Happy 177th Birthday Sherlock Holmes!

Today, January 6th, 2024, is Sherlock Holmes’s birthday!

Well, not really.

Sixty-something years ago, William Baring-Gould wrote a supposed biography of the fictional detective which pronounced January 6th to be his birth date, and Sherlockians everywhere—judging by the “Happy 171st Birthday Sherlock Holmes!” Facebook posts I’m seeing—continue to celebrate it.

I don’t.

It’s not because I have a better idea of what day Sherlock Holmes was born, it’s just that we really don’t know, so why make it up?

Baring-Gould—not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—picked January 6th because it marked the Feast of the Epiphany, and Holmes was a guy who came up with a lot of sleuthing epiphanies over the many Conan Doyle stories (60, including four novels) that make up “the Canon.”

“The Canon,” by the way, is what Sherlockians call those 60 original stories—that’s how seriously they take their Holmes.

They sanctify his stories as if they were a biblical canon.

And woe be it for an author to vary from “the Canon”!

I learned this the hard way, when I offered an advance reading copy of my first novel, One Must Tell the Bees, to a Sherlock Holmes society.

One Must Tell the Bees was the first book ever to bring Sherlock Holmes together with Abraham Lincoln, and I thought Sherlockians would be excited.

Nobody had ever done it before—bring the most famous fictional detective in the world together with the most popular and consequential American President—unless maybe there’s a Sherlock Holmes & Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunters somewhere on the Internet, which really wouldn’t count, not being faithful to “the Canon.”

One Must Tell the Bees is entirely faithful to “the Canon,” as I see it, as well as to the history of the Civil War, but the Sherlock Holmes society, which is based in the U.K., where Holmes originated, wasn’t buying it.

Their response to my offer of an advance reading copy was brief and un-British-like:

Alarm bells are ringing here. It is generally believed Sherlock Holmes was born in 1854. Abraham Lincoln died in 1865. Do the math.

That was it.

“Do the math.”

I was offended, of course, but my wife thought it was hysterical. I had shattered the stereotypes of the polite Brit and the rude American, she said. “Think about it. You managed to get a Brit to be rude to an American. And that takes some doing.”

But I was still offended.

I’d put a lot of work into that book—12 years’ worth—and although I did expect historians and students of Lincoln might be leery of a novelist bringing a fictional British detective to America during one of the most crucial periods of our history, as if Abraham Lincoln needed a Brit’s help to accomplish what he accomplished, I thought Sherlockians would be intrigued, if not excited.

But it turned out the reaction was the other way around.

History-minded readers got it right away.

Sherlockians, on the other hand—as the “alarm bells are ringing” email anticipated—proved a harder sell.

Even grown men with grandfatherly photos on their Facebook profiles reacted in most un-grandfatherly ways, with comments ranging from “I don’t think so,” to “Utter Shite.”

One hard-liner even dismissed a “Holmes for the Holidays” ad with the comment, “Arthur Conan Doyle would never have used that word!” (he meant ‘holiday’) and closed out his post with, “Sloppy.”

I pointed out that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would never have advertised on Facebook, either, but that did not mollify him.

Now, I must admit that my interpretation of “the Canon” is a bit different than most Sherlockians.

Radically different, as it turns out.

Holmes’s birth year—as the snarky Brit email indicated—is almost universally pegged as 1854, thanks to one story: His Last Bow. In that story, the narrator describes Holmes as “a tall, gaunt man of 60.” And the story is set in 1914.

Subtracting 60 from 1914, Sherlockians derive a birth year for Sherlock Holmes of 1854.

But the narrator in His Last Bow is not Dr. Watson. It’s a third-person narrator, and by no means a “third-person omniscient” narrator, as we say.

In fact, this guy knows nothing about the man he’s describing. Doesn’t even realize he’s Sherlock Holmes, because Holmes is in disguise as an Irish American spy passing on faked British war secrets to the Germans.

For reasons too boring to elucidate here, I’ve always believed Sherlock was a good five years older than he looked to that narrator—and therefore born circa 1848.

Which is how I brought him to America in 1864 as a 16-year-old chemical assistant at the DuPont gunpowder works in One Must Tell the Bees, where he comes to the attention of Abraham Lincoln and, after Lincoln’s assassination, is enlisted in the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth…which we now know to have been the very first case of the man who would become known to the world as the great detective, Sherlock Holmes.

And, since Arthur Conan Doyle isn’t alive to disagree—let alone advertise on Facebook—I stand by my story.

Fortunately, Sherlockians are coming around.

A wonderful review of One Must Tell the Bees even appeared in the summer journal of one of the oldest Sherlock Holmes societies still in existence.

The very same society that had refused an advance reading copy in the first place.

So, as Sherlockians everywhere celebrate the great detective’s birthday today, I offer a birthday toast to my own favorite detective, who, according to my calculations, was born 177 years ago this month.

And if anyone asks how I got that number, I just say, “do the math.”