Literary Works That Shape Our World: A Critical Analysis - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Analysis of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” by Arthur Conan Doyle

“The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” Is a Crime Scene and We’re All Accomplices

Look, you don’t read Sherlock Holmes so much as you fall into him. Into them, really—the sleight-of-hand mysteries, the foggy London alleyways, the dense air of pipe smoke and precision. You open one story, thinking maybe you’ll kill time, and you end up three stories deep, muttering about tobacco ash and muddy footprints like you've joined some Victorian occult. This is what Arthur Conan Doyle does: he cons you. With style. With logic. With the illusion of control.

And yes—illusion is the word, because what Holmes offers isn’t truth. It’s tidiness. And tidiness, especially in the late 19th century when everything is messy and colonial and industrial and politically incoherent, is a form of violence. Clean lines. Clear motives. Wrapped-up endings. Very male. Very British. Very Empire. But let’s hold that thread for a second.

The Genius Myth and the Glamour of Disconnection

Sherlock Holmes is a genius. We get it. He’s also a jerk. We get that, too. And yet there’s something grotesquely seductive about his detachment—like watching someone solve a brutal crime while barely remembering to eat. He’s the original emotionally unavailable boyfriend, and Watson is the exhausted roommate always cleaning up his experiments and making sure he doesn’t starve.

But what Holmes is really doing—beneath the violin and the sulks and the cocaine—is indulging in the most dangerous fantasy of all: the fantasy that intelligence can be apolitical. That pure reason exists. That morality can be solved like a riddle. (Spoiler: it can’t.)

He’s the kind of man who’d mansplain your trauma back to you as if it were a crossword clue. And we—faithful readers, fanfic writers, BBC binge-watchers—love him for it. Why? Because he lets us believe the world can be understood if we just look hard enough.

Victorian London: The Original True Crime Podcast

Before there were podcasts with moody theme music and 10-part murder deep-dives, there was Holmes, peering at footprints in the garden and deducing your entire childhood. Conan Doyle gives us London as a living corpse—choked with smog, crackling with telegraph wires, pulsing with inequality so intense it barely registers as abnormal. This is a city where someone can disappear without consequence. Where women scream into pillows and no one hears.

Every story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is basically a crime procedural wrapped around a moral panic. And Doyle isn’t exactly subtle: there are disguises, late-night chases, foreign villains with thick accents and shady motives. It’s all delicious and deeply suspect. The violence is always neat. Surgically placed. Conveniently solved.

Except when it isn’t. Except when it bleeds through the page—like in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” where the entire story feels like a nightmare scrawled in Gothic ink, and the evil is not just a person but a whole rotted social system. Colonialism, patriarchy, incest-adjacent manipulation. You name it.

Women, If They Exist at All

Let’s talk about women. Or the lack of them. Or their haunting, overdetermined presence. Irene Adler is the obvious name, the supposed “woman who beat Holmes.” Which sounds great until you realize she’s really just a vehicle for Holmes to not fall in love. She’s not a woman; she’s a metaphor. A plot twist in a dress.

Most of the women in these stories are paper-thin and panic-stricken, which makes sense—Doyle’s world isn’t really built for them. They’re wives, victims, bait. Occasionally, they’re clever, but always in a way that makes Holmes look smarter by comparison. The emotional labor of the stories falls on Watson (bless him), who feels things for Holmes, for the victims, for the reader. Meanwhile, Holmes just coldly calculates, then disappears into the fog like a toxic Tinder match.

And yet, it’s the women—ghostly, underwritten—that often drive the stakes. They’re the ones being silenced, locked up, lied to. They’re the ones with everything to lose. You could rewrite these stories from the women’s point of view and end up with a Victorian Handmaid’s Tale.

Science, Sleight-of-Hand, and the Worship of Clarity

Sherlock Holmes doesn’t believe in magic, which is hilarious, because he basically is magic. What he does—deduction, observation, rational inquiry—is presented like science. But really it’s stagecraft. It’s performative empiricism. Like a TED Talk wrapped in fog.

In Doyle’s hands, science becomes sacred. Telegraphs, telegrams, the railway timetables—all this infrastructure is more than setting. It’s proof that the world can be charted, mapped, solved. But here’s the trick: most of Holmes’s deductions would fall apart under peer review. His “proof” is often intuition, dressed up in logic’s clothing.

Still, it’s intoxicating. In a world reeling from industrialization, where God is dying and the state is failing, Holmes is an atheist priest. He offers clarity. It’s fake—but it feels real. And in literature, feeling real is sometimes more dangerous than truth.

Blood on the Cravat: Violence with Manners

We need to talk about violence. Not just the acts—the murders, the mutilations, the threatening letters—but the tone of violence in these stories. It’s incredibly polite. Almost erotic in its restraint. A man is crushed by a giant boulder, and we barely flinch. A woman is locked in a room and emotionally terrorized, and the prose glides past it like it’s tea being served late.

This isn't gore. It’s worse. It’s curated violence. Framed. Distant. You’re allowed to feel shocked, but only for a moment. And Holmes never takes it personally. That's part of the fantasy. Violence is something to be solved, not stopped. It’s an intellectual obstacle. Not a human one.

Which says something very bleak about the culture it came from. Or—worse—ours.

Why We’re Still Obsessed (And Should Probably Examine That)

People still devour Sherlock Holmes like he's the original content drop. And maybe he is. He’s got a brand. An aesthetic. A method. There’s something beautifully algorithmic about the way the stories unfold: you always know the vibe, even if the plot twists.

But the real reason we keep coming back is because the stories give us permission to believe that every problem has a solution. That injustice, once seen clearly enough, will collapse under the weight of its own contradiction. That the right man, with the right knowledge, can fix anything.

And we know that’s a lie. But we want it anyway. We crave control dressed up as chaos. We crave Holmes.

The Character of Sherlock Holmes: A Man Who Doesn’t Blink

Sherlock Holmes is one of those literary figures who feels less like a character and more like a concept. Like gravity. Or caffeine addiction. He's so canonical that it’s hard to imagine he was invented at all. More like he walked fully formed out of the smog, muttered something about footprints in the garden, and started charging clients.

And yet, under the famous deerstalker (which, side note, wasn’t even in the books—thanks, illustrators), Holmes is weird. Not quirky-weird. Broken-weird. He’s obsessive, condescending, emotionally calcified. A brain in a trench coat. You get the feeling that if he lived today, he’d ghost you after five long texts, then solve your murder six months later out of guilt.

He hates boredom more than evil. That’s the core of it. He doesn’t solve crimes because he cares about justice. He solves them because they interest him. Which is not exactly noble. It’s kind of sociopathic. Holmes doesn’t believe in good or evil—he believes in patterns. Data. Clues. And he filters the entire world through that lens, which makes him simultaneously brilliant and dangerous.

What makes him fascinating—still, infuriatingly, fascinating—is that he’s not interested in being liked. You never get the sense that he wants to be understood. He’s fine with being alone, misunderstood, even hated—so long as he’s right. It’s a kind of armor. It’s also a warning.

Watson, bless his mustachioed soul, tries to round Holmes out. He gives us warmth. Empathy. Exposition. But Holmes? Holmes remains this cold, whirring machine. The stories flirt with giving him a heart (Irene Adler, remember?), but then the door slams shut. Feelings are inefficient. Affection is noise.

He chooses to be unknowable—and we choose to obsess over him for that very reason.

The Enduring Appeal of Sherlock Holmes: Why We’re Still Fixated

So. Why do we keep resurrecting him? Why are there podcasts, TikToks, BBC episodes, Robert Downey Jr. movies, plush dolls, themed escape rooms? What exactly is the grip?

It’s not nostalgia. That’s the lazy answer. Most people haven’t read the original stories, and if they did, they'd be mildly shocked by the casual imperialism and weird dental metaphors. And it's not just the mysteries, either. Let’s be honest: half the time the solution is so convoluted it barely matters. (“Ah yes, the snake was trained to slither down the bell rope on command—obviously.”)

No. The real appeal is Holmes himself. Or more specifically, what Holmes represents: absolute certainty in an uncertain world.

We live in chaos. Always have. But especially now—when the news cycles outpace logic, when facts are fungible, when institutions keep collapsing into scandals and nonsense. Sherlock Holmes doesn’t just offer answers. He offers the fantasy that the world makes sense. That behind every mystery is a pattern, a logic, a cause. That if you're smart enough, observant enough, detached enough, you can fix it.

Holmes is both the original hacker and the ultimate content creator. He disrupts the system, rewrites the code, drops conclusions with a smug mic drop, and vanishes into the night. He’s Batman without the trauma, House MD without the malpractice lawsuits, every Reddit sleuth with better hygiene and actual success rates.

And yet—there’s something darker under the fandom. A kind of yearning. We don’t just admire Holmes. We want him to save us. Solve us. Look at our messy lives, our split identities, our trauma archives, and explain it back to us. We want to believe there’s an answer to the chaos. Holmes is that belief system.

Which means the stories aren’t just entertainment. They’re coping mechanisms.

That’s why Holmes lasts. Not because he’s likable. Not because the plots are airtight. But because he gives form to our need for clarity. He’s the fantasy of control in a universe that never gives us any.

And sure, he’d probably hate all this psychoanalysis. But you know what? He’d understand it.