OOC
GAME: Canonish
DESCRIPTION: Literary multi-fandom game.
DATE: May 2008
PB: Jude Law
JOURNAL: finalproblem
IC
CHARACTER'S FULL NAME: Sherlock Holmes. Disguises are many, and aliases include Altamont, Captain Basil, and Sigerson.
BOOKVERSE: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, etc.
AUTHOR: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
HISTORY: No one knew for a fact that the boy born on a dull and dreary January sixth, 1854, would be destined for greatness. But considering the already-formidable intellect of his elder brother, the people suspected. The two boys were raised in a conventional and austere household, in a family of old country squires which would eventually produce two of the most brilliant young men ever known: Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes. Mycroft was the elder by seven years, and his incredible reasoning skills became the template which Sherlock improved, and they treated riddles like games. Neither of the boys played outside much, and the sedentary parents were content to let their precocious children do what they liked with their intelligence — so the Holmes children delved instead into a world of problems and quandaries and formulas. Mycroft pandered to politics; Sherlock took a liking to chemistry.
After secondary, Sherlock would go on to studying it at Oxford, but his university years were less thrilling than one would expect. Having spent most of his time with his brother, he was unused to socialisation, particularly socialising with people who weren't quite on his intellectual level. It made Sherlock into a bookish and withdrawn individual; he spent his hours buried in his books and chemistry sets, probing scientific issues by himself and practicing deduction as a hobby system, simply a way to pass the time. He stayed more physically active than his brother, however, taking up fencing and boxing with a passion, alongside his more harmless talent in playing the violin.
Yet few other men had taken chemistry, and so his studies set him apart from the rest; Sherlock made only one friend in his two years at Oxford, being one Victor Trevor, after Victor's bull terrier caught Holmes' ankle and made him bedridden for a week. Despite their differences (much like the future friendship between Holmes and Watson), it would be an incredibly rewarding connection, however, as Victor Trevor inadvertently led to Sherlock's first real 'case'. Helping Victor's father, Mr. Trevor, in a mystery, the older man was awed by Holmes' deductive powers. Minutes after meeting him, Trevor told the young man, regardless of his studies into chemistry: "That's your line of life."
The case of the Gloria Scott would be what forged Holmes' professional life into what it is today. Intrigued by the success he'd had with Mr. Trevor, and the respect he'd won for solving what seemed to him like such a simple problem, Sherlock decided to develop his hobby system into something more substantial. He honed his deductive abilities against that of his brother's, and started to pick up some political knowledge from the elder Holmes. He read voraciously, continued studying, and compiling a vast and bizarrely "out-of-the-way" knowledge. It began with small hints and tips to the police forces, but soon they began calling him in for consultation, and even the Scotland Yard started requiring Sherlock's services.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Holmes became a famed detective, solving cases across the globe (his pride, admittedly, growing in turn), only personally bested four times: three by a man, and once by a woman, a certain Irene Adler. He picked up his faithful biographer, medical consultant and sidekick, John Watson, at age twenty-four in 1878, when the doctor and the eccentric detective started lodging together. Sherlock labels himself a "consulting detective"; other detectives, both government and private, all go to him for help, and private inquiry agencies send clients to him. The man at 221B Baker Street is the last court of appeal; the final hurdle for any unsolvable mystery.
He became aware of the other 'verses a couple years ago, when he happened to cross paths with a lesser Carrollian figure fleeing the pages of Wonderland with a Canon Cop right on his heels. The criminal vanished without a trace; Holmes, however, was quick to lend this strange foreigner a hand, and they both managed to track down the missing character. The CC stepped back into his own world, but not before handing Holmes an unusual card.
A meeting with the director of the CC was forthcoming, and soon Sherlock Holmes had even more unofficial power in his hands. He's been taking long strides across bookverses since then, tracking down crime of a whole new order.
APPEARANCE: A bit over six feet, Holmes is a tall, gaunt man in his thirties with a lean, whippet-thin frame which makes him appear yet even taller. The man possesses aquiline features, with a thin hawk-like nose, and often an impassionate look. His eyes are cold, hard, and steel-grey, making his quite a fierce gaze to meet; his eyes are either bright with intellectual fire and drive, or at other times, hazed over with the lazy indolence which characterises his low periods and cocaine dazes. He often smokes a pipe, and unless he is in disguise, he is constantly primly-dressed, tweed-suited and respectable, featuring the Inverness cape and deerstalker hat for which he is so famed.
PERSONALITY: Sherlock Holmes is a man of contradictions: when hot on the pursuit, he can be impassioned and driven with a manic energy, forgoing sleep and food in order to obtain results. He chases down leads and new information with a powerful interest, and lives for little else but chemistry and his professional detective-work. The man has a taste for dramatic flair, often revealing his answers in the most theatrical method possible; he is astonishingly good at disguises, and fond of being uncommunicative and cryptic in order to enhance the impact of his inevitable revelations. "The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime." His personal life is, however, a mystery; he counts no man friend aside from Watson, holds no particular interest in nature, and prefers instead to stay encloseted within his London apartment, simply waiting until the next mystery comes to his doorstep. He is antisocial, and easy to have as an acquaintance and contact and hired detective, but difficult to know personally.
Sherlock plays the violin, enjoys a good classical concert, often smokes pipes as he ponders dilemmas, and gathers an enormous miscellany of information in order to better his general knowledge. He suffers from a rather large ego, but is anything but egotistical and his arrogance is, in fact, well-deserved. If his pride is ever insulted, he can be practically malicious in his reassertion of it. Above all else, Holmes enjoys unravelling intriguing mysteries moreso than the plain and simple ones — excitement and intellectual stimulation is his first concern, and honour and justice his second. Even in his search to solve crime, he occasionally circumvents the law himself, as long as there is a 'good cause' behind it. His morality is largely his own, and it's simply rather lucky that he chose to side with the law rather than criminality. This may be due to the fact that Sherlock is strongly patriotic; he reveres the queen, and often helps his government and other royalty.
During the lull between cases, Holmes finds an alternate high in cocaine. He enjoys and craves (and arguably needs) the danger of his work, abhorring boredom — after his bursts of passion during a case, he can plunge into periods of lethargy and depression, barely moving from his books and his violin. He is slow to rise and messy in his own personal habits. Though Sherlock's mind is methodical and his reasoning acute, all of his paperwork is atrocious — Holmes keeps all record and mementos of his past cases stuffed in a tin box, and is prone to leaving his paperwork accumulating in haphazard heaps around the apartment, until he finally finds the energy to sort them. The papers, simply put, lose their intrigue once they have been solved. The man is capable of being obsessively organised when it comes to his favourite pasttime, since he maintains and updates a personal index, "a system of docketing all paragraphs concerning men and things." His excellent sense of recall and memory sometimes renders this index unnecessary, but it serves well as a second repository of knowledge.
Sherlock Holmes treats his clients with politeness and easy courtesy, and listens avidly to their stories. At other moments, however, he can become impatient and sarcastic. Even his closest friend has remarked upon his inhumanity at times, as Holmes can be dispassionate and cold in his reliance upon reason, logic, and intellect. He has no place for hot emotion in his life — though like all men, he occasionally suffers from it.
LOGS
???: Holmes & Irene meet again
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