Sherlock Unlocked

by Daniel Smith

  A BLOODY BUSINESS

  When Watson first encountered Holmes, the detective was celebrating a scientific discovery far ahead of its time. ‘I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin, and by nothing else,’ he proclaimed. It was, he said, ‘the most practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don’t you see that it gives us an infallible test for blood stains.’ This was by no means an empty claim. It had long been a problem to identify accurately bloodstains, especially when they were not fresh. There was no truly reliable method, for example, of distinguishing a spot of rust from a genuine bloodstain, not to mention telling human from animal blood. As Holmes laboured in the chemistry lab at Bart’s, the idea of distinguishing different types of human blood was still decades off. Back in the 1860s, a Swiss chemist called Christian Friedrich Schönbein had noted that if a stain foamed on contact with hydrogen peroxide, it likely contained haemoglobin and so could be assumed to be blood. But it was not an easy test to run. However, according to Holmes, his new method could identify blood in a solution where the proportion of blood was not more than one in a million. This was truly breathtaking stuff.

  THE KASTLE-MEYER TEST

  In fact, it would not be until 1903 that the real world caught up. In that year, a procedure was developed by the German chemist, Erich Meyer, based on earlier work by an American, Joseph Kastle. The Kastle-Meyer test, as it was known, used phenolphthalein to detect the presence of haemoglobin: the chemical turns bright pink in its presence. At last, the achievement of Holmes could be mirrored in true-life investigations.

  A Fine Fellow

  Holmes’s skills as a chemist were so well established by Conan Doyle that in 2002 the Royal Society of Chemistry decided to bestow an Extraordinary Honorary Fellowship on the detective. The award was symbolically presented to the statue of Holmes that resides outside Baker Street Underground Station. Fittingly, in attendance was a modern-day Fellow of the Society going by the name of John Watson. The Society, established in 1841 as the Chemical Society of London with the aim of generally advancing chemical science, also struck a commemorative silver medal in Holmes’s honour. Dr David Giachardi, then chief executive of the Society, commented:

  Our particular interest is his love of chemistry, and the way that he wielded such knowledge for the public good, employing it dispassionately and analytically. He also embodied other personal traits that society seeks in today’s law officers – personal rectitude and courage. Last month the Royal Society of Chemistry honoured the achievements of Sir Alec Jeffreys, whose work in the 1980s led to the employment of DNA fingerprinting in criminal detection. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, through Holmes, anticipated one hundred and twenty years ago the utilization of chemistry in the battle against crime.

  The Last Word in Obscurity

  In ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’, Watson refers to Holmes having written a monograph on the polyphonic motets of Lassus, which had been printed for private circulation, and ‘is said by experts to be the last word upon the subject’. It is difficult to think that it had very much competition. The Lassus in question is Roland de Lassus, a sixteenth-century Flemish composer, whose broad output of work included 516 motets – essentially, complex choral works performed in Latin. The motet is something of an acquired taste. In around 1300, the French musicologist Johannes de Grocheio described the form as something which was ‘not to be celebrated in the presence of common people, because they do not notice its subtlety, nor are they delighted in hearing it, but in the presence of the educated and of those who are seeking subtleties in the arts’. For Holmes, there was undoubted beauty to be found in the works of Lassus. ‘Do you remember what Darwin says about music?’ he once asked Watson. ‘He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at.’

  THE ENTHUSIASMS OF FRIENDSHIP

  The question of whether Holmes’s work on the motets was quite as important as Watson suggests is disputed by some Holmesian scholars. As Benjamin Grosbayne has put it: ‘As for being “the last word upon the subject,” the enthusiasms of friendship must be taken into consideration. Tovey, Koechlin, Jeppesen, Mattieu, Bäumker, Sandberger, E. Van der Straeten and other authorities make no mention of Holmes’s monograph.’

  The Temple of Food

  In two stories (‘The Dying Detective’ and ‘The Illustrious Client’) Holmes takes Watson for a bite of something ‘nutritious’ at Simpsons-in-the-Strand, one of London’s foremost dining institutions. A brief résumé of its history suggests why Holmes found it such an appealing spot. It opened in 1828 as a smoking room (no doubt immediately earning it kudos in Holmes’s book) but then evolved into a coffee house. During this period, it also became known as the national headquarters of chess. Messengers in top hats would tear around town reporting news of important chess moves as they happened. While Holmes is not known to have been a player himself, it is surely likely that he admired the ultimate game of intellect and strategy. By the 1850s, though, Simpsons had morphed again, this time into a traditional English dining room, famous for its hearty meat dishes. Besides Holmes, its celebrated clientele included Charles Dickens and the prime ministers William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. By the time Holmes and Watson were regulars, it had been subsumed into the grand setting of the Savoy Hotel but maintained its distinct identity. P. G. Wodehouse was another admirer, describing it as ‘a restful temple of food’.

  Mysteries Within Mysteries

  In the canonical stories, there are more than a hundred passing references to cases handled by Holmes about which the details are unknown. Records of at least some of these, it is to be presumed, are sitting in that old, battered dispatch box of Watson’s in the vaults of Cox & Co. (see here). The little information we are given in many cases leaves more questions than answers, providing a fruitful reserve of inspiration for other authors to create their own Holmes tales. It is impossible for reasons of space to list all of the references here but a taster can be provided. So, here are just fifteen, but each of them pointing towards a lost gem of a story:

  • The Abernetty Family (and the depth to which the parsley had sunk into the butter)

  • Bert Stevens, the Mild-Mannered Murderer

  • The Bogus Laundry Affair

  • Colonel Warburton’s Madness

  • The Colossal Schemes of Baron Maupertuis (Netherland-Sumatra Company)

  • The Dundas Separation Case (in which a husband ‘had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife’)

  • The Giant Rat of Sumatra (featuring Matilda Briggs)

  • The Madness of Isadora Persano (with a remarkable worm unknown to science)

  • The Most Winning Woman (who poisoned three little children)

  • The Politician, the Lighthouse and the Trained Cormorant

  • The Repulsive Story of the Red Leech and the Terrible Death of Crosby the Banker

  • Ricoletti of the Club Foot and his Abominable Wife

  • The Singular Affair of the Aluminium Crutch

  • The Woman at Margate with no Powder on her Nose

  • Wilson, the Notorious Canary-Trainer

  Sherlock the Space Cadet?

  Everybody knows that Holmes is an intellectual powerhouse, don’t they? Well, it turns out that Watson was not quite so convinced of his companion’s cerebral brilliance, in their early days at least. Watson’s doubts are outlined in an extract from A Study in Scarlet, a narrative in which he described the detective’s ‘ignorance’ as being ‘as remarkable as his knowledge’. While he described Holmes as strong in the areas of ‘sensational literature’ (‘He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.’), chemistry and anatomy (the latter a field in which he was ‘accurate, but unsystematic’), and acknowledged his competence in geology and botany (‘Well up in . . . poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.’), he was utterly dismissive of his basi
c grasp in other disciplines. He described as ‘nil’ Holmes’s knowledge of literature (the sensational stuff aside), philosophy and astronomy, while his understanding of politics was but ‘feeble’. Holmes particularly shocked Watson by professing to have no knowledge of Copernican theory and the composition of the Solar System. ‘That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun,’ pondered Watson, ‘appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.’ Holmes, though, goaded him that now he knew the theory he would do his best to forget it for its lack of practical use to him. ‘What the deuce is it to me?’ he proclaimed indignantly. While Holmes characterizes himself as a ‘brain’ with the rest of him ‘mere appendix’, he was no Renaissance Man-style polymath.

  READ-Y OR NOT

  As the canon developed, however, Watson’s early evaluation of his comrade’s academic abilities came to be seen as a little hasty. While Holmes’s ignorance of Copernican theory is certainly surprising, the gaps in his knowledge in other areas were surely overestimated. In particular, the canonical stories do not back Watson’s assertion that his knowledge of literature was nil. In The Sign of the Four alone he twice quotes from that giant of German letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (from two different works, too: Faust and Xenian), commends Jean Paul (the commonly used alias of the German author Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) and borrows a phrase from François de la Rochefoucauld. Elsewhere, in ‘A Case of Identity’ he attributes a quote to the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz; in ‘The Red-Headed League’ he slightly misquotes Gustave Flaubert’s letter to George Sand (in which it is suggested ‘The man is nothing, the work is everything.’); and in ‘The Noble Bachelor’ he cites Henry David Thoreau. He was also seen reading a volume of Petrarch on the train to Boscombe Valley. Hardly a man with no interest in literature, then. It is also worth noting that even though he claimed ignorance of the ideas of Copernicus, Holmes was sufficiently versed in astronomy that, in ‘The Greek Interpreter’, he was able to talk confidently on the ‘causes of the changes of the obliquity of the ecliptic’!

  By the Book

  Despite the aforementioned aspersions cast on Holmes’s literary knowledge by Watson, the detective was also a prolific author in his own right. Here is an overview of some of his most important work, each referred to at some point in the canon:

  • The Polyphonic Motets of Lassus

  • The Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, With Some Observations Upon the Segregation of the Queen

  • The Book of Life

  • On the Surface Anatomy of the Human Ear (for the Anthropological Journal).

  • Upon Tattoo Marks

  • Upon the Dating of Documents by Handwriting Analysis

  • Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of Various Tobaccos

  • Upon the Influence of a Trade upon the Form of a Hand

  • Upon the Subject of Secret Writings

  • Upon the Tracing of Footsteps (with Some Remarks upon the Uses of Plaster of Paris as a Preserver of Impresses)

  There were several other works in the pipeline too, every bit as esoteric in nature. Whether they were ever completed, we do not know. But what joy to have been able to read The Chaldean Roots of the Cornish Language, The Use of Dogs in Detective Work, Malingering or The Typewriter and its Relation to Crime.

  Performance of a Lifetime

  Holmes has been portrayed on stage, screen and radio by a glorious company of outstanding actors. There is only one, however, who has appeared as Holmes in major productions of every canonical story. Between 1989 and 1998, Clive Merrison played the detective in a landmark radio series for the BBC, with Michael Williams as his Watson in each of Conan Doyle’s sixty stories. The series was dramatized by Bert Coules in what must go down as one of the medium’s great feats of scriptwriting. So successful was the series that Merrison resumed the role between 2002 and 2010 for four series of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which Coules based on canonical references to unexplained cases. Williams having died, Andrew Sachs took over the role of Watson for these pastiches, at the end of which Merrison had notched up appearances in no less than seventy-five Holmes stories.

  Dodgy Dealings

  Charles Augustus Milverton was described by Holmes as ‘the king of the blackmailers’ and ‘the worst man in London’. There can be little doubt that Conan Doyle based the rogue on a real-life art dealer by the name of Charles Augustus Howell. Howell became mired in scandal and was accused of being a blackmailer extraordinaire before his life ended amid intrigue and allegations of foul play. Born in 1840, Howell got close to several pivotal figures in the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. For instance, he was an agent for and confidante of Algernon Swinburne, but Swinburne came to believe Howell had sold some ‘indecent’ letters that belonged to him to a publisher who subsequently used them to blackmail Swinburne. There were also rumours that he abused his association with the Rossetti family for personal gain and that he was instrumental in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s scandal-inducing decision to retrieve the poetry that he had originally buried with his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. In 1890, aged 50, Howell was discovered dead in London’s Chelsea, his throat slit and a coin allegedly inserted into his mouth. Tuberculosis was given as the official cause of death, with his body probably having been mutilated post-mortem. A stash of incendiary letters – a treasure-trove for an alleged blackmailer – were subsequently said to have been found in his house. Swinburne would call him ‘the vilest wretch I ever came across’ and Edward Burne-Jones, another of the Pre-Raphaelite trailblazers, described him as ‘a base, treacherous, unscrupulous and malignant fellow’. ‘I’ve had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow,’ Holmes said of Milverton. The exact nature of Howell’s crimes remains shrouded in mystery but his misdeeds nevertheless inspired the creation of one of literature’s least appealing n’er-do-wells.

  Mum’s the Word

  Conan Doyle had a close relationship with his mother, Mary, who he always referred to as ‘the Ma’am’. She was undoubtedly a resilient woman who overcame many challenges during her lifetime, not least a difficult marriage to Arthur’s father. It is to her that we owe ‘The Copper Beeches’, at least in part. In 1891, Conan Doyle had written to her saying that he was considering finishing Holmes off since he ‘takes my mind from better things’. In her reply to him, she implored: ‘You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!’ In January of 1892 he finished the manuscript for ‘The Copper Beeches’, a story that closely echoed a plot suggestion that the Ma’am had previously made to him. She had told him that he should create a story featuring a girl with ‘beautiful golden hair: who kidnapped and her hair shorn should be made to impersonate some other girl for a villainous purpose’. With the exception of Violet Hunter’s luxuriant chestnut tresses, he pretty much kept to her suggestions. She in turn had probably been inspired to come up with the plot after reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Holmes survived to fight another day, even if Conan Doyle had it in mind to end the story cycle. As he told his mother, Holmes ‘lives, thanks to your entreaties, well barely’.

  Snake in the Grass

  One of the most popular of all the canonical stories (which I shall not name here for fear of spoiling the plot for the uninitiated) pivots around a trained snake. This snake, while a wondrous plot device, nonetheless seems to have little connection to the real world. In the first place, Holmes described the serpent as a ‘swamp adder . . . the deadliest snake in India’. Yet there is no such species in India, or indeed on the entire Asian continent, nor was there in Conan Doyle’s time. There is a venomous swamp viper that inhabits areas of East Africa, although the Indian cobra is perhaps a more likely candidate for the snake’s true species. The story also makes two rather curious claims about this particular deadly species. First, it suggests it drinks milk, for which there is very little credible supporting scientific evidence, an
d also that it had been trained to respond to the sound of a whistle. Snakes are to all intents and purposes deaf. Many species are able to detect vibrations and respond to low-frequency noises but the narrative requirement that the snake in question could respond to a whistle blown in a different room stretches credibility to breaking point. Conan Doyle probably found inspiration for this story in an article published in Cassell’s Saturday Journal in February 1891. It featured the tale of an explorer who had a close encounter with a boa constrictor in West Africa and used a bell-pull to effect his escape. Regardless of its uncertain scientific foundations, Conan Doyle’s version of the story packed a bite worthy of even the most aggressive snake.