by Marvin Kaye
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
CARTOON, by Marc Bilgrey
FROM WATSON’S SCRAPBOOK, by Dr. John H. Watson
COMING NEXT TIME . . .
SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker
ASK MRS HUDSON, by Mrs Martha Hudson
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SHERLOCK HOLMES CHOCOLATE CARDS, by Gary Lovisi
A MOST VALUABLE INSTITUTION, by Dan Andriacco
LIVING THE LIE, by Marc Bilgrey
A COLD PLACE TO DIE, by J. P. Seewald
THE SHOCKING AFFAIR OF THE STEAMSHIP FRIESLAND, by Jack Grochot
KILLING SAM CLEMENS, by William Burton McCormick
A FRESH START, by Janice Law
THE RUBA ROMBIC ROBBERIES, by Gary Lovisi
ONLY THE DEAD, by Gordon Linzner
RATIONALIST FEMME: PUNITIVE JUSTICE, by William E. Chambers
THE WOMAN, by Mackenzie Clarkes
REFLECTION OF GUILT, by Laird Long
THE ADVENTURE OF THE NINE HOLE LEAGUE, by John J. White
THE SPECKLED BANDANNA, by Hal Charles
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #13 (Vol. 5, No. 3) is copyright © 2014 by Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved. Visit us at wildsidemagazines.com.
Publisher: John Betancourt
Editor: Marvin Kaye
Assistant Editors: Steve Coupe, Sam Cooper
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine is published by Wildside Press, LLC. Single copies: $10.00 + $3.00 postage. U.S. subscriptions: $59.95 (postage paid) for the next 6 issues in the U.S.A., from: Wildside Press LLC, Subscription Dept. 9710 Traville Gateway Dr., #234; Rockville MD 20850. International subscriptions: see our web site at
www.wildsidemagazines.com. Available as an ebook through all major ebook etailers, or our web site, www.wildsidemagazines.com.
The Sherlock Holmes characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are used by permission of Conan Doyle Estate Ltd., www.conandoyleestate.co.uk.
CARTOON, by Marc Bilgrey
FROM WATSON’S SCRAPBOOK, by Dr. John H. Watson
It was not easy convincing Holmes to let me release, after all these many years, information of a highly personal nature, but at length he relented, though with one condition. You see, The Adventure of the Nine Hole League, which John J. White has faithfully reported from my original notes, reveals one of my ratiocinative friend’s few secrets. The case itself is an excellent one, as I have often argued, to which he customarily replies, “Then tell about it, but leave out—well, you know what.”
I suppose I have pestered him about this for so very long that he has finally acquiesced just to stop what he has termed “a perennial persecution, Watson!” Truly, I cannot see why he ever minded being shown in an utterly human light, but suffice it to say that it did bother him, and that is that.
The condition he has imposed is an easy one; he insisted on this issue’s Holmesian adventure being The Adventure of the Dying Detective, presumably because it shows me off as slightly less than professionally competent, but I would have defied any other “medico” to render a differing diagnosis. So there!
I am pleased that this issue of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine includes Dan Andriacco’s examination of Holmes’s ongoing relationship to journalists. I don’t recollect any other look at that aspect of my friend’s investigative procedures, but I may be wrong about that. At any rate, it is well worth a look-see.
And now I turn this forum over to my colleague, Mr Kaye.
—John H. Watson, M. D.
* * * *
What a rich issue this is! Several of our continuing contributors are aboard, including William E. Chambers, Janice Law, Gary Lovisi, and my dear friend Marc Bilgrey, who is SHMM’s resident cartoonist, having produced several cartoon books, including The Private Eye Cartoon Book, The Science Fiction Cartoon Book, and The Sherlock Holmes Cartoon Book. In this issue, Marc has also sent us one of his new crime stories.
I am always very pleased to offer a new Kelly Locke mystery. Kelly, a TV journalist, and her Chief of Detectives father Matt have a habit of wrestling with criminal cases that always remind one of Sherlock Holmes. This time, they investigate The Speckled Bandanna.
Our first-timers include Laird Long – one of a series of short shorts that will appear in subsequent issues of SHMM, as well as Gordon Linzner, and J. P. Seewald.
Our upcoming issue will welcome back Jack Grochot, Adam McFarlane, and Stan Trybulski, and the 15th issue in the works will again be an all-Holmes magazine!
We are still in need of new articles about anything criminous you’d like to write about. Articles about Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson, et cetera, are always welcome, as are those about Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe, or any other famous mystery writer. General crime is always welcome, too.
If you have an idea for an article, please query us at [email protected].
(Do note there are two n’s in the address.)
—Canonically yours,
Marvin Kaye
COMING NEXT TIME . . .
STORIES! ARTICLES! SHERLOCK HOLMES & DR. WATSON!
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #14 is just a few months away…watch for it!
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SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker
Ten Little Pips: The Cinematic Sherlock Holmes and the And Then There Were None Trope
2015 will mark the 125th anniversary of the birth of Agatha Christie, the only serious rival to Arthur Conan Doyle for the title of the best-known author of mystery fiction. The occasion is being marked by several developments—fall 2014 will see the publication of an as-yet untitled new Hercule Poirot novel by British author Sophie Hannah, authorized by the Christie Estate and the first Poirot pastiche, and the airing in the US of the final five episodes of the popular David Suchet series, including the detective’s final case, Curtain, whose publication garnered Poirot front-page coverage in The New York Times.
But the Poirot stories, which established the gathering-of-the-suspects ending beloved by traditional mystery authors, including Rex Stout, as the great Belgian sleuth displayed the results of his little gray cells, are not Christie’s best-known or best-selling work. That distinction goes to the novel known today as Ten Little Indians or And Then There Were None, a book that scared me when I read it as a thirteen-year-old, and which has reportedly sold a mind-blowing 100 million copies. The plot is familiar even to those who’ve never read it—ten strangers, trapped on an island by a mad killer, are picked off, one by one. Popularity aside, it truly rates consideration as one of Christie’s cleverest; it’s certainly the most atmospheric, and while she plays fair with the reader, not one in a thousand will solve the puzzle without just guessing.
While some authors resort to multiple corpses to sustain interest in a lagging plot, Christie ratcheted up the tension by having her reader wonder who will be murdered next (and how) rather than if anyone else would perish. With the characters themselves aware at an early juncture that they all are being targeted for death, the author’s skills at portraying what the Holmesian Jeeves has called “the psychology of the individual,” have a lot of
opportunity to display themselves. But what Ten Little Indians does not have (and does not suffer for the absence in the slightest) is a master sleuth.
N.B.: Somewhere in the clutter in which I live, there is a worn and battered box with my name magic-markered on the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are attempts at fiction (for which a literate world is not yet prepared), including “And Then There Were None?” a revisionist look at the novel through the eyes of a certain Baker Street consulting detective.
But the insertion of a classic Golden Age rationalist into a Ten Little Indians plotline has seemed a natural for others. Intriguingly, the concept appeared, if not necessarily for the first time, not long before the 1939 publication of Christie’s book.
Six years earlier, in 1933, Sono Art-World Pictures distributed A Study in Scarlet, a seventy-one-minute film that owed next-to-nothing to the novel of that name, apart from a familiar deduction about the killer’s appearance and taste in cigars. Available online, and as part of multi-disk DVD collections that include a potpourri of obscure Sherlockiana, it’s a bit creaky, but still entertaining—that is, if it’s taken on its own terms and not compared with the legion of better screen depictions of Holmes and Watson.
For many Sherlockians, the film is best-known because the low-key actor in the lead, Reginald Owen, was the first to have also played Watson (in the 1932 Clive Brook Sherlock Holmes, an adaptation of the Gillette play). Owen, whose career included parts in both Mrs. Miniver and Mary Poppins, is remembered mostly for his Ebenezer Scrooge, but he does an adequate job as Holmes, even if he’s the wrong physical type for the part. But the acting isn’t the most memorable aspect of the 1933 movie; that distinction belongs to the plot. The screenplay by Robert Florey tosses in a bunch of characters with Canonical names—Forrester, Merridew, and even Jabez Wilson, and opens dramatically, with the discovery of a corpse in a railway carriage at Victoria Station. The dead man is James Murphy, and he proves to be just the first victim of a killer targeting members of a tontine. That group is led by Thaddeus Merridew, here described as London’s Milverton-like master blackmailer. And, as in the Christie story, verses of the Ten Little Indians nursery rhyme (starting with “Six little black boys playing with a hive; a bumble-bee stung one, and then there were five.”) seem to parallel the murders. Intriguingly, an aspect of the solution anticipates the answer to Christie’s puzzle, although there’s no reason at all to believe the film had any influence on her. And even if it did, there’s no comparison with a B- B (pun unintended) movie that doesn’t sweat the details (221A Baker Street, anyone?) and a carefully-constructed classic that will still be enjoyed, long into the future.
But the better-known introduction of Holmes into a Ten Little Indians plotline is 1945’s The House of Fear, one of the Rathbone/Bruce films. Along with the other eight in the Universal series that do not involve the Nazis as bad guys, The House of Fear starts very strongly. An off-screen narrator recounts the grim doings at Drearcliffe House, in Scotland. The structure has been the subject of a legendary curse for generations—it is said that at Drearcliffe, “no man goes whole to his grave.”
Drearcliffe, which is the ancestral home of Bruce Alistair, currently houses the seven members of a fellowship known as the Good Comrades. Their lives there have been unremarkable despite the legend, until the arrival one evening of an envelope addressed to retired barrister Ralph King.
As the narrator recounts, “King received it casually. When they saw the contents, the Good Comrades took the whole thing as a joke but their housekeeper was right, it was no laughing matter.”
Those contents were seven orange pips, and as in the canonical “The Five Orange Pips,” the seeds are heralds of death. The night after the pips were set on King, he died in a fiery car crash over the cliffs near his home. An untimely end is also in store for Stanley Raeburn, an elderly actor, after the Mrs. Danvers-like housekeeper hands him an envelope containing six orange pips. It’s after Raeburn’s death by drowning (somehow, presumably getting maimed in the process to keep faith with the curse) that the narrator, who turns out to be an insurance agent named Chalmers travels, to 221B for assistance.
But Holmes and Watson’s arrival on the scene—and even the eventual presence of the one man who makes Bruce’s Watson seem like a towering intellect whose skull might well be coveted by a Dr. Mortimer—Dennis Hoey’s imbecilic Lestrade—does nothing to stop the slaughter, as the Good Comrades are knocked off one by one. The slapstick Bruce and Hoey both produce (Watson at one point unknowingly dialogues with an owl!) mar the creepy effect screenwriter Roy Chanslor aimed at. There are plot holes, unsurprisingly—as in the canonical Hound, there’s no recent history of the curse’s efficacy that would naturally be expected—if Alistair’s father went whole to his grave, why would anyone take the prophecy seriously? The solution, which I won’t spoil here, will surprise some, but some contemporary viewers who have seen variations of it in other contexts, will easily anticipate it. While The House of Fear is not one of the best Rathbone/Bruce outings, it comfortably fits in the middle rank.
The Holmes-Ripper film A Study in Terror featured a detective frantic to stop the next murder. The tension of that premise, which would also obtain in a Ten Little Indians-like plot, is compelling enough that there’s very reason to expect that someone will use it again in a Holmes film. It’s recently appeared in print—French author J.M. Erre’s Le Mystere Sherlock, a 2012 novel not yet translated into English, is set in Meiringen itself. Ten academics have gathered—one of whom will be chosen to head the Sorbonne’s new department dedicated to Holmes. After the group is cut off from the outside world by a blizzard, someone begins knocking off the professors, one by one. Erre’s approach is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as in the section where the Christie novel is used as a guide by the survivors to stay alive.
Readers interested in a more serious approach will be delighted to happen upon Locked Room International’s latest from Paul Halter, justifiably labeled as John Dickson Carr’s heir in crafting clever puzzles, and even cleverer solutions to them. The Invisible Circle, set in a castle off the Cornish coast, features a number of impossible crimes, including one committed in a locked room, apparently by a killer wielding Excalibur itself. The tensions mounts to a fever-pitch as the murderer begins stalking everyone trapped in the castle.
The plot structure isn’t a natural fit for the Cumberbatch or Downey series, and isn’t easily squeezed into the forty-five-minute or so length of an episode of Elementary; for now, the latter (whose star, Johnny Lee Miller starred in Mindhunters, in which the people being taken out one by one are all FBI profilers), perhaps in a special extended episode or multi-parter, is the best bet for a Holmesian adaptation of the story. In the interim, 2015 will see the BBC three-part adaptation of Christie’s original, one that may finally adhere to the grim spirit of the original and faithfully translate it to the screen, even if the power of subtle suggestion is a challenge for any filmmaker.
* * * *
Lenny Picker, a freelance writer in New York City, who recognizes his hubris in even thinking Christie’s solution to her own puzzle missed the mark, can be reached at [email protected].
ASK MRS HUDSON, by Mrs Martha Hudson
I am ever so grateful to my friend Mrs Amalie Warren for filling in for me with this column. However, I do need to correct one error that she understandably made in reference to my late husband Archibald. She states that he took up residence as a private investigator in the New World, specifically, Manhattan. But she has confused the issue. He did not go there, but rather to some place in the state of Ohio. He had a son with the same name, and it was he who eventually travelled eastward.
And now for a few bits of correspondence.
* * * *
Dear Mrs Hudson—
I am ever so puzzled how you have been able to tolerate the erratic behaviours of Mr Holmes over the years. I concede that he is, of course, a genius
, and violin playing in the middle of the night is not so terrible a thing to deal with, but obnoxiously-odourous chemicals? Ragamuffins and shady characters visitng at all hours? And shooting holes in the walls for target practice—really!!
You must possess the patience of a saint.
Miffed in Mulberry
* * * *
Dear Miffed,
There was a time, I do admit, when I seriously considered asking my tenant to find other lodgings, but there are three reasons why I came to put up with it all. First of all, and I do admit that this displays a certain degree of cupidity on my part, but Mr Holmes and Dr Watson were always prompt with their monthly rent, and I have been a landlady long enough to know that this is not always the case. Secondly, both gentlemen are ever so considerate and caring…well, the good doctor certainly is, and I do think his influence to some extent has mellowed his companion. Finally, when I perceived how Mr Holmes’s detectival investigations not only righted injustices, but assuaged the fears and tensions of his clients (especially the women!), I determined to accept his many idiosyncracies as the price for the privilege of having him as my tenant.
I did, however, put a stop to his “bullet-carving” the initials V. R., on my walls!
Yours Truly,
Mrs Hudson
* * * *
Dear Mrs Hudson,
Do you know what sort of music Mr Holmes liked to play on his violin?
Harmoniously Curious
* * * *
Dear Harmoniously Curious,
I did have to ask him about this. His musical tastes are wide-ranging, though he is especially fond of Beethoven. However, the one composition I have heard him play more often than any other is Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor, which he says is the fifth and final movement of the Partita Number Two.
This is a lengthy piece; it takes him perhaps twenty minutes to play, and it is always the final music of the night. It is—he tells me—in the form of a theme and variations. The theme, I can tell you, is quite haunting.
