appearing. With a couple of novels and a dozen stories having turned Sherlock Holmes into a national sensation by the time Silver Blaze was published, it can be assumed that Doyle was already probably growing tired of the pressure to produce that Holmes was putting on him as well as the attention he was taking away from other projects of greater person interest. He was just a dozen stories away from taking the unprecedented and unthinkable step of killing off not just a beloved literary figure but a cash cow. Doyle was now starting to view Sherlock’s adventures as a thing he wrote for money rather than for enjoyment. That his mysteries were starting to get solved less by Holmes figuring everything out for himself and more by discovering a key element which stimulated confessions by those involved could be either the result of simply growing bored with his character and not wanting to spend as much time figuring out plots which showed off Holmes being brilliant or it could be that the public clamor for more Sherlock simply meant he no longer had the time to put in the effort to make Holmes look brilliant. Either case would certainly contribute strongly to a desire to end his second collection of short stories with the elimination of a problem which seemed to be revealing a deterioration of his writing skills.

Professor Moriarty has taken on a life nearly as expansive as Sherlock’s himself in the century-plus since his first appearance in the Holmes canon—which also happens to be the one in which he is killed. Moriarty has been elevated to the supreme position of nemesis and continually pops up in new adaptations. Does this so-called “Napoleon of Crime” actually live up to his reputation in the one and only story in which he appears?

Though Holmes does refer to Moriarty with a pejorative reference to Napoleon, he is never even mentioned or alluded to until the stories written after—but sometimes set before-- “The Final Problem.” It is only in the reference that Professor Moriarty ever assumes the level of evil genius to which the comparison to Napoleon applies. In his one and only showdown with this alleged criminal mastermind, he reveals none of the qualities of the Norwood builder, Jonas Oldacre, whose truly sinister plot Holmes will later describe “as a masterpiece of villainy.” Likewise, at no point in “The Final Problem” does Holmes display the kind of rare emotional repugnance toward Moriarty that, by contrast, he so cavalierly displays toward the master blackmailer Milverton by openly admitting to Inspector Lestrade that Milverton is the sort of criminal who “to some extent, justify private revenge.” The fact is that among the criminal opponents against which Holmes squares off over his long career, the Moriarty on display in “The Final Problem” would probably not even crack the top twenty. As nemeses go, he is staggeringly unfit to take on the immortality he’s enjoyed since going over those raging falls. It seems likely, therefore, that Doyle went to such great lengths to create the illusion of Moriarty being the criminal equivalent of Holmes simply to make it easier to accept Sherlock's death. Better to die at the hands of a Napoleon of crime than a Louis XVI of crime, after all.

Although the stories featured in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes are often faulted the notable absence of Holmes’ dizzying deductive powers, the collection is also often lauded for presenting the most “human” Sherlock. How do these stories show Holmes being less like a calculating machine and more like normal human being?

Needless to say, if you want to make a character who has been criticized as less than human seem fully human, there is absolutely no better way to go about that than to real his mortality. Merely through the act of dying, this collection makes Sherlock more human than any other. More to the point, however, is “The Yellow Face” which is singularly unique in the Holmes canon in that not only does he not solve a crime through any means of investigation, but his deductions which form the basis of his suspicions are proven to be utterly wrong. Next to dying, proving that you can make mistakes is another surefire way to prove yourself human. Likewise, does the extensive set-up to “The Reigate Squire” reveal a fully flesh and blood Holmes. The trip to the country which winds up turning into that particular case is actually intended to be a much-needed period of rest for a Holmes who has been left almost physically debilitated by the exhaustive effort put into bringing down an international conspiracy of high-stakes swindlers. Thus is Holmes shown to be capable of making mistakes in logic as well as incapable of solving crimes on a whirlwind basis without becoming every bit as physically and mentally fatigued as the average person.