by J. R. Trtek
The fact that the murder occurs earlier than expected is not a fatal inconsistency. Since the assassins knew Hannay to be loose and still able to reveal their plot to the British authorities, they may have chosen to make their move earlier than originally intended in order to better guarantee success.
Meanwhile, various seasonal and other references in The Thirty-Nine Steps do not necessarily contradict the presumed chronology and sometimes support it. On his rail journey north, for instance, Hannay mentions newspaper articles about the beginning of cricket season and “starters for the Derby,” which presumably refers to the Epsom Derby. That horse race took place on May 27 in 1914, and so indeed would have been imminent as Hannay rode toward Scotland. At the same time, first-class cricket matches had begun in England on May 2 of that year, about three weeks prior to the presumed beginning of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Later in the novel, Sir Walter Bullivant is said to be at his Berkshire cottage because he spends Whitsuntide there, a remark that places Hannay’s eventual rendezvous with the spymaster in early June. (It may be remembered that Watson’s narrative contradicts this, stating that Sir Walter retired to the cottage around the time of midsummer, which would have been a bit later.)
On the other hand, in referring to the time of year, Hannay uses both “spring” and “summer” in his narrative to describe the landscape. He also makes mention of nesting curlews, which usually begin that activity in April, though apparently mating may continue for several weeks thereafter. There are, however, two pointed discrepancies in The Thirty-Nine Steps that bear thoughtful consideration.
The first concerns the moon. On the night of his escape from the dovecot, Hannay declares that the moon was “well on its last quarter and would not rise till late.” Consulting astronomical records for 1914, however, one discovers that the moon would reach first quarter on June 1 and thus would have set early rather than rising late. Either way, the sky would presumably have been moonless when Hannay made good his escape, and this error may have just been due to a misunderstanding on the part of John Buchan, who apparently authored The Thirty-Nine Steps based on interviews with Hannay.
There is, however, a far more profound error in Hannay’s narrative as presented by Buchan. Indeed, it is an error not of chronology but rather of simple historical fact: the premier of Greece was not slain in the middle of 1914, and his murder did not precipitate war. Instead, the one significant political murder that occurred during that interval was the killing of Austria–Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination on June 28 was the immediate spark that ignited the First World War.
It is clear that John Buchan altered some details in telling Richard Hannay’s story in The Thirty-Nine Steps—most notably, the omission of involvement by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in the pursuit and eventual rescue of Hannay. But one must conclude too that Buchan also altered his fictionalized narrative to disguise the fact that it was not the assassination of Karolides that the Black Stone plotters carried out but rather that of Franz Ferdinand.
Suppose that the target was indeed the archduke, and that it was his assassination that Bullivant and company learn of in Berkshire on the evening of Hannay’s reappearance. That would set the latter’s arrival at the spymaster’s home on June 28, the day of Franz Ferdinand’s murder. Moreover, it should be noted that in Thirty-Nine Steps from Baker Street, Hannay spends an additional day at Turnbull’s cottage while Sherlock Holmes works on deciphering more of Scudder’s notebook, an extra twenty-four hours not mentioned in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Thus, counting back what is now fourteen days to Hannay’s arrival at the Turnbull cottage puts us at June 14, which means that he escaped the dovecot on the night of June 12–13, two days before the moon reached third quarter. While not “well past” that point in the lunar cycle, this is still more consistent with Hannay’s description of a night where the moon would rise late than the conditions of May 29–30.
Working further backward, these assumptions put Hannay’s initial departure from London on June 7—a Sunday, as it should be. However, it also puts Hannay’s flight to Scotland after the running of the Epsom Derby and more than a month into the English cricket season. The latter would make newspaper references to the beginning of that season far less likely, and the former would be completely inconsistent with the presumed articles previewing the race. The mention of nesting birds also becomes a bit more strained in the context of a June start to events.
These issues can be resolved if we assume that Buchan deliberately put false seasonal references into The Thirty-Nine Steps for a specific purpose: to make it appear that events had occurred earlier than Franz Ferdinand’s murder and thus remove any suggestion that the Black Stone was involved in the archduke’s death.
It does seem somewhat odd that Sir Walter Bullivant did not have Buchan expose this truth in The Thirty-Nine Steps, for implicating German agents in a plot that set off the war would have been a huge propaganda coup for Britain and its allies. The fact that the Karolides ruse was adopted—and employed years later by Watson in his narrative—suggests that there was even more to this story, perhaps elements that would have had a negative image on Britain’s image as well, if they had been exposed. In all likelihood, we will never know the answer to this question.
APPENDIX C: TANGLED TALES
In an addendum to The Hapsburg Falcon, clues in both the short story “His Last Bow” and the novel The Maltese Falcon were used to propose that, just prior to the First World War, a young Sam Spade acted as one of Sherlock Holmes’s agents in events leading up to the capture of the Von Bork spy ring.
In the same vein, the preceding narrative titled Thirty-Nine Steps From Baker Street reveals that the Holmes story “His Last Bow” and the John Buchan novels The Thirty-Nine Steps and Mr. Standfast actually comprise a larger tale involving Sherlock Holmes, John H. Watson, and Richard Hannay, heretofore considered an entirely fictional person. The preceding appendix deals with some elements of the chronology of that saga, until recently distorted by omissions and deliberate obfuscation in those previous, separate texts. This closing section considers a number of additional loose, sometimes contradictory threads that run through the combined set of stories, beginning with “His Last Bow.”
This short story is notable for several reasons. Though not the last published tale in the accepted Sherlockian canon, it portrays events later in Holmes’s life than any of its companion pieces, taking place a full decade after the detective’s supposed retirement. Moreover, it was the first authenticated Sherlock Holmes story published that, on first glance, seems to not have been authored by John H. Watson. Ostensibly related in third person by Arthur Conan Doyle, who is believed to have acted in many instances as Watson’s literary agent, the story is a tale of espionage whose single surprise, if it can be called that, is that one principal turns out to be Sherlock Holmes in disguise, with John Watson also appearing briefly at the end.
A few questions have always attended the story, not the least of which is the true identity of its author. Several different suggestions have been made, from the aforementioned Doyle to either Sherlock or Mycroft Holmes. Watson obliquely claimed authorship himself in a later story, asserting that his absence from most of the action required framing the narrative in third person instead of his usual first-person style.
The text of Thirty-Nine Steps from Baker Street makes clear, however, that “His Last Bow” was actually penned by John Buchan, author of the Hannay novels—Holmes himself tells Watson that the person who wrote “His Last Bow” was the same individual who wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps, and Sir Walter Bullivant’s description of the man he suggested write the short story fits Buchan to a tee: Bullivant’s man has been in the intelligence corps and saw time in the War Communications Office; Buchan had served in the intelligence corps and, prior to that, been part of the War Propaganda Bureau. The parallels are self-evident.
Buchan had already written The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle under the direction of Sir Walter Bullivant
, using information gathered in interviews with Richard Hannay, and so it is not surprising that he was selected to pen a short story about Holmes’s cracking of the Von Bork spy ring. That it was published under the name of Arthur Conan Doyle is also understandable, as explained by Holmes in the narrative: it was not desirable that any connection between Hannay and Holmes be hinted at, lest the Germans become aware of Holmes’s continuing involvement in wartime espionage, and so Buchan’s authorship was kept secret. Instead, Doyle agreed to pose as the actual author—though with a price, and apparently to Watson’s decided irritation.
Another aspect of “His Last Bow” that has troubled commentators is the reasoning behind Holmes’s action in taking Von Bork into custody and dismantling his spy ring in the first place. After all, prior to August 1914, the British were playing the German espionage cell for all it was worth, feeding Berlin false or misleading information—why cut short a good thing?
The answer, as made clear in the preceding narrative, is that the Germans had been successful in their Cerberus strategy: by employing independent spy rings, they had been able to verify—or discount—information gathered by their different cells. One member of the Black Stone—Von Schwabing—had, by August 1914, escaped with British naval secrets that exposed as false the corresponding alternate information that Holmes and his agents had been feeding Von Bork for some time. This exposure would have rendered Holmes’s operation useless in any event, and so there would have been no reason to continue it.
While the story of “His Last Bow” is correct in the essence of Holmes’s infiltration and destruction of the Von Bork spy apparatus, there are elements that appear to have been fictionalized, reimagined, or altered in time. For example, some of Holmes’s remarks concerning Von Bork, related during the very first cab ride through London in Thirty-Nine Steps from Baker Street, are placed toward the end of “His Last Bow,” after Von Bork has been subdued. Similarly, other remarks by Holmes in the short story, such as his comment on the “East wind,” appear to have been made instead while preparations were being made to apprehend the three German spies waiting to escape from the Ruff. Perhaps the most significant discrepancy is the paean to a better England that will arise after the First World War, sentiments which in “His Last Bow” are expressed by Holmes but which are revealed in the foregoing narrative as being uttered by Watson! One may wonder if that misquotation by Buchan ruffled Watson’s feathers as much as, if not more than the credit that Arthur Conan Doyle accepted for the story itself.
Though some of these errors may have been due to misunderstanding on the part of John Buchan, others may have been deliberate, intended to either facilitate the story-telling or avoid disclosure that Holmes and Watson had been collaborating in much greater depth and for a longer period of time than “His Last Bow” implies. Indeed, the tone and some of the information conveyed in the short story appears to have the purpose of creating the public impression that Sherlock Holmes had gone back into retirement after besting Von Bork and was not engaged in subsequent espionage activities, while at the same time implying that Dr. John Watson would be on duty solely with the Royal Army Medical Corps for the remainder of the war. (In 1917, the year of the story’s publication, both men were, of course, actually engaged in uncovering more German spy and sabotage activities centered in both the Cotswolds and London itself.)
While Thirty-Nine Steps from Baker Street casts some elements of “His Last Bow” in a somewhat new light, the newly discovered manuscript also allows one to view The Thirty-Nine Steps and Mr. Standfast from a different perspective.
The escape of Von Schwabing is not mentioned in Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, though it serves as a key element in the plot of the later novel Mr. Standfast. The reason for the omission in the earlier novel is rather easy to understand: the British Secret Service did not wish to publicly acknowledge that a German spy had eluded capture. By the time Mr. Standfast was published in 1919, however, the war was over and won, and so Von Schwabing’s escape five years earlier could be admitted without as much embarrassment.
Some parts of The Thirty-Nine Steps stretch credulity—two in particular. The first is Hannay’s use of lentonite, a fictional explosive stored in the room where Hannay is held prisoner by the Germans. In Buchan’s novel, he sets it off to blow open the door to his cell, amazingly suffering no harm other than being rendered unconscious for a few seconds. As Thirty-Nine Steps from Baker Street reveals, Hannay’s escape was less violent if just as dramatic, and actually orchestrated by Sherlock Holmes.
The other part of the story that strains the reader’s patience are details of the theft of secrets from the meeting between British and French officials in Sir Walter Bullivant’s home. In Buchan’s version as related in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Von Schwabing attends the conference posing as the First Sea Lord—at that time Prince Louis Alexander of Battenberg, father of the 1st Earl Mountbatten. In that disguise, with no one realizing he is an imposter, Von Schwabing effortlessly leaves the gathering with top secret British naval plans. That the German spy could accomplished such a feat verges on the ridiculous.
As Watson relates in his own description of the event, Von Schwabing actually was present at the meeting in the guise of a nondescript aide, whom every official assumed to be in someone else’s entourage. Why Buchan added his own somewhat absurd version of the episode is a bit mystifying, though it may be that he was instructed to do so in order to draw critical attention away from the matter of Hannay’s escape from the Germans, mentioned in an earlier paragraph. By having Buchan romanticize one part of The Thirty-Nine Steps to the point of exaggerated, improbable melodrama, Sir Walter Bullivant may have hoped perhaps to make Hannay’s fictitious use of lentonite seem more believable by comparison, and thus avoid having the public—and perhaps the Germans, if they read the novel—question how Hannay actually managed to escape his cell in the first place.
In any case, publication of Thirty-Nine Steps from Baker Street reveals at last the important role played by Sherlock Holmes and John Watson in the recovery of Richard Hannay, aspects of the drama intentionally kept from the public at the time. The narrative also makes clear that Holmes and Watson laid the groundwork in Biggleswick for the struggle between Hannay and Von Schwabing that took place in Britain and later on the Continent, and that was chronicled by John Buchan in Mr. Standfast. As already noted, that novel was published in 1919, after hostilities had concluded, and one can only regret that Bullivant chose not to reveal the contributions of Holmes and Watson with the publication of the third Hannay book.
Nonetheless, eventual acknowledgment is better than none at all, and—a century after the fact—full credit may now be given to The Great Detective and his biographer not only for the rescue of Richard Hannay and the uprooting of German spies on British soil, but also the saving of London from fiery devastation. Watson may have viewed Holmes as his own monument, but a London preserved also stands as continuing testament to his friend’s enduring majesty.