Pipe or cigar? Not so elementary, my dear Watson

When the famous Sherlock Holmes comes up, the image of the pipe-smoking detective follows automatically. Yet the hero of Baker Street also smokes cigars, a detail that has strangely been forgotten.

Did Conan Doyle take the cigar out of his character’s hands after a friendship soured?

Let us not beat about the bush: every reader of Conan Doyle knows that Sherlock Holmes smoked cigars. Go back to the books and you will see that, like his creator, the character was a cigar smoker.

So what happened for the cigar suddenly to disappear in favour of the pipe? A sad personal affair that directly concerned Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may be the explanation.

Oscar Slater was a dead man, destined for the gallows. That was without counting on the writer, whose own investigation spared him the ultimate punishment. Compensated by the Crown, Slater appeared in the press smoking large cigars. That thoroughly irritated Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Oscar Slater never repaid the funds raised for his defence, something the novelist found unacceptable.

Yet the cigar keeps burning for Sherlock Holmes

Despite that personal setback, cigars remained a constant presence in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work. Sherlock Holmes never stopped sharing a cigar with his companion Dr Watson whenever he needed to take a step back from an investigation.

Yet every screen adaptation, on television as in the cinema, shows the detective with a pipe in his hand. The deerstalker, the magnifying glass and the violin are likewise accessories added to the character, none of which Doyle ever mentions.

It seems the cigar simply disappeared after Holmes was first played by William Gillette in 1890. A pipe smoker himself, he appeared in the detective’s guise with a pipe in his hand. His successors then followed suit. That is how a cigar smoker in literature ended up a pipe smoker on screen.