Also like Wilde, Holmes is great for snappy one-liners. I also like to think that both Poe and Wilde left their stamp on the consulting detective - even a description of Holmes’ physical characteristics could be substituted for the great dandy. I love to imagine queer men picking up the Sherlock Holmes omnibus, enjoying the lovely domesticity and great adventures of the Baker Street bachelors, homosexual subtext and all. In 1924, he wrote on the trials of Oscar Wilde: “I thought at the time, and still think, that the monstrous development which ruined him was pathological, and that a hospital rather than a police court was the place for its consideration” - not an unusual attitude for a medical professional to take. “Finally, his eyes came round to the fresh and smiling face of Billy, the young but very wise and tactful page, who had helped a little to fill up the gap of loneliness and isolation which surrounded the saturnine figure of the great detective.”ĭoyle may not have realized he was hitting all these homosexual signifiers, but he built on Poe’s foundation of the homosexual detective: an intellectual, urban aesthete, with a taste for exotic, eccentric decoration, indulging in cocaine to take the edge off and a predilection for male company, who stalks the seedy underbelly of London solving crimes.ĭoyle’s own take on homosexuality was based on a medical standpoint, not criminal. When Watson returns to 211B in The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone, he glances about the apartment. It was at length arranged that we should live together during my stay in the city.” Seeking in Paris the objects I then sought, I felt that the society of such a man would be to see a treasure beyond price and this feeling I frankly confided to him. The narrator of The Murders in the Rue Morgue meets Dupin in an “obscure library” and writes how he.“felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervour, and the vivid freshness of his imagination. We learn that “a variety of untoward events” have reduced Dupin to poverty, and he now only goes out at night. Historian Graham Robb details the encoded homosexuality of Dupin in Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century. Doyle drew inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe’s private eye, C Auguste Dupin, introduced in The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841. Sherlock Holmes, after all, is one of a long line of aesthetic, homosexual detectives. Holmes’ powers of deduction may have been inspired by real-life surgeon Dr Joseph Bell of the University of Edinburgh Infirmary, whom Doyle had once served as an outpatient clerk, but it’s not a huge leap to say Doyle borrowed Holmes’ aestheticism from Oscar Wilde.
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