Sherlock Unlocked

by Daniel Smith

  Smoking Out the Truth

  There is an almost universally recognized visual shorthand for Sherlock Holmes – a face in silhouette, sporting a deerstalker and smoking a curved calabash pipe. As we have already seen, the deerstalker was a detail established not by Conan Doyle but by Sidney Paget (see here). Ironically, the calabash pipe also has no place in the original stories. Instead, it is likely that the calabash became a staple of the Holmesian world only when the actor and playwright H. A. Saintsbury utilized it as a prop in his legendary performance as the detective, in the early years of the twentieth century. The canonical stories, meanwhile, specifically mention that his pipe collection included clays, briars and long cherry-woods. Of course, his love of pipes brought about a new phrase in the English language – the ‘three-pipe problem’, a teaser that is so thorny that it requires an especially extensive period of tobacco consumption to free up the mind. Such was his love of tobacco that he also eagerly consumed cigarettes and cigars, although never with quite the satisfaction with which he would suck upon a pipe.

  TOBACCO HAZE

  The ‘dense tobacco haze’ that surrounded him was so frequently in evidence that smoking is omitted from the narratives of only four of Conan Doyle’s sixty stories. No wonder Holmes felt qualified to author a monograph Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of Various Tobaccos, of which he identified some 140 variants.

  On the Wrong Track

  Railways play a recurring role in the canonical stories. Holmes and Watson are regular users of both the London network and cross-country services. Without them, there is every chance that numerous criminals would have escaped justice. But on occasion the railway also served as a backdrop to macabre scenes. Cadogan West was the poor unfortunate in ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’, whose body was discovered on the tracks of the London Underground just outside Aldgate Station. The tale was published in 1908 but is set around 1895, when the underground system was barely more than three decades old. The gruesome fate of Cadogan West recalled a real-life crime that rocked the country back in 1864. On 9 July that year, the mortally wounded Thomas Briggs, an elderly banker, was discovered on an embankment next to the tracks somewhere between Bow and Hackney in the east of London. He had been travelling on a train operated by the North London Railway when he was robbed and assaulted just before 10 p.m. A gold watch and watch chain, along with Brigg’s black silk chimney pot hat, were taken. Briggs had been beaten around the head with a blunt object that left his carriage covered in blood. He was then thrown from the train. When he was found on the embankment, he was still alive and was initially taken to a public house at nearby Cadogan Terrace, where he succumbed to his injuries. Was Cadogan West’s name maybe inspired by this detail of the story? Regardless, what set this crime apart was not merely its brutality but its setting – this was the first murder to be committed on a train in Britain. Police investigations quickly resulted in the finger being pointed at a German tailor called Franz Müller. The suspect fled across the Atlantic with the police in hot pursuit, and he was arrested on American soil in late August. He was found to be in possession of Briggs’s watch and also his hat, which Müller had attempted to disguise by reducing its height. Extradited back to Britain, the defendant protested his innocence during a three-day trial but the evidence against him mounted, and he was found guilty. His hanging three months later outside London’s Newgate Prison was attended by some 50,000 spectators. Moreover, public perceptions of the railways would never be the same again!

  The Wrong Type

  ‘It is a curious thing,’ Holmes commented in ‘A Case of Identity’, ‘that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting. Unless they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some letters get more worn than others, and some wear only on one side . . . I think of writing another little monograph some of these days on the typewriter and its relation to crime. It is a subject to which I have devoted some little attention.’ Not for the first time, Holmes proved to be far ahead of his time. The first truly modern typewriter, the Remington Model I, had only come onto the market in the 1870s and Conan Doyle – via Holmes – is believed to be the first to have formally raised the idea that typewriter identification might become a tool of criminal investigators. Where he obtained his knowledge on the subject is not clear.

  LEVY V. RUST

  ‘A Case of Identity’ was published in 1891 but it would be a further two years before such evidence found its way into real world courts. In an 1893 case, Levy v. Rust, an expert witness testified that a series of receipts all featured peculiarities in their printing that were not consistent with them having been produced on the typewriter of the defendant. Sure enough, the judge agreed that the defendant could not have produced the paperwork in question and found in his favour – and so another idea first posited by Holmes found acceptance in the mainstream judicial system.

  Getting into Gear

  Holmes’s world is typically one of hansom cabs and steam engines but in ‘His Last Bow’, published in 1917 and, in terms of the date when it is set, the latest chronologically (being a tale of ‘The War Service of Sherlock Holmes’), the motor car makes its first appearance in the canon. And like buses, having waited so long for one to turn up, you then find two arriving together. Von Bork, the story’s German spymaster, zoomed around the place in a ‘100-horse-power Benz’ – a well-chosen vehicle. Karl Benz, after all, was the epitome of German engineering excellence and a symbol of a country that was confident and international in outlook. It was Benz who invented what is widely regarded as the first practical internal-combustion-engine automobile, for which he received a patent in 1886. Exactly which model Von Bork enjoyed is not certain, but the Benz Company vehicles had a reputation for excellence and power. Meanwhile, Holmes, chauffeured by Watson, travelled in a Ford. Henry Ford’s company was American in origin but had been producing vehicles in Manchester since the early 1910s. In fact, by 1913, Ford was by some distance the largest car producer in Britain, churning out Anglicized versions of the original Model A and the astronomically successful Model T. The precise model Holmes drove in is not stated, merely being described as ‘little’. The choice of a Ford is perhaps indicative of Conan Doyle’s love for all things American, a passion explored here.

  Friends in High Places

  Only a handful of fictional characters have achieved the global reach of Holmes, and he can claim fans from across the planet and all walks of life. However, he can have had few more powerful fans than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who occupied the White House from 1933 until 1945. Roosevelt was a passionate admirer of the detective and enjoyed membership of the elite Sherlockian organization, the Baker Street Irregulars. He was even responsible for A Baker Street Folio: 5 Letters about Sherlock Holmes – a series of papers prepared for the Baker Street Journal, a publication issued by the Baker Street Irregulars. He wrote them during the latter stages of the Second World War, demonstrating that Holmes inadvertently provided a diversion for the leader of the Free World at a crucial moment in world history. The most controversial of Roosevelt’s epistles was one that posited that Holmes was in fact an American by birth. According to the presidential thesis, he had been brought up by a father or foster father who inhabited the American underworld, which provided the opportunity for Holmes to be schooled in the theory and practice of criminality. In the letter, written on 18 December 1944, Roosevelt asserted: ‘At an early age he felt the urge to do something for mankind. He was too well known in top circles in this country and therefore chose to operate in England. His attributes were primarily American, not English . . .’ For all his love of America, surely such a suggestion would have driven Conan Doyle to issue a ‘Hands off – he’s ours’ warning, although the desire to assimilate him into American culture was an undoubted compliment.

  HITLER AND THE HOUND

  On a more macabre note, it has been suggested that Adolf Hitler was also a rather unexpected fan of Holmes. It is difficult to imagine that the
Holmes of, say, ‘His Last Bow’, would have been very happy to learn of the German Führer’s acclaim. Nonetheless, it is thought that Hitler kept a German film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles in his wartime bunker.

  You Can’t Please Everyone

  If Roosevelt was eager to claim Holmes as one of his own, other international leaders have been rather more critical of the detective. Take, for instance, a curious incident in Mao Tse-Tung’s China in 1968. With the country in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese media reported that a minister of public security had been drummed out of office after attempting to school his agents in Holmes’s ‘special abilities of detection’. According to a statement issued by the Combined Command Headquarters of Revolutionary Rebels of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, this represented an unacceptable attempt to mould public security personnel in the image of the ‘watchdog of the British bourgeoisie’ (a status credited to Holmes, who was seemingly treated as a real human being by the Chinese authorities throughout the affair). There was simply no place in Mao’s China for the kind of individualism (not to mention the defence of private property) inherent in Holmes’s work. Doubtless driven by similar reservations, Joseph Stalin was another who did not take to the detective – the Sunday Times reported in 1950 his ‘stubborn refusal . . . to read any of the Sherlock Holmes adventures’. Yet Holmes has been an enduringly popular figure in Russia, not least during the Soviet era. The publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles was received with the same kind of excitement in Moscow as had been evident in London. But perhaps his peak popularity coincided with the phenomenal success of the Russian TV series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Featuring Vasily Livanov in the main role and running from 1979 to 1986, it commanded huge viewing figures and made a superstar of Livanov. He was even awarded an honorary MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) by the British authorities in recognition of his work, and Moscow’s statue of Holmes is based upon him.

  The Sound of Silence

  Very few writers succeed in concocting a form of words so meaningful and evocative that they become absorbed into the fabric of the language. In English, Shakespeare is unrivalled as a coiner of phrases that enter common usage. However, Conan Doyle can claim one or two of his own. Perhaps the most famous is ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night time’. The words were originally used in ‘Silver Blaze’, when Holmes realized the significance of a dog not barking. It is a memorable inversion of the expected order of things – significance usually being attached to that which may be seen or heard or sensed, not to that which is entirely absent. Before long, the phrase became a way of highlighting all manner of significant absences or silences. It has proved a particularly potent verbal grenade for those in the political sphere.

  PARLIAMENTARY LANGUAGE

  Allusions to ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night time’ have been made in UK parliamentary debates on at least 35 occasions – while Sherlock Holmes has garnered well over 200 mentions. In 1955, for instance, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rab Butler, launched an attack on the opposition for what he considered omissions in their pre-election manifesto. ‘It is rather like Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson,’ he said. ‘What was significant about the action of the dog? The dog did not bark.’

  The Smoking Gun

  Another commonly used phrase for which Conan Doyle and Holmes may legitimately claim the credit is the notion of ‘the smoking gun’. Used to mean an item of evidence proving incontrovertible guilt, it can be used in a variety of contexts. In recent history, for instance, political leaders believed that the discovery of weapons of mass destruction would represent ‘the smoking gun’ necessary to justify the invasion of Iraq. Other examples are less highly charged – from the cat with cream on its whiskers to the accountant with a stash of undocumented receipts or the boy with the football walking away from the broken window – all may be deemed examples of smoking-gun evidence. While Conan Doyle never used that exact phrase himself, he gave a very close approximation in ‘The Gloria Scott’, published in 1893 but detailing Holmes’s first chronological foray into detection. It includes a scene in the cabin of a ship’s captain where there lies a body ‘with his brains smeared over the chart of the Atlantic . . . while the chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand’. It was this first literary appearance of a ‘smoking pistol’ that transmuted into the ‘smoking gun’ of popular parlance.

  In the Picture

  In ‘The Cardboard Box’, we gain an intriguing insight into the kind of public figures who stirred the heart of Dr Watson. We learn that he possessed a framed picture of General Charles Gordon, and an unframed one of Henry Ward Beecher. Gordon is perhaps not a surprising choice, having been heralded as one of the great military heroes of the Victorian age. His dramatic career encompassed service in the Crimean War, stints in China and Egypt and a period as Governor-General of the Sudan. Having returned exhausted to Europe at the start of the 1880s, he was re-posted to Khartoum (the Sudanese capital) in 1884 to evacuate British troops and civilians in the face of local rebellion. However, in contravention of his orders, Gordon maintained a small force to counter the rebels, holding off the besieging enemy for the best part of a year. Acclaimed by the public, his masters in London nonetheless resented his ignoring their commands and only supplied a relief force once Khartoum had fallen and Gordon was dead. He was the sort of courageous maverick, regarded by the public virtually as a martyr, who would have appealed to Watson the steadfast military man. By contrast, Henry Ward Beecher was a less predictable choice. A noted social reformer who campaigned hard for the abolition of slavery, he was sent to Europe by Abraham Lincoln to raise funds for the Union forces in the American Civil War. This was probably when Watson encountered him, drawn to his reputation for moral rectitude. However, in 1875 Ward Beecher became embroiled in a notorious adultery trial and while he was ultimately acquitted of all charges, it did his good name enduring harm. It is possible Conan Doyle shoehorned him into his story as an oblique reference to the marital infidelity that forms an important aspect of the plot. Given the uncertainty over Watson’s own marital situation, it is intriguing that the doctor should have so admired a man himself accused of extramarital shenanigans.

  The Adventure of the Two Collaborators

  Today, J. M. Barrie is best known as the creator of Peter Pan, but even before that he was among the foremost authors of his age. He was also a close friend of Conan Doyle, and created some of the earliest Holmes pastiches. The two met while Conan Doyle was working at The Idler magazine and their friendship was consolidated through a mutual love of cricket that saw them play for the same side. Barrie’s first Holmes effort came in 1891, when the character was enjoying his first flush of success in The Strand. That November, just four months after Conan Doyle had debuted the detective in the short-story format, ‘My Evening with Sherlock Holmes’ appeared in the Speaker magazine, its author uncredited. It was a frivolous and affectionate skit in which the author declares: ‘To my annoyance (for I hate to hear anyone praised except myself) Holmes’s cleverness in, for instance, knowing by glancing at you what you had for dinner last Thursday, has delighted press and public, and so I felt it was time to take him down a peg.’ Then, in 1892, Barrie was struck down by a bout of bronchitis aggravated by anxiety at the lack of progress he was making on a commission – a booklet for an operetta called Jane Annie; or, the Good Conduct Prize. Conan Doyle visited him and agreed to help him complete the project. To show his gratitude, Barrie wrote ‘The Two Collaborators’, which was said to have been written on the flyleaf of one of Barrie’s novels, A Window in Thrums. In the story, Holmes and Watson attempt to get to the bottom of the failure of an opera that Watson has composed. The third and final pastiche, ‘The Late Sherlock Holmes’ was published in the St James’s Gazette on 29 December 1893, just a few weeks after Holmes had apparently met his end in ‘The Final Problem’. In Barrie’s take, Watson is accused of having had a hand in his ol
d companion’s demise before (somewhat prophetically) it is discovered that all is not what it seems. If imitation is the ultimate form of flattery, how much more satisfying for Conan Doyle must it have been that a friend and talent such as Barrie was behind it.

  Never the Twain

  One leading literary light who was rather more ambiguous in his attitude to Holmes was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain. In 1902, Twain – author of such classics as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – produced A Double-Barrelled Detective Story. It appeared shortly after Conan Doyle had unleashed The Hound of the Baskervilles onto the world. Twain’s tale, set in the American West, was an acerbic parody of the detective fiction genre of which Conan Doyle was at the forefront. For Twain, Conan Doyle’s stories were just too perfectly formed, and Holmes too superhumanly analytical. So, in this story, we get a murderous character by the name of Fetlock Jones, who just happens to be the nephew of Sherlock Holmes. When it is discovered that Holmes himself has arrived on the scene, the ‘village was electrified with an immense sensation’. But Jones is rather more sanguine about his relation’s abilities: ‘Anybody that knows him the way I do knows he can’t detect a crime except where he plans it all out beforehand and arranges the clues and hires some fellow to commit it according to instruction.’ Sure enough, Holmes draws quite the wrong conclusions from the evidence before him, despite going through a quite logical process of deduction. It was to all intents and purposes, one great author cocking a snook at another.