Sherlock Unlocked Read online

  SHERLOCK

  UNLOCKED

  Also by Daniel Smith

  How to Think Like Sherlock

  The Ardlamont Mystery

  In memory of my father-in-law, Bob de Vekey (1940–2018)

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

  Michael O’Mara Books Limited

  9 Lion Yard

  Tremadoc Road

  London SW4 7NQ

  Copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 2019

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78929-069-1 in hardback print format

  ISBN: 978-1-78929-092-9 in ebook format

  www.mombooks.com

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  What’s in a Name?

  Never Beeton

  The Opening Chapter

  The Original Consulting Detective?

  The Legendary Langham

  Get Me a Paget – Any Paget!

  Becoming Sherlock Holmes

  A Baffling Performance

  What Have You Done with Mrs Hudson?

  Lazy Parenting

  Wild at Heart

  For What It’s Worth

  Stranded

  Sowing the Seed

  The Price of Success

  The Sincerest Form of Flattery

  Where Angels Fear to Tread

  Carved into History

  Art in the Blood

  Drawn from Life

  The Name’s Holmes . . . Sherlock Holmes

  Dear Mr Holmes

  Disrespecting One’s Elders

  Cock-Sure

  Smoking Slippers

  Home from Holmes

  A Place to Call Home

  The End?

  Off the Record

  The Amateur Reasoner

  Smarter than Einstein?

  Take It to the Bank

  Arms and the Man

  A Good Reade

  Not So Elementary, My Dear Watson

  Not Even the Brightest in the Family

  Doctor, Heal Thyself!

  Serial Monogamist?

  A Troublesome Son

  A Good Sport

  Bowled Over

  Heading for a Falls

  A Whale of a Time

  Fiddling the System

  The Guy’s in Disguise

  Ringing a Bell

  School of Scandal

  Defending the Family Honour

  The Islander Who Wasn’t

  When Doctors Go Wrong

  Something to Steady the Nerves

  Déjà Vu

  Bar Flies

  The Game is Afoot!

  The Right Tools

  Barts Alumni?

  A Fine Fellow

  The Last Word in Obscurity

  The Temple of Food

  Mysteries Within Mysteries

  Sherlock the Space Cadet?

  By the Book

  Performance of a Lifetime

  Dodgy Dealings

  Mum’s the Word

  Snake in the Grass

  Smoking Out the Truth

  On the Wrong Track

  The Wrong Type

  Getting into Gear

  Friends in High Places

  You Can’t Please Everyone

  The Sound of Silence

  The Smoking Gun

  In the Picture

  The Adventure of the Two Collaborators

  Never the Twain

  Monkeying Around

  Following in the Footsteps

  On the Shoulders of Giants

  A Wimsey-cal View

  A Clubable Fellow

  Identifying Irene

  Arise, Sir Sherlock

  Keeping It in the Family

  Putting Your Finger on It

  Take That!

  Baritsu or Bartitsu

  A Dog-ged Pursuit

  Ripper Yarns

  A Bad Habit

  A Gambling Man? You Bet

  Beastly Behaviour

  The Best Man for the Job

  Away with the Fairies

  A Man of Pseudo-Science

  A Jewel of a Story

  The Play’s the Thing

  Raffle Winner

  Local Rivals

  Backing the Underdog

  High Spirits

  My Word!

  Value for Money

  Love Rat

  The Hounds of Hell

  Partners in Crime-Writing?

  In the Pinkertons

  America’s Holmes

  Hands Across the Ocean

  Family Secrets

  No Casement to Answer

  Swings and Roundabouts

  Life, the Universe and Everything

  Scouting for Heroes

  His Master’s Voice

  The Bee-All and End-All

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INTRODUCTION

  There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, ‘THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY’

  What is Sherlock Holmes to you? Is he, as he is for millions, that figure in a deerstalker hat, smoking a curved pipe? Or perhaps in your mind’s eye he is Basil Rathbone, or Jeremy Brett, or maybe Benedict Cumberbatch? When you think of Holmes, do you conjure up a master of deduction, an unfeeling brain without a heart? And what about Watson? Is he that buffoon so entertainingly depicted by Nigel Bruce, and rehashed by countless actors since?

  Sherlock Holmes is so enduringly popular that he has become virtually detached from himself. Everyone thinks they know what sort of character he is, but our views are inevitably tinged by the effect of countless secondary interpretations of the original stories in which he appeared. That deerstalker and pipe were never there in Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of the detective. As you will read, they were adornments added by an illustrator and an actor, respectively. That is what happens when a literary creation gains sufficient popularity to become a cultural property belonging to everybody. Holmes is in rarefied company in this respect – Dracula, Peter Pan, Harry Potter – creations that exist beyond the texts that birthed them come along only every now and again.

  The idea of this book, then, is to go back to Conan Doyle’s original stories of the world’s greatest consulting detective and explore forgotten aspects of Sherlock Holmes – both the literary character and the cultural phenomenon. From clues in the text, we will explore everything from the personality traits of Holmes and Watson to the publishing history of the stories and the real-life cases that fuelled Conan Doyle’s imagination. There will be tales of grisly murders, friendships between famous names, curious plot anomalies that got past both Conan Doyle and his editors, and much more besides.

  Conan Doyle was one of history’s great story-tellers. With an unstinting curiosity about the world, he crafted narratives that rip along and characters who – even when infuriatingly other-worldly, as Holmes can sometimes seem – are ultimately rooted in a profound humanity to which we can all relate. If Holmes were merely the ‘brain without a heart’ that he is sometimes depicted as, his readers would have lost interest decades ago.

  But Conan Doyle had a complicated relationship with his literary son. While the world at large loved Holmes, his creator quickly grew weary of him. Were it not for the extraordinary financial incentives he had to carry on wi
th the stories, Holmes might well have had a much shorter career. Indeed, Conan Doyle thought he had successfully killed him off after just two novellas and twenty-four short stories – only to find his creation was already starting a life beyond his control. This all meant that Conan Doyle did not always write the Holmes stories with the same eye to detail with which they have been read in the 125 years and more since. As a result, the tales are littered with inconsistencies and apparent errors that raise fascinating questions in their own right, all adding to the rich tapestry of the Holmesian universe.

  A quick comment on terminology. The adjective ‘Holmesian’ – relating to all things related to Holmes and to those people who dedicate themselves to its study – is used widely. I have opted for this terminology over the commonly used alternative, ‘Sherlockian’. The words are, to a large extent, interchangeable, although historically Holmesian has been more widely used in Britain, with Sherlockian more popular in the US. As a born-and-bred Londoner who grew up in the southern reaches of the city, several areas of which make appearances in the stories, I defend my right to prefer the British variant!

  You will also see many references to ‘the canon’ and things ‘canonical’. The canon comprises simply the four Holmes novellas and fifty-six short stories (as published by the Strand magazine) written by Conan Doyle between 1887 and 1927. The founding texts, as it were. A great many were prefixed with the phrase ‘The Adventure of. . .’ when they originally appeared in the Strand, but for the sake of brevity I have rendered titles in their shortened forms in this volume. So, for instance, I refer to ‘The Speckled Band’ rather than ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’.

  There is no right or wrong way to enjoy Sherlock Holmes. If Rathbone or Cumberbatch is Holmes for you, that’s just fine. Conan Doyle certainly wouldn’t have worried. He, least of all people, believed in venerating his sage of Baker Street. But if the fancy takes you, this book will take you back to the author’s original stories – a springboard from which you can dive into the fascinating wider world of the great detective as Conan Doyle envisaged him, full of forgotten facts and intriguing anecdotes. This is a chance, then, to unlock Sherlock. To paraphrase Holmes: ‘Come, reader, come. The Game is afoot!’

  What’s in a Name?

  Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are up with the likes of Romeo and Juliet or Catherine and Heathcliff among literature’s most famous pairings. However, there was a time when Conan Doyle had other plans as to what his crime-fighting duo should be called. In early notes written in 1886 for the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, he indicated the duo were going to be called Sherrinford Holmes (Sherrington Hope was another name under consideration) and Ormond Sacker (or possibly Secker – the handwriting is difficult to decipher). Thankfully, within a month or so, Sherrinford was cast aside for Sherlock and Ormond Sacker/Secker gave way to Dr Watson. Even the title of the book changed, from the working title A Tangled Skein to the version that we are so familiar with today. The question of the inspirations for the names of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson has long been a source of contention. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr seems one of the more likely contenders for the detective’s surname, given Doyle’s self-professed admiration for the American physician and writer. Wendell Holmes was best known in Europe as one of the so-called New England Fireside Poets, who explored domestic and moralistic themes in largely conventional poetic styles. As for the origins of Sherlock, there are several candidates. There was a literary precursor in the form of William Sherlock who memorably appeared in Lord Macaulay’s A History of England. Then there was a William Sherlock serving as a Chief Inspector in London, whose name regularly found its way into the newspapers of the time. But perhaps more likely is Patrick Sherlock, an old schoolmate of Conan Doyle from his days at Stonyhurst College. Alternatively, Eille Norwood – who famously played Holmes in a series of silent movies – said Conan Doyle once told him that he named his lead character after two cricketers. As for Dr Watson, it was long thought that his name was borrowed from James Watson, a medical friend of Conan Doyle when he was practising as a GP in Southsea on the English south coast. However, more recent analysis suggests that the two men did not meet until some time after Conan Doyle had already conjured up Dr Watson. So, a more likely candidate is Dr Patrick Heron Watson, an eminent figure in the medical faculty at Edinburgh University when Conan Doyle was a student there. Like his fictional counterpart, Heron Watson had become a military man after completing his medical studies, before eventually being medically discharged. Moreover, Heron Watson’s obituary in the British Medical Journal in 1913 described a man of many notable achievements as well as an ‘extraordinarily simple nature with intense affections’. It might have been a description of Holmes’s own trusty comrade.

  ORMOND SECKER

  Incidentally, ‘Ormond Sacker’ was likely derived from London’s geography – ‘Ormond’ coming from the famous Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital and Sacker/Secker from Secker Street in Waterloo, close to the Royal Waterloo Hospital. Meanwhile, Secker Street was near Stamford Street, which probably inspired the naming of Stamford, the character who initially introduces Holmes and Watson in A Study in Scarlet.

  WHATEVER YOUR NAME IS!

  There is an additional twist to the story of the genesis of Holmes and Watson’s names. Given that they are only a duo, it would not seem unreasonable to expect some consistency across the stories as to their first names. Sure enough, Sherlock is only ever Sherlock. But Dr Watson appears both as John and James. To make matters worse, it is his first wife, whose maiden name was Mary Morstan, who throws the question of his nomenclature into doubt. We know from references across the canon that Watson’s given name is John. So just who is this ‘James’ character that the fragrant Mary refers to? It is to be hoped that it is merely a slip of the tongue and not a reference to some rival for her affections. Moreover, we are told that his middle name begins with ‘H’. The crime writer and great Holmesian Dorothy L. Sayer proposed a neat solution. She suggested that the ‘H.’ in Watson’s name stands for ‘Hamish’, which itself is a derivation of James. So, Mary might be sharing an intimacy – a pet name based on a middle name unknown to the world at large. Certainly, Holmes displayed no reaction to Mary’s use of the name, and it is hardly a thing that would have escaped his notice. The suggestion, then, is that she was in the habit of calling her husband James for innocent, if unclear, reasons.

  Never Beeton

  Sherlock Holmes’s debut in A Study in Scarlet was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in November 1887. Today, that magazine is widely regarded as the most valuable in the world. Not bad considering that copies sold for just a solitary shilling at the time. The first Beeton’s Christmas Annual had appeared in 1860, the brainchild of the publisher Samuel Beeton, husband of Isabella, better known as Mrs Beeton and the author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. That title was first published in 1861 and sold millions of copies over many decades. However, by the time A Study in Scarlet was ready to be unleashed, both Mr and Mrs Beeton were long since dead and the annual that bore their family name was owned by the firm of Ward, Lock & Co. Conan Doyle had hoped to receive a royalty dependent on sales for his story, but in a polite letter he was told that it was quite impossible as ‘it might give rise to some confusion’. Instead, he was paid a flat £25 and in return surrendered the copyright in its entirety. The annual had sold out by the end of the month. Today, there are just thirty-four copies known to have survived, most of them in libraries. It is extremely rare for an edition to come onto the open market and, when they do, there is always someone willing to pay a premium. The record price was achieved at auction in 2007, with the winning bid coming in at $156,000. We can only imagine how much one of the two copies signed by Conan Doyle himself would fetch should they ever come up for sale.

  The Opening Chapter

  Four years before A Study in Scarlet first appeared, Conan Doyle set out to write his first novel. It was 1883 and he was working as a do
ctor in Portsmouth at the time. He was starting to supplement his income by short-story writing but was already frustrated by the tendency for such stories to appear without their author’s name attached. Here was his chance to launch himself upon the world. With the not particularly promising title The Narrative of John Smith, it told the story of a fifty-year-old gout-sufferer compelled into a week of bed rest. Unsurprisingly, it was not big on dramatic plot swings: instead it was a connected set of discursive passages taking in everything from medicine to religion to interior design. According to its author, it had a ‘personal-social-political complexion’. He sent off the text, which took up about four exercise books, to a potential editor only for it to go missing in the post, never to be recovered. Undaunted, he reproduced it from memory, although it never did find a publisher in his lifetime. However, in 2004 it was given a new lease of life when the second draft came up for auction and was bought by the British Library for £1 million. The Library published it in 2011, to the general delight of academics and enthusiasts, even though the tale pales against the Holmes stories. Conan Doyle himself may well have been turning in his grave. ‘I must confess,’ he wrote in his later years, ‘that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again – in print.’

  The Original Consulting Detective?

  Sherlock Holmes himself suspected he was the world’s first and only consulting detective, but a real-life counterpart may also have had a strong claim to that title. This potential rival was a gentleman of German extraction called Wendel Scherer. Around 1881, while touting his services as a private consulting detective, he found himself summoned to help investigate what became known as the St Luke’s Mystery. It was certainly a strange case. A baker, who had himself come to England from Germany in 1870, was said to have returned one night to his home in Lever Street (in the St Luke’s district of East London), never to be seen again. He had run a successful business but after his disappearance it was taken over by an old friend to whom he had given a part-time job. This friend, one Felix Stumm, was said to have grown close to his former boss’s wife and suspicion soon enshrouded him. No body was ever recovered, making it impossible to make a murder charge stick, but Stumm was eventually sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for fraud. There are particular aspects of the case that suggest Conan Doyle may have been influenced by it when writing A Study in Scarlet. For one thing, the victim went by the name of Urban Napoleon Stanger, while the victim in Holmes’s debut was Stangerson – hardly a common name. Then there is the significance of the German language in the story, not to mention the fact that Conan Doyle chose to locate his hero’s home in Baker Street, echoing the profession of the victim of the St Luke’s Mystery. The evidence is not conclusive, but it is at least possible that Wendell Scherer was the prototype of the world’s most famous consulting detective.