SHERLOCK HOLMES
THE SEVENTH BULLET
DANIEL D. VICTOR
TITAN BOOKS
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE SEVENTH BULLET
ISBN: 9781845869102
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First edition: October 2010
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Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© 1992, 2010 Daniel D. Victor
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For Norma
To me she will always be “the woman.”
“The treason of the Senate! Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous; interests that manipulate the prosperity produced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few; interests whose growth and power can only mean the degradation of the people, of the educated into sycophants, of the masses toward serfdom.”
—David Graham Phillips
The Treason of the Senate, 1906
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Prologue
Acknowledgements
For their help in editing the manuscript, I would like to express my gratitude to Richard Evidon; Robert MacDowell; Christine McMullen; Norma K. Silverman; Barry Smolin; Peter Turchi; and my parents, Alfred and Ruth Victor. I would also like to thank Jane Cushman. It was her faith from the start that enabled this project to succeed.
Preface
Any manuscript purporting to be a newly discovered case involving Sherlock Holmes deserves a word of explanation. When such a manuscript also casts a controversial light on well-established historical events, a naturally sceptical reading audience is entitled to know how its discovery came about.
In June 1976 I completed my doctoral dissertation on the little-known American novelist David Graham Phillips. Although few people today even recognise Phillips’ name, many are quite familiar with the title of “Muckraker,” which an angry President Theodore Roosevelt pinned on him for the writer’s attack on members of the United States Senate in 1906. My particular interest in Phillips focused on the dichotomy in his nature that resulted, on the one hand, in the kind of political dissent that so enraged Roosevelt and, on the other, the eccentric and stylish mode of dress that earned Phillips the label of “dandy.” My dissertation, entitled “The Muckraker and the Dandy: The Conflicting Personae of David Graham Phillips,” studied the impact of this psychological split on Phillips’ fiction, fiction that, at least during his own lifetime, garnered him comparisons to Tolstoy, Balzac, and Dickens.
The library at Princeton University houses the primary collection of manuscripts related to David Graham Phillips. Because the fact is well documented that the great bulk of his work changed very little between its creation in longhand and its publication, I felt comfortable in bypassing the Princeton collection during my doctoral studies. Besides, as a struggling graduate student on the West Coast, I didn’t have the money to travel to New Jersey anyway. But three years ago I finally did get to make the pilgrimage; and while investigating the aforementioned handwritten papers of Phillips, I discovered—to my amazement and joy—at the bottom of one of the eleven cartons of documents pertaining to Phillips, the battered and water-damaged manuscript tied with twine that, thanks to the university’s gracious consent, I have been allowed to edit and present here to what I assume is an eager audience.
When I first saw Dr. John Watson’s account of Phillips’ murder, I had no idea of the report’s explosive—not to mention priceless-contents. It had no title (I confess to generating the present one thanks to the suggestion of a friend at the National Endowment for the Humanities). The original first page simply showed “David Graham Phillips” scrawled across it in a handwriting different from that which covers the rest of its pages. Although the library research department claims no knowledge of how or when the manuscript actually arrived, I surmise that some good Samaritan who knew of the Phillips collection at Princeton must simply have sent Watson’s narrative to the University where an unsuspecting librarian no doubt mistakenly placed it among the compositions written by Phillips himself.
I cannot, of course, vouch for the authenticity
of the manuscript. In general, it appears to be historically accurate. References to Phillips’ role in reporting the naval collision, for example, or Hearst’s generous offer of employment or the testimony of the numerous witnesses Watson cites can all be found in various biographies of Phillips’ life. However bizarre and contradictory, even the details surrounding Phillips murder—including the passages from the assassin’s diary—are consistent with the journalistic and scholarly accounts I have researched. But because Dr. Watson himself confesses to clouding some of the more controversial aspects in order to protect those who were still in power when he wrote the memoir shortly after World War I, it is difficult to determine exactly how definitive his narrative really is. For the reader seeking to try, I have included a selected bibliography following the text.
But accurate or not, the manuscript demands to be made public. Let historians and critics more qualified than I be the final judges. I can surely attest to its contents’ conforming to all the vagaries of human nature and the political process that I myself have come to regard as true. I have taken the liberty of adding the chapter titles and headnotes and clarifying those transitions and explanations that were illegible, lost, or omitted in the original.
Learn from history or be condemned to repeat it, Santayana admonished. Judging from the success of the political assassins subsequent to the events marked in the history that follows, we have done very little learning. I present Dr. Watson’s narrative, therefore, with the hope of making better students of us all.
—D.D.V.
Los Angeles, California
June 1992
N: NATIONAL ARTS CLUB
P: PRINCETON CLUB
R: RAND SCHOOL
S: SAMUEL J. TILDEN’S FORMER HOME
T: THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S BIRTHPLACE
X: ASSASSINATION SITE OF DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS
–: ROUTE OF D.G.P. ON 23 JANUARY 1911
One
THE AMERICAN LADY
“As between knaves and fools, I incline towards knaves. At least, they are teachers of wisdom in the school of experience, while fools avail nothing, are simply provokers and purveyors of knavery.”
–David Graham Phillips, Light-Fingered Gentry
Even now, some thirty years later, it seems difficult to imagine that one of the worst disasters in British naval history, a tragedy occurring more than two thousand miles from our native England, could have so greatly affected the lives of my good friend Sherlock Holmes and me; but that is exactly the case.
In June of 1893, during manoeuvres forty miles off the coast of Syria in the Levant, Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon, commanding the fleet of eleven warships from the oaken bridge of H.M.S. Victoria, issued his fateful order to turn about. Despite the protests of Rear Admiral Markham aboard the nearby H.M.S. Camperdown that there was not sufficient room for the double file of ships to execute a turn, the Camperdown was commanded to proceed. Giving truth to the appropriateness of Admiral Markham’s fears, the Camperdown rammed into the Victoria, which, owing to a gaping wound in her side, plummeted downward. There was created, as the pressman David Graham Phillips reported, “a vortex, at the bottom of which whirled the great blades of the screws. Into this maelstrom, down upon those frightful, swift revolving knives, were drawn several hundred British sailors, marines, and officers. They were torn into pieces, the sea was reddened all around, and strewn with arms, legs, heads, trunks. Then the boilers, far down beneath the surface, burst, and scores of those alive were scalded to death—and the sea smoothed out again and began to laugh in the superb tropical sunlight of the summer afternoon.”
In addition to the enormity of the disaster—386 brave seamen lost their lives—a significant aspect to the story was the profound silence of Fleet Street on the matter. Sceptics even went so far as to suggest collusion between the Admiralty and the government in keeping the details secret. In fact, when the full account of the tragedy was finally published, the world learned—much to the dismay of the British press—that it was an American, the aforementioned Phillips, who, with timely telegrams and fortuitous connections, had secured the story for the newspapers in the United States.
An American member of my own profession, Dr. Ira Harris, happened to be in the telegraph office in Tripoli when Phillips’s daring request to anyone at all for information on the naval collision arrived.* Ascertaining the facts from an unidentified seaman who had witnessed the event, Dr. Harris relayed the account in detail through a Turkish clerk back to Phillips in London.
Needless to say, the journalistic community was amazed. How a mysterious sailor, a medical practitioner, and a non-English-speaking telegrapher could combine to report a story of such importance with such accuracy seemed nothing short of a miracle.
It was not until three years later, when Phillips himself visited us at Baker Street, that I learned the solution to the puzzle. Following his presumed death at the hands of Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland in April 1891, my friend Sherlock Holmes spent three years touring distant localities. The summer of 1893 brought him not only to the Holy Land, as Holmes explained in the case my readers know as “The Adventure of the Empty House,” but also to the environs of the ill-fated naval manoeuvres. The nameless sailor who had relayed in such fine detail to Dr. Harris the narrative of the collision at sea had, of course, been Sherlock Holmes; but it was only the photographs accompanying the newspaper stories of Holmes’s reappearance in 1894 that enabled Dr. Harris to learn the true identity of the anonymous witness who had furnished him with the account. Upon making this discovery, Dr. Harris informed Phillips, who, during his next trip to London, came to Baker Street to thank personally the man responsible for providing him the means to establish his international reputation. Ironically, it was this celebratory encounter between Holmes and Phillips that resulted in our personal enquiry into the writer’s brutal and bizarre assassination more than ten years later, an atrocity so strange that it actually sent echoes of vampirism reverberating through the corridors of the American Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Holmes and I had been involved in portentous cases before, but none besides his role in bringing Von Bork to justice at the start of the Great War held such worldwide implications as Phillips’s shocking murder. Nonetheless, because in 1906 Phillips had so successfully attacked the evildoers in his government that he brought down upon himself the wrath of many who to this very day still command power at its highest echelons, it is with great trepidation even now—more than a full decade after Phillips’s death in 1911—that I dare set my pen to paper. In the name of propriety as well as prudence, therefore, I have taken the necessary care to obfuscate not only those incriminating details that might yet give rise to embarrassment, but also the specific identities of those less-easily recognised dignitaries who could still have cause to be distressed by certain particulars being made public for the first time in the narrative that follows.
It was early in the spring of 1912 when I first met that most inimitable of American ladies, Mrs. Carolyn Frevert. As I have chronicled elsewhere, Sherlock Holmes and I had by this time been going our separate ways for many a year. After retiring as a consulting detective, Holmes had taken up the tending of bees in a quaint cottage in Sussex. I, happily settled into my most recent marriage, was receiving patients in my Queen Anne Street surgery. In point of fact, we scarcely saw each other. Although he might come up to London to hear some celebrated violinist at the Albert Hall, or I might journey to Sussex for what he termed the “occasional weekend visit,” these were social engagements; inevitably, the continuous occupation of ridding England of her miscreants and rogues had passed to younger men. Sherlock Holmes, after all, was now fifty-eight; I, his frequent partner in combating lawlessness and crime, fifty-nine. We no longer had the physical stamina or the energetic enthusiasm to pursue the denizens of the underworld. Indeed, the sole substantive link to our days at what my generous readers assure me will become a world-famous address was the person of Mrs. H
udson, our ever-faithful housekeeper, who, despite the opportunity to rid herself of her most untidy boarder, had given up her Baker Street lodgings to look after Holmes and his bees in the Downs. Her only real fear, she constantly repeated, was that her friendly former rooms would be razed and supplanted by some blocks of dour office buildings.
On a clear, blustery mid-March afternoon—Friday the thirteenth, to be exact, if not ironically macabre—the specific events that would carry us halfway round the world actually began. Since I had no patients scheduled after the gouty Mr. Wigmore, I entertained high hopes of beginning my weekend early. As no-one else was seated in my waiting room when I ushered the limping patient in for his examination, I was looking forward, on such a beautiful day, to a constitutional and then tea with my dear wife. It was to my great surprise, therefore, that when I escorted Wigmore out of my consulting-room door, I saw perched rigidly in one of the bowbacked chairs a raven-haired woman who despite her middle age was still quite handsome. Dressed entirely in black, she sat perfectly motionless except for the constant flutter of the black lace fan she was holding. Since it was not hot enough to warrant such an action, I took it to be the outward show of some inner agitation.
“Are you ill, madam?” I asked.
“No, Dr. Watson,” she replied, looking up at me. Even in those few words, I was able to detect her American accent. “In fact, I really did not come to consult you as a doctor at all. I’m rather afraid that I’m here under false pretences since it’s not even you whom I really wish to speak with.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, feeling a little chagrined.
“I’ve come all this way, Dr. Watson, to see your friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”
I must confess that, as I had not seen Holmes for quite some time myself and since his person did not figure in my every waking thought, I was completely taken aback by the reference. After all, only moments before, my deepest thoughts were of the cakes and biscuits my wife would be serving at tea.
The Seventh Bullet Page 1