by J. R. Trtek
Holmes and Spade quite possibly stayed in touch with one another, though whether the American detective ever learned of the existence of the text I have titled The Hapsburg Falcon is, at this point, unknown. It is generally accepted, however, that Holmes and Watson were both still alive well into the 1920s, and perhaps after his brush with Gutman and the bird in 1928, Spade wrote about it to Holmes, who, no doubt, immediately recognized the statue and the man he had known as Jasper Girthwood. It is tempting to think that Spade received Watson’s handwritten manuscript from Holmes or Watson and then passed it on to Dashiell Hammett, whose own revised version is the tale contained in this volume; however, no evidence, direct or circumstantial, points to such a heady scenario.
One final set of curious clues should be mentioned for the sake of completeness. Many times in The Hapsburg Falcon, dialogue and situations occur that are chillingly similar to moments in The Maltese Falcon. The sheer number of these matches makes it difficult to believe that both stories actually happened independently, just as they are narrated in their respective texts, but rather that one inspired the telling of the other. It would then be natural to assume that, since the events of the Holmes story predate those in the Sam Spade tale, The Maltese Falcon is perhaps fiction, in whole or in part, drawing some dramatic elements from Watson’s original manuscript. The final such shared detail between the two stories, however, creates a problem with that hypothesis. It occurs near the conclusion of The Hapsburg Falcon, when Holmes remarks that the statue is made of “the substance from which fantasies are spun.” In content, this comment is remarkably close to the line uttered by Humphrey Bogart as Spade in John Huston’s 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon: “The stuff that dreams are made of.”
This coincidence, among others, might suggest that Hammett at least saw Watson’s presumed earlier manuscript, even if he didn’t actually rewrite it, and used details from it to flesh out his retelling (or fabrication) of Spade’s encounter with the falcon. The line mentioned in the previous paragraph, however, appears only in the Huston screenplay; it is not present in Hammett’s original novel. This leaves the door open to another, far more disappointing possibility: perhaps it is The Hapsburg Falcon that is merely fiction, and its author planted the “fantasies” remark, along with other elements drawn from The Maltese Falcon, in hopes of enhancing the suggestion of a Spade-Holmes connection, all without realizing that Bogart’s line is from the 1941 film, not the 1929 novel.
So is The Hapsburg Falcon an altered but essentially true narrative by Dr. John H. Watson or pure hoax? I suspect that, as with much in the realm of Sherlockiana—both the apocrypha and the sacred canon itself—we shall always feel the burden of constant doubt while trying to lift ourselves on the wings of eternal hope.
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1 A pillar-box is a large cylindrical public mailbox.
2 The City here refers to the historic heart of London, encompassing only that part inhabited through the Middle Ages and not the present metropolis as a whole.
3 Estimates are parliamentary budget requests.
4 A navvy is a laborer, especially one employed in construction or excavation projects. The term was coined in the 18th century to apply to those working on navigation canals.
5 The Jago is a fictional East End slum described in Arthur Morrison’s 1894 novel A Child of the Jago and generally thought to represent the real district then known as the Old Nichol.
6 Assizes, or the courts of assize, were periodic criminal courts, which heard the most serious cases. Minor offenses, on the other hand, were dealt with in so-called magistrates’ courts by justices of the peace. This court system was revised in the early 1970s.
7 Holmes’s grandmother was the sister of Horace Vernet, the French artist.
8 “We shall see.”
9 George Bradshaw published the most popular railroad timetables during the Victorian era. By Edwardian times, his name was applied to any such set of schedules.
10 The Reichenbach Falls of Switzerland are the site of Holmes’s final confrontation with Professor Moriarty, who fell to his death there. At the time, Holmes was presumed to have perished as well.
11 “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.” The quotation is from Blaise Pascal.
12 Indra’s jewels refer to a metaphor of Buddhist philosophy. Also called Indra’s net or Indra’s pearls, Indra’s jewels symbolize the sense of infinitely repeating interconnections among all elements of the cosmos. It will be recalled that Holmes spent some time in India and Tibet following his duel with Professor Moriarty.