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Simon Whistler, a podcaster and YouTuber, has solved the mystery behind Sherlock Holmes’s fan mail. In a recent episode of his series Today I Found Out, he reveals how a bank ended up receiving and responding to letters addressed to Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective for nearly sixty years.
Whistler explains that the Abbey National Bank started receiving fan mail for Holmes in the 1930s. While Sherlock’s residence at 221B Baker Street wasn’t real when Doyle wrote his stories, London’s street addresses had changed by the 1930s, and the bank’s headquarters now sat at Holmes’s fictional address.
Instead of discarding mail addressed to a character who didn’t exist, the bank decided to hire someone to act as Holmes’s secretary and respond to fans. For decades, until the bank moved its headquarters in the 2000s, a series of secretaries took on the role, often telling fans that Holmes had retired to the countryside to raise bees or replying using quotes from Doyle’s books.
“Mr. Holmes has been asked to help with Watergate and Irangate, to solve the murder of Olaf Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, and find lost homework to prove to the teacher that the student really did it,” said Nikki Caparn, Holmes’s secretary, in a 1989 interview with The New York Times. “Many people know he's not real and write tongue in cheek. But some people haven't worked it out. The stories were written in the late 1800's and early 1900's and Mr. Holmes would be 136 years old now, so it's unlikely that he'd still be living here.”
Today, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, situated on Baker Street just a few doors from 221B, handles Holmes’s fan mail. In the video above, Whistler shares the story of how Abbey National Bank came to share its address with Sherlock Holmes, and how the responsibility of replying to letters eventually moved from the bank to the museum.
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