Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #20. Arthur Conan Doyle

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      “You are right, Holmes. We are bound to go.”

      He sprang up and shook me by the hand.

      “I knew you would not shrink at the last,” said he and for a moment I saw something in his eyes which was nearer to tenderness than I had ever seen.

      Apparently Holmes chokes up when he is about to commit a felony. Later, he confesses his law-breaking to his brother and to Inspector Lestrade. The Scotland Yarder warns him that some day his penchant for burglary will get him and Watson into trouble. “For England, home and beauty—eh, Watson?” Holmes responds in the words of a Royal Navy toast. “Martyrs on the altar of our country.”

      Instead of suffering martyrdom, though, Holmes eventually is called to Windsor where he receives a remarkably fine tie-pin “from a certain gracious lady.” Watson, pushing his own deductive talents to their limits, tells us, “I fancy that I could guess that lady’s august name and I have little doubt that the emerald pin will forever recall to my friend’s memory the adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans.”

      That was in that hallowed year of 1895. In 1902, Holmes refused a knighthood (“The Adventure of the Three Garridebs”). Why refuse, given that he accepted the French Legion of Honour (“The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez”)? I suspect that Holmes thought that service to crown and country was its own reward. But why was that knighthood-worthy adventure never told? Perhaps it was too sensitive, the same reason that we have been deprived the story of “the lighthouse, the politician and the trained cormorant”—which was surely another affair of state.

      The last recorded meeting of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson took place on the evening of August 2, 1914, “the most terrible August in the history of the world.” We know about it from the account originally published in The Strand under title of “His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes.”

      In this fourth espionage story in the Canon, it is Holmes who is the spy. During two years of undercover work in America and Ireland, he has supplied the master spy Von Bork with false plans and arranged for some of the German’s best men to be arrested. Posing as an Irish-American named Altamont, Holmes has disguised his rather public face by adopting what Watson calls “that horrible goatee.” “These are the sacrifices one makes for one’s country,” says Holmes, pulling at his little tuft. “To-morrow it will be but a dreadful memory.”

      Watson asks him how he got lured away from his bees. “Ah, I have often marveled at it myself. The Foreign Minister alone I could have withstood, but when the Premier also deigned to visit my humble roof—” One can’t help but think that Altamont is engaging in a bit of blarney here. That was at least the third Prime Minister to visit Holmes at home; the old sleuth-hound should have been used to it by then. But he goes on:

      “It has cost me two years, Watson, but they have not been devoid of excitement. When I say that I started my pilgrimage at Chicago, graduated in an Irish secret society at Buffalo, gave serious trouble to the constabulary at Skibbareen and so eventually caught the eye of a subordinate agent of Von Bork, who recommended me as a likely man, you will realize that the matter was complex.”

      No doubt the great detective’s well-honed burglary skills came in handy at Skibbareen! Anthony Boucher suggested with great plausibility that Holmes learned about being an undercover agent from Birdy Edwards (The Valley of Fear). Perhaps some day the Irish and American adventures that Holmes merely sketches out in this story could receive a more complete treatment, similar to the second half of The Valley of Fear.

      After two solitary years of acting a part, Holmes brings in Watson for the end-game. Surely this was not merely because he valued the doctor’s skills as a chauffeur. No, it was a tribute to their friendship, their many years as comrades in arms. And at the end they stand on the terrace for perhaps their last quiet talk together, and some of the most memorable lines in the entire Canon:

      “There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

      “I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

      “Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. Start her up, Watson, for it’s time that we were on our way. I have a check for five hundred pounds which should be cashed early, for the drawer is quite capable of stopping it if he can.”

      The Basil Rathbone film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror ends with this quote up to “when the storm has cleared.” It also features Von Bork as a Nazi agent. After the great critical success of Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in 20th Century Fox’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Universal acquired the franchise and in 1942 brought it into the 20th century. Bluntly stated, the first three Universal pictures—The Voice of Terror, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, and Sherlock Holmes in Washington, are World War II propaganda films. In The Voice of Terror, for example, a young woman named Kitty, reminiscent of Kitty Winter, gives a rousing appeal for help to a pub full of ruffians: “England’s at stake. Your England as much as anyone else’s! No time to think about what side we’re on—there’s only one side, England, no matter how high or how low we are.” The film was immediately followed by a pitch to buy war bonds.

      David Marcum, writing in the winter 2013 issue of The Baker Street Journal, made the ingenious suggestion that these films were actually adventures of Solar Pons, the latter-day Holmes clone, and his Watsonian associate Dr. Parker. “Pons’s and Parker’s names were changed to Holmes and Watson for easier familiarity to the 1940s movie-going public.” Well, that would at least explain Rathbone’s bizarre hair-do in those three movies, the reason for which has been a Sherlockian mystery for more than seventy years!

Ouida Rathbone, Basil’s wife, in 1953 combined elements of all four canonical spy stories, plus “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Final Problem,” and “The Adventure of the Empty House” into a play called “Sherlock Holmes: A Drama in Three Acts.” It closed after just two evening performances and one matinee. This stitched-together Frankenstein of a work demonstrates that great source material—dialogue ripped from the stories—doesn’t necessarily make for a great play. You still need a plot. Mrs. Rathbone seems to have missed that1.

      Spy stuff involving international intrigue and foreign agents was not the only opportunity Holmes had to serve the crown.

      In “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” and “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” Holmes indirectly serves the interests of the same exalted personage. The clue to that connection, if you need one, is that Alexander Holder—the unhappy custodian of the Beryl Coronet—refers to “my illustrious client.” Surely the gentleman in question was then the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.

      In both of these cases, as in the spy stories, Holmes’s task is to retrieve a McGuffin. The Beryl Coronet, a magnificent piece of jewelry, is “one of the most precious public possessions of the empire”—and yet the playboy prince pawns it to get ready cash! In “The Illustrious Client,” the object of the quest is the dirty diary of another playboy, Baron Gruner, which Holmes sees as the only way to tear Violet De Merville’s affections away from the scoundrel.

      Unsurprisingly, Holmes turns to burglary once again to get his hands on the diary. And once again he gets away with it. The story closes with these words: “Sherlock Holmes was threatened with a prosecution for burglary, but when an object is good and a client is sufficiently illustrious, even СКАЧАТЬ