Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches I

by Bill Peschel

  “A very plausible theory,” observed Holmes, with a smile, “I congratulate you, John.”

  “But what does S.S.S. stand for?” I asked.

  “Possibly Society for the Suppression of Side,” suggested Holmes wriggling in his chair, as was his habit when in high spirits. “Many billiard players think the ordinary amateur too much inclined to fancy shots instead of playing a plain stroke and building up his game on simple lines. Foreigners, I understand, are purists in sport as in language.

  “But let me see those cues, John. I suppose you brought them round on purpose to be examined?”

  “Yes, sir,” said John. “I have been to the Match-room to fetch the cues back to the club, and I thought as how you’d like to look at them.”

  Sherlock Holmes had the tips of the gentlemen’s cues under his powerful glass. The Marker watched him intently. At last Holmes turned from his examination.

  “Your theory won’t fit the facts, John, I am sorry to inform you,” he said. “Your members have lost their games through carelessness, pretentiousness, and gross neglect of opportunities offered. For instance, the chalk used by all of them I find to be wretched stuff that would not grip the ball in any circumstance.”

  “It’s Spinks chalk, sir,” said John, “the best chalk!”

  “It is a cheap colourable imitation,” said Holmes, “but not the genuine article. Take my glass and look for yourself. You see it is a common white chalk doctored with a green colouring. Remember the billiard proverb, John, ‘All is not Spinks chalk that is green.’ Then your friends have each of them attempted to win admiration and applause by screwing, using side unnecessarily, and other fancy strokes, instead of playing a plain game. Result: the leathers of their two-piece tips have come apart and are too loose to permit of accurate striking. Striking with such tips is not merely a tempting of providence, it is deliberate suicide. These people could do nothing other than fail.”

  “But what about S.S.S. and the three grey pellets?” said John. “And the foreigners from Soho?”

  “See!” said Holmes, flipping the tip off one of the cues with his fingers and popping one of the pellets into his mouth.

  “For God’s sake, Holmes, stop!” I shouted, starting forward. “You may be poisoned!”

  “Think of Hove, Mr. Holmes,” cried John.

  But Holmes smiled, and, taking the pellet from his mouth, placed it flat side down on the top of the cue, pressed it with his thumb, and handed the cue to the Marker. “I have no billiard balls here,” he said, “but try that tip on those dumb-bells, John, and see if it holds.”

  John struck the heavy dumb-bells a blow. Then he gazed with wonder at the tip. “Why, sir, it’s as firm as a rock, and just newly on! Is it a real tip?”

  “A good tip for you, my lad,” said Holmes. “And now, Watson, pass me that street map, please. And those envelopes. You will note all three envelopes are addressed in a careful business hand by the same clerk; and, therefore, from the same place. And also the paper is of a high-class quality, obviously from a good house. Now, looking at the map, we find that Greek Street, Soho, runs from Shaftesbury Avenue to Soho Square; and it is more likely that we shall find the business house whence those envelopes emanated in one of these two respectable thoroughfares rather than in Greek Street or the other low quarters of Soho.

  “But Greek Street post office is at the Soho Square end of the street and somewhat out of the way for Shaftesbury Avenue people. That limits our search, therefore, to the Square, according to my hypothesis, and there may be some firm in that Square that is interested in billiards and that recommends Spinks Self-Sticker—a tip in one piece that you can put on in one second and use immediately. Each of these envelopes contained a sample Spinks Self-Sticker tip and a gentle and kindly hint from this firm, which, had your friends taken, would probably have put them where you expected them to be in the tournament. One cannot be too careful of one’s tip. And this tip made in one piece is the only tip that will withstand excessive side. But never mind, John.

  “The club’s honour is still safe. I play my own tie to-day, and I play with the new tip, and shall win with it.”

  “I believe you will, Mr. Holmes,” said John, rising to go. “And I was sure you would solve the mystery of the three grey pellets, sir.”

  “But why did those gentlemen all go abroad, Holmes?” I asked.

  “Where would you go if you had make an ass of yourself, Watson?”

  The acumen of my friend was a source of never-ending wonder to me.

  Sherlock Holmes and the Drood Mystery

  Edmund L. Pearson

  One of the literary world’s greatest mysteries was launched on June 9, 1870, when Charles Dickens died with the unfinished manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood left on his desk. He was only halfway through the book, and had told the rest of the story to his friend, and ever since fans and scholars have debated if Dickens would have finished the story that way. Some have even tried their hands at finishing it, a task which has been pursued to the present day.

  Not surprisingly, Conan Doyle had an interest in the Drood case. As a budding writer with a medical practice in Portsmouth, he read a paper to the local literary society giving his solution. Later, the confirmed Spiritualist would report that from the great beyond, Dickens had asked him to finish Drood. “I shall be honored, Mr. Dickens,” Conan Doyle told him. “Charles, if you please,” Dickens replied. “We like friends to be friends.”

  Several writers have borrowed Sherlock to find the killer, including Edmund L. Pearson (1880-1937), librarian and true-crime aficionado, whose “The Adventure of the Lost Manuscripts” appears in the 1911 chapter. This chapter from The Secret Book (1914) was published in the Boston Evening Transcript of April 2 and republished as a pamphlet by Aspen Press in 1973. It opens with the meeting of the eight members of the Hell-Fire Club, a group dedicated to nothing more innocuous than getting together and telling stories about books. It should be noted that, except for the presence of Holmes and Watson, this retelling of Drood hews closely to Dickens’ story, as discussed in the footnotes.

  “Perhaps,” remarked Bronson, mildly, “I may go on, now.”

  A week had elapsed, and this was another meeting of the Club.

  “Go right ahead,” said Tilden, heartily, “you won’t disturb us a bit.”

  Tilden and Lenox were playing piquet in a corner.

  “But I,” plaintively exclaimed Bronson, “have prepared a paper for this evening.”

  “That’s right,” said Sayles, who was the secretary, “it was Bronson’s evening.”

  Ryerson made a satirical salaam and folded up his papers.

  “Say no more,” said he, “I withdraw.”

  “Of course,” Bronson continued, “I wouldn’t—”

  “Don’t apologize. It will only make matters worse. I am already offended beyond repair.”

  Pretending to be in a huff, he commenced to poke the fire.

  “Last winter,” began Bronson again, “I read The Mystery of Edwin Drood for the first time. How many of you have read it?”

  Only three out of the eight of us had done so.

  “That’s the usual proportion. You fight shy of it because it isn’t finished, I suppose. I had always let it alone for that reason, but I find that I had missed a great deal of fun. Of course, I became an advocate of one of the theories as to its solution—everyone does—and I have put it into the guise of a Sherlock Holmes story. Everybody feels free to get gay with Sherlock, so I needn’t apologize. Here it is.” So saying, Bronson read

  SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE DROOD MYSTERY

  “Watson,” said Sherlock Holmes, beaming at me across the breakfast table, “can you decipher character from handwriting?”

  He held an envelope toward me as he spoke. I took the envelope and glanced at the superscription. It was addressed to Holmes at our lodging in Baker Street. I tried to remember something of an article I had read on the subject of handwriting.

  “The
writer of this,” I said, “was a modest self-effacing person, and one of wide knowledge, and considerable ability. He—”

  “Excellent, Watson, excellent! Really, you outdo yourself. Your reading is quite Watsonian, in fact. I fear, however, you are a bit astray as to his modesty, knowledge, and so on. As a matter of fact, this letter is from Mr. Thomas Sapsea.”

  “The famous Mayor of Cloisterham?”

  “Quite so. And for pomposity, egregious conceit coupled with downright ignorance, he has not his peer in England. So you did not score a bull’s-eye there, my dear fellow.”

  “But what does he want of you?” I asked, willing to change the subject. “He isn’t going to engage you to solve the mystery of Edwin Drood?”

  “That is precisely what he is doing. He is all at sea in the matter. Come, what do you say to a run down to Cloisterham? We can look into this matter to oblige the mayor, and take a ramble through the cathedral. I’m told they have some very fine gargoyles.”

  An hour later, we were seated in a train for Cloisterham. Holmes had been looking through the morning papers. Now he threw them aside, and turned to me.

  “Have you followed this Drood case?” he asked.

  I replied that I had read many of the accounts and some of the speculations on the subject.

  “I have not followed it as attentively as I should have liked,” he returned, “the recent little affair of Colonel Raspopoff and the czarina’s rubies has occupied me thoroughly of late. Suppose you go over the chief facts—it will help clear my mind.”

  “The facts are these,” I said. “Edwin Drood, a young engineer about to leave for Egypt, had two attractions in Cloisterham. One was his affianced wife—a young school-girl named Miss Rosa Bud. The other was his devoted uncle and guardian, Mr. John Jasper. The latter is choir-master of the cathedral. There were, it seems, two clouds over his happiness. One of these was the fact that his betrothal to Miss Bud—an arrangement made by their respective parents while Edwin and Rosa were small children—was not wholly to the liking of either of the principals. They had, indeed, come to an agreement, only a few days before Edwin Drood’s disappearance, to terminate the engagement. They parted, it is believed, on friendly, if not affectionate terms.

  “The other difficulty lay in the presence, in Cloisterham, of one Neville Landless—a young student from Ceylon. Landless has, it seems, a strain of Oriental blood in his nature—he is of dark complexion and fiery temper. Actual quarrels had occurred between the two, with some violence on Landless’s part.

  To restore them to friendship, however, Mr. Jasper, the uncle of Edwin, arranged for a dinner in his rooms on Christmas Eve, at which they were to be the only guests. The dinner took place, everything passed off amicably, and the two left, together, late in the evening, to walk to the river and view the great storm which was raging. After that they parted—according to Landless—and Drood has never been seen again. His uncle raised the alarm next morning. Landless was detained, and questioned, while a thorough search was made for the body of Drood. Beyond the discovery of his watch and pin in the weir, nothing has been found. Landless had to be released for lack of evidence, but the feeling in Cloisterham was so strong against him that he had to leave. He is thought to be in London.”

  “H’m,” remarked Holmes, “who found the watch and pin?”

  “A Mr. Crisparkle, minor canon of the cathedral. Landless was living in his house and reading with him. I may add that Landless has a sister—Miss Helena—who has also come to London.”

  “H’m,” said Holmes. “Well, here we are at Cloisterham. We can now pursue our investigations on the spot. We will go to see Mr. Sapsea, the mayor.”

  Mr. Sapsea proved to be exactly the pompous Tory jackass that Holmes had described. He had never been out of Cloisterham, and his firm conviction of the hopeless inferiority of all the world outside England was so thoroughly provincial that I suspected him of some connection with the Saturday Review. He was strong in his belief that young Neville Landless had murdered Drood and thrown his body into the river. And his strongest reason for this belief lay in the complexion of Landless.

  “It is un-English, Mr. Holmes,” said he, “it’s un-English and when I see a face that is un-English, I know what to suspect of that face.”

  “Quite so,” said Holmes, “I suppose that everything was done to find the body?”

  “Everything, Mr. Holmes, everything that my—er—knowledge of the world could possibly suggest. Mr. Jasper was unwearied in his efforts. In fact he was worn out by his exertions.”

  “No doubt his grief at the disappearance of his nephew had something to do with that, as well.”

  “No doubt of it at all.”

  “Landless, I hear, is in London?”

  “So I understand, sir, so I understand. But Mr. Crisparkle, his former tutor, has given me—in my capacity as magistrate—assurances that he can be produced at any moment. At present he can be found by applying to Mr. Grewgious at Staple Inn. Mr. Grewgious is a guardian of the young lady to whom Edwin Drood was betrothed.”

  Holmes made a note of Mr. Grewgious’s name and address on his shirt-cuff. We then rose to depart.

  “I see,” said the mayor, “that you are thinking of paying a call on this un-English person in London. That is where you will find a solution of the mystery, I can assure you.”

  “It is probable that I shall have occasion to run up to London this evening,” said Holmes, “though I believe that Dr. Watson and I will stroll about Cloisterham a bit, first. I want to inspect your gargoyles.”

  When we were outside, Holmes’s earliest remark was, “But I think we had better have a little chat with Mr. John Jasper.”

  We were directed to Mr. Jasper’s rooms in the gatehouse by a singularly obnoxious boy, whom we found in the street, flinging stones at the passers-by.

  “That’s Jarsper’s,” said he, pointing for an instant toward the arch, and then proceeding with his malevolent pastime.

  “Thanks,” said Holmes, shortly, giving the imp sixpence, “here’s something for you. And here,” he continued, reversing the boy over his knee, and giving him a sound spanking, “here is something else for you.”

  On inquiry it appeared that Mr. Jasper was at home. He would see us, said the landlady, but she added that “the poor gentleman was not well.”

  “Indeed?” said Holmes. “What’s the matter?”

  “He do be in a sort of daze, I think.”

  “Well, well, this gentleman is a doctor—perhaps he can prescribe.”

  And with that we went up to Mr. Jasper’s room. That gentleman had recovered, apparently, from his daze, for we heard him chanting choir music as we stood outside the door. Holmes, whose love for music is very keen, was enraptured, and insisted on standing for several moments while the low and sweet tones of the choir-master’s voice, accompanied by the notes of a piano, floated out to us. At last we knocked and the singer admitted us.

  Mr. Jasper was a dark-whiskered gentleman who dwelt in a gloomy sort of room. He had, himself, a gloomy and reserved manner. Holmes introduced us both, and informed Mr. Jasper that he was in Cloisterham at the request of the mayor, Mr. Sapsea, to look up some points in connection with the disappearance of Edwin Drood.

  “Meaning his murder?” inquired Mr. Jasper.

  “The word I used,” said Holmes, “was disappearance.”

  “The word I used,” returned the other, “was murder. But I must beg to be excused from all discussion of the death of my dear boy. I have taken a vow to discuss it with no one, until the assassin is brought to justice.”

  “I hope,” said Holmes, “that if there is an assassin, I may have the good fortune—”

  “I hope so, too. Meanwhile—” and Mr. Jasper moved toward the door, as if to usher us out. Holmes tried to question him about the events of Christmas Eve, prior to the young man’s disappearance, but Mr. Jasper said that he had made his statement before the mayor, and had nothing to add.

  “Surely,�
� said Holmes, “I have seen you before, Mr. Jasper?”

  Mr. Jasper thought not.

  “I feel almost positive,” said my friend, “in London, now—you come to London at times, I take it?”

  Perhaps. But he had never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Holmes. He was quite sure. Quite.

  We departed, and as we strolled down the High Street, Holmes asked me if I would object to spending the night in Cloisterham.

  “I shall rejoin you to-morrow,” he added.

  “But are you going away?”

  “Yes, to London. I am going to follow Mr. Sapsea’s advice,” he added with a smile.

  “I thought you wanted to see the gargoyles,” I objected.

  “So I did. And do you know, my dear fellow, I believe I have seen one of the most interesting of them all.”

  Holmes’s remark was entirely enigmatic to me, and while I was still puzzling over it, he waved his hand and entered the omnibus for the station.

  Left thus alone in Cloisterham, I went to the Crozier, where I secured a room for the night. In passing the gatehouse I noticed a curious-looking man with his hat in his hand, looking attentively at Mr. Jasper’s window. He had, I observed, white hair, which streamed in the wind. Later in the afternoon, having dropped in at the cathedral to hear the vesper service, I saw the same man. He was watching the choirmaster, Mr. Jasper, with profound scrutiny. This made me uneasy. How did I know but what another plot, like that which had been hatched against the nephew, was on foot against the uncle?

  Seated in the bar at the Crozier after dinner, I found him again. He willingly entered into conversation with me, and announced himself as one Mr. Datchery—“an idle buffer, living on his means.” He was interested in the Drood case and very willing to talk about it. I drew him out as much as I could, and then retired to my room to think it over.

  That he wore a disguise seemed clear to me. His hair looked like a wig. If he was in disguise, who could he be? I thought over all the persons in any way connected with the case, when suddenly the name of Miss Helena Landless occurred to me. Instantly, I was convinced that it must be she. The very improbability of the idea fascinated me from the start. What more unlikely than that a young Ceylonese girl should pass herself off for an elderly English man, sitting in bars and drinking elderly English drinks? The improbable is usually true, I remembered. Then I recalled that I had heard that Miss Landless, as a child, used to dress up as a boy. I was now positive about the matter.