Steele published articles about his association with Sherlock Holmes, and frequently corresponded with many fans of his work. In these four essays, written between 1929 and 1940, he describes his introduction to Sherlock Holmes, recalls other illustrators and the actor William Gillette, and discusses Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his works.

My First Meeting with Sherlock Holmes

This letter describes his first meeting with Sherlock Holmes. It is Steele’s reply to a letter he received, asking about a handprint he had drawn for a Collier’s cover thirty-seven years before, in October 1903.

226 W. 13th St., N. Y.
March 3, 1940

Dear Mr. Robertson:

I’ll try to answer your question, tho’ I fear the “solution” is a commonplace one, not to say elementary. I am hampered by the fact that the only Sherlock book I own is the one-volume Complete Edition. So I don’t know what you mean by the “sketch of six clues” in your copy of the Return. I can guess, however, that the publisher may have cooked up a display ad and used the handprint as one of the “clues.” My handprint was drawn in the background of the Collier’s cover, Oct. 31, ‘03, accompanying “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” which was No. 2 of the Return series. The print had nothing to do with McFarlane’s thumb, or with that story, or any other, as I remember it: I put it in merely as a suggestion of what might be seen on the walls of the Baker Street rooms.

As a Sherlockian, you may be interested in the fact that this drawing was sent down to Collier’s as a rough sketch, from Deerfield, Mass., after I had made it before breakfast, to catch the morning mail. After a few days they wrote me that they were reproducing the sketch as it was, since they thought I couldn’t do better if I worked a month on it. This was the first instance in which I used a Gillette photo. (The first cover — the one for The Adventure of the Empty House — was the “Exit, Moriarty,” reproduced in the program.) …

Does this answer your questions? In any event, there can be no question of “effrontery” between Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. I like to include myself among these, altho I have frankly confessed that I am most un-erudite and most forgetful even about stories I myself illustrated. The fourth dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars took place on the evening of January 30th (at the old Murray Hill Hotel, the perfect spot). It was the best one since the December ‘36 dinner which I described in the New Yorker (and in 221B). Chris Morley was once more the Gasogene, and I made for him a little sketch for the menu card: Sherlock examining the food and analyzing the wines, and taking no chances. Under this was the caption “We cannot be too careful, Watson.” The seriousness of these devotees is shown by the fact that five different men came up to my chair and asked me practically the same question — ”Pardon me, Mr. Steele, I can’t seem to identify this quotation: will you tell me what story it was taken from?”

I first met Sherlock Holmes in Brooklyn in 1891 or 1892, at the home of a boyhood friend, Alfred E. Heinrichs (a lawyer, now retired.) He asked if I ever read detective stories, and I said no. But he said there was a new collection of them called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and he’d like to try them on me. He read aloud “The Red Headed League” and two others — that was enough to attach me to Sherlock and the good Doctor for life.

Very sincerely yours,
Frederic Dorr Steele

From The Baker Street Journal, Old Series, Volume 4, no. 1, January 1949

Sherlock Holmes in Pictures

Steele was an authority on how the character was presented. His essay appeared in The New Yorker on May 22, 1937.

Sherlock Holmes is 50 years old. William Gillette is dead. Neither fact is quite credible.

This is written by the illustrator who, since The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1903, has made pictures for nearly all the tales. Oddly enough, I do not care for “defective” stories, and never have had any desire to curl up with a good one. But thanks to my long association with the Emperor of Detectives, I have found myself looked upon as an expert in crime. My plight is a little like that of Mr. Reginald Birch, who drew pictures for Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1885 and has carried that golden-curled, velvet-suited incubus on the back of his neck ever since.

Let us consider the pictures of Sherlock, beginning with those drawn long before my time. You know my methods, Watson. We must have facts;  it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Sidney Paget was not the earliest illustrator of Sherlock Holmes (the first was D.H. Friston, who illustrated A Study in Scarlet in 1887), but it was Paget who imposed his conception on the English mind. Beginning with the Adventures in 1891 in the Strand Magazine, he continued through a second series (Memoirs); then followed with The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Return. He died, prematurely, a few years later. Sir Arthur writes of “poor Sidney Paget,” and of the younger brother who posed for him and made Sherlock handsomer than the author intended. Paget’s pictures improved as he went along; if the earlier ones seem imperfect to our eyes, it is partly because of the crude woodcut reproduction. Scenes of gloom and terror were likely to appear faintly comic. Few American readers saw these English illustrations, and for some the first Sherlock was the plump and dapper blade portrayed by W.H. Hyde when a few of the tales were printed in Harper’s Weekly in 1893. H.C. Edwards Illustrated the last Memoir, “The Final Problem”, in McClure’s for December.

For most Americans, the image of our hero was created by the actor William Gillette, who wrote the absurd and delightful melodrama entitled Sherlock Holmes, which reached the New York stage in November, 1899, ran two seasons in America and a season in London. Mr. Gillette was blessed by nature with the lean, sinewy figure and keen visage required, and his quiet but incisive histrionic method exactly fitted such a part as Sherlock. I can think of no more perfect realization of a fictional character on the stage.

In 1903, just ten years after Doyle had killed Sherlock, he brought him back to life. His series entitled The Return of Sherlock Holmes began publication at the end of that year, in the Strand Magazine with illustrations by Paget, and simultaneously in Collier’s Weekly with pictures by myself. For the first story, The Empty House, I made six illustrations, and by a curious coincidence, Paget and I chose the same subjects in four instances. That date, 1903, corrects, of course, the faulty chronology of those who have vaguely supposed that my drawings preceded the play.

I did not need to be told to make my Sherlock look like Gillette. The thing was inevitable. I kept him in mind and even copied or adapted parts of a few of the stage photographs. At that time I never had seen the play, and it was not until 1929 that Mr. Gillette actually became my model in the flesh. Lured from retirement for a farewell tour by the artful George C. Tyler, cornered in the Biltmore by the hounds of publicity, he seated himself — with the air of one taking the electric chair — and for the duration of three cigarettes talked to Mr. H.I. Brock of the Times and exhibited his famous profile for my first drawing of it from life.

My original model for Sherlock Holmes was an Englishman named Robert King, who posed as him throughout the thirteen tales of the Return. The drawings for the first story were made in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and Mr. King journeyed there to help me. He was a sensitive, fine fellow; his nose was not hawklike, but he had cavernous eyes — and he owned a frock coat. When later stories came along, about 1908, King, to my regret, had swum out of my ken, and I fell back on that standby of the studios, Frank B. Wilson. Irish by ancestry (his real name was Wall), he had gone on the stage as a youth and had been for some years actor and stage manager in the company of Sir Henry Irving. After a breakdown of health he set his face resolutely toward a new job. He became a model, kept an amazing store of costumes and other equipment stowed away in odd places, and for thirty years or more was the most resourceful, faithful, and competent man in that stop-gap profession. About 1926, while the later stories were appearing in Liberty, two of Wilson’s tall sons followed in their father’s footsteps; but most of the Sherlocks in this series were drawn from the fine frame and crag-like head of a model called S.B. Doughty.

Mr. Vincent Starrett in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes lists twelve Englishmen and six Americans who have Illustrated the text, and even that list is incomplete. Mr. Edmund Pearson, the eminent criminalographer, wrote an admirable paper, “Sherlock Holmes Among the Illustrators,” for the Bookman of August, 1932. Speaking of Arthur I. Keller, one of the Americans, who had taken a fling at Sherlock in The Valley of Fear, he says it was he who “dealt the cruelest blow at Watson. From merely the innocent Johnny of Mr. Steele’s drawings, Watson emerges in Mr. Keller’s pictures as boobus Britannicus”… Mr. Keller himself spoke some memorable words to me on the subject of models: “Oh yes, I probably used Wilson, but it didn’t matter who it was. I only use models for construction anyway.” The individuality in his figures was supplied from his own head; he never could have been accused of “type casting.”

Readers of the early tales have remarked a rapid change in Sherlock. The thinking machine who rigidly excluded from his mental storehouse any knowledge not useful for his immediate purpose soon became a walking encyclopedia. But physically Sherlock needed no change or development; Dr. Doyle from the outset knew what his hero look like. It is odd that the “great hawks bill of a nose” so explicitly described was ignored by the English draughtsmen for many years. Not until the Return series was well underway did one see in Paget’s noses a suggestion of aquilinity. Was it the Gillette influence? Such considerations bring up old questions: Do illustrators ever read the text? And the corollary: Should all illustrators die at dawn and all books come out with their text undefiled? Shall we make exceptions in the rare instances in which author and artist are one, as in Thackeray, du Maurier, Pyle? What would Doyle’s own pictures have been like? Did he like Paget best?

Here I can tell what Sir Arthur said to me on the one occasion when I met him. It was at a luncheon given for him in New York by Mark Sullivan, of Collier’s, sometime during the second term of Theodore Roosevelt. The President could not come, but his daughter Ethel and one or two Cabinet members and their wives were there. A weighty occasion. I was somewhat palpitant when my turn came to talk with the great man. Would he be kind to me? Would he commend my earnest efforts? I must be self-effacing, I thought; I will ask him about Paget first. “Young man,” he began briskly, “do you know who did the best illustrations ever made for me? Cyrus Cuneo!” He began to tell me why; something interrupted; the interview ended. I had not needed to be self-effacing. Sir Arthur effaced me. I can make no explanation of his preference: Mr. Cuneo was notorious for committing the illustrator’s deadliest sin, giving the plot away. If he had done the drawings for Watson’s tales, I felt sure no cunningly hidden solution, no trick ending was safe. Later I found out that he had Illustrated many of Doyle’s other novels but never a Sherlock.

Evidences have come to me in the mail of a vast invisible army of Sherlock Holmes idolaters– bits of curious information, inquiries for the “old originals,” now and then the request for “data to help me on a monograph I desire to write on Sherlock Holmes.” Perhaps the most extraordinary of these communications came to me from Dr. Gray Chandler Briggs of St Louis, a devoted collector of Sherlockiana, who wrote me that he had spent a summer vacation in London, mapped Baker Street with care, located the lodgings at the present number 111 Baker Street, and submitted his findings to the author. He sent me the map, descriptions, and photographs, and they were published later in the Gillette souvenir program. His theory about the location of the house thus attracted much attention. It has been approved by Vincent Starrett, disapproved by H.W. Bell, author of an amazing Holmes-Watson chronology, and, we must add, blandly dismissed by Doyle himself. Whether we can accept the Briggs theory or not, it is a most ingenious addition to the lore of the subject. On a visit to London in May, 1931, I spent a pleasant evening following the ardent Doctor’s footsteps, and can report that, save for a new arc light near the “kerb,”, the premises remained as he described them.

The matter of the original drawings also involves Dr. Briggs. He had seen one at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in his own City in 1904, and were they any left, and could he get them? Artists are disorderly beings, but something must necessarily be done with studio accumulations. In my own case these were kept in a packing box, the object of frequent profane revilings. My fellow-craftsmen will agree, I am sure, that the joy of creation is exceeded only by the joy of destruction. Hence during the agony of moving, or cleaning, the box was dragged out and the less fit were slaughtered. So some years ago the number had been reduced to perhaps a score, and Dr. Briggs has them all.

The late Ralph Barton cheered one Christmas for me with what is now a valued souvenir. He had redrawn one of my cover designs of long ago, a profile of Sherlock in a dressing gown, with a bloody handprint on the wall. The hawklike beak was undisturbed but the chin had disappeared beneath a Santa Claus beard, complete with string.

“But how did you remember that design so clearly?” I wrote in my letter of thanks.

“Because,” he replied, “it was pasted on the ceiling over my bed.”

After three years I am still pleasantly embarrassed by the outrageous overpraise accorded my drawings by Mr. Starrett in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. “No happier association of author and artist can be imagined; one thinks of Tenniel and his Alice.” You may take even giddier flights in the chapter called “The Evolution of a Profile.” “Sixty tales, in all, comprise the saga of Sherlock Holmes; and Steele has Illustrated twenty-nine. While he yet lives and loves, and lifts his pencil, will he not do the other thirty-one?” Meantime my own favorite edition remains the one-volume Complete Sherlock Holmes, with no cuts — in either sense of the word.

In writing of stage Sherlocks, Mr. Pearson makes a shrewd guess: “The Steele pictures had in their turn and influence on the stage or upon the screen for it seems probable that the enormous number of properties assembled for the Baker Street scene in John Barrymore’s filmed play (1922) originated in Mr. Steele’s fascinating pictures of Holmes’s rooms.” I can testify to the accuracy of that chance shot. I happened to meet Jack Barrymore, just off the train from Hollywood. “There’s a film I want you to see,” he said. “Just finished it. ‘Sherlock Holmes.’ I dug up an old German named Von Seyffertitz for Moriarty. Had a lot of fun. Think you’ll be interested.”

“Indeed I will,” I said, hoping the old drawings were remembered. “I used to make pictures of Sherlock.”

His eyebrows twisted with the Barrymore grin. “Why, hell, we had all your old pictures out on the lot. You’re more to blame than Gillette.”

On a murky winter evening some years ago, the Baker Street Irregulars, a little group of Sherlock devotees, met in a coffeehouse in the Forties for votive rites in honor of their patron saint. After some tramping in the slush I found the unmarked door and was ushered into a warm, smoky room. Long train of tables, Italian wines, savory odors. Just such a room as one might look for in Soho, perhaps. What were those strange words floating in the smoke? Gasogenes, Trichinopoly cigars, orange pips?… Christopher Morley greeted me kindly. He, it seemed, was a gasogene. No, he was the Gasogene. The other officers were the Tantalus and the Commissar, and let no true Sherlockian ask why. “That is your drink, right there by the Blue Carbuncle.”

“Fine. It was all perfectly obvious from the first, my dear Watson.”

I had been a little cold. If I could catch up in my drinking, would I understand a little better what they were talking about? If someone asked me for the papers, would I know enough to say they were on the sundial? If one muffed the answer to such a challenge, the next round was on him, I was told. Surely this was a dangerous place. Another drink? Well, they all look friendly enough. Increasingly so. But how did they all know so much? Could I remember Enoch J. Drebber’s address? Another drink, perhaps? Well, why argue? One must not be quarrelsome. On my left sat the Gasogene, on my right Gene Tunney. No, I would not be quarrelsome… Time for the first toast. “There are only three standard toasts, gentlemen, three obligatory tests. We will rise for the first one, gentleman. I give you the Woman! The woman? Could it be Irene Adler? I was beginning to get the hang of it. Elementary…  Alexander Woollcott, who had insisted on coming in a hansom, still wore a hideous red fore-and-aft cap… The second toast was Mrs. Hudson. The third, Doctor Watson’s second wife. Time for a pipe. Pipes are occasionally of extraordinary interest, Watson. But where is Gillette? Afraid he’s not coming; it’s half past eight. Patience, my dear Watson. If I am not mistaken, I hear his step even now upon the stair. 

A commotion at the entrance, yes, it was he. We saw the tall, fragile figure, the pale, smiling face above the concave dress shirt. “Splendid, Mr Gillette. We’d given you up. It was good of you to leave your other party to join us.”

“Other party? Certainly not. I’ve been four hours on the way from Hadlyme, Connecticut, and I’m damned hungry.”

After he had been fed, he told us that it was Charles Frohman who had suggested his play, that it had been concocted in a few weeks, and — even more incredible — that before that time he had never read a Sherlock Holmes story.

The unquenchable Woollcott reported this incident later in The New Yorker. A certain artist, he wrote, wept softly into his souffle at the sight of his most famous model. Mr. Woollcott must stand corrected. I am sure it was not a souffle we wept in, but a compote Lestrade.

Conan Doyle never quite forgave the reading public for preferring “these lighter sketches,” nor could he quite forgive his own Sherlock Holmes, who “may perhaps have stood a little in the way of my more serious literary work.” But what man can control the lightning of his own fame? Today his brain child, so often disparage by its father, unquestionably is known to more people living on this oblate spheroid than any other character in secular fiction. Why do these uncounted millions love the tales and, forsaking all others, return to them with deep satisfaction and a sense of personal attachment? In mere ingenuity of structure they are no better than those of the present-day artificers. Not all the tales observe the strict rules of the game — the game between writer and reader. In some, accident rather than deduction plays a part in the solution. Sometimes there is no solution at all. But what do these lapses weigh against the gift of the priceless Watson, against the wealth of color, atmosphere, and racy, humorous character? To read the tales is to take the perfect anodyne, to be carried back gently across fifty years to a dim, gas-lit London, with the four-wheeler coming up out of the yellow fog, bearing our client — and a little problem which may present some points of interest.

The passing of william gillette

In the early twentieth century, William Gillette was the actor most Americans associated with Sherlock Holmes. A nationally famous star, he brought Holmes to life in 1899, in a play he had written with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s permission. Gillette starred as Holmes in theaters around the world for 40 years. Steele was a member of The Players, and Gillette had been one of the club’s founders. Steele was also editor of the club’s newsletter, where this tribute appeared on October 1, 1937. 

The Passing of William Gillette, Last Founding Member of The Players
By Frederic Dorr Steele

The Players lost its last surviving charter member when William Gillette died, last April, at the age of eighty-three years and nine months. Many newspapers stated that he was eighty one, but old friends and neighbors in his native Hartford knew better. He was born on July 24, 1853. At the time of the formation of The Players he was thirty-five. On December 31, 1907 he delivered the memorial address on our Founders Night. His membership continued until 1920, when he relinquished it for a period of nine years. In December 1929, soon after his farewell revival of Sherlock Holmes, he was brought back to our rolls as an honorary member. After that he came here to take part in such events as the Mark Twain dinner and the Booth centenary.

William Gillette was so towering figure in the theater that an account of his career would be a repetition of what most of us know. His bent toward the stage was evident in his boyhood when he built little theaters for himself, wrote and acted plays, ran away from school to be an actor, and neglected various universities for his greater love. Early in the eighties, in the Madison Square Theater days, he was already writing and adapting pieces in which his own peculiar histrionic methods could be utilized. He led a new school of natural acting and realistic stage direction.

Throughout his career the characters fitted the actor. (Being his own playwright made this convenient.) They were dynamic but calm in the midst of tumble, clear-headed or sardonic or bland in the midst of bewilderment and jitters. Sudden outbursts of energy in such characters had an electrical dramatic effect, as in his war plays Held by the Enemy and Secret Service, and in Sherlock Holmes. Later impersonations, in plays of his own devising and in Barrie’s Crichton, expressed the same quiet dominance. He knew his own abilities and limitations as an actor, and he was usually right about plays. He was a showman and a practical genius, having scant patience with any kind of dramatic entertainment that failed to entertain.

More than a quarter-century ago William Gillette was acclaimed as one of the “immortals” of our American Academy. A paper he wrote at the time called The Illusion of the First Time in Acting expresses with inimitable keenness and dry humor his views on the theater. “All this talk about reading plays is nonsense,” he said in effect. “There is no such thing as reading a play. The play is –” but go and read it yourself in our library! Or read the same ideas, differently expressed, in the introduction for his play Sherlock Holmes, published a year or two ago. His writings are like his speech; his private letters, with their humorous quirks and their red ink signals, have the same piquancy and charm.

He was intensely individual both on and off the stage. The reticent New England gentleman never was wholly concealed by the practical man of the world. His detestation of personal publicity was genuine enough, but his efforts to avoid it became news, and his troubles increased. Legends accumulated about his castle on the banks of the Connecticut, about his three-mile miniature railroad, his house-boat, his motor cycle, and his princely hospitality for those friends who could get at him at all.

Twice after his retirement he yielded to the urge to be a trouper again. Managers announced farewell appearances, but Mr. Gillette made no promises. “About every five years I seem to have a fit of revivals,” he said before the curtain of Three Wise Fools, “and I rather like them. I expect to meet you all in 1940.”

His last will and testament was made late in January. In it, after specifying generous bequests to relatives, friends and charities, he wrote: “I would consider it more than unfortunate for me — should I find myself doomed after death to a continued consciousness of the behavior of mankind on this planet — to discover that the stone walls and towers and fireplaces of my home, founded at every point on the solid rock of Connecticut, and many other things of like nature, should reveal themselves to me as in the possession of some blithering saphead who had no conception of where he is or with what surrounded. For this reason I am hoping that my executors, in disposing of this property, as they will be obliged to do, will exercise discrimination in carrying out my earnest wish.” These are not the words of a grudging curmudgeon. They have his usual salty, satiric humor, but one sees in them rather the deep feeling of a sensitive man who loved his life and was sorry to leave it.

Reminiscent notes of sherlock holmes