The Early Punch Parodies of Sherlock Holmes

by Bill Peschel

  One day, while Holes and I were sitting at meat-tea, a meal which in my bereaved condition I had recently substituted for dinner, I noticed that my friend’s face wore a more than usually keen and alert look. His mouth was twitching and his fingers were spread out with their tips meditatively laid together, as was his habit when his brain was particularly active. Some fried eggs and bacon lay before him on one plate; on another was a piece of bread thickly spread with strawberry jam; on a third reposed a square of dry toast, over which had been imposed a thick layer of potted shrimps; at his side steamed a cup of tea, but he had taken neither bite or sup. At last the silence grew oppressive and I ventured to break it.

  “Holes,” I said pleadingly, “what are you thinking about?”

  He did not answer me.

  “Holes,” I began again, “three cruel murders and two mysterious disappearances are reported in this very evening’s papers.”

  Even that did not rouse him.

  “Holes,” I continued, making my words as impressive as possible, “the police are said to have clues, and Scotland Yard is confident that—”

  With a sudden and terrific vehemence the unparalleled investigator sprang to his feet: never have I seen him so angry.

  “Scotland Yard!” he shouted in tones of contempt, so withering that the very cups and saucers seemed to cower under it. “Who dares to speak to me of Scotland Yard—to me but for whom the fumblers who inhabit that idiots’ asylum would long since have been dismissed? Look here, Potson,” he went on eagerly, “I’ll wager that if a crime were committed practically under their very noses they would never see it. By George, we’ll try it. Go to the telephone, Potson, and ring up Lumpkin, the Scotland Yard Inspector.”

  I did so.

  “Tell him to come here at once on important business connected with an attempted murder.”

  Again I obeyed his instructions.

  “Now, Potson, take that carving-knife and endeavour to commit suicide—nay, you must avoid the jugular—that’s right—a little deeper—that will do nicely. Tie a napkin round your throat, put the knife in my hands and open the window so that I may be half out of it when Lumpkin comes in, as though I were attempting to escape. Capital! Now we’re ready for him.”

  Here I ought to say that, being accustomed to obey Holes blindly, I had made a fairly large gash in my throat, and was suffering a certain amount of inconvenience. But who in my place would not have done as I did? It was enough for me to know that Holes wanted a thing done.

  A minute afterwards Inspector Lumpkin entered with a rush and stood aghast at the scene. It was certainly a dramatic one. I was lying on the floor, blood-stained and all but lifeless; the black cat was on the top of the books shelf, meowing piteously, and Holes, disguised as a Russian anarchist, had one leg out of the window, and was glaring at Lumpkin while he waved the carving-knife above his head.

  Lumpkin’s mind was made up in a moment. He whistled and four burly constables sprang into the room:—

  “Arrest that man,” said Lumpkin, pointing to Holes.

  There was a sharp struggle, but numbers in the end were too many for my friend, and he had to yield after disabling three of his captors.

  “Did I not tell you so?” said Holes, as he was taken out. “The fools do not know a case of suicide when they see it.”

  I was too far gone to answer, but it was even as Holes said. Fortunately I recovered some months afterwards—too late, however, to save Holes from the sentence of penal servitude which was passed upon him. Of course he escaped from prison immediately, but the incident proved, as Holes said it would, that the police of this metropolis are incorrigible bunglers. Lumpkin, I am sorry to say, took the whole thing very badly. He has never been able to forgive Holes for having so manifestly got the better of him.

  A Scandal in Paflagonia

  R.C. Lehmann

  This story plays off of Ruritanian romances, a popular genre that was launched in 1894 with Anthony Hope’s “The Prisoner of Zenda.” These stories featured swashbuckling adventures among the aristocracy in the scattering of kingdoms, principalities and duchies of central Europe and the Balkans. They’re hard to take seriously today, but elements of them can still be found in the fantasy genre. Authors who have found interesting uses for Ruritania include Dorothy L. Sayers in “Have His Carcase” (1932), the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup” (1933), and George MacDonald Fraser in “Royal Flash” (1970).

  It was a foggy evening in the early part of December, and Holes and I were, as usual, sitting together in my modest but comfortable first-floor apartments (£2 a week, lights not included) in Baker Street. The lamp, an Argand, was burning brightly on the centre of the table, and its diffused light, moderated by an unpretending green shade, shone on the cold ascetic features of the most phenomenal thought-expert of this or any other age. His lean hands were extended on the arms of his chair, and a slight drumming noise made by his long lean fingers showed that his mind was busy. I was sitting at the other side of the room, devoting myself, according to my custom, partly to a profound admiration of his many qualities of head and heart, and partly to not being noticed by the impassive object of my enthusiasm.

  At last Holes looked up. His hands still remained comparatively idle, but his face was working convulsively, as faces are apt to do under the overpowering influence of some sudden detective emotion. Then he spoke:—

  “I don’t agree with you, friend Potson,” he said sharply. “The man, of course, is stout and has a hare-lip, but he is otherwise not unsuited to the amenities of polite society.”

  I was about to gasp with astonishment, not having the very vaguest idea of what he was referring to, but a stern expression on Holes’s face warned me to be careful. Accordingly I fell back on a formula suitable for all such occasions, and merely remarked in an awe-struck voice, “Holes, you become more and more marvellous every day! How on earth did you manage”—I was about to add (somewhat incautiously, I admit)—“to find out with such extraordinary precision exactly what I was not thinking about?” But Holes interrupted me.

  “The simplest thing in the world, my dear Potson, when you once come to know the steps of the process. You want to know how I found out you were thinking that our friend Chickweed was an outsider? Nay, nay, do not interrupt me. I know what you are going to say, so you need not say it. This is how I discovered it. You have an ink mark on the first finger of your right hand. As you looked at it your lips moved. Hence we get ink-lip. The letter before i is h, and n and k are by Donderkopf’s well-known law closely related to a and r. Thus, instead or ‘ink’ we get ‘bar’ and, since Edgar Allan Poe has shown in the story of the ‘Gold Bug’ that u is the letter of most frequent occurrence in the language, we just pop e on at the end of the word, and thus we get ‘hare-lip.’ Chickweed is the only man of our acquaintance who possesses that painful labial peculiarity, and therefore I knew that you must be thinking of him. Do you follow me?”

  It was now permissible to gasp, and I did so.

  “Holes, Holes,” I murmured in a deeply appreciative voice, “will you never cease to astound me?” Holes waved the compliment aside, and I was just about to question him further on his remarkable gift of thought-reading when an agitated step sounded in the passage, the sitting-room door was unceremoniously flung open, and a dishevelled young man with his hat pressed down to his chin and a face bearing the evident marks both of dissipation and of suffering flung himself violently into the middle of the room.

  “Mr. Holes,” he shouted in an agonised voice, “save me, save me. I am the miserable, the persecuted, the downtrodden—but tush, why should I tell my name to a man who knows everything by intuition? Suffice it to say that, as you have already guessed, I am indeed he, and that the plot of which I am the victim is thickening every moment. Save me, oh save me!”

  With these words he collapsed in a heap on the floor, and no efforts of mine availed to resuscitate him. In desperation I was about to apply my 10-horsepower galvaniser, when Holes
stopped me.

  “No bungling, friend Potson,” he hissed. “I know this man. It is”—and with a dramatic gesture he uncovered his (Holes’s) head and sang a few bars of what was evidently a national anthem—“It is the unhappy monarch of Paflagonia!”

  I knelt and kissed the fallen King’s hand. “What shall we do with him?” I asked.

  Holes’s face grew stern. “Throw him out of the third-floor window,” he said. “It is what he himself would have wished, for it is the only method of saving him from his relentless foes.”

  I did as Holes commanded me. At the subsequent coroner’s inquest, which Holes very generously attended, the young man’s name was given as Smith, and under this name and a plain headstone he was buried. The creature who now sits upon the throne of Paflagonia is, of course, an impostor, but, for reasons of state, which I have never, I admit, been able to fathom, Holes has consistently refused to denounce him. When I urge him to this course he simply smiles and says, “Potson, you must leave these matters to me. In my own good time I shall do what the necessity of the case may force upon me, but for the present I shall not disturb the peace of Paflagonia.” And with that I am forced to be content.

  1904

  The Story of the Princess

  R.C. Lehmann

  Holmes is fond of talking about crimes of the past and how they’re so much more involving than today’s capers, and Holes is no different, even if he does mingle the real with the fictional. In one paragraph, he mentions James Greenacre (1785-1837), a grocer hanged for killing his fiancée; highwayman Dick Turpin (d. 1739), who was turned into a romantic fictional hero after his execution for horse theft; the Mannings, a couple who were executed in 1849 for murdering a man in their house and burying him under the kitchen flagstones; the “Rugeley poisoner” William Palmer (1824-1856) was executed for poisoning a fellow-gambler and suspected of killing his wife, children, uncle, mother-in-law and others; Sweeney Todd (not Tod), “the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” the villain of an 1846 penny dreadful novel revived for the successful 1979 musical; and Three-Fingered Jack (c. 1872-1900), a U.S. outlaw who died from a buckshot wound during a train robbery.

  I ought to have mentioned before that in my lodgings in Baker Street, of which, as I said, the price is £2 a week (lights not included), I possess a heavy accumulation of note-books dealing with the marvelous exploits and super-human career of the most phenomenal detective known to this or any other age. These I propose to publish in various forms from time to time for the benefit of the public which has been good enough to interest itself in my beloved but austere friend’s immortal achievements. There will be in the first place a series of ten volumes on “Holes as a Man.” These will be followed after a short interval by twenty of a similar size on the subject of “Holes in Relation to the Creation of the World,” and the matter will be, temporarily at least, concluded by the issue of twelve quarto volumes entitled “Radium: is it Holes?” When I shall have completed these I shall be able to contemplate with satisfaction my humble share in the epoch-making events which it is my duty to chronicle. I can promise the public that in absorbing interest no less than in the virile graces of a breezy literary style not one of these entrancing volumes will fall short in any degree of the high standard which, out of a regard for the imperishable memory of Holes, I have consistently set for myself.

  We were sitting one morning in the aforesaid lodgings, little reckoning of the prodigious occurrences which were even then impending over our heads. There had been a lull in the criminality of the United Kingdom. In fact, the steadily decreasing average of murders and the almost complete cessation of industry in the matter of burglaries and arsons had been causing serious disquiet to the statesmen then at the head of the government of the country. Frauds, embezzlements and mysterious disappearances, to be sure, had maintained themselves more or less at the accustomed level, but even in this department, if you applied the test of volume rather than of values, there were suspicious signs which could not fail to produce uneasiness in the minds of those who refused any longer to be hide-bound by the musty shibboleths of the discredited Scotland Yard school of investigators. Holes, whose courage even in the midst of these depressing circumstances had never flagged for a moment, and whose serenity of temper and marvelous resourcefulness had endeared him more than ever to the select circle of his intimate friends, did not, of course, conceal from me the extreme gravity of the outlook so far as the criminal production of the country was concerned.

  “Potson,” he used to say to me, “something will have to be done. We cannot afford to rely for ever on our past. What is the use of talking about Greenacre, Dick Turpin, the Mannings, Palmer, Sweeney Tod and Three-Fingered Jack! They’re dead, friend Potson, dead and gone, and they’ve left no successors. France is creeping up to us—the decennial averages prove it—Germany is even now ahead of us, and America is dumping many of her best and most highly finished criminals upon our markets. I ask you, are we to take it lying down?”

  To such a question, I admit, I had no answer ready at the moment, nor, had I possessed one, should I have ventured to offer it, for Picklock Holes was a man not easily diverted from any course on which he had set his heart, and I always judged it better not to affront him needlessly when once I saw that he had made up his mind.

  Well, as I say, we were sitting in my rooms in Baker Street. Holes had his steely eyes intently fixed on a coffee-stain made by me on the table-cloth that morning, and from certain curt interjectional remarks which had been falling from his thin, tightly-closed lips I gathered that he was deducing from it by his own unsurpassable methods a widely ramified and diabolical plot on the part of Russian emissaries to assassinate the Mikado of Japan. Before, however, he had time to complete the steps of his process and to bring the infamous crime home to the chief of the Russian police, the door of our sitting-room was softly opened and a young girl, tastefully dressed in a short skirt and an ordinary shirt waist with hat to match, stepped, or, I should rather say, sidled into the room. Casting a look full of meaning at Holes, she subsided into a chair and remained silent, while Holes, upon whom her arrival had already made a marked impression, half rose from his chair and then resumed his former sitting posture.

  “Mr. Holes,” she said at length in a voice of peculiar sweetness, “do you know me?”

  “You should not ask such a question, Miss,” I interrupted; “Picklock Holes knows everybody.”

  “Tush, Potson,” muttered Holes with some severity. Then, turning to our visitor, he continued, “Proceed, Miss, your melancholy story is not unknown to me.”

  “In that case I need only tell you, since you know that they are all deeply in love with me, that he”—there was a world of meaning in her utterance of the word—“has followed me hither, and is at this moment in Baker Street.”

  “Potson,” said Holes, drawing his chair closer to that of the girl who still kept her eyes riveted on his, “go outside and deal with this man as I would have him dealt with.”

  I obeyed, and having passed out through the front door I found a thickly-built and ill-favoured ruffian whistling an operatic air on our door-step. To accost him, to see that he was a more powerful man than myself, to take him to the nearest public-house, and to stand him a cold whisky—all this was the work of a moment. When I returned to the sitting-room Holes seemed visibly annoyed at my entrance, and even more so at the account I gave of my doings.

  “Oh, Potson, Potson,” he exclaimed, “will you never learn? Forgive me, Miss, I must leave you for a moment. Come, Potson, and see how the thing ought to be done.” Then, having bowed politely to the young lady, he took me with him out of the room.

  The burly ruffian was no longer on the door-step, but a rapid deductive calculation and a look up the street revealed him to us about a hundred yards away. Holes was after him in a moment. In the brisk fight that ensued the girl’s persecutor was severely mauled, while the only damage inflicted on Holes was that a random blow of his opponent’s managed t
o entirely and without redemption split one of my austere friend’s best infinitives. We then returned to our home. Alas, the young lady was gone, gone like a beautiful dream—and so were all my best silver spoons, the tea-pot presented to me by the Imaum of Kashmir, and a massive silver-gilt epergne once the property of Galen, and most valued by me on that account.

  I turned to Holes for an explanation. His face was quite calm.

  “The poor Princess,” he said, “is now in safety, Heaven help her. Hers has been a terrible story. Forgive me, Potson, but it had to be.”

  “Holes,” I murmured reverentially, “you were never greater and more generous than you are at this moment.”

  Mr. Punch’s Symposia

  C.L. Graves and E.V. Lucas

  A regular series this year was “Mr. Punch’s Symposia,” in which eminent public figures debated a “pressing” question. This time, the topic was “Should novelists accept decorations?” and the authors discussing the matter included Hall Caine, William Le Queux, Marie Corelli, Henry James, and Rudyard Kipling. ACD played a minor role in the article. When asked “Why should novelists be denied this elevating and stimulating recognition?” he replied: