Sherlock Holmes Victorian Parodies and Pastiches

by Bill Peschel

  As we crowded round him, eager to read the multitudinous messages, we were arrested by a low cry from the garden.

  “He cannot have escaped,” muttered Holmes, as we all rushed out.

  “We have found him, sir,” said a detective, coming forward to meet us in the garden.

  “Found him? Found whom?” demanded Holmes.

  “Mr. Tollocks, sir.”

  “Mr. Tollocks—nonsense,” said Holmes, quickly.

  “Come here then, sir.”

  We followed the man, and found the five other detectives and Mrs. Boddle grouped round the water-butt at the back of the house. Gazing into the butt, an extraordinary spectacle met our view. At the bottom, in about eighteen inches of water, sat a middle-aged gentleman in evening clothes. His button boots had been carefully taken off, but otherwise he was in full dress. He had evidently been drinking pretty heavily over night, and apparently his brain was not yet very clear; for, in answer to Mrs. Boddle’s almost tearful entreaties that he should get up and come in, he replied in bibulous accents, “Go ’way, go ’way, dear. Call me ’gain—half-pasht nine, thatsch a dear.” With some difficulty, and in spite of his expostulations that he was “perfidy comferrable” where he was, we got him into the house, and sobered him sufficiently to answer our questions.

  It seemed that he had been dining not wisely but too well at his club, and on his return home, after an abortive attempt to enter by the front door, he had taken off his coat, and quietly gone to sleep in the water-butt.

  “And the balls—how do you account for these?” asked Sherlock Holmes.

  “The ballsh?” said Mr. Tollocks, with a puzzled expression.

  “Yes, the billiard balls we found in your pockets?”

  Mr. Tollocks laughed gaily. “Alwaysh shtick the chalk in my pocket; shupposh I shtuck ballsh by mistaksh,” he explained, brimming over with mirth at the recollection.

  “And all this stuff—how did you come by this?” asked Mugson, holding up the mass of paper.

  “Thatsh the tape. Put penniesh in the shlot of the tape machine and got all that—all that blooming paper. Shplendid fun,” said Mr. Tollocks, still laughing merrily.

  “I think we had better leave him to Mrs. Boddle,” said Mugson. “We worked well, sir,” he added to Holmes, “and I am much obliged, I am sure, for any little assistance you were able to give us.”

  “That’s always the way, Watson,” said Sherlock, bitterly; “I do all the work, they get the credit. All the evening papers will be full of Mr. Mugson’s intelligence and energy, I suppose.”

  As we drove away together, Holmes remarked to me: “I tell you what, Watson, next time you can do the detecting, and I shall do the writing.”

  The Adventure of the Two Collaborators

  J.M. Barrie

  “Sir James Barrie paid his respects to Sherlock Holmes in a rollicking parody,” Conan Doyle wrote in Memoirs and Adventures. “It was really a gay gesture of resignation over the failure which we had encountered with a comic opera for which he undertook to write the libretto. I collaborated with him on this, but in spite of our joint efforts, the piece fell flat. Whereupon Barrie sent me a parody on Holmes, written on the flyleaves of one of his books.”

  The comic opera is Jane Annie, for which Conan Doyle and Barrie wrote the book and Ernest Ford the music. The story can be found at the start of this chapter. Although it was considered a failure, Sherlock fans still consider it a success, if only because it inspired this delicious parody.

  In bringing to a close the adventures of my friend Sherlock Holmes I am perforce reminded that he never, save on the occasion which, as you will now hear, brought his singular career to an end, consented to act in any mystery which was concerned with persons who made a livelihood by their pen. “I am not particular about the people I mix among for business purposes,” he would say, “but at literary characters I draw the line.”

  We were in our rooms in Baker Street one evening. I was (I remember) by the centre table writing out “The Adventure of the Man without a Cork Leg” (which had so puzzled the Royal Society and all the other scientific bodies of Europe), and Holmes was amusing himself with a little revolver practice. It was his custom of a summer evening to fire round my head, just shaving my face, until he had made a photograph of me on the opposite wall, and it is a slight proof of his skill that many of these portraits in pistol shots are considered admirable likenesses.

  I happened to look out of the window, and perceiving two gentlemen advancing rapidly along Baker Street asked him who they were. He immediately lit his pipe, and, twisting himself on a chair into the figure 8, replied:

  “They are two collaborators in comic opera, and their play has not been a triumph.”

  I sprang from my chair to the ceiling in amazement, and he then explained:

  “My dear Watson, they are obviously men who follow some low calling. That much even you should be able to read in their faces. Those little pieces of blue paper which they fling angrily from them are Durrant’s Press Notices. Of these they have obviously hundreds about their person (see how their pockets bulge). They would not dance on them if they were pleasant reading.”

  I again sprang to the ceiling (which is much dented), and shouted: “Amazing! But they may be mere authors.”

  “No,” said Holmes, “for mere authors only get one press notice a week. Only criminals, dramatists and actors get them by the hundred.”

  “Then they may be actors.”

  “No, actors would come in a carriage.”

  “Can you tell me anything else about them?”

  “A great deal. From the mud on the boots of the tall one I perceive that he comes from South Norwood. The other is as obviously a Scotch author.”

  “How can you tell that?”

  “He is carrying in his pocket a book called (I clearly see) Auld Licht Something. Would anyone but the author be likely to carry about a book with such a title?”

  I had to confess that this was improbable.

  It was now evident that the two men (if such they can be called) were seeking our lodgings. I have said (often) that my friend Holmes seldom gave way to emotion of any kind, but he now turned livid with passion. Presently this gave place to a strange look of triumph.

  “Watson,” he said, “that big fellow has for years taken the credit for my most remarkable doings, but at last I have him—at last!”

  Up I went to the ceiling, and when I returned the strangers were in the room.

  “I perceive, gentlemen,” said Mr. Sherlock Holmes, “that you are at present afflicted by an extraordinary novelty.”

  The handsomer of our visitors asked in amazement how he knew this, but the big one only scowled.

  “You forget that you wear a ring on your fourth finger,” replied Mr. Holmes calmly.

  I was about to jump to the ceiling when the big brute interposed.

  “That tommy-rot is all very well for the public, Holmes,” said he, “but you can drop it before me. And, Watson, if you go up to the ceiling again I shall make you stay there.”

  Here I observed a curious phenomenon. My friend Sherlock Holmes shrank. He became small before my eyes. I looked longingly at the ceiling, but dared not.

  “Let us cut the first four pages,” said the big man, “and proceed to business. I want to know why—”

  “Allow me,” said Mr. Holmes, with some of his old courage. “You want to know why the public does not go to your opera.”

  “Exactly,” said the other ironically, “as you perceive by my shirt stud.” He added more gravely, “And as you can only find out in one way I must insist on your witnessing an entire performance of the piece.”

  It was an anxious moment for me. I shuddered, for I knew that if Holmes went I should have to go with him. But my friend had a heart of gold.

  “Never,” he cried fiercely, “I will do anything for you save that.”

  “Your continued existence depends on it,” said the big man menacingly.

&n
bsp; “I would rather melt into air,” replied Holmes, proudly taking another chair. “But I can tell you why the public don’t go to your piece without sitting the thing out myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” replied Holmes calmly, “they prefer to stay away.”

  A dead silence followed that extraordinary remark. For a moment the two intruders gazed with awe upon the man who had unravelled their mystery so wonderfully. Then drawing their knives—

  Holmes grew less and less, until nothing was left save a ring of smoke which slowly circled to the ceiling.

  The last words of great men are often noteworthy. These were the last words of Sherlock Holmes: “Fool, fool! I have kept you in luxury for years. By my help you have ridden extensively in cabs, where no author was ever seen before. Henceforth you will ride in buses!”

  The brute sunk into a chair aghast.

  The other author did not turn a hair.

  To A. Conan Doyle.

  from his friend

  J. M. Barrie

  The Duke’s Feather

  “Cunnin Toil” (R.C. Lehmann)

  For 150 years, the humor magazine Punch served as Great Britain’s mirror, critic, and jester. During the Victorian era, one of its principal writers was Rudolph Chambers Lehmann (1856-1929), a lighthearted man who was a model of the gentleman of leisure. A descendant of the Scottish Chambers family who built a fortune in book publishing, the child Lehmann met literary lights such as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. He studied law at Cambridge, but soon after graduation quit the legal profession to write and indulge in his passion for rowing.

  Lehmann was also one of the more prolific Holmes parodists of the period. Following Conan Doyle’s model, he wrote two series of eight stories and even returned for a curtain call a la “His Last Bow” (the stories can be found in The Early Punch Parodies of Sherlock Holmes). His Picklock Holes is a shadier, loopier version of the great detective, and the settings and plots are much more farcical than the norm.

  “The Duke’s Feather” draws on the then-current political upheavals in the Russian Empire. Tsar Alexander III came to the throne in 1881 after his father was assassinated by Nihilists, an anarchist movement that rejected all authority. The new tsar turned his country inwards, rejecting all things Western, and dedicated his secret police to eradicating anyone who posed a threat to his authority.

  Two months had passed without my hearing a word of Holes. I knew he had been summoned to Irkoutsk by the Czar of Russia in order to help in investigating the extraordinary theft of one of the Government silver mines, which had completely and mysteriously disappeared in one night. All the best intellects of the terrible secret police, the third section of the Government of the Russian Empire, had exhausted themselves in the vain endeavour to probe this mystery to the bottom. Their failure had produced a dangerous commotion in the Empire of the Czar; there were rumours of a vast Nihilist plot, which was to shake the Autocracy to its foundations, and, as a last resource, the Czar, who had been introduced to Holes by Oloa Fiaskoffskaia, the well-known Russian Secret Agent at the Court of Lisbon, had appealed to the famous detective to lend his aid in discovering the authors of a crime which was beginning to turn the great white Czar into ridicule in all the bazaars of Central Asia. Holes, whose great mind had been lying fallow for some little time, had immediately consented; and the last I had seen of him was two months before the period at which this story opens, when I had said good-bye to him at Charing-Cross Station.

  As for myself, I was spending a week in a farmhouse situated close to the village of Blobley-in-the-Marsh. Three miles from the gates of the farmhouse lay Fourcastle Towers, the ancestral mansion of Rear-Admiral the Duke of Dumpshire, the largest and strangest landowner of the surrounding district. I had a nodding acquaintance with His Grace, whom I had once attended for scarlatina when he was a midshipman. Since that time, however, I had seen very little of him, and, to tell the truth, I had made no great effort to improve the acquaintance. The Duke, one of the haughtiest members of our blue-blooded aristocracy, had been called by his naval duties to all parts of the habitable globe; I had steadily pursued my medical studies, and, except for the biennial visit which etiquette demanded, I had seen little or nothing of the Duke. My stay at the farmhouse was for purposes of rest. I had been overworked, that old tulwar wound, the only memento of the Afghan Campaign, had been troubling me, and I was glad to be able to throw off my cares and my black coat, and to revel for a week in the rustic and unconventional simplicity of Wurzelby Farm.

  “BESIDE ME STOOD PICKLOCK HOLES, WRAPPED IN A HEAVY, CLOSE-FITTING FUR MOUJIK.”

  One evening, two days after my arrival, I was sitting in the kitchen close to the fire, which, like myself, was smoking. For greater comfort I had put on my old mess-jacket. The winter wind was whistling outside, but besides that only the ticking of the kitchen clock disturbed my meditations. I was just thinking how I should begin my article on Modern Medicine for the Fortnightly Review, when a slight cough at my elbow caused me to turn round. Beside me stood Picklock Holes, wrapped in a heavy, close-fitting fur moujik. He was the first to speak.

  “You seem surprised to see me,” he said. “Well, perhaps that is natural; but really, my dear fellow, you might employ your time to better purpose than in trying to guess the number of words in the first leading article in the Times of the day before yesterday.”

  He plucked a small piece of Berlin worsted—I had been darning my socks—off my left trouser, and examined it curiously. My admiration for the man knew no bounds.

  “Is that how you know?” I asked. “Do you mean to tell me that merely by seeing that small piece of fancy wool on my trousers you guessed I had been trying to calculate the number of words in the Times leader? Holes, Holes, will you never cease from astounding me?”

  He did not answer me, but bared his muscular arm and injected into it a strong dose of morphia with a richly-chased little gold instrument tipped with a ruby.

  “A gift from the Czar,” said Holes in answer to my unspoken thoughts. “When I discovered the missing silver-mine on board the yacht of the Grand Duke Ivanoff, his Imperial Majesty first offered me the Chancellorship of his dominion, but I begged him to excuse me, and asked for this pretty toy. Bah, the Russian police are bunglers.”

  As he made this remark the door opened and Sergeant Bluff of the Dumpshire Constabulary entered hurriedly.

  “I beg your pardon, Sir,” he said, addressing me, with evident perturbation; “but would you step outside with me for a moment. There’s been some strange work down at—”

  Holes interrupted him.

  “Don’t say any more,” he broke in. “You’ve come to tell me about the dreadful poaching affray in Hagley Wood. I know all about it, and tired as I am I’ll help you to find the criminals.”

  It was amusing to watch the Sergeant’s face. He was ordinarily an unemotional man, but as Holes spoke to him he grew purple with astonishment.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, Sir,” he said; “I didn’t know about no—”

  “My name is Holes,” said my friend calmly.

  “What, Mr. Picklock Holes, the famous detective?”

  “The same, at your service; but we are wasting time. Let us be off.”

  The night was cold, and a few drops of rain were falling. As we walked along the lane Holes drew from the Sergeant all the information he wanted as to the number of pheasants on the Duke’s estate, the extent of his cellars, his rent-roll, and the name of his London tailor. Bluff dropped behind after this cross-examination with a puzzled expression, and whispered to me:

  “A wonderful man that Mister Holes. Now how did he know about this ’ere poaching business? I knew nothing about it. Why I come to you, Sir, to talk about that retriever dog you lost.”

  “Hush,” I said; “say nothing. It would only annoy Holes, and interfere with his inductions. He knows his own business best.” Sergeant Bluff gave a grumbling assent, and in another moment we entered the great gat
e of Fourcastle Towers, and were ushered into the hall, where the Duke was waiting to receive us.

  “To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit?” said his Grace, with all the courtly politeness of one in whose veins ran the blood of the Crusaders. Then, changing his tone, he spoke in fierce sailor language: “Shiver my timbers! What makes you three stand there like that? Why, blank my eyes, you ought to—”

  What he was going to say will never be known, for Holes dashed forward.

  “Silence, Duke,” he said, sternly. “We come to tell you that there has been a desperate poaching affray. The leader of the gang lies insensible in Hagley Wood. Do you wish to know who he was?” So saying, he held up to the now terrified eyes of the Duke the tail-feather of a golden pheasant. “I found it in his waistcoat pocket, he said, simply.”

  “My son, my son!” shrieked the unfortunate Duke. “Oh Alured, Alured, that it should have come to this!” and he fell to the floor in convulsions.

  “You will find Earl Mountravers at the cross-roads in Hagley Wood,” said Holes to the Sergeant. “He is insensible.”

  The Earl was convicted at the following Assizes, and sentenced to a long term of penal servitude. His ducal father has never recovered from the disgrace. Holes, as usual, made light of the matter and of his own share in it.

  “I met the Earl,” he told me afterwards, “as I was walking to your farmhouse. When he ventured to doubt one of my stories, I felled him to the earth. The rest was easy enough. Poachers? Oh dear no, there were none. But it is precisely in these cases that ingenuity comes in.”