Month After Month His Papers Accumulated: A Don Redmond Centenary

<h4 style="text-align: center;">"The index books, and others perhaps less excusable" [CREE] </h4><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimZH4doDP8mq5nUaKy5xShwcaVAqYK-_ezCOYeng3MSQPsWY0O1BGYfMweoewRz1YqmBsg5uaaDtw7aHtRPF8ehHzvp4Hz2YxZ3c4si6PucOVUUZIh94AeExqWewio7HnGyJteSX_WicgU0gw9q1WvAwrEtXK6tynnrf0VMLPQZWiBHU2XEFrMAxJCzg/s1678/Redmond%20-%20composite.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1118" data-original-width="1678" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimZH4doDP8mq5nUaKy5xShwcaVAqYK-_ezCOYeng3MSQPsWY0O1BGYfMweoewRz1YqmBsg5uaaDtw7aHtRPF8ehHzvp4Hz2YxZ3c4si6PucOVUUZIh94AeExqWewio7HnGyJteSX_WicgU0gw9q1WvAwrEtXK6tynnrf0VMLPQZWiBHU2XEFrMAxJCzg/w640-h426/Redmond%20-%20composite.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div>Today, May 19, would have been the 100th birthday of my father, Donald A. Redmond, one of the more prolific Sherlockians of his generation. He is best known in many quarters for his two scholarly books — <i><a href="https://affiliates.abebooks.com/c/2670720/77416/2029?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abebooks.com%2Fservlet%2FSearchResults%3Fkn%3DSherlock%2520Holmes%252C%2520a%2520Study%2520in%2520Sources%26sts%3Dt%26cm_sp%3DSearchF-_-topnav-_-Results%26ds%3D20" target="_blank">Sherlock Holmes, a Study in Sources</a></i> and <i><a href="https://affiliates.abebooks.com/c/2670720/77416/2029?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abebooks.com%2Fservlet%2FSearchResults%3Fkn%3DSherlock%2520Holmes%2520Among%2520the%2520Pirates%26sts%3Dt%26cm_sp%3DSearchF-_-topnav-_-Results" target="_blank">Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates</a></i> — but he wrote much more as well, including articles in Canadian, British and American journals and newsletters over four decades.<div>  <br />I have been working lately to compile a bibliography of his writings, and then assemble an anthology to make some of the gems available to today's Sherlockians. I know I haven't found everything he wrote (and I never will), but there are at least 250 discrete items, from technical research to Sherlockian "grand game" speculation and some fragments of flippant verse: <br /><br /></div><div><blockquote>I suspect of Sherlockians very few<br /> Excepting John Clay (perhaps Merridew)<br />   Can tell at a glance<br />   At the knees of their pants<br /> A tired old limerick from a clerihew. </blockquote><br /><br /></div><div>That one was typewritten on a recycled catalogue card, and never published — just as his essay "The Case of the Builders Bodies", identifying some sources for the plot of "The Norwood Builder", apparently never saw print. Some day maybe it will, along with a sheaf of others. <br /><br /></div><div>Shortly after my father's death in 2014, I wrote <a href="https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2014/11/remembering-donald-redmond-bsi-2s.html#.YnfWFS0ZOxA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a summary of his life and Sherlockian career</a> for I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere<br /><br />A chemistry graduate of Mount Allison University, he went on to study library science at McGill University and the University of Illinois, and worked in library administration in Nova Scotia, Ceylon, Turkey and Kansas (where we both caught the Sherlockian bug) before becoming chief librarian of Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 1966-77. Railways, Meccano, and church administration and history were among his enthusiasms in addition to Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle.</div><div>  <br />He was admitted to the Baker Street Irregulars in 1969, with the title "Good Old Index" in recognition of his work as an indexer. A Two-Shilling Award from the BSI followed. </div><div><br /></div><div>His first major Sherlockian index, covering <i>The Baker Street Journal</i> from 1946 to 1969, appeared in 1970, and he continued to index the <i>BSJ</i>, with cumulations, until 2012. Other indexes followed, knocked out on a series of manual and then electric typewriters — he never had the slightest desire to touch a computer. </div><div><br /></div><div>And then there was <a href="https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/books-video-music/specialized-collections/literature-genre-doyle.jsp" target="_blank">the Bigelow Index at the Toronto Reference Library</a>, an attempt to index the universe of Sherlockian literature, launched in the 1960s by S. Tupper Bigelow and carried on by my father as a volunteer.</div><div>  <br />The volume of words he knocked out on those typewriters was immense: those indexes and books, cards for the Bigelow Index, articles, verses, quizzes, and even one or two parodies, not to mention correspondence. </div><div><br /></div><div>To take just one example, in the late 1990s he was conducting what amounted to a monthly column for the <i>Baker Street Dispatch</i>, a newsletter out of Ohio. One of those columns took its title from a phrase in "The Musgrave Ritual": "Month After Month His Papers Accumulated." In it, my father described a little of his methods of indexing:</div><div>  <br /></div><blockquote><div>"The Sherlockian periodicals flow steadily into the mailbox, and when the in-tray is full, seldom before, I set to with index cards, thesaurus of Sherlockian subjects, and typewriter, to bring some semblance of order out of the Sherlockian Chaos. When the tray has been reduced so that the inward flow will not submerge my desk, I transfer the cards to the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library (some 160 miles away) and the Sherlockiana itself (themselves?) to the file tray. There it further mellows until it too threatens to overflow, and I reluctantly set about to dispose of it somehow.</div><div>  <br />"Nominally the disposal is to a filing cabinet, alphabetized almost as arcanely as Jabez Wilson's volume of the <i>Britannica</i>, from Abbots to Architecture and on to the Van Herder Airguns (compare with the V entries in Holmes's own index) and the <i>Whitechapel Gazette</i> and the Wigmore Street Post Office. <br /><br />"But the filing cabinet is full. It is always full. It always has been full."</div></blockquote><div></div><div>  <br />So are the bookshelves, he added, especially when he had handfuls of newsletters converted into bound volumes. </div><div></div><blockquote><div>"I am not a successor to John Bennett Shaw; I know that what gathers is not a complete collection of Sherlockiana, and I have no interest in its being such. I could not afford to make it complete; the prices attached by dealers to items lacking in this collection could readily be attached to choice items for sale out of Windsor Castle.</div><div><br /></div><div>"But I think there is an eventual value to this collecting. How few are now and will in future be the collections which reflect, not the outstanding gems of the annals of Sherlock Holmes, but the ceaseless activity, energy and enthusiasm of the almost countless Sherlockian devotees, and societies of devotees, who are actively keeping green the Master's memory. <br /><br /></div><div>"There is too a real danger that the wheel will be endlessly re-invented, unless the endless bits of scholarship, the grains of knowledge carried by countless Sherlockian ants, are in some way collected and stored. There will always be a need for collections of papers, and for indexes to them."</div></blockquote><div></div><div>  <br />I have the filing cabinet now, though the Toronto library has its contents and will someday have all these manuscripts I have been wrangling. The bound volumes, most with "Redmond" at the base of the spine, are on my shelves and elsewhere around the Sherlockian world. </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd4AzcqolzUVNiho089qnxtTMVsMjf49YD5TGawAsfTFGosr35Aty-SiLrk1BNlhhJRycQXPRo8A97nZV5zYKfd1GxGsZuaRpGoE_5jajdQe_0ctRkPPaf3vwt87JeBHHzlZ5BDnK31obxIWb6_abOp0qgAzY1_PSzjjyJSn0E6BizSLsNEZe9LU86cw/s1598/redmond-2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1598" data-original-width="1000" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd4AzcqolzUVNiho089qnxtTMVsMjf49YD5TGawAsfTFGosr35Aty-SiLrk1BNlhhJRycQXPRo8A97nZV5zYKfd1GxGsZuaRpGoE_5jajdQe_0ctRkPPaf3vwt87JeBHHzlZ5BDnK31obxIWb6_abOp0qgAzY1_PSzjjyJSn0E6BizSLsNEZe9LU86cw/w400-h640/redmond-2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Don Redmond, October 1982</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And on this centenary of his birth, I know that many Sherlockians join me in remembering Don Redmond.</div><div><br /></div><div>--</div><div><br /></div><br />

Month After Month His Papers Accumulated: A Don Redmond Centenary

"The index books, and others perhaps less excusable" [CREE]  Today, May 19, would have been the 100th birthday of my father, Donal...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

The Case of Sherlock Holmes: A Book Rich with Insights

<h4 style="text-align: center;">"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes." [HOUN]</h4><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEilWf73jMWACAFJGfiMtbJhhVmYZSooxI6JNbIKvS-fAPVd0Ua9ZXoYeIVsp6qQlEl3uDuUGWWKkYlg30nnZXGxejqXq0arDB_TlSD7WYpgv1_T5n_fBAoMffKt_EoYbsU47WojCkut6Iru7zIIGxvkmaBvMCq3XTBEJYrxa-cq0QfZUBrrxgCTajuQEQ=s1200" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEilWf73jMWACAFJGfiMtbJhhVmYZSooxI6JNbIKvS-fAPVd0Ua9ZXoYeIVsp6qQlEl3uDuUGWWKkYlg30nnZXGxejqXq0arDB_TlSD7WYpgv1_T5n_fBAoMffKt_EoYbsU47WojCkut6Iru7zIIGxvkmaBvMCq3XTBEJYrxa-cq0QfZUBrrxgCTajuQEQ=w640-h480" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Image credit: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_United_Services_Institute_interior_13.jpg" target="_blank">Royal United Services Institute Interior</a>, Wikimedia Commons (public domain - <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en" target="_blank">CC BY SA 4.0</a>)</span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><div> It is always 1895 — and it was precisely 1895 when an elegant building was erected at 61 Whitehall, in London's government district, for the <a href="https://rusi.org/" target="_blank">Royal United Services Institute</a>, a think tank focusing on military issues. From this somewhat unlikely venue, and specifically from RUSI researcher Andrew Glazzard, comes a new book rich with insights into what makes the Sherlock Holmes stories what they are. <br /><br /><br /> I have been reading about the Sherlockian Canon for decades, and rarely have I learned as much from one book as I did from this 250-page work, <i><a href="https://amzn.to/3inQYvh" target="_blank">The Case of Sherlock Holmes</a></i>, published by the Edinburgh University Press (hardback 2018, paperback 2020).</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://amzn.to/3inQYvh" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="266" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhLgzQD4aVHHy_gLryblWf0tt6rWHeBP8gEsbscE1oAUNMlVru8hO-jYh8CW2YEmkB8r889G1dVGgaNZFXhFb-HxavxmZ90-b1R2MeqAsOPErxkeNGB05ZpjIriEoB8-y5LqK032nWQd-1r2LaozBxrEAYg7Tjr8uO_c9cKvnHU6bf6JGxtw-7Br9V38w=w266-h400" width="266" /></a></div><br /> <br /> It speaks strongly to Sherlockians even though Glazzard is not a Sherlockian himself (he certainly spends no time on the so-called canonical Game) but an academic, whose previous book was about Joseph Conrad. There have been other academic books about the creator of the great detective, of course, such as <i><a href="https://amzn.to/34ZdlEp" target="_blank">The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order</a></i> (1995) by Rosemary Jann and <i><a href="https://amzn.to/37COHdw" target="_blank">Arthur Conan Doyle and the Meaning of Masculinity</a></i> (2000) by Diana Barsham, but this one is strikingly readable and moves along briskly. <br /><br /><br /> An example of Glazzard's insights comes in a chapter titled "The Guardians of Securities", where he points out a curious change in emphasis between the very early Sherlock Holmes stories and the ones written after 1892.<br /><br />From <i>The Sign of Four</i> to "The Beryl Coronet," the early stories have largely been about physical treasure: gold bullion, counterfeit half-crowns, a massive blue jewel. But the later stories, from "The Stock-Broker's Clerk" to "Black Peter", begin to emphasize paper wealth such as stocks and bonds, or at least to include passing references (Sir Charles Baskerville got rich on South African investments, for example).<br /><br /> The details are often surprisingly current. Hall Pycroft in "The Stock-Broker's Clerk" was out of work because of developments in Venezuela; Glazzard the RUSI researcher points out that Venezuela did, in reality, suffer a revolution and a civil war starting in 1889, something Arthur Conan Doyle must have noticed in the newspapers that he loved to read. <br /><br />He also probably started reading the stock quotations; Glazzard credits Conan Doyle biographer Andrew Lycett with pointing out that after the success of the first dozen stories from <i>The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</i>, Conan Doyle was suddenly comparatively wealthy and would naturally have started to take an interest in investment opportunities, as Watson did at the time of "The Dancing Men."<br /><br /> Something like 30 of the 60 canonical stories get the spotlight in chapters headed "Finance", "Class", "Family," "Sex," "Race," "War," and "Secrecy." The book doubles down on the widely recognized homosexual subtext to "Wisteria Lodge," then finds a similar theme in "The Blanched Soldier" — and for good measure suggests that there is evidence of pedophilia in "The Priory School."<div><br /><br /> Glazzard looks at story after story identifying themes that interested Doyle and, even more, themes that were already preoccupying his readers in the <i>Strand </i>and other popular media. </div><div><br /></div><div>Divorce law and dysfunctional families, a nation crawling with foreign spies, the scandalous behaviour of the aristocracy, "the growing political power of women and industrial workers," the Canon has them all. Few of the things Glazzard points out are particularly obscure; anyone who has read a little about Victorian history has heard of them. But like poor Watson, we see but we do not observe until somehow they are shown to be relevant. <br /><br /> Several decades after the RUSI building opened in 1895, <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/SK4kvMxtFdLo1WmD6" target="_blank">an equestrian statue was erected</a> in the middle of the road just outside the front door, honoring World War I commander Douglas Haig. Haig's reputation among historians is now dubious, but the living man made such an impression on Arthur Conan Doyle during the Great War that his autobiography, <i>Memories and Adventures</i>, includes an embarrassingly effusive fanboy tribute. </div><div><br /></div><div>Glazzard quotes ACD's words about Haig in a late chapter of his book titled "That Secret History of a Nation," a phrase borrowed from "The Bruce-Partington Plans." He places several canonical stories in the context of the spy fiction that fascinated the British public in the late 19th and early 20th century, in anticipation of the Great War that was to come. <br /><br /><br /> One of his insights explains a lot about the Canon's espionage stories, as illustrated by the names given to three top-level spies: Hugo Oberstein, Louis LaRothière, and Eduardo Lucas — a German, a Frenchman, and a Spaniard. They represent "geopolitical reality" as interpreted by Conan Doyle, the author says, explaining a major shift within barely a decade: "Where France had been the presumed enemy in 'The Naval Treaty', 'The Second Stain' was first published in The Strand in December 1904, shortly after the Entente Cordiale was agreed between Britain and France," making Germany the popular foe.<br /> <br /><br /> This volume arrives on Sherlockian and Doylean shelves as Edinburgh University — Arthur Conan Doyle's alma mater — begins to establish itself as a centre of scholarly studies about the author and his greatest literary creation.  It's eminently worth attention from any serious Sherlockian. </div><div><br /></div><div>If I have one cavil about the book, it would be the subtitle, "Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle's Detective Fiction." There may be secrets, there may be lies, but mostly there are themes that interested the author, that were totally familiar to the Canon's original readers, and that will show today's Sherlockians where to find much more in the text than they knew was there. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Editor's note:</h3><div>You might want to check out the related episode of I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, a conversation with Marsha Pollak, BSI ("A Small But Select Library") and Michael Quigley, BSI ("A Large, Brass-Bound Safe"): <a href="http://ihose.co/ihose213" target="_blank">Corporals, Colonels, and Commissionaires</a>:</div><div><br /></div><div><iframe allowfullscreen="" data-dashlane-frameid="516" data-dashlane-rid="3ca8520fe50b2bdd" data-form-type="" height="192" mozallowfullscreen="true" msallowfullscreen="true" oallowfullscreen="true" scrolling="no" src="//play.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/18532706/height/192/theme/modern/size/large/thumbnail/yes/custom-color/614b79/time-start/00:00:00/playlist-height/200/direction/backward" style="border: none;" title="Embed Player" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="100%"></iframe><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /></div><script type="text/javascript"> amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "scottmonty-20"; amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual"; amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart"; amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon"; amzn_assoc_region = "US"; amzn_assoc_design = "enhanced_links"; amzn_assoc_asins = "1474431305"; amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit"; amzn_assoc_linkid = "5a33620dc0c8de3b4556830adca79bb1"; </script> <script src="//z-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/onejs?MarketPlace=US"></script>

The Case of Sherlock Holmes: A Book Rich with Insights

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes." [HOUN] Image credit: Royal United Services Institu...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

Banknotes Fit to Pass Anywhere

<h4 style="text-align: center;">"Is it forgery, coining, burglary?" [VALL] </h4><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5WiHew1zvtrzv3F2Lnx8q2WKpaSGPxB4ZaRWKOUcuMr6Ifas344BkVvu3SEr4LBdZEvzPWBUkTgrFME9OfV8DeF6Er0ebUC57ccZQHRi6ZOy982UUW3Pt64F2tDgQAkt4CRhLhQh7gA-r/s1200/Collage_for_banknote_design%252C_Bank_of_Manchester%252C_UK%252C_1833._On_display_at_the_British_Museum_in_London.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="735" data-original-width="1200" height="392" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5WiHew1zvtrzv3F2Lnx8q2WKpaSGPxB4ZaRWKOUcuMr6Ifas344BkVvu3SEr4LBdZEvzPWBUkTgrFME9OfV8DeF6Er0ebUC57ccZQHRi6ZOy982UUW3Pt64F2tDgQAkt4CRhLhQh7gA-r/w640-h392/Collage_for_banknote_design%252C_Bank_of_Manchester%252C_UK%252C_1833._On_display_at_the_British_Museum_in_London.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Banknote, Bank of Manchester (credit: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collage_for_banknote_design,_Bank_of_Manchester,_UK,_1833._On_display_at_the_British_Museum_in_London.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a>)</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2014/11/remembering-donald-redmond-bsi-2s.html" target="_blank">Donald A. Redmond, BSI</a>, who was my father, wrote something like 200 works of Sherlockian scholarship and imagination over more than four decades, and I've spent a lot of time lately working through the typescripts he left in his files. Most of his works were published in one way or another, including two full-length books; but I have been surprised to find quite a mass of material that apparently never saw print.<br /><br /> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjILS3B7wBmSdRF-vgMhYGPUhkFkm9zSh9n_wKb-XAuOBwgMzXMpAo-_Z0p7DRtXkTASWbfY5Wv9K4hNDfD4RoamzqlyVKwAAqwVK6u2nxjHYAiVFaC7e2ksS20gSsSCG-R0D6UFeWRwnM7/s1680/Donald+Redmond.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1680" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjILS3B7wBmSdRF-vgMhYGPUhkFkm9zSh9n_wKb-XAuOBwgMzXMpAo-_Z0p7DRtXkTASWbfY5Wv9K4hNDfD4RoamzqlyVKwAAqwVK6u2nxjHYAiVFaC7e2ksS20gSsSCG-R0D6UFeWRwnM7/w286-h400/Donald+Redmond.jpg" width="286" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Credit: Redmond family photo</span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />A number of these never-published articles are brief studies that Donald Redmond (DAR) called "<b>Sherlockian Plotnotes,</b>" which seem to be leftovers from his research about Arthur Conan Doyle's sources for the Sherlock Holmes tales. (The central work resulting from that research was his 1982 book <a href="https://amzn.to/3aswNsc" target="_blank"><i>Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources</i></a>.)</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYy5ZeLH416XKVNLyT7tZF9vz2SIOYmwsm1kCm4CG1Zym9sQ926u0UIbVTDnq1TBdaneuzd4uOpnMd_VM3o2PZLaLKTwR_cRTytwK2smVzbkSTeruh3Q0stLen4L-mkHLxVJFHVuFC0yLS/s458/A+Study+in+Sources.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="458" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYy5ZeLH416XKVNLyT7tZF9vz2SIOYmwsm1kCm4CG1Zym9sQ926u0UIbVTDnq1TBdaneuzd4uOpnMd_VM3o2PZLaLKTwR_cRTytwK2smVzbkSTeruh3Q0stLen4L-mkHLxVJFHVuFC0yLS/s320/A+Study+in+Sources.jpg" width="210" /></a></div><br /><div><br /> One of those Plotnotes, dated 1989, deals with "The Three Garridebs," and with the crime at its center — not the attempt to shoot Watson in front of his friend Holmes, but the counterfeiting of Bank of England notes. Here's some of what DAR wrote on that topic:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote><div>"The key plot element in 3GAR, aside from the wild-goose-chase ruse, is the cache of plates for counterfeiting banknotes. This differs sufficiently from the thirty thousand napoleons in gold in REDH, perhaps the critic will allow, permitting more freedom of locale. It has been a popular device in pastiches too." </div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>He cites the Rathbone/Bruce film <i><a href="https://amzn.to/3mKUimb" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Dressed to Kill</a></i> and the more recent <i><a href="https://amzn.to/2YF9ysQ" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Without a Clue</a></i>.<br /><br /></div><div>"The pastiches," says DAR, "were not as adventurous as 3GAR — nor as the reality —for they chased after plates for pounds and fivers, whereas Rodger Prescott's notes were hundreds." <div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>On the other hand, Prescott was a coiner as well,</div><blockquote><div>"and most coining was of spurious silver — half-crowns, crowns, perhaps only shillings, worth $2 to$10 in 1980s purchasing power — which was easier to make and to pass, being so much more common. Holmes exposed one coiner, he alleged, by finding copper and zinc filings in his trouser cuffs — most unlikely, pewter (the usual material for duff coins) being composed of tin and lead. But the real money was in high­ value banknotes."</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Victorian newspapers make clear that the forging industry was viable. DAR quotes from the Portsmouth Evening News of 30 January 1883:</div><blockquote><div>"The manufacture of flash bank notes is being extensively carried on in the Midlands. The notes are of such good imitation that not only have commercial men been deceived, but they have been accepted by numerous local banks. The spurious character of the notes was first discovered on some being passed to the Bank of England. The police suspect that the notes are produced and circulated by a gang of clever swindlers, having agents in the principal midlandtowns."</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>And from the same paper in 1885:</div><blockquote><div> "On Monday or Tuesday last a woman, accompanied by a respectabletradesman in Leadenhall Market, appeared at the Bank of England, and tendered to a cashier a £500 note, which she requested cash and notes for. Thenote to all appearances was perfectly genuine, and it was only by the discovery that there were no notes of that particular number issued for that amount that the forgery was detected."</div></blockquote><div> <br /> A £500 note would have the modern purchasing power of — well, DAR, writing in the 1980s, says $35,000; I'd call it $100,000, based on the latest estimates of <a href="https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2021/09/thinking-about-money-in-sherlock-holmes.html#.YWWXfNpKjb0" target="_blank">how much the value of money has changed</a>. <br /><br /> He adds: </div><blockquote><div>"One may marvel over the fact that the Bank of England could record and keep track of the number of every single banknote; but recall that gold was the usual medium of everyday transactions, unless the amount was sizeable. Banking accounts were less common, used chiefly for cheques transmitted between firms or by persons of substantial means."</div></blockquote><div>  <br /><br /> One final note:</div><blockquote><div>"There was a Roger Prescott, by the way, far back in English history; his line founded Lancaster, Massachusetts, and brought the Prescott name to America. There is no record of his coining or forging; perhaps the plates still lie buried."</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>I hope to include some of these never-published studies in a proposed anthology of DAR's writing. Details will be announced in due course.</div><div><br /></div><div>--</div></div><div><br /></div><br />

Banknotes Fit to Pass Anywhere

"Is it forgery, coining, burglary?" [VALL]  Banknote, Bank of Manchester (credit: Wikimedia Commons ) Donald A. Redmond, BSI , who...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

Thinking About Money in the Sherlock Holmes Stories

<h4 style="text-align: center;">"certain arguments, metallic or otherwise" [COPP] </h4><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6C5ev3dNz-qw1SgMzQV71RnfPB66-N0e6IzMJDnzs-nKJTdwd9KHaMhdv88S-k8YJpXRiTrrqPJvCB3w1vll4JtPZctpEzVa_s-fXw3LMd6rmSfbz_RqDcUv6UnnbWuxhcaBXxKwcpPa0/s640/French+Gold+in+The+Red-Headed+League.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6C5ev3dNz-qw1SgMzQV71RnfPB66-N0e6IzMJDnzs-nKJTdwd9KHaMhdv88S-k8YJpXRiTrrqPJvCB3w1vll4JtPZctpEzVa_s-fXw3LMd6rmSfbz_RqDcUv6UnnbWuxhcaBXxKwcpPa0/w640-h480/French+Gold+in+The+Red-Headed+League.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Image credit: <a href="https://youtu.be/PTtiR9j-IQw" target="_blank">YouTube</a></span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div>Money figures in most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the reader misses some of the point without a reliable answer to the question, "How much is that really?" For North American readers, more specifically: what would the equivalent be in today's US dollars? <br /><br /><div>How lavish was that £6,000 cheque from the Duke of Holdernesse? <br /><br />How pricy was that 8d glass of sherry? (Here we get into the messy calculations: twelve pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound, so a pound would buy a round of sherry for 30 people at an expensive hotel.) <br /><br />How "nicely" could Mary Sutherland get along on the annual income of £100 from her trust fund? <br /><br /><br /> The obvious way to address this kind of question is a comparison of canonical sums with today's prices, such as the $18 rock bottom price for a glass of port (sherry doesn't seem to be available) at the Palm Court at New York's Plaza Hotel. </div><div><br /></div><div>Unfortunately, no single multiplier seems to work, especially for the luckless researcher who tries to take into account incomes (Mycroft Holmes's "four hundred and fifty pounds a year") as well as prices. It does appear that salaries were low in the Victorian era— but one must remember that hardly anybody paid income tax, and that there were no iPhones, cable packages, sushi or gym memberships to gobble up a modest middle-class income. <br /><br /> Three or four decades ago, I used that sort of hand-waving calculation to proclaim that £1 in Sherlock Holmes's era had the purchasing power of $100 in modern times. That made the Baker Street Irregulars' daily shilling the equivalent of a $5 bill. </div><div><br /></div><div>Later, as prices kept rising, I amended my rule of thumb to say that the pound was worth $120 ("<a href="https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2018/01/canonical-currency-in-present-day-terms.html#.YVH_u5pKjb0" target="_blank">Canonical Currency in Present-Day Terms</a>"), at the unfortunate cost of complicated mental arithmetic when the subject was, say, Watson's wound pension of eleven shillings and sixpence a day. That would work out to (brings calculator into play) $2,070 a month, not generous but unfortunately plausible. <br /><br /> Other enthusiasts have done the calculation in other ways, such as converting the 11/6 (or the Duke's £6,000, as the case may be) to US dollars at the traditional rate of $5 to £1, and inflating the result by the 125-year inflation factor of about 3,000 per cent. </div><div><br /></div><div>Alternatively, one could calculate inflation first and transatlantic currency exchange afterwards (the pound is worth about $1.40 US these days). The calculation is a simple one, as Sherlock Holmes mendaciously said in "Silver Blaze."</div><div><br /><br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">A Value Proposition</h3> Recently, however, it struck me that there's another way to look at the matter. After all, the pound, the basic unit of British currency, is tied firmly to the value of precious metals in two different ways. <br /><br /> First of all, it's the pound sterling. If you go back far enough £1 was the negotiable value of a "Troy pound" (373 grams) of silver. </div><div><br /></div><div>And second, it was in Victorian times almost entirely represented by a gold coin, a "sovereign", that wasn't just worth a pound, it literally was a pound. A sovereign, according to several trustworthy books of reference, contained 123.27 grains, or 7.98 grams, of gold (see also "<a href="https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2016/04/the-curious-incident-of-guinea-coin.html#.YVIAt5pKjb0" target="_blank">The Curious Incident of the Guinea Coin</a>").<br /><br /><br /> The prices of precious metals are volatile these days, to say the least. Over the past two years (which include the COVID-19 era and its severe threats to the world economy), silver has sold for as little as 37 cents per gram, as much as 94 cents. In 2020-21, the wildness has moderated a little, and the average price has been about 80 cents a gram. Multiply the weight by the price, and you'll find that a pound of silver should cost about $298 US. <br /><br /> Similar calculations work with gold, though Neil Gibson, the Gold King, would be glad to know that the swings are not as extreme. </div><div><br /></div><div>The price per gram has been about $56 a gram over the past two years, in a range from about $47 to $67. Multiply that $56 by the sovereign's weight of just under 8 grams, and you get $447 US as the value of the gold that Irene Adler gave Sherlock Holmes at her wedding. <br /><br /> Why aren't these numbers the same? Well, that's the effect of "the bimetallic question", that international economic conundrum on which Mycroft Holmes was available to be consulted. </div><div><br /></div><div>But either of the figures, $298 or $447, is a plausible candidate for the "real" value of an 1895 pound in today's American money. Which shines a whole new light on the "seven pounds thirteen" found on the body of Enoch Drebber, Mrs. Maberley's £5,000 trip around the world, and even the 55 shillings (just short of three pounds) that Holmes paid for his Stradivarius. </div><div><br /></div><div>More than you'd think, more than you'd think. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>Editor's note</i></b>: Also see "<a href="https://fourthgarrideb.com/2019/04/09/the-bimetallic-question-in-the-valley-of-fear/" target="_blank">The Bimetallic Question in The Valley of Fear,</a>" via The Fourth Garrideb</div><div><br /></div><div>Further listening:</div><div><iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610626000&color=%23ce1a21&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true"></iframe><div style="font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc;line-break: anywhere;word-break: normal;overflow: hidden;white-space: nowrap;text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif;font-weight: 100;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/sherlockholmes-trifles" title="Sherlock Holmes: Trifles" target="_blank" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;">Sherlock Holmes: Trifles</a> · <a href="https://soundcloud.com/sherlockholmes-trifles/old-money" title="Old Money" target="_blank" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;">Old Money</a></div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>--</div><div><br /></div>

Thinking About Money in the Sherlock Holmes Stories

"certain arguments, metallic or otherwise" [COPP]  Image credit: YouTube Money figures in most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

T.S. Eliot's Love Song to Sherlock Holmes

<h4 style="text-align: center;">"See how the yellow fog swirls down the street" [SIGN]</h4><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiymbj_C1x5SWMTHYzdn8jIOIPsKRBPcRzX-cfCQg7HJBpDrp9e4x0iGbD1cCXtWRM3hUbaOldynrMOiJ6BliF-a8mZ-8k2q-AHzjy_Va_lfKM214s25ai3dJsHascNO_47Bu1u6D99lh1R/s751/TS_Eliot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="498" data-original-width="751" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiymbj_C1x5SWMTHYzdn8jIOIPsKRBPcRzX-cfCQg7HJBpDrp9e4x0iGbD1cCXtWRM3hUbaOldynrMOiJ6BliF-a8mZ-8k2q-AHzjy_Va_lfKM214s25ai3dJsHascNO_47Bu1u6D99lh1R/w640-h424/TS_Eliot.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TS_Eliot.jpg#/media/File:TS_Eliot.jpg" target="_blank">T.S. Eliot</a> (Wikimedia Commons - <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en" target="_blank">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>)</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><div>"Let us go then, you and I," said Sherlock Holmes to his companion, "when the evening is spread out against the sky." <br /><br />No, wait: that wasn't Sherlock, that was Prufrock, the speaker in a poem that continues to intrigue and infuriate, and that is recognized as one of the principal works of Modernism although it's now more than 100 years old.<br /><br /> You may have studied "<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock" target="_blank">The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock</a>" in high school, and you may remember that its author was T. S. Eliot, who also wrote "Four Quartets," "Murder in the Cathedral," "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," and much more. <div><br /></div><div>Eliot was born in St. Louis in the fall of 1888, during the season of London's Jack the Ripper murders, and (according to some chronologists) simultaneous with the Baskerville hound case on Dartmoor. He moved to London as a young man, turned British, and lived until the early days of 1965, when the musical "Baker Street" was in Boston tryouts before its Broadway run. From the early career of Holmes himself to the first murmurings of the Great Sherlock Holmes Boom a lifetime later, in fact. <br /><br /> Scholars both Sherlockian and academic have repeatedly pointed out connections between the canons of Sherlock and Prufrock, starting at least as far back as a brief item in the journal <i>Notes and Queries</i> in 1948. Vernon S. Goslin wrote in <i>The Sherlock Holmes Journal</i> in 1965, noting Eliot's death, that "Conan Doyle and Eliot share the same poetry of outer London." </div><div><br /></div><div>One issue later, A. D. Henriksen had a full-length article in the <i>SHJ</i> discussing Eliot's own 1928 essay about the Sherlock Holmes tales. (See also "<a href="https://crimereads.com/t-s-eliot-crime-fiction-critic/" target="_blank">T.S. Eliot, Crime Fiction Critic</a>" on CrimeReads)<br /><br /><br /> Your high school teacher, explaining "Prufrock" (or, more ambitiously, "The Waste Land"), probably did not point out that several of Eliot's works contain blatant references to the stories of Sherlock Holmes. </div><div><br /></div><div>The most widely known of these is the verse about Macavity, the Mystery Cat, who bears a strong resemblance to the late Professor James Moriarty, to the point that the musical "Cats," based on Eliot's poems, belongs in a comprehensive Sherlockian collection. "East Coker," the second of the Four Quartets, is notable for turning a canonical place name into a common noun: "On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold." <br /><br /> And in "Murder in the Cathedral," a considerable passage from "The Musgrave Ritual" — literally from the questions and answers of the ritual — is quoted in a quite different context, a duel of words between Archbishop Thomas à Becket and the Tempter who is trying his soul. </div><div><br /></div><div>One of the great Sherlockians, Nathan L. Bengis, went to the horse's mouth about these lines, and was able to report in <i>The Baker Street Journal</i> in 1951 that Eliot himself said the borrowing was "deliberate and wholly conscious."</div><div><br /></div><blockquote><div>"Who shall have it? He who will come. What shall be the month? The last from the first. What shall we give for it? Pretence of priestly power." </div></blockquote><div><br /> So what about Prufrock and his love song? </div><div><br /></div><div>There is nothing that blatant, but it is not hard to read the whole 140-line poem as a Sherlockian work — a slightly surrealist pastiche, let's say. Eliot wrote this "love song" in 1910-1911, less than a decade after Sherlock Holmes's apparent retirement from active practice, and exactly contemporary with the publication of such canonical tales as "The Devil's Foot," "The Red Circle," and "Lady Frances Carfax." (It was actually published in 1915.)</div><div><br /> When it speaks of "the yellow fog" and "the soot that falls from chimneys," it is talking about the London that Holmes and Watson knew, and "the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt-sleeves" could be their very smoke.</div><div><br /></div><div>Prufrock, like Holmes, walks through London's "streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question." The reader is not to ask what the question actually is, says Prufrock, but I think we know:</div><div><br />"What did you do with the bodies?"<br /><br /> And when Prufrock speaks of being "formulated, sprawling on a pin… pinned and wriggling on the wall," how can one not think of Peter Carey? Or, indeed, of Jack Stapleton: "A pin, a cork, and a card, and we add him to the Baker Street collection!" </div><div><br /></div><div>Many other lines in the poem have canonical connections, and the narrative of an aging, insecure man wishing but not daring to present himself as a lover might have an echo here and there. "There will be time," says Prufrock,</div><div><blockquote> there will be time<br /> To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;<br /> There will be time to murder and create. </blockquote><br />And it seems clear that what Eliot created more than a hundred years ago came in part from Sherlock Holmes. </div><div><br /></div><div>--</div><div><br /></div><br /></div>

T.S. Eliot's Love Song to Sherlock Holmes

"See how the yellow fog swirls down the street" [SIGN] T.S. Eliot (Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0 ) "Let us go then, you a...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

No Ticket! Dear Me, Watson

<h4 style="text-align: center;">"Square-toes had hopped over" [STUD] </h4><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihCMxQifRtNpKU7egYZjk9WckYOjO0cQT_2n2Q_Q67lCLWVrWR4BXbTlNOBR6jLNqhwKIEIIZXdbzeXax2LgSMp4s4oHvs0zZark96_xXGiIkxbpSblYxT87ba_d1xiURWVo8_cE28SxH3/s1274/No+Ticket+-+Indiana+Jones+and+the+Last+Crusade.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="537" data-original-width="1274" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihCMxQifRtNpKU7egYZjk9WckYOjO0cQT_2n2Q_Q67lCLWVrWR4BXbTlNOBR6jLNqhwKIEIIZXdbzeXax2LgSMp4s4oHvs0zZark96_xXGiIkxbpSblYxT87ba_d1xiURWVo8_cE28SxH3/w640-h270/No+Ticket+-+Indiana+Jones+and+the+Last+Crusade.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Source: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0vNsH81YeA&ab_channel=Movieclips" target="_blank">YouTube</a> screengrab </i></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br />When Sherlock Holmes hears about the discovery of Arthur Cadogan West's body, early in the events of "The Bruce-Partington Plans," he is told that no ticket for an Underground train was found in West's pockets. </div><div><br /></div><div>His immediate response: </div><blockquote><div>"According to my experience it is not possible to reach the platform of a Metropolitan train without exhibiting one's ticket. Presumably, then, the young man had one."</div></blockquote><div><br /> It should be obvious to a Watson — even to a Lestrade — that this deduction is simply wrong. Indeed, it turns out that West never had a ticket, for the simple reason that he never was a passenger. Holmes can be forgiven for not immediately realizing that the young man's body had been placed on the roof of a train, not a proceeding that happens every day, but it seems extraordinary that he does not consider a much more commonplace explanation.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLtMMIiHpsd0k6bztwWPFG2KKIJD7LAw-HPZ2nOZFeoVTmw023jjNlm2XjnpVMr9O2Bg2IT0dOf6NhgxE9Qj8f_6kCcqyg1mkY1cdggthadvDzOudpS6d8Rp03wmdaVml7Nl6JAIB-HBNA/s622/Ticket.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="622" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLtMMIiHpsd0k6bztwWPFG2KKIJD7LAw-HPZ2nOZFeoVTmw023jjNlm2XjnpVMr9O2Bg2IT0dOf6NhgxE9Qj8f_6kCcqyg1mkY1cdggthadvDzOudpS6d8Rp03wmdaVml7Nl6JAIB-HBNA/s320/Ticket.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Metropolitan Railway ticket from 1901, now in the <a href="https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/collections-online/tickets/item/2011-1553" target="_blank">London Transport Museum</a></i></span></span><br style="text-align: start;" /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>   </div><div><br /> How might a passenger get to the train without buying a ticket? Through the trick known nowadays in New York as <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">turnstile-hopping</a>, or through corruption by a friendly and negligent employee. </div><div><br /></div><div>Regardless of the Metropolitan Railway's security measures and the vigilance of its guards, there must have been many attempts every day, some of them successful, to sneak onto a platform, and thence onto a train, without buying a ticket.</div><div><br /> Is it possible that Holmes, whose usual fare included jewel thefts, murdered baronets, and vanishing steamships, remained blissfully unaware of petty crime and twopenny fraud? The man who claimed to have "an exact knowledge of London" must surely have had some knowledge of pickpocketing, prostitution, drunkenness, random violence, and the thousand little cheats by which the poorer classes got by. </div><div><br /></div><div>No doubt Watson's delicacy excised these phenomena from the records of Holmes's cases. The acute observer will notice "a little knot of roughs" and a broken window at the corner of Goodge Street in "The Blue Carbuncle," and of course the fraudulent beggar Hugh Boone in "The Man with the Twisted Lip," but it is difficult to think of many other examples. </div><div><br /></div><div>The official police had to pay attention to such matters, but Holmes was in a position to overlook them, or at least to delegate them to his ragamuffin Irregulars, and Watson clearly did not wish to bring them to his readers' attention. <br /><br /> The remarkable discrepancy between London crime (and London life) as a whole, and the more affluent and sanitized portion of it that was of interest to Sherlock Holmes, has of course often been noticed. Mostly we attribute it to class bias. </div><div><br /></div><div>The Holmes who airily commented in "The Noble Bachelor" about the quality of his incoming correspondence — "the humbler are usually the more interesting" — did not generally walk the talk: his known cases involve, if not royalty and aristocracy, at least the respectable members of the middle class. If they are financially embarrassed it is frequently because they have spent their fortunes, like Sir Robert Norberton of "Shoscombe Old Place."<br /><br /> Admittedly, Hall Pycroft of "The Stock-Broker's Clerk" has never been wealthy, but he is a self-respecting member of the clerical class, who probably read Watson's narratives in the <i>Strand </i>magazine once he had caught up on the day's stock market news. </div><div><br /></div><div>Even while employed, he might have found it expedient to join a goose club like Henry Baker, paying so many pence a week toward the year-end luxury of a Christmas dinner, and once out of a situation he quickly found it difficult to make ends meet, but he would never have fit with that knot of street-corner roughs. <br /><br /> Cadogan West, the young man who died on the Underground without even the solace of a ticket on his person, was of a similar occupational class, though more financially secure. In the <i>Baker Street Journal</i> for Autumn 2013 ("Short Sentences: Deductions from a Few Words in 'The Bruce-Partington Plans'"), I noted that his fiancée, Violet Westbury, was telling Holmes no more than the truth when she described his salary as "ample." </div><div><br /></div><div>Judging from available information about the pay scales for government clerks, West probably earned about £300 a year, or 50 percent more than Hall Pycroft's £200. In current US dollar buying power, the equivalent would be about $40,000. <br /><br /> In other words, at the age of 27, he was earning close to the median annual income currently enjoyed in the United States, and he had it tax-free since British income tax in the 1890s did not touch middle-class earners. </div><div><br /></div><div>If West's needs were indeed "simple," as Violet Westbury also tells Holmes, he must have been well able to support himself and comfortably anticipate taking a wife. Sherlock Holmes did not have most of this information at the time of his exchange with Watson about the missing ticket, but perhaps he jumped to a conclusion from the simple knowledge that Cadogan West was a government employee. <br /><br /> Apparent respectability, however, is no guarantee, as Britain's Financial Conduct Authority discovered in December 2014 when it was found necessary to ban a London hedge fund manager from the finance industry <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">after he was found to have evaded £42,000 in commuter fares</a>. <br /><br />--</div><div><br /></div>

No Ticket! Dear Me, Watson

"Square-toes had hopped over" [STUD]  Source: YouTube screengrab  When Sherlock Holmes hears about the discovery of Arthur Cadoga...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

Sherlock Holmes — His Limits

<h4 style="text-align: center;">"You defined my limits in a very precise fashion" [FIVE]</h4> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPxha-boxOk8yGj9HqdSPGi4JuiE-PXzB6ASrd1wWYJMjT9G9gvN5hMbkgp0ncxvBPZeO-SXDUzUQSvVZakYVYeqQE_FVF7tGgFjTJ0mD3uoW1Bjs76gKvX6ey7N8_qwmChNMz48K2blnc/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="616" data-original-width="960" height="410" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPxha-boxOk8yGj9HqdSPGi4JuiE-PXzB6ASrd1wWYJMjT9G9gvN5hMbkgp0ncxvBPZeO-SXDUzUQSvVZakYVYeqQE_FVF7tGgFjTJ0mD3uoW1Bjs76gKvX6ey7N8_qwmChNMz48K2blnc/w640-h410/image.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Image credit: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNfpel0c2J8&t=1980s&ab_channel=YourDailyBrew" target="_blank">YouTube</a></span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /> Knowledge of literature — nil. Knowledge of astronomy — nil. Admirers of Sherlock Holmes all know that Watson erred badly in his assessment of his roommate, rendered as "Sherlock Holmes — his limits" in <i>A Study in Scarlet</i>. We are talking, remember, about the same Sherlock Holmes who quoted Goethe, Hafiz and Flaubert, and who chatted over dinner about the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic. <br /><br /> But performance appraisals are never easy, and anybody who has been a parent knows about reading a school report card, basking in every positive comment, and tensing up over any hint that the great hope of the next generation needs to work harder on spelling. <div><br /></div><div>Mastery of one class is noted with an A as "profound", of another as "feeble" with an F; and what can a parent make of a notation that the student's work in a third field of study is "accurate, but unsystematic"? What was the teacher thinking? <br /><br /> In this case, what was Watson thinking? </div><div><br /></div><div>Was he really qualified to judge Holmes's violin playing, or his proficiency with the singlestick? A physician himself, he might reasonably pass judgement on Holmes's knowledge of anatomy and even chemistry, but did he have the qualifications in philosophy to conclude that Holmes's expertise there too was "nil"? <br /><br /> Such objections have been raised many times. But perhaps the most damning criticism of Watson's report card on Holmes is the number of subjects that it entirely omits. </div><div><br /></div><div>Mathematics, for example: had Watson not yet noticed the mathematical finesse that allowed Holmes to work out the calculations of the Musgrave oak and elm, or to boast when determining a train's speed that "the calculation is a simple one"? <br /><br /> The railway calculation may be simple in theory, by the way, but it's awkward in practice. Several Sherlockians have tied themselves in knots over a formula for working out the speed in one's head, including Julian Wolff in <i>The Baker Street Journal</i> in 1963 (The Editor's Gas-Lamp: "The Dynamics of the Binomial Theorem," <i>BSJ</i>, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1963. pp. 199-200).</div><div><br /></div><div>He advised that to come up with his conclusion of 53.5 miles per hour, Holmes merely had to "divide 1227.27 by the number of seconds required to travel 1800 feet". And he appended this elegant graph. </div><div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX7oDY1qdRLLfpkNf2KX9a9XXcFTa6t5ypI2c7P1eTpfQmFRJFVyYgWvpXQxZdObEFak-o59sTdl9LCRdCzYpotlDiwB6zqqeqmsaAMDHNGCYnq9CxO5m-wWLS1XWNk2sZNvld5aS9vHH4/s804/wolffgraph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="739" data-original-width="804" height="588" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX7oDY1qdRLLfpkNf2KX9a9XXcFTa6t5ypI2c7P1eTpfQmFRJFVyYgWvpXQxZdObEFak-o59sTdl9LCRdCzYpotlDiwB6zqqeqmsaAMDHNGCYnq9CxO5m-wWLS1XWNk2sZNvld5aS9vHH4/w640-h588/wolffgraph.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Dr. Wolff's chart, BSJ, Vol. 13, No. 4</span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Long-time Sherlockian and math professor Tom Drucker has kindly reminded me that if d = rt (distance equals rate times time) then r = d/t (rate is equal to distance over time). "Since the distance is being kept fixed," he writes, "that just gives an inverse relationship between rate and time, as illustrated in Wolff's graph. The curve itself is a hyperbola."</div><div><br /><br /> But Watson's report card for Holmes has no line for mathematics! Nor is there one for foreign languages, though it appears that Holmes had some acquaintance at least with French, German, Italian, Persian, Arabic and Tibetan. <br /><br /> What about zoology: was it as "variable" as Holmes's botany? Maybe it was, at that, considering his willingness to believe that snakes drink milk, and his insistence that a worm found in an ordinary match-box was "unknown to science". It is notable that his response to the charlatanism of "The Creeping Man" is cast as philosophy (nil) rather than physiology (feeble). <br /><br /> There is an interesting lacuna somewhere between Holmes's alleged knowledge of botany (variable… knows nothing of practical gardening) and his expertise in the varied soils of London, which Watson places under Geology. It is interesting to imagine that Holmes, who grew up as the heir to a line of "country squires", got his knowledge of dirt from listening to conversations between his father and a steward or foreman on the family land, but did not stick around long enough for the repetitive labor of planting. And yet he knew, in the case of "Wisteria Lodge", what one is supposed to do with a spud, a tin box, and an elementary book on botany — it's never too late to learn.</div><div><br /></div><div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Don't Know Much About History?  </h2>And as I recently prepared an essay on canonical references to English kings, queens, battles, and constitutions, now in print as <i><a href="http://credmond.ca/ashoe.html" target="_blank">A Sherlockian History of England</a></i>, I found myself wondering why Watson does not even attempt to rate his new acquaintance's "Knowledge of History" along with Literature and Astronomy. </div><div><br /></div><div>That knowledge cannot have been quite "nil", since an English schoolboy can hardly escape without learning a little about William of Orange and the Battle of Waterloo. In fact, as I point out in my essay, Holmes studies early English charters (land deeds), investigates an ancient British barrow (burial site), examines Saxon and Norman graves with professional care at Shoscombe Old Place, recognizes allusions to Charles I and Charles II in the Musgrave ritual, buys a 1642 book and chats with Watson about its origins, knows one Napoleonic battle from another, has an opinion about the causes of the American Revolution, ostentatiously identifies the date of a century-old house — in short, shows every evidence of being familiar with British history, especially (but not only) its relevance to his own work. <br /><br /> Knowledge of History, then: profound, although one might admit to its being "unsystematic" in view of the theory he apparently espouses connecting the Cornish language to ancient Chaldean, brought to Cornwall by Phoenician tin traders from Lebanon. The mildest thing one might say about this suggestion is that <a href="http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2002-May/022206.html" target="_blank">modern archaeologists do not agree with it</a>, but Holmes the historian gets points for being aware that tin mining has been the backbone of Cornish civilization for many centuries. <br /><br /><br /> It would appear that he knew something of American history too, incidentally, at least enough to be aware of the Ku Klux Klan (in "The Five Orange Pips") and to make sense of Effie Munro's story in "The Yellow Face". What his marks might be in genetics, in view of how he accepted that narrative, is a question for another day. <br /><br /> History, mathematics, biology, even geography (though Holmes apparently knew where Egria was): Watson's sketch of Holmes's limits leaves out too many basic subjects. </div><div><br /></div><div>But of course he was still getting to know his roommate in those days, and one wonders how he had had the opportunity to test that "good practical knowledge of British law" and the expertise in poisons. </div><div><br /></div><div>Would you hire a young professional based on so partial a resumé? </div><div><br /></div><div>Depends on the importance you attach to his knowledge of sensational literature, I suppose.<div dir="ltr" id="divtagdefaultwrapper" style="color: black; font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </div> </div><div><br /></div>

Sherlock Holmes — His Limits

"You defined my limits in a very precise fashion" [FIVE] Image credit: YouTube Knowledge of literature — nil. Knowledge of ast...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

Sherlock Holmes, Socks, and Simpson

<h4 style="text-align: center;"> "I must kick off my boots and stockings" [SIGN]</h4><div> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Bb336eTNAvzqtG-OhtUup341Sr4HuWKnbDrSWU8DfmENdyax4UroTj1iJtWRfANB5Bmw9sCeUgoO5m4dtRrMWwL6_oDua9Emrt-v8IfCAXhHexGpvRNpChui12jJ8Pu1ir-UYF0xELi_/s1600/Socks.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Socks with the profile of Sherlock Holmes" border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Bb336eTNAvzqtG-OhtUup341Sr4HuWKnbDrSWU8DfmENdyax4UroTj1iJtWRfANB5Bmw9sCeUgoO5m4dtRrMWwL6_oDua9Emrt-v8IfCAXhHexGpvRNpChui12jJ8Pu1ir-UYF0xELi_/w640-h360/Socks.png" title="Sherlock Holmes socks" width="640" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><div>Fancy socks — <b><a href="https://amzn.to/2CpA4uP" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">some of them with Sherlockian patterns</a></b> — are in style just now. These otherwise humble garments also make one fleeting and memorable appearance in the Sherlock Holmes tales, along with a handful of insignificant ones such as the discovery of Neville St. Clair's socks in the room that he used for his transformation into Hugh Boone. </div><div><br /></div><div>The story where socks take center stage for a moment is "The Three Garridebs," in a passage that David L. Leal pointed out in an article in <i>The Baker Street Journal</i> last year. The moment "is hilarious, and I never tire of it," he wrote. The locale is the Baker Street sitting-room; the speaker is John Garrideb, later to be dramatically revealed as "Killer" Evans, counterfeiter and gunman. He claims to be an American, a lawyer from Kansas, but Sherlock Holmes observes that his clothes are British: "The shoulder cut of your coat, the toes of your boots — could anyone doubt it?"</div><div><br /></div><div>Garrideb replies: </div><blockquote><div>"Well, well, I had no idea I was so obvious a Britisher. But business brought me over here some time ago, and so, as you say, my outfit is nearly all London. However, I guess your time is of value, and we did not meet to talk about the cut of my socks. What about getting down to that paper you hold in your hand?"</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>From that moment, Holmes is suspicious of the American, whose business card gives his address as Moorville, Kansas, and uses the grandiose American title of "counsellor at law." When he speaks of having been "in the law at Topeka," the capital of Kansas since statehood was granted in 1861, Holmes makes mention of an entirely bogus "Dr. Lysander Starr," supposedly a former mayor of the city. Garrideb falls into the trap by agreeing that "his name is still honoured."</div><div><br /></div><div>The story Is familiar enough. But we might pause to think about that mention of (perhaps fashionable) socks In the context of prominent figures in the frontier state of Kansas. "The Three Garridebs," published in 1924, is almost certainly set in the summer of 1902, a period when populism (largely born of rural desperation, so that socks were a luxury) was still struggling with conservatism for dominance.</div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0SXBnD_KsIt13ZlhwtI7_FoVT5ronuM4F_65MYN2vhJnePmaQDlyY26ErrNWnduDwwpbC5LrNv58ZS4-CcOMcqj4tAF3Nt6xG6xRTMmuh7i2qch41hWVFXfd8m5W6n_9nMUtd57TLfNyq/s417/Jerry_Simpson.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="417" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0SXBnD_KsIt13ZlhwtI7_FoVT5ronuM4F_65MYN2vhJnePmaQDlyY26ErrNWnduDwwpbC5LrNv58ZS4-CcOMcqj4tAF3Nt6xG6xRTMmuh7i2qch41hWVFXfd8m5W6n_9nMUtd57TLfNyq/s320/Jerry_Simpson.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><font size="2">Jerry Simpson (credit: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Simpson" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>)</font></i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>In that era, if you mentioned socks in the same breath as Kansas, you could only be referring to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Simpson" target="_blank">Jeremiah Simpson</a> (1842-1905), who served as a United States Congressman from Kansas for six years (1891-1895 and 1897-1899). One of the most memorable representatives of the rural populism of his era, he had been born in Prince Edward Island (part of Canada from 1867 onward) but raised in New York. </div><div><br /></div><div>He served with an Illinois regiment during the Civil War, worked on ships steaming the Great Lakes from Indiana, and finally settled on a Kansas farm. During hard times in 1883-1884 he joined a locally organized political movement. Things got worse in 1889, to the point that farmers were burning their main crop, corn, for fuel. (They would soon be switching from corn to wheat, easier to grow in conditions of frequent drought.)</div><div><br /></div><div>When the 1890 election came along, Simpson was nominated for Congress by the People's Party, the Democrats not yet being a force in the region. He faced a Republican candidate, a wealthy railroad attorney who, he charged, even wore "fine silk hosiery." Silk socks were better than none at all, the Republican unwisely shot back, and "Sockless Jerry" was elected in a landslide. His name is still honoured (to borrow Holmes's phrase) as an icon of Kansas populism.</div><div><br /></div><div>Could Holmes have been aware of the story of Sockless Jerry Simpson in 1902? Could Watson, or that fellow Arthur Conan Doyle, have known about him in 1924 and dropped Topeka (and socks) half-consciously into the story of a con man who claimed to be from the Sunflower State? Research has not been done, but it seems likely that The Times and other newspapers known at Baker Street might have mentioned the sockless politician once or twice, and his story, once heard, is hard to forget.</div><div><br /></div><div> --</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><script type="text/javascript"> amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "scottmonty-20"; amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual"; amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart"; amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon"; amzn_assoc_region = "US"; amzn_assoc_design = "enhanced_links"; amzn_assoc_asins = "B01MCRKD5N"; amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit"; amzn_assoc_linkid = "4142c2256ed4f6938d75fd05defbcff2"; </script> <script src="//z-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/onejs?MarketPlace=US"></script></div>

Sherlock Holmes, Socks, and Simpson

 "I must kick off my boots and stockings" [SIGN]   Fancy socks — some of them with Sherlockian patterns — are in style just now. ...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

Crows and Sherlock Holmes

<h4 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <span style="text-align: start;">"Here's British Birds" [EMPT] </span></h4> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioZJo6K_By1nc6Qq029nVUkeo4olBMOJhQkzxKP_aXeVwquq1oTj0YQSay5v241xPkYpB4YPYODR_ljZkkczDx4Tp_8s_B7TR6tTQSNpLUhADi757s_98UUP4_nNMitTiKsgp40h2LM5X2/s1600/Crowborough+Edition.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="357" data-original-width="700" height="326" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioZJo6K_By1nc6Qq029nVUkeo4olBMOJhQkzxKP_aXeVwquq1oTj0YQSay5v241xPkYpB4YPYODR_ljZkkczDx4Tp_8s_B7TR6tTQSNpLUhADi757s_98UUP4_nNMitTiKsgp40h2LM5X2/s640/Crowborough+Edition.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <br /></div> <div class="mobile-photo"> </div> "You do occasionally find a carrion crow among the eagles," Holmes tells Watson in "Shoscombe Old Place," using an avian metaphor to describe the possibility that Sir Robert Norberton is a bad 'un. It's not a kind way to speak of crows, who by all informed accounts are highly intelligent and social creatures, but he said it and we have to deal with it.<br /><br />Norberton is the only crow mentioned in the canonical stories, unless we count "the Crow Hill mine" referred to in <i>The Valley of Fear</i>. Or unless we are using a carefully selected edition of the stories, such as a version of the Doubleday <i><a href="https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Doyle&bi=0&bx=off&cm_sp=SearchF-_-Advtab1-_-Results&ds=30&recentlyadded=all&sortby=17&sts=t&tn=Complete%20Sherlock%20Holmes&yrh=1960&yrl=1930">Complete Sherlock Holmes</a></i> published between 1930 and 1960. For there, behold what we find in chapter 3 of <i>The Sign of Four</i>, in the episode where Holmes and Watson accompany Mary Morstan to meet her mysterious benefactor:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"> "At the Lyceum Theatre the crows were already <a href="https://twitter.com/HarrytownSchool/status/887375553334054918" target="_blank">thick at the side-entrances</a>."</blockquote> <br />The word should, of course, be "crowds," as it was in earlier editions and later ones as well. Newt and Lilian Williams, prominent figures now greatly missed by their friends in the Occupants of the Empty House in central Illinois, discovered this amusing typographical error in the 1970s. It launched them on a massive project to identify all the errors in the Doubleday text (and there are many of them) which they came to call <b>The Great Crow Hunt.</b> <br /><br />My father, <a href="https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2014/11/remembering-donald-redmond-bsi-2s.html#.XJZjwChKjb0">Donald A. Redmond</a>, BSI, 2s ("Good Old Index"), dedicated his 1990 book about the printing of the Canon, <i><a href="https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results&an=Redmond&tn=Sherlock+Holmes+among+the+Pirates&kn=&isbn=">Sherlock Holmes among the Pirates</a></i>, to Newt and Lilian. And Les Klinger, compiling his <a href="http://wessexpress.com/html/signoffour.html"><i>Sherlock Holmes Reference Library</i> volume for <i>The Sign of Four</i></a>, was able to consult the Williamses' much-marked-up copy of the Baring-Gould <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results&an=Baring+Gould&tn=Annotated+Sherlock+Holmes&kn=&isbn="><i>The Annotated Sherlock Holmes</i></a>, now treasured in the Occupants' library under the name of <i>The Annotated Annotated</i>. It records: <blockquote class="tr_bq"> "Peter Blau and Cameron Hollyer determined that the 'crows' appeared first in the Crowborough edition." </blockquote> <div> Crowborough was the village near the country home where Arthur Conan Doyle spent his final years; its name regrettably comes not from crows but from an old English word for yellow. The "Crowborough edition" of ACD's writings, in 24 volumes, was produced at the end of the author's life, in 1930, by Doubleday, who subsequently used some of the typesetting in the Complete SH — including the Crowborough crows.<div> <br />Perhaps it was the memory of all these theatre-going crows that stimulated Canadian novelist Shane Peacock to make the birds play a significant role in his first "Boy Sherlock Holmes" novel, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Eye-Crow-Sherlock-Holmes-Case/dp/0887769195/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Eye+of+the+Crow&qid=1553360504&s=gateway&sr=8-1"><i>Eye of the Crow</i></a>, which appeared in 2007. <br /><br />So much for the crows who are birds. For the record, there is also Erasmus Crow, one of the victims in "The Adventure of the Reluctant Corpse" by Matthew J. Elliott, which appears in Volume III of the never-ending <a href="http://bakerstreetbabes.com/interview-with-david-marcum-editor-of-the-mx-book-of-new-sherlock-holmes-stories/"><i>MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories</i></a>. <br /><br />And many of us are acquainted with <a href="https://twitter.com/221Bcrow" target="_blank">@221BCrow</a>, who is an actual person, a writer and enthusiast of Victorian gay history well known in the Sherlockian twittersphere and the Pacific Northwest.<br /><br />In a different category are the crows who are sounds rather than winged creatures. "Finally," Watson writes, again in <i>The Sign of Four</i>, "he [Holmes] broke out into a loud crow of delight." That's not the hoarse caw of the crow, but a totally unrelated sound that has been called by the same word at least since the first English translation of the Bible a thousand years ago, which contains the phrase "Se cocc crawe," the cock crew.</div> <div> <br />It is, in fact, the same noise referred to in "The Norwood Builder" as "Lestrade's little cock-a-doodle of victory". And that's a peculiarly interesting phrase because, if you look up "cock-a-doodle" in the <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i>, one of the quotations documenting the word's use comes from the 1853 novel Peg Woffington by Charles Reade. "It seemed not unlike a small cock-a-doodle-doo of general defiance," Reade wrote, in a book Conan Doyle must certainly have read (he was a great admirer of Reade's later and greater book <i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i>) and, it seems pretty clear, borrowed — and improved — for "The Norwood Builder".<br /><br />Apart from crows, there are other corvids, notably ravens, which figure in <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i> as a pair of them "croaked loudly from a tor." Faced with Selden's body, Holmes observes that "We cannot leave it here to the foxes and the ravens." The Canon also twice refers to "raven" hair; in both instances the black tresses are borne by villains.</div> <div> <br />As far as I can tell, the tales make no mention of rooks, jackdaws, or magpies, and there is just one jay: Abe Slaney, captured at the end of "The Dancing Men," laments that Holmes tricked him with "a note which made me walk in here, like a jay, and give myself into your hands." I have no idea what that idiom is supposed to mean.</div> <div> <br /></div> <div> [<i>Editor's note: the author lives not terribly far from the home of the Toronto Blue Jays.</i>]</div> <div> <br />--</div> <div> <br /><br /> </div> </div>

Crows and Sherlock Holmes

"Here's British Birds" [EMPT]  "You do occasionally find a carrion crow among the eagles," Holmes tells Wats...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

Sherlock Holmes: The Detective Who Will Never Die

<h4 style="text-align: center;"> "That seems final, does it not?" [BRUC]</h4> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5l_OXtk0c3sm2IYcwcXkmSrJTYLnY0WhhVVmQmLG33rs3la2QQAY-ypi22hWkk3Vwp0E1MuzJNLz2ZMRDH6876El_8Wx4KhPTOkFBJqGP2f1-fby4_EyHtbxRGaDHvnjkSySgqBE9sH3U/s1600/John-murray-1917-10-22-his-last-bow-dustjacket+cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="439" height="510" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5l_OXtk0c3sm2IYcwcXkmSrJTYLnY0WhhVVmQmLG33rs3la2QQAY-ypi22hWkk3Vwp0E1MuzJNLz2ZMRDH6876El_8Wx4KhPTOkFBJqGP2f1-fby4_EyHtbxRGaDHvnjkSySgqBE9sH3U/s640/John-murray-1917-10-22-his-last-bow-dustjacket+cropped.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> <br /> In 1927, when <i>The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes</i> was published, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in its preface that "Mr. Sherlock Holmes may become like one of those popular tenors who, having outlived their time, are still tempted to make repeated farewell bows to their indulgent audiences."<br /> <br /> Outlived his time, never; but farewell bows, yes indeed, and frequently, in the 60 canonical tales created by Conan Doyle and John H. Watson over a 40-year period. Thus it is no surprise that in one of the later tales, "The Three Garridebs," Watson cheerfully remarks that this adventure "is not the first we have shared, Holmes. I hope it may not be the last."<br /> <div> <br /></div> <div> Indeed it was not. But behold a list of the stories—no fewer than ten of them—that were, in their day, the "last" Sherlock Holmes story:<br /> <br /> <h3> <b><i>A Study in Scarlet</i> (1887) </b></h3> </div> <div> The original published adventure of Sherlock Holmes, and with no hint that there might ever be a second one, it was last as well as first.<br /> <br /> <h3> <b><i>The Sign of the Four</i> (1890) </b></h3> </div> <div> A more sophisticated novel than its predecessor, <i>The Sign of the Fou</i>r again appeared with no indication that a series was in prospect. Indeed, Watson tells Holmes as the adventure ends that "I fear that it may be the last investigation in which I shall have the chance of studying your methods."<br /> <br /> <h3> <b>"The Final Problem" (1893) </b></h3> </div> <div> This came as the 24th short story in a quick succession following those two novels. Its title could hardly be clearer as an indication that it was meant to put a period (in British terms, a full stop) to the detective's career. Indeed, Watson describes it as "the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished". <br /> <br /> <h3> <b><i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i> (1902) </b></h3> </div> <div> While this was definitely a new story, it was antedated to avoid the implication that Sherlock Holmes lived again. Doyle said that it was "a reminiscence, not a resurrection" of Holmes. It was definitely a one-off, the 27th story and, for a time, the last.<br /> <br /> <h3> <b>"The Abbey Grange" (1904) </b></h3> </div> <div> This was one of the short stories that would soon be collected in <i>The Return of Sherlock Holmes</i>. Nothing in the tale itself suggests that it might become the last adventure, but in "The Second Stain,"  published just a month later (see below), Watson writes that he "had intended" "The Abbey Grange" to be the last "which I should ever communicate to the public."<br /> <br /> <h3> <b>"The Second Stain" (1904) </b></h3> </div> <div> Coming at the end of <i>The Return</i>, this was a natural stopping-place for a reluctant author. And Conan Doyle prefaces it with an unusually long, and unusually dull, first paragraph in which he explains that Holmes has now retired and "notoriety has become hateful to him." As a result, he says, there will be no more: "this long series of episodes should culminate in the most important international case."<br /> <br /> However, money talks, so there were more stories. </div> <div> <br /></div> <div> <h3> <b>"His Last Bow" (1917) </b></h3> </div> <div> "His Last Bow" is the story of Holmes's involvement in espionage before World War I, a later era than is reflected in any of the other canonical stories, and its title — subsequently borrowed for the entire collection in which it appears — strongly suggests that the hero detective would appear on the stage no more.<br /> <br /> <h3> <b>"The Lion's Mane" (1926)</b> </h3> </div> <div> This tale one of the stories that would be collected in <i>The Case-Book of Sherlock Holme</i>s. Nothing in it actually says that there will be no further tales, but it is set in 1907, at or beyond the end of Holmes's career, and told in Holmes's own voice, rather than that of Watson, because it is set "after my withdrawal to my little Sussex home," when detective and doctor have almost lost contact. <br /> <br /> <h3> <b>"Shoscombe Old Place" (1927) </b></h3> </div> <div> This was in fact the last of the Doyle/Watson tales ever to be published. It is very suitable for that position: a story of degeneration, death, and old bones, whose final words are "old age."<br /> <br /> And yet when <i>The Case-Book</i> was compiled and published in 1927, to be followed by <i>The Complete Sherlock Holmes</i> in 1930, "Shoscombe Old Place" no longer stood last.<br /> <br /> <h3> <b>"The Retired Colourman" (1926)</b></h3> That honour of the last story, if it can be called such, eventually went to "The Retired Colourman," another 1926 story, and another story about the bleakness of old age. Perhaps the reference to retirement was the reason for placing it last, or perhaps it was the sentence that now stands at the very end of the volume for a reader who goes through the Canon in order: "Some day the true story may be told." <br /> <br /> Until it is, <i>The Complete Sherlock Holmes</i> is, like Holmes's own monograph about the polyphonic motets of Lassus, "said by experts to be the last word upon the subject." One might also quote Holmes himself, from "The Norwood Builder":<br /> <blockquote class="tr_bq"> "You said it was final; and so it was, in a very different sense." </blockquote> <br /> For the stories just keep coming. In 1948, "The Man Who Was Wanted" was published as the 61st canonical tale, and it took a considerable while before evidence surfaced that its author was neither ACD nor Watson but Arthur Whitaker. In 1978, Michael Dibdin wrote a pastiche under the title <i>The Last Sherlock Holmes Story</i>, and in 2004 Michael Chabon produced <i>The Final Solution: A Story of Detection</i>. <br /> <br /> But neither book was the end, and the end is not yet in sight. We may hope that it never will be.<br /> <br /> [<b><i>Editor's note</i></b>: <i>today, February 21 (or 2/21 in U.S. calendar format) would seem to be the perfect day to review <a href="https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2013/10/celebrate-national-poetry-day.html#.XG7BEOhKjb0">Vincent Starrett's iconic poem "221B,"</a> which contains the lines "Here dwell together still two men of note / Who never lived and so can never die"</i>]<br /> <br /> --</div> <div> <br /></div>

Sherlock Holmes: The Detective Who Will Never Die

"That seems final, does it not?" [BRUC] In 1927, when The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes was published, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

Welcome To America — 125 Years On

<h4 style="text-align: center;"> "It was the one thing which suggested a Continental tour." [CREE]</h4> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT3D8LqbDhkc6r4yWSa9GJu_U4Mk6rc_laFNJuXDVSWzvD665p4gry3KtCwb9Lg_9CfudYAmI_Y2x5gm35yf1I-pNqkPvv7bSGM3EdutaVZskszoLKDKMN5Pb_JvBfx78InRZ8pOzrx8kN/s1600/Welcome+to+America+cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Christopher Redmond's Welcome to America Mr. Sherlock Holmes" border="0" data-original-height="1171" data-original-width="1600" height="468" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT3D8LqbDhkc6r4yWSa9GJu_U4Mk6rc_laFNJuXDVSWzvD665p4gry3KtCwb9Lg_9CfudYAmI_Y2x5gm35yf1I-pNqkPvv7bSGM3EdutaVZskszoLKDKMN5Pb_JvBfx78InRZ8pOzrx8kN/s640/Welcome+to+America+cropped.jpg" title="Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes" width="640" /></a></div> <br /> Remember that time when the creator of Sherlock Holmes <a href="http://shoso.ninja-web.net/Shoso-inBulletin/vol5BLAU.html">played golf with Rudyard Kipling</a>, spent an afternoon drinking with Indiana's greatest poet, and lost a collar-button moments before he had to go on stage?<br /> <br /> Not all on the same day, of course, but all during the same ten-week adventure, Arthur Conan Doyle's 1894 lecture tour of North America. It came just months after Holmes's supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls, and at every stop, from Brattleboro to Milwaukee, Conan Doyle faced eager questions from reporters and the public: <b><i>will there ever be more Sherlock Holmes stories for us?</i></b><br /> <br /> In a free-for-all environment without copyright protection, American publishers had already started pirating ACD's early books, and after the tour they came out with <a href="https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2017/11/episode-133-sherlock-holmes-collection.html#.XEEwHFxKjb0">dozens more editions</a>, especially of <i>The Sign of the Four</i>.<br /> <br /> Quite possibly these cheap editions, rife with typographical errors, and the publicity Conan Doyle generated during and after his tour did as much to make the detective a permanent giant of popular culture as did William Gillette's play five years later.<br /> <br /> Because Conan Doyle lectured almost every night in a different city, Sherlockians across a quarter of the continent have a chance to stand where the great man once stood: New York, of course, and New Rochelle; Toronto and Niagara Falls; Philadelphia and Baltimore; Cincinnati and Toledo. One city at least already has a plaque marking Conan Doyle's stop there: Indianapolis, where the Illustrious Clients erected it in 1994.<br /> <br /> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin5isuzjL6Hc-2bc8KU9V4aT6EMWBKGBwDWqA1MnxkafYwZ8w-PAQTKZCGLuimePY2vZLCyY9vJqJqyR0zm23bRRgAnrn842LH9-1F_iFHKciiy6ZOUoUugY0fxU0NKmEV6yzM5-nfY1hl/s1600/Clients+ACD+plaque.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="268" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin5isuzjL6Hc-2bc8KU9V4aT6EMWBKGBwDWqA1MnxkafYwZ8w-PAQTKZCGLuimePY2vZLCyY9vJqJqyR0zm23bRRgAnrn842LH9-1F_iFHKciiy6ZOUoUugY0fxU0NKmEV6yzM5-nfY1hl/s1600/Clients+ACD+plaque.jpg" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo credit: <a href="http://bakerstreetbeat.blogspot.com/">Dan Andriacco</a></td></tr> </tbody></table> <br /> The tour ran from early October to early December 1894, which means that its 125th anniversary will arrive in a few months, and there are ample opportunities for quasquicentenary celebrations.<br /> <br /> More than 30 years ago, using detailed research in newspaper files and other contemporary sources, I reconstructed the day-to-day story of Conan Doyle's 1894 tour in the book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-America-Mr-Sherlock-Holmes/dp/0889241848">Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes</a></i>, which was published in 1987 by Dundurn Press of Toronto. It was pleasantly received by Conan Doyle scholars at the time, but it has long been out of print.<br /> <br /> I'm delighted to announce that <i>Welcome to America</i> is about to appear in a new edition published by <a href="http://wildsidepress.com/authors-r/redmond-christopher/">Wildside Press</a>. The 1987 chapters will be unchanged, as will the extensive source notes, and the reconstructed text of "Readings and Reminiscences," the lecture Conan Doyle gave to audiences in town after town.<br /> <br /> There will be a new introduction pointing to some of the research that has been done since 1987 adding to scholars' knowledge of the 1894 tour, but that new material is not my work and will not be incorporated into the main narrative. I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere readers <a href="https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2017/06/grave-matters.html">have already learned about one chapter</a> in the book that needs correcting, the one describing Conan Doyle's visit to the grave of Edgar Allan Poe — a touching incident that probably never took place.<br /> <br /> Please watch for announcements about <i>Welcome to America</i>, and look forward to reading about Conan Doyle's partying with the young athletes of Toledo, his testy remarks about anti-British sentiment in parts of the United States, his visit to Cooper's Cave at Glens Falls, and the six-year-old who whacked him in the head with a stuffed toy.<br /> <br /> --<br /> <br />

Welcome To America — 125 Years On

"It was the one thing which suggested a Continental tour." [CREE] Remember that time when the creator of Sherlock Holmes play...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

We Hear of Freddy Everywhere

<h4 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <b>"the intelligence of your correspondent" [VALL] </b></h4> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPc_JYjUIhAIenDflGqnMUk1KMmavW3Mis6J1LpqkdD_8aRiDij8a-cr-1AXZkY02JG5JYLbzUM8Jbf8V_cNSegjpOL6s3FGkhjjs6HhDcFuYuSruhRWEgtHaK0bazICu_ZuB7DfXoVbSW/s1600/Letter_from_Arthur_Conan_Doyle_to_Herbert_Greenhough_Smith_1912.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="574" data-original-width="1067" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPc_JYjUIhAIenDflGqnMUk1KMmavW3Mis6J1LpqkdD_8aRiDij8a-cr-1AXZkY02JG5JYLbzUM8Jbf8V_cNSegjpOL6s3FGkhjjs6HhDcFuYuSruhRWEgtHaK0bazICu_ZuB7DfXoVbSW/s640/Letter_from_Arthur_Conan_Doyle_to_Herbert_Greenhough_Smith_1912.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <br /></div> Chris Redmond's recent report about the overlap between <a href="http://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2018/06/pigging-out-on-sherlock-holmes.html">the world of Sherlock Holmes and that of Freddy the Pig</a> triggered some memories from Susan Rice, ASH, BSI ("Beeswing"). Susan wrote to share them.<br /> <blockquote class="tr_bq"> "I never read the Freddy books, so the first time I heard of him was at a Mohonk Mountain House mystery weekend early in the '80s. These were wonderful mystery weekends, first managed by Dilys Winn and Carol Brenner of Murder Ink, where a complicated and very bookish mystery was enacted by writers as victims and murderers and general suspects. These weekends were so popular they were sold out within an hour of going on sale like rock concerts. The players were divided into teams and worked to solve the mystery and then present it to the judges and other players — the top prize being guaranteed reservations for the next year.<br /> <br /> "In '81 or '82 we were all so happy with our random team that we resolved to play together every year, with the magisterial consent of Carol and Dilys. At our first group meeting we met a fellow from the west coast who claimed to be a Sherlockian and was annotating the stories on note cards. His name was Les Klinger. When we convened the next year, the teams were all named for detectives, and it was Les who suggested we call ourselves the Freddy the Pig team as that was a detective the organizers were unlikely to choose for a team name. We won by a mile, and when we returned the following year, the teams were named after the rooms of a British estate, so we opted to be The Pigsty.<br /> "Also on the team were Karen and Billy Palmer, owners of Bogie's Restaurant on West 26th Street in New York, which for a decade became the center of the local mystery scene, and Henry Enberg, BSI. We enjoyed this weekend for many years until it began to be offered in the Neiman Marcus catalog and the clientele fell from its lofty heights of writers and fans to wealthy Texans.<br /> <br /> "Then, just a few years ago, Billy and Karen decided to leave the city for a small town upstate named Roxbury and bought a house a couple of centuries old. At a welcome party given by a neighbor they learned for the first time that the house catty-corner across the street was the home of Walter Brooks, the author of the Freddy books, and was sometimes mobbed by fans. They were subsequently invited over for a tour of the house.<br /> <br /> "You may not know the Palmers, but they are well known to veteran local Holmesians, as we had a number of <a href="https://prioryscholarsnyc.wordpress.com/">Priory School</a> and <a href="http://ash-nyc.com/">Adventuresses</a>' meetings at Bogie's in the '80s. They had lots of local or visiting mystery authors signing books during Mystery Sundays and offered a general mystery quiz at which drinks were the prize. Billy's collection of old radio mysteries allowed one to be played every Sunday when no author was the centerpiece, and also inspired our radio recordings.<br /> <br /> "You may have heard of ZPPR Productions because of the four cassette tapes offered for sale in the Merchants' Room and played widely at scion meetings. They were written by Andrew Joffe, Sarah Montague, Paul Singleton, and Henry Enberg and are very funny — they also entertained at the four Sherlockian cruises that ME Rich, the Stixes, and I arranged in the '80s and '90s. That's why they have a name in the Sherlockian community, but our other work was sold to public radio and were aired widely."</blockquote> <br /> And Susan concludes: "We hear of Freddy everywhere!"<br /> <br /> We're grateful to Susan and her happy memories. And we're grateful to have such dedicated and faithful readers like her.<br /> <br /> --<br /> <br />

We Hear of Freddy Everywhere

"the intelligence of your correspondent" [VALL]  Chris Redmond's recent report about the overlap between the world of Sh...

+ Read more »

by Scott Monty

The Adventure of the Three Anthologies

<h4 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <span style="text-align: start;"><b>"Many acquaintances, and those in the most different classes of society" [STUD]</b></span></h4> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLL77RF_FhJvmYtrI_gQLXY1y62YI2DDTk_y97_Lvs5XzFi9NCqTHdQFYtUgz39gUxT0tdElJAD3VGgcCzOXPlGT3W_jQic0nCYrCWujfXfsGwX2XjhF6YgKfDzVvBtdLiXOZpvyT7m3rR/s1600/Sherlockians+in+Minnesota.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="702" data-original-width="1000" height="448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLL77RF_FhJvmYtrI_gQLXY1y62YI2DDTk_y97_Lvs5XzFi9NCqTHdQFYtUgz39gUxT0tdElJAD3VGgcCzOXPlGT3W_jQic0nCYrCWujfXfsGwX2XjhF6YgKfDzVvBtdLiXOZpvyT7m3rR/s640/Sherlockians+in+Minnesota.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> <br /> While I was working with the publisher on the final approvals for <i><a href="http://wildsidepress.com/about-being-a-sherlockian-edited-by-christopher-redmond-paperback/">About Being a Sherlockian</a></i>, recently issued by Wildside Press [<i>See "</i><a href="http://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2017/11/about-being-sherlockian-its-more-than.html">About Being a Sherlockian - It's More Than Just the Stories</a>"<i> - Ed.</i>], I was starting to sign up authors for a future book to be titled <b><i>Sherlock Holmes Is Like</i></b>. You'll enjoy it, I promise, when it appears, probably towards the end of 2018.<br /> <br /> Like <i>About Being</i>, this book will be a collection of essays on a theme, written by a total of 60 Sherlockians. Why 60? Because that's how many stories there are in the Sherlock Holmes Canon, and all this nonsense was started with an anthology about those stories, titled just <i><a href="http://wildsidepress.com/about-sixty-why-every-sherlock-holmes-story-is-the-best-edited-by-christopher-redmond-paperback/">About Sixty</a></i> and published in 2016 [<i>See also </i>"<a href="http://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2016/10/about-sixty-eliminates-improbable.html">About Sixty Eliminates the Impossible</a>"<i> - Ed.</i>]. So by next year there will be three anthologies with 60 authors each. Beyond that, I'm not making any promises. Or threats.<br /> <br /> Sixty authors to a book, but not the same 60 in each, and yet not all different ones either. Now that the authors for book three are all lined up, subject to any emergencies that may arise, I've done some calculations about <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SherlockianAnthologiesbySixty/">how many people have been involved</a> in creating these volumes:<br /> <br /> <ul> <li>A total of 101 people wrote in the first two books: <b>19</b> had essays in <b>both</b>, 41 only in <i>About Sixty</i> and 41 only in <i>About Being</i>.</li> <li>Of the 19 people who have already been published twice, <b>10</b> will make it a hat-trick with <i>Sherlock Holmes Is Like</i>. The other authors in <i>Is Like</i> will include <b>14</b> who were in <i>About Sixty</i> but not <i>About Being</i>, <b>3</b> who were in <i>About Being</i> but not <i>About Sixty</i>, and <b>33</b> who were not in either of them.</li> <li>When <i>Sherlock Holmes Is Like</i> appears, there will be <b>10</b> people who have appeared in <b>all three books</b>, 26 who have been in two of the three, and 98 only in one of them.</li> </ul> <br /> <br /> That works out to 60 writers whose work I edited for the first time in <i>About Sixty</i>, 41 who arrived for <i>About Being a Sherlockian</i>, and 33 showing up for the first time in <i>Sherlock Holmes Is Like</i>. A total of <b>134</b> authors, then, from multiple countries, generations, genders and orientations, societies, interests, reputations and platforms.<br /> <br /> And I'm very grateful to every one of them.<br /> <br /> <br /> <i><b>Photo credit</b>: the author. (Some of the authors of About Sixty, gathered at The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes conference in Minneapolis, June 2016)</i><br /> <br /> --<br /> <br />

The Adventure of the Three Anthologies

"Many acquaintances, and those in the most different classes of society" [STUD] While I was working with the publisher on the...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond

What Was Jefferson Hope Singing in A Study in Scarlet?

<h4 style="text-align: center;"> "Singing snatches of songs and gibbering" [DEVI]</h4> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLqduurNc6wycooh-oPwsLeAu-FHjEtZh0qYLVNCN6vV5WE2LoOfSXm3gfVWTgrvBin_GONCOl-nOxZ-du9aXaQQHKwResbvumPnOtXLs8nwDliP2KbFwVoewchCZF19WDEykB2eZ-BV6w/s1600/Jefferson+Hope+-+John+Rance.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="575" data-original-width="846" height="434" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLqduurNc6wycooh-oPwsLeAu-FHjEtZh0qYLVNCN6vV5WE2LoOfSXm3gfVWTgrvBin_GONCOl-nOxZ-du9aXaQQHKwResbvumPnOtXLs8nwDliP2KbFwVoewchCZF19WDEykB2eZ-BV6w/s640/Jefferson+Hope+-+John+Rance.JPG" width="640" /></a></div> <br /> <br /> Jefferson Hope, the villain or possibly hero of <i>A Study in Scarlet</i>, had to pretend to be drunk when he encountered a policeman right after killing Enoch J. Drebber. Constable John Rance told Holmes and Watson<br /> <div> <blockquote class="tr_bq"> "He was at the gate when I came out, a-leanin' up ag'in the railings, and a-singin' at the pitch o' his lungs about Columbine's New-fangled Banner, or some such stuff."</blockquote> <br /> A perfectly reasonable reaction to that statement would be skepticism: "new-fangled" banner? Really? It sounds like a twentieth-century word, the sort of word your grandfather would have used about automatic transmissions. ("These modern gramophones are a remarkable invention," Sherlock Holmes said in, probably, 1903.) Indeed, my heart leaped briefly as I wondered whether Arthur Conan Doyle had invented it. He did, after all, <a href="http://www.bsiarchivalhistory.org/BSI_Archival_History/ACD_Word.html">invent a number of words</a>, or new meanings for words, including "snick," [NAVA] "grimpen," [HOUN] and "wonder-woman." [ILLU]<br /> <br /> <br /> But it is not so. The <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i>, which had advanced no farther than the letter B when <i>A Study in Scarlet</i> appeared in 1887, got to the N-words by 1907, and when the entry for "newfangled" (no hyphen, please) appeared, it adduced many uses of the word dating back literally hundreds of years. "Let vs se and examine more of this newfangled philosophye," one scholar wrote in, apparently, 1531. A 1603 translation of Montaigne's essays referred to "new-fangled and vicious introductions." Shakespeare also uses it.<br /> <br /> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja4Dz9Q49iS0XeQMITrVPM9T3_xGyF2icw_nhAtrZZ7MAW7g2wVawHmIeYMvEwavVNVVtFT_t3u31FpaczBP-mPudjD3FHjOzv7uLoDVVbuaIJrauuMR769ByV8ajtIodZMb_r8XtcaJnX/s1600/quote-at-christmas-i-no-more-desire-a-rose-than-wish-a-snow-in-may-s-new-fangled-shows-but-like-of-each-william-shakespeare-367076.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="850" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja4Dz9Q49iS0XeQMITrVPM9T3_xGyF2icw_nhAtrZZ7MAW7g2wVawHmIeYMvEwavVNVVtFT_t3u31FpaczBP-mPudjD3FHjOzv7uLoDVVbuaIJrauuMR769ByV8ajtIodZMb_r8XtcaJnX/s640/quote-at-christmas-i-no-more-desire-a-rose-than-wish-a-snow-in-may-s-new-fangled-shows-but-like-of-each-william-shakespeare-367076.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> <br /> <br /> In any case, Jefferson Hope is not likely to have been singing about newfangled anythings. To a modern ear, the song John Rance heard was self-evidently about a star-spangled, not new-fangled, banner, and one thinks of the song by that name that became the national anthem of the United States in 1931, a mere fifty years after the events in Lauriston Gardens. True enough, "The Star-Spangled Banner" was written in 1814, reflecting events in the then recent unpleasantness known as the War of 1812, and it could well have been known and sung in 1881, the year <i>A Study in Scarlet</i> apparently takes place. Jefferson Hope was, almost ostentatiously, an American.<br /> <br /> But "Columbine" still needs some explaining. The editor of the relevant volume in the <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Sherlock-Holmes-set/dp/0192123297">Oxford Sherlock Holmes</a></i> series says in an endnote that Hope "automatically sings American patriotic songs ('Hail, Columbia!' and 'The Star-spangled Banner')." Maybe so, but "Columbia" is not "Columbine", not quite. <br /> <br /> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrI8YBs8aYgKtNQ9j6eyAyb0QWfM4m95seFwayLWdf1FOWBvRxLocegPtaVGzdJBO1ED2UMvCk-HVeAkvEwsbfbwjqErt44KmCWKmDRknIh2e0hfTAEDiUithyphenhyphenyrh8IFlKt5gZgkv3crpJ/s1600/harlequin-and-columbine-edgar-degas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="895" data-original-width="900" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrI8YBs8aYgKtNQ9j6eyAyb0QWfM4m95seFwayLWdf1FOWBvRxLocegPtaVGzdJBO1ED2UMvCk-HVeAkvEwsbfbwjqErt44KmCWKmDRknIh2e0hfTAEDiUithyphenhyphenyrh8IFlKt5gZgkv3crpJ/s200/harlequin-and-columbine-edgar-degas.jpg" width="200" /></a></div> "Columbine" would be a more familiar name than "Columbia" to the ear of London constable John Rance. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbina">Columbine</a> is the consort of Harlequin in British pantomime, which is not "pantomime" as the rest of the world knows it, but a form of down-market comedy embracing the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlequinade">Harlequinade</a>, which is derived from the Italian <i>commedia dell'arte</i>. The Harlequinade involves love scenes and other clichés including a slapstick police chase which may be the original of the Keystone Cops. (Things are getting complicated, even without bringing in the currently popular figure Harley Quinn, who is associated with the Joker, who has battled Sherlock Holmes in a classic 1976 comic book and in other media — oh, whatever.)<br /> <br /> "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPlQS1pzHdA">Hail, Columbia</a>" dates from 1789 and is not now familiar unless you're the Vice President of the United States, whose official tune it is. Rather better known, and possibly a more likely choice for Jefferson Hope in his improvisation, is the song "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wIDXclKtGQ">Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean</a>." Written in 1843, it was (along with "Hail, Columbia") a candidate for the role of national anthem until "The Star-Spangled Banner" won out in 1931. One of its stanzas begins thus:<br /> <blockquote class="tr_bq"> The star spangled banner bring hither,<br /> O'er Columbia's true sons let it wave.</blockquote> <br /> <div> And if that isn't "Columbine's new-fangled banner", well, I don't know what is.<br /> <br /> <br /> --</div> <div> <br /></div> </div>

What Was Jefferson Hope Singing in A Study in Scarlet?

"Singing snatches of songs and gibbering" [DEVI] Jefferson Hope, the villain or possibly hero of A Study in Scarlet , had to...

+ Read more »

by Chris Redmond