Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches I

by Bill Peschel

  He went on to say that the police had no clue, and in despair he had come to Keys, a genuine acknowledgment of the Great Detective’s marvellous powers, if a somewhat tardy one.

  Keys closely questioned him as to anything unusual having been noticed in the vicinity, and the inspector said that one of his men had seen thirteen cabs passing shortly before the explosion.

  “Arrest the President and all the Officers of the Bakers’ and Pastrycooks’ Union at once,” said Keys. Greatly wondering, but willing to catch at any straw, the Inspector hastened to obey him.

  One evening, some little time after the conviction and subsequent confession of the men whose arrest Keys had ordered, the Inspector dropped in, he said, for a smoke, but it was easy to see that he was dying to ask a question, so presently Keys said, “Well, Morebusiness, you want to know how I did it.”

  The Inspector nodded an eager assent.

  “Well, my friend, it was quite simple. Dynamite is heavy stuff, and in such a quantity could not have been carried by hand without exciting suspicion, but what more harmless looking than a four-wheeler, and thirteen of them—isn’t that a baker’s dozen!”

  VI. The Adventure of Mr. Santa Claus

  It was Christmas Eve. Outside the snow was falling heavily, but we were comfortably seated in front of a cheerful fire, in our dining-room in Butcher Street. With strange illogicality Keys was playing “Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” on the comb, for surely one could neither rest nor be merry with that beastly row going on, but it was only another proof of the extraordinary incongruity of that marvellous man. Laying down the comb—thank goodness—he turned to me. “Whenson, when I was a little boy I believed in Santa Claus, and stockings, and—”

  A knock at the door interrupted these remarkable confidences, which were revealing the Great Man in a light so foreign to his usual taciturnity.

  “Come in,” he said. The door opened slowly, and a strange figure appeared before our astonished eyes. It was a small boy, hardly reaching to the handle of the door, and his little cap was covered with snow.

  “Ah, ha!” said Keys, in his most impressive manner, “you have just come in from outside.” At the evidence of such uncanny powers of deduction the little creature started to run away.

  “Don’t be frightened, my little man. I knew it from the coagulated moisture collected on your cap, but little boys must learn to be polite. Lift your lid.” He did so, scattering the Christmas largesse all over our priceless Bokhara rug.

  “Now come over here and tell us your troubles,” said Keys kindly.

  In the genial warmth of the roaring fire, his damp clothes steaming like a hot toddy—a strange concoction of the ancient Romans—his little lips lisped a tale of a strangeness such as had surely never been told before, unless I may be allowed to excerpt some stories of mine which have been published by the well-known firm of Brown & Younger.

  “Please sir. I writted a letter to Mr. Sandy Claws Esq., to bring me a hairy-plain for Christmas all painted red all over, and the Post-Offis they sent the letter back and says as how they carn’t find ’im. I knowed you could find anybody, so I come to you.”

  “Quite right, my little man,” and Keys’ keen eyes gleamed with professional pride. “You go straight home to bed and to sleep, and I will see that Mr. Santa Claus calls and you will find the red aeroplane when you wake up in the morning.”

  Quite satisfied the diminutive client departed, and Keys picked up the comb again—I found I had an important engagement and departed also.

  It was close on one o’clock in the morning when I returned, and Keys was still sitting before the fire. With unusual geniality he got up and held out his hand. “Merry Christmas, Whenson.” We shook hands. Feeling something sticky, I looked at my right hand, and saw some red paint on it, and then I noticed some white fluff adhering to the front of his coat.

  Keys often assumed disguises, but—as Santa Claus!—well, I forgave him the comb.

  The Indiscretions of Dr. Carstairs

  “A. De O.”

  One of the benefits of self-publishing these stories is that the editor, who answers to no one but his conscience and his wife, can put in material of interest to the reader but outside the scope of the book. Such is the case here. This is neither a parody or a pastiche, but an excerpt about Dr. Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle’s teacher at the University of Edinburgh and one of the inspirations for Sherlock Holmes! It was as house-surgeon, a role Carstairs describes below, that Conan Doyle gathered material for his stories.

  This was found in The Indiscretions of Dr. Carstairs, a collection of stories drawn from the doctor’s life. Dr. Carstairs is a pseudonym for what a contemporary account called a “well-known West End physician,” and “A. De O.” was a friend entrusted with editing the collection after the doctor’s death. These stories were favorably compared with Conan Doyle’s own collection of medical stories, Round the Red Lamp.

  This excerpt is from the introduction. “A. De O.” and his friends dined at Richard Carstairs’ home. The talk turned to stories, and doctors who were also authors. While Carstairs was known as one of the best storytellers in London, one of his guests wondered if he could write them as well. After all, he said, “telling a story is to writing it what a sketch is to a picture, and I’m afraid a good deal of their essence would evaporate by the time Dick wrote out his tales as he tells them to us.” Dr. Carstairs thinks otherwise.

  “Of course,” said Carstairs, “all you fellows think I’m a damned old fool without any brains. You fancy that because I’m a drudging old family Aesculapius, I couldn’t write a book if I wanted to. Let me tell you, a doctor with a wide miscellaneous practice sees more life, more real life, down to the bone and with the red juice in it than most of the clever literary beggars who write about it. Why, if you come to look at it with a straight eye you’ll see it must be so. We get our stethoscopes on the real man or woman, there’s nothing kept back on us. We may make mistakes in the diagnosis, but we get the naked unveiled symptoms of both soul and body. Remember, that the man who comes to a doctor is bound to tell everything as it is; no embroidery, no withholding. What he knows, we know; and often a great deal more that he betrays without his being aware of it. We’ve got to minister to minds diseased as well as to broken bodies. And only a physician realizes how inextricably one is bound up with the other—Siamese twins that die if you try to sever them.”

  Carstairs paused for a moment; I had been sitting back in my chair listening like the rest absolutely motionless under the spell of the deep voice and earnest shining eyes. Clearly, Dick was speaking from his heart. The pause broke the spell, and Williams [the butler—ed.] moved towards the table. We had finished dinner and Carstairs turned to the man.

  “We’ll have our coffee and cigars in my room. Let’s move in there now if you are all ready.”

  As coffee was handed round, Carstairs went back to his theme, but in a different mood.

  “Yes, I always think the doctor is the true man of letters if only he’d set down what he knows. Unfortunately we are a busy people, with no time to make books out of our store of experience. We spend our lives in gaining it, and never think of preserving it for others to enjoy.”

  “Come,” said Miller, “there are lots of doctors who have written. We are the richer for their works and their neglect of their patients. There’s Holmes and Maugham and Osler, and wasn’t Trollope a doctor?”

  “And Erasmus Darwin,” said I, “and Paracelsus and Keats—in his way, and old Brown, and many others.”

  “What about Conan Doyle?” said Carteret, “he’s the fella for me.”

  “Yes, begad,” said Carstairs. “Look at Sherlock Holmes; that was something to do. Doyle’s made a personality, a man, a character; created him. He’s as real as Hamlet or Absalom; now that’s what I should like to be able to do, to give actual life to a character, and launch him on the world.”

  Dick had no children, and I always knew it was a keen grief and disappointment to him no less t
han to his wife.

  “Well,” said Thorpe, “we know where he got Sherlock Holmes from—the old surgeon he worked with up in Scotland. He had all Holmes’s tricks—telling you what you had for breakfast on the second Sunday in Advent if he got so much as a look at your evening shoes.”

  “H’m,” said Carstairs, “do you fellows know that I worked with Joe Bell, the prototype of Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Did you, Dick; tell us about him.”

  “He was the most popular teacher of clinical surgery at Edinburgh. He used to visit the wards most days and lecture to a mob of students on the cases as they lay in bed, but the real field-days were Mondays at twelve, when he saw the out-patients in his operating theatre. The place was packed; every fellow rushing for the front row. Old Joe would come in and sit on a chair in the little arena, then he’d take a clean towel and stretch it tight across his knees, smoothing it well out and tucking it under his legs; and when he’d gone solemnly through that ceremony, he’d turn to his house-surgeon and say:

  “‘Well, Mr. Atkinson; what have you got outside?’ And in would come the first patient. Bell’s clerks and dressers always used to sit down in the arena in the order in which they would be called; the first man would take his stand by Bell’s side. I shall never forget my first appearance on that stage. There were at least a hundred men in the theatre that day, and a patient was brought in and seated opposite Joe.

  “‘Now, Mr. Carstairs, what’s the matter with this man?’

  “I looked and gaped at the fellow, but beyond his being rather shabbily dressed, there was nothing very obvious. I took so long that the students began to shuffle their feet sarcastically. At last I managed to give vent to a sapient ‘I don’t know, sir.’ The whole theatre cheered derisively. Joe smiled encouragingly. ‘But it is quite obvious, Mr Carstairs, look at his right leg.’

  “I could only see a broken patch over the knee, and said so.

  “‘Quite right, but how did he get that?’

  “‘Fell down, sir.’

  “‘I think not,’ said Joe, ‘look again carefully.’

  “I looked in vain and confessed as much. Joe took pity on me.

  “‘This is Monday morning. On Saturday night the man got drunk, as he is entitled to, in exercise of his inalienable rights as a citizen and a wage earner. On Saturday night it was raining very hard and he got wet; he went home and sat in front of the fire; being drunk he didn’t notice that his trousers were singeing, and that he actually burned a hole in the skin over his patella. Didn’t you notice the fact that he walked in lame? and kept his right leg stiff and straight?

  “‘Now, then, my man, pull up your right trouser leg, and let us have a look.’

  “Sure enough there it was, a bad burn all septic and inflamed.

  “I turned to Joe with my mouth open. He smiled at my bewilderment and said to the patient:

  “‘Is that right, my man?’

  “‘That’s just aboot richt, sir.’

  “Everybody cheered Joe, and I went crestfallen to my seat.”

  “By Gad, I like that,” said Carteret, “just one more, Dick.”

  “Yes, we must have another, please,” called Miller, who had been listening keenly.

  “Well, if you aren’t bored then,” Carstairs went on: “I remember a man taking his seat on the chair one day, who had come in out of his turn by some mistake. The house-surgeon had ordered into the theatre a case of spinal injury; but this man had slipped in first.

  “‘What’s this case, Atkinson?’ said Joe.

  “‘Injury to the lumbar vertebra, sir.’

  “‘Let’s have a look; take your things off my man.’

  “The man stood up to do as he was told; he began to take his coat off.

  “‘Stop,’ cried Joe. Turning to me he asked:

  “‘What’s the matter with this man, Carstairs?’

  “‘Spinal injury, sir,’ said I, pat as you please, taking my tip from Atkinson.

  “‘That as may be, but what else?’

  “That stumped me.

  “‘Don’t know, sir.’

  “‘Don’t know; don’t know! Why just look at him, look at his position! Do you take off your coat like that? Look at his right arm!!’

  “To me he looked merely an infernally clumsy labourer. I grew scarlet, and the fellows all sniggered at my discomfiture.

  “‘Help him off with his coat; now his shirt; now look and see if he hasn’t got an axillary abscess.’

  “It was there right enough, of course.

  “‘Now my man, what about your back?’ said Joe.

  “‘Please, sir, it’s the next man that’s got a bad back, mine’s all right.’

  “Joe joined in the roar of laughter that went up. I rather think Atkinson wanted to injure the man’s spine for him to get even.”

  1914

  Nobody knew it at the time, but the Edwardian age was drawing to a close. It was the last spring and summer before the cataclysm that would sweep up Conan Doyle, his family, and his friends, and when it settled it would be—despite Holmes’ reassurance in “His Last Bow”—a different world. Conan Doyle, too, would be altered as well, knocked by family losses onto the path of his last, great crusade.

  Until then, his life moved along his familiar paths: rounds of public-spirited speeches, broken by travel, sports, family, and spurts of writing. He agitated on behalf of divorce law reform, the treatment of Portuguese political prisoners, the proposed Channel tunnel between England and France, and a proposed bill to ban the import of skins and plumage for women’s hats. He also began work on The Valley of Fear, another Holmes novel that would be published later this year.

  The possibility of a European war occupied his mind, particularly how it would play out with advancements in submarine technology. Believing that Britain could be blockaded into starvation, he promoted the channel tunnel in his speeches and wrote Danger!, a polemic within a story about the subjugation of Britain by an unnamed power blockading its ports.

  In May, Conan Doyle and Jean embarked on a six-week visit to the United States and Canada. The Canadian government had invited them to Jasper Park in the Northern Rockies on a publicity tour of that remote part of the country. They visited at least 17 cities, crossed the Great Lakes by steamer, and experienced Niagara Falls and Coney Island. Conan Doyle watched and participated in baseball games, was locked in a cell and sat in the electric chair at Sing Sing, visited an Indian school, attended dinners, and spoke on Canadian literature and Oscar Wilde’s plays. This exhausting schedule was broken only by a week of rest at Jasper.

  He also gave interviews, once of which landed him in hot water again with the suffragists. His observation that their violent activities might incur a violent response in turn was portrayed in print as advocating lynching them. He hastily issued a statement clarifying his views, and resolved to be more careful talking with the press.

  At the end of six weeks, he and his wife were ready to come home. He was physically exhausted, but like Holmes, he was hungering for work to occupy his mind. As for Canada, “Their clubs & papers bore me, everything is raw. There is no history (save in the East) and Nature is not kind.”

  While they were overseas, Europe moved closer towards war. Just days before the Conan Doyles sailed for home, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated. Two weeks after they arrived home to Windlesham, war was declared on June 28.

  Conan Doyle threw himself into war work as if he were a one-man army and government. He volunteered to serve as a soldier. Failing that, he organized a home guard, publicized it, and sent guidelines to towns across Britain that asked for his advice. The government shut down his plan in favor of its own scheme, and a few months later, he enlisted as a private in the Sixth Royal Sussex Volunteer Regiment. Most evenings, he could be seen drilling with the other soldiers, standing guard duty, or marching in the rain. At 55, he displayed the energy of a man half his age.

  His public persona shifted to the war
effort as well. He addressed recruiting meetings. He wrote letters filled with advice on prosecuting the war, such as adding inflatable rubber lifeboats to ships. He joined the country’s greatest writers (John Galsworthy, G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and others) to work for the government writing propaganda. As The Valley of Fear was serialized in The Strand, its author rapidly turned out The World-War Conspiracy, The Great German Plot, and other manifestos and articles. As he did with the Boer War, he began writing a history of British participation in the Great War.

  Soon after the war began, the family suffered its first loss. Jean’s brother, Malcolm Leckie, was mortally wounded at the first big battle at Mons. By the end of the year, as he prepared a lecture on “The Great Battles of the War,” Conan Doyle realized that the war was going to be long and bitterly fought. His confidence in the cause was not diminished, but with his brother, Innes, and his son, Kingsley, entering the fight, he had to worry about what it would cost.

  Publications: Holmes: The Valley of Fear (Sept. 1914-May 1915). Also: The Works of A. Conan Doyle, “Danger!” (July); “To Arms” (Sept. 1914, pamphlet).

  The Adventure of the Strange Sound

  Murray Marble

  The difficulty any writer of Holmes stories must overcome is to make the solution worthy of the master. This story from The Good Companion Chess Problem Club in 1914 succeeds by inserting a clever chess problem whose solution invokes a little-known subset of the pawn promotion rule. Non-chess players should understand that when a player’s pawn is moved to the farthest rank, as black’s pawn threatens to do in the story, it can be exchanged for a black queen, rook or knight (the latter identified as S in the notation). At least, that’s the rule today. Back then, chess players had another option. Don’t worry if you can’t figure it out, an explanation can be found at the end of the story.