“ ‘What’s this, Mr. Holmes? Man, it’s witchcraft! Where in the name of all that’s wonderful did you get those names?’ ”
Arthur I. Keller, Associated Sunday Magazines, 1914
“Douglas!” he stammered. “Birlstone! What’s this, Mr. Holmes? Man, it’s witchcraft! Where in the name of all that is wonderful did you get those names?”
“It is a cipher that Dr. Watson and I have had occasion to solve. But why—what’s amiss with the names?”
The inspector looked from one to the other of us in dazed astonishment. “Just this,” said he, “that Mr. Douglas, of Birlstone Manor House, was horribly murdered last night!”28
2 Watson was not originally the narrator of this adventure, or so William S. Baring-Gould believes. He explains, “The original manuscript (176 folio pages with many deletions, corrections, and additions in the author’s hand) shows that such expressions as ‘said Dr. Watson’ and ‘said he’ are crossed out and the direct ‘said I’ substituted.” The manuscript of The Valley of Fear is owned by a private collector and has been little studied. Four pages of notes on The Valley of Fear are owned by Peter E. Blau, B.S.I. Recently published by the Baker Street Irregulars, in a volume entitled Murderland (apparently considered originally as a picturesque name for the setting of the tale), they outline a very different story from that eventually recorded by Dr. Watson. Many of the character names are different. For example, John Douglas seems to have operated under the names John Durant or Durrant and John Desmond; McMurdo’s first name is John as well. “Max Mackey” may be another name for Ted Baldwin. McMurdo kills someone called “Red Mike” (Boss McGinty?). Douglas has a son of seventeen, who appears to be an important character. The “Scowrers” are only referred to as “MM.” With the exception of a specific scene reproduced at note 71, below, the notes will not be further considered here.
3 That Porlock would use the Greek ´9 in a note otherwise written in English reveals a bit about his education and background. Owen Dudley Edwards, editor of the Oxford University Press edition of The Valley of Fear, observes, “Scholars and aesthetes often used [the Greek ´9], Oscar Wilde among them.” Remarking upon Porlock’s use of the character as ostentatious, Edwards suggests that Porlock may have come originally from the world of academia. Conveniently for Holmes, the Greek ´9 also appears as a distinctive characteristic of important handwriting specimens in The Sign of Four (Thaddeus Sholto’s hand, whose similarities to Oscar Wilde have already been noted) and “The Reigate Squires” (where there is no suggestion, other than ownership of Pope’s Homer, that either writer is an aesthete or scholar).
4 Did Holmes’s contact consider literary history in choosing Porlock as his assumed name? Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” in an opium-induced state of inspiration some three or four miles outside the village of Porlock (located across the Bristol Channel from Wales). Before he was able to finish the poem, a man from Porlock stopped by on business, interrupting Coleridge’s creative drive and leaving “Kubla Khan” forever unfinished. Anthony Boucher considers the possible connection but reaches no discernible conclusions, writing, “ ‘A person on business from Porlock’ interrupted for ever the highest flight of the genius of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; a letter from Porlock provoked one of the greatest displays of the genius of Sherlock Holmes. I feel sure that some deeper meaning is latent here, but cannot define it.” Boucher also wonders why “that noblest Holmesian of them all,” Vincent Starrett, did not mention the Sherlockian connection in his essay “Persons from Porlock,” published in Bookman’s Holiday, in which he considers the problem of great artists dealing with “persons from Porlock” who intrude on their artistic work (or indeed, as Starrett points out, even marry them). Perhaps “Porlock” chose his or her pseudonym purely for its internal rhyme with “Sherlock”?
5 See Appendix 1 for a discussion of the candidates for the person behind the mask of “Fred Porlock.”
6 In “The Final Problem,” which was written and published before The Valley of Fear, Watson claims never to have heard of Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s cunning nemesis who features prominently in that story. Yet all of the major chronologists except Gavin Brend concur that the events in The Valley of Fear occurred before those of “The Final Problem” (see Appendix 3). Given the conversation between Holmes and Watson here, Watson’s later denial in “The Final Problem” seems merely literary license, as John Dardess puts it in “On the Dating of The Valley of Fear,” “necessary for the properly dramatic introduction of Moriarty to the public.” Dardess points out that if, when writing “The Final Problem,” Watson had admitted to knowing the professor, the description that followed would have been superfluous. Similar views are expressed by G. B. Newton, in “The Date of The Valley of Fear,” and James Buchholtz, in “A Tremor at the Edge of the Web.” The latter writes that the description of Moriarty, which Watson here assigns to Holmes, had doubtless been made on an earlier occasion, but its transposition becomes artistically necessary, as Watson, the practised story-teller, instantly and rightly recognised. D. Martin Dakin, in A Sherlock Holmes Commentary, makes the same point, suggesting that Watson took the liberty of telescoping the events and put into Holmes’s mouth in 1891 a speech introducing him to Moriarty, which in reality he spoke some years earlier.
But B. M. Castner, in “The Professor and The Valley of Fear,” argues that the inclusion of Moriarty in The Valley of Fear is the fiction, not Watson’s ignorance in “The Final Problem.” He makes a compelling case for the proposition that Professor Moriarty—that is, the man playing that rôle during the months immediately preceding “The Final Problem”—was Sherlock Holmes, infiltrating the Moriarty gang to gather evidence. The real Moriarty, the theory goes, had perished earlier, probably at Holmes’s hands. Not until 1914, when Holmes was reunited with Watson after having been presumed dead, did the detective decide to work with Watson in introducing Moriarty into The Valley of Fear (in which Moriarty plays no rôle) and reveal the truth of Moriarty’s earlier death. In “On the Track of Moriarty: The Valley of Fear,” Michael P. Malloy reviews Watson’s use of literary devices in other stories and concludes that Watson did not know of the existence of a connection between Moriarty and the murder in The Valley of Fear until sometime after 1903.
7 In The Valley of Fear, Holmes is operating at the peak of his powers, according to Anthony Boucher, and his ease and confidence shine through in Watson’s depiction of him. This is a “ripe, mature Holmes,” writes Boucher, in his Introduction to The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Volume I, “free from external eccentricities, his hand unburdened by either the cocaine needle or the violin’s bow. Here is Holmes as the perfect thinking mind, in cryptanalysis, in observation, in deduction. And here, more than in any other Canonical story that comes to mind, is Holmes at his most completely charming, whether playfully dangling the cryptically obvious before his colleagues (whom for once he respects) or ruefully admitting ‘a distinct touch’ from Watson’s pawky humour.”
8 Legal damages for wounded feelings or punishment.
9 Whatever the merits of Moriarty’s book, Walter Shepherd gathers that Holmes must have found it incomprehensible, since dynamics is a subject of applied mathematics, not pure mathematics. We may assume, Shepherd writes in On the Scent with Sherlock Holmes, that he at least looked through the book but was completely baffled by it, though he may thus have learned what an asteroid is and so added an iota to his knowledge of astronomy.
The great science/science fiction writer Isaac Asimov points out that The Dynamics of an Asteroid is a misleading title, for asteroids behave no differently from other bodies orbiting the sun. Asimov’s explanation for the title is that Professor Moriarty wrote on the problematical behaviour of a single fragment following the explosion of a planet, often hypothesised to be the source of the asteroid belt.
10 According to George H. Strum (“Doubleday’s Code”), Porlock’s cipher is based on the system described by Abner Doubleday in his book Reminis
cences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–1861, published in 1876. Strum concludes that Porlock must have read Doubleday’s book.
11 Curiously, the American editions have “47” in place of the second “127,” and the Strand Magazine text has “13.” If Holmes’s translation is accurate, “127” is the correct cipher.
12 Dr. Karl Krejci-Graf, among others, puzzles over the fact that Porlock codes the irrelevant part of the message while leaving significant information uncoded. “What is the use of a cipher if you give everything away by writing name and locality in open script?” he asks, in “Contracted Stories.” “The point seems to be that Porlock had found a way to include the names in the cipher but that Watson, who had to change the names to protect the client, had not the same ingenuity.”
13 Mail was collected and delivered from six to eleven times daily in the districts of London outside the City (where twelve deliveries were made daily).
14 This marks the first public identification of Billy the page, who appears in ten of the Sherlock Holmes tales but is referred to by name in only three (the other two being “The Mazarin Stone” and “Thor Bridge”). And although The Valley of Fear was not published until 1914, Charles Rogers’s play Sherlock Holmes (1894) and William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes (1899) both feature a page named Billy. Is the name a coincidence? Or did Rogers or Gillette personally visit the Holmes household? For more, see this editor’s “Paging Through the Canon.”
15 T. F. Foss, in “The Case of the Professor’s Ineptitude,” wonders at Moriarty’s failure to follow up on this patently stealthy concealment and characterises Moriarty as a “slap-happy, irresponsible criminal practitioner.” But D. Martin Dakin counters with the thought that Porlock may well have been eliminated, for he is never heard from again. The letter itself seems to be a highly unnecessary risk for Porlock. Sending Holmes a letter asking him to destroy the cipher message was pointless and carried at least as much danger as simply sending the cipher key.
That Porlock did not follow up the cipher with a simple, one-word key seems itself telling. “The clear inference,” deduces John Hall, in Sidelights on Holmes, “is surely that Porlock sent neither message, or at least not of his free will.” Unlike Foss, Hall takes a generous view of Moriarty, believing that the mastermind “persuaded” Porlock to send the messages to Holmes. His curiosity piqued, Holmes would be persuaded to take on the case, and might inadvertently help Moriarty complete his crime.
16 A sparkling flash of light; figuratively, a brilliant witticism or insight.
17 That is, Bradshaw’s General Railway and Steam Navigation Guide for Great Britain and Ireland. David St. John Thomas, in his introduction to a modern facsimile of the August 1887 guide, calls it
a British national institution. Its contents—advertisement as well as “editorial”—reflected the prosperity of the times… . The man who regularly subscribed to Bradshaw had an honoured place in his community; parsons took an especial pride in displaying it on their shelves and understood its intricacies so that they could proffer advice on the best routes. Indeed, plotting the quickest cross-country journey between a West country resort and a Scottish fishing port, or between a Welsh coal-mining valley and the Constable Country, was a frequently-played parlour game in the days that every one and everything going more than a dozen or so miles did so behind a steam engine running on rails to a schedule published in Bradshaw.
18 Robert Winthrop Adams proposes, in “John H. Watson, M.D., Characterologist,” that the dictionary Holmes considers would have been Watson’s copy of the “British Webster”—that is, The Comprehensive English Dictionary, by John Ogilvie, LL.D. (London, Edinburgh & Glasgow, 1868), a staple of many libraries at the time.
Howard R. Schorin finds it surprising that Holmes would so quickly proclaim the dictionary inadmissable for purposes of the cipher. In “Cryptography in the Canon,” he defends the venerable reference book, reminding us that “it is precisely this book which has been used for such messages since the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when the numbered-source code was most popular and in use.”
Roger Johnson, in private correspondence, disputes these conclusions, pointing out that many dictionaries were available (for example, Nuttall’s Standard Dictionary, edited by the Rev. James Wood [London and New York: Frederick Warne & Co.] was very popular) and suggests that Holmes discarded a dictionary as the key because of the large variety available. The reason Holmes states is absurd: no dictionary can be termed “limited.”
19 Britain’s best-known almanac, first published in 1868. A copy of the 1878 edition—along with a Bradshaw’s railway guide and twelve pictures of Britain’s most attractive women—is buried in a time capsule underneath Cleopatra’s Needle, the Egyptian granite obelisk erected on Victoria Embankment in 1878.
20 Mahratta is a variant of Maratha, or the Hindu people from India’s Maharashtra region. (Maharashtra’s capital is Mumbai, or Bombay.) The article on the Empire of India in the 1900 Whitaker’s Almanac conveys something of a hostile attitude toward the legacy left by Maratha founder and king Sivaji, who spent most of his life doing battle with the dominant Mughal empire. It states:
Simultaneously with the decline of the Moguls rose the power of the Mahrattas. They were Hindus, and the country from which they came may be roughly described by drawing two lines from Nagpur to Surat and Goa on the west coast. The founder of their power was Sivaji (1627–1680), a chieftain of the family of Bhonslah… . In 1760 Delhi was in their hands, and though they suffered a disastrous defeat at Panipat in 1761, at the hands of Ahmed Shah, the Afghan invader, they remained for some time the first Power in India, and were the most dangerous opponents of the English. Their system, however, was one of organised plunder rather than of settled government. Like the Pindaris, a horde of freebooters who followed in their train, they were a scourge to the country. It was not until both Pindaris and Mahrattas were finally overthrown in 1818, that India enjoyed the blessings of internal peace. The Mahratta empire, containing within itself the seeds of disintegration, was fated to bend before the superior sway of European adventurers, who, either from love of adventure or thoughts of gain, had been attracted in increasing numbers to the shores of India.
Hugo Koch, in a masterful study entitled Some Observations Upon the Date of the Tragedy of Birlstone: The Evidence of Whitaker’s Almanack: 1890, concludes that the page number “534” is fictionalised and that the cipher was indeed drawn from the same page as the “Mahratta” reference. From a minute examination of the relevant pages for the almanacs from 1881 to 1914, he determines that only two editions contain the cipher clues that Holmes reads out loud: those for 1890 and 1904. The latter may be rejected on the ground of Moriarty’s death in 1891.
Jennifer Decker, after consulting here of Whitaker’s for 1879 to 1912, makes the unconventional assertion (in “Piercing the Veil at Last”) that the cipher was based not on Whitaker’s at all but on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” taking the choice of “Porlock” as the writer’s alias as her initial clue (see note 4, above). Frankly, the message she derives from the work, although cleverly explained, seems to this editor to be gibberish.
21 This is the only reference in the Canon to Holmes’s eyebrows. Note that Inspector MacDonald’s eyebrows are also described as bushy.
22 January 7 is the day after the traditional date of Holmes’s birthday. Surely it is clear, chides Nathan Bengis, in a much-repeated analysis in “What Was the Month?” that there had been some small jollification the night before in celebration of the Master’s birthday, and that his lack of appetite was the result of a hangover? Bengis also suggests that the events of January 6 were undertaken on that date as a deliberate warning to Holmes. In both “The Empty House” and “The Red Circle,” Holmes appears to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, lending ammunition to those who believe that Holmes’s birthday was “twelfth night,” or January 6. That January 6 was both the date of the Saturday Review issue in
which Christopher Morley (founder of the Baker Street Irregulars) first suggested the birthdate and the birthday of Felix Morley (Christopher’s brother), however, sheds some doubt on the issue.
23 The fishing port of Aberdeen was the principal city of northern Scotland, with large factories for the manufacture of cotton, woolen and linen fabrics, whale fisheries, and ship-building establishments. It became a royal burgh (town) in 1176.
24 In fact, MacDonald has not appeared previously in Watson’s records, and makes no further appearance after The Valley of Fear.
25 John Hall gathers much from Holmes’s oblique comment here. “It is clear from the conversation,” he declares, in The Abominable Wife and Other Unrecorded Cases of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, “that Holmes had attempted to interest MacDonald in the activities of Professor Moriarty prior to The Valley of Fear itself, but without much success.”
26 Roger Johnson writes, in private correspondence to this editor, “Note that the Scottish-born and raised Conan Doyle calls MacDonald a ‘Scotchman,’ although we [the English] have been told for decades that the word ‘Scotch’ is unacceptable and must be replaced by ‘Scottish’ or ‘Scots.’ The only exceptions today relate to food and drink: Scotch eggs, Scotch pancakes, and of course Scotch whisky. Needless to say, other Scottish writers of the period, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, unaffectedly called themselves Scotch.”
27 “Lestrade,” notes Ian McQueen, in Sherlock Holmes Detected: The Problems of the Long Stories, “for all his long association with Holmes, was never addressed except with due familiarity.”
28 Curiously, the Strand Magazine and English editions have “this morning,” even though forthcoming witness statements indicate that the body was found the previous evening. The correction of this apparent error by the American editors seems to indicate that the editors and the author (who presumably would have corrected the English editions had the error been pointed out) simply did not communicate with each other after submission of the manuscript.
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