Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches I

by Bill Peschel

  The Great Detective reeled and leaned up against the side of the room. So! The cold-blooded admission of the beautiful woman for the moment took away his breath! Herself the mother of the young Bourbon, misallied with one of the greatest families of Europe, staking her fortune on a Royalist plot, and yet with so instinctive a knowledge of European politics as to know that any removal of the hereditary birth-marks of the Prince would forfeit for him the sympathy of the French populace.

  The Countess resumed her tiara.

  She left.

  The secretary re-entered.

  “I have three telegrams from Paris,” he said. “They are completely baffling.”

  He handed over the first telegram.

  It read:

  “The Prince of Wurttemberg has a long, wet snout, broad ears, very long body, and short hind legs.”

  The Great Detective looked puzzled.

  He read the second telegram.

  “The Prince of Wurttemberg is easily recognized by his deep bark.”

  And then the third.

  “The Prince of Wurttemberg can be recognized by a patch of white hair across the centre of his back.”

  The two men looked at one another. The mystery was maddening, impenetrable.

  The Great Detective spoke.

  “Give me my domino,” he said. “These clues must be followed up,” then pausing, while his quick brain analysed and summed up the evidence before him—“a young man,” he muttered, “evidently young since described as a ‘pup,’ with a long, wet snout (ha! addicted obviously to drinking), a streak of white hair across his back (a first sign of the results of his abandoned life)—yes, yes,” he continued, “with this clue I shall find him easily.”

  The Great Detective rose.

  He wrapped himself in a long black cloak with white whiskers and blue spectacles attached.

  Completely disguised, he issued forth.

  He began the search.

  For four days he visited every corner of London.

  He entered every saloon in the city. In each of them he drank a glass of rum. In some of them he assumed the disguise of a sailor. In others he entered as a solider. Into others he penetrated as a clergyman. His disguise was perfect. Nobody paid any attention to him as long as he had the price of a drink.

  The search proved fruitless.

  Two young men were arrested under suspicion of being the Prince, only to be released.

  The identification was incomplete in each case.

  One had a long wet snout but no hair on his back.

  The other had hair on his back but couldn’t bark.

  Neither of them was the young Bourbon.

  The Great Detective continued his search.

  He stopped at nothing.

  Secretly, after nightfall, he visited the home of the Prime Minister. He examined it from top to bottom. He measured all the doors and windows. He took up the flooring. He inspected the plumbing. He examined the furniture. He found nothing.

  With equal secrecy he penetrated into the palace of the Archbishop. He examined it from top to bottom. Disguised as a choir-boy he took part in the offices of the church. He found nothing.

  Still undismayed, the Great Detective made his way into the home of the Countess of Dashleigh. Disguised as a housemaid, he entered the service of the Countess.

  Then at last a clue came which gave him a solution to the mystery.

  On the wall of the Countess’s boudoir was a large framed engraving.

  It was a portrait.

  Under it was a printed legend:

  THE PRINCE OF WURTTEMBERG

  The portrait was that of a Dachshund.

  The long body, the broad ears, the unclipped tail, the short hind legs—all was there.

  In a fraction of a second the lightning mind of the Great Detective had penetrated the whole mystery.

  THE PRINCE WAS A DOG!!!!

  Hastily throwing a domino over his housemaid’s dress, he rushed to the street. He summoned a passing hansom, and in a few moments was at his house.

  “I have it,” he gasped to his secretary. “The mystery is solved. I have pieced it together. By sheer analysis I have reasoned it out. Listen—hind legs, hair on back, wet snout, pup—eh, what? does that suggest nothing to you?”

  “Nothing,” said the secretary; “it seems perfectly hopeless.”

  The Great Detective, now recovered from his excitement, smiled faintly.

  “It means simply this, my dear fellow. The Prince of Wurttemberg is a dog, a prize Dachshund. The Countess of Dashleigh bred him, and he is worth some £25,000 in addition to the prize of £10,000 offered at the Paris dog show. Can you wonder that—”

  At that moment the Great Detective was interrupted by the scream of a woman.

  “Great Heaven!”

  The Countess of Dashleigh dashed into the room.

  Her face was wild.

  Her tiara was in disorder.

  Her pearls were dripping all over the place.

  She wrung her hands and moaned.

  “They have cut his tail,” she gasped, “and taken all the hair off his back. What can I do? I am undone!!”

  “Madam,” said the Great Detective, calm as bronze, “do yourself up. I can save you yet.”

  “You!”

  “Me!”

  “How?”

  “Listen. This is how. The Prince was to have been shown at Paris.”

  The Countess nodded.

  “Your fortune was staked on him.”

  The Countess nodded again.

  “The dog was stolen, carried to London, his tail cut and his marks disfigured.”

  Amazed at the quiet penetration of the Great Detective, the Countess kept on nodding and nodding.

  “And you are ruined?”

  “I am,” she gasped, and sank to the floor in a heap of pearls.

  “Madame,” said the Great Detective, “all is not lost.”

  He straightened himself up to his full height. A look of inflinchable unflexibility flickered over his features.

  The honour of England, the fortune of the most beautiful woman in England was at stake.

  “I will do it,” he murmured.

  “Rise dear lady,” he continued. “Fear nothing. I WILL IMPERSONATE THE DOG!!!”

  That night the Great Detective might have been seen on the deck of the Calais packet boat with his secretary. He was on his hands and knees in a long black cloak, and his secretary had him on a short chain.

  He barked at the waves exultingly and licked the secretary’s hand.

  “What a beautiful dog,” said the passengers.

  The disguise was absolutely complete.

  The Great Detective had been coated over with mucilage to which dog hairs had been applied. The markings on his back were perfect. His tail, adjusted with an automatic coupler, moved up and down responsive to every thought. His deep eyes were full of intelligence.

  Next day he was exhibited in the Dachshund class at the International show.

  He won all hearts.

  “Quel beau chien!” cried the French people.

  “Ach! was ein Dog!” cried the Spanish.

  The Great Detective took the first prize.

  The fortune of the Countess was saved.

  Unfortunately, as the Great Detective had neglected to pay the dog tax, he was caught and destroyed by the dog-catchers. But that is, of course, quite outside of the present narrative, and is only mentioned as an odd fact in conclusion.

  The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted

  Arthur Whitaker

  Readers were probably startled when they opened their issue of Cosmopolitan in August 1948 to see a new Sherlock Holmes story. It had been 18 years since Conan Doyle’s death. Did they wonder if Spiritualism really did work, and if he was busy dictating new stories from beyond the veil?

  The story was discovered by Conan Doyle’s biographer Hesketh Pearson. He came across the typewritten story while going through Conan Doyle’s papers for a b
iography in the early 1940s. Worldwide, Sherlockians were eager to read the story, but the literary estate’s owners, sons Adrian and Denis, waited until after the war to make a deal.

  Then, like any good mystery story, there was a plot twist. A retired architect, Arthur Whitaker, read the story. He announced that he had written the story and sent it to Conan Doyle in 1911 suggesting a collaboration. Conan Doyle turned it down, but paid Whitaker ten guineas for it.

  The Doyle sons refused to believe Whitaker and threatened to sue. Fortunately, Whitaker had kept his copy of the manuscript as well as Conan Doyle’s letter, and the estate was forced to back down.

  During the late autumn of ’95 a fortunate chance enabled me to take some part in another of my friend Sherlock Holmes’s fascinating cases. My wife not having been well for some time, I had at last persuaded her to take a holiday in Switzerland in the company of her old school friend Kate Whitney, whose name may be remembered in connection with the strange case I have already chronicled under the title of “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” My practice had grown much, and I had been working very hard for many months and never felt in more need myself of a rest and a holiday. Unfortunately I dared not absent myself for a long enough period to warrant a visit to the Alps. I promised my wife, however, that I would get a week or ten days’ holiday in somehow, and it was only on this understanding that she consented to the Swiss tour I was so anxious for her to take. One of my best patients was in a very critical state at the time, and it was not until August was gone that he passed the crisis and began to recover. Feeling then that I could leave my practice with a good conscience in the hands of a locum tenens, I began to wonder where and how I should best find the rest and change I needed.

  Almost at once the idea came to my mind that I would hunt up my old friend Sherlock Holmes, of whom I had seen nothing for several months. If he had no important inquiry in hand, I would do my uttermost to persuade him to join me.

  Within half an hour of coming to this resolution I was standing in the doorway of the familiar old room in Baker Street.

  Holmes was stretched upon the couch with his back towards me, the familiar dressing gown and old brier pipe as much in evidence as of yore.

  “Come in, Watson,” he cried, without glancing round. “Come in and tell me what good wind blows you here?”

  “What an ear you have, Holmes,” I said. “I don’t think that I could have recognized your tread so easily.”

  “Nor I yours,” said he, “if you hadn’t come up my badly lighted staircase taking the steps two at a time with all the familiarity of an old fellow lodger; even then I might not have been sure who it was, but when you stumbled over the new mat outside the door which has been there for nearly three months, you needed no further announcement.”

  Holmes pulled out two or three of the cushions from the pile he was lying on and threw them across into the armchair. “Sit down, Watson, and make yourself comfortable; you’ll find cigarettes in a box behind the clock.”

  As I proceeded to comply, Holmes glanced whimsically across at me. “I’m afraid I shall have to disappoint you, my boy,” he said. “I had a wire only half an hour ago which will prevent me from joining in any little trip you may have been about to propose.”

  “Really, Holmes,” I said, “don’t you think this is going a little too far? I begin to fear you are a fraud and pretend to discover things by observation, when all the time you really do it by pure out-and-out clairvoyance!”

  Holmes chuckled. “Knowing you as I do it’s absurdly simple,” said he. “Your surgery hours are from five to seven, yet at six o’clock you walk smiling into my rooms. Therefore you must have a locum in. You are looking well, though tired, so the obvious reason is that you are having, or about to have, a holiday. The clinical thermometer, peeping out of your pocket, proclaims that you have been on your rounds today, hence it’s pretty evident that your real holiday begins tomorrow. When, under these circumstances, you come hurrying into my rooms—which, by the way, Watson, you haven’t visited for nearly three months—with a new Bradshaw and a timetable of excursion bookings bulging out of your coat pocket, then it’s more than probable you have come with the idea of suggesting some joint expedition.”

  “It’s all perfectly true,” I said, and explained to him, in a few words, my plans. “And I’m more disappointed than I can tell you,” I concluded, “that you are not able to fall in with my little scheme.”

  Holmes picked up a telegram from the table and looked at it thoughtfully. “If only the inquiry this refers to promised to be of anything like the interest of some we have gone into together, nothing would have delighted me more than to have persuaded you to throw your lot in with mine for a time; but really I’m afraid to do so, for it sounds a particularly commonplace affair,” and he crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it over to me.

  I smoothed it out and read: “To Holmes, 221B Baker Street, London, S.W. Please come to Sheffield at once to inquire into case of forgery. Jervis, Manager British Consolidated Bank.”

  “I’ve wired back to say I shall go up to Sheffield by the one-thirty-a.m. express from St. Pancras,” said Holmes. “I can’t go sooner as I have an interesting little appointment to fulfill tonight down in the East End, which should give me the last information I need to trace home a daring robbery from the British Museum to its instigator—who possesses one of the oldest titles and finest houses in the country, along with a most insatiable greed, almost mania, for collecting ancient documents. Before discussing the Sheffield affair any further, however, we had perhaps better see what the evening paper has to say about it,” continued Holmes, as his boy entered with the Evening News, Standard, Globe, and Star.

  “Ah, this must be it,” he said, pointing to a paragraph headed: “Daring Forger’s Remarkable Exploits in Sheffield.”

  Whilst going to press we have been informed that a series of most cleverly forged cheques have been successfully used to swindle the Sheffield banks out of a sum which cannot be less than six thousand pounds. The full extent of the fraud has not yet been ascertained, and the managers of the different banks concerned, who have been interviewed by our Sheffield correspondent, are very reticent.

  It appears that a gentleman named Mr. Jabez Booth, who resides at Broomhill, Sheffield, and has been an employee since January 1881, at the British Consolidated Bank in Sheffield, yesterday succeeded in cashing quite a number of cleverly forged cheques at twelve of the principal banks in the city and absconding with the proceeds.

  The crime appears to have been a strikingly deliberate and well-thought-out one. Mr. Booth had, of course, in his position in one of the principal banks in Sheffield, excellent opportunities of studying the various signatures which he forged, and he greatly facilitated his chances of easily and successfully obtaining cash for the cheques by opening banking accounts last year at each of the twelve banks at which he presented the forged cheques, and by this means becoming personally known at each.

  He still further disarmed suspicion by crossing each of the forged cheques and paying them into his account, while, at the same time, he drew and cashed a cheque of his own for about half the amount of the forged cheque paid in.

  It was not until early this morning, Thursday, that the fraud was discovered, which means that the rascal has had some twenty hours in which to make good his escape. In spite of this we have little doubt but that he will soon be laid by the heels, for we are informed that the finest detectives from Scotland Yard are already upon his track, and it is also whispered that Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the well-known and almost world-famed criminal expert of Baker Street, has been asked to assist in hunting down this daring forger.

  “Then there follows a lengthy description of the fellow, which I needn’t read but will keep for future use,” said Holmes, folding the paper and looking across at me. “It seems to have been a pretty smart affair. This Booth may not be easily caught for, though he hasn’t had a long time in which to make his escape, we mustn’t lose
sight of the fact that he’s had twelve months in which to plan how he would do the vanishing trick when the time came. Well! What do you say, Watson? Some of the little problems we have gone into in the past should at least have taught us that the most interesting cases do not always present the most bizarre features at the outset.”

  “‘So far from it, on the contrary, quite the reverse,’ to quote Sam Weller,” I replied. “Personally nothing would be more to my taste than to join you.”

  “Then we’ll consider it settled,” said my friend. “And now I must go and attend to that other little matter of business I spoke to you about. Remember,” he said, as we parted, “one-thirty at St. Pancras.”

  I was on the platform in good time, but it was not until the hands of the great station clock indicated the very moment due for our departure, and the porters were beginning to slam the carriage doors noisily, that I caught the familiar sight of Holmes’s tall figure.

  “Ah! here you are, Watson,” he cried cheerily. “I fear you must have thought I was going to be too late. I’ve had a very busy evening and no time to waste; however, I’ve succeeded in putting into practice Phileas Fogg’s theory that ‘a well-used minimum suffices for everything,’ and here I am.

  “About the last thing I should expect of you,” I said as we settled down into two opposite corners of an otherwise empty first-class carriage, “would be that you should do such an unmethodical thing as to miss a train. The only thing which would surprise me more, in fact, would be to see you at the station ten minutes before time.”

  “I should consider that the greatest evil of the two,” said Holmes sententiously. “But now we must sleep; we have every prospect of a heavy day.”

  It was one of Holmes’s characteristics that he could command sleep at will; unfortunately he could resist it at will also, and often have I had to remonstrate with him on the harm he must be doing himself, when, deeply engrossed in one of his strange or baffling problems, he would go for several consecutive days and nights without one wink of sleep.