The Early Punch Parodies of Sherlock Holmes

by Bill Peschel

  . . . There seems to me no question whatever. Sooner or later such authors as are worthy of distinction receive it; others do not. Those that are thus singled out from among the ruck are properly grateful.

  The humor lies in knowing that ACD had been knighted two years before. What wasn’t publicly known was that he had seriously considered rejecting it, privately calling it “the badge of the provincial mayor.” He told his mother in a letter, “Fancy Rhodes or Chamberlain or Kipling doing such a thing! And why should my standard be lower than theirs? It is the Alfred Austin & Hall Caine type of man who takes rewards.”

  But the “Ma’am” (as ACD called her) wasn’t going to let her son keep a knighthood out of the family. She pressed him repeatedly to accept the honor, and finally convinced him that refusing it would insult the king. But he made sure to get in the last word. In 1924, long after his mother had died, he published “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs” in which Watson mentions that Holmes turned down a knighthood in 1902, the same year ACD accepted his.

  The Story of the Lamplighter

  R.C. Lehmann

  Gas lighting plays an important role in the Holmes stories. Its warm glow creates the atmosphere where we can imagine we’re in the Baker Street apartment, cozy by the warm fire, and mulling over a knotty mystery while outside can be heard the clatter of hansom cabs and the rattling of shutters against the biting wind. While electric lighting began making inroads against gas after World War I, it is still possible to experience the London night as Holmes and Watson did. The gas lamps still burn in central London, Covent Garden, the Royal Parks and outside Buckingham Palace.

  It was evening, a Sunday evening, in Baker Street. The lamps were nearly all lit, and the intellectual features of the domestic architecture of which that thoroughfare is celebrated were thrown into high relief by the rays emitted from the tops of the somewhat inartistic lamp-posts that had lately flashed into sudden life as the swift foot of the lamplighter approached, stopped for a moment, and then rapidly passed on in his path of duty, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but, like a true Imperial Briton, ever upward to higher things. Usually the man went forward alone: none cared to follow him in a progress so frequently interrupted by the pauses required by the modern torch-bearer’s employment.

  But on this particular Sunday evening those who kept their eyes open might have observed that, as he passed the house before which stood the twenty-seventh lamp-post, the front-door swiftly but quietly opened, and two figures, heavily hatted and cloaked, emerged into the half-light of Baker Street, and promptly fell into line behind the unconscious but dutiful employé of the Gas Company.

  One of these figures was tall and thin; its muscles seemed made of steel; it had a pale, thoughtful and ascetic face; its forehead was high, its sentences were short, and its fingers were lean, meditative and impressive. At a casual glance it might have been mistaken for a prosperous undertaker retired from the active pursuit of business, but still taking an interest in the mortuary arrangements of his former rivals in the pall and coffin trade. A second and more careful look might have convinced the observer that he saw before him an exiled Emperor, and it would have required a third and a piercing scrutiny to prove that this was none other than Picklock Holes.

  With regard to the second figure it is only necessary to mention that it was addressed by Picklock Holes occasionally as “friend Potson,” but more frequently as “Tush! nonsense,” or “Pooh, absurd.” In fact, not to put too fine a point upon it, it was me.

  You may ask what brought us into Baker Street on the track of a lamp-lighter on a Sunday evening in mid-February. The fact is, the town had lately been thrown into a fever of excitement by a series of extraordinary and hitherto inexplicable disappearances. All the victims—for we could not doubt that in some sense they were victims of somebody—were of the male sex, and what was even more remarkable they were all grandfathers of an advanced age. Matters had been brought to a crisis this very morning by the disappearance of Mr. Picklock Holes’s own grandfather on the mother’s side, almost before the eyes of his grandson.

  “This,” said Holes, when he realised that his grandsire was unquestionably gone, “is too much,” and he had at once thrown himself into the detection of the crime with all a sleuth-hound’s ardour. As a first step he had called upon me in my Baker Street lodgings, and had spent some hours in planning out the process by which he intended to convict the guilty. This was how his argument ran:—

  “A grandfather,” he began, “is not exactly like an ordinary citizen. It may be assumed, I think, that he is no longer in the first flush of his youth and beauty, and it is therefore unlikely that a barmaid, for instance, or even a chorus girl, will have run away with him. By a further process of elimination we arrive at the conclusion that only an Italian marchioness (I spare you the steps by which I reach this point) can have had anything to do with it. But mark my words—there are at this moment no Italian marchionesses in London. What then? Remove the marchioness and you leave a void or vacuum. To fill this in accordance with the preferences of nature you must select—a hush! I hear him passing.”

  It was at this moment precisely that, dragging me with him, he dashed out of the front-door and flung himself into the chase of the lamp-lighter.

  Before the next post was reached Holes had closed upon his prey. In a moment the man was bound and gagged and hurled into a passing four-wheeler, which immediately set off on its way to the family mansion lately inhabited by Mr. Thomas Baltimore Jubley, Holes’s maternal grandparent. I followed as fast as I could on foot. When I arrived I witnessed a touching family scene. Old Mr. Jubley himself was standing in the drawing-room warmly embracing Picklock Holes, who was shaken with an emotion to which he rarely gave way.

  “My boy, my lion-hearted boy,” said Mr. Jubley, “you have found me. How shall I thank you?” Then turning to me he continued, “I was in bed; I overslept myself, and had but lately descended when Picklock arrived.”

  After warmly congratulating both gentlemen, I withdrew, fearing that even so intimate a friend as I was might be de trop at such a moment.

  I ought, perhaps, to mention that we never heard anything more of the lamp-lighter. Holes had left him by mistake in the cab, which had driven off before any of us noticed it. We applied, of course, at the lost property office at Scotland Yard, but all in vain. The cabman, with a lack of honesty unusual in his calling, had failed to deposit our lost captive, and all further trace of him disappeared.

  The Adventure of the Swiss Banker

  R.C. Lehmann

  Although Potson disguises the location of this adventure, there’s little doubt that it took place somewhere along the French Riviera. After the principality of Monte Carlo legalized gambling in the 1860s, the place became a favorite watering hole for the British aristocracy, including Queen Victoria and her retinue of nearly 100 and her son Bertie, the Prince of Wales. Note that “renny var ploo” is really “riene ne va plus,” the French phrase for “no more bets.”

  One incident—I might almost call it an adventure—which diversified and added zest to the relations between Picklock Homes and myself is of a character so astounding as to completely and without the possibility of denial cast into the shade all those adventures which my duty to posterity no less than my vehement admiration for our one and only unparalleled detective marvel has hitherto compelled me to narrate. I will now endeavour to set it down, though I am fully aware how inadequate my humble powers of literary composition are to the task of doing justice to one so primus inter pares as was (alas! that I should have to use a tense which, as applied to him, is his only imperfection) as was Picklock Holes.

  Much against our will we had temporarily left our comfortable bourgeois quarters in Baker Street. It was no easy matter for us, as may well be imagined, to tear ourselves away with so many investigations unfinished. When I say that the shocking murders in the Rue Morgue, and the all but inexplicable mystery of Marie Roget—affairs which had bee
n so disgracefully bungled by M. Dupin and Mr. Poe of the united Paris and New York police—had been but recently confided to Mr. Holes, it will be understood that our natural reluctance to depart had become well nigh insuperable. Still, duty is duty, and when the Duke Cosimo di Monte Carlo called upon us one day and offered Holes a year of his ducal income if he would discover the whereabouts of his erring son, the Marchese Casino Del Rouletti, we could no longer hesitate.

  Having, therefore, given the landlady strict instructions to keep the Baker Street Rifle Club in full activity and to put any inquirers from the Free Trade Union off the scent, we departed one morning from Charing Cross with two black bags and a guide to polite conversation in four languages, and on the following morning, Holes as usual taking the lead and driving all the railway engines, we found ourselves deposited in a bright little town on one of the many shores of the Mediterranean. Why we had come to that precise place I know not, nor did I gather its name. It was enough for me that Holes was my leader. I ought to add that, the better to conceal ourselves and our mission from prying eyes, Holes had assumed the disguise of a Swiss banker, while I was garbed as his sister, a not unprepossessing lady of forty-five summers, wearing a large hat with plumes and carrying a small yellow reticule suspended by a gold chain from my left wrist. Thus attired nobody could possibly have suspected that it was us, nor, if we could have seen ourselves, could we have imagined that we were other than what we appeared to be.

  The scene as we entered what I afterwards learnt was the Ducal Palace was indeed a brilliant one, with its gathering of rank and fashion and beauty and wealth from all the quarters of the globe. Holes, however, paid no attention to it, but, brushing his way haughtily and inductively past the innumerable obsequious and liveried attendants, he made his way swiftly to a gorgeously decorated inner hall, where crowds of Europe’s bluest-blooded aristocracy were mingled with all that America could show of millionaires round numerous large tables on which was proceeding a game that was as obviously moneyed as it was manifestly mysterious.

  “Potson,” said Holes in a tremor of excitement, as we paused before one of these tables, “Potson, do you see that man?” he pointed to an individual decently dressed in black, who was spinning a small ivory ball in a wheel set in the centre of the table. “That, unless I am mistaken—but tush! listen to him.”

  Saying this he pushed me into a chair next to the person in question, at the very moment when the weird phrase “Renny var ploo”—the meaning of which I did not understand—fell from his lips.

  “Do you hear that?” hissed Holes. “The last word was ‘ploo,’ which rhymes to ‘you.’ Changing the pronoun we get ‘I.’ The other words you heard are Roumanian for ‘am the missing heir,’ and the full sentence, therefore, is ‘I am the missing heir.’ The fool has betrayed himself, and the reward will certainly be ours.”

  “But, Holes,” I began.

  “Silence, Potson,” whispered Holes menacingly. “Silence, and observe me.”

  At this instant the massive figure of Duke Cosimo was plainly visible on the opposite side of the table. Horror was depicted upon his brow; his mouth was working convulsively. Holes waited no longer. Taking a roll of banknotes from his pocket he handed them to me, instructing me where to place them. I did as he ordered me, and in a moment the notes were swept away. Again, again, and yet again the same proceeding took place, until at last I heard Holes say, “The trap is baited. Now for the revelation.”

  With these words he made his way through the crowd, seized the man I have described, and, having ordered me in a low voice to lay hold of all the money within my reach, shouted out in clear tones so that the whole astonished room could hear:—

  “Duke, this is your son, the Marquis Cosimo! He has led the life of a croupier”—this, I have been told, means the life of a rake—“but it is yet time for him to reform, and to cast new lustre on the great name he bears.”

  The excitement and the confusion were at first frightful, but order was at last restored, and the Duke was eventually compelled to acknowledge his son, and to pay to Holes the stipulated reward of ten million francs in gold.

  “Potson,” said Holes, as he pocketed the sum, “I shall place no less than one hundred francs to your credit.”

  “Holes,” I sobbed, “you are too generous. To be known as your friend is credit enough for me.”

  The Story of the Lost Picklock

  R.C. Lehmann

  The second series of eight Holes stories concludes with a reference to the Russo-Japanese war, which started a month before this story appeared. It ended in September of 1905 in a defeat of the Tsarist navy at the hands of the revived Empire of Japan. The peace treaty was mediated, not by Holes, but by President Theodore Roosevelt.

  There are some things a man never forgets. Years may pass: a nomadic existence may find a rest in Baker Street; Baker Street in turn may give way to more aristocratic things and a better quarter of the town; there may be marryings and births and buryings; any one, in fact, of the innumerable events to which even a canonical existence is liable may bring its obliterating influence to bear on the mind, but these unforgettable things, when once they have occurred, stand out for ever with a startling and permanent distinctness that none of the chances and changes of this mortal life can ever manage to thoroughly or even partly efface or, for the matter of that, to injuriously affect. Of such was the adventure which, in pursuance of my duty to Holes amid humanity at large, I am about to describe.

  We had been for some time past living a quiet life, disturbed only by a series of telegrams from the Emperor William and a prolonged quest for a briar-root pipe and a cairngorm shirt-stud (an heirloom in the Holes family), which, as it subsequently turned out, had been abstracted and stomachically concealed by Laura, the favourite parrot of Mrs. Coles, our landlady. In the investigation which had followed on the disappearance of these articles Holes had displayed all his marvellous acumen. Never had I known his deductivity to burn with a steadier and a more brilliant flame. How well I recall that memorable afternoon when he sprang suddenly from the horse-hair armchair on which he had been resting and, with a look of concentrated essence of intellect which was almost overwhelming in its Bovrility, shouted to me:—

  “Potson, fool of my heart, you are sitting on it, you are sitting on it.”

  “Am I, Holes?” I replied, gently. “I am glad to know it, for I have never yet sat on a pipe or a cairngorm, and the feeling is both novel and agreeable.”

  “Not that, you worm,” hissed the great detective, “I don’t mean that—at least not in the way you mean,” and he proceeded to prove to me that the cushion on which I was seated, being covered with red plush, was intimately allied with the legs of a footman, and that thus, proceeding by the stages of hair-powder, powder-puff, puff-paragraph, par-value, value received, he was able to prove that I had actually been at one time or another in receipt of the lost objects. Ten days afterwards, Laura having in the meantime given up the ghost, they were found in her inside. I shall always consider this one of Holes’s most astounding experiments. But I am straying from my point.

  For some weeks I had noticed that Holes seemed ill at ease. Nothing worried him quite so much as the consciousness that events which he could comfortably have controlled and moulded to the benefit of the human species were passing without any help from him; that those who had set these events in motion had done so without consulting him. “It is strange,” he would mutter in that far-away ascetic voice of his, “that after all I have done both for the Czar and the Mikado they should have had the face to go to war without a word to me.”

  “Holes,” I broke in impatiently, for I am free to confess that I could never keep my temper in face of a slight put upon the man whom I considered to be the marvel of the century, “Holes, it is worse than a crime: it is a blunder of unparalleled magnitude. But there is one comfort: the fools will live to regret it.”

  “Hush, hush, Potson,” said Holes not unkindly, “we must not judge them
harshly. Let us remember that possibly even an Emperor and a Mikado may be subject—it almost shocks me to think so—to human frailties. They may be jealous; on the other hand they may be merely ignorant. And yet even they must have heard what unexampled facilities I possess for concluding wars. Potson, do you recollect—?”

  “Do I recollect!” I interrupted. “Why, Holes, everybody knows that you finished, absolutely and entirely finished, the South African war months and months and months before the army had begun to dream of peace. That has always seemed to me one of the surest proofs of your massive and superhuman intellect.”

  Here I broke down, and sobbed like a child.

  “Nay, Potson,” said Holes, patting me on the back with one hand, while with the other he brushed away what I was tempted to think might be the nearest approach to a tear that had ever trickled over that thought-worn and meditative cheek, “nay, Potson, you must not repine. Though we are not matched in brain-power—Heaven knows I did not ask for all I have, nor did you intend to have so little—we still have one another. Yet I own that, things being what they are, I am—pardon my weakness, Potson; I cannot help it—I am lost in amazement—”

  “No, no, Holes,” I shrieked in anguish, “not lost. Don’t say that. Not lost. What should I do without you? Not lost.”

  But the bolt had fallen. The silver cord was broken. The pitcher had gone to the well once too often. Apollo had bent his bow for the last time. The last cartridge had been expended. Holes, the mighty detective, the unequalled discoverer of the lost, was now lost himself. He had said it, and it was not for me, the poor Baker Street doctor, to contradict him.