The Early Punch Parodies of Sherlock Holmes

by Bill Peschel

  TO FAY COMPTON

  My dear Fay.

  For several reasons I am anxious to inscribe this book to you. Unless somehow or other I safeguard you publicly, you are liable to be accused by gossip of having written it, an accusation that both you and I might be justified in resenting. Many people suppose that you wrote an earlier novel of mine called “Carnival,” which, were it true, would make you out to be considerably older than you are, since I take it that even your precocity, though it did run to marriage at the age of seventeen (or was it sixteen?), would hardly have allowed you to write “Carnival” at the same age.

  Then lately a young gentleman wrote to ask me if I would inform him whether the generally accepted theory that you had written the first two chapters of “Sinister Street” had any existence in fact. So you see, I do not exaggerate when I say that you are liable to be credited with “The Vanity Girl.” Equally I should not like gossip to pretend that the heroine if not drawn by you was certainly drawn from you; and though any friend of yours or mine would laugh at such a suggestion, it is just as well to kill the cacklers before they lay their eggs. But the chief reason for inscribing this book to you is my desire to record, however inadequately, what pleasure and pride, dear Fay, your charm, your talents, your beauty, and success have given to

  Your affectionate brother,

  Compton Mackenzie.

  Capri, August 4, 1919.

  Mr. Compton Mackenzie has found it necessary to state publicly in a dedication that his books have not been written by his sister.

  The following extracts are taken from possible future dedications by various authors:—

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Sir Oliver Lodge

  Our common concern with the life beyond has become so well known that our interests in this present life are in danger of becoming involved. In a volume of Sherlock Holmes stories recently purchased abroad I find you described as the author, and another book assures me that I have written extensively on the Atomic Theory. You will, I am sure, see the harm which I am likely to suffer through such mistakes. Nor does the confusion end here. I find that my novel, “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” is now slated to be by Sir Conan Lodge, and another book of mine, “The Lost World,” to be by Sir Oliver Doyle. Also I have seen myself described as “The Principal of Birmingham University,” and yourself as the well-known detective of Baker Street. May I solicit your aid in helping me to suppress any further confusion of our respective genii? My best wishes to you and the good work.

  Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd., www.punch.co.uk.

  Mrs. Asquith Remembers

  A newspaper error is turned into a joke at ACD’s expense.

  From Mrs. Asquith’s reminiscences:

  “One day after this conversation he [the late Lord Salisbury] came to see me in Cavendish Square, bringing with him a signed photograph of himself. This was in the year 1904, at the height of the controversy over Protection.”—Sunday Times.

  As Lord Salisbury is generally supposed to have died in 1903, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been requested to investigate the incident.

  1921

  Australia

  ACD spent six months of 1920 giving a series of talks on spiritualism in Australia and New Zealand. The talks were popular, attracting believers and skeptics alike. Being heckled did not bother him. “If Spiritualism had been a popular cult in Australia,” he wrote, “there would have been no object in my visit.” The Kellaway refers to Frederick Kellaway (1870-1933) who was the Secretary for Overseas Trade.

  Sir A. Conan Doyle has been saying that the telephone service in Australia is worse than it is in England. We only hope Mr. Kellaway will realize that to Sir A. Conan Doyle hardly anything seems impossible.

  The Adventure of the Agitated Chemist

  F.D. Grierson

  Francis D. Grierson (1888-1972) turned his war experiences into his novel “The Single Star” (1918) before turning to the mystery genre, where he wrote more than 45 novels, including stories about Superintendent Andrew Ash and DCI George Muir.

  [It is rumoured that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is writing another series of Sherlock Holmes stories for The Strand.]

  Holmes leaned back in his chair and pressed the soles of his feet together.

  “As I have frequently pointed out,” he remarked, “it is the expected that happens.”

  A taxi-cab had pulled up outside our door and I caught the sound of voices, apparently in altercation.

  “It is a retired Colonel of Bengal cavalry,” said Holmes in reply to my look of inquiry. “he lives at Twickenham, with no attendants save a professional boxer, a baboo, a khitmutgar and five chupatties. He is coming to consult me about the disappearance of—”

  At that moment our landlady tapped at the door and ushered in a tall man dressed in a suit of old-fashioned cut.

  “Mr. Holmes?” he said, peering shortsightedly at my companion, who nodded and smiled genially. “And this, no doubt,” he added, “is your friend and colleague, Dr. Watson, before whom I may speak without reserve? Good.”

  “Pray take a seat,” said Holmes pleasantly. “You must be tired; it is a long way from Kensington,” he added, glancing at a rhododendron in our visitor’s buttonhole.

  The stranger bowed and took the chair Holmes had indicated.

  “My name,” he said, “is Mutford—Saul Mutford. I am a member of the Pharmaceutical Society and I keep a chemist’s shop in Bracelet Lane, off the Strand. I am a bachelor and live in a couple of rooms over my shop. My trade has declined of late years and I am unable to afford an assistant.”

  He paused and drew the back of his hand across his lips. Holmes filled a tumbler with ’75 brandy.

  “Drink this,” he said kindly. “It will steady your nerves.”

  The glass rattled against the man’s teeth as he swallowed the draught and I loosened my hypodermic in its sheath, but he controlled himself and went on:

  “You will forgive my agitation, gentlemen, when you hear my story.”

  Holmes took a powerful lens from his pocket and carefully examined the man’s forehead, on which great drops of sweat had appeared.

  “Take your time, Mr. Mutford,” he said kindly. “Presently you will feel able to tell us all about the loss of the heavy gold repeater, English lever, escape movement, jewelled in three holes, which you have carried in the lower left-hand pocket of your waistcoat for twenty-seven years.”

  “But I have not lost my watch,” said the chemist, evidently surprised at the rapidity of my friend’s deductions.

  “It is not, however, in the pocket I have mentioned,” said Holmes, a trifle irritably.

  “No. The lining has worn through and I now carry my silver hunter in my trousers pocket.”

  Holmes filled his pipe deliberately from the Persian slipper in which he kept his tobacco, lit it and half-closed his eyes.

  “Let us have your story in your own words,” he said; “and pray omit no detail, however trivial it may appear to you.”

  “I believe, Mr. Holmes,” began Mutford, “that you have been studying the new theories of spiritualism.”

  “I have devoted some attention to the matter,” replied Holmes.

  “Well, to come to my story, Sir,” went on the chemist, “I am not, I think, an imaginative man, but I freely admit, Mr. Holmes, that I am terrified by something I cannot put a name to. One evening a few weeks ago I was sitting in my back room reading a new book on the uric acid question. The shop was closed. Suddenly I became aware of a creaking noise, punctuated by what sounded very like squeaks, that seemed to come from some distance away. It at once occurred to me that someone had got into the shop, but a careful search revealed nothing. Every night since then the noises have been repeated, and the thing is getting on my nerves. I consulted the police, and Mr. Lestrade of Scotland Yard is now taking up the case; but I felt that I must come to you and beg you to help me.”

  Holmes leaned forward, keenly interested.

  “Can you remember,” h
e asked, “the day on which you first heard the noises?”

  “It was on a Friday,” replied Mutford; “the thirteenth of last month.”

  Holmes chuckled and fired his revolver two or three times into the coal-box, a sure sign that he was pleased with himself. Rising he took down a thick manuscript book and turned the leaves quickly.

  “Mr. Mutford,” he said, “did you ever hear of the ‘Thirteen Beans’?”

  “Never”

  “I thought so. That is their cleverness; they and their agents are everywhere, yet no one except myself has ever heard of them. Briefly, they are an association of persons whose object it is to abolish the use of drugs, and as a first step to that end they have been quietly getting rid of chemists. They first endeavour to drive them mad by various means; if that fails they murder them. They are vegetarians and they invariably initiate and conclude each crime on the thirteenth of the month.”

  “Good heavens!” cried our unhappy guest; “to-day is the thirteenth.”

  “Exactly,” replied Holmes; “and with the information which you have placed in my hands I hope that tonight we shall be able to lay their leaders by the heels. Watson, if you will kindly call a taxi and slip your revolver into your pocket.”

  We drove rapidly to Mutford’s shop, and by Holmes’s direction concealed ourselves in the small back room. For an hour we waited there in the dark, and I confess that my heart beat painfully when the door of the shop, which Holmes had left unlocked, was pushed open and a single knock sounded on the inner door. Holmes said “Come in,” at the same time flashing an electric-torch on the burly figure that entered.

  “Lestrade!” he cried in amazement.

  “Why, Mr. Holmes,” said the detective, “you here? I just looked in to tell Mr. Mutford that we have solved the little mystery that has been worrying him.”

  “I am afraid that I have forestalled you,” chuckled Holmes. “However, let us hear your version; but I beg that you will be brief, for if I am not mistaken we are about to receive a less amusing visitor.”

  “We shall see,” replied Lestrade. “I had a good look round here while you were out, Mr. Mutford,” he went on, “and had the wainscot taken down. And I have got the culprits literally in a trap.”

  Laughing with an almost offensive heartiness he held up a large cage, in which, squeaking violently, were a number of terrified mice.

  * * * * *

  “Watson,” said Holmes thoughtfully as we drove back to our rooms, “I am not the man I was before I had that fatal accident.”

  Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd., www.punch.co.uk.

  Telepathic Dog

  Another brief derived from ACD’s tour of Australia and New Zealand. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for the country’s economic and financial matters, including tax issues.

  Sir A. Conan Doyle tells of a dog in Australia that had the power of divining the number of coins in a man’s pocket. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is believed to have made an offer for it.

  The Thunderbolt

  E.V. Lucas

  An announcement that there would be no pantomime at Drury Lane theatre this year brought this reaction from ACD. For those living outside of Britain, pantomimes are family friendly musical comedies put on during Christmas and New Year’s Day. Typical “panto” stories include “Cinderella” (the Ugly Sister being one of the characters referred to below), “Aladdin,” “Dick Whittington and His Cat,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Traditions include the appearance of a pantomime horse, cross-dressing actors (men in dresses, women in tight male garments, for example), slapstick and sing-songs. Audiences are encouraged to cheer the hero, jeer the villain and join in the singing.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who at the same time has been chatting with a deceased Ugly Sister of great repute in his day, says that the famous comedian was also in the gloomiest vein. The effect of this cessation on the minds of the young, he remarked in effect, will be incalculable. It is essential for the good temper and good sense of the nation that every Christmas thousands of children should be supplied with the catch-phrases of the day and the right and proper facetious attitude towards mothers-in-law, drunkenness and kippers. Only thus can our national humour persist and be kept sweet. The nation that tends to new jokes or abandons its old ones is, he concluded, lost. At this point the control seems to have snapped.

  1922

  Ministers Who Might Have Been

  C.L. Graves

  Bonar Law (1858-1923) became Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister when throat cancer forced him to resign after 211 days in office. The fairy photographs refer to the Cottingley Fairies, a series of photos taken by children showing them with fairies. ACD concluded that the photos were real, and wrote “The Coming of Fairies” in their defence.

  The heroic renunciation of office by the Hon. Esmond Harmsworth, M.P., because the Premier foolishly declined to guarantee the evacuation of Mesopotamia and Palestine, is very far from being the only tragedy brought about by error in judgment on the part of Mr. Bonar Law in the task of framing an Administration.

  The attempt to secure Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as Home Secretary was equally and unnecessarily unsuccessful. As the eminent publicist was without a seat in the House of Commons, it was arranged that he should go to the Lords as Baron Baskerville. But Sir Arthur very properly stipulated that, if he undertook the responsibilities of this office, the Criminal Investigation Department must be reorganized on an ectoplasmic basis and fairy photographs accepted as evidence in all cases. Mr. Bonar Law, with the prosaic dourness which unfortunately characterizes him, refused to give the requisite pledge, and the prospects of establishing a “Spiritual Home” Office were abruptly terminated.

  Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd., www.punch.co.uk.

  Put and Take

  The “Put and Take” referred to below was a gambling game, possibly invented by soldiers in the trenches. Players used a spinning top with instructions written on the sides for winning and losing coins. It was a popular party pastime during the 1920s and ’30s.

  Sir Conan Doyle is our authority for stating that we shall still play games in the next world. Is there to be no escape from “Put and Take”?

  Witchcraft

  This item refers to the Witchcraft Act of 1735 which penalized those who pretended to be a witch by offering to call up spirits, predict the future, cast spells or locate lost items. The act remained in force until 1951.

  Sir A. Conan Doyle, in a contemporary, urges the repeal of the medieval Witchcraft Act. For our part we should badly miss the fun of burning a witch occasionally.

  1923

  Me, Or the Strange Episode of the Reincarnated Greek

  “Evoe” (E.V. Knox)

  The hardest parodies to write are those that take on two targets at the same time. It’s rarely attempted, probably because it takes twice as much work to properly send up both creations. In addition to E.V. Knox’s story below, featuring Ayesha, the goddess from H. Rider Haggard’s “She,” there were two examples that appeared in ACD’s time. In 1903, Tit-Bits magazine paired two of ACD’s creations in “Sherlock Holmes and Brigadier Gerard.” In 1912, S. Beach Chester took Holmes and Maurice Leblanc’s master thief Arsène Lupin and turned them on their heads in “The Arsene Lepine-Herlock Soames Affair.”

  Edmund Valpy Knox (1881-1971) was a longtime contributor to Punch and its editor from 1932 to 1949. Literary accomplishments ran in the family. His brother was theologian and mystery writer Ronald Knox (1888-1957). A daughter from his first marriage was the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. His second wife, Mary Shepard, was not only the daughter of illustrator E.H. Shepard (“Winnie the Pooh”, “The Wind in the Willows”) but she illustrated the Mary Poppins books as well. The illustrations by longtime Punch artist George Morrow (1869-1955) came from Knox’s story collection “Fiction as She Is Wrote.”

  (Written in honour of the simultaneous recrudescence of “Sherlock Holmes” in the “Strand Magazine”
and “She” in “Wisdom’s Daughter.”)

  Chapter I.—The Veiled Client

  It was one Saturday afternoon early in April of the year 1923, as we were sitting together in his room in Baker Street, discussing the strange dearth of news in the popular press, that my friend Holmes tossed over to me a half-sheet of peculiar yellow-looking notepaper, at the same time putting to me the typically laconic question—

  “Well, Watson, what do you make of that?”

  There was neither name nor address written on the paper, nothing in fact but the grotesque series of symbols which I reproduce as nearly as possible below :—

  “Except that it is written in a foreign language of which I am completely ignorant, I can make neither head nor tail of it, Holmes,” I replied.

  “No, it does not tell us much,” he admitted, “either about the history or the circumstances of the sender. It is fairly obvious, of course, that it was written by a woman of less than thirty years old, who is accustomed to have her own way, and wears a heavy signet-ring on the little finger of the right hand (one cannot possibly miss the bold yet feminine flourish of the letters nor the slight scratch on the surface of the sheet); at the same time, judging from the fact that it is written on Egyptian papyrus of the Twenty-first Dynasty and in a mixture of Koptic and Demotic, it is possible to make a tolerably accurate guess at the nationality, if not at the business, of our fair correspondent. You know, surely, that I had written a monograph upon the older Egyptian papyri? Perhaps it will assist us a little if I translate the message.”