“And now I made a very careful examination of the corner of paper which the Inspector had submitted to us. It was at once clear to me that it formed part of a very remarkable document. Here it is. Do you not now observe something very suggestive about it?”
“It has a very irregular look,” said the Colonel.
“The point is a simple one.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1893
“My dear sir,” cried Holmes, “there cannot be the least doubt in the world that it has been written by two persons doing alternate words. When I draw your attention to the strong t’s of ‘at’ and ‘to’ and ask you to compare them with the weak ones of ‘quarter’ and ‘twelve,’11 you will instantly recognise the fact. A very brief analysis of these four words would enable you to say with the utmost confidence that the ‘learn’ and the ‘maybe’ are written in the stronger hand, and the ‘what’ in the weaker.”12
“By Jove, it’s as clear as day!” cried the Colonel. “Why on earth should two men write a letter in such a fashion?”
“Obviously the business was a bad one, and one of the men who distrusted the other was determined that, whatever was done, each should have an equal hand in it. Now, of the two men it is clear that the one who wrote the ‘at’ and ‘to’ was the ringleader.”
“How do you get at that?”
“We might deduce it from the mere character of the one hand as compared with the other. But we have more assured reasons than that for supposing it. If you examine this scrap with attention you will come to the conclusion that the man with the stronger hand wrote all his words first, leaving blanks for the other to fill up. These blanks were not always sufficient, and you can see that the second man had a squeeze to fit his ‘quarter’ in between the ‘at’ and the ‘to,’ showing that the latter were already written. The man who wrote all his words first is undoubtedly the man who planned this affair.”
“Excellent!” cried Mr. Acton.
“But very superficial,” said Holmes. “We come now, however, to a point which is of importance. You may not be aware that the deduction of a man’s age from his writing is one which has been brought to considerable accuracy by experts. In normal cases one can place a man in his true decade with tolerable confidence. I say normal cases, because ill-health and physical weakness reproduce the signs of old age, even when the invalid is a youth. In this case, looking at the bold, strong hand of the one, and the rather broken-backed appearance of the other, which still retains its legibility, although the t’s have begun to lose their crossing, we can say that the one was a young man, and the other was advanced in years without being positively decrepit.”
“There cannot be the least doubt in the world that it has been written by two persons.”
W. H. Hyde, Harper’s Weekly, 1893
“Excellent!” cried Mr. Acton again.
“There is a further point, however, which is subtler and of greater interest. There is something in common between these hands. They belong to men who are blood-relatives. It may be most obvious to you in the Greek e’s, but to me there are many small points which indicate the same thing. I have no doubt at all that a family mannerism can be traced in these two specimens of writing. I am only, of course, giving you the leading results now of my examination of the paper. There were twenty-three other deductions which would be of more interest to experts13 than to you. They all tend to deepen the impression upon my mind that the Cunninghams, father and son, had written this letter.
“Having got so far, my next step was, of course, to examine into the details of the crime, and to see how far they would help us. I went up to the house with the Inspector, and saw all that was to be seen. The wound upon the dead man was, as I was able to determine with absolute confidence, fired from a revolver at the distance of something over four yards. There was no powder-blackening on the clothes. Evidently, therefore, Alec Cunningham had lied when he said that the two men were struggling when the shot was fired. Again, both father and son agreed as to the place where the man escaped into the road. At that point, however, as it happens, there is a broadish ditch, moist at the bottom. As there were no indications of boot-marks about this ditch, I was absolutely sure not only that the Cunninghams had again lied but that there had never been any unknown man upon the scene at all.
“And now I have to consider the motive of this singular crime. To get at this, I endeavoured first of all to solve the reason of the original burglary at Mr. Acton’s. I understood, from something which the Colonel told us, that a law-suit had been going on between you, Mr. Acton, and the Cunninghams. Of course it instantly occurred to me that they had broken into your library with the intention of getting at some document which might be of importance in the case.”
“Precisely so,” said Mr. Acton, “there can be no possible doubt as to their intentions. I have the clearest claim upon half of their present estate, and if they could have found a single paper—which, fortunately, was in the strong box of my solicitors—they would undoubtedly have crippled our case.”
“There was no powder-blackening on the clothes.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1893
“There you are!” said Holmes, smiling. “It was a dangerous, reckless attempt in which I seem to trace the influence of young Alec. Having found nothing, they tried to divert suspicion by making it appear to be an ordinary burglary, to which end they carried off whatever they could lay their hands upon. That is all clear enough, but there was much that was still obscure. What I wanted above all was to get the missing part of that note. I was certain that Alec had torn it out of the dead man’s hand, and almost certain that he must have thrust it into the pocket of his dressing-gown. Where else could he have put it? The only question was whether it was still there. It was worth an effort to find out, and for that object we all went up to the house.
“The Cunninghams joined us, as you doubtless remember, outside the kitchen door. It was, of course, of the very first importance that they should not be reminded of the existence of this paper, otherwise they would naturally destroy it without delay. The Inspector was about to tell them the importance which we attached to it when, by the luckiest chance in the world, I tumbled down in a sort of fit and so changed the conversation.”
“Good heavens!” cried the Colonel, laughing. “Do you mean to say all our sympathy was wasted and your fit an imposture?”
“Speaking professionally, it was admirably done,” cried I, looking in amazement at this man who was for ever confounding me with some new phase of his astuteness.
“It is an art which is often useful,”14 said he. “When I recovered I managed, by a device which had perhaps some little merit of ingenuity, to get old Cunningham to write the word ‘twelve,’ so that I might compare it with the ‘twelve’ upon the paper.”
“Oh, what an ass I have been!” I exclaimed.
“I could see that you were commiserating with me over my weakness,” said Holmes, laughing. “I was sorry to cause you the sympathetic pain which I know that you felt. We then went upstairs together, and having entered the room and seen the dressing-gown hanging up behind the door, I contrived, by upsetting a table to engage their attention for the moment and slipped back to examine the pockets. I had hardly got the paper, however, which was, as I had expected, in one of them, when the two Cunninghams were on me, and would, I verily believe, have murdered me then and there but for your prompt and friendly aid. As it is, I feel that young man’s grip on my throat now, and the father has twisted my wrist round in the effort to get the paper out of my hand. They saw that I must know all about it, you see, and the sudden change from absolute security to complete despair made them perfectly desperate.
“I had a little talk with old Cunningham afterwards as to the motive of the crime. He was tractable enough, though his son was a perfect demon, ready to blow out his own or anybody else’s brains if he could have got to his revolver. When Cunningham saw that the case against him was so strong he lost all heart, and made
a clean breast of everything. It seems that William had secretly followed his two masters on the night when they made their raid upon Mr. Acton’s and, having thus got them into his power, proceeded under threats of exposure to levy blackmail upon them. Mister Alec, however, was a dangerous man to play games of that sort with. It was a stroke of positive genius on his part to see in the burglary scare which was convulsing the country side, an opportunity of plausibly getting rid of the man whom he feared. William was decoyed up and shot; and, had they only got the whole of the note, and paid a little more attention to detail in their accessories, it is very possible that suspicion might never have been aroused.”
“And the note?” I asked.
Sherlock Holmes placed the subjoined paper before us.
“It is very much the sort of thing that I expected,” said he. “Of course, we do not yet know what the relations may have been between Alec Cunningham, William Kirwan, and Annie Morrison.15 The result shows that the trap was skilfully baited. I am sure that you cannot fail to be delighted with the traces of heredity shown in the p’s and in the tails of the g’s. The absence of the i-dots in the old man’s writing is also most characteristic. Watson, I think our quiet rest in the country has been a distinct success, and I shall certainly return much invigorated, to Baker Street to-morrow.”
1“The Reigate Squires” appeared in the Strand Magazine in June 1893 as The Reigate Squire (singular); in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes it was changed to The Reigate Squires. In Harper’s Weekly (June 17, 1893) it was altered to The Reigate Puzzle.
2There was a Hotel Dubost at 19 Place Camot, but this is unsatisfactory.
3Carol P. Woods calculates that to fill the average French hotel room to “ankle-deep” would require 10,741 crumpled telegrams; and he muses that Holmes’s illness was caused not entirely by the exertions put forth in the Netherlands-Sumatra case but also by the telegram-crumpling itself, which would have required slightly over 179 hours of opening, reading, crumpling, and tossing.
4In the American editions, this collection curiously becomes one of “Eastern weapons.” Perhaps a Jezail rifle was included and was accidentally discharged, wounding Watson?
5A closet or cupboard.
6Alexander Pope (1688–1744), the British poet and satirist, is critically best known for An Essay on Criticisim, The Rape of the Lock, and An Essay on Man. His lauded translation of Homer, which earned him a considerable financial windfall, was written in heroic couplets (rhyming lines of iambic pentameter) and comprised eleven volumes: six for the Iliad (1715–1720) and five for the Odyssey (1725–1726). Perhaps the thief took with him the volume of the Odyssey that contained the line, “These riches are possess’d, but not enjoy’d!”
7An American prejudice against fancy titles continues to be evident—in the American texts, the word “man” replaces “squire.”
8Watson, not to be outdone by Holmes’s habit of quoting Shakespeare, here paraphrases Polonius: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2).
9That would be 1709, the year in which 100,000 British, Austrian, and Dutch soldiers clashed with 90,000 French in the last major battle of the War of Spanish Succession. Fought near the village of Malplaquet, ten miles south of Mons, the engagement forced the French to retreat, but there were heavy casualties on the allies’ side, preventing them from advancing to Paris.
10A small sea-bird associated with storms. In “The Naval Treaty,” Holmes jovially refers to Watson as “the stormy petrel of crime.”
11Remarkably, the handwriting in the note (reproduced above) exactly matches that appearing in the manuscript of “The Crooked Man,” reports L. S. Holstein in “The Puzzle of Reigate.” Holstein concludes that Watson must have written both and was an innocent dupe of the Cunningham/Kirwan gang. Holmes, who recognised Watson’s handwriting immediately, concocted much of his explanation to shield his good friend from exposure.
12By making such a detailed study of the Cunninghams’ handwriting, Holmes—here investigating in 1887—was both of and ahead of his time, since handwriting analysis was then developing elsewhere in Europe but was as yet largely unknown in Britain. Interest in handwriting as a window to one’s character goes back at least as far as ancient Greece: Aristotle once noted, “Just as all men do not have the same speech sounds, neither do they all have the same writing.” Numerous scholars dabbled in studying handwriting in the early part of the nineteenth century, but public interest blossomed after Jean Hippolyte Michon, a French abbot, coined the phrase “graphology” in the 1870s and published two popular books on the subject. Michon’s methodology was rigid by today’s standards, assigning specific personality traits to distinct elements of writing (and assuming the absence of such traits in the absence of such elements). It was his student, Jules Crepieux-Jamin, who adapted a more holistic, interpretive approach to Michon’s findings and who is credited with fathering the French school of graphology.
Crepieux-Jamin’s great work, L’Ecriture et le Caractere, was not published until 1888, the year after the events of “The Reigate Squires.” His theories were tested in the 1890s by the German philosopher Ludwig Klages and psychologist Alfred Binet (father of the modern intelligence test), who sought to link handwriting more closely to the field of psychology. However, with the apparent exception of Holmes, British knowledge of the subject was almost nonexistent. Only after World War II, when German graphologists sought asylum in England, was interest there sparked by the publication of several new books. Holmes had a definite interest in the criminological use of graphology, as is borne out by his observations on handwriting in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” “The Cardboard Box,” “The Second Stain,” “The Abbey Grange,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’,” and “The Norwood Builder.” Winifred Christie, in “Sherlock Holmes and Graphology,” speculates that Holmes may well have consulted with Michon and Crepieux-Jamin on a visit to France in the 1880s.
13That Holmes was not exaggerating is demonstrated by acclaimed mystery writer John Ball, Jr., who, in his essay “The Twenty-Three Deductions,” provides a full list of the twenty-three damning inferences Holmes might have drawn from the Cunninghams’ note. Ball’s points range from the somewhat obvious (paper quality, ink quality, paper source, whether the writers of the note were left- or right-handed) to the more obscure (whether both writers had used the same ink; the presence or absence of scent, fingernail marks, or blotting; any indication that the note had been subject to “pocket-rubbing”). “The Reigate Squires” is the only case, however, in which Holmes demonstrates his expertise, and, notes David James Trapp, he might have spared Violet Hunter from much anxiety if he had applied a graphological analysis to Jephro Rucastle’s letter to her in “The Copper Beeches.”
14Indeed, “malingering” or the fraudulent portrayal of an injury or accident proved highly useful to Holmes in “The Dying Detective,” and he stated there, “Malingering is a subject upon which I have sometimes thought of writing a monograph.”
15The connection of Annie Morrison, if any, to Miss Morrison of “The Crooked Man” or to Morrison, Morrison & Dodd of “The Sussex Vampire” is unknown.
THE CROOKED MAN1
Knowledge of the Bible helps Holmes solve the locked-room puzzle Watson calls “The Crooked Man.” The case is rooted in the evils of the Indian Mutiny, the uprising of native troops against the British rule of India. Although Watson’s own military service and his circle of friends are the usual reasons for the frequent military connections in the Canon, this case is brought to Watson by Holmes himself. The tale commences late one evening, while Watson’s wife lies upstairs sleeping. This tranquil domestic scene is quickly contrasted with Watson’s picture of another household, the home of Colonel James Barclay and his wife, Nancy. The colonel lies dead on his hearth, with the door locked from the inside, with his wife insensible beside him. Holmes’s careful observations reveal two other mysterious visitors to the room, and he uses The Baker Street Irregulars to track them down. Altho
ugh the tale ends with a confession, some suggest that Holmes may be misled by the near-Biblical tale he hears.
ONE SUMMER NIGHT, a few months after my marriage,2 I was seated by my own hearth smoking a last pipe and nodding over a novel, for my day’s work had been an exhausting one. My wife had already gone upstairs, and the sound of the locking of the hall door some time before told me that the servants had also retired. I had risen from my seat and was knocking out the ashes of my pipe, when I suddenly heard the clang of the bell.
I looked at the clock. It was a quarter to twelve. This could not be a visitor at so late an hour. A patient evidently, and possibly an all-night sitting. With a wry face I went out into the hall and opened the door. To my astonishment, it was Sherlock Holmes who stood upon my step.
“Ah, Watson,” said he, “I hoped that I might not be too late to catch you.”
“My dear fellow, pray come in.”
“You look surprised, and no wonder! Relieved, too, I fancy! Hum! You still smoke the Arcadia mixture of your bachelor days, then! There’s no mistaking that fluffy ash upon your coat. It’s easy to tell that you’ve been accustomed to wear a uniform, Watson; you’ll never pass as a pure-bred civilian as long as you keep that habit of carrying your handkerchief in your sleeve. Could you put me up to-night?”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 77
