The Early Punch Parodies of Sherlock Holmes

by Bill Peschel

I was sitting alone in my room at 10.29 on the night of the 14th of last November. I had been doing a good deal of work lately, and I was tired. Moreover, I had had more than one touch of that old Afghan fever, which always seemed to be much more inclined to touch than to go. However, we can’t have everything here to please us; and as I had only the other day attended two bankers and a Lord Mayor for measles, I had no real cause to complain of my prospects. I had drawn the old armchair in which I was sitting close to the fire, and, not having any bread handy, I was occupied in toasting my feet at the blaze when suddenly the clock on the mantelpiece struck the half hour, and Picklock Holes stood by my side. I was too much accustomed to his proceedings to express any surprise at seeing him thus, but I own that I was itching to ask him how he had managed to get into my house without ringing the bell. However, I refrained, and motioned him to a chair.

  “My friend,” said this extraordinary man, without the least preface, “you’ve been smoking again. You know you have; it’s not the least use denying it.” I absolutely gasped with astonishment, and gazed at him almost in terror. How had he guessed my secret? He read my thoughts and smiled.

  “Oh, simply enough. That spot on your shirt-cuff is black. But it might have been yellow, or green, or blue, or brown, or rainbow-coloured. But I know you smoke Rainbow mixture, and as your canary there in the corner has just gone blind, I know further that bird’s-eye is one of the component parts of the mixture.”

  “Holes,” I cried, dropping my old meerschaum out of my mouth in my amazement; “I don’t believe you’re a man at all—you’re a devil.”

  “Thank you for the compliment,” he replied, without moving a muscle of his marble face. “You ought not to sup—” He was going to have added “pose,” but the first syllable seemed to suggest a new train of thought (in which, I may add, there was no second class whatever) to my inexplicable friend.

  “No,” he said; “the devilled bones were not good. Don’t interrupt me; you had devilled bones for supper, or rather you would have had them, only you didn’t like them. Do you see that match? A small piece is broken off the bottom, but enough is left to show it was once a lucifer—in other words, a devil. It is lying at the feet of the skeleton which you use for your anatomical investigations, and therefore I naturally conclude that you had devilled bones for supper. You didn’t eat them, for not a single bone of the skeleton is missing. Do I make myself clear?”

  “You do,” I said, marvelling more than ever at the extraordinary perspicacity of the man. As a matter of fact, my supper had consisted of bread and cheese; but I felt it would be in extremely bad taste for a struggling medical practitioner like myself to contradict a detective whose fame had extended to the ends of the earth. I picked up my pipe, and relit it, and, for a few moments, we sat in silence. At last I ventured to address him.

  “Anything new?” I said.

  “No, not exactly new,” he said, wearily, passing his sinewy hand over his expressionless brow. “Have you a special Evening Standard? I conclude you have, as I see no other evening papers here. Do you mind handing it to me?”

  There was no deceiving this weird creature. I took the paper he mentioned from my study table, and handed it to him.

  “Now listen,” said Holes, and then read in a voice devoid of any sign of emotion, the following paragraph:—“This morning, as Mrs. Drabley, a lady of independent means, was walking in Piccadilly, she inadvertently stepped on a piece of orange-peel, and fell heavily on the pavement. She was carried into the shop of Messrs. Salver and Tankard, the well-known silversmiths, and it was at first thought she had broken her right leg. However, on being examined by a medical man who happened to be passing, she was pronounced to be suffering from nothing worse than a severe bruise, and, in the course of half-an-hour, she recovered sufficiently to be able to proceed on her business. This is the fifth accident caused by orange-peel at the same place within the last week.”

  “It is scandalous!” I broke in. “This mania for dropping orange-peel is decimating London. Curiously enough I happen to be the medical man who—”

  “Yes, I know; you are the medical man who was passing.”

  “Holes,” I ejaculated, “you are a magician.”

  “No, not a magician; only a humble seeker after truth, who uses as a basis of his deduction some slight point that others are too blind to grasp. Now you think the matter ends there. I don’t. I mean to discover who dropped that orange-peel. Will you help me?”

  “Of course I will, but how do you mean to proceed? There must be thousands of people who eat oranges every day in London.”

  “Be accurate, my dear fellow, whatever you do. There are 78,965, not counting girls. But this piece was not dropped by a girl.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Never mind; it is sufficient that I do know it. Read this,” he continued, pointing to another column of the paper. This is what I read:—

  “Missionary Enterprise.—A great conference of American and Colonial bishops was held in Exeter Hall this afternoon. The proceedings opened with an impassioned speech from the Bishop of Florida—”

  “Never mind the rest,” said Holes, “that’s quite enough. Now read this”:—

  “The magnificent silver bowl to be presented to the Bishop of Florida by some of his English friends is now on view at Messrs. Salver and Tankard’s in Piccadilly. It is a noble specimen of the British silversmith’s art.” An elaborate description followed.

  “These paragraphs,” continued Holes in his usual impassive manner, “give me the clue I want. Florida is an orange-growing country. Let us call on the Bishop.”

  In a moment we had put on our hats, and in another moment we were in a Hansom on our way to the Bishop’s lodgings in Church Street, Soho. Holes gained admittance by means of his skeleton key. We passed noiselessly up the stairs, and, without knocking, entered the Bishop’s bedroom. He was in his nightgown, and the sight of two strangers visibly alarmed him.

  “I am a detective,” began Holes.

  “Oh,” said the Bishop, turning pale.

  “Then I presume you have called about that curate who disappeared in the alligator swamp close to my Episcopal palace in Florida. It is not true that I killed him. He—”

  “Tush,” said Holes, “we are come about weightier matters. This morning at half-past eleven your lordship was standing outside the shop of Salver and Tankard looking at your presentation bowl. You were eating an orange. You stowed the greater part of the peel in your coat-tail pocket, but you dropped, maliciously dropped, one piece on the pavement. Shortly afterwards a stout lady passing by trod on it and fell. Have you anything to say?”

  The Bishop made a movement, but Holes was before-hand with him. He dashed to a long black coat that hung behind the door, inserted his hand deftly in the pocket, and pulled out the fragmentary remains of a large Florida orange.

  “As I supposed,” he said, “a piece is missing.”

  But the miserable prelate had fallen senseless on the floor, where we left him.

  “Holes,” I said, “this is one of your very best. How on earth did you know you would find that orange-peel in his coat?”

  “I didn’t find it there,” replied my friend; “I brought it with me, and had it in my hand when I put it in his pocket. I knew I should have to use strong measures with so desperate a character. My dear fellow, all these matters require tact and imagination.”

  And that was how we brought home the orange-peel to the Bishop.

  The Duke’s Feather

  R.C. Lehmann

  The opening of the second installment in the Holes cycle refers to the 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 rejects all authority. The tsar turned his country inwards, rejecting all things Western and his secret police were dedicated to eradicating anyone who posed a threat to the autocracy.

  Holes’ involvement with the Russian Czar pa
rallels Holmes’ dealings with royalty. From the King of Bohemia in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Holmes requested a photo of Irene Adler; from the Czar, Holes asked for a gold-chased drug injector.

  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.

  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 gate 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.”

  “Holes,” I said, “I admire you more and more every day.”

  Lady Hilda’s Mystery

  R.C. Lehmann

  Lehmann was not afraid to send his characters anywhere in search of a joke. In this case, it’s Bokhara, a large, ancient city that straddled the Silk Road that connected Europe to China. How Potson was able to reach Bokhara from England in “a day or two” is not mentioned.

  “Holes opened it, and read it.”

  A day or two after the stirring events which I have related as taking place at Blobley-in-the-Marsh, and of which, it will be remembered, I was myself an astonished spectator, I happened to be travelling, partly for business, partly for pleasure, through one of the most preci
pitous of the inaccessible mountain-ranges of Bokhara. It is unnecessary for me to state in detail the reasons that had induced me once more to go so far a-field. One of the primary elements in a physician’s success in his career is, that he should be able to guard, under a veil of impenetrable silence, the secrets confided to his care. It cannot, therefore, be expected of me that I should reveal why his Eminence the Cardinal Dacapo, one of the most illustrious of the Princes of the Church, desired that I should set off to Bokhara. When the memoirs of the present time come to be published, it is possible that no chapter of them will give rise to bitterer discussion than that which narrates the interview of the redoubtable Cardinal with the humble author of this story. Enough, however, of this, at present. On some future occasion much more will have to be said about it. I cannot endure to be for ever the scapegoat of the great, and, if the Cardinal persists in his refusal to do me justice, I shall have, in the last resort, to tell the whole truth about one of the strangest affairs that ever furnished gossip for all the most brilliant and aristocratic tea-tables of the Metropolis.

  I was walking along the narrow mountain path that leads from Balkh to Samarcand. In my right hand I held my trusty kirghiz, which I had sharpened only that very morning. My head was shaded from the blazing sun by a broad native mollah, presented to me by the Khan of Bokhara, with whom I had spent the previous day in his Highness’s magnificent marble and alabaster palace. As I walked I could not but be sensible of a curiously strained and tense feeling in the air—the sort of atmosphere that seems to be, to me at least, the invariable concomitant of country-house guessing-games. I was at a loss to account for this most curious phenomenon, when, looking up suddenly, I saw on the top of an elevated crag in front of me the solitary and impassive figure of Picklock Holes, who was at that moment engaged on one of his most brilliant feats of induction. He evinced no surprise whatever at seeing me. A cold smile lingered for a moment on his firm and secretive lips, and he laid the tips of his fingers together in his favourite attitude of deep consideration.