第 40 页

A stolen military secret

It is late November 1895. A dense fog has hung over London for some days, and Holmes and Watson have been confined to their apartment. This fog is a running theme and an important narrative device throughout the story.

Mycroft arrives at Baker Street with Inspector Lestrade to ask for his brother’s urgent assistance. Holmes is restless from inaction and eager for adventure, and agrees to help with the case.

The body of Arthur Cadogan West, a young clerk working at the Woolwich Arsenal (an armaments factory), has been found on the Underground tracks just outside Aldgate station. His skull has been fractured, and he has a sheaf of top-secret government papers in his pocket. These were the Bruce-Partington Plans, concerning a revolutionary new submarine. Such vessels were not in use until World War I, but research and development was ongoing in the early years of the 20th century, so the story anticipates the critical role these covert naval vessels were to play in the coming decades. Work on Britain’s E-class submarine was also in progress at the time, and the Bruce-Partington submarine may well have been a

The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim.

Sherlock Holmes

Submarines captured the public imagination in 1870 when Jules Verne published his novel 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. The British Navy commissioned its first vessel in 1902.

code for this particular pioneering war vessel. The plans comprised 10 pages, but only seven are found on the clerk; three of the four most vital pages are missing. Mycroft urges his brother to find them as a matter of vital national security.

Piecing things together

As the story unfolds, it seems that the apparently steady and honest Cadogan West is in fact guilty of the crime. The plans were kept in a safe in a locked office next to the arsenal. Only two people had keys to this office—Sir James Walter, a prominent government scientist who is beyond reproach, and Sidney Johnson, the loyal senior clerk. However, Cadogan West worked alongside Johnson and had daily access to the plans. Holmes surmises that he could have had duplicate keys made as part of a plan to steal and sell the papers to a foreign agent for a large sum.

Holmes visits the spot where the clerk’s body was found—a junction in the line—and learns that a passenger had heard a loud thud at around 11:40pm, but was ❯❯

232 HOLMES TAKES A BOW

The final journey of Cadogan West

Alive Dead

In pursuit of the stolen plans, Cadogan West follows the thief to Oberstein’s house in Caulfield Gardens, London, where he is murdered. The villains use the passing train to dispose of his body.

unable to see anything through the thick fog. Strangely, although the poor clerk’s head had been crushed, there were no signs of violence in the train cars, nor any blood on the line. Holmes deduces that he must have been killed elsewhere, and that his body, which Holmes believes was placed on the train’s roof, had fallen as the train turned the corner.

A round of calls

Holmes and Watson proceed to visit several people connected with the case. First, they go to the home of Sir James Walter, but to their surprise they discover that he has died that morning; his brother, Colonel Valentine Walter, informs them that the scandal of the missing papers was a “crushing blow” that killed him. Holmes wonders whether it is suicide—a “sign of self-reproach for the duty neglected”—but strangely, the reader never learns the cause of his death.

Trains stop

directly behind Oberstein’s home, so the body is placed on a train car roof.

Aldgate station

Body falls off

at a sharp bend, and is found just before Aldgate station.

Next, they visit the murdered clerk’s fiancée, Miss Violet Westbury, who tells them that she and Cadogan West had been on their way to the theater when he had inexplicably disappeared into the fog near his office at about 7:30pm. The two theater tickets found in his pocket would seem to corroborate her story. She says he would never sell a state secret, but does admit that he had seemed upset and said something about “foreign spies” and “traitors.”

A visit to Sidney Johnson at the arsenal yields information that excites Holmes: outside the window of the office from which the papers were stolen is a bush with snapped-off branches; also, the shutters do not close fully, making it possible for someone outside to observe the activity inside the room. Finally, they speak with the railroad officer at Woolwich station, who remembers having seen a very agitated man boarding the 8:15pm train to London. Holmes is stumped, and says he cannot recall that he and Watson “have ever had a case which was more difficult to get at.”

A clever conceit

Holmes asks his brother for a list of all the foreign agents in London. One of these, Hugo Oberstein, has just left town. This is the German spy’s second appearance in the Holmes stories—he was one of the foremost agents in “The Second Stain” (pp.202–07)—but plays a more significant role in this story.

In his pursuit of moral justice— even at the expense of the law— Holmes persuades Watson to help him break into Oberstein’s residence. The lodgings back onto an above-ground section of the Underground line near Gloucester Road station, at a junction where the trains often stop for several minutes. They soon notice scuffs and bloodstains on the window overlooking the line and conclude that Cadogan West’s body was placed on the roof of a carriage from the window, which is immediately above where the train would have stopped. They also come across a series of coded messages in the

This must be serious, Watson. A death which has caused my brother to alter his habits can be no ordinary one.

Sherlock Holmes

THE ADVENTURE OF THE BRUCE-PARTINGTON PLANS 233

I’m afraid… that all the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men cannot avail in this matter.

Sherlock Holmes

Daily Telegraph agony column, posted by “Pierrot,” arranging to buy the Bruce-Partington plans from a mystery seller.

In an ingenious move, Holmes posts another “Pierrot” message in the paper, requesting to meet the unknown document thief that night at the agent’s Caulfield Gardens apartment. The ruse works, and Colonel Valentine Walter arrives to find Holmes, Watson, Lestrade, and Mycroft waiting for him.

A satisfying conclusion

Colonel Walter confesses to the theft, explaining that he was in debt and motivated by the financial reward, and had copied his brother’s keys to the office. Cadogan West, while out with his fiancée, had seen lights on in the office and had gone to investigate. He had then boarded the 8:15pm train to London in pursuit of the colonel, and followed him to Oberstein’s lodgings where he met his unfortunate end.

Colonel Walter insists that the fatal blow to the young clerk’s head was inflicted by Oberstein, who had taken three of the most important pages of the document, hoping the remaining seven would be enough to incriminate the clerk. Holmes persuades the colonel to write to the treacherous agent, who is now on the Continent, offering him the fourth vital page he needs to be able to build the submarine.

Oberstein takes the bait, returns to London, and is captured, and the missing pages from the Bruce-Partington plans are discovered in his trunk. Holmes’s genius at solving the crime wins him an emerald tie pin from a “certain gracious lady”—Queen Victoria herself. Colonel Walter goes to prison and dies there. Oberstein serves 15 years—a light sentence for what was then a capital offense, prompting critics to suggest that he “bought” his life with more secrets.

Real-life crimes

The fog—so much a feature of Victorian London—plays a pivotal role in this story of conspiracy and deception. Its presence, as Holmes maintains at the story’s opening, allows people to roam around unnoticed. The heavy shroud it casts over the city makes it possible for Cadogan West to follow Colonel Walter to Oberstein’s house, and both enables Oberstein to place Cadogan West’s body on the train, and allows it to fall unseen.

Over the years, experts have debated the extent to which real-life crimes inspired this Holmes tale. It has been suggested that the body of a young woman found in a London train tunnel gave Conan Doyle the idea for Cadogan West’s end, and that the character of Colonel Walter is based on Frank Shackleton, brother of polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and a prime suspect in the 1907 theft of the Irish Crown Jewels. Whether accurate or not, one thing is certain: Conan Doyle was a master at weaving real-life circumstances—from political scandals to the lead-up to war— into his intricately crafted fiction. ■

The birth of the London Underground

As the population of London ballooned in the first half of the 19th century, it became increasingly difficult and time-consuming to cross the city along its busy streets. A group of engineering entrepreneurs came up with a radical vision of “trains in drains”—an underground system of passenger steam trains.

After years of investment, planning, and construction, the world’s first underground railroad, the Metropolitan Line, opened in 1863. One of its stations was Holmes’s local— Baker Street. The gas-lit wooden carriages carried 40,000 Londoners the 3-mile (5-km), 18-minute stretch on its first day. Detractors warned of the slippery slope to social equality as upper-class passengers were forced “to ride side by side with Billingsgate ‘fish fags’.” But the Underground network expanded rapidly and became largely responsible for the move of low-paid workers out of inner-city slums, the expansion of the suburbs, and the birth of commuting.

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

US: November 1913 UK: December 1913

COLLECTION

His Last Bow, 1917

CHARACTERS

Mrs. Hudson

Holmes’s landlady.

Culverton Smith Planter and amateur microbiologist.

Inspector Morton

Scotland Yard detective.

WELL

WATSON

WE

SEEM TO HAVE FALLEN

UPON EVIL DAYS

THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE (1913)

H

olmes often goes to great lengths to solve his cases, and in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” he takes his dedication to the cause to a new level. Having been previously unable to prove a case of poisoning—and having provoked the wrath of the murderer in the meantime—Holmes prepares a cunning trap, while in the process coldly and calculatedly deceiving those who love him most into believing that he is dying.

Holmes at death’s door

One foggy November day, a distressed Mrs. Hudson calls on Watson with devastating news: Holmes is at death’s door. Poor Mrs. Hudson; Holmes, not content merely with swamping her house with acrid tobacco fumes, keeping wildly uncivilized hours, conducting “weird and often malodorous scientific experiments,” and firing his revolver indoors—making him the “very worst tenant in London”—

The tools of Holmes’s transformation

Belladonna Beeswax Vaseline

Belladonna is Beeswax crusted Vaseline applied

used by Holmes around his mouth across Holmes’s

to imbue his eyes makes him look like forehead further

with “the brightness he has not had food embellishes his

of fever.” or water for days. “ghastly face.”

THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE 235

The sick room was a gloomy spot, but it was that gaunt, wasted face staring at me from the bed which sent a chill to my heart.

Dr. Watson

now adds extreme emotional manipulation to the catalog of indignities he has perpetrated on his landlady over the years.

A distraught Watson rushes to Holmes’s bedside to find him rambling deliriously about oysters and apparently suffering from a highly contagious tropical disease he says he must have caught while “working on a case” among Chinese sailors at Rotherhithe docks. Not caring for his own safety, Watson wants to examine him, but Holmes insists he stay back, woundingly making reference to his “mediocre qualifications.” Mysteriously, Holmes also sharply reprimands him when he is about to touch a small ivory box on the mantelpiece.

Holmes dispatches Watson, now bitterly hurt as well as distressed at the imminent death of his friend, to fetch the one man Holmes says can help him: Culverton Smith, a planter and amateur microbiologist visiting London from Sumatra. On his way out, Watson encounters a strangely excited Inspector Morton of Scotland Yard (described here as “an old acquaintance,” but never explicitly encountered anywhere else in the canon).

A formidable foe

The ill-tempered Smith is small and frail, but with “menacing” eyes, and a “skull of enormous capacity.” Clearly he is a mastermind from the same mold as Moriarty. Initially reluctant to receive Watson, he brightens up when he hears of Holmes’s plight: “He is an amateur of crime, as I am of disease. For him the villain, for me the microbe.” Smith agrees to call on Holmes.

Obeying Holmes’s strict, cryptic instructions, Watson returns alone to 221B and hides behind his friend’s bed. When Smith turns up, it is to gloat. Thinking he and Holmes are alone, he admits to sending the small ivory box, which he had booby-trapped with a deadly disease. He also confesses to murdering his nephew in a like manner to secure a “reversion”; that is, to get his hands on the young man’s property. At Holmes’s request, he turns the gaslight up, unwittingly signaling to Inspector Morton outside, who promptly arrives to make the arrest. With Watson as a witness to all that has been said, the game is up, and Holmes admits to deceiving his adversary as well as his friend.

The truth comes out

Holmes tries to soothe Watson by explaining that he could never have deceived him if he had let him get close—“Do you imagine that I have no respect for your medical talents?”—and that in turn Watson could never have fooled Smith without himself really believing that Holmes was dying. Having not eaten for three days, he suggests a restorative meal at one of their favorite establishments, Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. That he has put Watson and Mrs. Hudson through the wringer does not seem to cross his mind. ■

A deadly cosmetic

Holmes fooled Watson and Mrs. Hudson by dilating his pupils with belladonna, smearing beeswax around his mouth, and rubbing petroleum jelly on his forehead. The belladonna that Holmes uses would have come from Atropa belladonna, or deadly nightshade. Highly poisonous, belladonna’s Latin name (which translates as “beautiful woman”) derives from a habit common among Venetian ladies during the Renaissance of using the atropine from the plant to dilate their pupils. As a former ophthalmologist, Conan Doyle would have been well aware of its properties.

A sensational case took place in New York in 1893, when doctor Robert Buchanan was convicted of murdering his wife with morphine: he had also given her belladonna to disguise the characteristic narrowing of the pupils that would betray the presence of the drug. During the trial, the courtroom was subjected to a horrifying demonstration in which a cat was given a fatal dose of morphine, and then belladonna was applied to its eyes to show the effect.