Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
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of great affection among readers:
It was pleasant to Dr. Watson to find himself once more in the untidy room of the first floor in Baker Street.... Finally, his eyes came round to the fresh and smiling face of Billy, the young but very wise and tactful page, who had helped a little to fill up the gap of loneliness and isolation which surrounded the saturnine figure of the great detective.
“It all seems very unchanged, Billy. You don’t change, either....”
A mythical character can remain unchanged for a quarter of a century; perhaps Billy now deserves that title.
THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS. The youngsters who helped Holmes in a few cases would be of the smallest importance to modern readers had not the American Sherlockians of the 1930s chosen the name “Baker Street Irregulars” for their organization. They might almost have been the same people, for the children of (say) 1890 were middle-aged folks in 1934, when the American BSI had its beginning.
But the original Irregulars were Londoners (one presumes Cockney accents), urchins or “street arabs” in the contemporary phrase. They are seen in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, where their wages are fixed at one shilling a day (around $5 in modern buying power), and their leader is Wiggins. After these two early cases they return only in “The Crooked Man,” when the leader is Simpson, the earlier generation of boys having presumably grown past the age when they could be of use to Holmes as unobtrusive spies. In one other case, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes uses a boy (Cartwright), but as a lone agent on Dartmoor rather than as the leader of a London gang.
“Irregulars” are combatants not from the regular army (George Washington used the word about his own ragged troops). Applying it to the boys of Baker Street (and there may have been girls too; the text is indefinite), Holmes means investigators who are independent of the police. He uses the same word in “Lady Frances Carfax” to mean himself and Watson.
Throughout the tales, Watson is made to drop hints about other cases in which Sherlock Holmes was engaged. Usually he makes mention of the other business that was under way at the time, but sometimes he compares the current case to some other, and on several occasions Holmes does the same thing, drawing both on his direct experience and on his reading.
Such allusions range from the generic (“a very commonplace little murder,” Holmes calls his current business in “The Naval Treaty”) to the memorable:
As I turn over the pages, I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy, and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin — an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour. [“The Golden Pince-Nez”]
Listing the unpublished cases in The Tin Dispatch-Box (1965, reprinted 1994), I defined them as “any criminal investigation or professional business in which Holmes was involved or took a particular contemporary interest. Using this definition, there are altogether 111 cases.” (The listing which led to that total has a few omissions.) Such cases are of interest to the would-be biographer as clues to filling in the great stretches of Holmes’s career not covered in the published stories, and as instances in which he made use of his powers to solve mysteries about which the reader would love to hear.
The unpublished cases have provided motifs for a number of “pastiches,” or imitations of the original tales, including several of the Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1952–53) by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr. They were also the basis of many scripts by Edith Meiser and her successors for a long-running series of American radio dramatizations (1932–43). For such purposes the unpublished cases are ideal, since generally there is merely a thought-provoking phrase, rather than a plot to which the writer must stick.
A surprising amount can, however, sometimes be deduced about an unpublished case. Edward F. Clark, Jr., in the Baker Street Journal in 1963 offered a careful exegesis of a few words in “The Final Problem”: “I knew in the papers that [Holmes] had been engaged by the French republic upon a matter of supreme importance.” A number of scholars have toyed with “the papers of ex-President Murillo,” mentioned in “The Norwood Builder,” identifying that gentleman with various former South American leaders. Exploration of what Watson meant to say begins to overlap with investigation of Doyle’s sources, as when “the peculiar persecution of John Vincent Harden” is said to have been suggested to the author’s mind by his reading about Texas bandit John Wesley Hardin. Some of the unpublished cases refer to historical people, including the Pope (presumably Leo XIII) and Vanderbilt (one of the New York railroad clan). Others contain intriguing but inexplicable names, personal or geographical, including “Isadora Persano” and “the island of Uffa.” In a class by itself is “the giant rat of Sumatra,” a phrase that has intrigued not only pasticheurs and scholars but also the designers of new hazards in the popular game “Dungeons and Dragons.”
THE ROOMS AT 221B BAKER STREET
The arrangement of Holmes’s (and, in some of the stories but not all, Watson’s) rooms is unclear, and in any case may have changed over the years. “The Mazarin Stone,” a story that is a one-act play lightly rewritten, contains what amount to stage directions, calling for exits and entrances hardly compatible with a conventional suite in Baker Street. It is more satisfactory to build up the lodgings — and particularly the sitting room, where most of the action takes place — in the mind’s eye. Still, a creditable job has been done by the proprietors of several restorations, particularly the one at the “Sherlock Holmes” public-house in Northumberland Street, London. Some enthusiasts have 221B rooms in their own homes; one created by the late Allen Mackler is now housed at the Wilson Library of the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. Illustrators, stage designers, and television producers have faced the same challenges as creators of the full-scale article, generally emphasizing whichever features of the room, authentic or otherwise, are needed for their immediate purposes.
A monstrous amount of furniture must be fitted into the room if every sentence in the Canon is to be taken as true. The chairs on either side of the fire, in which one imagines Holmes and Watson sitting to chat, are a bare beginning: Don MacLachlan, writing in Canadian Holmes in 1989, includes in the inventory “12 chairs, two stools, one sofa, and something sittable-on by the window. Enough seating for at least 17 people.” But there are many other objects in the room as well, from the dining table to the workbench with Holmes’s chemicals, not to mention a bearskin rug, a safe, a sideboard, and the coal-scuttle in which Holmes kept his cigars. A plausible floor plan was drawn by Julian Wolff to accompany his analysis of the rooms in the Baker Street Journal in 1946. He includes a bathroom adjacent to the sitting room — a facility that may have amounted to a luxury in 1895. He also puts Holmes’s bedroom (which figures in “The Dying Detective” in particular) adjacent to the sitting room, relegating Watson to an upper storey (British “second,” American “third,” floor).
The dominant feature of the suite at 221B must have been clutter. Holmes had “a horror of destroying documents,” Watson reports, and attached his unanswered letters to the mantelpiece with his jackknife. Chemical experiments were often in progress, discarded newspapers and telegrams littered the floor, and relics of cases were, Watson says, wont to turn up in the butter dish. There may have been a little space left for Watson’s cherished portrait of General “Chinese” Gordon, but the conventional decorations of a Victorian sitting room, the antimacassars and ostrich eggs, must have been almost entirely absent. For it is probably a mistake to imagine a spacious room; the chamber of a pair of bachelors was surely rather cosy than elegant.