Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches II Page 4

  Chapter One

  The case of Professor Hickorychicory—pronounced Hickychicky—is the next on my list at this period of our residence at Shaker Street, and it is the one I propose to give here. This case, which caused the disappearance and supposed death of Herlock Sholmes, proved the most tensely exciting of all in which I shared the work of my amazing friend.

  Sholmes had been absent for several days, and I was growing somewhat uneasy on his account, when one morning a coal-heaver was shown into my rooms while I was at breakfast. I rose to my feet, somewhat surprised, but at once the well-known voice reassured me.

  “Good-morning, Jotson!”

  “Sholmes!” I exclaimed, in astonishment.

  “Himself!” he replied, sinking into the armchair, and resting his feet on the mantelpiece in his old familiar way that I knew so well. “Give me something to eat, my dear fellow. I have eaten nothing for fourteen days. I am famished!”

  He devoured bacon and eggs ravenously. Through the grime on his face, he looked at me with his old smile.

  “I see you have changed your habits, my dear Jotson.”

  “In what way, Sholmes?”

  “You have taken to clean-shaving.”

  I started.

  “My dear Sholmes,” I protested, “you have been absent! How can you possibly be aware—”

  “Deduction, my good fellow,” said Sholmes carelessly. “When I left you, you were wearing a moustache. At the present moment there is no trace of hair on your upper lip. To the trained eye of a detective, Jotson, the inference is clear. You have shaved clean!”

  “I see that you have not changed, at all events, Sholmes,” I replied. “The same amazing insight—the same irresistible power of deduction—”

  “You flatter me, Jotson. At the present moment,” he said moodily, “my insight is at fault. I have met my match at last, Jotson.”

  “Impossible!”

  “It is true. Have you ever heard of Professor Hickorychicory—pronounced Hickychicky?” I shook my head.

  “Naturally,” said Sholmes. “Few have heard of him. The police know nothing of him. Even the fact that his name is Hickorychicory, and pronounced Hickychicky, has failed to put them on the track. Yet he is the most dangerous criminal in London—or in the world. Every crime that has been committed during the past seventy years has been planned by this man. His hand is everywhere—invisible, but powerful. It was he who stole the Crown Jewels of Spoofia; he who robbed the Princess of Ghammon; he, my dear Jotson, who kidnapped the young Duke of Shepherd’s Bush, and assassinated the Marquis of Hornsey Rise; he who made away with the Depaste diamonds; he who administered the permanent sleeping-draught to Sir Tedward Bray; he who abstracted the Prime Minister’s spectacles at a critical moment, and caused him to remain in ignorance of the existence of Vulgaria on the map at a very critical hour in European history!”

  “Good heavens, Sholmes!”

  “It is true, Jotson. With this unseen, invisible, indiscernible, and unspotted criminal I am now at the death-grapple!”

  “My dear Sholmes!”

  “Murder,” said Sholmes quietly, “is nothing to him! I have had several narrow escapes. He has sworn my death! Ha, ha! Yesterday, in a fashionable restaurant, I detected a fragment of German sausage in my soup. It was a plot to poison me; he bribed the waiter. Last evening I received free tickets for the latest revue at the Giganteum Theatre; a cunning scheme to bore me to death. Last night a German band began to play under my window; I barely escaped with my life. This morning, as I came here, my taxi-cab was blown sky-high by a bomb cunningly placed in the taximeter, timed to go off when twopence had ticked away. I was blown into the air. Fortunately, I landed unharmed on top of the Monument, and descended safely by means of the steps.

  “Jotson, you know that I have nerve, but I confess that this has shaken me.”

  He rose to his feet and tiptoed to the window. On the other side of the street a ragman was passing, uttering the familiar cry: “Rags and bones, bottles and jars!” Sholmes turned to me, his face blazing with excitement.

  “Run, Jotson!”

  “Sholmes!” I ejaculated.

  “You see that ragman? It is Professor Hickorychicory—pronounced Hickychicky—in disguise! Bolt!”

  We rushed to the door.

  Hardly had we reached the garden when a terrific explosion shook the building to its foundations. Sholmes looked at me with a grim smile.

  “Just in time, Jotson!”

  Hardly had we reached the garden when a terrific explosion shook the building to its foundations. “A bomb!” he said. “The work of Professor Hickorychicory!”

  “Sholmes!”

  “A bomb!” he said. “The work of Professor Hickorychicory—pronounced Hickychicky. He sticks at nothing. The coils are closing round him, Jotson. Only my demise can save him.” He set his teeth. “It is a struggle for life or death between Herlock Sholmes and Professor Hickorychicory—pronounced Hickychicky. Jotson, are you with me?”

  “Hear me swear—” I began.

  “Enough! Let us go!”

  With a few magic touches of his hand, he disguised me as a fishmonger. Then he hurried me away.

  Chapter 2

  The next few weeks were crammed with excitement.

  It was the hardest case Herlock Sholmes had undertaken, and he did not conceal from me that sometimes he feared that Professor Hickorychicory—pronounced Hickychicky—might yet escape him. Our narrow escapes were marvellous; we grew familiar with danger. The coils were closing round the hardened criminal, but he was fighting hard. The man who had ruled the criminal world for seventy years was not to be taken easily.

  Why Sholmes did not cause the arrest of the man who was so deeply dyed with crime was a mystery to me. Sholmes did not explain. It was one of the secrets that were locked up in that inscrutable breast.

  It was at sunset one evening that we found ourselves pursuing a lonely track amid the rocky waste and precipices of the wild Hill of Ludgate. Far below us flowed the dark water of the Fleet river. Sholmes had been silent for several minutes—a most unusual circumstance. He turned to me suddenly.

  “Jotson!” he said. His voice was unusually gentle, and I could not help a rush of tears to my eyes. I blew my nose. “Jotson, I feel that the end is coming—the end for him, Jotson, and the end for me!”

  “Sholmes!” I murmured.

  “He is here,” said Sholmes. “I have tracked him down. In the narrow pass leading to the Bridge of the Black Friars he is in hiding. Jotson, my old friend, good-bye!”

  “You shall not go alone!” I exclaimed.

  “I must, Jotson. At the finish we must be alone—Herlock Sholmes, the detective, and Professor Hickorychicory—pronounced Hickychicky—the master-criminal. Fear not for me, Jotson; I am armed. I have here a railway sandwich, and with one blow—”

  “But—”

  “If I fail, Jotson, I leave to you all my belongings. My account in the bank, amounting at the present moment to fourpence-halfpenny, will be paid to you in a lump sum. I have instructed my bankers. The furniture at Shaker Street is yours—on the sole condition that you pay the remainder of the instalments. Only the tabby cat I should like to be given to my Aunt Sempronia. You promise me this, Jotson?”

  I promised, with tears in my eyes. Could I refuse him anything at that moment?

  It was in vain to seek to change his resolution. The last scene of the tragedy was to be enacted between those two alone—Herlock Sholmes, my dear, amazing friend, and the dark and tortuous criminal, the spelling of whose name gave no clue to its pronunciation.

  We parted, and Sholmes plunged into the dark and gloomy pass. I sat upon a rock and waited. My eyes were blinded with tears. Was I ever to see again my astonishing friend—ever again to behold those old familiar feet resting upon the mantelpiece in the old rooms at Shaker Street? I am not ashamed to say that I wept, and the lonely rocks around me echoed: “Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!”

  Suddenly there wa
s a trampling of feet—a sound of voices. I recognised the voice of Herlock Sholmes.

  “At last!”

  “At last! Ha, ha!” echoed another voice, the deep and thrilling tones of Professor Hickorychicory—pronounced Hickychicky.

  For a moment I saw them—locked in a deadly embrace, reeling upon the verge of the wildest precipice of the Hill of Ludgate. Then they disappeared from my sight—still locked in that deadly embrace as in a Chubb lock.

  I stumbled away—I hardly know how. I had looked my last upon Herlock Sholmes—that marvellous man whose adventures I now present for the first time to the public (copyright in the U.S.). Far, far below, where the dark waters of the Fleet murmured beneath the frowning crags of Ludgate Hill, lay Herlock Sholmes, side by side with his deadly foe, Professor Hickorychicory—pronounced Hickychicky!

  Bibliographic Bones

  Frank Place

  Civilizations are built on not just the discovery of knowledge, but the ability to store that wisdom so others can learn from it. Teaching the importance of record-keeping, admittedly a dry subject, needed flavoring to help the lesson go down, as seen in this piece for The Medical Pickwick, which came with footnotes and a bibliography that were omitted. The magazine was a literary journal by and for physicians, and appears to have been published for seven years (1915-1922). Little is known of Frank Place (1880-1959) except that he wrote a 12-page pamphlet, “Bibliographic Style in Medical Literature” (1913).

  One evening, as I was sitting at home looking over a paper for the Royal Society, I heard the sounds of footsteps on the stairs and in an instant my friend and co-renter, Fetlock Jones, the great defective, had come into the room. I was about to ask him what had detained him when he broke into speech. “I am sorry to have been so late, Swatson, but I have been detained at the library. Here I have spent the better part of a day in chasing wild geese.”

  Chasing wild geese in a medical library was quite in keeping with the eccentricities of the great defective, but how it could have come about I was at a loss to guess. I said as much to him.

  “You may well be surprised, Swatson; I confess I fell down when I began some investigations I had planned for today. I was mired, in fact. What imp possesses your profession I don’t know. No, not your confreres at the library, but the writers in the magazines. I intended to read some articles which interest me; and a pretty time I had of it. I handed in my list of periodicals and when they were brought to me I started in. This was my first reference: Lancet, 1902. Two massive tomes answered present. By rummaging around I located the indexes and finally the article. The next was worse: Proceedings of the Royal society of medicine, I, p. 39. This ‘I’ turned out to be three solid volumes. Part one contained four ‘Sections,’ part two five, and part three, four ‘Sections.’ I looked on page thirty-nine in each section in vain till I struck part three, Section on Therapeutics, the last one in the book; there I found it. Still worse was the case of the next: Virchow’s Archiv, 1901. Here were four volumes, and I had to read through the table of contents of each, or eight solid pages of German titles. The half-dozen other references were just as bad. A little more definiteness would have saved much time for me.”

  “Elementary, my dear Jones. Elementary. You should have a real problem set before you. I have here some case reports along that very line, which you may be interested to hear. They are records of actual occurrences in the course of my work; I call them ‘bones’ from my bibliographic museum. I use the word ‘bone’ as do the American sporting writers, to indicate an error in strategy, deriving it from ‘bone-head,’ one lacking in brains. A player who makes an error ‘pulls a bone.’ So I consider some errors in references as bones, and record them in my bibliographic case-books.”

  “Good,” said Fetlock, “let’s hear them. I feel in just the mood for them;” and, filling his pipe with “shag,” he lighted it and settled back to listen.

  “First, then, let me read you one that was called to my attention by Dr. J. W. Ballantyne of Edinburgh. I will read his remarks on it exactly as he records it. Whether another would have had the same, more, or less difficulties is immaterial.

  “Case I. I have paid special attention to the bibliographical notices and references, as, in the first volume, I have tried as far as possible to give the reader references which themselves contain literature lists. I have endeavored to verify all these, and to give for each the volume, the page, and the year of publication; this has been a task of great magnitude, and unaided I should have been forced to abandon it, but, with the help of the Index Catalogue of Washington, the Index Medicus, and Taruffi’s fine work (Storia della teratologia) in eight volumes, it has been accomplished. The reader will never know how many inaccurate references have been corrected, and how many weary hours have been spent in putting right the errors which greater care on the part of earlier writers would have prevented. Here is a single example and a glaring one. In Taruffi’s Storia (vol. vi, p. 149) I found a reference to the case of a woman who had given birth to six anencephalic fetuses; it was Adam Mencer, A. Medical Times and Gazelle, Dicem. 1861. I looked up this reference and could find no trace of it; I looked up the indexes of adjacent volumes and fared no better. I then thought that perhaps Mercer Adam was meant, and I referred to his articles on Teratology in the Edinburgh and London Monthly Journal of Medical Science, and there, in his second article, I found it, not the case indeed, but a reference back to one reported by J. Martin in the New York Journal of Medicine for March 1849. Then, as it happened, the only set of this Journal to which I could gain access lacked the very volume I wanted. Then I went to the Index Catalogue and found that J. Martin’s paper had also appeared in the Medical Examiner of Philadelphia for 1849; I looked this up and got the original reference at last. So Taruffi’s Adam Mencer, A. Medical Times and Gazette, Dicem. 1861. had become Martin J., Med. Exam. Phila., 1849, n. s., v. 23!”

  “This beats Scotland Yard,” cried Fetlock.

  “Case II. This case began in the reading of an abstract in the Journal of Cutaneous Diseases, N.Y. 1900, xviii, 470, quoted thus: “Persistent Verrucous Urticaria, J. V. Hieleman. Bull. Med. and Surg. 1900,” the abstract in turn being taken en masse from St. Louis Med. and Surg. Jour. In this latter reference the date is lacking; but as the abstract is printed in the current literature department, the original is probably of the same year, 1900, or the year preceding, 1899. The index of the St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal had no reference to the desired article, either under ‘verrucous,’ ‘urticaria,’ or ‘persistent.’ A page by page search through the two volumes for 1900 revealed the abstract in the August number, volume 79, page 96. (Later research discovered this article indexed under ‘Case. . .’) But no additional information was found, the first abstract giving all that was found here.

  “A search through the Index Medicus for 1898 and 1899, and through Bibliographia Medica for 1900, failed to show Hieleman. Neither the library nor various indexes contained any mention of a Bull. Med. and Surg., though such journals were examined such as the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal, and others of similar titles.

  “Hyde’s Practical Treatise on Diseases of the Skin, which gives ‘literature,’ quoted an article late enough to contain a reference to our quarry: “Arch. f. Derm. 1906, vol. 81, p. 209”, which in turn quoted “Bull. Med. and Surg. 1900.” Back home! Apparently this was copied from one of the American references. Now the indexes of the Archiv were consulted, and lo! here we find ‘Hjelmman’ who had contributed to Scandinavian journals. The horizon shows signs of approaching day. A dash was made to the Scandinavian journals and those for 1899 and 1900 were scanned. The Upsala Lakareforenings Forhandlingar showed nothing, but in Nordiskt Medicinskt Arkiv was found a reference, and there I found it correct. The original reference should now read: J. V. Hjelmman. Ett Fall af ‘urticaria perstans verrucosa’ Finska Lakarresallskapets Handlingar. Helsingfors, 1889, xli, 1236-1241.”

  “Marvelous,” exclaimed Fetlock
Jones in a Montgomery-and-Stone voice.

  “Case III. Lubarsch and Ostertag’s Ergebnisse der allgemeinen Pathologie. 1907. xi, abt, 2, 396, refers to an article on paralysis of the recurrent laryngeal nerve thus: ‘Mieczslaw (Arch. f. Laryngol. Bd. 19. heft 11.)’ The table of contents of volume nineteen of this Archiv showed nothing of Mieczslaw, likewise the index of the set and the Index Medicus. A crossfire was now begun. The library catalog revealed a French dissertation on this subject by Cuisset published in 1913. As these theses are usually accompanied by lists of references I examined this one, but unsuccessfully. I did, however, find a reference that I thought would furnish a clue: Gantz, Monatsschrift fur Ohrenheilkunde, 1906. On turning to this I found it to be the very one I was searching for. Mieczslaw had become Mieczclaw Gantz, and the ‘Archiv, Bd. 19, heft 11’ had become ‘Monatsschrift fuer Ohrenheilkunde, Berlin, 1906, xl, 703.’ The original Helft 11 may have been the successor of ‘xl’ in some other reference, but the other changes are hard to explain.”

  “Case IV. A review was found in Semon’s Internationales Centralblatt fuer Laryngologie und Rhinologie, 1909, xxv, 128, which was quoted as follows: ‘Leriche, M. R. (Title in German and French). Somédicale des hospitaux de Lyon, 18, November ciété 1908.’ As the society is quoted but the journal printing the article is not, one is justified in consulting the organ of the society for that year, namely: ‘Bulletin de la Société médicale des hopitaux de Lyon,’ 1908, volume 7. I did so and found, in the first place, that the society met on the 17th, not the 18th. of November of that year, and, in the second place, that the article I wanted was not in the volume. Search in the ‘Lyon médicale’ and in the Index Medicus for 1907, 1908, and 1909, failed to disclose any reference to the title desired. At about this point I began to lose interest in Leriche and allowed myself to become switched to another line where traffic was less impeded.