The Mary Russell Companion (6 page)

Characters known to Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes
is known first and foremost through the sixty stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was either A) the author of the 56 fictional short stories and four novels concerning Holmes, Watson, Mycroft, etc, or B) the literary agent of Dr Watson, the means by which Holmes and Watson became known to the reading public.  The Russell Memoirs are firmly based upon the latter assumption: that the Conan Doyle stories are true accounts of an extraordinary man.  And just as clearly, that the man had a life long after Conan Doyle’s stories left him at the dawn of the Great War, in August 1914 (
His Last Bow
).

Unlike the main subject of his tales, Watson (or perhaps Conan Doyle) is not terribly interested in complete detail or strict accuracy.  Holmes’ precise age, birthplace, or family history are never given, although the Memoirs say that he is 54 when he and Russell meet in 1915.  Both accounts agree in Holmes’ fascination with beekeeping, although Conan Doyle has the detective retired to the Sussex Downs, apart from the German spy case of 1912-1914, while the Memoirs make it clear that the retirement is more apparent than actual.  Certainly, he has maintained his contacts with the London underworld, and the bolt-holes he established in the great city appear to be kept well stocked. 

It is not necessary here to describe the detective, his personality, or his techniques, since (as his brother Mycroft says) “I hear of Sherlock everywhere.”  However, it should be noted that Mary Russell finds the widespread belief that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character very troubling, giving her the occasional sensation of being somewhat fictional herself.

(Holmes’ age and more are addressed in the essay collection
Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes
, available as an ebook.)

Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes at breakfast

Dr Watson
is the narrator of most of the Conan Doyle Holmes accounts.  He and Holmes meet in 1881 (
A Study in Scarlet
) when Watson comes back wounded after serving as a medic with the British Army in Afghanistan, desperate for cheap housing.  A mutual acquaintance brings the two men together, and the world is changed.

A large part of the success of the Conan Doyle tales is due to Watson’s Everyman character, providing access to the at times incomprehensible workings of Holmes’ mind—and even more so his heart.  Later film versions of Dr Watson chose to depict the Afghan Army veteran as a bumbling ignoramus, but in the originals, Watson is Holmes’ right-hand man, essential for his medical knowledge, his unflagging courage, and his loaded revolver.

The Russell memoirs do not see a lot of Dr Watson, although Russell is clearly fond of him.  He does have occasional appearances, but the mentions of him are more of his absence, and when he is called upon, it is as a kind of distant Irregular.  The good Doctor seems to travel a great deal in his older age, spending considerable time in German spas.

Mrs Beeton’s Labour-Saving Apparatus (1923)

Mrs. Hudson
is the landlady of 221 Baker Street, renting the two men a suite of rooms in central London (a sub-let that gives the “B” to the famous address).  Sherlockians argue over whether or not she has some connection with the villainous Hudson of “The Gloria Scott”, and if she is the “Martha” who appears in “His Last Bow”. In the Russell Memoirs, her name is given as Clara (
Locked Rooms
) and the husband’s criminality is what has brought her to Holmes’ attention in the first place.  All would agree, however, that Mrs. Hudson is the most patient landlady in all of London, fond of her tenant despite his endless demands and bohemian existence:

Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering woman. Not only was her first-floor flat invaded at all hours by throngs of singular and often undesirable characters but her remarkable lodger showed an eccentricity and irregularity in his life which must have sorely tried her patience. His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London. On the other hand, his payments were princely. I have no doubt that the house might have been purchased at the price which Holmes paid for his rooms during the years that I was with him. (
The Dying Detective
)

In the Memoirs, Mrs Hudson takes young Russell under her wing, tutoring her in the womanly arts and providing an affectionate warmth at the center of the cerebral Holmes household.  In Sussex as in Baker Street, Mrs Hudson is no mere housekeeper: in “
Mrs Hudson’s Case
”, after Holmes flatly refuses to believe her suspicions, the doughty lady takes matters into her own hands and solves the case on her own, thank you very much.

Interestingly enough, Mrs Hudson’s image does not appear in the early illustrations for the
Strand
.

Mycroft

Mycroft Holmes
is Sherlock Holmes’ brother, seven years the elder.  Fat where Sherlock is thin, slow where the younger is nervous and quick, he is even more misanthropic and possibly more brilliant (both brothers would agree).  Mycroft  appears in just four of the Conan Doyle stories, first of all in
The Greek Interpreter,
where Holmes surprises Watson with the revelation of this hitherto unsuspected sibling, describing him as having:

...no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the correct one. And yet he was absolutely incapable of working out the practical points...

Mycroft spends his days in his Whitehall office, and his evenings in the Diogenes Club (where silence is enforced) across from his rooms on Pall Mall.  Sherlock is coy about his brother’s precise job, saying at first that Mycroft “audits the books in some of the government departments”, although later (
The
Bruce-Partington Plans
) he admits that it goes far beyond that:

Occasionally he
is
the British government….the most indispensable man in the country.

The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearinghouse, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience….Again and again his word has decided the national policy.

The Mycroft of the Russell memoirs is drawn in considerably greater detail regarding his home, his housekeeper, his assistant, and his long-time relationship with a woman who appears in that early Conan Doyle story.  He suffers a heart attack at the end of 1923, after which he undertakes a regime of exercise and diet.  Russell has been fond of her brother-in-law, but events during the autumn of 1924 bring to her attention the darker side of his Intelligence activities, and the dire consequences of putting great power in one man’s hands.

Characters first seen in the Russell Memoirs

Inspector John Lestrade
is the son of G. Lestrade, the Scotland Yard inspector of the Conan Doyle stories—a policeman described as “a little sallow rat-faced, dark-eyed fellow” whose talents prove almost as unprepossessing as his appearance.  Holmes describes the elder Lestrade as “the best of a bad lot” although shockingly conventional in his approach to solving crimes.  Not, however, conventional enough to spurn the assistance of the world’s only consulting detective, one Sherlock Holmes. 

The son, John, has clearly learned from his father, and for the most part is willing to align himself with that most unconventional of detectives.  Still, there are times when he is forced to put his foot down—but only rarely is he driven to issue actual warrants for the arrest of Holmes and Russell.

Ali & Mahmoud Hazr

Mahmoud and Ali Hazr
are Bedouin brothers who wander the Palestine countryside as public scribes; at the same time, they are employed by Mycroft Holmes as spies for the Crown, reporting to London the information they pick up and the rumors they hear in the desert places.  When Russell and Holmes arrive by night, the brothers are given the responsibility of watching over them—a task they greet with scorn until Russell wins their affection by nearly murdering Ali.  However, the Hazr “brothers” are also cousins Maurice (Marsh) Hughenfort, the Duke of Beauville, and his cousin Alistair, who have another, very different life in England.

Damian Adler
is the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler.  Irene Adler appears in the Conan Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia”, an operatic contralto and “well-known adventuress” who so soundly defeats Holmes that ever after, he admiringly refers to her as “The Woman”.  According to the Memoirs (as in the W. S. Baring-Gould biography,
Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street—
although Baring-Gould goes on to posit that their son was Nero Wolfe!) the detective and the singer have a liaison during Holmes’ “great hiatus”, the years he spends outside of England following his apparent death in the Reichenbach Falls incident of 1891.  (Details of the death are in “The Final Problem”, and of the hiatus in “The Empty House”.)  Father and son first meet in 1919, when young Captain Adler is charged with murder in France.  When the charges are dropped, Adler leaves Europe for Shanghai, where his artistic impulse flowers, compelled by the Holmes family’s “art in the blood” (In “The Greek Interpreter”, Holmes says that his grandmother was the sister of “the artist Vernet”, although which such Vernet is not specified).

By the time Adler comes to England in the Twenties with his Chinese wife, Yolanda, and “preternaturally clever” young daughter, Estelle, he is a successful Surrealist painter. The Adlers appear in two of the Memoirs.