THE PATH OF THE COLONEL’S BULLET
PERCIVAL WILDE, in his novel Design for Murder, expresses, through several characters, the criticisms that a bullet fired from the ground floor of a house on one side of the street into the second storey of a house across a street the width of Baker Street cannot penetrate both the shadow and the bust of Sherlock Holmes that is casting it, because the bust must be at some distance from its shadow; or, if it strikes both shadow and bust, it should strike the lamp that is in a straight line with them; and, in either event, because of the required elevation of the gun’s muzzle, it must strike the ceiling and not the far wall of the room.
Robert S. Schultz, however, writing in “The Ballistics of the Empty House,” attempts to refute each of these points:
•The bust was very close to the window, rather than far away. Watson describes seeing a “hard, black outline upon the luminous screen of the window.” Had the bust been any great distance removed from the window, Schultz argues, it would have cast a large, fuzzy shadow; and if it were closer to the lamp than to the window, the outline would have been even larger and more indistinct. Schultz estimates, then, that the model was approximately one foot from the window.
•The gun, shadow, bust, and lamp need not have been in a straight line. “Needless to say, all this talk about straight lines is misleading; one would think it was well known that the path of a bullet is a parabola, not a straight line.” (This refutation is not well developed, however, and the parabolic distortion cannot have been significant over these short distances.)
•After an elaborate analysis of the heights and distances involved, Schultz concludes that only if the sitting room were of “palatial” dimensions could the bullet have failed to strike the wall.
To the first of these points, Wilde replies in “The Bust in the Window” that only a large light would create an indistinct shadow, with both an umbra (the main, darkest part of the silhouette) and a penumbra (the lighter, outer shadow). Since Holmes’s lamp was a small one, there would have been no penumbra, leaving only a sharp outline, no matter where the bust was placed. To the third point, he argues that Schultz miscalculates the height of the room and that “[t]he height of the shadow above the muzzle of the gun was far more than [Mr. Schultz] admits, and . . . I decline to find that the angle was so small that it was inconsequential.”
This editor’s experiments with light sources confirm Schultz’s point that, even with a brilliant lamp, the bust must have been close to the shade to produce a shadow the approximate size of the bust (and note that there is no suggestion that the bust was considerably smaller than life-sized, which would be required to produce a life-sized shadow if it were not close to the shade). However, personal experiments will confirm that while the distance from the lamp to the bust may affect the degree of “sharpness” of the shadow, it will not affect the size; only the distance of the bust from the shade affects that. Thus, in a darkened room, a very bright lamp some distance from the bust could produce a shadow with a “hard, black outline,” and no lamp-smashing would occur with only the slightest elevation of the gun muzzle.
Furthermore, both commentators fail to recognise that the critical distance in the equation is not the height of the room but the distance across Baker Street, which Schultz states to be approximately 66 feet, a distance Wilde does not challenge. While present-day scholars may question the certainty expressed by Wilde and Schultz respecting the identification of particular buildings as Camden House and 221 Baker Street, the distance at other locations on Baker Street cannot have been significantly less.
A diagram indicates this editor’s understanding and the absurdity of Wilde’s position. One does not even need to resort to trigonometry to do the relevant computations, only to use the basic rule that triangles with angles that are equal have sides that are proportional in length. If we accept that the distance from Moran’s gun to a bust placed about 1 foot from the window is 67 feet and that the height of the bust above Moran’s shoulder is 10.5 feet (allowing a 5.5-foot high shoulder, 4.5 foot distance from the floor of 221B to the top of the bust, and an 11.5 foot distance from ground to the floor of 221B, roughly Schultz’s assumptions), we have a triangular ratio of 10.5/67 (see diagram). Two additional triangles must be considered: the length of the suite in Baker Street and the striking place of the bullet on the wall, and the distance of the lamp from the bust and the path of the bullet (and, concomitantly, whether the lamp is in the bullet’s path).
If the wall of the suite were 14 feet from the bust (not an unusual length for a room), the height of the bullet’s striking place must be x/14 = 10.5/67, or about 2.2. That is, the bullet must have struck the wall about 2' 3" higher than the top of the bust—an acceptable result. If the room is elongated to 20 feet, the height of the striking place is x/19 = 10.5/67, or about 3 feet above the top of the bust. Surely the ceiling was higher than 7.5 feet! Even assuming that the height of the bust above Moran’s shoulder were much greater—say, 15 feet—similar results are achieved. For a 15-foot suite, the formula is x/14 = 15/67, or 3.14 feet, again producing a 7.5-foot ceiling. It is obvious that the great distance across Baker Street produces these results.
As to the lamp-smashing, if one assumes that the lamp were no more than one foot from the bust, then the formula x/1 =10.5/67 produces the information the bullet would rise 0.15 feet, or about 2” in that one-foot trip, enough to miss a carefully-positioned lamp if the bullet struck the top of the bust. The farther back from the bust the lamp is placed, the more clearance there is between the path of the bullet and the lamp. Therefore, so long as the lamp did not extend above the top of the bust, no smashing need be imagined.
The path of the colonel’s bullet.
1 “The Empty House” was published in Collier’s Weekly on September 26, 1903, and in the Strand Magazine in October 1903.
2 As Christopher Morley explains, Ronald Adair earns the title “The Honourable” by virtue of being the son of a peer—in this particular case, an earl. For more on the peerage, see “The Noble Bachelor,” note 16. Morley goes on to clarify that while the title could be used by either sex (his sister would also be an Honourable), it was not transferable by marriage; therefore, had Adair married, he and his wife “would have been announced by the butler as The Honourable Ronald Adair and Mrs. Adair.”
3 “Robert” in the original manuscript (corrected) and in the first English edition; the Strand Magazine and Collier’s Weekly versions, as well as the American editions, use “Ronald.”
4 Publication of “The Empty House” occurred almost immediately following Holmes’s retirement. See “The Second Stain,” note 5. From 1894 to 1903, Watson had supposedly been prohibited from revealing the news of Holmes’s return from the dead to the public, and yet there is a plethora of evidence that Holmes was actively pursuing cases during that time. Edgar W. Smith finds it “difficult to believe” that the news was a shock “to the hundreds of people who had come in contact with the Master in the course of the dozens of cases he had handled since his tardily acknowledged resurrection, or to the many thousands of others who had heard of these cases, and, inevitably, of him.” Smith does not suggest what story, if any, Holmes bothered to tell his new clients and old friends.
5 The exact date is not stated. “One would have thought,” remarks June Thomson, in Holmes and Watson, “that, even if [Watson] were not keeping a journal at the time, the day of his reunion with Holmes would have been etched in figures of fire in his memory.”
6 In visiting his various patients, muses Christopher Morley, Watson would likely have to utilise the services of a hired carriage, as it’s unlikely he would be earning enough to maintain his own. Furthermore, Morley chides, despite his apparent dedication to his work, “The fact that he kept thinking about the Adair case rather than his patients suggests his heart was not in his profession.”
7 See “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” note 14.
8 An address on the mansion-heavy Park Lane, alongside the
eastern edge of Hyde Park, signified a stature of high status and considerable wealth. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel of social climbing Vanity Fair (1848), for example, a clear-eyed student at Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies is described as being “attached” to a desirable gentleman named Frederick Augustus Bullock not out of any great love for him, but because her mind is “fixed,—as that of a well-bred young woman should be,—upon a house in Park Lane, a country house at Wimbledon, a handsome chariot, and two prodigious tall horses and footmen, and a fourth of the annual profits of the eminent firm of Hulker & Bullock, all of which advantages were represented in the person of Frederick Augustus.”
9 Gaming clubs, started mostly by veteran gamblers, proliferated in the West End sometime around 1891, as Ralph Nevill details in his London Clubs: Their History and Treasures (1911). Given his apparent fondness for gambling, Adair was fortunate to escape any great financial catastrophe; Nevill writes, “Such clubs were in reality little but miniature casinos, and the main, if not the sole, qualification for membership lay in being possessed of ample funds and a tendency to part with them easily.” Perhaps Adair was wise in limiting his appearances to an establishment like the Baldwin, a club for card players that, according to Nevill, “admits no strangers . . . [and] which opens at two o’clock in the afternoon. The stakes here are very small.”
10 See “The Red-Headed League,” note 56.
11 We have seen references to Lord Balmoral before in the Canon: He is the unseen father of Lord Robert St. Simon (“The Noble Bachelor”), and his horse ran in the “Wessex Cup” (“Silver Blaze”).
Balmoral Castle was the royal summer and hunting estate in the Scottish highlands, leased by Queen Victoria in 1848 and bought for her by Prince Albert in 1852. Philip Weller reports that Victoria occasionally used the name Balmoral as an alias (presenting herself as “the Duchess of Balmoral” when travelling incognito), and he suggests that Lord Balmoral may thus be a concealed reference to the Prince of Wales’s involvement in the great 1890 “Baccarat” or “Tranby Croft” card scandal. In 1890, the prince’s friend Sir William Gordon-Cumming was accused of cheating in a private game of baccarat (cards) in which the prince was a player. The prince extracted a written agreement from Gordon-Cumming that in exchange for the silence of everyone present, Gordon-Cumming would never play cards again. The affair resulted in a serious embarrassment to the Crown, when an action for libel was brought by Gordon-Cumming in 1891. The prince was called as a witness, and vicious cross-examination laid bare seamy aspects of the prince’s private life. Rumours even spread that Gordon-Cumming had been forced to “take the fall” for the prince’s wrongdoing.
12 In American numbering, the third floor.
13 In the manuscript, this is a “bullet of an expanding character”; in Collier’s Weekly and American editions, an “expanded revolver bullet.” Also known as a “dumdum” bullet, the expanding bullet was once primarily used in game hunting; the exposed lead nose (or “soft nose,” for lead is a soft metal) distorts the body of the bullet upon impact, creating a larger wound. These bullets were first made in the town of Dum Dum, a suburb of Calcutta, and the headquarters of the Bengal artillery until 1853. In 1899, the use of dumdum bullets in warfare was banned at the Hague Convention, and that ban was agreed to by Great Britain in 1905—not that the ban would have saved Ronald Adair.
14 “He” in American editions.
15 S. E. Dahlinger, in “The Adventures of a Hated Rival,” suggests that this is Barker, Holmes’s “hated rival upon the Surrey shore,” described in “The Retired Colourman” as “[a] tall, dark, heavily-moustached man . . . with grey-tinted sun-glasses.” D. Martin Dakin comes to the same conclusion. See “The Retired Colourman,” note 17.
16 There is no book in English, apparently, called The Origin of Tree Worship; S. Tupper Bigelow notes that the closest match is James Ferguson’s 1868 book Tree and Serpent Worship, with the handful of a subtitle, illustrations of mythology and art in India in the first and fourth centuries after Christ from the sculptures of the Buddhist Topes at Sanchi and Amravati prepared under the authority of the Secretary of State for India in Council with Introductory Essays and descriptions of the plates. Unfortunately, this appears unlikely to be the book so handily carried by the old “bibliophile,” for it weighs over eleven pounds!
17 Bliss Austin, in “Two Bibliographical Footnotes,” suggests that the Catullus and the earlier mentioned Origin of Tree Worship might perhaps be a single book, Grant Allen’s The Attis of . . . Catullus . . . with Dissertations on . . . the Origin of Tree Worship, and on the Galliambic Metre (1892). Book collectors argue unendingly over the exact “five volumes” carried by Holmes.
18 Even despite the drama of the situation, Watson, an ex-soldier who has seen battle, displays a surprisingly weak constitution here, leading S. C. Roberts (in Doctor Watson) to conclude that other emotional factors—such as the illness and death of his wife, Mary Morstan—must have also contributed to the doctor’s sudden loss of consciousness. Yet Walter P. Armstrong, Jr., thinks that Watson did not faint at all, but in fact invented his dramatic reaction in a burst of poetic licence. “A Watson who in real life had never fainted,” he reasons, “might easily in composing an imaginative account of an emotional scene which never happened depict Watson as fainting.”
19 It does seem a bit strange that Holmes, posing as a doddering book collector, conveniently happens to be carrying a flask of brandy. “Where did this brandy come from?” asks Walter P. Armstrong, Jr. “Did Sherlock Holmes, as one of the properties in his character of an aged bibliophile, carry a hip flask? It does not seem likely. Nor can he, after a three years’ absence, have known where the brandy in Watson’s home was kept.” In fact, Holmes would not have been familiar with the layout of Watson’s current residence, which, being in Kensington, is therefore not the Paddington residence of “The Engineer’s Thumb” nor the apartment that backs on Mortimer Street in “The Final Problem.”
Of course, Armstrong could be underestimating Holmes, who shrewdly could have had a flask at the ready for just the purpose of reviving his friend. In Baker Street Chronology: Commentaries on the Sacred Writings of Dr. John H. Watson, Ernest Bloomfield Zeisler argues Holmes surely “foresaw the possibility, if not the likelihood, that his faithful old friend might be so startled [by his reappearance] as to require resuscitation; he prepared himself for this by pocketing his brandy flask.”
20 Here we learn that Moriarty’s eyes, like Holmes’s (The Hound of the Baskervilles), were grey.
21 See “Baritsu,” page 822.
22 American editions add the word “soon.”
23 Holmes’s ostensible reasons for faking his own death don’t quite hold up upon closer examination. He speaks of lulling Moriarty’s conspirators into complacency and then having his vengeance upon them; but as T. S. Blakeney points out, Holmes had not long before been informed by the London police that the whole of Moriarty’s gang—save the professor himself—had been captured. Not until after he makes the decision to fabricate his demise does Holmes learn that the police wire was not entirely accurate and that Colonel Moran was still at large. Perhaps, Blakeney suggests, Holmes’s memory of the experience has (understandably) gotten somewhat jumbled, and “his statement of his thoughts, as given by Watson, must have been coloured by wisdom after the event.”
24 What does this mean? By its context, “some months later,” although ambiguous, seems to refer to a short period of time after the incident at the falls. Holmes and Moriarty clashed in the spring of 1891, and “The Final Problem” was not published in the Strand Magazine until December 1893. Is it reasonable to take “some months later” to mean the almost three-year period from April 1891 to February or March of 1894, when Holmes could have read the published account? Or was it the case instead that—even though Watson supposedly kept his grief private for two years until finally penning “The Final Problem”—he wrote another “account” of the matter, perhaps for the be
nefit of brother Mycroft, which the latter forwarded?
25 Watson’s (and Holmes’s) time references in “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House” are severely criticised by numerous scholars, especially Holmes’s reference to “the darkening sky.” See the appendix on page 823.
26 While Moriarty may have brought the confederate (Colonel Moran) along as a “bodyguard,” argues Noah André Trudeau, in “The Second Most Dangerous Man in London—Dangerous to Whom?,” this particular henchman had a different purpose in mind. In Trudeau’s scenario, Colonel Moran could see that Moriarty was about to “take a fall” through Holmes’s efforts and wanted to be sure that Holmes in fact eliminated Moriarty, so that Moran could take over the organisation. He shot Moriarty just as he was on the verge of the falls (hence Moriarty’s “horrible scream”). Holmes did not hear the shot fired by the silent air-gun. This also explains why Moran was situated atop the cliff, not at Moriarty’s side. Trudeau also answers the question raised by critics of why Colonel Moran did not prepare himself with a gun to use against Holmes and was inexpediently slinging rocks. If, after killing Moriarty with the gun Moran did bring, Moran’s gun jammed, the stone slinging is explained. Finally, Trudeau’s theory explains the absence of Moriarty’s body, for Moran would have retrieved it to prevent the discovery of the bullet wound.
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