Sherlock Holmes Victorian Parodies and Pastiches Page 2

  The instance given, moreover, is of doubtful value, for it is by no means certain that Hampshire, specially favoured as it is in other ways, outshines the other shires in point of intellect. It has undoubtedly produced, in the person of the illustrious Burrows—popularly known as “Nosey”—the only poet who is fit to be named in the same breath with the bard of Avon. But one swallow does not make a Spring, and one poet, however brilliant the coruscations of his genius, will not raise the intellectual character of a whole county.

  In other points, however, the superiority of Hampshire over all the other counties of the kingdom is conspicuous and undoubted.

  The donkeys of Hampshire, for instance, have longer ears, and bray when beaten, with a nearer approach to the eloquence of Balaam’s ass than any other donkeys.

  The lunatics of Hampshire have stranger hallucinations and indulge in more fantastic freaks than the lunatics of any other county.

  The journalists of Hampshire are the pink of journalists, they surpass all other journalists in their solemn reverence for Mrs. Grundy, and their soulless worship of conventionality; in their facile powers of making mountains out of molehills, and their marvellous skill in giving form and substance to airy nothings.

  The mashers of Hampshire are the cream of mashers: they are “flyer,” and spryer, and artfuller, and awfuller, mash more madly, slang more fluently, swagger more insolently, and generally go to the dogs with more headlong rapidity than any other mashers.

  The maidens of Hampshire are the flower of maidens: they are crummier, and prettier, and naughtier, and wittier, flirt more freely, wink more wickedly, kiss more warmly, and dispense their favours with a more bountiful generosity than any other maidens in the kingdom.

  The soot of Hampshire is smuttier than any other soot, and the grass of Hampshire is greener than jealousy itself.

  The cats of Hampshire are paragons of cats: they catch more mice, bone more bloaters, breed more kittens, purr more softly, and wail in a more wildering variety of discordant notes than any other cats in creation.

  The fleas of Hampshire are the finest of the species: they are more bloodthirsty, have greater powers of suction, skip more nimbly, are caught less easily, love life better and retain it longer than any other fleas in any other county in Britain.

  The babies of Hampshire are born much earlier than any other babies, and the children of Hampshire reach their majority six months sooner than any other children in any other portion of the globe.

  The cockroaches of Hampshire—but there is no need to pursue the subject any farther.

  The examples given prove, I think, in a far more conclusive manner than the single fact adduced by Dr. Doyle that our blessed county is in all conscience a veritable marvel, and deserves to be added as an eighth item to the Seven Wonders of the World.

  1891

  ‘Conan Doyle at his desk.’ Newspaper illustration, 1894.

  The year 1889 started promisingly for Conan Doyle with the birth of his first child, Mary Louise. She was followed the next month by the birth of Micah Clark, a historical novel set during the 1665 Monmouth Rebellion when a bastard son of Charles II attempted to overthrow James II. Conan Doyle felt his third published novel was “the first solid corner-stone laid for some sort of literary reputation.”

  His good opinion of his abilities was confirmed in August when he joined Oscar Wilde to dine with Joseph Stoddart, editor of the U.S. magazine Lippincott’s. Thanks to literary pirates, Conan Doyle’s stories were building a large audience in America. Stoddart commissioned Conan Doyle to write a novella for his magazine. The terms were generous: £100 for just the serial rights, four times what he received for all rights to A Study in Scarlet. He began work on The Sign of Four. Conan Doyle also was pleased to discover that Wilde—who would contribute The Picture of Dorian Gray under the same deal—admired his work, particularly Micah Clark. To an ambitious young writer, the dinner was a smashing success.

  The good news continued into 1890. Conan Doyle entered into a friendly correspondence with Robert Louis Stevenson. They exchanged letters for several years, and the idea was even floated of visiting Stevenson at his home in Samoa. But Stevenson’s health was failing, and nothing came of it.

  Conan Doyle spent the middle part of the year finishing The White Company, a novel he had been working on for two years. Set during the Hundred Years’ War, his tale of a company of archers’ adventures in France and Spain gave him the opportunity to present an idealized view of the nobility of England’s warriors. He spent several weeks in a cottage in the New Forest, Hampshire, surrounded by the hundreds of books he acquired for research. After writing “The End,” he threw his pen at the wall, saying, “Well, I’ll never beat that.”

  The summer was also a time of personal growth on the medical front. Reading that scientist Robert Koch had discovered a treatment for tuberculosis, Conan Doyle decided to cover the official announcement in Berlin. Despite the lack of an invitation and a rudimentary grasp of German, he traveled to the city and tried to talk his way into the hall, only to be turned back. Undeterred, he found someone to tell him the details and concluded in his article that the cure probably wouldn’t work. It was a bold act for an unknown general practitioner to stand against the opinions of eminent scientists. But Conan Doyle was right, and the encounter made him realize that “I had spread my wings and had felt something of the powers within me.”

  After spending eight years in Southsea, Conan Doyle felt the need for a change. He wanted to stay in medicine, but he enjoyed writing. He had even received two fan letters in October praising the Holmes novels. They were from unexpected sources: Dr. Lawson Tait, who innovated new ways to perform abdominal surgery, and Baron Coleridge, the poet’s nephew and Lord Chief Justice of England. “They were not the sort of men one would expect to read ‘shilling shockers,’ let alone write a fan letter,” Conan Doyle observed.

  In November, he set his course for medicine. He closed his Southsea practice in favor of studying eye surgery in Vienna. It is a measure of Conan Doyle’s optimism that he did not see his limited knowledge of German as an obstacle. But it was, and he abandoned his studies and moved his family back to England. In March 1891, after finding rooms on Montague Place near the British Museum, he opened a practice on Upper Wimpole Street specializing in eye diseases.

  But London was full of accomplished eye surgeons. Conan Doyle found himself paying rent and expenses with no income to support his practice and his family except from his writing.

  Time again to rethink matters. He looked at the huge market for short fiction in the magazines and wondered how a writer could stand out. He concluded that a series of stories about a hero could build a demand for more stories from that writer. From his published work, he cast Sherlock for the role. He quickly wrote “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Red-Headed League” and mailed them to Greenhough Smith at The Strand magazine.

  Smith read the stories and was impressed. “What a God-send to an editor jaded with wading through reams of impossible stuff! . . . I realized at once that here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe.” He bought the stories and cut a deal for four more, paying £35 each. Drawing on current events and his prodigious memory, Conan Doyle found it easy to come up with stories.

  In May, Conan Doyle came down with influenza. During his slow recovery, he took a hard look at his future. His practice wasn’t drawing patients; he was more in demand as a writer than as a doctor. He closed his practice and moved to a villa in South Norwood, where he would spend his mornings writing, and his afternoons indulging in tricycling, photography, tennis, soccer, and cricket.

  The period of July to December of 1891 represented a watershed in Conan Doyle’s life. Each month, The Strand printed a new Sherlock Holmes story. Each month, sales rose. Smith realized that he had a moneymaker on his hands, and he returned to Conan Doyle for more stories. Already tired of Holmes, he raised his price, demanding £50 each for six stories. To his surprise, he got it. By
November, he had written five of them, and told his mother that he was planning to slay Holmes in the sixth “and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.” The Ma’am, however, wouldn’t hear of it. Bowing to her vehement objections, he wrote “The Copper Breeches” instead. For now, Holmes had escaped his executioner.

  Publications: Holmes in Lippincott’s: The Sign of Four (Feb. 1890). Holmes in The Strand: “A Scandal in Bohemia” (July 1891); “The Red-Headed League” (Aug. 1891); “A Case of Identity” (Sept. 1891); “The Boscome Valley Mystery” (Oct. 1891); “The Five Orange Pips” (Nov. 1891); “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (Dec. 1891). Other Holmes: The Sign of Four (Oct. 1890). Also: Micah Clark (Feb. 1889); Mysteries and Adventures (pirated short story collection, March 1890); The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales (March 1890); The Firm of Girdlestone (April 1890); The White Company (Oct, 1891).

  My Evening with Sherlock Holmes

  J.M. Barrie

  Although Conan Doyle began Sherlock Holmes’ career with two novels, it wasn’t until the first short stories appeared that he captured the public’s imagination. This is reflected in the timing of the parodies; the first one appeared four months after The Strand published “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Published anonymously in the Nov. 28 issue of The Speaker, its author was identified by Sherlockian Charles Press as Conan Doyle’s future friend, Peter Pan creator James M. Barrie.

  I am the sort of man whose amusement it is to do everything better than any other body. Hence my evening with Mr. Holmes. Sherlock Holmes is the private detective whose adventures Mr. Conan Doyle is now editing in The Strand Magazine. To my annoyance (for I hate to hear anyone praised except myself) Holmes’s cleverness in, for instance, knowing by glancing at you what you had for dinner last Thursday, has delighted press and public, and so I felt that it was time to take him down a peg. I therefore introduced myself to Mr. Conan Doyle and persuaded him to ask me to his house to meet Sherlock Holmes. For poor Mr. Holmes it proved an eventful evening. I had determined to overthrow him with his own weapons, and accordingly when he began, with well-affected carelessness, “I perceive, Mr. Anon, from the condition of your cigar-cutter, that you are not fond of music,” I replied blandly—“Yes, that is obvious.”

  Mr. Holmes, who had been in his favourite attitude in an easy chair (curled up in it), started violently and looked with indignation at our host, who was also much put out.

  “How on earth can you tell from looking at his cigar-cutter that Mr. Anon is not fond of music?” asked Mr. Conan Doyle with well-simulated astonishment.

  “It is very simple,” said Mr. Holmes, still eyeing me sharply.

  “The easiest thing in the world,” I agreed.

  “Then I need not explain?” said Mr. Holmes haughtily.

  “Quite unnecessary,” said I.

  I filled my pipe afresh to give the detective and his biographer an opportunity of exchanging glances unobserved, and then pointing to Mr. Holmes’s silk hat (which stood on the table) I said blandly, “So you have been in the country recently, Mr. Holmes?”

  He bit his cigar, so that the lighted end was jerked against his brow.

  “You saw me there?” he replied almost fiercely.

  “No,” I said, “but a glance at your hat told me that you had been out of town.”

  “Ha!” said he triumphantly, “then yours was but a guess, for as a matter of fact I—”

  “Did not have that hat in the country with you,” I interposed.

  “Quite true,” he said smiling.

  “But how—” began Mr. Conan Doyle.

  “Pooh,” said I coolly, “this may seem remarkable to you two who are not accustomed to drawing deductions from circumstances trivial in themselves (Holmes winced), but it is nothing to one who keeps his eyes open. Now as soon as I saw that Mr. Holmes’s hat was dented in the front, as if it had received a sharp blow, I knew that he had been in the country lately.”

  “For a long or a short time?” Holmes snarled. (His cool manner had quite deserted him.)

  “For at least a week,” I said.

  “True,” he replied dejectedly.

  “Your hat also tells me,” I continued, “that you came to this house in a four-wheeler—no, in a hansom.”

  “——,” said Sherlock Holmes.

  “Would you mind explaining?” asked our host.

  “Not at all,” I said. “When I saw the dent in Mr. Holmes’s hat, I knew at once that it had come unexpectedly against some hard object. What object? Probably the roof of a conveyance, which he struck against when stepping in. Those accidents often happen at such a time to hats. Then though this conveyance might have been a four-wheeler, it was more probable that Mr. Holmes would travel in a hansom.”

  “How did you know I had been in the country?”

  “I am coming to that. Your practice is, of course, to wear a silk hat always in London, but those who are in the habit of doing so acquire, without knowing it, a habit of guarding their hats. I, therefore, saw that you had recently been wearing a pot-hat and had forgotten to allow for the extra height of the silk hat. But you are not the sort of man who would wear a little hat in London. Obviously, then, you had been in the country, where pot-hats are the rule rather than the exception.”

  Mr. Holmes, who was evidently losing ground every moment with our host, tried to change the subject.

  “I was lunching in an Italian restaurant today,” he said, addressing Mr. Conan Doyle, “and the waiter’s manner of adding up my bill convinced me that his father had once—”

  “Speaking of that,” I interposed, “do you remember that as you were leaving the restaurant you and another person nearly had a quarrel at the door?”

  “Was it you?” he asked.

  “If you think that possible,” I said blandly, “you have a poor memory for faces.”

  He growled to himself.

  “It was this way, Mr. Doyle,” I said. “The door of this restaurant is in two halves, the one of which is marked ‘Push’ and the other ‘Pull.’ Now Mr. Holmes and the stranger were on different sides of the door, and both pulled. As a consequence the door would not open, until one of them gave way. Then they glared at each other and parted.”

  “You must have been a spectator,” said our host.

  “No,” I replied, “but I knew this as soon as I heard that Mr. Holmes had been lunching in one of those small restaurants. They all have double doors, which are marked ‘Push’ and ‘Pull’ respectively. Now, nineteen times in twenty, mankind pushes when it ought to pull, and pulls when it should push. Again, when you are leaving a restaurant there is usually some one entering it. Hence the scene at the door. And, in conclusion, the very fact of having made such a silly mistake rouses ill-temper, which we vent on the other man, to imply that the fault was all his.”

  “Hum!” said Holmes savagely. “Mr. Doyle, the leaf of this cigar is unwinding.”

  “Try anoth—” our host was beginning, when I interposed with—

  “I observe from your remark, Mr. Holmes, that you came straight here from a hairdresser’s.”

  This time he gaped.

  “You let him wax your moustache,” I continued (for of late Mr. Holmes has been growing a moustache).

  “He did it before I knew what he was about,” Mr. Holmes replied.

  “Exactly,” I said, “and in your hansom you tried to undo his handiwork with your fingers.”

  “To which,” our host said with sudden enlightenment, “some of the wax stuck, and is now tearing the leaf of the cigar!”

  “Precisely,” I said. “I knew that he had come from a hairdresser’s the moment I shook hands with him.”

  “Good-night,” said Mr. Holmes, seizing his hat. (He is not so tall as I thought him at first.) “Good-night, I have an appointment at ten with a banker who—”

  “So I have been observing,” I said. “I knew it from the way you—”

  But he was gone.

  1892

  Wit
h Sherlock’s help, Conan Doyle’s literary career took off. For the first time, he began fielding offers for his fiction. Instead of accepting whatever fee was offered, he could name his price. With medicine behind him, he devoted all of his energies to his pen. Before the year was out, he would finish two historical novels, about the Huguenots and Napoleon, as well as a one-act play about a veteran’s experiences at the battle of Waterloo.

  Conan Doyle also branched out socially. At a dinner for the staff of The Idler magazine, he met Jerome K. Jerome, the magazine’s co-founder and author of Three Men in a Boat. He was befriended by J. M. Barrie, with whom he would soon collaborate on a comic opera; Robert K. Barr, who parodied “The Song of the Bow” from The White Company and would publish this year “The Great Pegram Mystery”; and Israel Zangwill, the playwright whose recent locked-room puzzler The Big Bow Mystery pioneered the use of misdirection. (His brother, Louis, tried his hand at a Holmesian parody with the 1897 novel A Nineteenth-Century Miracle).

  Playing on Barrie’s amateur cricket team, Conan Doyle met E.W. Hornung, who would be inspired by Holmes to create Raffles the gentleman burglar. (Hornung would also become part of Conan Doyle’s family by marrying his sister.) During the summer, Conan Doyle visited Norway with Jerome and add skiing to his sporting interests.

  There was even Holmes’ future to consider. In February, Greenhough Smith called to request more stories for The Strand. Concerned about keeping up the quality of the stories, Conan Doyle hoped to keep Smith at bay by boosting his price. He would do it, he told the editor, but instead of £35 a story, he wanted £1,000 for a dozen stories. Done, Smith said.