Holmes: We are human and therefore fallible.
Watson: More than that. Change of character traits and attitudes…
Holmes: Isn’t that maturity?
Watson: You almost died at the Reichenbach Falls at his hands.
Holmes: You speak of Moriarty? I am confused. You think Moriarty is behind all these inconsistencies? This plot against you? Watson, my dear fellow, perhaps you are sicker than I recognise. Moriarty is long dead, his henchmen a distant memory.
Watson: Not Moriarty. Our creator.
Holmes: My dear fellow – the Oxford Movement has got to you. A little late to become a Tractarian isn’t it? I’m all for God but let’s not personalise his influence over us.
Watson: Dammit, Holmes – let us say, then, our Author in his big house in Crowborough.
Holmes: God lives in Crowborough? That seems rather prosaic. Pretty enough place but since you’d imagine He could choose anywhere, rather an unusual choice don’t you think?
Watson: You want specifics, I can see that. It is the way your mind works.
Holmes: Watson – don’t overexcite yourself. But concrete examples would help, yes.
Watson: Very well. Let us consider what has been called The Great Hiatus. You were gone, presumed dead, from 1891to 1894.
Holmes: Was it that long?
Watson: Possibly not, since I note in my account of The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge that that remarkable case took place in 1892.
Holmes: There you are – that’s you being shifty again.
Watson: I am not shifty. You recognised my limitations and my strengths. You said I saw but I did not observe. That I was too straightforward to be a proper detective, though I was capable and brave. Shifty was never mentioned.
Holmes: My dear fellow, I hate to state the obvious but as my Boswell you were ideally placed to put those words into my mouth.
Watson: Yet I was not the one doing so!
Holmes: You say.
Watson: What about my account of your drug use?
Holmes: Are you going to lecture me again?
Watson: I talk of your seven per cent solution of cocaine and your occasional use of morphine. But for a doctor I am remarkably ignorant of the consequences of taking these drugs – I mix them up terribly.
Holmes: You have only ever been a general practitioner. Accept your limitations –-
Watson: That is unworthy of you, Holmes. By the way, whatever happened to my bull pup?
Holmes: I had nothing to do with that. I know I tested poison on a dog once but it was not your bull pup –-
Watson: I mean, why do I never mention it after our first encounter? In the laboratory where we meet to discuss my sharing digs with you I tell you I keep a bull pup but is it ever mentioned again? Does it ever reach Baker Street?
Holmes: I don’t recall you having a dog there, no. What did you do with it?
Watson: I didn’t do anything with it! I had it then it was whisked away without so much as a by-your-leave. It’s the way the Author thinks. He gives me a bull pup because it seems a good idea but then worries that he is going to have to keep referring to it, have it taken for walks, have it looked after when we’re on a case. He can’t be bothered.
Holmes: Enough of this nonsense.
Watson: It is not nonsense! He is careless and slapdash and by being so upsets our lives. How do you think I felt when my darling Mary called me James not John during our investigation of the man with the twisted lip? Can you imagine how suspicious it made me?
Holmes: I cannot as women are not my province – nor to be trusted – but I see there a motive for murder, as Poiret suggested.
Watson: Do not go there. What did you do with your invention of a new method for detecting bloodstains? It is going to change the investigation of crime forever in the first case of yours I recounted -- A Study in Scarlet -- then it is never referred to again.
Holmes: There were flaws in it, I think.
Watson: You once observed that the large size of a man’s head must show intelligence and intellectual inclination on the grounds that a man with so large a brain must have something in it. And yet, as you know from your own head, that is not the case. I’ve never met a brainier man than you – except perhaps Monsieur Poiret –
Holmes: Watson …
Watson: Yet Moriarty himself commented you had less frontal lobe development than he would have expected. And your rather curious notion about the mind’s finite capacity for storage is something you forgot to adhere to.
Holmes: In what way?
Watson: Remember early on I listed your areas of expertise and ignorance? At that time you didn’t know nor care the earth revolved around the sun. You were ignorant in astronomy, philosophy and literature. Didn’t know much politics.
Holmes: True.
Watson: But then you quote Goethe in German, write a learned treatise on the polyphonic motets of Lassus – I like music as much as the next man but I haven’t the faintest ruddy idea what a polyphon is or who Lassus was. Then you recognise the king of Bohemia – Bohemia, mind! -- when you first set eyes on him. It makes no sense.
Holmes: I simply revised my views. All knowledge might be useful to the detective. I have always read widely and, as you should know, I have a strangely retentive memory for trifles. Or had – as I get older …
Watson: Very well: bees.
Holmes: Bees?
Watson: When did you ever express an interest in bees? You never even liked honey for breakfast – you used to grumble to Mrs Hudson, if she served it, that you were a marmalade man.
Holmes: I have to admit I am puzzled to find myself in a damp Sussex cottage with a leaking roof, the Downs winds howling about the eaves. I’ve always regarded myself as a city man -–.
Watson: More of His doing. He got bored with you – and with me, I’m under no illusions. Got a bee in his bonnet – if you’ll excuse the expression -- about spiritualism. Packed you off to the country to be a beekeeper. Get stung much?
Holmes: All the time. It hurts too.
Watson: I can imagine.
Holmes: How do you know all this?
Watson: Word gets around if you’ve ears to hear.
Holmes: I still can’t believe it. I’ll tell you what gets my goat –-
Watson: Is that an expression you picked up hanging around the stock sales in Lewes instead of lunching at Simpsons?
Holmes: Pawky, Watson, definitely pawky. It irritates me that other people have given me characteristics I never had.
Watson: Exactly my point!
Holmes: No, no, I don’t mean this Crowborough author you talk of. Some fellow named P.G.Wodehouse has a novel – Psmith, Journalist - in which he has a character say: “Elementary, my dear Watson” and suddenly everyone is saying it – except me, to whom it is attributed. Then -- I have never worn a deerstalker hat in my life but that is now, apparently, my regular apparel – though perhaps that is your doing?
Watson: Not at all. I described you wearing a travelling cap with ear flaps in The Case of Silver Blaze but that’s as near as I got to that ridiculous piece of headgear. It’s Paget you need to thank for that.
Holmes: Paget?
Watson: The artist Sidney Paget illustrated the stories. He drew you in a deerstalker and Inverness cape for The Boscombe Valley Mystery and then again in other stories. Afraid you got lumbered with it old fellow.
Holmes: The impudence of the man.
Watson: Do you know why you survived the Reichenbach Falls?
Holmes: My knowledge of baritsu. I slipped free of Moriarty’s grasp.
Watson: Holmes, you survived because our creator was paid a massive amount of money by an American magazine to bring you back. Otherwise, you would be as dead as Moriarty.
Holmes: Watson, you are showing a dreadful tendency lately to focus on commerce.
Watson: Who exactly wrote the second part of The Valley of Fear?
Holmes: What do you mean? You did.
Watson: I don’t wish to be technica
l but I always wrote from the first person point of view. That is written from the third person – from what is known as the author omniscient.
Holmes: Omniscient.
Watson: Exactly.
Holmes: I see where you are headed. You are like a compass with only one bearing – but is it true north? For as I recall it you constructed a rather romantic narrative from a bundle of papers.
Watson: It happened on other occasions too. Part two of The Study in Scarlet: Jefferson Hope’s life is described by whom?
Holmes: So you’re saying this is this Author intervening directly.
Watson: I am.
Holmes: So how does Poiret fit into this? Or Poirot, for that matter. Did this Crowborough author create them too?
Watson: No – and their story is complicated by their similarity. Poirot is created by a woman.
Holmes: God is a woman. Now I know you are mad.
Watson: Living in Torquay, I think.
Holmes: Really, Watson – this is too much!
Watson: That foreigner is still under the protection of his creator’s powerful church. One must be careful how one speaks of him.
Holmes: We have the same protection?
Watson: Not really. We are adrift. Depending on how you look at it either we have been given free will or everyone else in the world has been given the free will to do with us as they wish.
Holmes: Hence those flickers I saw that featured us both, yet not as we really are.
Watson: You came out of them rather well, though that French actor overplayed his hand. I come out of them a buffoon.
Holmes: I make no comment.
Watson: I fear that is how I will most often be portrayed.
Holmes: But think of poor Poiret. If what you say is true he will not be portrayed at all. His identity will be subsumed into that of another detective altogether, like a pagan deity subsumed into a Christian saint. His existence will be forgotten, much as that of Hercules Popeau.
Watson: Perhaps we should be grateful for small mercies then.
Holmes: Jean Paul has something to say about small things, Watson. It is that the chief proof of our real greatness lies in our recognition of our own smallness.
Watson: Holmes –
Holmes: It argues, you see, a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself a proof of nobility.
Watson: Holmes –
Holmes: There is much food for thought in Richter.
Watson: Holmes.
Holmes: Watson?
Watson: Do shut up.
The End
The Bruce and Rathbone Radio Mysteries
Author’s Note:
Between 1939 and 1946 Basil Rathbone and Nigel “Willy”Bruce appeared in a popular series of Sherlock Holmes “B” movies and over two hundred episodes of a radio series, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve written a handful of stories and a full-length novel about the two actors as their characters.
The Great Detective
The scene of the crime was 221B Baker Street. All the familiar objects were in place. On the mantelpiece, unanswered correspondence secured by a jack knife. In the hearth a coal scuttle containing cigars, a Persian slipper stuffed with tobacco. Beneath the window a chemical-stained table cluttered with test-tubes.
Less familiar was the blood pooled on the leather sofa and soaking the rug laid before it.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson were standing some yards to the left of the sofa. They were dressed for the outdoors in long overcoats and soft hats and were engaged in desultory conversation with an Egyptian pharaoh, a Roman centurion and an Indian chief in a feathered head-dress. A shapely slave girl in a revealing two-piece outfit – historical period indeterminate – hovered just behind this group.
Joseph “Joey” Timlin, the policeman in charge, stood by the sofa chewing his lip, his eyes fixed on the view of the London skyline through the window. The dome of St Paul’s was clearly visible next to Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.
His wife would go ape when she heard what job he’d pulled down. She thought Sherlock and his sidekick were just the cat’s pyjamas. Timlin looked across at the so-called Great Detective and Dr Watson. Both were tall men, one aquiline, one stout. He called out:
“Hey, Sherlock, suppose you’re going to solve this for me.”
The Indian chief, the pharaoh and the Roman centurion were already walking away when the man Timlin had addressed turned a weary look on him.
“I can assure you I have no interest in usurping your role,” he called back, his voice slightly nasal but strong and well modulated. “I am, after all, only –“
“I know well enough who you are,” Timlin said, walking over to him. He gestured at Dr Watson. “You and this fella both.” He stopped before them. “You’re Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.”
“And who might you be my good man?” Bruce tilted his chin at the policeman as he spoke.
Timlin introduced himself, watching the slave girl wiggle her ass across the vast gloomy hangar of a soundstage towards the exit door. There was blue sky and bright sunlight beyond. He sighed.
“Should be on my boat, day like today,” he said, almost to himself.
“It’s hardly our fault you’re not,” Rathbone protested mildly.
Timlin looked at him.
“It’s okay. I don’t have a boat. Just my pipedream.”
Bruce’s eyes widened.
“Strange fellow,” he mumbled.
“My wife’s nuts about you and – “ Timlin tipped his head towards Bruce – “especially you, Mr Bruce. Can’t get enough of you. Even got us drinking that Petri wine.”
“Petri wine? Really?” Bruce guffawed and gurgled a little. “Damned fine wine, you know.”
Timlin scowled. He remembered the night she’d first brought the wine home. He was in the kitchen when she got it out of the cupboard.
“Jesus, Betty, we’re only having burgers,” he said, thumbs hooked into the front of his belt, Bogart style. Apron on, she put her hands on her hips, Joan Crawford style.
“That nice Bill Forman on the Sherlock Holmes Radio Show says Petri Burgundy makes any meal taste great whether it’s steak or spaghetti or burgers.”
No messing with her when she had that voice on.
“You’re more of a beer man, I take it,” Rathbone said, a pleasant smile on his face.
“Nothing to beat an American beer.” Timlin stood a little straighter, puffed out his chest, sucked in his gut. “Best in the world from the best country in the world.”
“Quite so,” Rathbone said. “Patriotism is an admirable thing – indeed, it is essential in these dark days. I would hazard then that you’re more inclined to Sam Spade than Sherlock Holmes, perhaps?”
Timlin, still puffed up, nodded. He read Chandler too and thought he had the look of Philip Marlowe. Some hope. He was medium height, pasty-faced, a couple of stone overweight, wearing a cheap suit and black, scuffed brogues that were half a size too small – either that or his feet had decided to start growing again.
“I see nothing wrong with home-grown, now that you mention it. I read these Sherlock Holmes movies you’re doing are the most popular B movies ever and your radio show does pretty good too. But it seems to me it’s this fondness for all things British that has got us into a war in Europe that has nothing to do with us.”
“I quite understand,” Rathbone said soothingly.
“I’m afraid I don’t,” Bruce grumbled. “Man’s talking bunkum.”
“No, no, Willy. Sergeant Timlin has a perfect right to hold that view, mistaken though we may think it. Especially as, here in Los Angeles, we are merely guests in his country.”
“Mistaken?” Bruce harrumphed. “Total balderdash.”
Timlin controlled himself. His views on the war weren’t exactly pertinent to the investigation at hand.
“Man’s entitled to his opinion,” he said quietly.
“Quite so.” Rathbone was soothing. “Qu
ite so.”
“Thought Bogie made a damned fine Sam Spade,” Timlin said, in a crude attempt to salvage the conversation.
Bruce turned and glowered.
“You know him?” Timlin said. “Decent guy is he?”
Rathbone shrugged.
“Bogart’s fine until he’s had a few drinks and thinks he’s Bogart.”
Bruce barked a quick laugh.
Timlin looked from one to the other.
“Well, that’s Irish,” he said.
Rathbone gestured into the set of 221B Baker Street.
“Perhaps you can tell us what’s happening? This isn’t the way our Tuesday morning would usually start. Someone said there had been a murder…”
“Double murder,” Timlin said. “Man and woman shot to death on the sofa there last night.”
“Shot to death?” Bruce murmured. “Terrible thing. Do you know who they were?”
“Fella by the name of Neame. Charles Neame. He’s a bit part player on your picture here. I doubt you know him.”
“Charlie Neame?” Rathbone said, dismay in his voice. “Of course we know him. Strapping fellow. Good looking. Had an eye for the ladies –“
“And a forgiving wife,” Bruce added.
“That’s the one,” Timlin said. “And this particular lady was another bit-part player. Name of Lisabeth James. Lisabeth. What kind of a name is that? Who drops the first letter of a perfectly decent name –“
“Studios do,” Rathbone said. “Lisabeth is their idea of a film star’s name. Her real name is Doris. She’s been part of our little company for several pictures. As indeed has Charlie.” He shook his head. “Poor devils.”
“They were together you say?” Bruce asked.
“About as together as a couple can be, if you get my meaning.” Timlin smirked. “Doc who examined them says to me it’s the worst case of coitus interruptus he’s ever seen.”
“You’re aware that Miss James was also married?” Rathbone said. “So you have your motive.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Timlin said, pulling a piece of gum from his jacket pocket and unwrapping it. “I’m aware. She’s married to a guy called Cohen. Arty Cohen. Big in the trucking business. And I know the statistics about murder victims knowing their murderers too.”
The Belgian and The Beekeeper Page 14
