It Belongs In "Memoirs!" Not "Last Bow!"

 

My wife got me an awesome Sherlock Holmes desk calender for Christmas. (I got her a Chicago Cubs desk calendar, thus proving myself to be a husband of impeccable taste matching Angela's impeccable taste. Gee whiz, we're made for each other.)

When I arrived at work on January 14, my calendar told me it was the 132nd anniversary of the publication of "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box." So I immediately felt obligated to read it, which I did during my lunch break. 

This one has an interesting publication history. In England, it was originally published in the January 1893 issue of The Strand Magazine. In the U.S., it appeared in the January 14, 1992 issue of Harper's Weekly, which gives us the anniversary date.

This and 11 other stories published in 1892 and 1993 were collected as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. (1894) Well, except that "Cardboard Box" was left out of the British edition. It was initially included in the American edition, but quickly dropped in later reprints. The beginning of the story, in which Holmes deduces what Watson is thinking, was moved to the beginning of "The Adventure of the Resident Patient."

An annotated version of the story I have on my Kindle tells me that Doyle once said he left it out because it was "rather more sensational than I care for." (quoted from Daniel Stashower's superb biography of Doyle Teller of Tales) Sherlockian scholar Leslie Klinger quotes Doyle as writing "There was a certain sex element in the Cardboard Box story and for this reason I discarded it." The story was eventually reprinted in The Last Bow in 1917.

So what was the big deal? Well, the case involves a harmless spinster who receives a package in the mail. This package is the titular cardboard box, which contained two severed human ears.

The police think its probably a joke perpetrated by some rowdy medical students that the spinster once had to evict from her home. But Lestrade calls in Holmes anyways. Holmes examines the box, the twine that had been tied around it, the handwriting on the address and--after asking the spinster a few seemingly innocuous questions--is well on his way to uncovering a double murder.

Eventually, a story emerges of adultery, alcoholism and senseless violence. These are probably the elements of the story that convinced Doyle to remove it from Memoirs. It is, though, a great story in which Holmes makes some solid and clever deductions to get to the truth. You can read it yourself HERE.

For years, depending on the edition, reprints of Memoirs would sometimes have "Cardboard Box" put back in it (where it belongs, by golly). Other editions still had it in Last Bow, with the beginning of "Box" still moved to the beginning of "Resident Patient" in Memoirs. So if you have an older collection of the stories on your bookshelf, check it to see. If "Cardboard Box" is in the wrong place, you must now live with the horrible knowledge that your Holmes collection is flawed. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there you go. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Sherlock Holmes: "The Camberwell Poisoning Case" 12/6/43

How many turns does it take to wind up a particular pocket watch? That's the clue Holmes needs to solve a murder.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Sherlock Holmes in New York

 

I continue to discover that I had remarkable taste when I was young.

In 1976, Roger Moore--in the midst of his run as James Bond--played Sherlock Holmes in the made-for-TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York. Patrick Macnee is Watson and John Huston is a wonderfully evil Professor Moriarty.

How does Sir Roger fare as the Great Detective. Well, he really doesn't look like Holmes at all. And, of course, quantum mechanics teaches us that no actor can ever equal Jeremy Brett and Basil Rathbone in the role. But, all the same, Moore is quite good in the movie. His Holmes has a strong personality and exhibits great intelligence. Holmes makes a number of nifty deductions during this case and Moore brings verisimilitude to his sometimes melodramatic dialogue at these moments. He wears several pretty cool disguises and seems to have fun playing those parts--especially when he pretends to be a pompous Italian vaudevillian. Moore also endows Holmes with a sense of righteous fury when the situation calls for it.

 

Patrick Macnee is, I believe, deliberately plays homage to Nigel Bruce in his interpretation of Watson. I've never been completely happy with that version of Watson, though both Bruce and Macnee make a bumbling Watson so darn likeable that its hard to really object. (Macnee would get to play a more capable version of the good doctor 15 years later in a pair of films that featured Christopher Lee as Holmes.)

The films starts in London, with a disguised Holmes infiltrating Moriarty's lair to tell the master criminal that his latest scheme has been foiled and his minions tossed in jail. (Look for a fun in-joke here--the Maltese Falcon can be seen on Moriarty's desk. John Huston, of course, wrote and directed that classic film.)

But the minions won't talk, fearing Moriarty too much to rat him out. So, though his organization has been shattered, Moriarty himself is able to walk free. He vows revenge on Holmes first, though.

That revenge soon comes. Holmes and Watson are lured to New York City, where the son of Irene Alder has been kidnapped. (This is one of the few times, by the way, that Irene is portrayed as the actress/singer she was in "A Scandal in Bohemia"--rather than changed into a femme fatale/criminal.)

Soon after, Holmes is asked by the New York police to look into a massive gold robbery. Impossibly, tons of gold have disappeared from a secret underground vault. This has international implications that could lead to a world war.

But Holmes, by now, has been instructed to refuse to help without giving any explanation for his refusal. Otherwise, Irene's son will be killed. This is Moriarty's plot to destroy Holmes' reputation.

So, in order to thwart Moriarty, Holmes must first rescue the boy without Moriarty finding out the boy has been rescued, then dodging henchmen who are watching him, then solving the mysery of the gold robbery.

It's a great plot, with the Holmsian clues making sense and Holmes' multi-layered plan to outsmart his nemesis being legitimately clever. It's a Holmes mystery that feels like a Holmes mystery, with an actor who gives us a portrayal of Holmes that we can get into.

The movie is available on YouTube, so here it is. I've also acquired the novelization. When I've read this, I'll see if its worth commenting on in another post.

 

The Martian Sherlock Holmes

 

The Martian crown jewels have been loaned to Earth for study and display at the British National Museum. It's time to bring them home. They are loaded onto a robot spaceship. But when that ship arrives at the spacedock on Mars' moon Phobos, the jewels are gone!

The technician who loaded the jewels aboard the ship while it was in Earth orbit had been searched after completing that job. So the jewels were DEFINITELY on the ship. If it had been found and boarded while in flight, that would have changed its course enough to detect. So NO ONE messed with the ship or the jewels in flight. The police were present when the cargo was unloaded on Phobos. Everyone, including the cops, were searched. The spacedock facilities were searched. An embargo is placed on Phobos, so there's no chance to get the jewels off the moon if they did somehow arrive. But where did they go? How could they have possibly disappeared from a robot spaceship while that ship was in flight? It's the ultimate locked room mystery. 

This is the premise of "The Martian Crown Jewels," by Poul Anderson, first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1958 and reprinted a year later in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The story is Sherlock Holmes pastishe and it is a load of fun.

When Inspector Gregg can't find the jewels, he travels down to Mars to consult with Syaloch, the famous consulting detective. I love how effectively Anderson takes the character of Holmes and translates him into an alien from a non-human culture:

The Inspector flet a cautious way into the high, narrow room. The glowsnakes which illuminated it after dark were coiled asleep on the stone floor, in a litter of papers, specimans, and weapons; rusty sand covered the sills of the Gothic windows. Syaloch was not neat except in his own person. In one corner was a small chemical laboratory. The rest of the walls were taken up with shelves, the criminological literature of three planets--Martian books, Terrestrial micros, Venusian talking stones. At one place, patriotically, the glphs representing the reigning Nest-mother had been punched out with bullets. An Earthling could not sit on the trapeze-like native furniture, but Syaloch had courteously provided chairs and tubs as well; his clientele was also triplanetary...

...Syaloch was a seven-foot biped of vaguely storklike appea\rance. But the lean, crested, red-beaked head at the end of the sinuous neck was too large, the yellow eyes too deep; the white feathers were more like a penguin's than a flying bird's, save at the blue-plumed tail; instead of wings there were skinny red arms edning in four-fingered hands...

Syaloch takes the case, of course, accompanying Gregg when the policeman returns to Phobos. What follows could very well have been a mystery from the Holmes Canon in how Syaloch acquires information, asks a few questions which don't at first seem to be related to the case, then deduces the solution to the case. The solution involves understanding orbital mechanics, so most of us poor non-engineer readers probably won't get it. But it's a fair solution to a great mystery. And Syaloch is a great creation, perfectly straddling the line between being alien and being Holmes-like.

And the story has one of the best final paragraphs ever written as Syaloch takes on another case:

Somebody, somewhere in Sabaeus, was farnikng the krats, and there was an alarming zaksnautry among the hyukus. It sounded to Syaloch like an interesting case.

The story has been reprinted a number of times in anthologies. If you have an account with the Internet Archive, you can read it HERE. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Sherlock Holmes: "The Adventure of Sally Martin" 11/23/46

A man is murdered aboard a yacht and Holmes is asked to investigate. Not surprisingly, everyone else on board has a motive.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Sherlock Holmes: "The Ancient Queen" 11/14/48

An archeologist returns to London from Egypt with a newly discovered mummy. But this makes him the target of a fanatical cult. So he enlists the help of Sherlock Holmes. 

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Sherlock Holmes: "The Darlington Substitution" 1/4/47

Holmes takes a job as a bodyguard, which evolves into invetigating a blackmail plot, which in turn evolves into investigating a murder. A trick borrowed from King Solomon is used to resolve the situation. 

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Sherlock Holmes' character growth

 

I re-read A Study in Scartlet recently and have just finished re-reading The Sign of the Four. These are the first two Sherlock Holmes novels, published in 1887 and 1890 respectively.  But Scarlet is set in 1881 and many Holmes timelines (which are a source of a lot of speculation among Holmesians) place Sign of the Four in 1888.

It's interesting to see the differences in Holmes' character between these two novels. In both, he's still a brilliant detective who needs the mental challenge of a difficult case to make him feel truly alive. In Sign, we even see that he sometimes uses cocaine to deal with boredom when he doesn't have something else to occupy his lightning-fast mind.

But there are differences. In the first novel, he's adament about not learning or remembering ANYTHING that doesn't directly relate to his work. If a fact doesn't relate to his chosen profession, he doesn't want to clutter up his mind with it. 

But by the time we get to The Sign of the Four, Holmes is able to host a dinner in which he discusses a variety of non-detective related subjects knowledgably. I wonder if perhaps he also came to realize that any piece of knowledge, no matter what the subject, might help him one day solve a case. Or perhaps Watson is having a positive effect on him, turning him in some ways into being a more affable human being.

Here are exerpts from the books that show off this difference in characterization:

FROM A STUDY IN SCARLET: 

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

From THE SIGN OF THE FOUR:

Our meal was a merry one. Holmes could talk exceedingly well when he chose, and that night he did choose. He appeared to be in a state of nervous exaltation. I have never known him so brilliant. He spoke on a quick succession of subjects,—on miracle-plays, on mediæval pottery, on Stradivarius violins, on the Buddhism of Ceylon, and on the war-ships of the future,—handling each as though he had made a special study of it.

Gee whiz, Holmes, what do miracle-plays and medieval pottery have to do with detective work? In fact, by the time we get to the 1908 story "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," Holmes is writing a monograph on medieval music. 

This change in direction for the character is, I think, important. It doesn't seem out-of-character or inconsistant. It simply shows the Great Detective growing a little as a person. Not too much growth, mind you. He's still the Great Detective and will never be --SHOULD never be--a normal human being. But the idea that his friendship with Watson had some effect on him is satisfying. I prefer to think this is the case. After all, we learn in the 1904 short story "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" that Watson eventually weaned Holmes off drugs. Who knows, maybe encouraging Holmes to occupy his mind with other interests between cases is part of how the good doctor got him to stop shooting up.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sherlock Holmes: "The Cadaver in the Roman Toga" 11/9/47

Professor Moriarty is flooding London with counterfeit money, but Holmes is apparently distracted from this by a corpse that was found dressed as an ancient Roman. But then, Holmes often sees connections to which the rest of us are oblivious.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sherlock Holmes: "The Laughing Lemur of High Tower Heath" 10/26/47

In this spooky and atmospheric story, it appears that centuries-dead witch is threatening the life of a child. Holmes is asked to investigate and find a more rational explanation.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sherlock Holmes: "The Case of the Dog Who Changed His Mind" 9/28/47

An elderly woman is poisoned while sleeping in her locked bedroom. The police assume its suicide, but Holmes thinks differently. The victim's dog apparently agrees with Holmes!

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sherlock Holmes: "The Adventure of the Grand Old Man" 12/21/46

Holmes and Watson are tasked with double duty: Find a missing heir and prevent an old man from being frightened to death.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Never Double-Cross a Man with a Mongoose

"The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (Strand Magazine, June 1893) is a wonderful example of just how good a storyteller was Arthur Conan Doyle.

As a detective story, it's a very good one. A man has apparently been murdered while locked in a room with his wife, though a third person could have gotten in through a window. The key to the door was missing and the wife is catatonic and can't say what happened. The prints of a strange but unidentified animal were found at the scene.

By the time we enter the story, Holmes has actually made a lot of progress in the case. He stops by Watson's house (this is when the good doctor was married and not living a Baker Street) and recruits his help to continue the investigation. Watson readily agrees--there's a great line that shows insight into both men:

In spite of his capacity for concealing his emotions, I could easily see that Holmes was in a state of suppressed excitement, while I was myself tingling with that half-sporting, half-intellectual pleasure which I invariably experienced when I associated myself with him in his investigations.

Along the way, we learn the name (Simpson) of a Baker Street Irregular whom Holmes left on stake-out duty. I'm reasonably certain that this is the only Irregular other than Wiggins that's ever named. Of course, the whole point of the crew was that they could hang around places without being noticed.

The case is wrapped up without complications--Holmes uses intelligent but straightforward detective work rather than making brilliant deductive leaps. It makes you wonder why he needed Watson--did the Great Detective simply miss his friend?

The conclusion of the case involves finding and interviewing the titular "crooked man," a veteran of the 1857 Indian Rebellion who has been crippled by years of slavery and torture, He now makes a living doing conjuring tricks and showing off his trained mongoose.

This is really the best part of the tale--the man's tale is a great little story in of itself. There is betrayal, captures, escapes, torture and adventure all effectively encapsulated in just a few pages. It is effective edge-of-your-seat stuff.

We know that by 1893, Doyle was getting a little tired of Holmes and, wanting to concentrate on writing historical novels, would make his unsuccessful attempt to kill off the detective just a few stories later. Here, he puts together a good, solid detective story, but concentrates his best prose on the Crooked Man's tale of woe and adventure. It makes me wonder if perhaps Doyle had that story primarily in mind when he wrote "The Crooked Man." But since the Strand Magazine kept throwing money at him to write more about Holmes, he used Holmes as a framework to highlight the story he actually wanted to tell. That's all just a guess, of course, but it seems reasonable.

But what am I talking about? Everyone knows that Doyle was just Watson's literary agent and that the Holmes stories are all factual history. If this wasn't true, it would mean Holmes never really existed and no sane person wants to live in a world where that is true.

So, when you think about it, it's amazing that so many people encountered by Holmes and Watson were able to tell their stories in such an effectively dramatic fashion.

"The Adventures of the Crooked Man" is available online HERE.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sherlock Holmes: “The Adventure of the Haunted Bagpipes”—2/17/47

Not long after Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce took on the roles of Holmes and Watson in a couple of excellent movies produced by 20th Century Fox, they took as the famous duo on radio as well. By 1947, though, Rathbone had left the show. Tom Conway (who would also play the Saint on radio, as well as having already portrayed the lesser known suave detective known as the Falcon in a series of B-movies) took over as Holmes for awhile, doing a spot-on imitation of Rathbone each week.


Holmes was well-served on radio. The writers (most notably Edith Meiser) respected the character and kept the Great Detective intact, with all the quirks and personality traits that make him so memorable. Many of the scripts were adaptations of the original stories, but Meiser and her co-writers were more than capable of turning out well-plotted original mysteries.


This particular episode takes Holmes and Watson to Edinburgh in pursuit of Holmes’ arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty. Upon arrival, though, they seem to stumble onto some supernatural goings-on: there is apparently a ghost tramping about the neighborhood while playing his bagpipes. It all relates to an old legend about a bagpiper who was carried off to Hell by the devil centuries ago.


The script succeeds in building up a really spooky atmosphere. Even when Holmes deduces the real reason behind the supposed ghost, the story remains spooky. It all involves a particularly gruesome plot, you see, that includes the evil Professor, a strain of Black Plague germs and a vengeful plot to destroy the population of Edinburgh.


It’s a bit on the melodramatic side, but then, Holmes often finds himself hip-deep in melodrama. If its not a set of haunted bagpipes, then it’ll be a giant and murderous hound, a trained snake or an assassin with a silent air gun. “The Haunted Bagpipes” is a worthy addition to Holmes’ ever-growing case files.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Sherlock Holmes isn't a Rugby Fan

"Please await me. Terrible misfortune. Right wing three-quarter missing; indispensable to morrow.—OVERTON."

This is the confusing telegram that arrives at 221B Baker Street at the beginning of "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" (1904). Neither Holmes nor Watson can make heads or tails about it.

I love this particular Holmes story. The case unfolds in the logical fashion that is one of the marks of the great Holmes stories and it smoothly hits a series of various emotional notes ranging from comedy to tragedy. 

That telegram,by the way, is about a missing rugby player--someone the Cambridge team needs to find before their next big game. It's a subject that Holmes (and apparently Watson) aren't up on--so the terminology at first baffles them.

The subject of Holmes' knowledge (or lack of knowledge) about subjects not related to crime is interesting. The premiere Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, is famous for establishing the detective didn't know the Earth revolves around the Sun. But stories like "The Bruce-Partington Plans" and "The Adventure of the Three Students" tell us about Holmes' researches into medieval music. This essay suggests that this might relate to his violin playing. I like to think that it was a combination of Watson's influence and perhaps Holmes realizing that he never knows what sort of information might be useful in an investigation. But, whatever the reason, he didn't know a thing about rugby.

But he still follows up clues better than anyone else. The missing man received a telegram before going missing. Holmes backtracks this and runs a little con on some poor girl in the telegraph office to get more information. The trail leads them from London to Cambridge, where he runs into the brilliant Dr. Leslie Armstrong. Armstrong knows what's going on, but assumes Holmes has sleazy motivations and would make certain private matters public. 

Armstrong is smart--Holmes compares him to Moriarty. But he's a good guy who is simply wrong about thinking Holmes is a bad guy. With the help of a dog named Pompey, Holmes does eventually figure out what's going on and makes peace with Armstrong.

"The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" does often make lists of the best or most famous Holmes stories, but I think it really is one of the most purely fun tales in the Canon.

It's available online HERE. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sherlock Holmes: "New Years Eve off the Scilly Islands" 12/28/1947

Holmes and Watson ring in the New Year with a desperate search to find a bomb hidden aboard an ocean liner.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

CBS Radio Mystery Theater: "The Sign of the Four" 3/8/77

Over a decade after the networks abandoned dramatic radio, CBS dipped its toe in the water for one last attempt to bring the medium back. CBS Radio Mystery Theater was quite excellent and produced a large number of original radio plays. Sadly, it failed to kindle a true revival of the medium.

Here's an excellent adaptation of the 2nd Sherlock Holmes novel.

Click HERE to listen or download.

"My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know."

Every once in a while, I suddenly get in the mood to read at least one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories--it's sort of like a sudden onset of the flu. But instead of cough medicine and chicken soup, the cure is to go with it and read something from the Canon.

This happened the other day. I needed to read something Holmes. But I couldn't decide which one. There's a danger in these situations of my simply jumping to one of my favorites. This is fine by itself, but it means other stories in the Canon go unread by me for years.

So I jumped to Google and found a list of the 56 short stories. I realized I could then use a random number generator to pick a number from 1 to 56 inclusive, but what the heck fun would that be?

Instead, I found an web site that can random generate one or more picks from a list. I copied and pasted the list of stories into this, pressed Enter and came up with "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," first published in the Strand Magazine in 1892.

A carbuncle, by the way, is a now archaic term for a red gemstone--usually a red garnet. So the blue carbuncle in the story is worth a fortune in part because of its unusual color.

But as the story starts, there's no carbuncle involved. Holmes is simply doing someone a favor by trying to deduce the owner of a lost hat from clues on the hat itself.

The guy who dropped the hat also dropped a goose intended for Christmas dinner, which turns out to have the blue carbuncle inside it. The gem was in the news recently after having been stolen from a countess, with a maintenance man from her hotel having been charged with the crime.

It's a fun set-up. Early on, Holmes and Watson are remarking to each other how many of his most interesting cases--such as this one first seems to be--don't involve the actual commission of a crime. But soon after that, a crime that needs to be solved is dropped in their laps.

Holmes' deductions about the hat are classic. When he begins tracing the goose to discover how the gem got inside, he has another great moment when he worms information out of a grouchy goose salesman.

And the quote I use for the title of this post is one of the best bits of dialogue from the Canon.

The story is set at Christmas time, helping to set up an ending in which Holmes has identified a cringing,

frightened first-time thief as the real thief, but then decides that this situation might call for mercy triumphing over justice.

Of course, this isn't the only time Holmes considers letting a criminal walk. In fact, there's at least two occasions where he let a murderer get away with it because he felt the crime was justified. So letting a thief walk (knowing he can now get the innocent man freed, by the way) isn't really that big a deal for him.

So I'm satisfied with my newly-invented "Sherlock Holmes Short Story Randomizer." It worked out quite well and I'll probably be returning to it the next time Sherlockian fever strikes.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sherlock Holmes: "The Carpathian Horror" 4/14/47

In this very atmospheric variation of "The Sussex Vampire," Holmes and Watson travel to Carpathia to investigate a Count who thinks he's either going mad or is actually a vampire. The case soon turns into a murder investigation.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sherlock Holmes: “The Island of Death” 4/28/47

Five circus freaks are invited out to a remote island off the coast of Scotland by a scientist of questionable repute. Holmes and Watson tag along to watch out for them. Soon, there’s one murder and one attempted murder. Holmes has to sort through his odd set of suspects to find the killer in this bizarre and entertainingly melodramatic episode.

Click HERE to listen or download.