46 Ronald A. Knox, the father of Sherlockian scholarship, whose thesis it is that Mycroft was a double agent aiding both his brother and Professor Moriarty (see “The Final Problem”), writes, “Credat Judœus Apella; you do not really watch a house on the chance of its being revisited, for three years on end. No, Colonel Moran’s information will have come, as usual, from Mycroft. . . .” As before, Knox believes that Mycroft was not an entirely devious person, and that he aimed ultimately to double-cross Sherlock’s enemy rather than betray his brother. While Mycroft probably did inform Moran’s people that Sherlock had returned, he also must have known about the installation of the wax model and therefore was assisting his brother in setting a trap for them. Sherlock must have been concerned that Watson might not share his faith in Mycroft or understand his complex character and so hid from Watson the real story of Mycroft’s conflicting loyalties.
47 Garrot, or garrote, was a method of Spanish execution in which the condemned was strangled by a cord, wire, or iron collar. According to E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, originally the executioner would induce asphyxiation by twisting the cord with a stick; such a method lends meaning to the term itself, garrote being Spanish for “stick.” “In 1851,” Brewer continues, “General Lopez was garrotted by the Spanish authorities for attempting to gain possession of Cuba; since which time the thieves of London, etc., have adopted the method of strangling their victim by throwing their arms round his throat, while an accomplice rifles his pockets.”
In “Parker the Garrotter: Why Was He Harmless?,” Lionel Needleman speculates that Parker had been a notorious garroter in the 1860s who was captured during the outbreak of garroting that took place in the autumn and winter of 1862–1863 in London. After a term of imprisonment, he turned to the streets, a broken man, begging and performing on the jew’s-harp, where he came to Holmes’s attention.
48 This small musical instrument, known for centuries all over Europe and Asia, consists of a flexible metal (or wooden) “tongue” affixed to a two-pronged metal frame. The player places the frame in his or her teeth and plucks at the metal tongue with a finger; different notes may be achieved by modifying the shape of the mouth, altering the quality of the sound. Additionally, some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jew’s harps increased their ranges by incorporating two to as many as sixteen tongues. The etymology of the name is murky, but no connection has ever been made between the instrument and Jews. (It is also sometimes referred to as a “jaw’s harp.”)
49 This sentence is omitted in the English edition.
50 Given as “whirring” in some editions.
51 A metal cover that closes the breech of a gun once the cartridges have been loaded.
52 See “The Final Problem,” note 14, for a discussion of Victorian interest in phrenology, the study of the shape of the head.
53 Holmes apparently paraphrases Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene 3: “Journeys end in lovers meeting.” Scholars note that Holmes has a special fondness for Twelfth Night, as it is the only one of Shakespeare’s works he quotes twice (see also “The Red Circle”). From this, some have built a case that Holmes’s birthday was “twelfth night,” or January 6.
54 “Aloysius” in the manuscript.
55 An Anglo-Indian term, meaning a hunter, a sportsman.
56 The police have no choice but to bow to Holmes’s wishes, since none of them were witness to any of the events that just took place. And while Moran has been caught in possession of an air-gun (the same air-gun that Holmes professed to fear at the outset of “The Final Problem”), nothing links this weapon to the bullet fired. June Thomson wonders at Holmes’s refusal to cooperate with the police. In other cases, Holmes had kept his name out of any official reports in order to induce the police to continue to refer matters to him. Here, Holmes not only declines to take any credit for the capture but indicates that he will not even press charges against Moran. “In the absence of any explanation on Holmes’s part one can only assume that during the three years spent abroad he had learned to appreciate the advantages of living incognito and now preferred to avoid publicity . . .”
57 Park Lane fronts on Hyde Park for its entire length. From where, then, did the colonel fire? Percival Wilde, in “The Bust in the Window,” suggests a location inside the park near the Marble Arch entrance, though he would have faced the difficult task of escaping attention from the scores of people who frequented the park “between the hours of ten and eleven-twenty” at night. Edgar W. Smith also nominates a position within the park, but in considering the difficulties of firing accurately while aiming upward toward a target two flights above ground level, he posits that Moran must have climbed “a strategically placed tree” to reach the appropriate level. Nicholas Utechin, disregarding the height issue as well as that of any bystanders, argues that the Colonel shot Adair while standing on the pavement on the Hyde Park side of Park Lane.
58 The reference is to “Mrs. Turner” in the manuscript, corrected. Because there are earlier references to “Mrs. Hudson” in this adventure, this strongly supports the conclusion that Mrs. Turner worked for Mrs. Hudson. See “A Scandal in Bohemia” for a detailed discussion of the Hudson-Turner connection.
59 “Preserved” in the Strand Magazine.
60 For a discussion of the path of the colonel’s bullet, see the appendix on page 825.
61 This professed ignorance, comments D. Martin Dakin, appears to be a literary device used by Watson—the same device that he used to explain who Professor Moriarty was in “The Final Problem.” Watson did apparently know who Colonel Moran was, having noted his employment by Moriarty in The Valley of Fear (whose events predate those of “The Empty House”).
62 Remember that Moriarty’s Christian name is not disclosed in “The Final Problem,” and that the Professor’s brother, whose slanderous accounts of Holmes’s role in Moriarty’s death trouble Watson so, is named “Colonel James Moriarty.” Ian McQueen argues that the Professor never had a brother at all, and that Colonel Moran, attempting to reconvene the Professor’s gang upon his return to London, adopted Moriarty’s name professionally so as to assume a greater air of authority. Moran may have seen himself as a “brother-outlaw” to Moriarty, says McQueen, and used the term in his letters to the press in the sense not of a blood relationship but rather one of kinship with a close friend and colleague.
63 The phrase “of smoke” has been added in the English edition.
64 Bangalore is the capital (since 1830) of Karnataka, in southern India, and served as the military and administrative headquarters of British India from 1831 to 1881. Notwithstanding Watson’s efforts to disguise the regiment, the American editions refer to the Pioneers as the Bangalore Pioneers.
65 C.B. stands for “Companion of the Bath,” an order of British knighthood bestowed by the monarch as reward for outstanding military or civil service. The recipient of a C.B. would not actually become a knight or be referred to as “sir” or “dame”; such titles are reserved for the two highest classes of knighthood, Knight or Dame Grand Cross (G.C.B.) and Knight or Dame Commander (K.C.B. or D.C.B.). Those knights and dames, together with the sovereign, the “great master of the order,” and members of the C.B. class, make up the Most Honourable Order of the Bath.
66 The same educational career has been ascribed to another Holmes villain, John Clay in “The Red-Headed League”—meaning that both “the second most dangerous man in London” and “the fourth smartest man in London” were products of Eton and Oxford. Christopher Morley, placing Holmes as a graduate of that other well-known British university, sees the detective’s fixation on both as no mere coincidence, noting, “It must be borne in mind that Holmes was a Cambridge man and might perhaps be prejudiced.” Other, more favourably viewed graduates of Eton and Oxford, as culled by Morley, include Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and Monsignor Ronald A. Knox, chaplain of Trinity College at Oxford, who translated the Bible into English and “started the whole trend of modern
Sherlock Holmes criticism” with the satirical essay “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” (Knox was himself a detective novelist whose best-known such work was Still Dead, published in 1934.)
67 The “Jowaki Campaign” was a term for two separate British military expeditions, mounted in 1853 and 1877–1878, against the Jowaki Afridis, a Pashtun tribe whose territory encompassed the Khyber Pass in northern Pakistan. After annexing the Punjab, the British, recognising the strategic importance of the mountain gateway, clashed frequently with the resistant Afridis in an attempt to keep the pass open. The expeditions of the Jowaki Campaign were undertaken specifically as punitive strikes, meant to retaliate for Afridi raids into British territory in India and Pakistan.
68 Sherpur is a fortified plain outside Kabul (Cabul), the scene of a British victory in the Second Afghan War, in which Dr. Watson served as well.
69 Probably the East India United Service Club, located in St. James’s Square.
70 In “The Five Orange Pips,” we learn that Holmes saved Major Prendergast in the “Tankerville Club Scandal.”
71 Nicholas Utechin makes the interesting suggestion that the young Sebastian Moran used Professor Moriarty as his army coach (see “The Final Problem”) to gain his commission and that Moriarty followed young Moran’s career and later “sought him out.”
72 Holmes seems to be referring to the science of ballistics—the branch of physics that, in looking at the behaviour of projectiles, is more commonly understood to mean the study of bullets and firearms, particularly when used in policework. Yet Judge S. Tupper Bigelow, in “Was It Attempted Murder?,” believes Holmes to be mistaken in thinking that the bullets could be indisputably linked to Moran’s gun. “[I]t is useful to know,” writes Bigelow, “that ballistics was unknown at Scotland Yard, and for that matter, in any police department in the world, in 1895; the police became aware of its possibilities no earlier than 1909.” Bigelow goes on to note that it was only in 1910 that all U.S. police forces were using ballistics to investigate gun-related crimes. Perhaps Holmes expected to test-fire bullets from Moran’s air-gun and compare them to the bullet found in Adair’s body. If two bullets fired from the same gun looked alike, he must have reasoned, then two bullets that look alike must have been fired from the same gun. In this respect, “he was anticipating the part ballistics has played in the investigation of crime by about 15 years.”
73 Long before Moran’s trial, Holmes seems terribly confident that the villain would be sentenced “with extreme prejudice.” Later stories indicate that Holmes may have been premature in closing the book on London’s second-most dangerous man. In “The Illustrious Client,” which took place in 1902 (see Chronological Table), Holmes refers to “the living Sebastian Moran”; and in “His Last Bow” (definitely set in 1914), Holmes implies that Moran is still alive, saying: “The old sweet song. It was a favourite ditty of the late lamented Professor Moriarty. Colonel Sebastian Moran has also been known to warble it.” How does Moran escape the predicted gallows? In the end, all the evidence against him is circumstantial, as Judge Bigelow points out. The murder of Adair, for example, was witnessed by no one. The list of numbers and club friends found in his room could have been been written up by Adair solely to figure out how much money he had won and lost, and to whom; and finally, the fact that Moran shot at a wax dummy of Holmes is not grounds for attempted murder (proof of “similar acts” being inadmissible under British law). “So the overwhelmingly strong case against Moran,” Bigelow concludes, “boils down to this: Adair was killed; the expanding revolver bullet that killed him was similar to one that was shot from Moran’s air-gun; therefore Moran killed Adair.” Bigelow reports that as a result, Moran was in fact found not guilty of Adair’s murder.
74 Summarized by Ronald B. DeWaal in The Universal Sherlock Holmes.
75 Jay Finley Christ points out that Baedeker’s guide to Switzerland lists fourteen guides who were available in Meiringen, presumably the “experts” referred to by Dr. Watson.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE NORWOOD BUILDER1
With publication of “The Empty House” and Holmes in retirement (although the latter was unknown to the public), Watson was free at last to draw on his entire casebook of Holmes’s career to select his tales. His first post-Return effort was “The Norwood Builder.” The case is the first in the Canon to feature fingerprints as the key clue, and Holmes was clearly ahead of his law enforcement colleagues and the courts in recognising their significance. Scholars also raise questions about the strange will produced by Holmes’s client and suggest his incompetence as a lawyer.
FROM THE POINT of view of the criminal expert,” said Mr. Sherlock Holmes, “London has become a singularly uninteresting city since the death of the late lamented2 Professor Moriarty.”3
“I can hardly think that you would find many decent citizens to agree with you,” I answered.
“Well, well, I must not be selfish,” said he, with a smile, as he pushed back his chair from the breakfast-table. “The community is certainly the gainer, and no one the loser, save the poor out-of-work specialist, whose occupation has gone. With that man in the field, one’s morning paper presented infinite possibilities. Often it was only the smallest trace, Watson, the faintest indication, and yet it was enough to tell me that the great malignant brain was there, as the gentlest tremors of the edges of the web remind one of the foul spider which lurks in the centre. Petty thefts, wanton assaults, purposeless outrage—to the man who held the clue all could be worked into one connected whole. To the scientific student of the higher criminal world, no capital in Europe offered the advantages which London then possessed. But now—” He shrugged his shoulders in humorous deprecation of the state of things which he had himself done so much to produce.
Frederick Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1903
At the time of which I speak, Holmes had been back for some months, and I, at his request, had sold my practice and returned to share the old quarters in Baker Street.4 A young doctor, named Verner,5 had purchased my small Kensington practice, and given with astonishingly little demur the highest price that I ventured to ask—an incident which only explained itself some years later, when I found that Verner was a distant relation of Holmes’s, and that it was my friend who had really found the money.6
Our months of partnership had not been so uneventful as he had stated, for I find, on looking over my notes, that this period includes the case of the papers of ex-President Murillo,7 and also the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, which so nearly cost us both our lives.8 His cold and proud nature was always averse, however, to anything in the shape of public applause, and he bound me in the most stringent terms to say no further word of himself, his methods, or his successes—a prohibition which, as I have explained, has only now been removed.
Mr. Sherlock Holmes was leaning back in his chair after his whimsical protest, and was unfolding his morning paper in a leisurely fashion, when our attention was arrested by a tremendous ring at the bell, followed immediately by a hollow drumming sound, as if someone were beating on the outer door with his fist. As it opened there came a tumultuous rush into the hall, rapid feet clattered up the stair, and an instant later a wild-eyed and frantic young man, pale, dishevelled, and palpitating, burst into the room. He looked from one to the other of us, and under our gaze of inquiry he became conscious that some apology was needed for this unceremonious entry.
“A wild-eyed and frantic young man burst into the room.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1903
“I’m sorry, Mr. Holmes,” he cried. “You mustn’t blame me. I am nearly mad. Mr. Holmes, I am the unhappy John Hector McFarlane.”
He made the announcement as if the name alone would explain both his visit and its manner, but I could see by my companion’s unresponsive face that it meant no more to him than to me.
“Have a cigarette, Mr. McFarlane,” said he, pushing his case across. “I am sure that, with your symptoms, my friend Dr. Watson he
re would prescribe a sedative. The weather has been so very warm these last few days. Now, if you feel a little more composed, I should be glad if you would sit down in that chair and tell us very slowly and quietly who you are and what it is that you want. You mentioned your name, as if I should recognise it, but I assure you that, beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.”
Familiar as I was with my friend’s methods, it was not difficult for me to follow his deductions, and to observe the untidiness of attire, the sheaf of legal papers, the watch-charm, and the breathing which had prompted them. Our client, however, stared in amazement.
“Yes, I am all that, Mr. Holmes, and, in addition, I am the most unfortunate man at this moment in London. For heaven’s sake, don’t abandon me, Mr. Holmes! If they come to arrest me before I have finished my story, make them give me time, so that I may tell you the whole truth. I could go to gaol happy if I knew that you were working for me outside.”
“Arrest you!” said Holmes. “This is really most grati—most interesting. On what charge do you expect to be arrested?”
“Upon the charge of murdering Mr. Jonas Oldacre, of Lower Norwood.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 7