‘Sherlock Holmes and Dr Nikola: Too much at home in the underworld’ (original) (raw)

2013, Sherlock Holmes: The Man and His Worlds, Sally Sugarman (ed.) (Shaftsbury, VT: Mountainside Press, 2013)

It is a commonplace to acknowledge that the world Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduring creation, Sherlock Holmes, inhabited most comfortably was the seamy underworld of fin-de-siècle London. It is less orthodox, perhaps, to suggest that his role in it was closer to that of the criminal than the agent of the law than is generally thought. That, however, is what this paper will seek to argue in tracing a link between the delineation of the Holmes character and his lesser-known, contemporary, fin-de-siècle criminal alter ego, Dr Nikola. The gaping chasm left in the literary marketplace by Holmes’s untimely demise inspired many attempts to fill it. One of the less typical of these was by the relatively unknown Anglo-Australian author Guy Boothby, whose prototypical international master-criminal character, Dr Nikola, took the world of fiction by storm in the aftermath. In mid-1894, just months after ‘The Final Problem’ ran in December 1893, Boothby was commissioned to write a serial for a new middlebrow periodical, The Windsor Magazine. In this paper, I shall argue that he sought to cash in on the valuable opportunity arising from Holmes’s absence by reworking key Holmesian characteristics, such as impassivity and meticulousness, to define a flagship super-villain character for the Windsor. Though Nikola did not achieve Holmes’s enduring iconic status, he gained equal popularity in his own time and many contemporary reviewers linked the two characters, as the quote above indicates. Nikola’s lasting legacy, however, is his influence on the international master-criminal trope, which has survived most notably in the villains of Ian Fleming’s still hugely popular Bond offering. Hence through Nikola, Holmes himself, in addition to his renowned nemesis Moriarty, has had a direct and powerful influence on the creation of an oppositional trope that continues to be a staple of popular culture. In elaborating this unlikely link, I shall also explore the notion that given the ambivalence of Holmes’s own personality, and the curiously unresolved endings of many pre-hiatus Holmes stories, this master detective was ripe for transformation into a master-criminal.