Death and Resurrection

The murder of a hero

By 1893 Arthur Conan Doyle had come to resent his own creation. Holmes, he felt, was eclipsing the historical novels he considered his real work, and he resolved to be rid of him. He went looking for a grand enough setting for a death and found it at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland — a sublime, terrible place, a torrent plunging into a black abyss. There he sent Holmes and Moriarty over the ledge together, locked in each other's arms, and wrote to his mother with grim satisfaction that he had killed Holmes.

It is one of the boldest things a popular author has ever done: to murder, at the height of his fame, the character the entire audience had come for.

A nation in mourning

The reaction was unlike anything in the history of serial fiction. Readers cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand in fury. Young men in the City reportedly wore black mourning bands. Doyle was deluged with letters, some of them abusive, from a public that refused to accept the death of a man who had never lived. The character had escaped the author entirely; Holmes belonged to the readers now, and they were not prepared to give him up.

This was something genuinely new. A fictional character had become a public possession with a claim on his own author — an early, vivid demonstration of the strange power a serialised figure can hold over the culture that follows him month by month.

The reluctant resurrection

Doyle held out for years, then relented — first with a novel safely set before the death, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and finally with a true resurrection in The Empty House. The explanation he devised became canon: Holmes had not died at all but faked his death, spending three years abroad — the Great Hiatus — while two of Moriarty's men who could still kill him remained at large. He returns in disguise, startles Watson into the only faint of his life, and springs a trap on the last of the organisation that same night.

The machinery of the return — the wax bust in the window, the empty house, the air-gun — is so satisfying that it retroactively justifies the whole ordeal. Death made the return possible, and the return made the death forgivable.

The pattern it set

The death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes established a template the whole culture of serial storytelling would inherit: the beloved character too valuable to stay dead, the audience whose grief becomes a commercial and creative force, the resurrection engineered after the fact. Every comic-book hero who has died and returned, every series revived by fan demand, follows a path Conan Doyle blazed unwillingly in the 1890s. The Reichenbach Falls are where a character first proved he could outlive his own author's wishes — the birthplace, you might say, of the immortal franchise.