It is hardly surprising that Holmes would notice Griggs’ tattoo and be able to identify it even though he saw only a portion of it beneath Griggs’ sleeve cuff. In “The Red-headed League,” Holmes remarks to Mr. Jabez Wilson, “The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature of the subject.” This monograph on the subject of tattoos appears to be lost to us, but it seems likely, in view of this Roosevelt manuscript, that Holmes had made the study of tattoos prior to 1880 and that the monograph probably was published around the same time as the publications of his monographs on tobacco, the identification of footprints and the dating of documents.
Holmes frequently exhibited a familiarity with the American Civil War, an event that was to find mention in his subsequent cases, “The Five Orange Pips,” “The Valley of Fear” and “The Cardboard Box.”
Back to chapter seven
CHAPTER EIGHT
Roosevelt’s discourse on the realities of American politics accords with his subsequent writings on the system in which he was to play a part throughout his life. While Roosevelt deplored the sordid sides of big-city political machines, he was careful to defend their positive contributions. “The terms machine and machine politician are now undoubtedly used ordinarily in a reproachful sense,” he wrote in The Century, November 1886, “but it does not at all follow that this sense is always the right one. On the contrary, the machine is often a very powerful instrument for good; and a machine politician really desirous of doing honest work on behalf of the community is fifty times as useful as is the average philanthropic outsider.”
Theodore Roosevelt’s confidence that no one would ever be elected to a third term as President finally proved unfounded when a member of his own family – his cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt – sought and won a third term in 1940 and a fourth in 1944, after which a Constitutional Amendment made Washington’s concept of a two-term limit the law of the land.
Back to chapter eight
CHAPTER NINE
The scene in which Roosevelt sits down at his desk and strikes a ‘balance sheet’ in the Tebbel case seems to mark the point at which Roosevelt is bitten by the ‘detective bug,’ although it would be fifteen years before he became President of the Board of Police Commissioners of the New York Police Department. A word about that service may be appropriate. Until 1895, Roosevelt had been serving with great distinction as a member of the Civil Service Commission, appointed to the post in 1889 by President Harrison. In that period, Civil Service rules were extended to more than fifty thousand government employees. Meanwhile in New York City, a coalition of political parties formed in 1894 to oppose Tammany Hall, electing W. L. Strong as mayor. Strong first asked Roosevelt to head the Street Cleaning Department and Roosevelt declined. He accepted the job as head of the Police Department and placed the historically corrupt force on a thoroughly efficient basis. His major accomplishment was to put an end to the despicable habit of members of the Police Department blackmailing victims encountered in the course of duty. Roosevelt took over in 1895, a date which coincides with the so-called missing year in the biography of Sherlock Holmes, leading to speculation – and it must be speculation, because there is no supporting evidence – that Holmes had returned to New York to be of assistance to Roosevelt in reorganising the police. Baring-Gould indicates that it was in the period of late 1895 to late 1896 that Holmes cleared his brother Sherrinford of the charge of murder, “an investigation that led him in turn to a cesspool of ancient horrors associated with black magic,” but Holmes’ exact activities and whereabouts in this year are the subject of speculation only, and it is to this speculative realm that we must assign the tantalising prospect that Holmes helped clean up corruption in the NYPD.
As in London, it was commonplace for New Yorkers to use the services of scores of private messenger services, as well as the telegraph office, for crosstown communications in the era before telephones. Holmes’ message to Hargreave probably was sent through one of these private services available in all of the hotels in the area around his lodgings on Twenty-second Street.
By now, anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes knows of his extraordinary knack for makeup and costumes, learned during his association with the Sasanoff troupe and put to such remarkable use in various adventures. However, it was not until another consummate actor and master of makeup brought Sherlock Holmes to the movie screen that admirers of Holmes were able to see the magical transformations Holmes effected – the actor Basil Rathbone. In one of Rathbone’s ‘Holmes’ films, the actor, in pursuit of Moriarty, donned much the same disguise as that described herein by Roosevelt – sailor’s cap, shirt, and dungarees, though without the beard. One of Rathbone’s most effective ‘Holmes disguises’ was that of an English music hall performer in the film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes’ off-hand reference herein to his disguise as “a little old flower-lady who would win your hearts” is too tempting to contemplate!
Holmes’ little discourse on his reasoning process accords with that of a similar one in “The Five Orange Pips.” Holmes states, “The ideal reasoner would, when he has once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it, but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.” Something which Holmes proceeded to do brilliantly in deducing that the murder of Nigel Tebbel was part of a plot to assassinate President Hayes. Yet Holmes seems bothered by his readiness to “jump to a conclusion,” even a correct one. As he remarks later in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” it is “a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”
The Times reports that President Hayes dined aboard the S.S. Mosel with Herr Schumacher; Postmaster General Key; Governor Howard of Rhode Island; U.S. Attorney Woodford and his wife; and Captain Neynaber of the Mosel, who would be commanding the splendid oceanliner as she left her dock at Hoboken, New Jersey, on Saturday, July 3. North German Lloyds vessels usually sailed on Saturdays. Hayes left New York in the afternoon of July 3 after spending the day safely at the Woodford residence at Manhattan Beach. The news accounts of the visit contain no mention of any plot against Hayes, a tribute to the skill with which Holmes handled this delicate situation.
The British Consul General’s office was located at 24 State Street, and it was an urgent message to the Consul General which Wakefield carried the previous night at Holmes’ behest. It might have been assumed that the British envoy would have been a friend of Mycroft Holmes, who was associated with the British government in various capacities. It is quite surprising to learn that Holmes knew the British Consul General from a date when they had been students under the mathematics tutelage of none other than Professor James Moriarty! In later adventures, Professor Moriarty would be described by Holmes as “the Napoleon of crime” and organiser of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected; a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. Odd, that Holmes – a genius, a philosopher, and an abstract thinker, himself – would describe Moriarty in this adventure as a man he didn’t like when they ought to have hit it off wonderfully, having so much in common. Or, did Holmes instinctively know even at this early date that Moriarty was the personification of crime and that they were destined to have a deadly struggle?
Holmes describes his commandeering of a local policeman as an extraordinary act, but he was to make it commonplace for himself in the years to come!
Back to chapter nine
CHAPTER TEN
Nothing in the literature of crime matches for sheer thrill the picture of Sherlock Holmes on the scent, dashing to various parts of a city in search of the persons who may put into his hands the ends of the minute strands of evi
dence and circumstance that will lead him to the resolution of his ‘problem.’ In this instance, beginning with visits to tobacco wholesale markets in order to trace Tebbel’s cigar and then to the Customs House for data on the berths of German steamships, finally comparing this data and pinpointing the spot where a dastardly crime might be committed. Holmes lectures Watson on his investigative process in “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax.” He points out, “When you follow two separate chains of thought, Watson, you will find some point of intersection which should approximate the truth.”
It seems probable that the hotel where the conspirators waited without success for a chance to kill President Hayes stood on West Street where it meets Christopher and Barrow streets, the Manhattan terminus of the Hoboken ferry most likely used to convey passengers to the Hoboken pier of the German steamship company.
Holmes was not ashamed to boast of his talents as a burglar. “You know, Watson, I don’t mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal,” he states in “Charles Augustus Milverton,” producing for Watson’s perusal a “first-class, up-to-date burgling kit, with nickel-plated jemmy, diamond-tipped glass cutter, adaptable keys, and every modern improvement which the march of modern civilisation demands.”
Holmes’ performance in reconstructing what transpired in room 405 of the hotel on West Street during the night of July 2–3, 1880, is a typical example of the Holmes method: “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important” (“A Case of Identity”).
“The faculty of deduction is certainly contagious, Watson,” exclaims Holmes in “Thor Bridge,” complimenting Watson for an achievement, just as he complimented Roosevelt in this adventure.
The Broadway Squad was a nineteenth-century forerunner of the special task forces which the New York Police Department would use, ranging from undercover decoy cops posing as drunks, old women, and handicapped persons to lure muggers to the special task force that included more than one hundred detectives in the search for the “Son of Sam.” The Broadway Squad had been set up primarily to protect theatregoers in the ‘Rialto’ that stretched from Union Square to Forty-second Street. These were hand-picked men (described by Roosevelt in Chapter 3) and were, as Holmes dubs them, New York’s “finest.” The job of these plainclothes street cops was made somewhat easier in 1880 by the installation of lights on Broadway from Fourteenth Street to Twenty-sixth, but as any cop of the Times Square beat today will tell you, the worst possible crimes are committed beneath the brightest of lights.
Back to chapter ten
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Tilden House at 15 Gramercy Park South is now the home of the National Arts Club, founded in 1898, which took over the Tilden mansion for its headquarters in 1906. Roosevelt returned to the address after he retired from the White House, lunching daily in the club’s dining room and conducting meetings connected with his editorship of The Outlook. The National Arts Club was the second private club to move into what had been an exclusive residential community. The Players, founded by Edwin Booth, opened a few years earlier next door to the Tilden house. If, in fact, Holmes came back to New York City in the ‘missing year’ of 1895–96, it seems likely that he would have visited The Players, although he may have used his stage name, Escott.
After his defeat under the peculiar circumstances of the 1876 Presidential election, Tilden preferred to live as private a life as possible, eventually giving up his Gramercy Park residence in favour of his Yonkers estate. Gramercy Park was founded as a private park and remains one to this day, keys to its gates available only to those who live in the homes surrounding it. (The original keys were gold.)
Theodore Roosevelt married Alice Lee on October 27, 1880, his twenty-second birthday, the marriage taking place in Boston. Alice Lee Roosevelt was a nineteen-year-old blue-eyed, brown-haired beauty. The couple returned to Manhattan where Roosevelt attended Columbia Law School in the winter of 1880–81. Roosevelt did not enjoy the study of law and gave it up, taking his bride to Europe in the summer of 1881. There, he collected information for a book he had begun at Harvard, The Naval War of 1812. It seems likely that Roosevelt would have dropped in on Sherlock Holmes to introduce the sleuth to the new Mrs Roosevelt. Holmes, it seems probable, would have introduced the Roosevelts to his new roommate, Dr John H. Watson, whom Holmes had met in January 1881. That Roosevelt corresponded with Watson (as evidenced by the documents cited in the Introduction) proves conclusively that the two men had met before beginning their correspondence. It is probable that they met more than once. The second meeting would appear to have occurred in December 1886, when Roosevelt was again abroad (this time to marry his second wife – his first wife, Alice, having died in February 1884). On December 2, 1886, Dr Watson and Holmes would surely have attended Roosevelt’s wedding to Edith Kermit Carow, a woman three years younger than himself but whom he had known since childhood. The third reunion of Roosevelt and Holmes was, as I have speculated, in 1895, when Holmes came to New York to assist Roosevelt in cleaning up the New York police department. Following is a representation of the pertinent dates in the lives of both men:
A more detailed chronology of Holmes’s life may be found in Baring-Gould’s life of Holmes. Roosevelt wrote an autobiography.)
Back to chapter eleven
CHAPTER TWELVE
In 1880, as today, no one was a better observer, reporter, or commentator on the affairs, morals, and modes of the day than the cab driver! Although public mass transit was in its incipient stages in the city (there were elevated trains on the East and West sides and tramways), those who could afford it or who didn’t want the jostle and bounce and crowding of the trains and cars could call on the hackneys and coaches that plied the streets and avenues. The astute observations of the doorman at the Union League Club indicate that then, as now, the city’s doormen were every bit as observant as the cabbies.
The Republican National Committee met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel beginning July 1, 1880, to organise the Garfield-Arthur campaign, coming out of its meetings with the usual declarations of party solidarity and forecasts of an impending defeat of the Democratic slate. The party unity thus outwardly achieved was a result of compromises at the convention in June which put New York’s Chester A. Arthur on the Garfield ticket. The Arthur nomination was largely the handiwork of party boss Senator Roscoe Conkling. Arthur was Conkling’s protégé and was rewarded for his efforts for Grant in 1868 by appointment as Collector of the Port of New York, the rich patronage position from which Hayes dismissed Arthur in 1879 to the consternation of the Stalwarts. Upon the election of Garfield and Arthur, the Stalwarts expected Garfield to put New York patronage in the hands of a Stalwart. However, Garfield gave Arthur’s old job as Collector to a ‘Half-Breed’ adherent of James G. Blaine, an act that was to have a significant impact on the solidarity heralded by the National Committee at their July 1880 meeting.
The first practical typewriting machine had been patented by the American journalist C. L. Sholes in 1867, and Holmes appears by his obvious familiarity with the machine to have made quite a study of it, with special attention to its value as a means of providing clues in criminal investigations. While he mentioned to Augustus Roosevelt his intention of writing a monograph on the subject, he still had not done so some years later. He stated in “A Case of Identity” that he was thinking “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.”
Back to chapter twelve
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It appears that Roosevelt has given the central character of this conspiracy a fictitious name in preparing his manuscript. No record exists of any prominent person with the name Tiberius Gaius Nero Veil.Obviously, Roosevelt took the names of four Caesars for this man’s given names. The surname, Veil, is, apparently, an anagram of the word ‘evil.’ The political history which thi
s man relates makes sense in terms of his Republican associations, but it is a history which fits numerous Republicans of the era. Nor is the familiarity with Arthur (calling him ‘Chet,’ for instance) a clue, because Arthur was known as ‘Chet’ to hundreds of political hacks.
There was definitely an incident of some kind involving Hayes at Columbus, Ohio, on June 22, 1880. A newspaper account dismisses it as a rumour in which Hayes was reported to have dropped dead on a street in the city while he was in Ohio to attend a college graduation.
Readers of Watson know that Holmes’ landlady, Mrs Hudson, followed the English custom of preparing and serving Holmes meals, but the lodging and rooming houses of New York City in the year 1880 did not follow this practice. Holmes surely had to have had quite an impact on the Italian lady who rented him his rooms, but, alas, if the lady had harboured hopes of a romance with the young Englishman, she was bound to be disappointed, given Holmes’ strong views on the pitfalls awaiting a detective who permitted romance to complicate his life.
The violin, like the deerstalker cap, Inverness cloak, pipe, and magnifying glass, has become indelibly identified with Holmes. He played a Stradivarius at 221B Baker Street, but the cavalier manner in which he handled the violin which Roosevelt describes, permitting it to be buried under the clutter of his Twenty-second Street rooms, indicates that Holmes had not yet acquired his ‘Strad.’ Again and again, in lulls during his cases or immediately after solving them, Holmes resorted to “violin-land, where all is sweetness, and delicacy, and harmony” (“The Redheaded League”). In “The Five Orange Pips,” he tells Watson, “Hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather, and the still more miserable ways of our fellow-men.” But Holmes’ liking for music went beyond that which he produced himself. He frequented numerous concerts in London. (“Let us escape from this weary workaday world by the side door of music. Carina sings tonight at the Albert Hall, and we still have time to dress, dine, and enjoy,” he says in “The Retired Colourman.”) There were plenty of chances to escape by the side door of music in 1880s New York. The famous Academy of Music stood on Fourteenth Street, a short walk from Holmes’ rooms and on the same street as the Union Square Theatre. Holmes could hear music by the New York Symphony Orchestra or catch recitals at Steinway and Chickering halls. New York City was opening its vistas to music from Britain, as well. Gilbert and Sullivan had arrived in late 1879.
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