Such a view is not universally shared. Attorney Andrew G. Fusco, in “The Case Against Mr. Holmes,” argues in great detail that Holmes had no special legal knowledge or training. He points out that Holmes’s use of legal terminology is often improper technically. In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” he may have done nothing more than present the facts of the case to defense counsel, which readily produced objections to be raised at trial. His diligent search for legal proofs of guilt may be nothing more than the product of his compulsive personality. Furthermore, there is no evidence of Holmes receiving any formal legal education. In short, Fusco concludes, Holmes had nothing more than a “good practical knowledge of British law,” as would be expected of a detective who frequently dealt with the law and the police.
69 Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) completed the first volume of Lieder ohne Wortes (Songs Without Words), a book of music for the pianoforte, in 1830. There were eight volumes in all, the last of which was finished in 1845. Several scholars speculate that because Holmes played the violin and not the pianoforte, he must have been working out simple melodies for the unmusical Watson, not tackling full transcriptions of the pieces.
70 In the essay “Sherlock Holmes and Music,” Harvey Officer, composer of the Baker Street Suite for violin and piano, challenges Watson’s recollection by attesting that Holmes could have played neither “sonorous and melancholy” chords nor “fantastic and cheerful” ones while playing a violin “thrown across his knee.” “Chords on a violin,” Officer explains, “are not natural to the instrument. They can only be played when the violin is held strongly in its accustomed position, and even then they are not the violin’s most expressive sounds. It is preeminently the instrument of melody, not of harmony.”
But William Braid White, a musicology expert, considers that a seated Holmes may have “placed the tail piece of the violin against his middle, holding his left arm under it and the fingers of that arm on the fingerboard in the usual way. This would bring the violin to a position nearly at right angles to his body as he sat in the chair, leaving his right arm and hand free to use the bow, and the left arm and hand, as before remarked, equally free for the fingerboard.” When Holmes produced these chords, White concludes, he was reminding himself of, and perhaps practising, the famous “Chaconne” (at any rate, the introductory parts of it) from Johann Sebastian Bach’s D Minor Sonata for violin, which, he apparently believes, any listener would characterise as “fantastic and cheerful.”
Rolfe Boswell, among others, points out that Watson never says that Holmes placed a violin across his knee, but rather a fiddle. This could well have been the medieval fiddle, which was flat and oval and had five strings; or any bowed, stringed instrument in the violin family, all of which are termed in the vernacular “fiddles.” Boswell favors the latter interpretation, arguing that Holmes’s instrument of choice was the viola.
Scene from a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (ca. 1881).
71 Emanuel Berg takes Watson’s wording here (a series as compensation for the trial upon his patience) to indicate that the “series of favourite airs” were the work of William Schwenk Gilbert (1836–1911) and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842–1900), the lyricist and composer of our most enduring comic operas. Watson’s preference, according to Berg, would have been for those works between Trial by Jury (March 25, 1875) and Patience (April 23, 1881), a period of productivity that included H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) and The Pirates of Penzance (1879). Guy Warrack suggests that Mendelssohn’s Auf Flügeln des Gesanges might well have been another of Watson’s favourites.
72 G. Lestrade, as he signs a letter in “The Cardboard Box,” a policeman assigned to Scotland Yard, appears in fourteen of Watson’s published accounts. While Holmes upheld a friendly attitude toward Lestrade and his brethren, he disdained their methods. Holmes called Lestrade the best of the professionals (The Hound of the Baskervilles), the “pick of a bad lot” (A Study in Scarlet), lacking in imagination (“The Norwood Builder”), and normally out of his depth (The Sign of Four).
Lestrade frequently patronised Holmes’s methods yet evidently bore a secret respect for Holmes. At the conclusion of “The Six Napoleons,” Lestrade, congratulating Holmes on his successful investigation, remarks, “We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.” L. S. Holstein, who has conducted a thorough analysis of Lestrade’s career, places him at around forty at the time of the affair reported in A Study in Scarlet; and Lestrade continues to interact with Holmes as late as “The Three Garridebs” (1902). From this, Holstein concludes that Lestrade was born sometime between 1844 and 1846, making him ten or twelve years older than Holmes. Aside from the mention of Lestrade’s first initial, there are no indications of what the detective’s first name might be; nor is there any clear consensus among scholars on the pronunciation of “Lestrade.”
73 R. K. Leavitt observes, in “Nummi in Arca or The Fiscal Holmes,” that these clients were Holmes’s daily fare, not the more profitable Reginald Musgraves. “Holmes very soon outgrew his dependence upon [such clients], though he continued (be it said to his credit) to interest himself in such cases all through his years of affluence.”
74 Despite a lack of concrete evidence either here or elsewhere in the story, William S. Baring-Gould declares that this is “the famous Mrs. Hudson,” Holmes’s faithful landlady, who is mentioned by that name throughout the rest of the Canon. Baring-Gould and other scholars further assert that the landlady’s first name is Martha. They make this claim based on the text of “The Lion’s Mane,” in which the retired Holmes refers to “my old housekeeper,” who tends to him in Sussex Downs, and “His Last Bow,” in which Holmes speaks of a “dear old ruddy-faced woman” who is “Martha, the only servant I have left.” William Hyder, in “The Martha Myth,” disputes these assumptions, concluding on the basis of Watson’s descriptions that Mrs. Hudson, Holmes’s Sussex housekeeper, and Martha are in fact three separate women.
As to Mrs. Hudson, little is known about her personal life. Vincent Starrett speculates, in “The Singular Adventures of Martha Hudson,” that she was a young widow who took up housekeeping after her marriage ended for reasons unknown. “But,” Starrett laments, “no whisper of her life before that day in 1881, when Holmes first called upon her, has ever been revealed. The notion persists that she had been unhappy; she kept so very still about it all.” D. Martin Dakin finds it curious that in all of the Strand Magazine illustrations of the Canon (many drawn from life, some believe), there is no depiction of Mrs. Hudson.
75 Edgar W. Smith speculates, in Baker Street Inventory, that that magazine was the March 1881 issue of the popular literary journal Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975). Specialising in the serialisation of novels, the magazine, whose first editor was William Makepeace Thackeray, published the work of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins. Arthur Conan Doyle was also a frequent contributor. Tage La Cour suggests that a scientific magazine would be a more likely source for an article on deductive reasoning.
76 Euclid, in Greek Eucleides (fl. ca. 300 B.C., Alexandria), is best known for his thirteen-book Elements, which laid out the principles of geometry and other mathematics. The first six books cover elementary plane geometry, the continuing bane of many a modern high school student. See The Sign of Four, note 16.
77 Originally, third-class carriages in the British railway system had no roofs or seats, and passengers—largely the poor and working class—were left unprotected from the elements, flying sparks, or pollution. Later, the 1844 Railway Act mandated that all third-class carriages be covered. Thomas Hardy, in his story “The Fiddler of the Reels” (1893), describes those early days of transportation by noting that “the unfortunate occupants of these vehicles were, on the train drawing up at the London terminus, found to be in a pitiable
condition from their long journey; blue-faced, stiff-necked, sneezing, rain-beaten, chilled to the marrow, many of the men being hatless; in fact, they resembled people who had been out all night in an open boat on a rough sea, rather than inland excursionists for pleasure.”
Although third-class accommodations had improved considerably by the time of the events in A Study in Scarlet, they were still far from luxurious, and a professional such as Watson may have attached some stigma to travelling in such a fashion. In “The Retired Colourman,” Josiah Amberley’s insistence on travelling third class leads Watson to label him a “miser.”
78 The “Underground Railways,” more properly the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District, and City and South London Railways, irrevocably changed the fabric of everyday life in London, carrying over 110 million passengers per year by 1896, according to Baedeker. First opened in 1860, the trains for the most part ran through tunnels or cuttings between high walls. London was the first city to adopt underground railways. The railway figures prominently in “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” but the only recorded instance of Holmes or Watson actually travelling by Underground occurs in “The Red-Headed League,” when the pair journey to Aldersgate.
Christopher Morley points out the timeliness of Watson’s mention of the Underground here; the nearby Baker Street station, first opened in 1863, was then undergoing expansion.
79 William S. Baring-Gould calls this an early sign of Watson’s predilection for gambling, to which he refers many years later in “The Dancing Men” and “Shoscombe Old Place.” In the latter story, when Holmes asks Watson whether he knows anything about horse racing, the doctor replies, “I ought to. I pay for it with about half my wound pension.”
80 Holmes’s fees varied widely during his career. For a detailed discussion of Holmes’s income at this time in his career and later, see this editor’s “On Sherlock Holmes’s Money.”
81 Ian McQueen is dubious that Watson would have had sufficient time to acquire a marked degree of facial tanning. Instead, McQueen suggests, Watson, “revelling in his rôle as the old campaigner,” may have exaggerated, “partly for understandable reasons of vanity, partly with the object of enabling Holmes to display his remarkable deductive capacity. It may be that Holmes was not so quick with his inference about Afghanistan as Watson would have the reader believe.”
82 This is not as foregone a conclusion as Holmes pretends it to be; Samuel F. Howard notes that on the basis of the limited data reported by Watson, Holmes might well have concluded that Watson was returning from South Africa, where the Zulu campaign (1879–1880) was just concluding. Furthermore, as several commentators note, Afghanistan is not in the “tropics” in any normal sense of the word. “Either Holmes had other data that he did not explain to Watson (or Watson did not pass on to us),” Howard writes in “More About Maiwand,” “or he was guilty of sheer guesswork. I prefer to believe he observed some other detail in Watson’s appearance that he did not bother to repeat to Watson when, months later, he explained his methods to him.”
83 The Chevalier Auguste Dupin, whose adventures are recorded in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842), and “Purloined Letter” (1844), was of “illustrious parentage” but lived in poverty in a small back library at No. 33 Rue Dunot, Faubourg-St. Germain. An anonymous chronicler reports that Dupin preferred to sit behind closed shutters, lit only by “a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays.” He would emerge from his rooms, “when the fit was upon him,” to wander through Paris and experience “the infinity of mental excitement” resulting from his observation of Parisian life. A heavy smoker who favored a meerschaum pipe, Dupin was disdainful of the Paris police and had contempt for their methods.
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the story of a mother-daughter murder that baffles police, is widely considered the first modern detective story. It was published in Graham’s Magazine (of which Poe was the editor). Steinbrunner and Penzler’s Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection calls Dupin “the model for virtually every cerebral crime solver who followed.”
84 Arthur Conan Doyle disagreed with Holmes, assessing Poe’s hero-detective in a preface to the twelve-volume Author’s Edition of Poe’s works: “Edgar Allan Poe … was the father of the detective tale, and covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own… . On this narrow path [of creating a “hero” character] the writer must walk and he sees the footmarks of Poe always in front of him. He is happy if he ever finds the means of breaking away and striking out on some little side-track of his own.”
Holmes’s dismissive description of Dupin may belie a more deep-seated impulse. “There was always just a touch of professional jealousy in Holmes’s character,” writes Vincent Starrett, “—entirely natural, no doubt—that even Watson could not gloss away.” Yet in “The Cardboard Box,” Holmes takes quite a different tone, evidently referring to Dupin when he speaks favourably of the “close reasoner” in Poe’s “sketches.” Morris Rosenblum is one scholar who presumes that Watson must have been perplexed by this about-face; but Marshall Shaw Dickman believes he has found the reason for it: In “On Matters Surrounding the Case of the Purloined Letter,” Dickman relates his discovery of a manuscript suggesting that Dupin’s activities after “The Purloined Letter” resulted in the birth of Holmes’s mother. This would make Dupin Holmes’s grandfather. Could Holmes have seen the manuscript?
85 M. Lecoq, whose adventures are reported in a series of books by Emile Gaboriau, was a criminal-turned-detective for the Paris Surêté, or security police. The early career of Lecoq closely resembles that of the headline-making François Eugène Vidocq (1775–1857), who joined the Surêté as a police spy after serving prison time for a variety of petty crimes. Vidocq became chief of detectives, leaving the force in 1827 and returning in 1832—only to be dismissed that same year for allegedly orchestrating a robbery with the intention of “solving” it. Vidocq’s memoirs were published in four volumes in 1828 and 1829. Partly fictional and probably ghost-written, they were widely read.
Monsieur Lecoq (Gaboriau never revealed his first name) was born around 1844 to “respectable” parents but turned to crime after his father’s financial ruin. Just when his life seemed headed down the wrong path, he consulted an astronomer, who told him, “When one has your disposition, and is poor, one may either become a famous thief or a great detective. Choose.” He chose the latter and became an expert at the use of disguise, developing useful tests to determine when a bed had been last used and when the hands of a clock had been set back. His adventures are recounted in L’Affair Lerouge (1866) (U.S. title The Widow Lerouge, 1873), Le Dossier No. 113 (1867) (U.S. title File No. 113, 1875), Monsieur Lecoq (1869), Le Crime de Orcival (1867) (U.S. title The Mystery of Orcival, 1871), Les Enclaves de Paris (1868) (U.S. title The Slaves of Paris, 1882), and the posthumously published long story Le Petit Vieux des Batignolles (1876) (U.S. title The Little Old Man of Batignolles, 1880). In his first case, L’Affaire Lerouge, Lecoq plays only a small part; the principal detection is by Père Tabaret, known as Tir-au-clair, an amateur detective who tutors Lecoq.
86 The book that Holmes so scorns is likely Monsieur Lecoq, in which Lecoq releases a prisoner and follows him for an extended period to determine his identity. In the judgement of historians and scholars, there is little in Lecoq’s career to justify Holmes’s verdict of “a miserable bungler,” although Lecoq’s mentor Père Tabaret himself described Lecoq in this case as committing “a great many blunders” and complained that he had squandered three or four opportunities to solve the case.
87 Holmes similarly laments a dearth of nefariousness in The Sign of Four (which probably took place in 1888): “Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those that are commonplace have any function on earth.” The high point of his career was clearly his e
xtended struggle with Professor Moriarty, which was not to commence until 1890 or so (in “The Final Problem,” Moriarty says that Holmes first “crossed his path” in January 1891, but that could not have been Holmes’s first knowledge of Moriarty). When that investigation was over, however, Holmes returned to relative boredom, causing him to sigh in “Wisteria Lodge” (1894 or 1895): “Life is commonplace, the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world.” T. S. Blakeney comments, “We clearly see from these observations that the artist [in Holmes] has outstripped the social worker… . More than once we catch a wistful tone in his reference to the dear departed Professor Moriarty—see The Norwood Builder and the tinge of hope that inspired his suggestion (The Missing Three-Quarter) that Dr. Leslie Armstrong might fill the gap left by the professor’s death.”
Self-portrait of artist George Hutchinson.
Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1892
88 Scotland Yard, originally a specific location, became the colloquial name for the detectives of the London Metropolitan Police. The first headquarters of the Metropolitan Police were the back premises of 4 Whitehall Place. The location had been the site of a residence owned by the kings of Scotland before the Union and used and occupied by them and/or their ambassadors when in London, and was known as “Scotland.” The courtyard was later used by Sir Christopher Wren and known as “Scotland Yard.” The residence backed on to Great Scotland Yard, the name of which was said to have been derived from the Scott family’s ownership during the Middle Ages. In either case, by 1887, the police headquarters embraced numbers 3, 4, 5, 21, and 22 Whitehall Place, numbers 8 and 9 Great Scotland Yard, numbers 1, 2, and 3 Palace Place, and various stables and outbuildings. In 1890, the headquarters moved to premises on the Victoria Embankment designed by Richard Norman Shaw, which became known as “New Scotland Yard” and was presumably well known to Holmes. In 1967, because of the need for a larger and more modern headquarters, a further move took place to the present site at Broadway, S.W.1, also known as “New Scotland Yard.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Page 7