East Wind Coming

by Yuichi Hirayama

(There are fringe possibilities for some of the skills noted. For example, it may have been that Watson had noticed some thickening of Holmes’s ears, indicative of a boxing man. But this is a remote possibility: Holmes’s amateur bouts would have been unlikely to produce any such trophies, and more to the point, Watson was not really that observant.)

  We do know for certain that Watson must have seen Holmes box in person at some stage, for in “The Yellow Face” Watson tells us that Holmes “was undoubtedly one of the finest boxers of his weight that I have ever seen,” which is specific enough. As noted above, the bout with McMurdo may well have been one occasion on which Watson was a spectator, although we cannot be certain of that. But what is certain is that Watson must have seen Holmes in the ring at some time or another, and there is nothing to rule out his having done so in the very earliest stages of their acquaintance.

  It is not immediately apparent just when Holmes’s interest in boxing first began. The quotation from “The Gloria Scott,” noted earlier, makes it clear that he was already keen on the sport in university days, but he may have been introduced to it even earlier by one of those country squires whom he reckoned among his ancestors. This is perhaps unlikely, though, for Mycroft does not give the impression that he was of a similar athletic inclination, which might tend to rule out tutelage by a relation, and that in turn may mean that Sherlock began boxing at school, as already noted, or at university.

  He certainly seems to have boxed fairly regularly whilst he was at university, and, that being so, we might wonder just why he seems to have had so few friends at this stage in his life. It might be thought that a keen boxer would have fitted quite well into the university sporting circle. On the other hand, Holmes may well have had a considerable acquaintance among the ‘fancy’ without having very many really close friends, particularly among those whose tastes ran to the cricket field or the river rather than the ring, so there is nothing there to strain our belief too greatly.

  Holmes seems to have had some considerable degree of skill in boxing, in the early days at least. Apart from Watson’s laudatory remark, which we might be inclined to dismiss as typical of the good doctor’s praise of his friend, there is the independent evidence of McMurdo in The Sign of Four that Holmes had wasted his gifts and ‘might have aimed high, if [he] had joined the fancy.’ We might perhaps again be inclined to treat this remark with caution, to put it down to the tendency of the professional (or exprofessional) to let the amateur down lightly, but McMurdo does not immediately strike the casual observer as being prey to this chivalrous propensity.

  Moreover, there are other, more unambiguous, examples of Holmes’s boxing skill throughout the canon, such as his defeat of the ‘slogging ruffian’ Woodley in “The Solitary Cyclist,” or his fight with the knife wielding Harrison in “The Naval Treaty.” And there are usually believable explanations for the few occasions on which Holmes did not do so well, such as his struggle with the Cunninghams in “The Reigate Puzzle,” when Holmes was just recovering from a near-total breakdown of his health.

  It is once again interesting to speculate as to how (and indeed if) Holmes kept his boxing skills honed when he started in practice as a detective. Watson tells us in “The Yellow Face” that Holmes “seldom took exercise for exercise’s sake,” but kept in training with a diet which “was usually of the sparest.” It is difficult to accept this absolutely literally, and when we remember that Watson had undoubtedly seen Holmes in the boxing ring, we might well feel justified in supposing that Holmes had, in the early days at least, been in the habit of working out at some gymnasium.

  There were several boxing clubs in London, but the two most important were one in Clapton, possible, but a fair distance from 221B, and the West London Boxing Club which met at the ‘Bedford Head’ in Maiden Lane, off the Strand. The latter is within easy reach of Baker Street, and must surely have some claim to having seen Holmes in action. In addition to these two, the London Athletic Club ran boxing classes during the winter months at Mr Waite’s, 22 Golden Square, while the German Gymnastic Society (two-thirds of whose members were English) also had winter time boxing classes at 26 Pancras Road, King’s Cross. There was thus no shortage of facilities.

  The “Alison’s rooms” referred to as the venue for the bout with McMurdo in The Sign of Four may have been a private boxing club or gymnasium, but are perhaps more likely to have been a private room, or rooms, let out for any public function in some inn or pub owned by Mr Alison. (Or, just possibly, Ms Alison Someone, though this is far less likely.) And pubs which specialized in the ‘fancy,’ with a boxing ring for the entertainment of patrons, still survived, although according to the anonymous compiler of the 1880 edition of Dickens’s Dictionary of London they were becoming rare, so that is yet another possibility.

  The mention of fencing, in “The Gloria Scott” makes it clear that this too was a sport which Holmes was keen on during his university days. And again, there is nothing too difficult about accepting that he would have acquaintances, but not close friends, in the fencing club. It is even possible that Reginald Musgrave had been a fellow member of the university fencing club, for the sport is one which may well have appealed to that languid aristocrat, and this shared interest could have been the origin of the friendship between the two men, though there is no hard evidence.

  Once again, we cannot tell whether or not Holmes’s interest predates his attendance at university. There is no further mention of fencing later in his career, which may perhaps indicate that he more or less dropped it completely later on, though here again we cannot be sure. (Dramatizers of the canon have been similarly shy of incorporating swordplay into their offerings, which is a pity, for Jeremy Brett or Basil Rathbone would surely have done full justice to the occasional bit of swashbuckling, and there would have been - for once! -- a sound canonical basis to justify its inclusion.) Holmes may have dropped the fencing in later life because - unlike boxing - there were relatively few places in London where he could have practiced fencing.

  The omission of any mention of singlestick fighting from Holmes’s own remark in “The Gloria Scott,” and again from Watson’s recollection in “The Five Orange Pips” is interesting. Singlestick (sometimes spelled with a hyphen, single-stick) may not be as immediately familiar as boxing or fencing, so it is perhaps worth stating that it was a sport carried out with, quite literally, a single ‘stick,’ similar to a quarterstaff, a five foot (or so) pole with which each of the two participants attempted to ‘break the head’ of the other, i.e. to draw blood from the scalp.

  Singlestick fighting was particularly popular in the West Country, so that if Holmes had been interested in this sport when he was very young there may be implications there regarding his place of birth. On the other hand, the omission of any mention of this sport in “The Gloria Scott” may mean that Holmes acquired his interest in it after his university days.

  That too is an interesting possibility, for the sport was also particularly popular with army and navy officers, and if Holmes had learned the skill from his father, that might be a pointer to the latter’s occupation, and that in turn might be an explanation for the somewhat distant relations which seem to have obtained between the Holmeses, father and son. But this is speculative, and it is interesting that the one army man with whom Holmes definitely came into contact was none other than Watson. But again, if Watson had introduced Holmes to singlestick fighting, he would surely have mentioned the fact in A Study in Scarlet, so that seems to be ruled out. And Watson also fails to mention singlestick in his recollection of his old list of Holmes’s limits in “The Five Orange Pips,” so perhaps it did not stick in his mind (no pun intended) as securely as the boxing and fencing.

  That in turn may indicate that Holmes’s proficiency in singlestick was not particularly great, but that reading conflicts with Holmes’s own claim, in “The Illustrious Client,” to be “a bit of a single-stick expert.” It might be asked
why an expert should be so badly beaten, but there is a world of difference between a sporting contest using the correct equipment, and an assault by not one, but two, opponents who possess no sporting inclinations. Moreover, at this fairly late stage in Holmes’s career, his neglect of his skills may have been a contributory factor. The question of Holmes’s expertise thus need not concern us too greatly, and there is no need to subscribe to the theory put forward by Asano Yoshiaki that Gruner’s hired thugs were actually Japanese martial arts experts, interesting though that suggestion undoubtedly is.

  Mention of Japanese martial arts leads us naturally to the last of Holmes’s accomplishments, that knowledge of “baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling,” to which he laid claim in “The Empty House.” This topic is one which has very naturally aroused a good deal of interest among Japanese Sherlockians, and there are quite considerable ramifications to it which cannot be adequately covered in a short general note such as this one. The authors of this note have produced a full-length study of the subject, and (without wishing to reveal too much detail to prospective purchasers of that!) have concluded that Holmes’s skill was in jujitsu, probably acquired between 1887 and 1891, with the balance of probability favoring late 1890 for the precise date, and that to Tokyo judo teacher Kano Jigoro was Holmes’s tutor. It also seems most improbable that Holmes was ever a true master of the skill, despite his easy defeat of Moriarty at Reichenbach.

  References

  1) Anon (Charles Dickens the younger?), Dicken’s Dictionary of London, 1880 (Second Year): An Unconventional Handbook London: Charles Dickens, 1880, p.40.

  2) Asano Yoshiaki, personal communication to The Red Circle of Niigata.

  3) WS Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: The Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective (New York,: Clarkson N Potter, 1962)

  4) Hirayama Yuichi and John Hall, Some Knowledge of Baritsu In press: to be published by The Northern Musgraves in 1996.

  5) William Hyder, From Baltimore to Baker Street Toronto: Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, 1995, p.24.

  6) Anne Jordan, ‘Was Holmes a Cab Driver?’ The Ritual, No.11 Huddersfield: The Northern Musgraves, 1993, pp.8-12.

  7) David Landis, ‘Holmes the Marksman: A Man and his Mettle,’ The Shoso-in Bulletin, Vol.5 (1995), pp.94-96.

  8) June Thomson, Holmes and Watson: A study in friendship London: Constable and Co., 1995.

  (The Baker Street Journal, March 1996)

  Did you know LeBrun, the French agent?

  One of the many writers of Sherlockian pastiche and parody was the Frenchman, Maurice Leblanc (1864 - 1941). Leblanc was a journalist and novelist who, in the early years of the new century, began to write detective stories at the request of his friend Pierre Lafitte, a publisher and the owner of the magazine, Je sais tout.

  Leblanc took an interesting approach to his pastiche: he put Holmes at the periphery of the tales, instead of at their centre. The true ‘hero’ of Leblanc’s books is the noted French criminal, Arsène Lupin, and Holmes is cast as a relatively minor character. He does not even appear in all the Lupin stories, and when he does it is under an alias which changed almost from day to day, being sometimes rendered as Herlock Sholmes, but later as Holmlock Shears. (Although the Japanese - who esteem Lupin as highly as Holmes - simply use ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in their translations.)

  The search for minor parallels between Holmes and Lupin is an interesting diversion: Lupin’s dog, for example, is called ‘Sherlock’ (in 813); there is an early morning encounter between a blackmailer and his victim at the blackmailer’s house, recalling the fatal meeting in Charles Augustus Milverton (in Le Bouchon de Crystal); and so on. And as far as overall style is concerned, the Lupin stories are broadly similar to the Holmesian canon in that a narrator writing in the first person gives us most of the information about Lupin; but in the Lupin stories there are switches into the third person for whole blocks of the text. The narrator is a friend of Lupin’s and is clearly a man; but he remains anonymous, positively self-effacing by comparison with the garrulous Watson. Even when Lupin and the narrator meet Holmes at a cafe, Lupin merely, ‘Allow me to introduce my friend,’ but he does not name the friend. The narrator is close to Lupin, for he tells us, ‘My excuse [for writing the accounts] is that I can supply something new: I can furnish the key to the puzzle. There is always a certain mystery about [Lupin’s] adventures: I can dispel it.’ We may safely assume that the narrator is none other than Leblanc himself.

  Perhaps the most significant work from the Sherlockian viewpoint is the novel first published in 1908 as Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmes, which was initially translated into English as Arsène Lupin versus Holmlock Shears, and then retitled as The Arrest of Arsène Lupin, the form in which it is perhaps best known. (The various editions of Lupin demand a bibliographical monograph of their own; the quotations from The Arrest in this article are taken from the English translation - the translator is not named - published by Newnes in their ‘Sevenpenny Series,’ no date but circa 1910.)

  In some ways, Lupin may be regarded as a Gallic version of Professor Moriarty. Lupin has a large criminal organisation at his disposal; there is always a car waiting at just the right place and just the right time to whisk Lupin out of the grasp of the official police force. Perhaps the most telling instance of Lupin’s forward planning in The Arrest is that he had - a full five years before the story opens - inveigled his way into the business of an architect, M. Destange, and, whilst ostensibly carrying out repairs and alterations to various properties, had constructed several secret doors and passages in the houses concerned. It was when Lupin began to use these clandestine entrances and exits to effect the removal of various portable valuables that Holmlock Shears (whom we shall here generally call Holmes, for convenience, so long as it causes no undue confusion to do so) was called in, and the book proper begins. Even Moriarty never planned anything quite that elaborate, or that far in advance!

  Lupin certainly has no lack of self-esteem: ‘I search history in vain for a destiny to compare with mine . . . Napoleon? Yes, Perhaps . . .’ and there is surely a fairly heavily stressed parallel here with that other Napoleon of crime, Moriarty. It would, however, be a mistake to identify Lupin with Moriarty without qualification. True, Lupin ‘speaks, writes, warns, orders, threatens, carries out his plans, as though there were no police, no magistrates, no impediment of any kind in existence. They seem of no account to him whatever. No obstacle enters into his calculations.’ At first glance, this may seem to parallel Moriarty’s own disregard for the forces of law and order quite closely, and so far as indifference to any moral code but his own is concerned, Lupin is not so very different from the Professor.

  But, unlike Moriarty, Lupin is no shrinking violet, depending for his success on secrecy, on the facade of respectability. On the contrary, Lupin positively enjoys notoriety, and he gets it - ‘The name of Arsène Lupin alone was a guarantee of originality, a promise of amusement for the gallery. And the gallery, in this case, was the whole world.’ And that phrase about speaking and writing as though there were no police, etc, must be taken very literally, for Lupin’s exploits - it seems churlish to label them mere ‘crimes’ - are known to, and admired by, the public, in France at any rate. (After the event, not before, of course!) Indeed, Lupin has some connection with a newspaper which publishes laudatory accounts of those exploits, the Echo de France ‘which has the honour of being [Lupin’s] official organ and in which he seems to be one of the principal shareholders.’

  Lupin is altogether a more human, more likeable figure than Moriarty, and - being French - Lupin has one little human weakness which Holmes can use against him, namely affection for the ‘fair-headed lady.’ Mlle Clotilde Destange, daughter of the architect, who will be noted in more detail in a moment.

  Notoriety is two-edged. We have seen that ‘no obstacle enters into [Lupin’s] calculations,’ but, fo
r all that, ‘the police struggle to do their best. The moment the name of Arsène Lupin is mentioned, the whole force, from top to bottom, takes fire, boils and foams with rage. He is the enemy, the enemy who mocks you, provokes you, despises you, or, even worse, ignores you. And what can one do against an enemy like that?’

  Lupin’s chief adversary in the official force is Ganimard, who is perhaps not so very different from Lestrade - ‘Ganimard is not one of those mighty detectives . . . whose name will always remain inscribed on the judicial annals of Europe. He lacks the flashes of genius that illumine a Dupin, a Lecoq or a Holmlock Shears. But he possesses first-rate average qualities: perspicacity, sagacity, perseverance and even a certain amount of intuition.’ But Ganimard is no match for Lupin, and so Holmes is consulted by Lupin’s victims.

  The treatment of Holmes (or ‘Holmlock Shears,’ or whatever he happened to be called) is rather curious: fidelity to, and respect for, the Doylean canon is combined with elements of caricature or parody, verging almost on resentment.

  From the general initial description we learn that

  Holmlock Shears is a man . . . of the sort one meets every day. He is about fifty years of age and looks like a decent City clerk . . . He has nothing to distinguish him from the ordinary respectable Londoner, with his clean-shaven face and his somewhat heavy appearance, nothing except his terribly keen, bright, penetrating eyes. .....And then, of course, he is Holmlock Shears, that is to say, a sort of miracle of intuition, of insight, of perspicacity, of shrewdness. It is as though Nature had amused herself by taking the two most extraordinary types of detective that fiction had invented, Poe’s Dupin and Gaboriau’s Lecoq, in order to build up one in her own fashion, more extraordinary yet and more unusual. And upon my word, any one hearing of the adventures which have made the name of Holmlock Shears famous all over the world must feel inclined to ask if he is not a legendary person, a hero who has stepped straight from the brain of some novel-writer, of a Conan Doyle, for instance.