Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
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is little in the text of the story to justify attaching to Irene Adler either the social standing or the morals of such women. A feminist interpretation of her life (as put forward, not surprisingly, by some of the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes) makes her an early career woman, misused and cast aside by a snob of a Bohemian prince. The American mystery novelist Carole Nelson Douglas interprets her in that way with particular sensitivity and conviction in a series of eight books:
• Good Night, Mr. Holmes (1990)
• Good Morning, Irene (1991), also published as The Adventuress
• Irene at Large (1992), also published as A Soul of Steel
• Irene’s Last Waltz (1994), also published as Another Scandal in Bohemia
• Chapel Noir (2001)
• Castle Rouge (2002)
• Femme Fatale (2003)
• Spider Dance (2004)
But most readers, it seems, have preferred to see her as the woman Sherlock Holmes loved and lost (or, in a minority view, loved and later won). Belden Wigglesworth celebrated her in a poem in the Baker Street Journal in 1946, one of many such apostrophes:
I wonder what your thoughts have been,
Your inmost thoughts of him, Irene, Across the years?....
Did you forget?
Did Baker Street quite lack a Queen? I wonder.
These and other imaginings are discussed at length, as are all aspects of Irene Adler, in chapters of my book In Bed with Sherlock Holmes (1984). There is much to say about her, and much that has already been said, but the Canon provides little basis for either sentimental or prurient speculation about a Holmes-Adler connection.
MYCROFT HOLMES. The brother of Sherlock Holmes, older than he by seven years, figures in two cases, both of which he brings to the detective’s attention. One is “The Greek Interpreter,” in which the client, Mr. Melas, happens to lodge in the same building as Mycroft. The other is “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” a government affair in which Mycroft, on behalf of the highest authorities, demands his brother’s assistance — for Mycroft, who “audits the books in some of the government departments” in the first case, turns out in this later one to have a much more crucial position. “Occasionally he is the British government,” Holmes tells an astonished Watson:
We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other.... Again and again his word has decided the national policy.
Such a description foreshadows the computerized “expert systems” of modern times, and indeed Robert A. Heinlein (in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 1966) found it appropriate to name an omniscient computer Mycroft. In more recent years the name has been borrowed for a number of software projects, including “a network that allows thousands of people to collaborate on large, complex jobs” developed at the University of California at Berkeley.
Watson describes Mycroft’s body as “gross,” his fat hand “like the flipper of a seal.” His habits are unvarying and unathletic — “Jupiter is descending,” says Holmes when his brother condescends to call. Otherwise, “Mycroft has his rails and he runs on them. His Pall Mall lodgings, the Diogenes Club, Whitehall — that is his cycle.” (The Diogenes Club, described in “The Greek Interpreter,” is a club — which Sherlock Holmes finds “soothing” at times — for unclubbable men, forbidden by by-law to take any notice of one another, or to talk, save in the Strangers’ Room.) But his detective powers are immense. “It was Adams, of course,” he says to his more active brother about a case the latter has been working to solve. Action, of course, is “not my métier,” but theorizing and thought from an armchair — in that, Mycroft Holmes excels. The passage from “The Greek Interpreter” in which the brothers compete in deductions about a stranger on the street is a classic, so much so that Doyle used it as one of his “readings” when he lectured in North America in 1894:
“An old soldier, I perceive,” said Sherlock.
“And very recently discharged,” remarked the brother.
“Served in India, I see.”
“And a non-commissioned officer.”
And so on. Not for nothing has it been suggested that Nero Wolfe, the corpulent, chair-bound detective created by Rex Stout in Fer-de-Lance (1934), The Doorbell Rang (1965), and several dozen other novels, is a relative of Mycroft Holmes.
MRS. HUDSON. The best appreciation of Holmes’s landlady, Mrs. Hudson, is an article by Vincent Starrett that appeared in the 1944 anthology Profile by Gaslight. He writes of her possible background, her management of the house at 221B Baker Street, her staff, and her loyalty to Holmes, shown particularly in her patience with his foibles. Other writings about her have interpreted her relationship with the detective in various ways, some suggesting that it was peculiarly personal. Certainly the kind of devotion seen in “The Empty House,” in which she repeatedly crawls to Holmes’s wax bust “on my knees” and in danger of her life to adjust its position, suggests something more than the usual relationship between tenant and landlady.
But “landlady” may be slightly misleading. In story after story, Mrs. Hudson is presented as the “housekeeper,” and it seems possible that rather than owning the house outright, she had it on a long-term lease and proceeded to rent rooms to gentlemen. Watson does speak, in “The Dying Detective,” of Holmes’s “princely” rental payments to her. On the other hand Holmes frequently treats her as an employee, demanding refreshment and ignoring scheduled mealtimes, and abuses the fabric of the building when it suits him. The most famous instance is his indoor target practice, in which he shoots the initials V.R. (for Victoria Regina) into the wall — an activity which must at least have filled the house with plaster-dust.
There may well have been a housemaid at 221B, although she is never mentioned, and certainly there was Billy the pageboy, at least during some periods. Other staff are uncertain; Holmes in “Thor Bridge” speaks of a “new cook,” which may imply that there had been a former cook, or may mean that Mrs. Hudson had finally delegated the kitchen duties to an employee. Breakfast may have been her forte, for it is mentioned in story after story, and in “The Naval Treaty” Holmes offers the high praise that Mrs. Hudson has “as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman,” a comment that has led to the general impression that she was in fact Scots. Then there is the famous reference in “A Scandal in Bohemia” to “Mrs. Turner,” one of those cruxes that Sherlockians love; it has been variously interpreted as meaning a cook, a temporary replacement while Mrs. Hudson was holidaying or unwell, or simply absent-mindedness on someone’s part.
Of the woman herself we know little, not even her first name, although without evidence she has been identified with the “Martha” who is the housekeeper in “His Last Bow.” Holmes once speaks of her cronies, but their identity is as unknown as Mrs. Hudson’s taste in amusement, food, or furnishings. Even her physique can only be inferred from a reference to her “stately tread.” What matters to the reader of the Sherlock Holmes tales is her reliable maintenance of the house in Baker Street, and her presence (in only fourteen of the sixty stories) as the motherly figure without whom the sometimes childlike Holmes would be lost in London. For that role, readers remember and honour her. Vincent Starrett again: “It is proverbial that landladies never die.”
BILLY. The pageboy of 221B Baker Street appears in ten of the stories, only three times by name. The “Billy” who ushers in visitors in The Valley of Fear, circa 1889, can hardly be the same boy who is there for “Thor Bridge” and “The Mazarin Stone” more than a decade later. A succession of boys is the obvious explanation, and it may be as few as two of them, since the appearances are clustered, most in