Nothing Is ‘Normal’ About Irene Adler
Everyone knows she’s Sherlock Holmes’ girlfriend. Or is she?
For what may be obvious reasons, I recently read every story in the original Sherlock Holmes canon — all four novels and 56 short stories.
(This is not bragging. 56 is not that many. Harlan Ellison, one of my favourite writers, is said to have written over 1 000 short stories in his lifetime. You’re welcome to try and verify that claim, but you’ll probably get distracted by the “Controversies and disputes” section of his Wikipedia page.)
The Holmes stories were written before we as a culture fell from god’s grace and invented sequel hooks. As a result, I was struck by the fact that some of the canon’s most famous characters appear quite suddenly and don’t stick around for very long.
An example: if you asked the average person to name three Sherlock Holmes characters, they’d probably say “Holmes, Watson, and Moriarty.” But Professor Moriarty only factors into two stories, and personally appears in just one: ‘The Final Problem,’ in which he pops up out of nowhere to kill Holmes. The second story, The Valley of Fear, takes place before ‘The Final Problem’ but was published 21 years later, establishing Moriarty as a recurring threat well after the fact.
