Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches I

by Bill Peschel

  I was on hand to meet Holmes when he returned the next day. He had two men with him and he introduced them as Mr. Tartar and Mr. Neville Landless. I looked with interest at the suspected man, and then tried to have speech with Holmes. But he drew me apart.

  “These gentlemen,” said he, “are going at once to Mr. Crisparkle’s. They will remain there until tonight, when I expect to have need of them. You and I will return to your hotel.”

  On the way I told him about Mr. Datchery, and my suspicions about that person. He listened eagerly and said that he must have speech with Datchery without delay. When I told him of my belief that Datchery was the sister of Landless, in disguise, Holmes clapped me on the back, and exclaimed:

  “Excellent, Watson, excellent! Quite in your old vein!”

  I flushed with pride at this high praise from the great detective. He left me at the Crozier, while he went forth to find Datchery, and also, he said, to have a word with Mr. Jasper. I supposed that he was about to warn the choir-master of the fact that he was watched.

  Holmes returned to the inn in capital spirits.

  “We shall have our work cut out for us tonight, Watson,” said he, “and perhaps we will have another look at the gargoyles.”

  During dinner he would talk of nothing except bee-keeping. He conversed on this topic, indeed, until long after we had finished our meal, and while we sat smoking in the bar. About eleven, an ancient man, called Durdles, came in, looking for Mister Holmes.

  “Mr. Jasper he’s a-comin’ down the stair, sir,” said he.

  “Good!” exclaimed Holmes, “come, Watson, we must make haste. This may be a serious business. Now, Durdles!”

  The man called Durdles led us rapidly, and by back ways, to the churchyard. Here he showed us where we could stand, hidden behind a wall, and overlooking the tombs and gravestones. I could not imagine the object of this nocturnal visit. Holmes gave our guide some money, and he made off. While I stood there, looking fearfully about, I thought I saw the figures of two men behind a tomb, at some little distance. I whispered to Holmes, but he motioned for silence.

  “Hush!” he whispered, “Look there!”

  I looked where he indicated, and saw another figure enter the churchyard. He carried some object, which I soon guessed to be a lantern swathed in a dark wrapping. He unfolded a part of this wrapping when he reached one of the tombs, and I recognized by the light the dark features of Mr. Jasper. What could he be doing here at this hour? He commenced to fumble in his pockets, and presently produced a key with which he approached the door of the tomb. Soon it swung open, and Mr. Jasper seemed about to step inside. But he paused for an instant, and then fell back, with a fearful scream of terror. Once, twice, did that awful cry ring through the silent churchyard. At its second repetition a man stepped from the tomb.

  Then Jasper turned and ran frantically toward the cathedral.

  The two men whom I had previously noticed sprang from behind a monument and pursued him.

  “Quick!” said Holmes, “after him!”

  We both ran in the same direction as fast as we could. Hindered by the darkness and by our unfamiliarity with the ground, however, we made poor progress. The fleeing choirmaster and his two strange pursuers had already vanished into the gloom of the cathedral. When at last we entered the building the sound of hurrying footsteps far above us was all we could hear. Then, as we paused, there came another dreadful cry and then silence.

  Men with lights burst into the cathedral and led us up the staircase toward the tower. The twisting ascent was a long business, and I knew from Holmes’s face that he dreaded what we might find at the top. When we reached the top there lay the choir-master, Jasper, overpowered and bound by Mr. Tartar. The latter, then, had been one of the men I had seen behind the monument.

  “Where is Neville?” said Holmes quickly.

  Tartar shook his head and pointed below.

  “This man,” said he, indicating Jasper, “fought with him, and now I fear he really has a murder to answer for.”

  One of the men in the group which had followed us to the top stepped forward and looked down toward Jasper. It was the man whom we had seen step out of the tomb. I started when I saw that except for the wig and a few changes in his costume it was the same man who had called himself “Datchery.”

  Jasper gazed up at him, and his face was distorted with fear.

  “Ned! Ned!” he cried, and hid his face on the stone floor.

  “Yes, yer may hide yer face,” said old Durdles, trembling with rage, “yer thought yer had murdered him,—murdered Mr. Edwin Drood, yer own nephew. Yer hocussed him with liquor fixed with pizen, same’s yer tried to hocus Durdles, an’ tried to burn him up with quicklime in the tomb. But Durdles found him, Durdles did.”

  He advanced and would have ground the head of the prostrate choir-master under his heel, if some men had not held him back.

  * * * * *

  “Of course,” said Holmes to me on the train back to London next morning, “no one in Cloisterham thought of suspecting the eminently respectable Mr. Jasper. They started with the presumption of his innocence. He was a possible object of suspicion to me from the first. This was because he was one of the two men who last saw Edwin Drood. When we had our interview with him—Jasper, I mean—I recognized him as the frequenter of a disreputable opium den near the docks. You may remember that I have had occasion to look into such places in one other little problem we studied together. He was, then, leading a double life. That was as far as I had gone when I returned to London last night.

  “But while there I had a talk with Mr. Grewgious, as well as with poor young Landless and his sister. From them I learned that Jasper was in love with his nephew’s betrothed, and had, indeed, been persecuting her with his attentions, both before and after Edwin’s disappearance. From Mr. Grewgious’s manner I became convinced that he, at any rate, viewed Jasper with profound suspicion. But he was a lawyer, and very cautious; he evidently had no certain proof. Other hints which were dropped led me to suspect that he was not mourning the death of young Drood.

  “This was a curious thing—the whole crux to the mystery lay in it. I sat up all night, Watson, and consumed about four ounces of tobacco. It needed some thinking. Why, if Jasper had plotted murder, had he failed to carry it out? The opium, the opium, Watson—you know, yourself, that a confirmed opium-smoker is apt to fail, is almost sure to fail, in any great enterprise. He tries to nerve himself before the deed, and ten to one he merely stupefies himself, and the plot miscarries.

  “This morning I saw Mr. Grewgious again, and charged him in so many words with keeping secret the fact that Drood was alive. He admitted it, and told me that Drood was in Cloisterham masquerading as Datchery.”

  “But why should he do that?” I asked, “why did he let Neville rest under suspicion of murder?”

  “Because he had no certain proof of Jasper’s guilt,” said Holmes, “and he was trying to collect evidence against him. He was himself drugged when the attempt was made upon his life, he was rescued on that occasion by Durdles, and his disappearance was connived at by Mr. Grewgious. The lawyer further told me of the ring which Edwin Drood carried with him, and which the would-be murderer overlooked when he took the watch and pin. Then, it was only necessary for me to drop a hint to Jasper about the ring. That sent him back to the tomb, into which he supposed he had flung Drood’s body to be consumed by quicklime. There he found the living, and not the dead Edwin Drood, as you saw.

  “But the opium was really the clew to the whole thing—I went to see the old hag who keeps the den he frequented, and learned from her that he babbled endlessly about the murder in his dreams. He had arrived at a point where he could not distinguish between the real attempt at murder and a vision. He acted as in a vision when he tried to commit the deed, and so it failed.

  “As for your theory about Miss Landless being Datchery—well, my dear fellow, I am glad for the sake of that proper, clerical gentleman, Mr. Crisparkle, that his
intended wife has not been masquerading in trousers at the Cloisterham inns. Poor Landless—I shall never forgive myself for his death. His murderer will meet the fate he richly deserves, without a doubt.

  “And now, Watson, we were discussing bees. Have you ever heard of planting buckwheat near the hives? I am told that they do wonderfully on buckwheat.”

  * * * * *

  Most of us had listened to Bronson’s paper with some interest. Toward the end, even the piquet players stopped their game to listen. When it was finished, Lenox said:

  “Well, I’ve never read Edwin Drood, but I must say that you’ve made a pretty fair imitation of a Sherlock Holmes story.”

  “Yes,” Sayles agreed, “you got the machinery of Sherlock and Watson all right, anyhow. Is that really your theory of the outcome of the novel?”

  Bronson smiled.

  “It’s the one I believe in,—sometimes. It was Richard A. Proctor’s theory, of course.

  “He believed that Drood was not really killed, and that he returned in disguise as Datchery to watch his uncle. Andrew Lang held the same opinion, and so have some of the other critics. On the opposing side you have Mr. Cuming Walters and Sir Robertson Nicoll. They are sure that Edwin Drood was murdered, and that Datchery was Helena Landless.”

  “The Helena Landless theory evidently doesn’t appeal to you,—since you put it into the mouth of Watson,—the good old donkey!”

  “No, it doesn’t. It fascinates those who get the bee in their bonnet, however.”

  “I was glad to see one thing,” said Sayles, “and that was that you had Holmes wallop that obnoxious boy,—Deputy, I think he’s called? I hated him . . . But I don’t think I agree with you that Drood survived. I’ve read some of the comments on the book, read them at the time of that mock trial in London, and it seems to me that the evidence is too strong that Dickens meant the murder to succeed. He told so many people that Drood was dead. Proctor and Lang held, I believe, that it would make a better story to have Edwin turn up alive at the end.”

  “That’s where they were wrong,” observed Crerar, the short-story writer. “Undoubtedly Dickens intended his readers to puzzle over the question if Edwin was really dead, but it’s a mistake to suppose that it wouldn’t have been a perfectly good tale of mystery with Edwin safely murdered. Anyone less an artist than Dickens—all apologies to you, Bronson—might have needed that climax of the unmasking of Datchery and the return of the missing Edwin. But Dickens would have managed well enough without it.”

  “That was a corking good idea to send Sherlock Holmes after the criminal,” said Tilden, “did you invent that, Bronson?”

  “Not altogether, I’m afraid,” replied Bronson, filling his pipe. “Andrew Lang did something like that in a magazine—Longman’s I think. But he just had Watson and Sherlock talk it over in their rooms—they didn’t go out on the trail.”

  “What’s the use of it all?” broke in Forbes, from his corner, where he had been reading the Deutsche Rundschau all the evening. “What good is it, anyway? Dickens is dead. No one knows how he would have finished the story. He might have done it anyway he wanted. What’s the use gassing about it?”

  This nice, thick, wet blanket stifled the conversation effectively. There was a pause for half a minute. At the end of that time Sayles, who was fooling with a chafing dish, upset some blazing alcohol, and created a diversion. When it had been put out, the beer was brought in, and Sayles announced that the Welsh Rabbit was ripe.

  The Episode of the Bold Bad Undergraduate and the Postage Stamps

  A still further adventure of the immortal Holmes as chronicled by Watson the Half-Witted

  “P”

  The Granta of today, with its focus on new writing from around the world, would scarcely recognize its earlier incarnation that would publish this parody. The magazine was founded in 1889 at Cambridge University as an undergraduate periodical of the type that can be found at many schools. It took its name from the medieval form of the River Cam which runs through the city of Cambridge. Back then, Granta published many authors with Sherlockian connections, such as A.A. Milne (1882-1956), who was also Granta’s editor, who wrote “The Rape of Sherlock” for Vanity Fair in 1903, actor Eille Norwood (1861-1948), who portrayed Sherlock in many silent movies; author, critic, and artist G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) who wrote about Sherlock and even did illustrations for an edition of the stories that were never to be, and Bertram Robinson (1870-1907), who helped Conan Doyle plot The Hound of the Baskervilles. Its original editor was R.C. Lehmann (1856-1929), the author of the “Picklock Holes” stories (reprinted in The Early Punch Parodies of Sherlock Holmes). Although Conan Doyle never contributed, he did turn up at a celebratory dinner with many of Punch’s writers in 1892 to mark Granta’s hundredth issue. The identity of “P” could not be determined.

  It was in the year 1897 that my friend Holmes and I were staying for a few days in one of our great University towns. For obvious reasons, I cannot give such particulars as would enable my readers to identify it: myself I was anxious to disguise it under the subtle pseudonym of Camford or Oxbridge, but Holmes would have it that there may be some who are so astute as to pierce even this.

  I had taken my friend down to recuperate from the ill effects of indiscriminate injections of cocaine, ink, morphia, boot polish, and ginger beer, extending over a period of some weeks in which no particularly brutal murders had occurred to absorb his interest. It was one morning, which I shall never forget, when our door burst open and in staggered three disheveled men of middle age, dressed in cap and gown.

  “Good morning, Mr Hubert Tiddlecombe,” said my friend to the middle one of the three, who had spun round after barking his shin violently against a mass of surgical instruments which I had left on the floor, “you are, I perceive, somewhat agitated!”

  “How did you know my name?” demanded our visitor in amazement.

  “When a man comes away with his coat put on inside out,” explained my friend sweetly, “I gather that he came away in some agitation, and when his tailor has inserted his name on the inside of the coat collar, the further deduction is obvious. But your business must indeed be urgent to induce you to come away in the middle of your breakfast!”

  My face must have echoed the look of blank surprise on our visitor’s, for Holmes hastened to explain: “If you will observe, my dear Watson, you will perceive a napkin still tucked in the front of his collar. A glance at the clock told me that it would be breakfast and not tea from which he made this hurried departure. The reasoning is as simple,” he added, “as my friend Watson here.”

  “You are right,” said our visitor when he had somewhat recovered from his amazement at my friend’s remarkable perspicacity, “my visit was very hurried. Such a calamity overhangs the old College of St Timothy” (this was not the name he used) “as has never threatened before.”

  “Half a minute,” cried my friend, and extended a long arm across the room to reach down the letter T of his encyclopedia of reference:

  “I have here Twist the forger, Tancred the great murderer, Toker the second most dangerous man in England, but I don’t seem to see your name here. Perhaps this is your first entrance into the criminal world?”

  “You mistake, sir,” murmured our visitor, flushing.

  Holmes had a simple method of dealing with such an emergency: “Watson’s fault!” he ejaculated, and turned the conversation. “Pray go on with your most interesting story.”

  “A terrible scandal,” said our visitor, pulling himself together. “I am, as you may be aware, senior tutor at St Timothy’s. An undergraduate under my charge has had stolen from his room stamps to the value of over a shilling, and when I tell you that the suspected culprit is the heir of one of the noblest families in all England—no other than—” (here he lowered his voice to a whisper).

  At this point Holmes rose with his finger placed expressively on his lips, and moved across to me. Gently propelling me across the room with his knee in the smal
l of my back, he muffled my head in the folds of the curtain. By the time I had extricated myself, I only heard Holmes bidding our visitor goodbye.

  “A most interesting case,” he said, taking off his coat and waistcoat and wrapping an old carpet round his head, at the same time producing the remainder of a cigar from his pocket. “Can you spare a couple of days to investigate this with me?”

  “My dear Holmes,” I cried warmly, “I shall be delighted to place myself at your disposal for a week or more. Now I come to think of it, I have a patient who has been waiting for me since Saturday last; but what does that matter?”

  “Capital, my dear friend,” said Holmes, clasping me by the hand. “Now keep cool!” So saying he plunged into the bedroom. Within half a minute he emerged skilfully disguised as a drain pipe, so that even I could hardly recognise him. “In this,” he explained, “I intend to lean up against the wall and await developments.”

  It was some ten hours later that I saw him again, when he returned to our rooms displaying proudly a battered boot and a cigarette end. “Be ready to start with me tonight,” he bade me. “If things turn out as I expect I already have the secret of this matter at my disposal. You had better take your revolver.”

  “Certainly,” I said hastily, “I will take at least three.”