SHERLOCKHOLMITOS
DAVID LESLIE MURRAY
[Originally published unsigned]
The Times Literary Supplement, (October 27, 1932), 782.
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DOCTOR WASTON. A Chronology of their Adventures. By
H. W. Bell. (Constable. 15s. net.)
SHERLOCK HOLMES: FACT OR FICTION. By THOMAS S. BLAKENEY. (Murray. 2s.
6d. net.)
DOCTOR WATSON. By S. C. ROBERTS. (Faber and Faber. 1s. net)
The discovery of the Mendelian
principle is the glory of an abbé;
and to another abbé, Fr. Ronald Knox,
belongs the glory of founding (as long ago as 1911) that important branch of
scientific studies for which South America has coined the needed word Sherlockholmitos. Last year saw the
publication of the first full-length biography of Dr. Watson; and now we
receive simultaneously two works of profound scholarship—Mr. H. W. Bell’s
painstaking chronology of all the cases, nearly 130 in number, in which Mr.
Sherlock Holmes is recorded to have been involved (a book which, among other
sensational theories, argues that Dr. Watson made three marriages); and Mr.
Thomas Blakeney’s more general study, comprising a less detailed chronology, a
review of Sherlockholmitos
literature, a character-sketch of Mr. Holmes and an analysis of his relations
with Scotland Yard. To both these writers, as to Dr. Watson’s biographer, Mr.
S. C. Roberts, who first publicly demonstrated that he had married twice, our
debt remains incalculable.
But the difficulties
experienced by these scholars in establishing a consistent chronology of the
“cases” force us to ask whether the preliminary textual problems have been
adequately explored. Is the “Case-book” more than a palpable late forgery—and
on the case-book alone “Watson’s” alleged second as well as third marriage
exclusively depends. “His Last Bow” is highly suspect, though it incorporates a
leaf from the original Codex Maritimus A,
1891-1893 [“Adventures” and “Memoirs”], and one story at least, “The
Bruce-Partington Plans,” recommends itself on internal evidence, apart from the
curious blunder whereby the name of a street, Cadogan Place, W., has been made
into the name of a man “Cadogan West.” “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” (Codex Maritimus B, 1903-1904) is a
complicated riddle containing such “doublets” as “The Six Napoleons,”
duplicating “The Blue Carbuncle,” and “The Second Stain,” duplicating “The
Naval Treaty.” Yet “The Golden Pince-Nez” may well be the first form of a story
in C.M.a.
Seeing that the
(so-called) “Study in Scarlet,” the “Sign of Four” and “The Hound of the
Baskervilles” have never had serious doubts thrown on their authenticity, we
have with them and the contents of C.M.a
a homogeneous Redaction of the Holmes Saga. But this only opens the way to
“higher critical” problems of peculiarly baffling sort. Let us take up that
document which we never handle without the thrilling feeling of being near the
primal sources of inspiration, that “Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H.
Watson, M.D., late of the Army Medical Department,” which opens the (so-called)
“Study in Scarlet.” Here we have a plain, straightforward narrative that
imposes itself by its inherent naturalness and credibility. Yet into the midst
of this tale of sordid gang-warfare—inappropriately entitled by some later hand
“A Study in Scarlet,” though the central murder is bloodless and bloodstains
play no serious part in tracking down the perpetrator—there is pitchforked,
without attempt at connexion, a romantic narrative of love and vengeance in
primitive Utah.
We perceive at once that U. comes from another source, the author of which we
will call A., denoting not an “American” but an “Americanizer,” for we do not
think that he a was a genuine Transatlantic writer. The (so-called) “Study in
Scarlet” appeared in 1887; in 1885 had appeared Stevenson’s “Dynamiter.” There,
in the “Story of the Destroying Angel,” we find a remarkable similarity to U.
In both there is the opening with the rescue of a girl in the great alkali
desert, and she has actually in both the same name “Lucy.” In both there is the
settlement in of the travellers in Salt Lake City, their falling under the
suspicion of the terrible Mormon hierarchy, the flight, the pursuit by the
“Destroying” (U. calls them “Avenging”) Angels, the murder of the father. The
differences (it is axiomatic in higher criticism) do but accentuate the
resemblances (and vice versa). U. is a
skilful adaptation of elements in “D.A.” A. is also the author of the Vermissa
episode in “The Valley of Fear” (which is, again, nothing but a retelling of
the historic exposure of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania by a Pinkerton
agent); and A., yet once more, appears to be responsible for the Ku Klux Klan
tale, “The Five Orange Pips” in C.M.a.
That this tale is a manipulation is shown by the fact that its opening (storm
scene) is but a slightly varied repetition of the opening of “The Golden
Pince-Nez”; while it is incredible that “Sherlock Holmes” or the rawest
plain-clothes policeman should have allowed Mr. Openshaw to go out unguarded to
his doom on a night of black tempest just because it was too much bother for
“Holmes” to change his slippers and dressing-gown.
But the problem of A.
leads us straight into the heart of the great Moriarty myth. Briefly there is
no way in which the alleged activities of Professor Moriarty can be fitted into
any conceivable chronology of the cases of “Sherlock Holmes.” In “The Valley of
Fear” (a case that cannot be, on the evidence of the learned works before us,
dated later than 1890), Moriarty figures as the arch-criminal organizer well
know to “Holmes” and “Watson”; yet in “The Final Problem” (1891) “Holmes”
discloses his name to “Watson” as a surprise, and “Watson” has never heard of
him. “Holmes,” moreover, claims to have known of Moriarty’s activities “for
years past”: yet he has never once mentioned him in all the range of cases
filling C.M.a. Moriarty is clearly a myth,
and may proceed from A., since the prosperous and respectable organizer of a
network of gangs is an American type of criminal. Moriarty is always victorious
whenever he appears. At the end of “The Valley” he defies “Holmes” by bumping
off Douglas-Edwards after all; in “The Final Problem” he hunts “Holmes” like a
wounded hare out of England, escapes arrest and (as we cannot doubt was the
original version of the tale) flings him into the Reichenbach Falls before
escaping—why should “Holmes” seek to escape?—up the cliff into Tibet, presumably to organize brigandage and
kidnapping in the Far East.
The impossibility of
fitting Moriarty into any rational scheme of Sherlockholmitos has driven one commentator to the desperate device
of identifying Moriarty with Holmes: Mr. Blakeney deals faithfully with this
hypothesis in an appendix. And yet it may contain a grain of truth, as we will
try to show. When we are reading the “Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.,”
we get a straightforward picture both of the Doctor and of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
John Watson is a retired Army man of sedentary and incurably bachelor habits,
with a bullet wound disabling his shoulder.
Holmes is a medico-chemical student, turned private consulting-detective, with
an exclusive and absorbing interest in his work. His knowledge of literature
and philosophy is nil, and he resents being told elementary facts of astronomy
as a useless burdening of his mind. As his dangerous profession requires, he is
an athlete in fine training. When we turn to the “Sign of Four” and its sequels
what do we meet with? First, a certain James
Watson with an injury to his leg;
then a “Sherlock Holmes,” who is a dope-fiend, a gourmet always giving
expensive little suppers, a literary aesthete readily quoting Hafiz, Horace,
Petrarch, Goethe, Flaubert, and a student of medieval manuscripts. This
personage has a highly placed butler [sic!]
in the Civil Service, a certain Mr. Mycroft (to whom the Redactor has tacked on
the surname “Holmes”; but Mycroft is no first-name for a Christian). This
“Holmes” is apparently a shady kind of secret agent, and if we could accept
“His Last Bow” as containing a historical substratum we might think his real
name, if not Mycroft, was “Altamont.” (But
that may have been one of his many aliases.) His companion can have no
connexion with the excellent Dr. John Watson. Limpfoot Jim is clearly a hired
gunman always in attendance of “Altamont,”
with a revolver always in his pocket. The attempts of R. to assign to him a
medical practice which he never attends to are farcical. Limpfoot Jim, we
should conjecture, was married once and (characteristically) to the presumed
heiress of the Agra
treasure. Disappointed in his rapacious hopes, there is but too much reason to
fear that he did her to death within a few years of the wedding. If this be
thought too terrible for belief consider the criminal record of “Altamont” himself. In the pay of the scandalous King of
Bohemia, he tried to steal from the wronged Irene Adler a valuable photograph,
while Limpfoot flung a smoke-bomb into her house. To preserve the blemished reputation
of a society beauty he and Limpfoot broke into the house of Mr. Charles
Augustus Milverton, rifled his safe of important documents and put him “on the
spot.” (Their own account of a mysterious woman of high rank entering and
shooting him as a blackmailer is too flimsy to be examined.) Further,
“Altamont” made illicit betting gains by running a disguised race-horse
(“Silver Blaze”); he blackmailed—if C.M.b
is authentic—the Duke of Holdernesse to the tune of £6,000 (or, it may have
been, £12,000) as the price of his silence over the Duke’s position as
accessory to the murder of the school master Heidegger; and, unless we assume
that he was an imbecile, he can have had none but a criminal motive for
hurrying the stockbroker’s clerk off to Birmingham when he must have known that
the robbery was to take place at Mawson’s, in London, on that very day.
So cunningly,
nevertheless, has R. interwoven the exploits of “Altamont”
and “Limpfoot Jim” into the honest chronicles of Dr. John Watson and Mr.
Sherlock Holmes that, except for the “Reminiscences,” we may doubt of we have a
single uncontaminated case of the real
Sherlock Holmes. (Even into the “Reminiscences” a forged passage representing
Holmes as a purchaser of rare first edition has been interpolated.) Enough has
been said to show the complexity of Sherlockholmitos. It is now for research to
continue to pierce the labyrinth.
Lexicon:
· Codex Maritimus A or “C.M.a”: “The Adventures
of Sherlock Holmes” and “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes”
· Codex Maritimus B or “C.M.b”: “The Return of
Sherlock Holmes”
· U.: the Utah episode in “A Study in Scarlet”
· A.: “Americanizer” (author of U.,
the Vermissa Valley episode in VALL, FIVE, and could
be Moriarty’s myth inventor)
· “D.A.”: “Story of the Destroying
Angel” by R. L. Stevenson.
· R.: “Redactor” (ACD?)
———————
The Times Literary Supplement (3
November 1932)
To the Editor
SIR, —One curious piece of evidence
seems to have escaped the notice of all students of Sherlockholmitos. In The Valley of Fear Holmes convinces a
more than usually imbecile C.I.D man that Moriarty really is a criminal by
pointing out that is expenditure is great and his official stipend small. He
has, says Holmes, no relation but a brother, a railway porter in a country
station in the West. In “The Final Problem”, his brother, Colonel James
Moriarty, is described as trying to clear his late brother’s reputation.
Has any scholar
explored the evidence supplied by the way in which people are represented as
dressing in the various stories? Do colonels wear gaiters with a frock coat?
The description of Colonel Ross in “Silver Blaze” suggests a gas inspector. Do
colonels wear long light beards? Colonel Valentine Walter, in “The
Bruce-Partington Plans”, does. There is a vast sphere of learned research open
to any well-equipped student in this matter
PETER
GREEN, Canon of Manchester.
The
Cathedral, Manchester.
———————
The Times (5 November 1932)
To the Editor
Conan Doyle himself acknowledged
indebtedness to Fletcher Robinson for the story of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was based upon a Dartmoor legend of a spectral dog. No doubt a number of
interesting affinities might be traced between Conan Doyle’s stories and those
of other writers; Fr. Knox has already indicated this line of research, and
your reviewer in The Times Literary
Supplement last week proposes a connection between A Study in Scarlet and Stevenson’s Dynamiter. I would suggest that “The Man with the Twisted Lip” owes
its inception to Thackeray’s tale of Mr. Altamont (a name with a strong
Holmesian flavour) in his Yellowplush
Papers.
T. S. BLAKENEY
67 St.
George’s Road, S.W.1.
(Letters from GREEN and BLAKENEY are
reproduced in The Sherlock Holmes Letters
edited by R. L. Green, Secker & Warburg, London, 1986, 156-157)
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