How Mark Twain Saved Sherlock Holmes

 

In 1902, as far as the world knew, Sherlock Holmes was canonically dead. He had been since 1893’s “The Final Problem” in which he tumbled to his apparent death down the precipices of  Reichenbach Falls taking his nemesis Professor Moriarty down with him. After nearly a decade of trying (in vain) to pacify enraged fans, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought the sleuth back in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901, arguably the tour de force of the Holmes canon. But there was a catch. Baskervilles was set around 1889, “The Final Problem” was set in 1891. This was Doyle’s compromise. Give his readers more of their beloved detective without officially committing to resurrect the character.

It was not until September of 1903 that Doyle revived Sherlock Holmes for good in the short story "The Adventure of the Empty House", set in 1894, three years after his apparent death. It was explained in this short work that Holmes faked his death in “The Final Problem” to lure out the rest of Moriarty’s gang (this was not Doyle’s plan, “The Final Problem" was written with the permanent death of the detective in mind). And so, the Holmes stories continued for over two more decades.

But here is a literary mystery. The year before Doyle revived Sherlock, Mark Twain wrote a short story featuring Doyle’s creation set in 1900 titled “A Double Barrelled Detective Story.” Twain knew of the character’s death, for, in his travel memoir Following the Equator (published in 1897) he referred to the character as “the late Sherlock Holmes”.

“A Double Barrelled Detective Story” was published before the world knew that Holmes’s death would be retconned by Doyle but, the interesting point, is that the story is indeed set after Dr. Watson would later be revealed to have discovered (in 1894) that Holmes had, in fact, survived the fall. In other short, Sherlock Holmes was discovered alive by Dr. Watson in universe in 1894. “A Double Barrelled Detective Story” is set in 1900 which makes sense in the cannon chronology but for the fact that the reading world (and perhaps Doyle himself) still had no idea that the character would be brought back.

So what happened? In-universe the answer is simple. Sherlock Holmes was, as readers would know a year later, alive and well in 1900 when Twain’s story was set and took his deductive skills to the American West. But how Mark Twain knew he would be is up for speculation.

The most likely conclusion is evident in Twain’s story itself.

In “A Double Barrelled Detective Story” Twain half-jokingly (it is a spoof after all) mentions the character’s multiple false deaths. One of them, his death at Reichenbach Falls, would later be revealed to certainly be so, but Twain’s correct guess that it was a false death may have been a misinterpretation of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Ultimately, it seems to have been a simple error. Twain mistook Baskervilles as the official resurrection of Sherlock Holmes. To be fair it was an easy error to make as the novel is vague about the precise year, determined only be inferences within the text. Doubtless, though, Twain must have found the characters inexplicable revival puzzling and even jarring.

Perhaps, however, it was “A Double Barrelled Detective Story” that ultimately convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to bring back his iconic creation for good. Indeed, few motivations are more compelling for an author than, rescuing their work from the claws of parody.