More romantically, Anthony Boucher argues in “The Records of Baker Street” that because every other musician in the Canon (besides Carina) is an eminent historical personage, then “Carina” must not be the singer’s actual name. Instead, he believes that Holmes was using the Italian term of endearment carina, meaning “darling.” “Then imagine the typography of the passage altered,” Boucher explains, “to read, ‘Let us escape from this weary workaday world by the side door of music; carina sings to-night at the Albert Hall . . .’ ” To Boucher, this constitutes a “momentary indiscretion on the part of Holmes, an obtuseness on the part of Watson,” and a tantalising reference to Holmes’s love life that will never be explained. William S. Baring-Gould does Boucher one better, suggesting that “Carina” was a reference to Irene Adler (who was not, in his view, deceased at that time), whereas Samuel Feinberg argues that it disguised Holmes’s relationship with noted American soprano Lillian Nordica (1857–1914), best known for her Wagner roles. These various conclusions, while satisfying to those who yearn to find the “softer emotions” present in Holmes, can hardly be supported by the single remark.
In the end, none of the candidates mentioned above, with the exception of the unsatisfying “Ternina,” fits the dates in question, and neither is there any real evidence for the more pleasant suggestions of the romantics. The intriguing mystery of Carina, then, to this day remains unsolved.
1 “The Retired Colourman” was published in Liberty on December 18, 1926, and in the Strand Magazine in January 1927.
2 Sufficient means, whether in the form of income or property, with which to live comfortably.
3 Professor Coram of “The Golden Pince-Nez” was engaged in a study of documents found in Coptic monasteries (see “The Golden Pince-Nez,” note 16). Strangely, only in the year 1899 were there two Coptic patriarchs in office, Cyril Maqar, head of the Catholic Patriarchate (which was founded in 1895 but named no patriarch until 1899), and Cyril V, known as Hanna al-Nasikh, who served as patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church from 1874 to 1927 (with a short respite in 1912). Wladimir V. Bogomoletz suggests that Dr. Watson may have confused the date of “The Retired Colourman” when he stated that it occurred in the “summer of 1898.” Of course, the “two Coptic patriarchs” for whom Holmes acted may not both have actually been holding that office—Holmes may have acted for both men in 1898, and Watson, writing up the story many years later, simply called them both patriarchs, as honorifics due them.
4 The Little Theatre in the Hay was built by carpenter John Potter in 1720 and later gave way, in 1821, to the larger Theatre Royal Haymarket, constructed next door. The original house’s first success was Hurlothrumbo, a comic opera by Lord Flame, pseudonym for the jester and actor Samuel “Maggoty” Johnson (sometimes referred to as “Little Samuel Johnson” to distinguish him from the Samuel Johnson). That production ran for thirty nights in 1729. The theatre was occasionally the site of surprising violence: Twenty people died in 1794 when an eager crowd surged forward for a glimpse of George III, who was attending a performance there; and a small riot occurred in 1879, when the pit was done away with to make room for orchestra stalls, depriving theatregoers of cheap seats near the stage. Violence aside, the theatrical productions were many and varied. Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin (the play that Abraham Lincoln would be watching at Ford’s Theater on a fateful night in 1865) ran at the Haymarket for four hundred nights beginning in 1861; and Oscar Wilde debuted A Woman of No Importance there in 1893 and An Ideal Husband in 1895. The ghost of John Baldwin Buckstone, a friend of Charles Dickens and manager of the Haymarket from 1853 to 1879, is said to haunt the theatre’s auditorium and dressing rooms.
5 W. W. Robson explains that “in boarding schools each pupil is given a number, for purposes of identification, which he keeps throughout his school career.”
6 In the Haymarket’s current upper circle—the second balcony above the orchestra stalls, situated above the royal circle but below the gallery—the rows run from A through G, and the seat numbers run upward from right to left. This would make Amberley’s seats two rows up, to the far left side of the balcony. Neither the 1896 nor the 1905 Baedeker mentions an upper circle, but both indicate prices for the Haymarket as “[s]talls 10s. 6d., balcony stalls 7s., balcony 5s., pit-circle 2s. 6d., upper boxes 2s., gallery 1s.”
7 A rake, a seducer, a lady’s man, a cad; derived from the character of Lothario in Nicholas Rowe’s enormously popular play The Fair Penitent (1703). In addition to adding a word to the dictionary, the “haughty, gallant, gay Lothario”—who seduces and then abandons the heroine Calista, driving her to suicide—would serve as the prototype for Robert Lovelace, the predatory gentleman suitor of Samuel Richardson’s seminal novel Clarissa Harlowe (1747–1748).
8 Although Holmes may have been simply tossing out an exemplary name, Jonathan Oates takes the remark seriously and suggests that Holmes had in mind the Anchor, a pub at 66 Algernon Road, Lewisham.
9 Gar Donnelson labels this the earliest date at which a telephone appears at Baker Street (“The Illustrious Client” and “The Three Garridebs,” which also make mention of a telephone, both clearly occurred in 1902). But he doubts that Holmes would have depended on the device as heavily as he claims, and writes, “Given the state of telephony in London at the time, one does have to doubt Holmes’s statement to Watson. . . . [T]elephone messages could be sent to the post offices for transmission as telegrams, and telegrams received at the post offices could be transmitted by telephone. So, whether or not the Yard yet had a telephone is perhaps beside the point.”
10 The identity of “Carina” is discussed on page 1751.
11 The Royal Albert Hall was inaugurated on March 29, 1871, in honor of the late Prince Albert, whose dream it had been to create a vast artistic, scientific, and cultural centre near the site of the Great Exhibition. With seven thousand seats, The Albert Hall is the largest concert hall in England, and it has played host to countless balls, fairs, concerts, sporting events, and plays, including several events of state. While esteemed for the quality of its performances, the hall was notoriously cursed with bad acoustics—namely echoes and reverberations—until renovations were made in the 1960s. The finale of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film The Man Who Knew Too Much is set at a concert held there, and of course, the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” reported the news that it was now known “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”
12 Crockford’s Clerical Directory was published by Oxford University Press commencing in 1869 and continues in print today.
13 “Living of Mossmoor cum Little Purlington” means that Elman’s parish (his “living”) was Mossmoor combined with Little Purlington.
14 Is this, like Jabez Wilson, another Mason who improperly flaunts his membership in that secret society? In “The Red-Headed League,” Holmes chastises Wilson for wearing a similar breastpin “against the strict rules of your order.”
15 The highly lethal potassium cyanide seems a likely culprit for Amberley’s attempted suicide, surmises Dr. J. W. Sovine. “Only an extremely rapid deadly poison effective in small dose would suffice for Josiah’s purpose,” he writes. “Cyanide of potassium qualifies.” And Amberley’s career in the manufacture of artistic materials would provide him with access to either potassium cyanide—which is used in photographic processing—or potassium ferrocyanide, the latter of which may be used to prepare the former.
16 “Let all things be done decently and in order” (I Corinthians.) Holmes, who frequently has taken justice into his own hands (see, for example, “The Abbey Grange”), here insists that Amberley stand trial, perhaps to provide an example for other criminals who might think themselves smarter than the Great Detective.
17 This statement seems inconsistent with Holmes’s later statement that Barker “had done nothing save what I told him,” which itself contradicts Holmes’s statement that they had “been working independently.” D. Martin Dakin suggests that this is further evidence of t
he spurious nature of the tale but also conjectures that Barker “may have been the detective noticed by Watson in The Empty House . . . , who was showing off in Park Lane—perhaps doing his best to make hay while the sun shone on him during Holmes’s absence.” S. E. Dahlinger comes to the same conclusion about the man, who is then described as wearing “coloured glasses” (see “The Empty House,” note 15). Several scholars equate Barker as the “well-known criminal investigator” who wrote the letter to the press reproduced in “The Man with the Watches,” published in the Strand Magazine in July 1898 through the agency of Arthur Conan Doyle and later collected in Conan Doyle’s Tales of Mystery (1908). Darlene Cypser identifies him with Cecil Barker of The Valley of Fear (although that Barker is definitely an American), while David R. McCallister concludes that Barker was the “hated rival” for the hand of maid Agatha in “Charles Augustus Milverton.” Gordon McCauley adds to the ferment by suggesting that Barker was a former Irregular.
18 The London police, like their American counterparts, were governed by rules barring them from coercing confessions (see “The Dancing Men,” note 22).
19 Broadmoor Prison for criminal lunatics (now a psychiatric hospital) was located in Crowthorne, Berkshire. It opened in 1863 with ninety-five female inmates; men were admitted the following year.
20 There is no direct evidence as to whether Holmes played chess. Svend Peterson cites numerous references in Holmes’s remarks throughout his career to games, gambits, moves, checks, and other chess terminology, leading Peterson to the inescapable conclusion that Holmes was an avid player of the game.
21 John Hall, in Sidelights on Holmes, suggests that Amberley had perhaps seen his wife and Dr. Ernest look around inside the strong-room, driving him to kill them out of greed rather than jealousy. “The possibility that Ernest may indeed have intended to run off with both Mrs. Amberley and the cash and securities is somewhat played down [by Watson], perhaps in order to retain the reader’s sympathy for the murdered couple.”
22 S. Tupper Bigelow shows, in “Sherlock Holmes Was No Burglar,” that technically, under British law, Holmes was innocent of burglary as well as unlawful entry—both crimes require a specific intent to commit a felony in the structure entered.
23 Charles A. Meyer makes the interesting suggestion that Amberley modelled his room after those in the well-publicised “murder castle” of mass-murderer H. H. Holmes. (Holmes was a pseudonym for his given name, Herman Mudgett, and thus there is no chance that he and Sherlock Holmes were related.) In the late 1800s, Holmes, a physician, constructed a three-storey hotel at the corner of Sixty-Third and Wallace in Chicago. Hidden behind the hotel’s façade was a bizarrely outfitted interior of secret passages, sealed chambers, trapdoors, surgeon’s tools, kilns, and a stretching machine. Once the hotel was completed, Holmes began gassing young women—some of whom he was linked to romantically—and dissecting them, selling their skeletons to medical schools. He struck pay dirt in 1893, when Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World. At least fifty tourists checked into Holmes’s hotel and were never heard from again. Holmes’s next project was an insurance scam in which his associate, Ben Pitezel, was to fake his own death. Travelling from city to city with Pitezel’s young children in tow, Holmes caught the interest of the Pinkerton Detective Agency and was finally captured on November 17, 1894. In all, Holmes claimed to have killed 133 people, among them Pitezel and Pitezel’s children. He was hanged in 1896. Holmes’s story is brilliantly told in The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, by Erik Larson (New York, 2003). Holmes is also the subject of a new documentary film titled H. H. Holmes: America’s First Serial Killer. Probably not coincidentally, celebrated writer/critic William Anthony Parker White (an avid Sherlockian), more commonly known as “Anthony Boucher,” wrote several mysteries under the second pseudonym of “H. H. Holmes.”
Motivated by Holmes’s exploits, Amberley may well have murdered other individuals in the room to test its capabilities. But this leaves unanswered the basic question: Why did he build it? Was it built expressly to murder his wife?
24 T. V. Ramamurthy quite astutely points out that a dying man who managed only four letters before expiring would hardly have had the strength (or presence of mind) to put the pencil back into his pocket. And who would have placed the pencil with Dr. Ernest’s body? Certainly not Amberley. In possible recognition of this anomaly, the words “on the body” do not appear in the Liberty publication of “The Retired Colourman.” But William G. Miller ingeniously explains: “[This] is, in fact, an incomplete sentence. Had not the eager inspector cut off Holmes in mid-sentence, the full statement would have been ‘If you find an indelible pencil on the body I will be very much surprised. . . . Instead, you will find the pencil in Josiah Amberley’s own pocket.’ ” He goes on to suggest that the pencil was inside the room before the murders and was probably used by Amberley to keep his records.
25 D. Martin Dakin wonders how this story could be told without embarrassing Inspector MacKinnon, even if he had long since retired. Might “MacKinnon” be an alias created by Dr. Watson? But then, he considers, could Lestrade, Gregson, Hopkins, and Athelney Jones all be aliases? Why, even the names of Watson and Holmes might be false identities! “[H]orror of horrors!” Dakin exclaims; “I recoil in guilty dismay from the hideous spectre I have raised, and hasten to disclaim the whole idea before I am indicted for heresy by the united membership of all the Sherlock Holmes societies.”
SELECTED SOURCES
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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 115