Sherlock Holmes Victorian Parodies and Pastiches Read online

  We sat at dinner together. It was a Christmas dinner; yet there was little about the decorations of the room or of the table to suggest that the glorious time of peace and dyspepsia and goose and good will was with us. The remarkable man with whom I was dining was not given to the display of sentimental decorative effects. He was practical, intensely practical. Everything for him had a meaning, and what did not have a meaning had one promptly manufactured to fit into it.

  I might have had my dinner at home, or I might have had it in a hotel or a restaurant. My reason for having it here, in a plain lodging house, was because I had been asked; had I not been asked I would not have been here; had I not been here I would have missed one of those remarkable manifestations of logical thought which are so frequently exhibited by the remarkable man.

  I may state that we had almost dined. We had had soup; we had had a bit of fish with oyster sauce; we had had roast beef; we had dallied with a small bit of fowl, and we were about to deal with plum pudding. It will at once be seen that our dinner was plain but substantial. It was a dinner which might have been eaten any day—the plum pudding, perhaps, being the only offering which had been made at the shrine of the festive season.

  It had been a silent dinner—comparatively. The remarkable man devoted himself to his meal with that intensity which marked his treatment of everything upon which he entered. Only twice had he spoken during the repast. Once he had asked me to pass the mustard, and once he had invited me to have more gravy. I saw he was wrapped in thought, and I knew better than to disturb the train of ideas.

  As he lifted the second spoonful of pudding to his lips, I observed him suddenly pause. To one who had studied him less than I had, the emotion which passed over his face would have passed unnoticed, but I was at once aware something had happened. Suddenly he raised his hand, and with his finger and thumb he nervously fingered the side of his mouth; then he withdrew his hand, and allowed it to rest a moment by the side of his plate. The action was suggestive that he had laid down something, but I could see nothing.

  He rang the bell with a sharp blow, and the obsequious landlady entered the room.

  “Mrs. Smith,” said the remarkable man, “you have a young girl concealed somewhere about the basement flat.”

  “Which I won’t deceive you, sir, I have,” replied the landlady.

  “She is untidy—is down at heel,” said the remarkable man.

  “I am sorry to say she is.”

  “She is the slavey—the maid of all work.”

  “She is.”

  “And she has red hair.”

  “She has.”

  “I knew it. Enough! I leave these lodgings at the end of the week.”

  “I am so sorry,” whimpered the landlady, as she left the room.

  I looked across for an explanation of the sudden resolve. For answer the remarkable man motioned me to come to the window. As I approached him he extended his open palm towards me, and I saw lying across it a single long red hair!

  “It was in the first spoonful of plum pudding,” he whispered.

  The whole affair was simple, and could be seen at a glance, but to make it clear, and draw the proper deductions, it had required the intellect of Sherlock Holmes.

  A. Dewar Willock

  The Real Sherlock Holmes

  (An Interview by Our Special Commissioner)

  Anonymous

  Not everyone was fond of Holmes, as demonstrated by this article from the Oct. 28 issue of The Scots Observer. The book in question was the recently released The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, containing the first dozen stories that appeared in The Strand. With the middle- and lower-classes becoming more educated, they sought entertainment in the printed word, and writers and publishers worked to fulfill the demand. Now-forgotten authors such as Marie Corelli and Hall Caine sold in the hundreds of thousands while literary writers such as Henry James barely cleared 10,000 copies, a disparity that left critics like the one in the Observer shaking his head at the direction the culture was turning. Even Conan Doyle saw Holmes as merely a money-spinner; his historical fiction was “the only work I really fancy.”

  In view of the recent publication of some of Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s more celebrated cases (writes our representative) I called upon that famous scientific detective for the purpose of elucidating if possible some of the more eventful and thrilling episodes in his adventures. I found the celebrated sleuth-hound, whose fame is now European, seated before a comfortable fire in his cosily furnished rooms in Baker Street. His chin was sunk upon his chest, and his lynx eyes were fixed upon the ceiling with that hawk-like expression which his portraits have rendered so familiar to us.

  “Good evening,” he said, without turning his head or altering his gaze, as I entered. “You could not have come at a better time. I was just off to bed. You wish to interview me,” he added, as his eyes literally pierced me through and through. “You wear a high hat on Sundays, you are fond of cream tarts, Mr. William Watson is your favourite author and seventeen years and six months ago you had a cousin who died.”

  “Really, Mr. Holmes,” I stammered in amazement. “It is quite true, though how on earth you know—”

  “It is very simple,” he said, smiling. “Moreover it saves me from ennui—it and cocaine. Life, my dear sir, (your name by the way begins with a D, as I see from your handkerchief) is only interesting because it is mysterious. What is ordinary is merely that which is not remarkable, and if you could open all the windows and sail over this vast city you would behold strange secrets. I do not seem to be able to persuade you of the importance of the improbable,” he said reflectively.

  “I have come, Mr. Holmes,” I began hastily, knowing from Dr. Conan Doyle’s account of him his weakness for this vein of reflection, and fearing to be taken beyond my depths; “I have come to ask you about the book—”

  “You mean,” he interrupted, “my treatise on the 742 ways of saying the word ‘damn’.”

  “No, I refer to Dr. Doyle’s collection of your adventures.”

  “I have heard of the man,” said Mr. Holmes. “It is my business to know about all kinds of people. But I’ve never met him. If you will look in my Index, under the heading Plagiarists—”

  “But,” I objected, “Dr. Doyle is a novelist.”

  “True; but he is also a plagiarist—the very worst kind of plagiarist, seeing that he steals from life. Oddly enough, as there was no classical concert this evening, I was just dipping into the very book to which you refer.”

  He waved his hand towards the table, and leaned back in his chair with a little soft laugh. As he put his fingertips together and, closing his eyes, assumed a languid expression of weariness, I guessed what was coming, and so seized my opportunity and my note-book.

  “It is perhaps,” Mr. Holmes resumed, “just as well, my good man, that people will not stick to the truth; otherwise my occupation—and it is a pleasant way of passing the time—would be gone. This man (who is a stranger to me) has compiled a book purporting to be my adventures. It is, in fact, a garbled version of some very inferior incidents in my professional career: but where or how he got hold of them I cannot say, although my mind is already made up. You see, Watson could never keep his tongue quiet, and he was the densest man I ever saw, as you may have perceived. If a man wore a muddy coat he would wonder how I knew he had been splashed. And then Scotland Yard has always been jealous of me. They may have given me away. But in any case it is of no consequence. Dr. Doyle, by the way, I am in a position to state, has written eight other books; and this one appeared originally in the columns of a magazine, where it ran for twelve months. Am I not right?”

  “Certainly, but how—”

  “It is merely the faculty of observation,” he replied. “By examining the book I find out all that. Obviously, too, he is a man of few scruples and no respect for the truth. He is an unfair man, striving, like all his class, to make ‘copy’ where he can. I have been grossly misrepresented by him. Do you think I r
eally made that blunder in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’? Do you imagine I really had as little a finger in ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ and ‘The Copper Beeches’ as he makes out? And do you suppose I interfered as ineffectually in the ‘Five Pips’ as he represents?”

  “What do you suppose was his object, Mr. Holmes?”

  The famous detective looked me full in the face.

  “Gain,” said he, simply.

  I started back in astonishment.

  “Yes,” he resumed; “it is all easy when you see the explanation. You see this book is large and expensively brought out; moreover it is issued by a publisher who caters for the million. Hence it is clear that a very large sale is anticipated. Why? Because the book is supposed to contain a popular element, and that popular element is myself. Now, it follows that Dr. Doyle must have heard of me, through Watson or the police; that he saw I should suit his game (which was money); and having invented spurious stories about me that he hit upon a publisher similarly unscrupulous. With my name, and a fairly accurate account of those interesting cases of mine, ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ and ‘The Speckled Band,’ he made a good start; and after that anything would sell, even stuff like ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ or ‘The Noble Husband’. It is a case of moral degeneration.”

  “What else do you gather of Dr. Doyle?” I asked.

  Mr. Sherlock Holmes yawned.

  “He is evidently a smoker; for your smoker always attributes the odious vice to his hero (I need hardly say I never touch tobacco). It is clear too he is not a teetotaler.”

  “One word more, and I have done. Should you say Dr. Doyle was young or old?”

  Mr. Holmes got up and stretched himself. “I need only refer you to the colour of his book,” he said. “Good night!”

  The Adventures of Shylock Oams: The Sign of Gore

  F.W. Freeman

  The Ludgate Weekly, in which this story appeared, was a magazine spun off of The Ludgate Monthly, a competitor of The Strand. It lasted less than a year, just long enough to publish an Conan Doyle short story (“The Great Brown-Pericord Motor”). The monthly edition went through several format changes in its nine-year history. It published a number of weird stories, such as “The Dragon of St. Paul’s,” in which a prehistoric flying creature is revived and attacks London, and Eden Phillpotts’ “The Muggsen Expedition” about exploring the North Pole by balloon. Nothing could be learned about F.W. Freeman.

  At eight o’clock one morning, when I was sharing rooms with Shylock Oames in Quaker Street; we were awaiting breakfast in the sitting-room. Oames was lying back in an arm-chair, apparently in the last stage of complete boredom, indulging his very reprehensible habit of a smoke before breakfast. The plugs and dottels of his yesterday’s pipes, carefully collected, formed the appetizing mixture with which he always began the day. I was looking idly out of the window.

  “There is a client coming down the street,” I said, as I noticed a stoutish man hurrying along the pavement, anxiously scanning the numbers of the houses.

  “I can see him,” said Oames, sleepily.

  I turned round, somewhat startled, but remembered there was a glass over the mantelpiece tilted so as to show the street.

  “He has just lost a fine black moustache,” said Oames; “I suppose he wants me to get him another.”

  “Good heavens” I exclaimed. “How can you tell that?”

  “My dear Wilkins,” he answered, oracularly, “I am afraid you will never get beyond the mere ABC of the art of scientific deduction. Did you not notice how his hand kept straying to his clean-shaved upper lip, and is not his hair black? When a man is perplexed and worried, he is in the habit of pulling his moustache.”

  It was true! Looking at the man again, I noticed his hand perpetually going to his upper lip and, finding nothing, his nervousness seemed to increase tenfold.

  Just then breakfast was brought in, and with it came a violent ring at the bell.

  We heard the door opened, a hurried question and answer, and then rapid steps on the stairs. A moment afterwards our door was flung violently open and the man entered, clutching off his hat, which in his hurry he dropped on the floor.

  Oames picked it up and handed it to him.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Jones?” he asked.

  At hearing his name, the man flopped into a chair and gazed open-mouthed at Oames’s imperturbable face.

  “Your name is in your hat,” he said, quietly.

  The man looked in his hat as if he were the victim of a conjuring trick.

  “What can I do for you?” said Oames again.

  Then the man seemed to remember his errand, and he jumped up and clenched his hands and became horribly excited, banging his head against the wall, and giving every manifestation of the utmost misery and despair.

  The magnetic influence, however, of Oames’s manner soon calmed him somewhat, and he managed to gasp out his tale. Oames’s surmise was correct. He had lost his moustache.

  “Stolen from me in my sleep, sir,” he ejaculated in his rage. “In my sleep, sir; what do you think of that? And look at the way he has cut me,” and he pointed to a long cut beneath the left nostril. “Find me the dastardly scoundrel and I am your slave for life.” And he danced about the room, clenching his hands. “Whatever I shall do I can’t think. What the other fellows will say to me—besides—”

  “You are a clerk in a bank, I think,” said Oames, quietly.

  Again the man stared open-mouthed, but merely nodded an affirmative.

  “What time did you wake this morning?” Oames went on.

  “Five o’clock.”

  “Did you feel sick?”

  “Yes, very. Why?”

  “Never mind why; just answer my questions. Was your door locked?”

  “Yes. The outer oak was locked; the inside door was merely shut.”

  “You live in chambers?”

  “Yes—in Bedford Row.”

  “Is there anybody you wish to marry?”

  A slight colour came into the man’s face. He looked shy and annoyed.

  “What has that to do with it?” he asked, rather sharply.

  “If you don’t care to answer my questions,” said Oames, with a shrug, “you had better go to the police.”

  “I shall have to, I’m afraid,” said the man.

  “Good morning,” said Oames. “Wilkins, breakfast is getting cold.”

  The man looked stunned. He had not a word to say, and would probably have gone; but another ring at the bell and more hurrying feet on the stairs gave a fresh turn to events.

  “A lady this time,” said Oames. And sure enough our door was again flung open and a young lady appeared, with evident traces of tears on her face.

  “Oh, Mr. Oames!” she said. “Whatever shall I do? Oh, please help me. Look what I have had sent me this morning. Oh—”

  Here she caught sight of our first visitor, and started violently. I thought she was going to faint.

  Suppressing a slight scream, she drew herself up haughtily and bowed stiffly. “Good morning, Mister Jones,” she said, with considerable emphasis on the “Mr.”

  The man looked utterly crushed. He tried to bow, and then fumbled in his pocket for his handkerchief, and held it to his face.

  The young lady then turned to Oames. “This gentleman,” she said freezingly, “has, doubtless, already explained. Perhaps when you show him what is in this envelope he will understand. Good morning. Good morning, Mister Jones.” And with a stately bow to our perspiring client, she swept out of the room.

  Oames opened the envelope. In it was a black moustache gummed on a card, bearing the legend, “This is what you were in love with.” Underneath was a cross in red, which Oames declared, after examining it through a microscope, to be blood.

  “It is the Sign of Gore,” he said. Then he turned to the man.

  “There is your moustache,” he said. “You have a rival for the love of that young lady?”

  “Yes yes! Ah! I see it now. A li
ttle whipper-snapper of a fellow—”

  Oames held up his hand. “You will find that he has procured a key of your rooms, and chloroformed you in your sleep.”

  “He lives on the floor below,” the man said.

  “Quite so. One piece of advice before you go. Don’t show yourself to the young lady till your moustache has grown again, for your appearance without it is, to say the least, plebeian; even now, I fear your chance is gone forever. And next time you are in trouble, take my advice and go straight to Scotland Yard. Good morning. You will be late for the bank, I am afraid.” And the man went, gasping in astonishment, and with his eyes sticking out like pegs on a hat-rack.

  “How true is the remark of the German philosopher,” said Oames, as we drew in our chairs to the table: “Donner und Blitzen!”

  1893

  It was a great opportunity, at first. W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan had parted ways over The Gondoliers, and their backer, Richard D’Oyly Carte, needed a new comic opera for his Savoy Theatre. J.M. Barrie was chosen, but he had written only three plays, and the strain of following the great G&S had trashed his nerves. He called on his friend and fellow cricket player Conan Doyle for help.

  The result was Jane Annie; or, The Good Conduct Prize, about the goings-on at a girls’ boarding school involving an elopement, golf, and hypnotism. Conan Doyle wrote half of it, working from Barrie’s outline. The result was a spectacular failure. On opening night in May, the audience’s reaction was so tepid the leading lady refused to come out of her dressing room for the curtain call, and the authors were not called to appear on stage. The reviews were accurate and mostly unkind. George Bernard Shaw wrote “The high privilege of joking in public should never be granted except to people who know thoroughly what they are joking about.” Jane Annie ran for 50 performances, but only because D’Oyly Carte had nothing to replace it. The friendship between Conan Doyle and Barrie survived, and Barrie memorialized the fiasco with the Holmes parody “The Adventure of the Two Collaborators.”