第 13 页

Power and fallibility

Although those participants in the Grand Game were Holmesian in their thoroughness and research, their criticism and analysis of the

in the Civil War. Readers can only guess that he joined the KKK in 1866, that he was somehow involved in their violent campaigns, and that around 1869 he fled the US with papers that will incriminate many KKK members. Unusually for this kind of story, the reader never learns what Elias did, how the papers came into his hands, why he left America, or why the KKK is on his trail. By not providing the background story, Conan Doyle tantalizes the reader brilliantly with a past that remains an enigma.

A view of Waterloo Bridge from Hungerford Bridge in 1888. It was from here that the final KKK victim, John Openshaw, fell to his death—yet it was officially recorded that he “had been the victim of an unfortunate accident.”

story rather misses the point, as Conan Doyle would no doubt have agreed. “The Five Orange Pips” is deeply atmospheric. The five little seeds exert a terrifying symbolic power, as each appearance signals another death and the story gathers an unstoppable momentum, as dark events and secret conflicts across an ocean come home to roost in the quiet Sussex countryside.

In no other Holmes tale do we see the great detective so nakedly vulnerable and so keenly aware of the huge responsibility he has in his role as crime fighter. “I am the last court of appeal,” he admits to his young client, and we see in this story that he knows the burden is a heavy one. His failure to prevent his client’s death cuts him to the quick, and it is perhaps this fallibility and compassion that emerge briefly from time to time—in between his feats of brilliance—that has sealed Holmes in the hearts of readers all over the world for so long. ■

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: December 1891 US: December 1891 (as “The Strange Tale of the Beggar”)

COLLECTION

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892

CHARACTERS

Neville St. Clair

Affluent businessman.

Hugh Boone

Disfigured beggar.

Mrs. St. Clair

Wife of Neville St. Clair.

Isa Whitney Patient of Watson’s, addicted to opium.

Kate Whitney Wife of Isa and old friend of Mary Watson.

Mary Watson

Wife of Watson.

IT IS BETTER TO

LEARN WISDOM

LATE THAN NEVER

TO LEARN IT AT ALL

THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP (1891)

Holmes examines an envelope

The name is written in dark ink that dried naturally, indicating a pause after writing.

The address is grayish in color, showing that the ink here has been blotted immediately.

The writer knew the addressee’s name but had to go and find out the address, which indicates that he was not familiar with it.

U

nusually, this story begins in the home of Watson and his wife, Mary, when they are disturbed one evening by a distressed friend of Mary’s, Kate Whitney. Her husband Isa is an opium addict and has been missing for two days; Kate suspects he is holed up in a opium den. As his doctor, Watson is dispatched to retrieve him. This scene provides a rare insight into Watson’s domestic life; his tone seems to hold both affection and resignation when he remarks, “That was always the way. Folk who were in grief came to my wife like birds to a lighthouse.”

Among the opium fumes

Watson arrives at the Bar of Gold, near London Bridge, and enters a “long, low room, thick and heavy with the brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the forecastle of an emigrant ship.” He soon encounters Isa Whitney— in the sorry state his wife had predicted. To the doctor’s sheer astonishment, he also sees Holmes among the mumbling addicts, disguised as a decrepit slave to the drug and clearly engaged in an investigation. Watson packs Whitney off in a cab home and joins his old friend on the hunt.

THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP 81

Holmes reveals his mission to Watson: a respectable man of business, Neville St. Clair, has gone missing. He was last glimpsed in the upstairs window of this same opium den by his wife, who happened to be passing by sheer chance. Mrs. St. Clair gained access to the establishment, but found the upstairs room occupied only by a filthy, disfigured beggar named Hugh Boone. There was blood on the windowsill, and items of St. Clair’s clothing and property were found concealed in the room and floating in the river outside. Boone was arrested, but in the absence of any further leads, Mrs. St. Clair has commissioned Holmes to get to the bottom of it. The detective is convinced that this will prove to be a straightforward murder case. He knows the opium den to be “the vilest murder-trap on the whole riverside” and its manager “a man of the vilest antecedents.”

One and the same

Much to Holmes’s surprise, however, his theory is proved incorrect when Mrs. St. Clair receives a note in her husband’s handwriting assuring her that all is well. While Watson sleeps, Holmes at last has the solution. Castigating himself for not seeing the truth sooner, he and Watson make their way to Bow Street police station, brandishing a bathroom sponge with which, quite literally, to clean up the matter.

As Holmes reveals by scrubbing the face of the imprisoned beggar, Hugh Boone and Neville St. Clair are in fact one and the same. A former actor turned journalist, St. Clair had discovered while researching an article just how much money a successful beggar might make, and for some years has been disguising himself grotesquely in the pursuit of easy cash. Unexpectedly sighted by his wife in his changing room above the opium den, he managed to preserve his secret, but at the cost of a murder charge. However, since no crime has actually been committed, St. Clair is released, promising an end to Hugh Boone.

“That rascally Lascar”

Charges of racism are occasionally leveled against Conan Doyle’s portrayal of the lascar who runs the opium den. Lascars were Indian sailors working on British vessels, many of whom settled in London.

Opium dens in Victorian London

This engraving by Gustave Doré entitled The Lascar’s Room in Edwin Drood conveys the seedy squalor of the Victorian opium den. It was made in 1872, two years after Dickens’s death.

But Holmes’s poor opinion of the lascar seems to stem more from his murderous criminality than his race, and the representation is far less uncomfortable to the modern reader than that of the crudely caricatured black boxer, Steve Dixie, in “The Adventure of the Three Gables” (see pp.272–73). ■

Dr. Watson’s evocation of the dreamy, seedy world inside the Victorian opium den is a captivating piece of writing, and the description may have been based on a real opium den at the time. London’s best-known den in the 19th century was almost certainly known to Conan Doyle. It was run not by an Indian lascar but by a Chinese immigrant called Ah Sing. The clientele was mostly Chinese sailors, but curious gentlemen and members of the literary elite were also visitors. Ah Sing’s den was to be immortalized in Dickens’s final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), and Ah Sing liked to boast that the great novelist had visited his establishment.

However, there were far fewer opium dens in London than the literature and popular press of the day implied. The Pharmacy Act of 1868 restricted the sale of opium products to pharmacists, and many of London’s addicts would not have been the stereotypical immigrant men smoking in a hazy cellar, but could be anyone who was regularly prescribed laudanum (an opium tincture) for pain relief or other symptoms. Laudanum was so ubiquitous it is sometimes referred to as “the aspirin of the 19th century”.

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION US: January 1892 (as “The Christmas Goose that Swallowed a Diamond”)

UK: January 1892

COLLECTION

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892

CHARACTERS Henry Baker British Museum employee, and drinker.

Peterson Commissionaire.

Countess of Morcar Wealthy owner of the blue carbuncle.

Catherine Cusack Lady-in-waiting to Countess of Morcar.

Breckinridge Poultry seller at Covent Garden market.

John Horner Plumber accused of stealing the blue carbuncle.

James Ryder Attendant at the Hotel Cosmopolitan.

IN THE LARGER AND

OLDER JEWELS EVERY

FACET MAY STAND

FOR A BLOODY DEED

THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE (1892)

T

he story opens on a frosty morning two days after Christmas. Watson calls on Holmes one day to find his friend busy examining an old hat. This “battered billycock,” has been found early on Christmas morning, along with a fine plucked goose for the pot, by a commissionaire named Peterson, who had witnessed their owner being attacked by a street gang. In the struggle that ensued, the victim had dropped the hat and goose before fleeing. Peterson picked them up and headed straight to Holmes to tell him of the events;

Jewel theft

Although jewel theft makes a compelling story, a glance through the Old Bailey’s court records around the period when “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” was written shows only a smattering of such cases. Most crimes were small-scale domestic burglaries, and there is certainly no prize approaching the value of the countess’s famous carbuncle.

In the world of fiction, however, Conan Doyle’s own brother-in-law was about to

he left the hat with Holmes for examination and took the goose back to his wife to cook.

An extraordinary discovery

The reader soon learns the victim was a man named Henry Baker. On examining the hat, Holmes establishes that Baker is a middle-aged man with gray hair, which he anoints with lime cream and has recently had cut. More surprisingly, he deduces that Baker is intellectual, was once well off but has fallen on hard times (probably due to drinking), and is physically unfit, and that his

create one of the greatest jewel thieves of all time. In 1898, E. W. Hornung, who was married to Conan Doyle’s sister Connie, wrote the first of 27 stories dealing with the exploits of

A. J. Raffles, the gentleman thief. Much as Holmes’s work is chronicled by Watson, Raffles’ adventures are recorded by his erstwhile companion Bunny Manders. The first volume of these tales, The Amateur Cracksman, was published in 1899 with a dedication to his brother-in-law that read “To

A.C.D. This Form of Flattery.”

THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE 83

home does not have gas lighting. Holmes’s keen deductions are only slightly compromised in that he makes use of the now-debunked science of phrenology (see p.188), when he points out the size of the hat, saying “a man with so large a brain must have something in it.”

Suddenly Peterson bursts into the room and announces excitedly that while preparing the goose for roasting, his wife found a large blue gem in its crop. Holmes at once recognizes the stone as the famous blue carbuncle, recently stolen from the Countess of Morcar at the Hotel Cosmopolitan. A suspect named John Horner, a plumber, is already in custody, but Holmes’s interest is piqued, and when the hat’s rather down-at-heel owner, Henry Baker, shows up, he unwittingly provides the detective with his first lead. Clearly ignorant of the goose’s contents, Baker informs Holmes he bought the bird at a “goose club” set up by the landlord of the Alpha pub, near the British Museum.

Conan Doyle’s footsteps

Holmes and Watson take a stroll through the “doctors’ quarter” of Wimpole Street and Harley Street, bound for the Alpha pub, following a route that was once Conan Doyle’s own daily commute. For a

Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem.

Sherlock Holmes

few months in 1891, shortly before writing this story, Conan Doyle lived just behind the British Museum and practiced medicine as an eye doctor in a clinic on Upper Wimpole Street. He rented a consulting room and a share of a waiting room, but patients were so scarce that, in his own words, “they were both waiting rooms.” He soon abandoned medicine to focus on his burgeoning career as a writer.

Holmes the trickster

As well as good old-fashioned legwork, Holmes employs a fair bit of psychological manipulation in his pursuit of the jewel thief. On meeting the poultry butcher who first sold the goose to the pub, he capitalizes on the man’s evident weakness for gambling to wheedle information out of him. Later, he utilizes carefully stage-managed shock tactics to prove one man’s innocence and another’s guilt.

At the story’s denouement, the head attendant at the Hotel Cosmopolitan, James Ryder, is revealed to have himself stolen the gemstone with the help of Catherine Cusack, the Countess’s lady-in-waiting. He then framed Horner, whom he knew to have a

In the 19th century, Covent Garden market, where the goose in this story was sold, bustled with buyers and sellers hawking fresh food.

criminal record. An inexperienced opportunist, Ryder took the gem to a criminal acquaintance who would sell it on his behalf. Fearful he would be stopped by the police, Ryder attempted to conceal the carbuncle by feeding it to a goose that his sister had promised him for Christmas, but somehow he ended up choosing the wrong bird from her flock. Meanwhile, the gem made its way via Covent Garden’s poultry market, the Bloomsbury pub, and an unfortunate street altercation in Tottenham Court Road, safely into Holmes’s hands.

The spirit of Christmas

“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” is a sort of Sherlock Holmes Christmas special, with a heart-warming Dickensian dash of redemption. It is suffused with light, comedic moments, and Holmes gets so carried away with what he terms “the season of forgiveness” that he ends up letting the distraught and remorseful culprit go free. ■

VIOLENCE

DOES

IN TRUTH

RECOIL UPON

THE VIOLENT

THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND (1892)

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: February 1892

COLLECTION

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892

CHARACTERS

Dr. Grimesby Roylott

Widowed former medical doctor, now living on his family estate in Surrey.

Helen Stoner Roylott’s stepdaughter, who lives with him in Surrey.

Julia Stoner Helen’s late twin sister, who died mysteriously two years before.

A

t the opening of this story, Watson clearly sets out to whet the reader’s appetite for what is to follow: “I cannot recall any [case] which presented more singular features than that which was associated with the well-known Surrey family of the Roylotts of Stoke Moran.” The time now has come, he says, to reveal a long-held secret, given that the embargo on revealing the truth has been lifted by the “untimely death of a lady.” This is a classic literary device that draws in the reader and gives a sense of immediacy to a story set in the past. Although the lady he speaks of is not named in his introduction, it becomes apparent that she must