1 “Thor Bridge” was published in the Strand Magazine in February/March 1922 and in Hearst’s International Magazine in February/ March 1922. The title page of the manuscript, which is owned by a private collector, shows that the tale had several alternate titles: “[The Little Tin?] Box,” “The Adventure of the Second Chip,” and “The Problem of Rushmere Bridge”—and that the final title was “The Problem of Thor’s [sic] Bridge.”
2 At 48-49 The Strand is located the Charing Cross branch of Lloyds TSB Bank, and a sign above the entrance declares “Cox & Co.” Sherlockians have traditionally identified this location as the home of Watson’s “tin dispatch-box.”
3 Watson’s middle initial appears only three times: here, at the foot of the sketch plan illustrating “The Priory School” (in the Strand Magazine in February 1904), and on the title page of A Study in Scarlet. Dorothy L. Sayers, in her classic article “Dr. Watson’s Christian Name,” argues that the “H” stands for “Hamish,” a Scotch name equivalent to “James” (see “The Man with the Twisted Lip” for an instance in which Watson’s wife refers to him as “James”). Several others propose “Henry,” primarily because of the high contemporary regard for cleric John Henry Newman. Still others, for varied but ultimately unconvincing reasons, propose “Hampton,” “Harrington,” “Hector,” “Horatio,” “Hubert,” and “Huffham.” One wag even suggests “Holmes”!
4 According to Watson’s previous accounts, he served in the Berkshires and the Northumberland Fusiliers, which were regiments of the British army sent over to India. This means, as Crighton Sellars points out in her essential “Dr. Watson and the British Army,” that he was never actually in the Indian Army, a separate organisation altogether.
5 Phillimore’s mysterious disappearance has inspired the “James Phillimore Society,” a group of Sherlockians who are devoted to magic and science fiction.
6 Philip Weller notes, “Lloyd’s Sailing Vessels for 1891–92 includes a wooden sea bark called the ‘Alicia,’ which was built in 1877, and which was wrecked in 1891.”
7 Speculations abound regarding the remarkable worm. Edgar W. Smith embraces the amusing suggestion of Rolfe Boswell, who thought of the worm not as a biological specimen but as an optical illusion used in the German Gestalt school of psychology. One could hypnotise oneself, or possibly go mad, by staring at a whirling spiral an inch in diameter. Boswell likened the effect to that of staring fixedly at a coiled watch spring, and noted that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary gave one definition of “worm” as “A spring or strip of metal of spiral shape 1724.” “Presumably,” Boswell wrote, “if you gaze at such a worm long enough, you’ll be Persano non grata, if not ‘stark staring mad.’ ”
A more serious effort is put forward by R. P. Graham, who unearths an 1819 article that was written by Sir John Ross (uncle of famed Antarctic explorer Sir James Clark Ross, both of whom sailed in search of the Northwest Passage in 1818) and entitled “A Voyage of Discovery, made under the Orders of the Admiralty, in His Majesty’s Ships Isabella and Alexander, for the Purpose of Exploring Baffin’s Bay and Enquiring into the Probability of a North-West Passage.” Ross’s work contains the intriguing text, “we sounded with the deepsea clamms, which brought up a quantity of mud, in which were five worms of a species that had not been seen before.” Graham asks, “Who of Ross’s crew . . . preserved these Baffin Bay worms, and who put one of their descendants into a match-box to help drive poor Isadora Persano ‘stark staring mad’?”
Startlingly, in the manuscript of “Thor Bridge,” Watson originally records the “worm” as a caterpillar.
8 See “The Mazarin Stone” and “His Last Bow.”
9 Referred to as a sycamore or buttonwood tree in the United States.
10 Previously, Mrs. Hudson has handled the cooking; as Christopher Redmond recalls, “The incident [in ‘The Three Students’] when Mrs. Hudson promises ‘green peas at seven-thirty’ gives no indication that they were to be prepared by anyone other than herself.” Holmes’s reference to a new cook must mean that Mrs. Holmes has finally hired someone else to handle the kitchen duties, or else that Holmes formerly employed a cook who has mysteriously never been mentioned.
11 A family-interest magazine established in 1842.
12 At that time, a woman was considered a spinster if she had not married by her early twenties, and thus Miss Dunbar may have been no more than twenty-three. It was a different era indeed. Historian A. N. Wilson, speculating on whether Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) might have proposed to Alice Liddell—the “real” Alice—when he was thirty-one and she was eleven, concedes that such a proposal would have been considered improper, but not necessarily criminal. “This probably seems more shocking to a twenty-first-century sensibility than it might have done to the Victorians,” he writes, noting that the 1861 census reveals that 175 women in Bolton and 179 in Burnley married at the age of fifteen or younger.
Miss Dunbar is one of several women clients of Holmes’s who, being unmarried, turn to governess work to support themselves (see “The Copper Beeches,” note 9). The others are Violet Hunter (“The Copper Beeches”) and Violet Smith (“The Solitary Cyclist”).
13 In the manuscript of “Thor Bridge,” the note sets the appointment for eight o’clock, and the body is found at midnight.
14 That is, the coroner’s court and the police court.
15 Billy appears only in “Thor Bridge,” “The Mazarin Stone,” and The Valley of Fear.
16 Mark Hunter-Purves makes the interesting suggestion that Bates was in love with Mrs. Gibson and stayed on at the Gibson estate only to be near her.
17 There is no evidence that Holmes is here telling the truth.
18 In nineteenth-century American usage, to advertise.
19 Brazil experienced a gold rush starting in 1695, when large deposits were discovered in what is now Minas Gerais. The discovery had a tremendous impact on the settlement and economy of Brazil; prospectors quickly established mining towns, and slaves were brought in from sugar plantations and the gold mines in Africa. With so much money coming into the region, the Portuguese government moved the colonial capital from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. The boom lasted only as long as the original deposits held out, although mining continued on a far more reduced scale. Despite the failure of many mines, however, as late as 1888, the Encylopædia Britannica still alluringly promised its readers that “the underground wealth of the country is as yet almost untouched.” Whether Gibson made his fortune in Brazilian gold or in “some Western state,” as seems more likely, is unknown.
20 The port city of Manáos (now Manaus) is the capital of the state of Amazonas, in northwestern Brazil. Overlooking the Rio Negro and located deep within the Amazonian rainforest, Manáos is sparsely populated, the only city within a six-hundred-mile radius. The majority of its wealth from 1890 to 1920—a short-lived period of glory—was generated through the production of rubber, leading to construction of a modern port in Manáos that was completed by 1900. One may surmise a lonely existence for the young, beautiful girl, and a romance with the ardent Gibson may have offered Senhorita Pinto a tantalising opportunity to leave that life behind.
21 To interview Grace Dunbar in prison.
22 Here ended the first instalment in the Strand Magazine text. The following appeared there: “The extraordinary solution of this enthralling problem will appear next month.” The second instalment of the case, published in the March 1922 issue of the Strand Magazine, contained a synopsis of the first part of the story, reproduced as an Appendix.
23 W. W. Robson is surprised that a man of Gibson’s means would retain a “rising barrister” rather than a more experienced member of the Queen’s Counsel. To be appointed to the Queen’s Counsel (King’s Counsel when the sovereign was male) was an honour of the highest distinction, and such barristers were eligible to write “Q.C.” after their names as well as to wear silk gowns in court. At one point, King’
s and Queen’s Counsel barristers served as counsel to the Crown, but that function was phased out until only the honour remained. Gibson may well have found that the Q.C.S whom he undoubtedly approached had no interest in taking on “this thankless business.”
24 For someone who often cautions Watson against letting a client’s appearance lead his judgement, Holmes seems to have let his guard down here to an astonishing degree. Only one look at Miss Dunbar somehow persuades Holmes that she is wholly innocent of wrongdoing. As Nathan L. Bengis marvels, “Is this the same man who boasted of never making exceptions?”
25 Why would Miss Dunbar exhibit such strong interest in this trivial incident? Robert Hahn explains that she did in fact murder Maria Gibson, in order to marry Neil Gibson. She planted clues and induced Gibson to call in Holmes, so that he could “save” her. When Holmes faltered, Dunbar called his attention to the vital clue—the chip.
26 In attempting to puzzle out what kind of weapon it is that Watson carries, Stanton O. Berg, a firearms consultant, calls particular attention to the mention of a safety catch. “Manual safeties on revolvers are rather rare,” Berg explains, “and even more rare when one must confine it to a revolver in existence in the year 1900. [O]nly the Webley Mark III Pocket Revolver in the .380 caliber . . . fits the time frame of this story” [Berg’s emphasis].
27 “The motto of the firm,” according to Holmes—see “The Creeping Man,” note 18.
28 G. Arthur Morrison disputes the result. A chip “no larger than a sixpence” would, according to his calculations, have required five times the force generated by a two-pound revolver that was flung fifteen feet by a heavy stone. “One may object that the stonework was in a cracked, crumbled condition and thus easily chipped,” Morrison writes, “but if this were the case, the newly exposed surface would not be a pristine white, but a dull grey like the surrounding surface because of moisture seepage.” Morrison suggests that Watson and Holmes together concocted the tale recorded by Watson (drawing on the Hans Gross book, discussed below) to conceal the real facts: that Marlo Bates and Miss Dunbar were having an affair, that Bates killed Mrs. Gibson (in a struggle initiated by her drawing her pistol), and that Bates devised a scheme to divert suspicion from Miss Dunbar by leaving too-obvious clues.
29 Suicide, or “self-murder,” was a criminal offence in England—largely unpunishable, of course; but until 1870, the personal property of one who had committed suicide became forfeit to the Crown. Mrs. Gibson was far from alone in seeking to end her life of unhappiness. “London,” Peter Ackroyd writes, “was the suicide capital of Europe. As early as the fourteenth century Froissart described the English as ‘a very sad race,’ which description applied particularly and even principally to Londoners.” Half-facetiously, Ackroyd observes that others have blamed London’s fog, the consumption of beef, “a contempt of death and a disgust of life,” the wine sold in London taverns, and the theatre for the “London vogue for suicides.” “Everything was blamed,” Ackroyd concludes, “except, perhaps, for the onerous and exhausting condition of the city itself.” Perhaps the melancholy of the city (combined with rabid jealousy) was especially jarring to Mrs. Gibson’s “whole-hearted, tropical, ill-balanced” nature.
30 There seems little doubt that Holmes was familiar with the writings of Dr. Hans Gross, professor of criminology at the University of Graz, Austria, whose great work on criminal investigation, Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter, was published in 1893. The case described by Gross is reproduced in “The Original ‘Problem of Thor Bridge,’” page 1633.
31 What does the future hold for the striking governess? June Thomson concludes that Dr. Watson, rather than Neil Gibson, later married Miss Dunbar but kept her identity secret, not only because he wished to conceal that he had married a woman who had been in prison on a murder charge but also to avoid attracting the vengeance of Gibson. But John Hall thinks little of Grace Dunbar’s character, charging that some of the blame for the unfortunate events should be assigned to her. She was aware that her presence in the household was straining relations between her employers, making for an awkward and ethically troubling situation. “Surely anyone with a grain of common decency would have wanted to get out of it as quickly as possible,” Hall writes, “if only to avoid further embarrassment to themselves?” As to her claim that she wished only to do good with her influence, Hall mostly dismisses that line of reasoning, noting that “the cynic might well suspect that there was also a certain satisfaction to be derived from the knowledge that Mrs. Gibson was consumed with an overweening jealousy and hatred. . . . It may well be that Holmes, when he spoke of Miss Dunbar and Mr. Gibson joining forces, thought that they thoroughly deserved one another.”
32 “Thor Bridge,” with its superb storytelling and characterisations, is another story that escapes the authorial doubts D. Martin Dakin affixes to many tales in The Case-Book. “While we must decisively reject [“The Lion’s Mane,” “The Blanched Soldier,” “The Mazarin Stone,” and “The Three Gables”], there are others in the collection that bear just as clearly the stamp of authenticity,” he writes. “Thor Bridge is one. The plot and style are excellent, and it shows in every line the marks of a genuine Watson reminiscence. Holmes dealing with the regrettable Mr. Neil Gibson, the Gold King, is Holmes at his best.”
33 Translation by Patrick J. Leonard, Sr., in “Thor Bridge—A Mystery Remains.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN1
“The Creeping Man” is more of a science-fiction story than a mystery, but the science of the tale is well grounded in medical trends of the day. In this story, Holmes is called in to discover the reasons that the respectable Professor Presbury has taken up courting a woman his daughter’s age. Watson demonstrates here that Holmes’s attitude toward dogs has changed markedly from his cold (but not cruel) dog poisoning in A Study in Scarlet. Now Holmes sees dogs as the mirror of their household, and he even plans a monograph on the topic. While the case, with its outlandish plot of a drug-based “fountain of youth,” has elements that seem laughable today, the obsessions of Professor Presbury and his fellow Victorians are not dissimilar from those reflected in current medical headlines.
MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES was always of opinion that I should publish the singular facts connected with Professor Presbury, if only to dispel once for all the ugly rumours which some twenty years ago agitated the University and were echoed in the learned societies of London.2 There were, however, certain obstacles in the way, and the true history of this curious case remained entombed in the tin box which contains so many records of my friend’s adventures. Now we3 have at last obtained permission to ventilate the facts which formed one of the very last cases handled by Holmes before his retirement from practice. Even now a certain reticence and discretion have to be observed in laying the matter before the public.
It was one Sunday evening early in September of the year 1903 that I received one of Holmes’s laconic messages:
Come at once if convenient—if inconvenient come all the same.
S. H.
The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar. He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my rôle was obvious. But apart from this I had uses. I was a whetstone for his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me—many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead—but none the less, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject. If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble rôle in our alliance.4
When I arrived at Baker Street5 I found him
huddled up in his arm-chair with updrawn knees, his pipe in his mouth and his brow furrowed with thought. It was clear that he was in the throes of some vexatious problem. With a wave of his hand he indicated my old arm-chair, but otherwise for half an hour he gave no sign that he was aware of my presence. Then with a start he seemed to come from his reverie, and, with his usual whimsical smile, he greeted me back to what had once been my home.
“You will excuse a certain abstraction of mind, my dear Watson,” said he. “Some curious facts have been submitted to me within the last twenty-four hours, and they in turn have given rise to some speculations of a more general character. I have serious thoughts of writing a small monograph upon the uses of dogs in the work of the detective.”
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 101