The Misadventure of Shelrock Holmes (2 page)

I started on the first page of A Scandal in Bohemia and truly, the game was afoot. The unbearable pain in my ear — vanished! The abyss of melancholy into which only a twelve-year-old boy can sink — forgotten!

I finished THE ADVENTURES that night. I wasn't sad — I was glad. It wasn't the end — it was the beginning. I had knocked fearlessly on the door of a new world and I had been admitted. There was a long road ahead — even longer than I dreamed. That night, as I closed the book, I knew that I had read one of the greatest books ever written. And today I realize with amazement how true and

Vlll INTRODUCTION

tempered was my twelve-year-old critical sense. For in the mature smugness of my present literary judgment, I still feel — unalterably

— that THE ADVENTURES is one of the world's masterworks.

I could not have slept much that night. If I did, I merely passed from one dreamworld to another — with the waking dream infinitely more wondrous. I remember when morning came — how symbolically the sun shone past my window. I- leaped from bed, dressed, and with that great wad of yellow-stained cotton still in my ear, stole out of the house. As if by instinct I knew where the public library was. Of course it wasn't open, but I sat on the steps and waited. And though I waited hours, it seemed only minutes until a prim old lady came and unlocked the front door.

But, alas — I had no card. Yes, I might fill out this form, and take it home, and have my parents sign it, and then after three days

— three days? three eternities! — I could call and pick up my card. I begged, I pleaded, I implored — and there must have been something irresistible in my voice and in my eyes. Thank you now, Miss Librarian-of-Those-Days! Those thanks are long overdue. For that gentle-hearted old lady broke all the rules of librarydom and gave me a card — and told me with a twinkle in her eyes where I could find books by a man named Doyle.

I rushed to the stacks. My first reaction was one of horrible and devastating disappointment. Yes, there were books by Doyle on the shelves — but so few of them! I had expected a whole libraryful — rows and rows of Sherlock, all waiting patiently for my "coming of age."

I found three precious volumes. I bundled them under my arm, had them stamped, and fled home. Back in bed I started to read — A STUDY IN SCARLET, THE MEMOIRS (with a frontispiece that almost frightened me to death), THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. They were food and drink and medicine — and all the Queen's horses and all the Queen's men couldn't put Ellery together again.

But my doom had been signed, sealed, and delivered in THE ADVENTURES. The books which followed merely broadened the picture, filled in the indelible details. That tall, excessively lean man. His thin razor-like face and hawk's-bill of a nose. The curved pipe, the dressing gown. The way he paced up and down the room, quickly,

eagerly, his head sunk upon his chest. The way he examined the scene of a crime, on all fours, his nose to the ground. The gaunt dynamic figure and his incisive speech. The gasogene, the Persian slipper, and the coal scuttle for the cigars. The bullet-pocks on the wall, the scraping violin. The hypodermic syringe 1 - what a shock to my fledgling sensibilities! The ghostly hansom cab —with a twelve-year-old boy clinging by some miracle of literary gymnastics to its back as it rattled off through the mist and fog ... Reader, I had met Sherlock Holmes.

THIS IS now both Queens speaking . . .

To think of Sherlock Holmes by any other name, 2 as Vincent Starrett has said, is paradoxically unthinkable. And yet in this book you will meet him under a host of aliases.

It is interesting to note that the name, as we know it today, did not come to Doyle's mind in a lightning flash of inspiration. Doyle had to labor over it. His first choice, according to H. Douglas Thomson, 3 was Sherrington Hope. Only after considerable shuffling and reshuffling did Doyle hit on that peculiarly magical and inexplicably-satisfying combination of syllables which is now so permanent a part of the English language.

There seems to have been a halfway mark when the name was Sherrinford Holmes, which Vincent Starrett claims to have been the first form, 4 substantiating this claim with a reproduction of a page from Conan Doyle's old notebook 5 in which "Sherrinford Holmes"

1 A persistent legend attributes the reform of Sherlock Holmes (the cocaine habit disappears in the later adventures) to a member of Britain's Royal Family who is supposed to have suggested to Doyle that Holmes abandon the hypodermic in the interests of propriety.

2 Holmes is sometimes called Fu-erh-mo-hsi by Chinese detective-story writers. He is invariably treated as a great popular hero who wages deadly combat with ghosts, fox-women, tiger-men, and other supernatural horrors so dear to the heart of the Chinese masses.

3 H. Douglas Thomson's MASTERS OF MYSTERY: A Study of the Detective Story; London, Collins, 1931. Page 139: "In A STUDY IN SCARLET Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance as Mr. Sherrington Hope."

* Vincent Starrett's THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES; New York, Macmillan,

1933. page 8.

5 Ibid., page n. The same notebook page proves that Watson also experienced a metamorphosis: his original name was supposed to have been Ormond Sacker!

can be clearly deciphered in his creator's own handwriting. But there is no proof that the notebook page represents Doyle's earliest thinking, 6 since in his autobiography 7 Sir Arthur makes the statement: "First it was Sherringford Holmes; then it was Sherlock Holmes." Note the additional "g" in the first name: this is unsupported by the notebook page and must be interpreted either as a trick of Doyle's memory or another evolutionary stage harking back to Thomson's "Sherrington." 8

It has been said too that Doyle finally chose the surname "Holmes" because of his great admiration for Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American essayist, poet, and physician; and "Sherlock" because he once made thirty runs against a bowler of that name and thereafter had a kindly feeling for it. Both are mere beliefs, though almost universally accepted. It is significant that Doyle revealed no details whatever in his autobiography as to the true origin of the final name.

As a general rule writers of pastiches retain the sacred and inviolate form — Sherlock Holmes — and rightfully, since a pastiche is a serious and sincere imitation in the exact manner of the original author. But writers of parodies, which are humorous or satirical take-offs, have no such reverent scruples. They usually strive for the weirdest possible distortions and it must be admitted that many highly ingenious travesties have been conceived. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how much of a purist one is, the name Sherlock Holmes is peculiarly susceptible to the twistings and mis-shapenings of burlesque-minded authors.

6 Great writers are capable of great afterthoughts. The evolution of "Sherlock Holmes" from the incunabular "Sherrington Hope" and/or "Sherringford Holmes" is a creative change second only to Edgar Allan Poe's magnificent alteration in the title of die world's first detective story. Poe originally called it The Murders in the Rue Trianon Bas. The scratching out of Trianon Bas and the adding of [Rue] Morgue is one of the most inspired acts of penmanship in the history of literature.

7 MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES; London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1924; Boston, Little, Brown, 1924. How could Doyle have resisted die overwhelming temptation to call his autobiography ADVENTURES AND MEMOIRS?

8 It is Vincent Starrett's opinion dial Mr. Thomson merely trusted to his memory when he claimed Sherrington Hope to be die original name — and that his memory failed him. Mr. Thomson probably garbled Doyle's own statement about Sherrin(g)ford Holmes, tJhen mixed it up with Jefferson Hope, the name of the murderer in A STUDY IN SCARLET. Mr. Starrett is so certain this is what happened diat he is willing to bet all his precious first editions of Holmes that he is right! Personally, we agree with Mr. Starrett's views — so unconditionally, in fact, that we are prepared to risk our own precious first editions by offering to share Mr. Starrett's bet.

That is why you will meet in this volume such appellative disguises as

Sherlaw Kombs

Picklock Holes Thinlock Bones Shylock Homes 9 Hemlock Jones Purlock Hone Holmlock Shears Herlock Sholmes Shamrock Jolnes Solar Pons Shirley Holmes

and, by comparison, such moderately warped Watsonisms as

Whatson Potson Whatsoname Jobson Whatsup

WE CANNOT bring you anything new of Sherlock — you've read all there is. By the time this book is published, the newly discovered short story, The Man Who Was Wanted, may have been given to the world by the Doyle estate —and you will have devoured that. And that's all there is, there is no more. We are realists enough to face the hard fact that there is no Cox's Bank--not in this world; that there is no dispatch-box in its legendary vaults containing the documents of unrecorded cases. They are lost to us forever.

9 One of the newest variants has a curious politico-economic flavor: on the night of May 6 1943, in the Rudy Vallee radio show, Basil Rathbone played the part ot a detective named F. H. A. Homes. And currently, in the magazine 'Speed Comics, there is a series of color comics in which The Master Detective (assisted by Dr. Watsis) is called Padlock Homes.

Two bizarre uses of Sherlock as a first name also come to mind. On July ii, 1043 Station WJZ of New York broadcast a "Sneak Preview" radio program titled "Cohen the Detective"; this show. Potash and Perlmutter style, concerned the de-tectival misadventures of two partners in the clothing business, Mr. Sherlock Cohen and his associate, Mr. Wasserman. And in the magazine "Funny Animals, there is now appearing a series of color comics about Sherlock Monk, a monkey wearing a deerstalker-cap and smoking a calabash pipe, and his assistant, Chuck, a duck wearing a flat, wide-brimmed straw hat; it is Chuck, however, who is the real sleuth of this strange zoological detective-team.

Someone has said that more has been written about Sherlock Holmes than about any other character in fiction. It is further true that more has been written about Holmes by others than by Doyle himself. Vincent Starrett once conjectured that "innumerable parodies of THE ADVENTURES have appeared in innumerable journals." 10 There aren't that many, of course; but a half dozen or more full-length volumes have been devoted to Holmes's career and personality, literally hundreds of essays and magazine articles, a few-score radio dramas, some memorable plays, many moving-picture scripts — and to put it more accurately, numerous parodies and pastiches.

We bring you the finest of these parodies and pastiches. They are the next best thing to new stories — unrecorded cases of The Great Man, not as Dr. Watson related them, but as some of our most brilliant literary figures have imagined them. These "misadventures" - these Barriesque adventures that might have been — are all written with sincere reverence, despite the occasional laughter and fun-pokings, which are only a psychological form of adoration — or, perhaps, downright envy. The old proverb — "imitation is the sin-cerest flattery" — reveals in a single laconic sentence the comprehensive motif of this book.

You will see Holmes through the eyes of Mark Twain, O. Henry, Bret Harte, Sir James Barrie, Stephen Leacock, and lesser lights — all Devotees of Doyle and Sycophants of Sherlock, all humble Watsons paying homage from their own 22iB, the eternal sanctuary of perpetual youth.

AND FINALLY, an explanation for certain omissions — "missing misadventures." We have not failed to consider the inclusion of three pastiches in which Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of Charles Dickens's Edwin Drood. The first of these, by Andrew Lang, appeared in "Longman's Magazine," London, issue of September 1905. The second, by Edmund Lester Pearson, is contained in Chapter III of the author's THE SECRET BOOK (New York, Macmillan, 1914). The third, by Harry B. Smith, appeared in "Munsey's Magazine," December 1924, and was later published in book form. 11 After many pipefuls of indecision we came to the conclusion that all three are

10 Vincent Starrett's THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES; page 162.

11 Harry B. Smith's HOW SHERLOCK HOLMES SOLVED THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD; Glen Rock, Pa., Walter Klinefelter, 1934, private edition limited to thirty-three copies.

INTRODUCTION Xlll

too specialized in treatment and content matter to appeal to the

general reader.

Nor have we overlooked Corey Ford's The Rollo Boys with Sher-loc{ in Mayfair; or, Keep It Under Your Green Hat. This is to be found in the author's THREE ROUSING CHEERS FOR THE ROLLO BOYS * and in the January 1926 issue of "The Bookman." As the title indicates, Mr. Ford contrived a triple-barreled parody of the Rover Boys, Sherlock Holmes, and Michael Arlen. But the satirical emphasis was almost exclusively on Arlen's literary style in his famous book, THE GREEN HAT, and so fails to maintain contemporary interest. Regretfully we have been forced to exclude the pastiches written by H. Bedford Jones. This popular author once wrote a series of stories revealing the "true facts" in Watson's unrecorded cases — an imaginary dip into that "travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box" in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross. But after writing the series, H. Bedford Jones decided to remove Sherlock—thus disenchanting the stories —and sold most of them as "ordinary" detective tales. We have had the pleasure of reading three of Mr. Jones's "recorded" cases — The Adventure of the At-\inson Brothers (referred to by Watson in A Scandal in Bohemia),™ The Affair of the Aluminium Crutch (referred to in The Uusgrave Ritual)?* and The Adventure of the Matilda Briggs (referred to in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire}. 15

We have also —this time without regret — omitted a translation of the numerous "Sherlock Ol-mes" pastiches counterfeited, so to speak, in the pulp-factories of Barcelona. These were written by anonymous hacks and spread throughout the Spanish-language countries of the world. You will understand our restraint when you read the following synopsis, generously supplied by that indefatigable enthusiast, Mr. Anthony Boucher. It is a typical example of what happened to Holmes in MEMORIAS ULTIMAS — a potboiler-potpourri of sex and sensation titled Jac^, El Destripador (}ac{ the Ripper).