by Otto Penzler
A Study in Handwriting
RING W. LARDNER
SPORTSWRITING HAS PRODUCED more than its share of outstanding literary figures. While such distinguished practitioners of “literature under pressure” as Ernest Hemingway and Jack London gained the majority of their fame after turning to other forms of prose, a few, including Ringgold Willmer Lardner (1885–1933) never strayed far from it.
He got his first job as a sports columnist while still a teenager and moved from newspaper to newspaper for many years before settling in at the Chicago Tribune in 1913, which became the home paper for his syndicated column, “In the Wake of the News.” While his columns purported to be journalism, they frequently lapsed into satire and often were entirely fiction. Lardner became one of the country’s greatest humorists and many of his short stories, mainly about baseball, have become classics. His first successful book, You Know Me Al (1916), was written in the form of letters by “Jack Keefe,” a minor league baseball player, to a friend using a unique and hilarious vernacular.
Lardner became disillusioned with his beloved game of baseball when he learned of the infamous “Black Sox” scandal; he had been close to players on the Chicago White Sox team and felt betrayed when they conspired to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.
“A Study in Handwriting” was first published in the March 16, 1915, “In the Wake of the News” column for the Chicago Tribune, and syndicated in more than one hundred newspapers.
A STUDY IN HANDWRITING
Ring W. Lardner
“I CANNOT REJOICE over the ever-increasing popularity of the typewriter,” said Sherlock Holmes, as he lounged in the most comfortable chair provided by our landlady, and refilled, for the sixth time within an hour, a particularly malodorous pipe. “It is spoiling one of the most absorbing ways of studying the human race.
“One can judge from a typewritten letter very little concerning its author; merely whether or not he is an expert with the machine. But a man’s handwriting will tell a careful student a writer’s likes and dislikes as plainly as he could state them himself, to say nothing of his occupation, his characteristics, his immense thoughts, his—”
“Do you mean to state,” I interrupted, “that you can accurately describe a man’s vocation, his traits, his opinions, by a study of his handwriting?”
“Just so,” returned my companion with a smile, “and if you would look into it, I am sure you would find it as interesting a study as your medicine and surgery.”
“I am sure I would find it all bosh,” I returned shortly.
“Try it and see,” said Holmes, and thrusting his long tapering fingers into the inside pocket of his lounging coat, he drew forth a letter. “Glance at this,” handing it to me, “and tell me what you learn of the writer.”
I spread the missive on my knee and looked at it for perhaps five minutes. It was written on hotel stationery in a graceful, legible hand, and read:
Editor: Chicago Tribune:
Of all the silly tommy rot and cheap Barrel House seen or heard, that contained under the heading “In the Wake of the News” has them all beat to a frazzle.
It appears to me that R. W. L——would make a good wit at a real wake and were he the corpse, I’d say thank God.
I’ve decided to switch to another paper, and talking the matter over with other fellow drummers the general opinion appears to be the same. Namely L——is a dead one.
Yours very truly,
XXXXX
“Well,” said Holmes at length, “what do you make of him?”
“Nothing,” I said, “except that he writes clearly and legibly.”
“O, Watson, Watson!” exclaimed my companion, and threw up his hands in mock horror. “Where are your brains?”
“In my head, I hope,” I said with some asperity. “But I did not make any ridiculous assertion as to my clairvoyant powers. It was you, I believe, who started the discussion. And it is surely your duty to make good your claim or admit that you were talking nonsense, as I believe to be the case.”
Holmes smiled quietly and reaching over, took back the letter he had given me. He pondered it in silence for some moments before he spoke.
“Watson,” he said, “it is as far from nonsense as anything could be. This power or knack, or whatever you choose to call it has served me in good stead in some of my most important cases. But I see you are still a skeptic and it is therefore my part to convert you. I have already made my study of this particular letter and will state my conclusions to you as briefly as I can.
“To begin with, I see the writer has recently been in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He has a bit of spare time on his hands, either while stopping at the Grand hotel, which is centrally located and homelike, owned by R. J. Warner and protected by the electric fire alarm system, or right afterwards. He is not a personal friend of the editor of The Tribune. He uses slang. He has no patience with a certain department of The Tribune called ‘In the Wake of the News.’ He is hard-hearted. He is religious. He makes his decisions only after careful thought and discussion. He is democratic. He is interested in the opinion of his fellows and not above talking with them. He is a salesman who travels. He is inconsiderate. I think that is about all. Do you follow me?”
“Holmes, you are wonderful,” I exclaimed. “But surely you will tell me how you reached some of your conclusions. For instance, how do you deduce that the writer is inconsiderate?”
“From his handwriting, of course,” returned my companion. “Study the formation of the letters in this sentence: ‘I’ve decided to switch to another paper.’ If he were considerate of the feelings of others, would he be so blunt with the person addressed? Wouldn’t he rather allow the editor to find out gradually that he was no longer a subscriber?”
“It is clear as day,” I admitted. “And how long did it take you to master this trick?”
“Trick!” said Holmes, disgustedly scratching the bridge of his aquiline nose with a goldhandled toothpick.
The Case of Death and Honey
NEIL GAIMAN
DESCRIBED AS ONE of the world’s ten most important postmodern writers, Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman (1960– ) is also one of its most popular and beloved. His literary output has included journalism, poetry, short stories, novels, books for children and young adults, and the comic books and graphic novels that brought him his first, and perhaps greatest, fame.
While writing for DC Comics, he was asked to revive a moribund character, The Sandman, and he did, turning it into one of the most successful series of all time. The Sandman gives the account of Dream, known by many names, including Morpheus. In January 1989, the series began; it concluded in March 1996. His first novel, Good Omens (1990), was coauthored with Terry Pratchett; his first solo novel was a novelization of a four-part BBC television series, Neverwhere (1996). Among his many other works are the horror/fantasy novel for young readers, Coraline (2002), which was released in 2009; Anansi Boys (2005), which debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list; American Gods (2001); and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013).
It would take a mighty effort to count the number of awards Gaiman has won in various genres, including horror, fantasy, comics, and children’s books.
“The Case of Death and Honey” was first published in A Study in Sherlock, edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger (New York, Bantam Books, 2011).
THE CASE OF DEATH AND HONEY
Neil Gaiman
IT WAS A mystery in those parts for years what had happened to the old white ghost man, the barbarian with his huge shoulder bag. There were some who supposed him to have been murdered, and, later, they dug up the floor of Old Gao’s little shack high on the hillside, looking for treasure, but they found nothing but ash and fire-blackened tin trays.
This was after Old Gao himself had vanished, you understand, and before his son came back from Lijiang to take over the beehives on the hill.
This is the problem, wrote Holmes in 1899: ennui. An
d lack of interest. Or rather, it all becomes too easy. When the joy of solving crimes is the challenge, the possibility that you cannot, why then the crimes have something to hold your attention. But when each crime is soluble, and so easily soluble at that, why then there is no point in solving them.
Look: this man has been murdered. Well then, someone murdered him. He was murdered for one or more of a tiny handful of reasons: he inconvenienced someone, or he had something that someone wanted, or he had angered someone. Where is the challenge in that?
I would read in the dailies an account of a crime that had the police baffled, and I would find that I had solved it, in broad strokes if not in detail, before I had finished the article. Crime is too soluble. It dissolves. Why call the police and tell them the answers to their mysteries? I leave it, over and over again, as a challenge for them, as it is no challenge for me.
I am only alive when I perceive a challenge.
The bees of the misty hills, hills so high that they were sometimes called a mountain, were humming in the pale summer sun as they moved from spring flower to spring flower on the slope. Old Gao listened to them without pleasure. His cousin, in the village across the valley, had many dozens of hives, all of them already filling with honey, even this early in the year; also, the honey was as white as snow-jade. Old Gao did not believe that the white honey tasted any better than the yellow or light brown honey that his own bees produced, although his bees produced it in meagre quantities, but his cousin could sell his white honey for twice what Old Gao could get for the best honey he had.
On his cousin’s side of the hill, the bees were earnest, hardworking, golden brown workers, who brought pollen and nectar back to the hives in enormous quantities. Old Gao’s bees were ill-tempered and black, shiny as bullets, who produced as much honey as they needed to get through the winter and only a little more: enough for Old Gao to sell from door to door, to his fellow villagers, one small lump of honeycomb at a time. He would charge more for the brood-comb, filled with bee larvae, sweet-tasting morsels of protein, when he had brood-comb to sell, which was rarely, for the bees were angry and sullen and everything they did, they did as little as possible, including make more bees, and Old Gao was always aware that each piece of brood-comb he sold meant bees he would not have to make honey for him to sell later in the year.
Old Gao was as sullen and as sharp as his bees. He had had a wife once, but she had died in childbirth. The son who had killed her lived for a week, then died himself. There would be nobody to say the funeral rites for Old Gao, no-one to clean his grave for festivals or to put offerings upon it. He would die unremembered, as unremarkable and as unremarked as his bees.
The old white stranger came over the mountains in late spring of that year, as soon as the roads were passable, with a huge brown bag strapped to his shoulders. Old Gao heard about him before he met him.
“There is a barbarian who is looking at bees,” said his cousin.
Old Gao said nothing. He had gone to his cousin to buy a pailful of second-rate comb, damaged or uncapped and liable soon to spoil. He bought it cheaply to feed to his own bees, and if he sold some of it in his own village, no-one was any the wiser. The two men were drinking tea in Gao’s cousin’s hut on the hillside. From late spring, when the first honey started to flow, until first frost, Gao’s cousin left his house in the village and went to live in the hut on the hillside, to live and to sleep beside his beehives, for fear of thieves. His wife and his children would take the honeycomb and the bottles of snow-white honey down the hill to sell.
Old Gao was not afraid of thieves. The shiny black bees of Old Gao’s hives would have no mercy on anyone who disturbed them. He slept in his village, unless it was time to collect the honey.
“I will send him to you,” said Gao’s cousin. “Answer his questions, show him your bees, and he will pay you.”
“He speaks our tongue?”
“His dialect is atrocious. He said he learned to speak from sailors, and they were mostly Cantonese. But he learns fast, although he is old.”
Old Gao grunted, uninterested in sailors. It was late in the morning, and there was still four hours walking across the valley to his village, in the heat of the day. He finished his tea. His cousin drank finer tea than Old Gao had ever been able to afford.
He reached his hives while it was still light, put the majority of the uncapped honey into his weakest hives. He had eleven hives. His cousin had over a hundred. Old Gao was stung twice doing this, on the back of the hand and the back of the neck. He had been stung over a thousand times in his life. He could not have told you how many times. He barely noticed the stings of other bees, but the stings of his own black bees always hurt, even if they no longer swelled or burned.
The next day a boy came to Old Gao’s house in the village, to tell him that there was someone—and that the someone was a giant foreigner—who was asking for him. Old Gao simply grunted. He walked across the village with the boy at his steady pace, until the boy ran ahead, and soon was lost to sight.
Old Gao found the stranger sitting drinking tea on the porch of the Widow Zhang’s house. Old Gao had known the Widow Zhang’s mother, fifty years ago. She had been a friend of his wife. Now she was long dead. He did not believe anyone who had known his wife still lived. The Widow Zhang fetched Old Gao tea, introduced him to the elderly barbarian, who had removed his bag and sat beside the small table.
They sipped their tea. The barbarian said, “I wish to see your bees.”
Mycroft’s death was the end of Empire, and no-one knew it but the two of us. He lay in that pale room, his only covering a thin white sheet, as if he were already becoming a ghost from the popular imagination, and needed only eye-holes in the sheet to finish the impression.
I had imagined that his illness might have wasted him away, but he seemed huger than ever, his fingers swollen into white suet sausages.
I said, “Good evening, Mycroft. Dr. Hopkins tells me you have two weeks to live, and stated that I was under no circumstances to inform you of this.”
“The man’s a dunderhead,” said Mycroft, his breath coming in huge wheezes between the words. “I will not make it to Friday.”
“Saturday at least,” I said.
“You always were an optimist. No, Thursday evening and then I shall be nothing more than an exercise in practical geometry for Hopkins and the funeral directors at Snigsby and Malterson, who will have the challenge, given the narrowness of the doors and corridors, of getting my carcass out of this room and out of the building.”
“I had wondered,” I said. “Particularly given the staircase. But they will take out the window frame and lower you to the street like a grand piano.”
Mycroft snorted at that. Then, “I am fifty-four years old, Sherlock. In my head is the British Government. Not the ballot and hustings nonsense, but the business of the thing. There is no-one else knows what the troop movements in the hills of Afghanistan have to do with the desolate shores of North Wales, no-one else who sees the whole picture. Can you imagine the mess that this lot and their children will make of Indian Independence?”
I had not previously given any thought to the matter. “Will India become independent?”
“Inevitably. In thirty years, at the outside. I have written several recent memoranda on the topic. As I have on so many other subjects. There are memoranda on the Russian Revolution—that’ll be along within the decade, I’ll wager—and on the German problem and…oh, so many others. Not that I expect them to be read or understood.” Another wheeze. My brother’s lungs rattled like the windows in an empty house. “You know, if I were to live, the British Empire might last another thousand years, bringing peace and improvement to the world.”
In the past, especially when I was a boy, whenever I heard Mycroft make a grandiose pronouncement like that I would say something to bait him. But not now, not on his death-bed. And also I was certain that he was not speaking of the Empire as it was, a flawed and fallible construct of
flawed and fallible people, but of a British Empire that existed only in his head, a glorious force for civilisation and universal prosperity.
I do not, and did not, believe in empires. But I believed in Mycroft.
Mycroft Holmes. Four-and-fifty years of age. He had seen in the new century but the Queen would still outlive him by several months. She was almost thirty years older than he was, and in every way a tough old bird. I wondered to myself whether this unfortunate end might have been avoided.
Mycroft said, “You are right, of course, Sherlock. Had I forced myself to exercise. Had I lived on bird-seed and cabbages instead of porterhouse steak. Had I taken up country dancing along with a wife and a puppy and in all other ways behaved contrary to my nature, I might have bought myself another dozen or so years. But what is that in the scheme of things? Little enough. And sooner or later, I would enter my dotage. No. I am of the opinion that it would take two hundred years to train a functioning Civil Service, let alone a secret service…”
I had said nothing.
The pale room had no decorations on the wall of any kind. None of Mycroft’s citations. No illustrations, photographs, or paintings. I compared his austere digs to my own cluttered rooms in Baker Street and I wondered, not for the first time, at Mycroft’s mind. He needed nothing on the outside, for it was all on the inside—everything he had seen, everything he had experienced, everything he had read. He could close his eyes and walk through the National Gallery, or browse the British Museum Reading Room—or, more likely, compare intelligence reports from the edge of the Empire with the price of wool in Wigan and the unemployment statistics in Hove, and then, from this and only this, order a man promoted or a traitor’s quiet death.
