Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches I

by Bill Peschel

  “But one doesn’t need footprints with finger and thumbprints,” observed Luther Trant.

  “No,” grunted the Thinking Machine, “and with this new Portrait Parle one doesn’t need a detective instinct at all.”

  “Of course not,” assented Holmes, bitterly, “one might as well see the omelette and then deduce broken eggs.”

  “Marvelous, Holmes, marvelous,” breathed Watson, sadly, half fearing he said the words for the last time.

  At that juncture the telephone rang and the Chief of Police wished speech with the society.

  Being nearest the instrument, Arsene Lupin answered.

  “Here’s luck, fellows,” he said, after hearing the message. “The Chief wants us to hunt up a hidden criminal, and he is sending us his Portrait Parle.”

  Various sniffs, sneers and snorts greeted this information, but with true detective taciturnity they awaited the arrival of the new labor-saving device. A messenger arrived with a box, which Watson placed on the table.

  The members of the society gathered round and stood agape, agog, and agley, while President Holmes lifted the cover.

  They saw what seemed to be a collection of hastily gathered junk. There was an old lantern, a gimlet, an iron hook, and a hatchet. Then in a small box was a scarab, or Egyptian beetle. In another box was an apple and a carrot, and wrapped in a sheet of butcher’s paper was an uncooked mutton chop. In a caterer’s box was a tempting-looking pie.

  Raffles looked at the pie appropriatively, but, after all, he was only a dilettante detective. The others, being the real thing, scorned to think of food, save for the Thinking Machine, who greatly desired to munch the apple.

  President Holmes folded his arms and put on a look that was saturnine to his very fingertips. “What do you hear the portrait say, gentlemen?” he asked.

  M. Lupin thrust his hand among his frogged lapels and said, oracularly:

  “It is a great scheme. Behold, we construct our man at once. He is an archaeologist, we learn from the scarab.”

  “And a butcher, we learn from the cutlet,” broke in M. Lecoq, who was ever the jealous rival of his compatriot.

  “He is a pastry cook,” suggested Raffles, still eyeing the pie, which was a meringue.

  “A farmer,” declared the Thinking Machine, with his eyes wandering from the apple to the carrot.

  “A carpenter, more likely,” said Arsene Lupin, “see the gimlet, the hatchet, and that big iron hook.”

  “And the lantern?” asked Holmes, looking aquiline for a change.

  “That proves the farmer,” whined the Thinking Machine, insistently.

  “Not at all,” said Holmes, “it proves we are to look for an honest man.”

  Watson declaimed a few well chosen words, and then Raffles said, airily: “But we’re to look for a criminal. The lantern merely means it’s a light matter, after all.”

  “Does the carrot imply we are donkeys?” demanded M. Lecoq, who was quick to catch an implication. But no one replied, for each was intent on puzzling out the meaning of the Portrait Parle.

  “The hatchet indicates that it is buried,” mused Holmes, “and the lantern will be useful in digging.”

  “We don’t have to dig at night,” said Raffles. “I think the mutton chop and pie indicate dinner time.”

  “Well, anyway, we’re to dig,” persisted Holmes, and Lupin said solemnly, “Of course, why, that beetle is the clew as the Gold Bug was. It’s a case of buried treasure. The hook, of course, is a locality, a peninsula or rocky coast.”

  “And the apple indicates the Garden of Eden, I suppose,” jeered Arsene Lupin, “it’s too far away, I won’t go there.”

  “You’re all too literal,” said the Thinking Machine, peevishly, “these things are merely imaginative suggestions. The apple is remindful of Paris and Helen, and so, I reason, the criminal we’re to search for is a beautiful woman.”

  “Then let us cherchez la femme at once,” cried Raffles, who was ever a gallant.

  “We’ll never accomplish anything working together,” said Holmes, at last. “All celebrated detectives must celebrate alone. Go your ways, my friends, remember the Portrait Parle, and return to-morrow night with the criminal it represents.”

  Glad to pursue their favorite and well-known methods, the infallible detectives broke up the meeting and disappeared.

  Back to the Fakir Street rooms they trooped the next night, each triumphantly leading a criminal of his own selection, and each secure in a true detective complacency that his was the right man.

  M. Lupin had arrested a prominent archaeologist, the Thinking Machine brought a blustering, well-to-do farmer, and Raffles brought a dapper French pastry cook. Each had his quarry, and as the meeting convened President Holmes prepared to hear and pass judgment on the various claims from his own infallible viewpoint.

  The telephone bell rang.

  “Is this Mr. Holmes?” asked the Chief of Police.

  “Yes,” said Holmes, asininely—I mean aquilinely.

  “Well, we have found the criminal we wanted, so you may call off your search.”

  “Indeed,” said Holmes. “May I ask you to bring him over here and compare him with the Portrait Parle which you sent me?”

  “I will bring him at once,” replied the urbane and obliging Chief.

  The members of the International Society of Infallible Detectives sat in grim gloom until the Chief arrived, leading an abject-looking criminal, whom they scanned with interest. He was assuredly not a scientific man, nor was he apparently a farmer, nor yet, to all appearances, a carpenter or a pastry cook.

  The Chief arrived, leading an abject-looking criminal.

  “I fear,” began President Holmes, in a sarcastic monotone, “we do not entirely understand the fluent language of your Portrait Parle.”

  “No?” said the Chief of Police, in surprise, “why, my dear sir, you’ve only to look at this man to see that he is perfectly photographed by the Portrait Parle I sent you. Observe his features! Is he not lantern-jawed, beetle-browed, gimlet-eyed, apple-cheeked, and hatchet-faced? Has he not a hook nose, mutton chop whiskers, carroty hair, and a pie mouth? Are you all so dense you cannot understand such a speaking description?”

  “Enough, Chief,” said Holmes, with a wave of his long, white hand, “enough, your Portrait Parle is a chatterbox!”

  The Mystery of the Missing Shirt

  A.E. Swoyer

  With abject apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Alfred E. Swoyer (1884-1963) was a University of Pennsylvania graduate who served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He rose in the legal profession until he became a judge in Honesdale, Pa., and wrote hundreds of short stories and articles, mostly on outdoor life, nature, and photography. This story appeared in the Sunday Oregonian of Aug. 18.

  With abject apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Herlock Shomes, the great detective, sat, pipe in mouth, idly strumming a banjo. Times were dull in the sleuthing business, and our hero had not the price of his regular shot of hop; no mysterious murders nor clueless robberies sought his mighty brain for a solution. The truth must be told—the peerless Shomes was on his uppers!

  “Great days, these, Fatson!” he said, carefully emptying the ashes from his pipe into a bit of paper, and dexterously rolling it into a cigarette. “Great days! No work for me; no annals for you to chronicle (at so much per chronic) for posterity! It seems as if the pleasures of a neat murder no longer appeal to the strong-arm man; we are becoming a race of mollycoddles!” A tear for a moment dimmed the eagle eye of Shomes, trickled gently down his classic nose and lost itself in the stubble of his two weeks’ beard.

  “Education has done it,” replied his friend. “The real brainy criminal has learned that it is easier and more genteel to start a bank than to break into one; while the monetary results are the same. But, cheer up, Shomes, nothing can keep a good man down but a tombstone or a cash register!”

  “You are right, Fatson! And even now I f
eel that in exactly five minutes, by yonder clock, a client, the victim of a dark and awful crime, will come—”

  A ponderous knocking at the door interrupted him. Rising hastily he set the clock ahead five minutes. “Thus is the power of deduction vindicated! Right to the minute! Fatson, open the door. It is our client! (Or, perhaps, the landlord for last January’s rent,” he muttered aside. “ ’Tis well I was not seen!”)

  Before the faithful Fatson could reach the door, it opened, and a tall man, with a huge and shaggy beard, entered and sank heavily into a chair; the latter, not built for heavy sinking, collapsed. The strange visitor continued until stopped by the floor.

  “Aha!” said Shomes. “I see that you are the victim of a slight accident! You wonder how I know? These things are easy to the trained mind! Fatson, you remember the interesting little problem of the Emerald Frankfurter, in which this power enabled me to trace a clew the dull wits of the police had not even seen?”

  The stranger, who, framed amid the wreckage of the broken chair, had been listening, open mouthed, now rose. “Mr. Shomes,” said he, “you are the man I need! Something mysterious and dreadful threatens me! I am a marked man! Last evening—” the trembling tones of this strong man made even the callous Fatson shiver—“last evening, as evidence of this power, the very shirt was stolen from my back. You, alone, can save me!”

  “This is, indeed, a mystery, a case after my own heart. I can see in it the hand of that master criminal, Desperate Desmond, who has thwarted me for years! Our lives are all in danger! But come, tell me the details.”

  “They are few enough. In the first place my name is Dalrymple. I run a doughnut foundry, and am fairly well to do. Last evening I dressed carefully to go to the club; I remember my undershirt particularly, it was of the knitted kind I always wear, but new. I spent an hour at the club, and on retiring found the shirt was gone! My outer shirt, vest, and coat were intact.”

  “H’m!” said Shomes. “You must have been robbed of this—er—undergarment then, either in your home, at the club or between the two places!”

  “Marvelous!” ejaculated Fatson.

  Shomes, with the remarkable agility he always showed when on a clew, whipped out a pocket rule and measured the distance between Dalrymple’s eyes. Swiftly he entered the results in a large ledger. “ ’Tis, indeed, Desmond’s work!” he muttered. “We must be quick! Mr. Dalrymple, may I have a sample of your whiskers? It is important! Thanks,” Snipping off a generous portion of the guest’s lace curtains, he turned his back, stuffed them into his pipe and began smoking vigorously.

  Again turning to his guest, he shot the question, “Have you dined? No? Good! Then we will accompany you—you must not be alone!”

  Dashing to the table, he seized a celluloid paper cutter and placed it in his pocket. “This is a desperate case—we must go armed!” he gritted, with a sinister scowl. “Fatson, call a taxi. And,” he hissed, in a tone so low that Dalrymple could not catch the words, “don’t get that gink on the corner. you lunkhead! Remember, we hung him up last week!”

  Quickly disguising himself by turning up his coat collar, the great detective led Fatson and Dalrymple to the door.

  In three-quarters of an hour the speeding taxi landed the party at a famous restaurant two blocks away. “Fatson and I will enter first, Mr. Dalrymple,” muttered Shomes. “We must not be seen together!”

  “Why did you leave him, Shomes?” asked Fatson, timidly, as they hurried into the restaurant.

  “Fatson! Fatson! You will never be a great detective. Don’t you know that the last man out pays the taxi? You would do well to read my monograph upon the subject.”

  The meal passed in silence save for the voice of Dalrymple ordering fresh supplies. Like all great men, Shomes sometimes went for days without a meal, particularly when broke; then he ate ravenously. So it was on this occasion. Fatson, being an opportunist, did likewise. Dalrymple watched them with ever-increasing respect. “I am glad the other fellow got my shirt!” he muttered, as he paid the check.

  At the scenes of the crime, as Shomes called them until he could determine which was the scene, the famous sleuth was at his best. Magnifying glass in hand, he poked and measured everywhere, entering notes in the big ledger which Fatson carried. From time to time he put choice bits of evidence, such as a bottle of Wilson’s, a few cigars and about a quire of the club paper into his pockets; clews like these could not escape the eagle eye of Shomes.

  Finally he rose. “Mr. Dalrymple,” he said, proudly. “I know the criminal! No further attempt will be made upon your life tonight! Go home, and tomorrow night I will have news for you! Fatson and I will now retire.”

  The next day was a busy one for both Fatson and Shomes. The former went about his medical labors in the veterinary department of the S.P.C.A.; the noted sleuth elected to experiment in his laboratory, as cool and collected as if Dalrymple were not compelled by a fiendish crime to wear his extra shirt. He refused to satisfy Fatson’s curiosity by any statement other then “Tonight we shall know all!”

  The day passed slowly for Fatson. Twice his boss called him down for an abstraction which caused him to inject strychnine into the veins of horses used by members of the Society, instead of those of less fortunate equines placed in his hands for a painless quietus. Annoyed by these trifles, Fatson returned to find Shomes deep in one of those profound chemical researches which would have made him famous in the world of science, had he cared to follow such a life. In the present instance he was trying to make a rye highball out of wood alcohol and lithia water.

  “How’s the case?” asked Fatson cheerfully.

  “We haven’t had a case for a month you rummy!” retorted Shames. “The last one we had you finished up when I wasn’t around. Got soused on two bottles, too! Thank you for reminding me of it.”

  “I meant the case of the stolen shirt,” replied Fatson, hurriedly.

  “Oh—that! The crime was committed by a tall, dark, red-headed man, with a scar on his left cheek—a tool of Desmond’s! I have decoyed him here to-night. He thinks to find money and jewels; instead, he will find me!” No one but Shomes could have been so deadly menacing.

  The telephone jangled. Shomes tore down the receiver.

  “That you, Shomes? This is Dalrymple. Remember that shirt business? Well, we were scared for nothing. It seems that at the club, Smith (he’s a trifle near-sighted) thought he saw a raveling on my coat. It happened to be a thread of my shirt, and when he kept on pulling—well, you know what happens when you pull a thread of one of those knitted things. I guess we can call the mystery unraveled.”

  “Just what I was about to inform you, Mr. Dalrymple. Herlock Shomes cannot be deceived!”

  Hanging up the receiver, the greatest of all detectives turned to meet the admiring gaze of Fatson.

  Sherlock Holmes Jr. Locates a Bomb Thrower

  Robert Sidney Smith

  “Sherlock Holmes Jr.” may be a footnote in the history of both Holmes and newspaper comic strips, but artist Sidney Smith (1877-1935) went on to greater things. The adventures of a bumbling detective began in October 1912 as a half-page cartoon in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune. It ran under that name until January 1914, when Conan Doyle’s lawyer forced it to change to Pussyfoot Sam, after which it sank shortly thereafter.

  Three years later, Smith debuted The Gumps, a strip that followed the comic adventures of an average middle-class family. The name came from a pet name for the public by Tribune editor and publisher Joseph Patterson. As the first major strip in which a story unfolded from day to day, it sparked a craze for continuity strips, and demand to reprint it from other newspapers led to the creation of the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate, later Tribune Media Services. The Gumps ran for 42 years, spawned movies and radio shows, and made Smith a millionaire (among the artists who worked on it was actor Martin Landau during the 1940s and ’50s). In 1935, Smith signed a contract that would pay him $150,000 a year, but while driving home died in a head-on co
llision.

  A collection of Sherlock Holmes Jr. strips were published by Malibu Press in 1990.

  The Arsene Lepine-Herlock Soames Affair

  S. Beach Chester

  As described in “Holmlock Shears Opens Hostilities” in Volume 3, French writer Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941) pitted his master thief and gentleman Arsene Lupin against Holmes in several stories, and was forced to change Holmes’ name after Conan Doyle caught wind of his scheme. Which, in turn, led to other writers enlisting Lupin for their stories, including a writer featured twice in this volume, Carolyn Wells.

  Enter Samuel Beach Chester (1880-1942), who wrote one of the few parodies that takes on two targets equally. It is an excerpt from Diners A Deux, Memoirs of a Maitre D’Hotel (1912), a collection of comic stories told by an Italian head waiter from his post at a New York City hotel’s restaurant.

  Little is known about Chester the man, other than he was a barrister and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He seemed like a fine fellow to raise a glass with. Only a person of wide interests and amusements can write books about the tango, gaming, history books about the founder of modern Greece and Henry IV, novels with inviting titles such as The Ideal Sinner and The Diary of an Undivorced Duchess, and collections of after-dinner stories. He proved no less amusing here, which begins with Giovanni the maitre d’hotel, confronting Arsene Lepine’s nemesis, the French detective Animal (Inspector Justin Ganimard in the books), when he led a squad of policeman into the dining room where Lepine is dining with Herlock Soames.