The Doylean connection is thus explicitly indicated at the very outset; and - with the possible exception of the description of Holmes’s physical appearance, which contrasts with that almost unnatural tallness and thinness noted by Watson in A Study in Scarlet - there is little that need trouble us about the similarities between Leblanc’s ‘Shears’ and the Doylean Holmes. The fact that the Holmes of The Arrest is aged fifty would set the tale somewhere in the early years of the new century, which might bother the Sherlockian chronologists slightly, but is not unacceptable; and Leblanc notes the keenness of Holmes’s eyes accurately - and even leaves him ‘clean-shaven’ when many Continental illustrators had saddled him with moustaches that would do credit to Baron Gruner.
***
Yet the respect for Holmes is not entirely unmixed, and there are hints of old and deep-seated geographical antipathies in Lupin’s musings - ‘ Arsène Lupin versus Holmlock Shears! France versus England . . . Revenge for Trafalgar at last!’ and this rather chauvinist view is evidently shared by the readers of the Echo de France, who relish the prospect of the local hero trouncing the representative of perfidious Albion. (Note also in this context that the ‘two most extraordinary types of detective that fiction had invented’ were both French! In passing, there is surely more than a hint of homage to Poe in the ‘Dupin/Lupin’ similarity?)
Certain aspects of Holmes are sometimes seen from a viewpoint which could not be anything other than French, as when, suspecting an accomplice of Lupin’s to be lurking in the shrubbery, Holmes ‘felt to see if the cylinder of his revolver worked, loosened his dagger in its sheath and walked straight up to the enemy with the cool daring and the contempt of danger which made him so formidable.’ Nobody could argue with the last sentiment, and we know that Holmes occasionally carried a revolver; but that ‘dagger in its sheath’ is an unquestionably Gallic touch.
The dagger apart, the character of the Holmes of The Arrest sometimes owes more to pure invention than to Conan Doyle. Thus, after Lupin has confined him to an empty house overnight, ‘Shears’ remarks -
“Pooh! . . . Schoolboy tricks! That’s the only fault I have to find with Lupin . . . He’s too childish, too fond of playing to the gallery . . . He’s a street Arab at heart!”
“So you continue to take it calmly, Shears?”
“Quite calmly,” replied Shears, in a voice shaking with rage. “What’s the use of being angry? I am so certain of having the last word!”
(In the event, he did, as we shall see.) The Holmes of the Doylean canon has sometimes been portrayed as exhibiting fairly wide mood swings; and in the stories he occasionally shows exasperation at official incompetence, or criticises himself for not seeing the truth earlier: but he never spoke to Watson ‘in a voice shaking with rage’ because of some personal affront by some villain. This is exaggeration to the point of burlesque, and a similar burlesque element is apparent in the conclusion of that ‘dagger in its sheath’ episode just noted - the enemy in the shrubbery is, of course, Watson!
Watson (or ‘Wilson’ in the Lupin stories) is treated with similar disdain, if not downright contempt. Both Lupin and the narrator refer to him as ‘the unspeakable Wilson,’ but then that is probably accurate enough and understandable enough, considering that Lupin is, when all is said and done, a criminal - the less cultivated members of the Moriarty gang, for example, probably alluded to both Holmes and Watson as something rather less genteel than ‘unspeakable’ on more than one occasion.
More significant - and less satisfactory - than this mere vulgar abuse is the parody of Watson’s character. Not merely the ‘ “Let’s go!” cried Wilson, tossing off two glasses of whiskey in succession,’ or his inevitable catch-phrase, ‘Cigarette ashes?’ at every mention of the word ‘clue,’ but a display of buffoonery that would put Nigel Bruce to shame: after being caught in the shrubbery, Watson allows Holmes to search the empty house, and inspect:
certain hardly perceptible chalk-marks, which formed figures which he put down in his note-book.
Escorted by Wilson, who seemed to take a particular interest in his work, he studied each room and found similar chalk-marks in two of the others. He also observed two circles on some oak panels, an arrow on a wainscoting and four figures on four steps of the staircase.
After an hour spent in this way, Wilson asked:
‘“The figures are correct, are they not?”
“I don’t know if they are correct,” replied Shears, whose good temper had been restored by these discoveries, “but at any rate they mean something.”
“Something very obvious,” said Wilson. “They represent the number of planks in the floor.”
“Oh!”
“Yes, as for the two circles, they indicate the panels sound hollow, as you can see by trying, and the arrow points to show the direction of the dinner-lift.”
Holmlock Shears looked at him in admiration.
“Why, my dear chap, how do you know all this? Your perspicacity almost makes me ashamed of myself.”
“Oh, it’s very simple,” said Wilson, bursting with delight. “I made those marks myself last night, in consequence of your instructions . . . or rather Lupin’s instructions, as the letter I received from you came from him.”
I have no doubt that, at that moment, Wilson was in greater danger than during his struggle with Shears in the shrubbery. Shears felt a fierce longing to wring his neck. Mastering himself with and effort, he gave a grin that pretended to be a smile and said:
“Well done, well done, that’s an excellent piece of work; most useful. Have you wonderful powers of analysis and observation been exercised in any other direction? I may as well make use of the results obtained.”
“No, that’s all I did.”
“What a pity! The start was so promising!” ‘
The attempts to make Watson look silly sometimes backfire, as when, after meeting Lupin in the restaurant, Holmes asks -
“Tell me, Wilson, what’s your opinion: why was Lupin in that restaurant?”
Wilson, without hesitation, replied:
“To get some dinner.”
“Wilson, the longer we work together, the more clearly I perceive the constant progress you are making. Upon my word, you’re becoming amazing.”
Wilson blushed with satisfaction in the dark; and Shears resumed:
“Yes, he went to get some dinner and then, most likely, to make sure if I am really going to Crozon, as Ganimard says I am . . . “
Holmes was wrong, and Watson was right: Lupin had indeed originally gone into the restaurant to dine, and for no other reason: he could not, and did not, know that Holmes would choose the same place in which to eat. The emphasis on burlesque is occasionally, as here, at the expense of logic.
As far as it goes, this parody element is quite funny; far more so than many deliberate attempts at humorous pastiche have been. But there is a hint not merely of parody but of downright contempt for Holmes: the worst aspect of the distorted relationship between Holmes and Watson in The Arrest is arguably Holmes’s utter indifference when the two of them are involved in a small (and quite innocent) dispute with three young workmen, who refuse to step aside:
Shears, who was in a bad temper, pushed them back. There was a short scuffle. Shears put up his fists, struck one of the men in the chest and gave another a blow in the face, whereupon the two men desisted and walked away with the third.
“Ah,” cried Shears, “I feel all the better for that! . . . My nerves were a bit strained . . .
He then realises that Watson’s arm is injured
[Watson] tried to lift it, but could not. Shears felt it, gently at first, and then more roughly, “to see exactly,” he said, “how much it hurts.” It hurt exactly so much that Wilson, on being let to a neighbouring chemist’s shop, experienced an immediate need to fall into a dead faint.
> Watson is taken to hospital, where Holmes holds the broken arm, and tries to console his friend:
“That’s all right, that’s all right . . . Just a little patience, old chap . . . in five or six weeks, you won’t know that you’ve been hurt . . .” . . . He interrupted himself suddenly, dropped the arm, which gave Wilson such a shock of pain that the poor wretch fainted once more . . .
Later yet, Holmes calls to see how Watson is going on:
“Oh, when I think that, just now, in the street, those ruffians might have broken my arm as well as yours! What do you say to that, Wilson?”
‘Wilson simply shuddered at the horrid thought . . .
Holmes then starts to leave:
“Take care of yourself old chap. Your task, henceforth, will consist in keeping two or three of Lupin’s men busy. They will waste their time waiting for me to come and enquire after you. It’s a confidential task.”
“Thank you ever so much,” said Wilson, gratefully. “I shall do my best to perform it conscientiously. So you are not coming back?”’
“Why should I?” asked Shears, coldly.
“No . . . you’re quite right . . . you’re quite right . . . I’m going on as well as can be expected. You might do one thing for me, Holmlock: give me a drink.”
“A drink?”
“Yes, I’m parched with thirst; and this fever of mine . . .”
“Why, of course! Wait a minute . . .”
He fumbled about among some bottles, came upon a packet of tobacco, filled and lit his pipe, and suddenly, as though he had not even heard his friend’s request, walked away, while old chap cast longing glances at the water-bottle beyond his reach.
Some commentators have insisted on taking Holmes’s apparent forgetting Watson’s existence in The Dying Detective quite literally, although many do not; but again Holmes’s indifference in The Arrest is exaggerated to the point where it ceases to be funny. It also contrasts unfavourably with Holmes’s reaction to Watson’s injury in The Three Garridebs. (Although that particular story was not published until 1924, and it is tempting - though it may be quite incorrect - to see the uncharacteristic slipping of the mask to reveal the human face as being Conan Doyle’s trying to counter the inaccuracies of such pastiches as The Arrest.)
***
If The Arrest were a humorous pastiche and nothing more, it would work quite well, despite the exaggerations; but in fact it has a serious, and quite well constructed basis, the elaborate forward planning by Lupin, and the struggle between him and Holmes, which is for the most part blessedly devoid of the worst elements of excessive jocularity which characterise the early chapters.
Holmes’s strategy for the actual arrest of Lupin might raise some eyebrows: Holmes has to threaten to implicate Lupin’s accomplice, the more or less innocent Mlle. Destange. This might strike some readers as ungentlemanly conduct, not the sort of thing we expect of Holmes. Lupin is handed over to the official police, and, as one might expect, promptly escapes!
In the second section of The Arrest, subtitled The Jewish Lamp, Holmes is once more in a position to arrest Lupin, but Lupin neatly turns the tables. This time it is Lupin who threatens to expose a lady’s honor. It turns out that she had written some injudicious letters to a persuasive villain, and been blackmailed into helping with the theft. (Shades of Charles Augustus Milverton, here!) Holmes, though he had been happy enough to implicate Mlle. Destange, cannot possibly see the wife of a nobleman pilloried in the press, and allows Lupin to go free, thereby to some extent redeeming himself from the earlier suspicion of caddish behaviour.
There is no record in the study of Conan Doyle by Hesketh Pearson - arguably the best of the biographers - that Leblanc and Conan Doyle ever actually met. Leblanc knew about Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes; and Conan Doyle knew about Leblanc and Lupin, for in the article, ‘Some Personalia about Sherlock Holmes,’ Conan Doyle tells how he was once taking part in an amateur billiards competition, and was handed a small packet which had been left for him. The packet contained an ordinary cube of billiard chalk, which Conan Doyle used for some months, until ‘the face of the chalk crumpled in, and I found it was hollow. From the recess thus exposed I drew out a small slip of paper with the words, “From Arsène Lupin to Sherlock Holmes.” Imagine the state of mind of the joker who took such trouble to accomplish such a result!’ It is tempting - though probably wildly inaccurate - to think that the present was from Leblanc himself, for he seems to have possessed a somewhat pawky sense of humour.
It is unclear how Conan Doyle regarded the Lupin parodies: it is known that Conan Doyle felt that the Holmesian canon detracted from his literary reputation, and the various pastiches and parodies emphasised Holmes at the expense of Conan Doyle’s other creations. It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Conan Doyle would surely have been more (or less) than human if he did not feel at least some pride at the compliment paid by Leblanc and Lupin; but this emotion may not have been entirely unmixed, and there is an interesting incident in The Illustrious Client when Gruner asks Holmes, ‘did you know Le Brun, the French agent?’ and Holmes replies, ‘I heard that he was a beaten by some Apaches in the Montmartre district and crippled for like.’ There is an interesting parallel here with the attack on ‘Shears’ and ‘Wilson’ in The Arrest; but is there anything more? ‘Le Brun’ is, after all, not so very different from ‘Leblanc’; did Conan Doyle consciously (or otherwise) perhaps feel that the ‘joker’ Leblanc deserved a jolly good thrashing? It is an interesting thought, but at this distance in time it must remain merely speculative.
Leblanc certainly had a high regard for Conan Doyle and the genuine Holmes; in an obituary in Les Annales Politiques et Littèraires in 1930, he wrote of Conan Doyle (in Dr Kai-ho Mah’s translation):
Conan Doyle had a lot of [talent], and of the best and most literary kind . . . But he has a still more than talent; he has the power of creation, since he created so representative a type as Sherlock Holmes . . . I defy any reader . . . not to be taken in by a Conan Doyle story from the very first pages, and not to read it to the last lime. . . The Master has a hard grip. . . It is very much due to him that the adventure story has regained a place of honour. . . Let us be grateful to the writer, Conan Doyle. Let us salute the great lesson of energy and mastery given us by the extraordinary Sherlock Holmes. And let us not forget all that is enjoyable and profoundly comic in the ineffable Watson. The man who has just died is not about to die in the memory of men.
Lupin, too, admired Holmes; in the last section of The Arrest - now entirely devoid of those elements of parody which mar earlier chapters - Lupin addresses Holmes almost in terms of affection, and constantly refers to him as ‘maître’ in a manner which recalls le Villard’s praise in The Sign of Four - ‘stray magnifiques, coup-de-maîtres and tours-de-force . . . “He speaks as a pupil to his master,” said I.’
It is perhaps not too difficult to believe that if Holmes - the real, the Doylean (the only!) Holmes - had actually met Lupin, he would have done exactly what ‘Holmlock Shears’ did, and let the lovable French rogue go free to fight another day.
References
1 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Some Personalia about Sherlock Holmes,’ (Peter Haining, [ed.]
2 The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Completing the Canon (London: Star, 1981), pp.160-168.
3 Hamada Tomoaki, private communication.
4 Hasebe Fumichika, ‘Maurice Leblanc’, Oubei Suirishousetsu Honyakushi [A History of Translations of Western Mysteries], Tokyo, Hon no Zasshi Sha, 1992, pp156-169.
5 Hall, Trevor H., ‘Sherlock Holmes and Arsene Lupin’, Sherlock Holmes and his Creator, London, Duckworth, 1978, pp56-69.
6 Leblanc, Maurice, ‘A propos de Conan Doyle,’ Les Annales Politiques et Littèraires, No.95 (1 August, 1930), p.111.
7 ---------, (trans. Kai-ho Mah), ‘Apropos of Con
an Doyle,’ BSJ, vol.21, No.2, (June, 1971), pp. 100-102.
8 Redmond Donald A., Sherlock Holmes: a Study in Sources, Kingston and Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982, p217; and private communication.
9 Steinbrunner, Chris, Penzler, Otto, Lachman, Marvin, Shibuk, Charles (eds), Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection, San Diego, New York, London, Harcourt Bruce Jovanovitch, 1976, pp242; 253-355.
40 Takehara Seichi, private communication.
(The writers with to thank Kasahara Seiji, who not only drew their attention to the French film of Les Aventures, but also generously provided some memorabilia connected with it; Hamada Tomoaki and Donald A. Redmond, for their comments, and Takehara Seichi for his original suggestion.)
(The Ritual No.19, Spring 1997)
Dr Watson’s Title
‘Being a reprint from reminiscences of John H Watson, MD, late of the Army Medical Department’ is the first line of A Study in Scarlet, the first volume of the Canon. This is the first time we, the readers, encounter John H Watson, MD. Watson also wrote clearly that ‘In 1878, I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London.’
However, there is an interesting opinion in the latest Japanese translation of A Study in Scarlet by Dr Kobayashi Tsukasa and Mrs Higashiyama Akane.1 These translators considered that John H Watson did not take his MD, and they consequently changed the sub-title to the story to ‘being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H Watson, MB . . .’ Throughout the Canon, Holmes and other characters address Watson as ‘Dr,’ but Kobayashi and Higashiyama contend that his was merely a courtesy title, such as James Mortimer, MRCS, honestly refused (in The Hound of the Baskervilles.)
It is obviously a serious matter to change one of the basic tenets of the Canon in this major fashion. Kobayashi and Higashiyama’s decision was made on the basis of an article published in Japan. ‘Watson no Keireki [Watson’s Career]’ by Ikoma Hisaaki, MD, who was assistant professor in the Medical Department of Tottori University, and who studied for a year at London University.2 Ikoma describes medical education in the late Victorian era, pointing out Holmes’s reference to Watson as being ‘only a general practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications,’ in ‘The Dying Detective,’ and noting that experimentation on animals for the degree of MD was severely restricted by law from 1876. We (HY and JH) consider the second point a minor one; but Ikoma’s point about ‘mediocre qualifications’ needs some response.
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