Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches I

by Bill Peschel

  The affair ended after another exchange of letters, but it might have left a mark on Shaw’s next play. Later that year, while writing Pygmalion, he endowed Professor Henry Higgins with the ability to place a person’s birthplace by their brogue “within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.” Positively Holmesian!

  Many affairs occupied Conan Doyle’s time this year. In August, he published an attack on the Oscar Slater trial. Although The Case of Oscar Slater brought attention to the errors committed by the police and the courts, it would be several years before his efforts had an effect. As head of the Amateur Field Sports Association, Conan Doyle expressed interest in improving the performance of the Olympic team in the coming 1916 games in Berlin. As a result, he was asked to form a committee to oversee funding for their training.

  Over the year, The Lost World was being serialized in The Strand and in newspapers in the United States and France. To lend an air of spurious authenticity, Conan Doyle corralled his friends to be photographed as members of the expedition, with himself behind a wig and heavy beard as Professor Challenger. He thought so much of the disguise that he presented himself on Willie Hornung’s doorstep, startling his brother-in-law. In October, the story appeared in hardcover. Reviews and sales were positive, and Conan Doyle began work on the sequel. The only objection came from Conan Doyle’s mother, the “Ma’am.” She was upset that he had not identified himself as “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” on the title page.

  By the end of the year, Conan Doyle again found himself belabored by his greatest creation. American critic Arthur Guiterman published a poem that accused Sherlock—and through him his creator—as a thief of Poe’s Dupin and Gaboriau’s Lecoq. The crime in Guiterman’s eyes was worse, because in A Study in Scarlet, Holmes had the temerity to dismiss Dupin as an inferior!

  This nettled Conan Doyle, who had repeatedly admitted and praised the sources of his inspirations. His reply opened with an insult—“Sure there are times when one cries with acidity, / ‘Where are the limits of human stupidity?’” and ended with a couplet echoed by every author accused of treating his fiction as autobiography: “So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle, / The doll and its maker are never identical.”

  Publications: The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales (April); “The Case of Oscar Slater” (Aug.); The Lost World (Oct.).

  The Adventure of the Mona Lisa

  Carolyn Wells

  On Aug. 11, 1911, painter Louis Béroud walked into the Louvre to visit the Mona Lisa, and found instead four iron pegs and a blank space on the wall. The theft caused a national uproar. The police questioned poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who police learned had received two statuettes stolen earlier from the museum by a friend. He denied having anything to do with it, but implicated his painter-friend Pablo Picasso, who also had a habit of lifting items from the museum for his own use. Picasso denied stealing it, and without proof or the painting, the investigation ended. The painting was recovered in 1913 when a patriotic Italian and former museum employee attempted to sell it to an Italian museum. In the meantime, the prolific writer Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) wrote this pastiche, which appeared in January’s Century magazine.

  The men of the International Society of Infallible Detectives, who will appear in a few more stories in this series, consist of Holmes and Watson; C. Auguste Dupin by Edgar Allan Poe; Arsene Lupin by Maurice Leblanc; Monsieur Lecoq by Émile Gaboriau; Raffles by E.W. Hornung; Luther Trant by Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg; and Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, a.k.a. “The Thinking Machine” by Jacques Futrelle.

  In their rooms on Faker Street the members of the International Society of Infallible Detectives were holding a special meeting.

  “If any one of you,” said President Sherlock Holmes, speaking from the chair, “has any suggestions to offer—”

  “My dear Holmes,” interrupted Arsène Lupin, “we don’t offer or accept suggestions any more than you do.”

  “No,” agreed the Thinking Machine, “we merely observe the clues, deduce the truth, and announce the criminal.”

  “What are the clues?” inquired M. Lecoq of the company at large.

  Raffles looked gravely at the old gentleman, and then smiled.

  “The clues,” he said, “are the frame thrown down a back staircase, the wall vacancy in the Louvre, and the nails on which the picture hung.”

  “Is the wall vacancy just the size of the Mona Lisa?” asked M. Dupin.

  “That cannot be ascertained, since the picture is not available to measure by,” returned Raffles. “But the Mona Lisa is gone, and there is no other unexplained wall vacancy.”

  “The evidence seems to me inconclusive,” murmured M. Dupin. “Is there not a law concerning the corpus delicti?”

  “That’s neither here nor there,” interrupted Arsène Lupin, and Raffles wittily observed, “Neither is the picture.”

  Sherlock Holmes passed his white hand wearily across his brow.

  “This meeting must come to order,” he said. “Now, gentlemen, you have heard a description of the clues—the discarded frame, the vacant space, the empty nails. From these I deduce that the thief is five feet, ten inches tall, and weighs 16o pounds. He has dark hair and one gold tooth. He is fairly healthy, but he has a second cousin who was subject to croup as a child.”

  “Marvelous, Holmes! Marvelous!” exclaimed Dr. Watson, clasping his hands in ecstasy. “He is already the same as behind bars.”

  “I don’t agree with you, Holmes,” declared Arsène Lupin. “It is clearly evident to me that the thief was a blond, rather short and thick-set, and looked like his great-aunt on his mother’s side.”

  Holmes looked thoughtful. “I can’t think it, Lupin,” he said at last, “and if you’ll go over the clues again carefully, you’ll perceive your fallacious inference.”

  “Münsterberg says,” began Luther Trant, but President Holmes cut him off, and said, with his saturnine smile, “Gentlemen, we must get to work scientifically on this problem. Unless we find the stolen picture, and convict the thief, we are not worthy of our professional fame. Now, how much time do you think we should take to accomplish our purpose?”

  “I could find the old daub in a week,” said M. Dupin, “you only have to reason this way. If—”

  “There now, there now,” said the Thinking Machine, querulously, “who wants to hear another man’s advice? Let us all go to work independently of one another. A week will be more than enough time for me to produce both picture and thief.”

  “A week, bah!” scoffed Raffles. “I can accumulate the missing canvas and the missing miscreant in three days’ time. I’m sure of it.”

  President Holmes kept on with his saturnine smile, and said, “Arsène, how much time do you require for the job?”

  “Two days and carfare,” replied Arsène Lupin. “And you yourself, Holmes?”

  The smile of Sherlock Holmes became a little saturniner as he returned quietly, “I already know where it is; I’ve only to go and get it.”

  “That isn’t fair,” broke in Luther Trant, cutting short Dr. Watson’s appreciative remark.

  “Perfectly fair,” declared Holmes, “I’ve had no more advantage than the rest of you. We’ve all heard a list of the clues, I’ve deduced the solution of the mystery. If you other fellows haven’t, it’s because you’re blind to the obvious.”

  “Always distrust the obvious,” began M. Dupin, didactically.

  President Holmes paid his usual lack of attention to this speech, and went on:

  “There’s no use of further conversation. We’re not a lot of consulting amateurs. We’re each famous, unique, and infallible. Let us go our various ways, work by our various methods, and see who can find the picture first. Let us meet here one week from to-night, and whoever brings with him the Mona Lisa will receive the congratulations of the rest of us, and incidentally the offered reward.”

  “Marvelous, Holmes! Marvelous!” cried D
r. Watson before any one else could speak.

  But there wasn’t much to be said. Famous detectives are ever taciturn, silent, and thoughtful, but looking as if the universe is to them an open primer.

  After saying good night in their various fashions, the detectives went away to detect, and Sherlock Holmes got out his violin and played “Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still.”

  A week slowly disengaged itself from the future and transferred its attachment to the past. Again the rooms in Fakir Street were cleared up nice and tidy for the meeting. Eight o’clock was the hour appointed, but no one came.

  “Hah!” muttered Holmes, “they have all failed, and they dare not come and admit it. I alone have succeeded in the quest. I alone have the priceless Joconde safe in my possession.”

  “Marv—” began Dr. Watson, but even as he spoke the door opened, and M. Dupin entered, with a large canvas under his arm. The picture was wrapped in an old shawl, but from its size and from the size of the smile on Dupin’s face, even Watson deduced that the canvas was the one at which Leonardo had slung paint for four years.

  “But, yes,” said M. Dupin, carelessly, “I have it. Only I will wait for the others, that I may display my prize amid greater applause than I expect from you, M. Holmes.”

  Holmes’s smile was only slightly saturnine, but before he could make a caustic reply, Lecoq came in, bearing a large roll carefully wrapped in paper. He beamed genially, and then catching sight of the shawled object leaning against the wall, he frowned.

  “What have yon there?” he cried. “Is it perhaps the gilded frame for the picture I bring?”

  Goaded beyond endurance by these scathing words, Dupin sprang to the shawl and tore it off.

  “Behold the Mona Lisa! Found! Oh, the glory of it!”

  “Ha!” cried Lecoq, and unrolling his roll, he, too, showed the original, the indisputably genuine Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece!

  Holmes looked at the twin pictures with interest.

  “They are doubtless the real thing,” he declared—“both of them. There is no question of the genuineness of either. It must be that Da Vinci painted the lady twice.”

  “Marvelous, Holmes! Marvelous!” chanted Watson.

  But the two Frenchmen were not willing to accept Holmes’s statement. They were volubly quarreling in their own picturesque tongue, and the purport of their excellent French was that each believed his own find to be the real picture and the other a copy.

  Into this controversy shambled the queer old figure of the Thinking Machine.

  “Squabble if you like,” he shrilled at them. “It doesn’t matter which wins, for I have the real Mona Lisa at home. I wouldn’t risk bringing it here. Both of yours are copies, and poor ones at that.”

  Just then appeared Luther Trant, followed by three messenger-boys. Each bore a picture of the Mona Lisa, which he set down beside the ones already there.

  “One of these is the real one,” declared Trant. “I hadn’t time to decide which, and my seismospygmatograph is broken. But I’ll find that out later. Anyway, it’s one of the three, and I’ve found it.”

  Into the hubbub caused by this announcement Raffles bounded, his face shining with hilarity.

  “I’ve got it!” he cried, and his followers entered.

  There were five messenger-boys, whose burden aggregated eight Mona Lisas, three sandwich-men wore two Jocondes each, and two washerwomen brought a clothes-basket containing four.

  “These are all vouched for by experts,” declared Raffles, “so one of ’em must be the real thing.”

  “Oh,” said Arsène Lupin, sauntering in, “do you think so? Well, I have a dray below, piled up with Mona Lisas, for each of which I have a signed guaranty by the best experts.”

  Sherlock Holmes stood looking on, his smile growing saturniner and saturniner.

  “Now, gentlemen,” he said, in his most cold-chisel tones—“Now, gentlemen, will you please step into the next room?”

  They stepped, but delicately, like Agag, for the floor was knee-deep in Mona Lisas, and as they entered the next room, behold, it was like stepping into a multi-scope, for the four walls were lined—lined, mind you—with Mona Lisas. And every one—every single one—bore indisputable, indubitable, impeccable, incontrovertible evidence of being the real Simon-Pure article.

  Quite aside from the chagrin of the detectives at knowing Holmes had outnumbered them, conceive of the delight of being able to gaze on scores of Mona Lisas at once! Remember the thrills that thrilled you when you stood in the Louvre and looked upon just one masterpiece of the great painter, then imagine those thrills multiplied until it was like fever and ague! It was indeed a great psychological moment.

  “Are they all genuine?” at last whispered M. Dupin, while Raffles began to compute their collective value to collectors.

  “All guaranteed by experts,” declared Holmes, and just then the telephone sounded.

  “Mr. Holmes?” said the chief of police.

  “Yes,” replied Sherlock, saturninely.

  “I have to inform you, Mr. Holmes, that we have the Mona Lisa. The thief, who is a paramaranoiac, has returned it to us, and confessed his crime. He is truly penitent, and though he must be punished, there will doubtless be found extenuating circumstances in his full confession and his return of the picture unharmed. I’m sure you will rejoice with us at the restoration of our treasure.”

  “Huh!” said Holmes, a little more saturninely than usual, as he hung up the receiver, “when a picture has been restored as often and as poorly as that has, one restoration more or less doesn’t matter. Now, gentlemen, you will please begin to give me a successful imitation of a moving-picture show.”

  The Death of Sherlock Holmes

  Anonymous

  The presidential election of 1912 was a donnybrook for the Republicans, as this cartoon for the May 22 issue of Puck implied. Former president Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), who had served nearly two full terms and had promised not to run for a third, reneged. Unhappy about the policies pursued by William Howard Taft (1857-1930), his hand-picked successor, Roosevelt challenged him for his party’s nomination. When he lost, he ran in the national election under the Progressive Party banner. Puck’s prediction was accurate. Abandoned by nearly all his allies, Taft came in third in the vote count and carried only two states to Roosevelt’s six, leaving Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) the winner.

  Sure Way to Catch Every Criminal. Ha! Ha!

  Sherlock Holmes, “Raffles,” Arsene Lupin, M. Lecoq, Carolyn Wells and Other Infallible Detectives Test the New Scientific “SPEAKING LIKENESS” Discovery.

  Carolyn Wells

  Illustrated by PAL

  This time, Carolyn Wells takes the opportunity to poke fun not just at the members of the Infallible Detectives, but the “speaking likeness” system invented by Paris police official Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914). This attempt to identify criminals using photographs and measurements was complicated and required well-trained clerks to take the correct measurements, and was abandoned in favor of fingerprints and simple mug shots. Not that this mattered to the detectives, as we’ll see below.

  This story, with its long subhead, appeared in the July 11 Sunday editions of many Hearst newspapers. The illustrator is known only by his signature, PAL. The cast of detectives was outlined in “The Adventure of the Mona Lisa.”

  The International Society of Infallible Detectives had assembled in their luxurious offices on Fakir street, this time to hold an indignation meeting.

  “Utterly absurd,” declared President Sherlock Holmes, “the Bertillon system is sufficiently unnecessary, but this Portrait Parle is a thousand times worse.”

  “What is it?” asked the Thinking Machine, querulously, “what is a Portrait Parle?”

  “Don’t you know any French?” asked M. Lecoq, superciliously, “it is a—a portrait that tells.”

  “It’s a speaking likeness,” broke in Raffles, and Holmes exclaimed: “Speaking likeness! It’s a screaming absu
rdity!”

  “It’s a roaring farce,” contributed Arsene Lupin to the general opinion, and Luther Trant remarked thoughtfully: “It’s a thundering shame!”

  “But what is it?” whined the Thinking Machine, “do somebody tell me!”

  “Well,” said Raffles, who was ever polite to the pettish old man, “it’s a way of describing criminals so you can always recognize ’em. It’s a special description of each feature, a record of each measurement and a detailed account of any peculiarities the subject may possess.”

  “Perfectly absurd!” ranted Holmes, “as if those weren’t the very things I deduce from abstract clews. The very deductions that I have built my fame upon! Show me the clews, and I describe the Portrait Parle myself!”

  “Marvelous, Holmes! Marvelous!” said Dr. Watson, but a trifle mechanically, as he was absorbed in an intricate testing experiment, and had his head in a rubber bag.

  “I think it’s a great thing,” declared M. Lupin, “if I had had such a help in my younger days, I should now be even more celebrated than I am.”

  “I think it’s a great thing,” declared M. Lupin.

  “Nonsense, Lupin,” said Holmes, with a slight trace of saturninity in his tone, “only a defective detective needs such a help. To my mind this Portrait Parle takes away all my chances for spectacular exploits, it leaves me no room for marvelous deductions.”

  “And incidentally leaves me without an appropriate comment,” said Watson, who had recovered his head.

  “Detecting isn’t what it used to be,” complained M. Lecoq, “why, even the climate has changed, and that ‘light snow,’ so indispensable in footprint work, now rarely falls at the right moment.”