The Hapsburg Falcon

by J. R. Trtek

  These papers, all tied into a bundle with twine, were found in a trunk that was a fixture of the Greenwich Village apartment that my wife’s brother moved into during the mid-1980s. The trunk’s original owner is unknown, and according to one veteran building tenant, the trunk itself had sat locked in those rooms without a key since at least the early 1960s.

  My brother-in-law simply covered it with a blanket for use as an improvised miniature sofa during the time he lived in that New York City flat, but one day his curiosity got the better of him, and he forced open the rusty lock. Within the trunk he found three vintage men’s shirts in almost mint condition, a ream of blank typing paper, and five bath towels. Wrapped within one of those folded towels was the manuscript described above.

  Nothing connected the trunk’s contents to any particular person, and my brother-in-law quietly took possession of the items he had discovered. The shirts were bartered for credit at a vintage clothing store, the typing paper was eventually used for note sheets, and the towels—which did not inspire trust—were simply thrown away. My brother-in-law read and kept the manuscript as a curiosity, but he did nothing with it at the time.

  In the early 1990s, my wife traveled from Portland to see her brother, who had since moved into a house in New Jersey. During that visit, he mentioned the manuscript to her, and, in turn, she—knowing my interest in Sherlock Holmes—told me of it. The news piqued my interest slightly, but as stated at the beginning of this addendum, Sherlockian pastiches are not hard to come across, and I did not follow up on an offer to have the manuscript sent to me. Instead, it sat on the East Coast for another several years. In 2008, however, my brother-in-law suffered a fit of spring-cleaning and decided to just mail the entire set of pages to me unannounced.

  As I began to read the story, I was not surprised by the pastiche’s ploy of reintroducing Irene Adler but was somewhat intrigued by the tale’s mention of a black bird statue. The description of Jasper Girthwood also struck a chord. Then, two-thirds of the way through, I was startled by the description of the statue’s history, given in Chapter 10. Having long been a devotee of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon and John Huston’s film adaptation of it, I realized at once that the story in my hands must relate Holmes’s encounter with that legendary—and what I had heretofore taken to be fictional—artifact. Moreover, I simultaneously understood that the character in the manuscript named Jasper Girthwood could be none other than a young Casper Gutman, Sam Spade’s antagonist in The Maltese Falcon.

  The narrative presented within this volume is identical with the corrected, typed manuscript found by my brother-in-law, with some exceptions. Assuming that the seven handwritten pages represent the beginning of the original manuscript—and I am in awe at the thought that those of inky scrawls may, indeed, have come from the pen of Dr. John Watson himself—I have chosen to replace the word “hello” throughout by “halloa,” which is the spelling employed in the handwritten portion. In addition, one pencil correction to a typewritten page changes “Hindoo” to the more modern “Hindu” spelling, while another converts “aether” to the contemporary “ether ” variant. Since each former choice in turn adds a fleeting sense of period to the scene where both appear, I have opted for the antiquated spellings instead. Otherwise, the penciled revisions have been retained.

  Moreover, as noted earlier, the original author’s apparent working title for the novel was The Black Falcon of Malta. Seeking to emphasize the parallelism between this story and the Hammett novel, however, I have chosen to dub it The Hapsburg Falcon instead. Also, chapters in the typed manuscript bear numbers only; I have supplied titles for them. Finally, I have added a dozen footnotes to clarify certain references for the modern American reader.

  I leave detailed speculation to the experts, but my suspicion is that the typescript represents a rewrite of a now mostly lost manuscript, the seven handwritten pages being the only portion of the original still extant. Without those missing handwritten pages—and there must have been over three hundred of them—one cannot be certain of the extent of any alterations or, if one prefers, fabrications. Nevertheless, the typescript—with revisions noted above—is offered for the public’s consideration. Those versed in the Sherlockian canon far more deeply than I may judge it for themselves.

  Appendix B :

  Parallel Chronologies

  The previous appendix to The Hapsburg Falcon gives a brief description of the manuscript and its provenance. In this second of three addenda to the novel, I wish to explore the internal chronologies of The Hapsburg Falcon and The Maltese Falcon, as well as the relationship between the two.

  Offhand, one might believe that the events of The Maltese Falcon cannot be dated with the precision, if disputed accuracy, that one finds possible in the Holmesian canon. In fact, as shown by Glenn Todd in a note to an illustrated edition of the novel, published first by Arion Press and then reprinted by North Point, the events in the Hammett work must take place between Wednesday, December 5 and Monday, December 10 in the year 1928. The analysis leading to this conclusion is also discussed in Richard Layman’s The Maltese Falcon, published by the Gale Group.

  Those far more adept than I in the methods of Sherlockian hagiography may be able to better pinpoint the chronology of events in The Hapsburg Falcon, but my best guess is that the novel takes place in March 1903. Holmes is clearly nearing the end of his professional career, generally agreed to have concluded in that or the following year, with one important exception to be noted later. Queen Victoria is deceased, as obliquely noted by Holmes in his comments to Jasper Girthwood regarding the emerald tie-pin given him by that late monarch. This reference, by itself, places Holmes’s encounter with Girthwood later than January 1901. In addition, Watson has, by now, moved from Baker Street into his Queen Anne Street residence, an event generally held to have occurred in the latter half of 1902. More specific evidence occurs toward the end of the novel, when Watson refers to having known Holmes for twenty-two years. Since the two are usually assumed to have met in 1881, that comment alone would appear to set the year as 1903.

  There is, however, at least one piece of possibly contradictory evidence. Watson informs Irene Adler during a conversation that, after the hiatus of the late 1890s, a new story about Holmes was published “in the past year.” This must be a reference to The Hound of the Baskervilles, which first appeared in serialization in The Strand Magazine in 1901. That year is not consistent with setting the falcon case in 1903, but it may be that Watson was referring to the first book publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which occurred in the spring of 1902.

  The action in The Hapsburg Falcon appears to unfold over the course of six days, from the first arrival of Stanley Hopkins at 221 Baker Street to the final departure of Irene Adler. Watson indicates at the beginning that it is late spring, yet later in the narrative he refers to “winter’s final frost.” Although it may seem that Watson’s highly personal sense of time may once again make precise dating of a story difficult or impossible, one remark by Holmes’s landlady is worthy of note. On the second day of events, as she chastises Dr. Watson for allegedly mentioning the subject of rent to Miss Adler, Mrs. Hudson observes that the “quarter day” is in exactly one week. The quarter day, on which rents were traditionally due, fell on one of four religious holidays. The corresponding spring holiday is Lady Day, March 25.

  From this, we may assume that Mrs. Hudson’s comment was made on the eighteenth, so The Hapsburg Falcon runs from Tuesday, March 17 to Sunday, March 22 of 1903. Again, more diligent scholars may find corroboration or contradiction with other internal clues, but I do note that having the final day of the affair fall on a Sunday is consistent with a passing mention by Watson that on the concluding morning of the adventure, Holmes complained of no “fresh newspapers” to read—in Edwardian times, newspapers were not printed on Sunday.

  While the internal chronologies of the two novels appear to be relatively tidy, serious problems arise when one tries to
reconcile them with each other. In The Maltese Falcon, Casper Gutman (whom I believe to be the same person as Jasper Girthwood) informs Sam Spade that the Parisian art dealer who had the falcon, Charilaos Konstantinides, was murdered and the statue stolen sixteen years previously. This places the murder—which, according to The Hapsburg Falcon, was not that of Konstantinides—in 1912 rather than 1903.

  Nine years is a bit of a discrepancy to explain, and reconciliation becomes purely speculative here. It is possible that Gutman did not wish to reveal the degree of his obsession to Spade—a quarter of a century in pursuit of the falcon—and so pretended his quest had been not as epic. Then too, it is not clear what happened to the man after the events recounted in The Hapsburg Falcon. Perhaps the damning material gathered by Langdale Pike was sufficient to put him in jail for a number of years—nine, perhaps? In that case, Gutman might not have wanted to account for them and so subtracted that period of time from his verbal record. In any event, the discrepancy between the two stories is a serious problem and suggests that one or both of the novels might actually be pure fiction.

  One significant element that The Hapsburg Falcon does leave hanging is the fate of Konstantinides himself and, indeed, the question of whether the art dealer ever had the original statue intended for Charles V. In The Maltese Falcon, we are led to believe that he had the real statue but was murdered and that the Russian Kemidov eventually got hold of it. (A tantalizing reference appears at the end of The Hapsburg Falcon, where Holmes mentions a scandal surrounding a young Russian military attaché named Kemidoff. Could this be mere coincidence? I, for one, am inclined to believe it is not.)

  In Watson’s tale, on the other hand, it appears that Konstantinides had a quite ordinary falcon statue, which was then stolen by Irene Adler. In defending his establishment, however, the art dealer murdered Adler’s accomplice and vanished, perhaps setting fire to his own shop in the process. But why? What motivated Konstantinides to flee and destroy his place of business? Could he have deliberately planted the fake statue, intending to vanish with the real one after destroying his shop to throw any pursuers off the scent?

  Oddly enough, Watson’s presumed narrative sidesteps these questions entirely. Clearly, more happened here than is offered to the reader. It is not unlikely that Watson deliberately obscured fact and chronology, and this apparent obfuscation may be a reason why Watson—if he, indeed, did write the present narrative—never offered it for publication. Yet another possibility is that the original, handwritten manuscript was never finished and the person who created the typescript added an incomplete fictional ending. Once more, I will let those more versed in the Holmes canon—and the Spade tradition—attempt to sort out these issues if they wish. Their resolution is certainly far beyond my capability.

  Appendix C :

  Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes

  In discussing the only detectives known to have crossed paths with the black falcon of Malta and the man known as Casper Gutman or Jasper Girthwood, we must be clear about one thing from the beginning. While the fact of Sherlock Holmes’s existence as a real historical personage is generally accepted by most impartial observers, it may come as a surprise to some—as it did to me—to learn that Sam Spade, though slightly fictionalized by Dashiell Hammett, was, in truth, also a flesh-and-blood person, whom Hammett met while the latter was pursuing his own first career as a private investigator for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

  Hammett had joined that firm in 1915, but three years later, during World War I, he was inducted into the army. While stationed in Maryland, he contracted the notorious Spanish influenza, and though that disease did not claim his life, it led to Hammett developing tuberculosis, which was responsible for his medical discharge from military service in 1919. All of twenty-five, the future writer then moved west and rejoined Pinkerton to work out of their offices in Washington State, Montana, and, finally, San Francisco. It was probably during that final stint that he met the man known to us as Sam Spade.

  By the end of 1921, however, Hammett’s worsening health led him to abandon Pinkerton and choose writing as a means of support for himself and his new wife and daughter. Later, during this second career, Hammett was inspired to use some of Spade’s experiences, as well as his own, in writing short stories, many centering around an unnamed fictional detective known as the Continental Op. Two novels followed in the late 1920s, and The Maltese Falcon was first published serially in the magazine Black Mask at the very end of that decade. In the early 1930s, three short stories with Spade as the main character appeared in the same publication.

  In The Maltese Falcon, Spade, in an absent-minded way, identifies the handgun that killed his partner, Miles Archer, as a Webley-Fosbery thirty-eight automatic and comments to his friend, police detective Tom Polhaus, that he had seen them before. The Webley-Fosbery was of English origin, first manufactured just prior to World War I and never widely distributed, with only a few finding their way to American owners. Where might Spade have acquainted himself with this firearm to such an extent that he could immediately identify it and show relatively little interest in such an uncommon weapon?

  Consider that justly famous episode in which Sherlock Holmes came out of a decade-long retirement to serve his country in 1914, the adventure known as “His Last Bow.” This story is of interest on several grounds, including the fact that it is one of the few tales in the generally accepted Holmes canon seemingly not penned by John Watson. (This has, of course, led to a great deal of speculation concerning the identity of the real author, none of which is really relevant here.) In this story, Holmes disguises himself as an Irish American named Altamount and travels to the United States in order to be recruited by a German spy network headed by the infamous agent Von Bork. As Altamount, Holmes eventually winds up back in Britain, serving Von Bork along with several others, including a certain Jack James. James, like Altamount, is an Irish American, but his US citizenship does him no good when he is arrested by British authorities and incarcerated on the Isle of Portland—actually a peninsula in Dorset.

  Who could Jack James have been? We should remember that in the later years of his career, Holmes employed numerous agents, many of whom appear in The Hapsburg Falcon. In fact, virtually all of those agents mentioned in the accepted Sherlockian canon, such as Langdale Pike and Shinwell Johnson, play a role in The Hapsburg Falcon, along with two who do not appear in Watson’s stories: Hollins and Stannard. Given Holmes’s resort to professional assistance in his later years, would it not seem likely that he would follow the same practice when dealing with perhaps the most important case of his career, an investigation of vital importance to the British government?

  In my view, the answer is an emphatic yes, and that argues that Jack James could easily have been an agent and confidante of Holmes, set up to be recruited by the Germans in the United States as “Altamount” himself was. And by now the reader, no doubt, knows who I think Jack James really was: Sam Spade. We know that Spade was of Irish descent. We can also observe that the pattern of both names (Jack James and Sam Spade) is oddly similar: first and last names starting with the same letter and a short a followed by a long a vowel pattern between those names. In addition, consider two more agents whom Altamount mentions in “His Last Bow”—Hollis and Steiner. Those names are tantalizingly similar to the two agents in The Hapsburg Falcon referred to a moment ago—Hollins and Stannard.

  All this would have put Spade in England before the outbreak of war, in circumstances where he might very well have become familiar with the Webley-Fosbery. Indeed, it is possible that he may have used such a weapon himself while masquerading alongside Sherlock Holmes as an informant for the Von Bork spy apparatus.

  Is such a hypothesis consistent with the facts of Sam Spade’s life? That’s difficult to answer, since virtually no definitive biographical information on the American detective is extant. The Continental Op stories, for example, probably draw on some of Spade’s experiences, but they are, no doubt, mixed
in with episodes from Hammett’s work as well, along with other elements that are complete fiction. One important fact, however, does appear in the short story “They Can Only Hang You Once.” There we are told that Spade is thirty-eight years old. This tale was published in late 1932, so the events detailed there must have happened no later than that year. Moreover, reference is made in the story to the stock-market crash of October 1929, making that the earliest possible date for the events it chronicles. Thus, Spade was thirty-eight years old sometime between late 1929 and late 1932. This puts his birth year as somewhere in the interval of late 1890 to late 1895—roughly the same age or slightly older than his friend Dashiell Hammett. That, in turn, would mean that, while helping Holmes in August 1914 against Von Bork, Spade would have been in his late teens or early twenties.

  I assert that as a young man, Sam Spade assisted Sherlock Holmes in his exploit against Von Bork. As Holmes’s plot against the German agent drove to its conclusion, the great detective would likely have arranged for his own undercover men to be arrested by British authorities in order to guarantee their safety during the final act of this real-life spy drama. The British nationals Hollis and Steiner, if, indeed, they were Hollins and Stannard, would have been quietly released later, but James—or Spade, if you will—was an American citizen. Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, a quiet power behind the scenes in government circles, could have secretly arranged for the young man to be discreetly returned to America in the fall or winter of 1914, perhaps aboard a British war vessel—a feat made easier by the fact that the Isle of Portland, where James was incarcerated, housed not only a prison but also a naval base.