Stephen Fry: Sherlock Holmes Altered the Course of My Whole Life

Stephen Fry says Sherlock Holmes cost him his school place, his freedom and ultimately gave him his career. "I can say without the slightest fear of exaggeration that Sherlock Holmes altered and determined the whole course of my life," Fry writes in a new essay on the enduring cultural grip of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective.

The mechanism, in Fry's telling, was absurdly concrete. As a schoolboy he joined the Sherlock Holmes Society of London as its youngest member to date. He persuaded his housemaster to let him travel to London to read a paper at a society meeting. His subject: the parallels between Conan Doyle's description of Professor Moriarty ("He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunk in his head") and TS Eliot's portrait of Macavity the Mystery Cat ("his eyes are sunken in. His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed").

"Any fool could see that Eliot had based his Macavity entirely on Moriarty, it was hardly news," Fry admits. "I thought I had discovered a great literary secret."

What happened after the meeting?

The event went well. The sequel did not. Fry stayed in London, sitting in cinemas from dawn till midnight. He boarded a train home three days late and found he had been officially declared missing. His parents and the police were informed; the school expelled him.

That expulsion led, in his words, to "other expulsions and disasters, which culminated in my landing in prison" — a chapter he defers to his first autobiography volume, Moab Is My Washpot, still in print. The cascade of consequences, dating to the early 1970s, eventually straightened him out. He won a place at Cambridge, met Hugh Laurie, and set off on a life of writing and performing. "None of which could have happened without that Sherlock Holmes Society evening," he writes.

His Holmes cv has since grown long. He played Mycroft, Sherlock's brother, in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson. He recorded the entire Canon for Audible (the Canon being Sherlockians' name for Conan Doyle's own 60 stories: four novels and five short-story collections — coincidentally an anagram of "Conan"). He has also written a Holmes pastiche of his own. "The closing of a very strange circle," he calls it.

Why does Holmes invite endless reinvention?

Fry situates Holmes in a lineage of revived classics — Bond, Jeeves, Poirot, Winnie-the-Pooh — but notes the practice of rewriting Holmes is nearly as old as the character. Conan Doyle, a Scottish doctor short of patients, published A Study in Scarlet in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. Within years, Fry writes, Holmes and Watson were as familiar to late Victorians "as their own friends and families".

Conan Doyle killed Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, dragging Moriarty into the cataract. The public reaction was immediate: grown men and women wept, mourners wore black armbands, and abusive letters reached the publishers, the Strand magazine and Conan Doyle himself. He first unearthed a pre-Falls story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, then revived his hero outright in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, followed by The Valley of Fear. He wrote Holmes adventures until 1927, never setting a story later than the eve of the First World War.

After Conan Doyle's death in 1930, the post-Canon caravan rumbled on. His son Adrian Conan Doyle and Golden Age writer John Dickson Carr produced The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Hollywood's Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce films began in 1939 with The Hound of the Baskervilles and soon dispatched the pair against the Nazis. The Conan Doyle Estate authorised such variations, and between 2014 and 2023 the character entered the public domain. Fry cites Jeremy Brett as most Sherlockians' favourite Holmes, himself included.

What makes Baker Street different?

The Game — the Sherlockian tradition of treating Holmes and Watson as real residents of 221B Baker Street — has no equivalent among Poirot, Father Brown or Lord Peter Wimsey, Fry notes. Letters begging Holmes for help arrived at Baker Street from Japan and South America; some correspondents petitioned Buckingham Palace and Downing Street for a knighthood.

His explanation is twofold. First, Holmes is "one of the most fully realised and enduring fictional characters ever created", anchored in a vivid, tangible world of test tubes, violin case and fog at the window. Second, need: the newly vast, bewildering Big City of the late 19th century demanded a mind that could feel "every node and every twitch on the filament".

Fry extends the lineage to Superman and Batman — "He was surely the first caped crusader, for all that his cape was constructed of good tweed" — while lamenting the shift from Holmes's earned, self-trained powers to unearned magical ones. He finds the Sherlockian method alive in Columbo, Monk and Ludwig, and in forensics itself: Holmes's cigar ash and magnifying glass prefigure mitochondrial DNA and the scanning electron microscope. Scotland Yard's criminal database, the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, carries the initials HOLMES. The world of Holmes, Fry concludes, remains "a work in progress" — endlessly modernisable, always itself.