第 44 页

J. M. Barrie on an operetta, Jane Annie, which was dismissed by George Bernard Shaw as an “outburst of tomfoolery.”

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: February 1922 US: February/March 1922

COLLECTION

The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1927

CHARACTERS Neil Gibson American millionaire, gold magnate, and former senator.

Mrs. Gibson

Neil’s Brazilian wife.

Miss Grace Dunbar

Governess to the Gibsons’ two young children.

Sergeant Coventry

Local policeman.

I CAN DISCOVER

FACTS

WATSON

BUT I CANNOT

CHANGE THEM

THE PROBLEM OF THOR BRIDGE (1922)

T

he 50th story in the canon, “The Problem of Thor Bridge” begins with a revelation that has haunted avid Holmesians ever since, as Watson mentions the existence of a “travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box” full of Holmes’s untold cases. But this story gives fans of the great detective more than just teasers. Beyond the story itself, and the remarkable range of motivations displayed among its cast’s principal players, it contains unusually rich insights into Holmes’s character, prejudices, and even his fallibility.

A problem without a solution may interest the student, but can hardly fail to annoy the casual reader.

Dr. Watson

No match for Holmes

The client is a ruthless American gold magnate and former senator named Neil Gibson, with a number of similarities to the real-life gold king and politician George Hearst (father of the famous newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst), which are surely too striking to be coincidental. Gibson’s wife, a fiery Brazilian (“tropical by birth and tropical by nature”), has been found shot through the head on a stone bridge over a lake on Gibson’s Hampshire estate, Thor Place. The Gibson children’s governess, Grace Dunbar, who admits that she met Mrs. Gibson on the bridge, has been arrested. The dead woman was found clutching an incriminating note from Miss Dunbar, and a fired revolver was subsequently discovered in the governess’s wardrobe.

Gibson is an unappealing character. His own estate manager calls him “an infernal villain,” and Watson observes waspishly, “An Abraham Lincoln keyed to base uses instead of high ones would give some idea of the man.” The millionaire wants Holmes to take the case in order to clear Miss Dunbar, but when he lies about

THE PROBLEM OF THOR BRIDGE 255

being in love with her, Holmes sends him packing. Used to getting his own way, Gibson greets Holmes’s refusal with angry threats, but Holmes is not remotely flustered, responding placidly, “Don’t be noisy, Mr. Gibson.” Holmes’s delightful immunity to intimidation is one of his most appealing characteristics, and it is this same lack of deference to status or ego that causes him to needle his royal employer in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (pp.56–61) and to scoff at Baron Gruner’s threats in “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” (pp.266–71).

Eventually Gibson admits that he previously made unsuccessful advances toward the charismatic governess, which she rebuffed. She stayed in his household, however, because it seems she felt she could exert a positive influence on his character. Gibson is plainly under her benevolent spell, so Holmes takes the case for the sake of the governess rather than her employer.

A devilish crime

After visiting Thor Place with Watson, and inspecting the crime scene with the official investigator, Sergeant Coventry, Holmes then interviews Miss Dunbar in her Winchester jail cell. She swears that the assignation at the bridge was proposed in a note from Mrs. Gibson herself, and that the letter she wrote in response merely confirmed the time and place. Miss Dunbar alleges that on arriving at the bridge, she was subjected to a tirade of bile from the jealous woman: “Never did I realize till that moment how this poor creature hated me… She poured her whole

Crime scene reconstruction

Crime scene analysis and reconstruction was a relatively new but rapidly developing discipline during the 40 years Conan Doyle was writing the Holmes stories. Some elements of forensics – such as fingerprinting – were already in use by the turn of the 20th century, but the Victorians still relied largely on a flawed model of detection, in which theories were based first on testimony and motive, before corroborative physical evidence was sought.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” however, Holmes warns against twisting facts to suit theories, and he was not alone in this belief. The criminalist Hans Gross wrote in 1898 that theories should be based on empirical physical evidence rather than testimony, and the criminologist Edward Oscar Heinrich held the belief that investigators needed to find out “what happened, where it happened and when it happened” before they could hope to find a suspect.

The make of gun (or guns) owned by Holmes and Watson is the subject of great Holmesian debate. Some believe that Watson’s revolver, which plays a vital role in this story, may have been either a Webley or an Adams (pictured).

wild fury out in burning and horrible words.” She claims Mrs. Gibson then fled from the bridge.

The revolver in Miss Dunbar’s wardrobe turns out to be one of a pair, but its match can not be found among Gibson’s “formidable array of firearms of various shapes and sizes.” British perceptions of gun-toting Americans have apparently not changed a great deal in the course of the past century, and Sergeant Coventry’s observation that “these Americans are readier with pistols than our folk are” is echoed elsewhere in the canon in trigger-happy characters such as “Killer” Evans in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs” (pp.262–65).

The breakthrough

The key to the case is a large, fresh chip in the bridge’s parapet, a chip that appears to have come from a ❯❯

256 THE FINAL DEDUCTIONS

The revolver was

tied to a length

of string.

revolver

chip in parapet

Mrs. Gibson’s body string

As the weight

pulled the revolver

over the bridge,

it chipped the

weight parapet.

Holmes carefully reconstructs the scene of the crime at Thor Bridge, with the aid of Watson’s revolver. He successfully demonstrates how the pistol that killed Mrs. Gibson was fired, and thereby solves the case.

hard object hitting the stonework with great force. Holmes realizes its significance, and Watson’s trusty revolver is once more pressed into service, as the crucial prop in a crime scene reconstruction. Holmes ties his gun to a length of string, and the other end of the string to a heavy stone, which he dangles over the bridge. Standing where Mrs. Gibson’s body was found, he holds the gun to his head, then releases his grip. As the stone drags the revolver into the lake, the gun strikes the parapet, creating a chip identical to the one already there.

Holmes has proved that the case is not a murder, but a suicide cunningly contrived to implicate the unfortunate governess. Although the idea may seem fantastical, Conan Doyle was, in fact, inspired

The revolver and string disappeared into the water beneath the bridge.

by a real German case, reported by the Austrian criminalist Hans Gross in 1896, of a man who killed himself in just this manner, making it seem to be murder so as not to invalidate his life insurance policy, from which his family would benefit.

The power of love

Gibson has already admitted that, having long since fallen out of love with his wife, he began to have strong feelings for Miss Dunbar. Though there was no impropriety, he says, “There is no doubt that my wife was bitterly jealous.” Mrs. Gibson was a passionate, primal South American (much like Mrs. Ferguson in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” pp.260–61) and she was “crazy with hatred” toward her children’s governess.

The story refers repeatedly to the difference between a “physical” relationship and a “mental” one, with the deep and intense, but chaste, intellectual bond between Gibson and Miss Dunbar being somehow more intimate than his former physical attraction and very real marriage to Mrs. Gibson. The governess speculates that Mrs. Gibson “loved so vividly in a physical sense that she could hardly understand the mental, and even spiritual, tie which held her husband to me,” while Gibson himself grapples with this concept when he tries to explain that “there is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.”

This question of physical versus spiritual love had at one time greatly occupied Conan Doyle’s own mind.

THE PROBLEM OF THOR BRIDGE 257

Long before his first wife, Louise (“Touie”) died in 1906, Conan Doyle had met and fallen in love with a beautiful woman, fourteen years his junior, named Jean Leckie. He always maintained that their relationship had remained platonic until they were married (following Touie’s death), and it is difficult not to read overtones of his own life in the complicated love triangle of “The Problem of Thor Bridge.” Alluding to the relationship with Leckie in a letter to his mother, Conan Doyle wrote, “there is a large side of my life which was unoccupied, but is no longer so.”

Gibson evidently feels the same way, and he is ultimately offered a chance at achieving his creator’s own happiness. The reader is left wondering whether he and Miss Dunbar will now get married, and whether she really will help him to “see past the dollars to something… more lasting.”

A detached professional?

In “The Problem of Thor Bridge” Holmes’s own behavior is complicated by his attitude toward his client, who seems to offend both his morals and his vanity. When first taking the case, Gibson asks him to name his price

Every link is now in its place and the chain is complete.

Sherlock Holmes

Mr. Neil Gibson has learned something in that schoolroom of sorrow where our earthly lessons are taught.

Sherlock Holmes

and think of his reputation: “If you pull this off every paper in England and America will be booming you. You’ll be the talk of two continents.” Holmes replies coldly that his fees are on a fixed scale, and that he prefers to work anonymously. These are rather contrary assertions for a man who has, for example, gleefully taken a large fee from the Duke of Holdernesse in “The Adventure of the Priory School” (pp.178–83). Possibly he is offended by the assumption that his motivations are so crude, or perhaps he simply wants some meaningful sacrifice from Gibson. While he enjoys prying riches from tightfisted Old World aristocrats, the American’s money is inconsequential to Holmes because it is inconsequential to the client.

As Holmes explains, “it is the problem itself which attracts me,” but if this desire to reduce human drama to a cerebral conundrum seems rather cold, it would appear that Holmes is more emotionally invested in the case than he will admit. He is genuinely sympathetic toward Miss Dunbar, and there is perceptible irritation in his voice when he snaps at Gibson, “Some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed into condoning your offences.”

A multifaceted hero

In this story, Conan Doyle depicts a much more layered Holmes than the detached superhero of earlier tales. Indeed, over the course of this and the other stories in The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, the detective betrays cruder emotions, such as anger, fear, vengefulness, and cynicism, than previously, along with a capacity for misjudgment and even defeat. His injury in “The Illustrious Client,” and the dispatch-box full of unsolved cases mentioned at the beginning of this story both imbue Holmes with a new and very human potential for failure. It may have been that Conan Doyle wanted to give his creation a more complex character, before consigning him to that “fantastic limbo for the children of imagination,” as described in his preface to the Case Book. ■

Holmes strikes the parapet of the bridge with his cane, as illustrated here by Alfred Gilbert in The Strand Magazine, and deduces that the chip was caused by a hard knock from above.

WHEN ONE TRIES TO

RISE ABOVE NATURE

ONE IS LIABLE TO

FALL BELOW IT

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN (1923)

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: March 1923 US: March 1923

COLLECTION

The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1927

CHARACTERS

Professor Presbury

Eminent physiologist at the University of Camford.

Trevor Bennett Professional assistant, lodger, and future son-in-law of the professor.

Edith Presbury

Daughter of the professor, and Bennett’s fiancée.

H.Lowenstein

Prague-based physiologist.

A.Dorak Lowenstein’s agent in London.

S

et in 1903, shortly before Holmes’s retirement, this story is prefaced with some interesting reflections from Watson about the role he has played in the great detective’s brilliant career; the doctor fully acknowledges that his methodical and literal ways of thinking may be irritating, but considers that they have acted as a foil and a stimulant to Holmes’s roving imagination.

A creepy case

The client in this case is Trevor Bennett, who is concerned about his employer, and presents Holmes

Jeremy Brett, Edward Hardwicke, and Colin Jeavons star as Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade, respectively, in this scene from the 1991 ITV adaptation of “The Creeping Man.”

with a number of details about Professor Presbury, a 61-year-old widower. The professor has recently fallen passionately in love with a young woman in her twenties, but she rejected him because of his age. Presbury then took a mysterious trip to Prague, and has been in an uncharacteristically irascible and aggressive mood ever since. His once-devoted dog is now agitated

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN 259

by its master’s presence, attacking him twice. Finally, the professor’s terrified daughter has spotted him in the middle of the night, “creeping” around, animal-like, on his hands and knees, along the landing.

Brushing aside Watson’s medical diagnosis of lumbago, Holmes suspects that something more interesting is afoot. Bennett has recorded that every nine days, the professor receives a package from a Bohemian dealer in London, which he will not let him open. The professor’s fits of rage and vigor follow the arrival of the package, so Holmes concludes he is obtaining some sort of drug from Prague.

When, following the nine-day cycle, Holmes and Watson travel to meet the professor at his university, he is instantly overcome by an alarmingly violent rage; Holmes also observes that the man’s knuckles are “thick and horny.” One night, during a clandestine observation of the professor’s movements, the duo watch in alarm as he squats on all fours, and then, with amazing agility, scales the ivy that grows on the side of his house. He is a sinister, terrifying apparition, “with his dressing-

In all our adventures I do not know that I have ever seen a more strange sight.