In His Last Bow , as Conan Doyle is describing ' the most terrible August in the history of the world ' he writes that ' One might have thought already that God ’ s curse hung heavy over a degenerate world , for there was an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air '. The scene he writes to capture this on a smaller scale is of two famous Germans ' stood with their heads close together , talking in low , confidential tones .' They are smoking cigars and ' the two glowing ends ... might have been the smouldering eyes of some malignant fiend looking down in the darkness .'
While it is unlikely that Conan Doyle had any prejudice against cigar-smokers ( he smoked both a pipe and cigars himself ) they do not favour well in the stories . No , for Holmes it is chiefly the pipe for thinking and the cigarettes for calming .
Suffice it to say that there is so much smoking in the books that you are at risk of cancer just reading them , so a fully-comprehensive examination of the subject would be many times longer and many times less interesting than this . What is key is that smoking is used by Conan Doyle to capture two distinct moods of Holmes that are inextricably tied to his personality . Through this elegant literary shorthand we learn much about Holmes ' interior without his thoughts or feelings ever being communicated to us explicitly . It is for this reason that I was saddened to find that the latest incarnation of the great Baker Street detective , as played by Benedict Cumberbatch , is a quitter . It may make the series more child-friendly , but without his cigarettes and his pipe , Holmes - for me at least - just ain ' t Holmes . smokers ' manifesto 08