Addendum to G. B. Bryan's “The Proverbial Sherlock Holmes”

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to reassess the use of proverbs in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, taking as a starting point the article previously published by G. B. Bryan on this same topic in Proverbium in 1996. In it, Bryan came to the conclusion that proverbs did not abound in the series. For this reason, the collection of stories and the four novels published have been surveyed for their use of paremias in order to establish their frequency of appearance and how they are used by the author. Once a rather extensive catalog of sentences susceptible to being considered as proverbs had been gathered, they were individually checked against dictionaries to establish whether they could be labeled as such. After a detailed examination of the materials obtained, this paper contradicts the thesis presented by Bryan and demonstrates that Conan Doyle uses proverbs in his detective stories quite often, most frequently through the character of Holmes.