“An anomaly which often struck me in the character of
my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was
the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a
certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits
one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not
that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The
rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural
Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical
man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars
in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his
unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of
his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have
always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air
pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair
with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the
opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that
neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.”—Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), “The Musgrave Ritual,” in
The Memoirs
of Sherlock Holmes (1894)
(The actor in the image accompanying this post is
Basil Rathbone, who set the template for subsequent cinematic depictions of
Sherlock Holmes.)
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