第 15 页

Roylott’s snake

There has been much speculation about the species of the snake in this story. Holmes identifies it as a swamp adder—“the deadliest snake in India”—but this name is one of Conan Doyle’s inventions. Some commentators have decided it must be an Indian cobra (Naja naja, pictured) since this matches the description of a reptile with a “diamond-shaped head and puffed neck.” The Indian cobra’s poison is suitably fast-acting, too: it blocks the transmission of nerve signals at the synapses (gaps between

I had never seen my friend’s face so grim or his brow so dark as it was when we turned from the scene.

Dr. Watson

Pick of the crop

During a visit to South Africa in 1900, Conan Doyle was asked by a journalist if he could name his favorite Holmes story. “Perhaps the one about the serpent”, he replied. It is easy to see why he chose “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”: it contains all the classic ingredients of a great detective story—a dastardly villain, a seemingly inexplicable death in a locked room, a young lady in great distress, moments of real danger, an injection of exotic and foreign “otherness,” and some inspired and brilliant sleuthing. ■

nerve endings) and can cause paralysis and heart failure, often within an hour but sometimes in just 15 minutes (although, inconsistently, Roylott himself dies within just a few seconds). It is the species most commonly used by India’s snake charmers, too, and during the Hindu festival of Nag Panchami (in which devotees worship live cobras) snakes are fed milk, which may be where Roylott got the idea to reward his snake. However, since snakes are not mammals, they cannot digest milk and it is harmful to them.

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: March 1892

COLLECTION

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892

CHARACTERS

Victor Hatherley

Young hydraulic engineer.

Colonel Lysander Stark

Middle-aged German man who hires Victor Hatherley.

Elise Young German woman who helps Hatherley to escape.

Mr. Ferguson

Stark’s “manager.”

EACH NEW DISCOVERY

FURNISHES A STEP

WHICH LEADS ON TO

THE COMPLETE TRUTH

THE ADVENTURE OF THE ENGINEER’S THUMB (1892)

A

s the reader is informed by Dr. Watson early on in “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” this case is one of only two that he has brought to Sherlock Holmes’s attention. Another unusual, although by no means unique, feature is the fact that the criminals manage to evade capture. In a few other cases, the perpetrators initially escape from Holmes, but then fate steps in to mete out justice. In this story, however, there appears to be no retribution for the crime.

An early-morning visitor

So many of Holmes’s cases begin with a knock on the door of the detective’s 221B Baker Street rooms, but here the victim arrives at Watson’s home. As the doctor stresses, the events occur during a quiet, comfortable time in his life: following his recent marriage, he has established a medical practice close to Paddington Station and now only occasionally visits Holmes, for social reasons.

Watson has a useful ally at the nearby station—a train conductor, who directs a steady stream of patients toward his consulting rooms. Early one morning, the conductor arrives with a young man who has alighted from the morning train and asked to see a doctor.

The severed digit

Watson learns the patient is a hydraulic engineer by the name of Victor Hatherley. He is pale and agitated, and when the doctor suggests that his train journey might have been monotonous, Hatherley breaks into wild laughter that borders on mild hysteria. He soon reveals to Watson the reason for his distress: he has suffered a terrible injury—the loss of his thumb.

Holmes sat in his big armchair with the weary, heavy-lidded expression which veiled his keen and eager nature.

Dr. Watson

THE ADVENTURE OF THE ENGINEER’S THUMB 91

Some critics have suggested that this loss of a thumb could be seen as akin to a symbolic castration, and that Conan Doyle was using it to issue a warning. In the 1890s, many people worried that young British men were becoming rather decadent and effete. So here this “castration” may be a reminder of the need to maintain good moral fiber and resilience in a world that challenged Britain’s dominance.

Many Holmes stories feature ruthless villains and gruesome crimes, some of which contain graphic descriptions of physical injury; yet, Watson’s recollection of Hatherley’s injury is shocking in its vividness: “There were four protruding fingers and a horrid red, spongy surface where the thumb should have been. It had been hacked or torn right out from the roots.” Conan Doyle does not usually resort to such sensational detail to grab attention, but here it works. Like Watson, the reader is roused from the preceding, rather sleepy, narrative, and the tale suddenly gains momentum. In its way, this injury is as horrifying as a murder and, like the doctor, the reader is anxious for Holmes to step in as soon as possible.

An analytical mind

When Watson and Hatherley arrive at 221B, Holmes immediately instills calm. After producing some bacon and eggs, he listens with close attention to Hatherley’s story. Holmes invites the young man to lie down on his couch while recalling the events: an approach that is strikingly reminiscent of a key technique that the esteemed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was using with his patients at the time Conan Doyle was writing this story. Of course, the author could not have known about Freud’s ideas, which were not revealed until 1895 with the publication of Studies on Hysteria, his groundbreaking book written with Joseph Breuer. Yet there is an uncanny similarity in the way that both Freud and Holmes listen to a narrative before working toward their conclusions through a steady process of logical deduction.

A tempting offer

Hatherley explains that he is alone in the world—both an orphan and a bachelor. He has been making little headway in his small business, so when a middle-aged German man, who introduced himself as Colonel

Victor Hatherley, illustrated here by Sidney Paget in The Strand Magazine, finds himself trapped inside the large hydraulic press that he was hired to repair.

Lysander Stark, visited him earlier that week and offered him a hefty fee—10 times his usual rate—to repair a hydraulic press, he was eager to agree. Hatherley admits to having had some misgivings about the new client’s manner and his insistence that the work should be carried out in complete secrecy, saying he evoked “a feeling of repulsion” and “something akin to fear.” However, he overlooked his ❯❯

92 THE EARLY ADVENTURES

When Hatherley

is taken from the station to the house where the press is located, the journey takes an hour, so the police estimate it was a distance of about 12 miles. Holmes believes that because the horse was “fresh and glossy” the house is in fact located very close to the station— a belief that proves to be correct.

The actual route was roughly circular, lasting an hour but

returning to near the station.

Police believe the house could be located anywhere within a

12-mile radius

of the station.

The house Eyford train station

distrust and dislike because he so desperately wanted the work. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the warning signs, it is Stark who turns out to be the villain of the piece. Conan Doyle’s choice of a German national for his evil-doer was probably no coincidence, since it may have been a reflection of the growing anti-German sentiment in Britain at the time. Germany was becoming increasingly militaristic under the ambitious and hostile rule of Kaiser Wilhelm, who was supporting the Boers in South Africa against the British during the Boer War (1899–1902).

A narrow escape

Hatherley explains to the group that Stark persuaded him to head out into the Berkshire countryside late that same evening, to examine and mend a hydraulic press being used to compact Fuller’s earth— a clay used in the wool-making process. He was met by Stark at the isolated station and driven for an hour through the darkness, in a horse-drawn carriage with frosted-glass windows, to the house where the press was located. At this point, Holmes interrupts to ask a seemingly trivial question about the carriage’s horse—was it tired-looking or fresh? The response— “fresh and glossy”—gives the detective his first clue.

At the house, Stark briefly left Hatherley alone, at which point he was approached by a beautiful

In the silence I heard a sound which sent my heart into my mouth.

Victor Hatherley

young woman, later identified as Elise. In broken English, she repeatedly implored the young engineer to leave immediately. However, Hatherley was in desperate need of his fee, and determined to prove his toughness by seeing the job through, so he chose to ignore her warning.

Stark returned with his alleged manager, a Mr. Ferguson, and the pair took Hatherley to the press, located inside a small room. As they entered, the colonel explained that they were now standing inside the machine itself, and that it would be “a particularly unpleasant thing for us if anyone were to turn it on,” since the ceiling would come down with crushing force to meet the floor. Hatherley examined the press, and after discovering a leak in the mechanism, he advised Stark on how to fix it. However, during his inspection it dawned on him that this device was not being used for crushing Fuller’s earth; instead, it was being used to press

THE ADVENTURE OF THE ENGINEER’S THUMB 93

metal. Upon hearing this, Holmes quickly realizes that it is a machine for making counterfeit coins.

Recognizing that Hatherley had seen through their ploy and afraid that he may have realized the true nature of their illegal work, Stark exited the room, locked the door, and turned on the press—intending to grind the engineer to a pulp. Hatherley screamed and begged to be let out, but his cries were ignored. The ceiling began its ominous descent and it was just a few feet away from Hatherley’s body when the engineer suddenly spotted a concealed panel in the walls of the press. He threw himself through it, narrowly avoiding death.

Waiting on the other side was Elise, who led him to a second-story window and urged him to jump. As Hatherley clung to the windowsill by his hands, Stark arrived brandishing a cleaver and hacked off his thumb. The engineer fell into the garden below and then staggered into some rose bushes before passing out. He regained consciousness the next morning and, nursing his injury, made his way to the train station, which he was surprised to find close by.

Coiners and smashers

…every moment now is precious, so if you feel equal to it we shall go down to Scotland Yard.

Sherlock Holmes

House on fire

After hearing the story, Holmes, Watson, and Hatherley set off by train for Eyford, with policemen in tow, to apprehend Stark. En route, they calculate the house’s likely location, using Hatherley’s estimate that it took an hour to get to the house, and therefore it was about 12 miles from the station. Yet Holmes insists the house is close to the station, surmising from Hatherley’s assertion about the fresh state of the horse that the carriage had gone in a circle in order to confuse the engineer’s sense of distance and direction.

Coins were counterfeited on a huge scale in Victorian London. It is thought that at the beginning of the 19th century there were nearly 50 mints churning out forged half-crowns and other coins, and that by 1850, more than one-fifth of all the trials held at London’s Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) were for “coining” (counterfeiting coins). The guilty parties included both men and women.

The forgers who set up a press, like Colonel Lysander Stark and his accomplices, were known as “coiners” or “bit-fakers,” while

Holmes’s deduction is confirmed when, on arrival, they notice flames coming from a nearby house and, as they approach, Hatherley is sure it is the one he was taken to (the discovery by firemen of his severed thumb proves it). The oil lamp that Hatherley had used to inspect the press had started the blaze and it has destroyed all evidence of the counterfeiting gang’s machine. The mysterious German, Elise, and Mr. Ferguson (who it turns out is really named Dr. Becher) have already fled, taking their hoard of counterfeit coins with them, and they are never apprehended.

A painful lesson

As they return to London, Holmes is remarkably sanguine about the case’s outcome. When Hatherley complains that he has lost both his thumb and his fee, Holmes laughs and tells him to simply dine out on the experience. The story, it seems, is not meant to be one of the typical expositions of Holmes’s brilliance, which is relatively modest here, but instead a salutary tale about how easy it is to get sucked into shady and dangerous dealings if one is tempted by easy cash. ■

the low-life criminals who would subsequently pass the forgeries into circulation were called “smashers.” The fake coins themselves were known as “snide,” and the smasher’s job was often referred to as “snide-pitching.”

Counterfeiting was a labor-intensive and skillful business, since the forgers had to get hold of a press and all the metal they needed to make the coins, and then correctly set up the machine to churn them out. Yet it proved to be a profitable (if disreputable) business for many.

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: April 1892

COLLECTION

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892

CHARACTERS

Lord Robert St. Simon

Middle-aged second son of the Duke of Balmoral.

Hatty Doran Young American woman, recently married to St. Simon.

Flora Millar Former music-hall dancer and an intimate of St. Simon.

Francis (“Frank”) Hay Moulton Wealthy American gentleman, formerly a mining prospector.

Inspector Lestrade Scotland Yard detective.

I HAD FORMED MY

CONCLUSIONS AS TO THE

CASE BEFORE OUR CLIENT

CAME INTO THE ROOM

THE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELOR (1892)

A

s the story opens, Watson is confined indoors by the seasonal ache of his war wound. His day is brightened by the arrival of an eminent new client: Lord Robert St. Simon, one of the highest aristocrats in the land.

The nobleman has recently married Hatty Doran, a free-spirited American heiress. However, during their wedding reception, the bride excused herself and fled, and has not been seen since. Flora Millar, a jealous chorus girl with whom St. Simon had once been intimate, tried to storm into the reception and was subsequently seen talking to Hatty in Hyde Park. Flora has been arrested but St. Simon does not believe she has done Hatty any harm, but he is anxious to find his wife, and so he engages the services of Holmes and Lestrade.