The case of Sarasate in “The Red-Headed League” ultimately demonstrates how Conan Doyle wove his fiction from the threads of real life. The decision to include a real performer at a real location, even if the date was a fiction, allowed readers to believe more deeply in Holmes’s world. And that, perhaps, is the greater truth behind the fiction — that it is not always the literal facts that matter most, but the feeling of authenticity they convey. Doyle understood this instinctively. He gave us a London that was more vivid than the real one — a London of gas lamps, hansom cabs, midnight adventures, and yes, violin music echoing through the halls of culture.
In the end, Sarasate’s appearance in the Holmes canon is both fact and fiction. He was real, he did play St. James’s Hall, and he was admired by the London public. But he did not play there on that October afternoon in 1890, and Holmes and Watson did not hear him that day. Still, the truth of the story is not diminished by this falsehood. Rather, it is enhanced. The fiction gains credibility by its brush with reality, and readers gain a more textured sense of Holmes’s world. It is a small deception in service of a larger truth — that the adventures of Sherlock Holmes take place in a world not quite our own, but close enough that we long to step into it.
Whether Doyle expected readers to check the concert schedules or not is beside the point. He was writing stories, not historical documents. Yet the richness of the canon lies precisely in these moments where the real and the invented meet. Sarasate, like Holmes himself, becomes part of the mythos. We believe in him not only because he was real, but because Holmes believed in him. And so, with a few strokes of the pen, Doyle summoned the sound of a violin into Baker Street, echoing from St. James’s Hall across the foggy streets of London — a melody composed of truth and fiction alike.