Mycroft Holmes 03 - The Notched Hairpin

by H. F. Heard

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  The Notched Hairpin

  A Mycroft Holmes Mystery

  H. F. Heard

  Foreword by Christopher Pittard

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  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Dr Christopher Pittard

  The Notched Hairpin

  The Red Brick Twins

  The Inspector’s “Who?”

  Mr. Millum’s “Why?”

  Mr. Mycroft’s “How?”

  The Enchanted Garden

  Preview: A Taste for Honey

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  Writing the foreword to a work of detective fiction presents a certain problem: how much of the plot should be discussed? Is it possible to discuss the novel meaningfully while keeping its secrets largely hidden? In any case, is the appeal of any novel, detective fiction or otherwise, to be found solely in its capacity to surprise? (Evidently not, or what would become of rereading?) The Notched Hairpin complicates such matters even further; not only does the novel appear late in a series in which the main surprise—the identity of Mr Mycroft—was revealed at the end of the first novel (A Taste for Honey [1941]), but the question of whodunit is itself revealed on the contents page. Clearly, then, the novel’s mysteries lie in questions deeper than that of the identity of a murderer, and in many ways such mysteries are often harder to avoid in a foreword such as this one. A murderer’s name can easily be edited out; discussion of larger philosophical questions, less so. As a compromise, therefore, I would like to discuss The Notched Hairpin primarily through the lens of its brief opening sentence, “Don’t touch” (3), on the basis that I can hardly be blamed for giving away secrets about the novel’s first two words. Thematically, however, those opening words contain most, if not all, of the moral questions Heard discusses in the rest of his novel; as the narrator Sydney Silchester comments later, touch “tells for a great deal” (45).

  The Notched Hairpin therefore begins, rather unusually, with a prohibition. What are we to make of this? We might begin with the fact that writers of early to mid-twentieth century detective fiction had attempted to shape the genre through sets of similar commands and prohibitions. The British author Ronald Knox’s ‘Decalogue’ of rules for detective fiction (1928) had famously ruled out the use of multiple secret passages, identical twins, and Chinamen; in the US, S. S. Van Dine’s “Twenty Rules for Writing a Detective Story” (1929) had set stricter generic boundaries, outlawing the incursion of romance or science fiction into the detective novel. But then again, these rules were never taken especially seriously (Knox’s were never meant to be, although Van Dine seemed more earnest); The Notched Hairpin appeared in the same year as Agatha Christie’s Crooked House and John Dickson Carr’s Below Suspicion and (as Carter Dickson) A Graveyard to Let, works by authors who wilfully ignored Knox and Van Dine’s rules. Heard is in good company here, as a writer who similarly defied generic convention and the limitations of genre. In his review of The Notched Hairpin, Anthony Boucher (a respected crime writer himself, best known for his locked room mystery Nine Times Nine [1940]) noted that Heard was “a writer as unclassifiable as he is entrancing.… he is the only man who ever won a $3,000 detective story prize with a pure science-fiction story” (35). But Boucher’s positive review of The Notched Hairpin also includes an intriguing insight into the public reputation of Heard; Boucher comments on the rumour that Heard’s novels are “transcribed by automatic writing; that his manuscripts are literally manu scripta, written by hand on odd bits and pieces of paper” (35). Such a story, whether true or not, stands in a strange relation to “Don’t touch”; it simultaneously emphasises the tactile (the novels are written “by hand” on material scraps) while denying it (the novels apparently come to Heard through a spiritualistic mode of automatic writing). While Boucher ultimately dismisses such rumours (“the only magic here entailed is the necromancy of a perfect minor writer” [35]), he nonetheless admits that there is something fitting about such narratives where The Notched Hairpin is concerned, and I shall return to the language of entrancement and magic shortly.

  But what of that initially cryptic opening sentence? Its immediate context is one of contamination; Silchester is rather brusquely advised not to touch the hairpin for fear of compromising its value as evidence. Therefore, the opening line signals a concern with material purity, a theme that continues with the maid Jane’s obsessional return to questions of cleanliness: “Patty or putty, dirt is dirt; but of course masters can be dirty, if maids must (and like to be) clean” (22). Detectives, too, like to be clean, tidying things up, from crime scenes to mysteries. Sometimes the metaphor is literalised; Sherlock Holmes, for instance, uses a sponge as an agent of detection in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” to wash away a disguise. Likewise, the dirt found on objects provides the detective with clues; we recall Holmes in The Sign of Four, when challenged to interpret a watch presented by Watson: “The watch has been recently cleaned, which robs me of my most suggestive facts” (13). More recent detective fiction has explicitly dramatised the process of detection as one of reading material traces, dirt, matter out of place; the most obvious examples are the success of television series such as Monk (2002–9) and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000– ). In The Notched Hairpin Mycroft anticipates the entomologist detective Gil Grissom when he comments that, regarding the science of detection, “quite a lot might be done with insects” (99). But this is not merely metaphor; there is a sense in which dirt is itself defined by transgression, the breaking of a law. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, building on eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophy, famously argued that ‘dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder’ (2). What is dirty or impure is that which is out of place, that which does not fit into a certain order: food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing (44–5). Systems, orders, and laws create their own dirt and impurities. Likewise, the literary theorist and critic David Trotter asks a pertinent question regarding the role of material disgust in detective fiction: ‘It seems to me … that moral and material horror are not so easily suppressed, and that we need to account for them, because they may be one of the reasons why people read detective fiction’ (68). For Trotter, the body is not simply a mystery to be solved, something little more than a question mark, but represents a physical contamination: ‘In detective fiction, the corpse is always out of place.… Murder makes a mess in a clean place. Stories about murder are therefore stories as much about dealing with mess as about deciphering clues’ (68, 70). We can, however, expand on Trotter’s terms; the place in which murder makes a mess is not always clean to begin with.

  As I have argued elsewhere (Pittard 2011), such concerns are characteristic (and even constitutive) of the late Victorian detective fiction that Heard so enthusiastically rewrites. The Notched Hairpin is continually looking over its shoulder at the culture of the 1890s (Silchester, of course, is too fixated on 1760 “as the acme of English Taste” (9) to penetrate to the mystery’s historical roots), perhaps most obviously in its direct references to Arthur Conan Doyle. Mycroft’s ability to identity different tobaccos by scent alone is surely a reference to Sherlock Holmes’ monograph “Upon the distinction between the ashes of the Various Tobaccos,” as noted in The Sign of Four (10); Holmes’ invocation of the “Indian lunkah” (11) mirrors Mycroft’s detection of the Asian Latakia (70), a tobacco highly impregnated with opium (furt
her shades of Holmes, most particularly in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”). Mycroft puts a new complexion on Sherlock’s methods, reinventing them by changing the means of sensory perception; Sherlock identifies tobacco by sight, Mycroft by smell; Mycroft’s “we hear, but don’t really attend” (91), crucial to the plot of The Notched Hairpin, is clearly an echo of Sherlock’s “You see, but you do not observe” in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (Adventures 11–12). Appropriately enough, in that same story it is Sherlock who mishears; wished goodnight by the disguised Irene Adler, his response is to wonder where he has heard that voice before, a scene lent iconic authority by Sidney Paget’s memorable illustration for the Strand Magazine. Paget captures Holmes in a moment of uncertainty, searching for his keys while on the steps at 221B Baker Street, caught between the public space of the street and the private space of the home; the confusion over the identity of Mycroft and Sherlock in Heard’s fiction has often left readers in a similar position. It should be noted that the publishing history of The Notched Hairpin has done much to confuse the issue: the previous edition of the novel, that published by Vanguard in 1981, declared unequivocally on its cover that Mr Mycroft was “Sherlock Holmes’ Brother” despite textual evidence to the contrary (the publishers were subsequently obliged to publish an unconvincing cover story to justify such a claim).

  Although Millum’s retrospective narrative is (if we believe the novel to be contemporary with its publication) set in the mid 1920s, he describes a society of moneyed intellectuals heavily influenced by Victorian fin de siècle decadence. The Yellow Book, the notorious periodical illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley (yellow was itself a late Victorian signifier of decadence, whether social, mental, or physical), gets a mention (47); Oscar Wilde runs throughout the narrative, from the explicit mention of Tite Street (47) to the unattributed quotation from The Ballad of Reading Gaol (“Who can tell to what red hell the sightless soul may stray” (49)). Millum’s circle, however, inverts aestheticism; the Wildean love of beauty for its own sake is distorted into the motto of “To find the grotesque in everything, that is the secret of life” (49). One is reminded here of Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray; “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault” (3). Millum and Sankey’s circle thus represents decadence pushed to its furthest conclusion, severed from aestheticist ideals. As Millum says, “when everything, without exception, is ridiculous, there is nothing left that has any real interest—one is on the frontier of insanity” (50). From here, it is a short step to murder.

  In many ways, then, The Notched Hairpin is Heard’s attempt to resolve the often contradictory dialogue between the Holmesian canon and fin de siècle decadence. The early Holmes, as he appears in A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890), is (as Ian Ousby points out in his now dated but still useful discussion) the model of decadence, the aesthete kept separate from wider respectable society and who must replace intellectual and artistic stimulation (when it is lacking) with the chemical stimulant of cocaine. It is, after all, Holmes himself who makes an explicit connection between crime and art when he provides the title for A Study in Scarlet: “Why shouldn’t we use a little art jargon?” (44). And although Conan Doyle is often taken to resemble the epitome of the anti-decadent (and later, anti-modernist) advocate of muscular imperialism, it should not be overlooked that The Sign of Four was commissioned by the American monthly Lippincott’s Magazine in tandem with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The two authors had already met at a dinner given by Joseph Stoddart (the editor of Lippincott’s), and although Doyle’s moral and aesthetic philosophies were often the opposite of Wilde’s, he nonetheless found much to admire in The Picture (Stashower 107). After 1891, however, and in the move from novels to short stories, Holmes shifts from aestheticism to ascetism. His cocaine usage largely disappears, and the narrowly specialised Holmes of A Study in Scarlet (as shown by Watson’s list of Holmes’ “limits” (20)) gives way to a more widely informed persona, able to quote at length authors of whom he had previously appeared unaware, and therefore much more fitting of a Victorian middle class ideal of education. There were, of course, material reasons for such a shift in characterisation, not least the fact that after his first two novels Doyle moved to the Strand Magazine, a monthly periodical explicitly concerned with its readers’ cultural health and which addressed itself towards conservative values of the family—the decadent Holmes would have been out of place here. Holmes’ specialist interests in A Study in Scarlet represent a late nineteenth century characterisation of decadence as the part obscuring or destroying the whole; early and mid twentieth century detective fiction, as a genre based around the part revealing or constructing the whole, does not sit easily with decadence. The Notched Hairpin addresses these tensions by dramatising the eventual exhaustion of decadent values, charting their collapse into a comfortable bourgeois existence (it is not a coincidence that the first part of the novel concentrates on property to the extent of personifying it as “The Red Brick Twins”). If late Victorian decadence was (as Regenia Gagnier argues) characterised by “its distance from, and rejection of, middle class life” (Gagnier 65), The Notched Hairpin represents the eventual triumph of that previously excluded class.

  In fact, the resurgent cultural bourgeois of the novel are greatly expanded: as Mycroft comments, “the police in the higher ranks have now become so intelligent and even scholarly. It illustrates the old advice: it always pays never to talk down to your audience, never to despise your foe, never to patronize the police” (197). In such a speech Heard also invites his audience to be similarly alert, to be scholarly in their reading of the novel. In this respect, Mycroft’s choice of holiday reading matter, Milton’s masque Comus (“So while I read Comus and, being so much the elder, brood on the dreaming water of Sabrina fair …” [8]), gains particular significance. Comus (or to give it its historically proper title, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle) concerns the fate of a Lady and her two brothers lost in the Shropshire woods; the Lady becomes separated from her siblings and falls into the clutches of the demonic supernatural villain Comus. Comus imprisons her and tries, poetically, to convince her to drink a magic potion which will turn her into one of his crew, a band of followers who have given in to sensual temptation and have consequently been transformed into animalistic figures. The brothers find the Lady and rout Comus’ army, but fall short of defeating the tempter himself; they invoke Sabrina, the river spirit, to finish the job. The text’s inclusion in The Notched Hairpin might easily be overlooked as simply providing a bit of local literary colour (after all, Milton’s Ludlow text is paired here with Housman’s poetic cycle A Shropshire Lad) but closer examination of the novel uncovers an intriguing set of subtle references. There is, for instance, the rather antagonistic pairing of Milton and Housman; Housman famously comments in poem LXII of A Shropshire Lad that “Malt does more than Milton can/To justify God’s ways to man” (Housman 42), such literary bickering neatly mirroring the friendlier antagonism between Silchester and Mycroft, established from the first line onwards (Mycroft’s urgent “Don’t touch” is met with Silchester’s rather clumsier meditation on ‘tact’).

  Likewise, the scene of the murder, the enclosed garden with an imposing stone throne at its centre, is strikingly similar to the setting of Milton’s play; caught in Comus’ headquarters deep in the woods, the Lady is imprisoned in a magic throne from which she cannot rise without Comus’ permission. Sankey, too, has such a magic chair; Heard frequently and deliberately draws our attention to “a beautiful stone chair carved in lovely half-marble Hopton Wood stone” (14) which exerts a kind of mystical fascination over Silchester. Part two begins with his own temptation: “I was just about to seat myself on this throne and see how it felt—and I was certain that it must feel as good as it looked …” (19). The story of the murder as told by the house agent intrudes, however, and puts him off; Silchester now feels that the chair “had about it an unpleasant se
nse of its last disagreeable occupant and his disagreeable last session” (13); instead, it is Mycroft who takes his place. Silchester does eventually get to sit in the throne, but it is striking that as he does so he experiences a paralysing mental unease: “was I again to find everything being ravelled, tangled, and confused, and maybe even our certainty of securing this place put in jeopardy? I was sufficiently upset to say unguardedly “I don’t understand!”” (36). What happens next is vital for understanding the significance of Comus in the novel; Mycroft reassures Silchester that everything will be resolved and explained, and then asks “Will you please get up and follow me?” (36). Silchester dutifully rises; his temporarily paralysing confusion is lifted by the magic spell of Mycroft, inviting him to leave the chair. Mycroft’s invitation to “get up and follow me” and Silchester’s response (“I rose” (36)) might easily be read as slightly ponderous writing; why does Heard linger on the detail of Silchester getting up? Why doesn’t Mycroft simply ask Silchester to follow him, as rising from the chair would be implied anyway? Such details only make sense if we accept that Heard is having some subtle fun here; the fussy Silchester becomes Milton’s Lady, imprisoned until released by explicit command to rise. It might be tempting here to cast Mycroft as Comus, the knowing trickster; a more fitting comparison, however, and one which Mycroft makes himself earlier, would be with Sabrina, the river nymph who is summoned to resolve this peculiar Shropshire problem and who frees the Lady from the chair.

  It may seem that I have wandered somewhat from contamination, decadence, and that phrase “Don’t touch.” But the key theme of Comus is self control, the ability to resist the temptations of decadence. Comus’ victims, his animalistic criminal crew, are complicit in their own downfall; Milton is careful to specify that Comus can only transform those who wish to be transformed. Thus, the Elder brother argues to the Younger that their sister will ultimately be safe because she possesses “a hidden strength” (Milton 100); that is, chastity: “She that has that, is clad in complete steel” (100). Likewise, the Lady points out to Comus that while her body may be imprisoned, “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind/With all thy charms” (105). There’s that word touch’ again; Comus’ sensuality is clearly a tactile one. He ‘feels’, rather than hears, the approach of others (93); he speaks of the gods “Forbidding every bleak unkindly Fog/To touch the prosperous growth of this tall Wood” (96). Even the Lady’s younger brother is aware of the tactile dangers that face her, and fears “Lest some ill greeting touch attempt the person/Of our unowned sister” (99). And it is Sabrina’s touch that restores order and releases the Lady: “Next this marble venom’d seat/Smear’d with gumms of glutenous heat/I touch with chaste palms moist and cold,/Now the spell hath lost his hold” (111). To touch is to have power; and, returning from Milton to Heard, this is exactly the kind of power that Mycroft uses to release Silchester from the throne and, of course, to solve the novel’s moral mystery.