Sherlock Holmes In America

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“It is always a joy to meet an American,” declares Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor,” “for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same worldwide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”

It should not come as a surprise, then, to find that the Sherlock Holmes stories are fairly bursting with Americans. The Great Detective’s very first outing, A Study in Scarlet, features a lengthy flashback set in the Mormon community of Utah, while the novel The Valley of Fear turns on an account of nefarious doings in the coal-mining communities of Pennsylvania. Americans feature prominently in several of the most popular Holmes adventures, including The Five Orange Pips and The Adventure of the Dancing Men, and no less a figure than the woman, the legendary Irene Adler “of dubious and questionable memory” who bested Sherlock Holmes, hailed from New Jersey. If further evidence is required, one need only recall that Holmes himself posed as an Irish-American spy named Altamont to outwit the German spymaster Von Bork in His Last Bow.

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