Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #22. Arthur Conan Doyle

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СКАЧАТЬ in my time; I know a feller named Humphrey Masters who can give you logical explanations enough to freeze your reason; and the only trouble with them is that they’re usually wrong.” So what is his method? “Method? Oh, I dunno. I just sit and think.” In practice, however, H.M.’s modus operandi are closer to those of the Great Detective than this humble description implies.

      From early days in his career, for example, Holmes was “a walking calendar of crime,” as young Stamford calls him. And the world’s first consulting detective put this knowledge of historical crimes to good effect in solving new ones. Here he is doing that in his first case with Watson at his side, A Study in Scarlet:

      “Then, of course, this blood belongs to the second individual—presumably the murderer, if murder has been committed. It reminds me of the circumstances attendant on the death of Van Jansen, in Utrecht, in the year ’34. Do you remember the case, Gregson?”

      “No, sir.”

      “Read it up—you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.”

      Again and again over the years that follow, Holmes turns to his commonplace books for details of cases that he remembers filing away. In The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor, he calls this “the knowledge of pre-existing cases which services me so well.” And then he gives a practical demonstration: “There was a parallel instance in Aberdeen some years back and something on very much the same lines at Munich the year after the Franco-Prussian War.”

      H.M., too, frequently calls on his vast knowledge of global crime to make observations significant to the solution of the case at hand. Near the end of Nine—And Death Makes Ten, for example, he says: “In France, years ago, the very same thing happened by accident: and very nearly cost one woman a whole lot of money because they wouldn’t believe she was herself. For years now I’ve been waitin’ for some clever blighter to apply the same dodge to deliberate crime, and lo and behold, somebody has.” Just so we know that the old man isn’t gulling us, the author cites the source in a footnote—Clues and Crime: The Science of Criminal Investigation by H.T.F. Rhodes. (Similarly, And So to Murder cites C.J.S. Thompson’s Poison Mysteries Unsolved to support a precedent to which H.M. alludes.)

      Surprisingly, however, H.M. doesn’t compare the clue of the missing painting in The Curse of the Bronze Lamp to another portrait removed for exactly the same reason in The Hound of the Baskervilles. And yet we know that he was familiar with the Canon. In Night at the Mocking Widow, the old sinner literally throws a bunch of Russian novels out a window and tells a young girl named Pam to instead “read some fellers named Dumas and Mark Twain and Stevenson and Chesterton and Conan Doyle. They’re dead, yes; but they can still whack the britches off of anybody at tellin’ a story.” About forty pages later, Pam is clutching a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

      H.M.’s knowledge of the Canon runs deep. He says in My Late Wives: “That was where the exquisiteness of this swine’s plans struck me in the seat of the pants like Patrick Cairns’s harpoon.” Cairns is, of course, the killer in The Adventure of Black Peter, a Sherlock Holmes story from that memorable year 1895, but that is not an analogy that would occur to a merely casual acquaintance of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

      Interestingly, both H.M. and Holmes evince a curious blind spot when it comes to finding helpful analogies in their own earlier adventures. The illusion that allows Frederick Manning to disappear from a swimming pool in A Graveyard to Let is essentially the same one employed by the lovely Lady Helen to vanish in The Curse of the Bronze Lamp just three books earlier, yet H.M. apparently never notices it. And if Holmes detected the obvious similarities among The Red-headed League, The Stock-broker’s Clerk and The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, he never says so. Nor does he compare The Adventure of the Six Napoleons to The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, The Adventure of the Second Stain to The Naval Treaty or the first half of The Valley of Fear to The Adventure of the Norwood Builder.

      Another resemblance between the two sleuths is their attitude toward justice. If Mycroft Holmes occasionally is the British government, his younger brother often puts himself above the law entirely by letting the criminal go. “Well, well,” he quips in The Adventure of the Three Gables, “I suppose I shall have to compound a felony as usual.” He usually justifies such actions by reference to a higher law. “I suppose that I am commuting a felony,” he concedes in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, “but it is just possible that I am saving a soul.” H.M. allows the criminals to escape in The Punch and Judy Murders, Behind the Crimson Blind and The Cavalier’s Cup for a much less elevated reason—he simply happens to like them. In Behind the Crimson Blind, he even blows up a ship in the harbor to help the villain (not a murderer) escape. In several other cases he enables a killer to escape in a different way—through suicide.

      Beyond the character of H.M. himself, the Merrivale corpus evokes the Canon through both blatant and subtle call-backs in the dialogue.

      “You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes,” observes a character in The Punch and Judy Murders. Lady Virginia Brace in The Cavalier’s Cup challenges Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters with, “Couldn’t you deduce that, like Sherlock Holmes, from my first name?” In The Peacock Feather Murders, a character asks, “Will you continue with your Holmesian analysis, or do you think it would spoil your effect if I merely confessed?” In none of these instances, be it noted, was the speaker addressing Sir Henry Merrivale.

      In Death in Five Boxes, the male romantic lead (Carr books always have one, along with a matching female) warns that a certain line of thought would be “theorizing without data.” (“It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts,” Sherlock Holmes famously said in The Adventure of the Second Stain.) Later, another man in that novel suspects the female romantic lead of being subject to “certain pawky humors.” He seems to regard that as a flaw, whereas Holmes clearly meant it as a compliment when he said at the beginning of The Valley of Fear that Watson was developing “a certain pawky humour.”

      Although H.M. himself eschews logic elsewhere, his bookseller friend Ralph Danvers uses decidedly Sherlockian logic in discussing the central problem of Night at the Mocking Widow with his old friend of H.M.:

      “If you have stated the circumstances correctly, it is beyond the bounds of human reason and therefore impossible.”

      “Uh-huh,” H.M. agrees.

      “Then somehow (unwittingly, that is) the circumstances have not been correctly stated!”

      Everyone remembers Holmes’s often-stated dictum that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” But Holmes also said in The Adventure of the Priory School, “It is impossible as I have stated it and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong.” Surely Danvers must have had this observation in mind.

      The Canonical roots of a simple four-word sentence in My Late Wives are equally obvious. “I am Roger Bewlay” is almost as dramatic as the powerful “I am Birdy Edwards!” from The Valley of Fear. (And is it just a coincidence that one of the victims in My Late Wives lived at Crowborough, the East Sussex town where Arthur Conan Doyle lived out his last years?)

      When the killer in The Red Widow Murders confesses under the false impression that he is going to die and thus insures that he will die via hanging, Chief Inspector Masters confides, “And I can’t say, between ourselves, that it’s very likely to weigh heavily on my conscience.” As most of will never forget, Sherlock Holmes says almost exactly the same thing regarding Dr. Roylott’s demise at the end of The Adventure of the Speckled Band.

      Dialogue aside, echoes of Baker Street permeate the adventures of Sir Henry Merrivale in ways big and small:

      Bill СКАЧАТЬ