“Mr. Gregson,” he said, “I have just made a discovery of the highest importance, and one which would have been overlooked had I not made a careful examination of the walls.”
The little man’s eyes sparkled as he spoke, and he was evidently in a state of suppressed exultation at having scored a point against his colleague.
“Come here,” he said, bustling back into the room, the atmosphere of which felt clearer since the removal of its ghastly inmate. “Now, stand there!”
He struck a match on his boot and held it up against the wall.
“Look at that!” he said, triumphantly.
I have remarked that the paper had fallen away in parts. In this particular corner of the room a large piece had peeled off, leaving a yellow square of coarse plastering. Across this bare space there was scrawled in blood-red letters a single word—
RACHE.
“What do you think of that?” cried the detective, with the air of a showman exhibiting his show. “This was overlooked because it was in the darkest corner of the room, and no one thought of looking there. The murderer has written it with his or her own blood. See this smear where it has trickled down the wall! That disposes of the idea of suicide anyhow. Why was that corner chosen to write it on? I will tell you. See that candle on the mantelpiece. It was lit at the time, and if it was lit this corner would be the brightest instead of the darkest portion of the wall.”
“And what does it mean now that you have found it?” asked Gregson in a depreciatory voice.
“Mean? Why, it means that the writer was going to put the female name Rachel, but was disturbed before he or she had time to finish. You mark my words, when this case comes to be cleared up you will find that a woman named Rachel has something to do with it. It’s all very well for you to laugh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. You may be very smart and clever, but the old hound is the best, when all is said and done.”
“He struck a match on his boot and held it up against the wall.”
Geo. Hutchinson, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lock Bowden, and Co., 1891)
“I really beg your pardon!” said my companion, who had ruffled the little man’s temper by bursting into an explosion of laughter. “You certainly have the credit of being the first of us to find this out and, as you say, it bears every mark of having been written by the other participant in last night’s mystery. I have not had time to examine this room yet,113 but with your permission I shall do so now.”
As he spoke, he whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass114 from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face. So engrossed was he with his occupation that he appeared to have forgotten our presence, for he chattered away to himself under his breath the whole time, keeping up a running fire of exclamations, groans, whistles, and little cries suggestive of encouragement and of hope. As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound as it dashes backward and forward through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent. For twenty minutes or more he continued his researches, measuring with the most exact care the distance between marks which were entirely invisible to me, and occasionally applying his tape to the walls in an equally incomprehensible manner. In one place he gathered up very carefully a little pile of grey dust from the floor, and packed it away in an envelope. Finally, he examined with his glass the word upon the wall, going over every letter of it with the most minute exactness. This done, he appeared to be satisfied, for he replaced his tape and his glass in his pocket.
“ ‘Look at that!’ he said, triumphantly.”
Richard Gutschmidt, Späte Rache (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1902)
“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,”115 he remarked with a smile. “It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”
Gregson and Lestrade had watched the manœuvres of their amateur companion with considerable curiosity and some contempt. They evidently failed to appreciate the fact, which I had begun to realize, that Sherlock Holmes’s smallest actions were all directed towards some definite and practical end.
“What do you think of it sir?” they both asked.
“It would be robbing you of the credit of the case if I was to presume to help you,” remarked my friend. “You are doing so well now that it would be a pity for anyone to interfere.” There was a world of sarcasm in his voice as he spoke. “If you will let me know how your investigations go,” he continued, “I shall be happy to give you any help I can. In the meantime I should like to speak to the constable who found the body. Can you give me his name and address?”
Lestrade glanced at his notebook. “John Rance,” he said. “He is off duty now. You will find him at 46, Audley Court, Kennington Park Gate.”116
“He examined with the glass the word upon the wall, going over every letter of it with the most minute exactness.”
D. H. Friston, Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1887
Holmes took a note of the address.
“Come along, Doctor,” he said: “we shall go and look him up. I’ll tell you one thing which may help you in the case,” he continued, turning to the two detectives. “There has been murder done,117 and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly118 cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore leg.119 In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the finger-nails of his right hand were remarkably long. These are only a few indications, but they may assist you.”
Lestrade and Gregson glanced at each other with an incredulous smile.
“If this man was murdered, how was it done?” asked the former.
“Poison,” said Sherlock Holmes curtly, and strode off. “One other thing, Lestrade,” he added, turning round at the door: “ ‘Rache’ is the German for ‘revenge’; so don’t lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.”120
With which Parthian shot121 he walked away, leaving the two rivals open-mouthed behind him.
90 Jerry Neal Williamson, in “ ‘And Especially Your Eyes,’ ” uses this scene to argue that Holmes was farsighted. Here, he points out, there is evidence of Holmes’s uncanny “long vision”: while he was able to spot the tattoo on the back of the marine’s hand, he cannot read the note to his satisfaction without enlisting Watson’s help. But there are numerous conflicting statements about Holmes’s vision throughout the Canon, as Richard L. Vaught, M.D., notes in “Now See Here, Holmes!” For example, Holmes has no trouble reading a “little brown-backed volume” (see text accompanying note 150, below), which was undoubtedly printed with very small type. Trevor H. Hall, in “The Late Sherlock Holmes,” proposes that Holmes developed amblyopia (a lazy eye) from his excessive tobacco use and eventually faced total blindness. Dr. Vaught concludes that Holmes was nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other, and he coins a new term, “antimetropia,” for this condition. (The medical term for farsightedness is hyperopia; for nearsightedness, myopia.)
91 The Latin phrase literally means “in the state in which,” or in its former state.
92 Mystery writer John Ball, Jr., in “Early Days in Baker Street,” sees in this and Lestrade’s later question “What do you think of it, sir?” remarkable deference to a “civilian” not part of the Yard. In Ball’s view, through the offices of Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes became a private agent in Her Majesty’s Government, “probably with the classification of Queen’s Messenger, a unique and highly restricted office. Queen’s (or King’s) Messengers may go anywhere in the British Empire on official business, and have extraordinary authority in the field.”
R. K. Leavitt takes the contrary view, expressed in “Nummi in Arca or The Fiscal Holmes,” that Holmes had been hired privately by the inspectors f
rom the Yard, to enhance their professional reputations.
93 Although Gregson appears or is mentioned in five cases (the others are The Sign of Four, “The Greek Interpreter,” “Wisteria Lodge,” and “The Red Circle”), this is the only case in which he is truly involved.
94 This is the only recorded case in which Scotland Yard’s two leading inspectors, Gregson and Lestrade, work together. Gavin Brend wonders whether a bit of intercontinental rivalry might have led to their teaming up. Perhaps, he writes, the officials at Scotland Yard “wished to impress their Transatlantic brethren by demonstrating that they were quite capable of discovering the murderer of Enoch J. Drebber of Cleveland, Ohio.” But the ranks of Gregson and Lestrade are never actually mentioned by Watson, and Bernard Davies suggests that the two were mere detective-sergeants at the time—making their pairing far less momentous.
95 William S. Baring-Gould points out that the nearest cab-rank was at the corner of Dorset Street, only a block away.
96 John Ball, Jr., who argues that Holmes was a “Queen’s Messenger” (see note 92 above), discounts this remark as being a mere cover for his official status. The detective, he reminds us, “is certainly not the first confidential agent in history to deny the true source of his employment.”
97 The violins made by Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) at his workshop in Cremona, Italy, have long been prized for their perfect design and pure tone. While apprenticing with Nicolò Amati in 1666 (see below), Stradivari began making improvements upon Amati’s model and creating violins with the Latin inscription Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Faciebat Anno [date] imprinted on them. (It should be noted that such a label may or may not indicate authenticity.) Stradivari’s best work was done after 1700; the instruments he produced during that period set the standard by which modern violins are designed and judged. A fitting description is found in The Lost Stradivarius (1895), by John Meade Falkner, in which a Stradivarius discovered in an old cupboard is described as possessing “a light-red colour, with a varnish of peculiar lustre and softness. The neck seemed rather longer than ordinary, and the scroll was remarkably bold and free.” Approximately 650 of Stradivari’s more than 1,100 violins, cellos, harps, guitars, mandolins, and violas survive today.
Professor Joseph Nagyvary, a Stradivarius expert, described the “Stradivari sound” in Scientific American as “very lively. It flickers, it constantly trembles, it moves like candlelight.” There is disagreement over how Stradivari was able to produce an instrument with such a superior tone: some believe the Alpine spruce he used was particularly dense, whereas others speculate that he treated the wood with a special varnish that affected the sound. Still others, of course, credit the violin-maker, in particular his grasp of geometry as it relates to design, rather than his materials.
Holmes himself was the proud owner of one of these rare instruments. In “The Cardboard Box,” Holmes recounts to Watson “with great exultation how he had purchased his own Stradivarius, which was worth at least five hundred guineas, at a Jew broker’s in Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings.”
98 The Amati family of violin-makers lived in Cremona in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The head of the family and founder of the “Cremona school” was Andrea Amati (ca. 1520–1578), whose flat, shallow design, later modified to perfection by Stradivari, provided the basic model for the modern violin. Nicolò Amati, Andrea’s grandson, was perhaps the family’s most famous violin-maker; a master craftsman, he counted among his students Stradivari and Andrea Guarneri (ca. 1626–1698), and his graceful, dulcet-toned violins represented the height of the Amati line. Nicolò’s son, Girolamo (1649–1740), continued in the family business, but his violins are thought to be somewhat inferior in quality to those of his father and great-grandfather.
Some of the alterations that Stradivari made to the original Cremona model were to fashion the current violin bridge, as well as to make the body of the violin even shallower and hence more resonant. There were changes also in the thickness of the wood, the type of varnish used, and various other minor but ultimately significant details such that, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Edition), “the majority of violins since made, whether by good or bad makers, are copies of Stradivari.”
Guy Warrack, in Sherlock Holmes and Music, notes that Holmes omits to mention the third great family of Cremona violin-makers, the Guarneris. “Possibly,” Warrack writes, “Holmes was true enough to his principle [expressed earlier to Watson, of not having ‘useless facts elbowing out the useful ones’] to shun knowledge of Guarneri violins in order to leave more room for knowledge of Stradivaris.”
99 This theme is oft repeated in the Canon. Holmes makes almost the identical remark in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and in other tales formulates the dictate as follows: “It is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories” (“Wisteria Lodge”); “We approached the case with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage” (“The Cardboard Box”); “One forms provisional theories and waits for time or fuller knowledge to explode them. A bad habit …” (“The Sussex Vampire”); “I make a point of never having any prejudices and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me” (“The Reigate Squires”).
“These abundant references to the topic,” remarks T. S. Blakeney, “show how keenly Holmes appreciated the liability to form one’s suspicions on insufficient evidence. He was not, however, entirely immune from the tendency himself, for both in The Sign of Four [where he misjudged the hiding place of the Aurora] and The Missing Three-Quarter [when he suspected Dr. Leslie Armstrong of villainy] he had to reform his theories, and in The Yellow Face his conclusions were definitely wrong.”
100 Where exactly was “Number 3, Lauriston Gardens”?
Both H. W. Bell (“Three Identifications: Lauriston Gardens, Upper Swandam Lane, Saxe-Coburg Square”) and Michael Harrison take the view that the row of four houses was on Brixton Road, yet set back some distance from the pavement. “And in fact,” Bell writes, “there is no such group of four houses in any of the streets intersecting the Road.” Bell does locate a single group of four on Brixton Road, numbered from 314 to 320, which, he claims, correspond perfectly to Watson’s description. “Since Watson specified No. 3, we may suppose that No. 318, the third in the row, was the scene of the death of Enoch J. Drebber.”
Michael Harrison comes to a similar conclusion as to the street—that is, that the house was on Brixton Road and not an adjoining street—but (seemingly unaware of Bell’s work) selects a group of five as fitting Watson’s description, namely numbers 152 to 160.
Bernard Davies, making an extended analysis in “The Book of Genesis,” rejects the suggestions of both Bell and Harrison. Watson’s later description of a central hallway with doors “to the left and to the right,” Davies notes, would be appropriate only for a double-fronted house: one with two reception areas. No. 318 Brixton (Bell’s choice), by contrast, was a semi-detached single-fronted house, with just one reception area. Similarly, Harrison’s candidate is discarded not only for being single-fronted but also for lacking front gardens. Davies identifies the group of houses at Nos. 329–335 Brixton Road, on the east side, between Villa Road and St. John’s Road (now St. John’s Crescent), as “Lauriston Gardens.” A 1962 photograph of the location is reproduced here.
Colin Prestige takes a different approach, in “South London Adventures,” latching on to the house’s proximity to the White Hart Tavern (see note 133, below) as a telling clue. Given that the tavern was situated at the junction of Loughborough Road and Lilford Road, Prestige decides that “the area known as Myatt’s Fields immediately stands out as being the most probable location [for the house].” He argues that No. 3, Lauriston Gardens was one of the houses along the northern stretch of Knatchbull Road, on a direct route from the White Hart to Holland Grove.
No. 3, Lauriston Gardens? Photographed by Bernard Davies (1962)
Note the curious
title of this chapter, taken from the Beeton’s text. The “Garden” became plural in later book editions.
101 According to William S. Baring-Gould, Christopher Morley seized on this expression (used again in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”) as an important indication that Holmes had been in America before 1881. Morley pursues this theme at length in “Was Sherlock Holmes an American?” He points to numerous indications of Holmes’s fondness for America and Americans, including his choice of disguise (in “His Last Bow”) as an Irish-American, his lack of knowledge of rugby (an institution of British schooling; “The Missing Three-Quarter”), and his famous remark “It is always a joy to meet an American.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt took this thesis even further in letters to the Baker Street Irregulars (of which he was a secret honorary member), eventually published in A Baker Street Folio: Letters about Sherlock Holmes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1945), edited by Edgar W. Smith. The President declared in a letter dated December 18, 1944: “On further study I am inclined to revise my former estimate that Holmes was a foundling. Actually he was born an American and was brought up by his father or a foster father in the underground world, thus learning all the tricks of the trade in the highly developed American art of crime. 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. I feel that further study of this postulant will bring good results to history.”
102 In pursuit of the continuing mystery of the house’s location, Owen Dudley Edwards calls this “a nice clue” and proposes that the inspectors must have taken a public conveyance to the local police station, where they interviewed the local man and then walked to 3 Lauriston Gardens.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Page 9