Sherlock Holmes Edwardian Parodies and Pastiches I

by Bill Peschel

  “Simple,” said Mr. Hennessy, scornfully; “’tis foolish.”

  “Niver mind,” said Mr. Dooley. “Pass th’ dope, Watson. Now bein’ full iv th’ cillybrated Chow Sooey brand, I addhress me keen mind to th’ discussion iv th’ case iv Dorsey’s dog. Watson, look out iv th’ window an’ see if that’s a cab goin’ by ringin’ a gong. A throlley car? So much th’ betther. Me observation tol’ me it was not a balloon or a comet or a reindeer. Ye ar-re a gr-reat help to me, Watson. Pass th’ dope. Was there a dog on th’ car? No? That simplifies th’ thing. I had an idee th’ dog might have gone to wurruk. He was a bull-tarryer, ye say. D’ye know annything about his parents? Be Mulligan’s Sloppy Weather out iv O’Hannigan’s Diana iv th’ Slough? Iv coorse. Was ayether iv thim seen in th’ neighborhood th’ night iv th’ plant? No? Thin it is not, as manny might suppose, a case iv abduction. What were th’ habits iv Dorsey’s coyote? Was he a dog that dhrank? Did he go out iv nights? Was he payin’ anny particular attintions to anny iv th’ neighbors? Was he baffled in love? Ar-re his accounts sthraight? Had Dorsey said annything to him that wud ’ve made him despondent? Ye say no. He led a dog’s life but seemed to be happy. Thin ’tis plainly not a case iv suicide.

  “I’m gettin’ up close to th’ criminals. Another shot iv th’ mad mixture. Wait till I can find a place in th’ ar-rm. There ye ar-re. Well, Watson, what d’ye make iv it?”

  “If ye mane me, Dugan stole th’ dog.”

  “Not so fast,” said Mr. Dooley. “Like all men iv small minds ye make ye’ers up readily. Th’ smaller th’ mind, th’ aisier ’tis made up. Ye’ers is like a blanket on th’ flure befure th’ fire. All ye have to do to make it up is to lave it. Mine is like a large double bed, an’ afther I’ve been tossin’ in it, ’tis no aisy job to make it up. I will puncture me tire with th’ fav’rite flower iv Chinnytown an’ go on.

  “We know now that th’ dog did not elope, that he didn’t commit suicide an’ that he was not kidnaped be his rayturnin’ parents. So far so good. Now I’ll tell ye who stole th’ dog. Yisterdah afthernoon I see a suspicious-lookin’ man goin’ down th’ sthreet. I say he was suspicious lookin’ because he was not disguised an’ looked ivry wan in th’ face. He had no dog with him. A damning circumstance, Watson, because whin he’d stolen th’ dog he niver wud ’ve taken it down near Dorsey’s house. Ye wudden’t notice these facts because ye’er mind while feeble is unthrained. His coat collar was turned up an’ he was whistlin’ to himsilf, a habit iv dog fanciers. As he wint be Hogan’s house he did not look around or change his gait or otherwise do annything that wud indicate to an unthrained mind that there was annything wrong, facts in thimsilves that proved to me cultivated intilligence that he was guilty. I followed him in me mind’s eye to his home an’ there chained to th’ bed leg is Dorsey’s dog. Th’ name iv th’ criminal is P. X. O’Hannigan, an’ he lives at twinty-wan hundhred an’ ninety-nine South Halsted sthreet, top flat, rear, a plumber be pro-fission. Officer, arrest that man!”

  “That’s all right,” said Mr. Hennessy; “but Dugan rayturned th’ dog las’ night.”

  “Oh, thin,” said Mr. Dooley, calmly, “this is not a case f’r Sherlock Holmes but wan f’r th’ polis. That’s th’ throuble, Hinnissy, with th’ detictive iv th’ story. Nawthin’ happens in rale life that’s complicated enough f’r him. If th’ Prisidint iv th’ Epworth League was a safe-blower be night th’ man that’d catch him’d be a la-ad with gr-reat powers iv observation an’ thrained habits iv raisonin’. But crime, Hinnissy, is a pursoot iv th’ simple minded—that is, catchable crime is a pursoot iv th’ simple-minded. Th’ other kind, th’ uncatchable kind that is took up be men iv intellict is called high fi-nance. I’ve known manny criminals in me time, an’ some iv thim was fine men an’ very happy in their home life, an’ a more simple, pasth’ral people ye niver knew. Wan iv th’ ablest bank robbers in th’ counthry used to live near me—he ownded a flat buildin’—an’ befure he’d turn in to bed afther rayturnin’ fr’m his night’s wurruk, he’d go out in th’ shed an’ chop th’ wood. He always wint into th’ house through a thransom f’r fear iv wakin’ his wife who was a delicate woman an’ a shop-lifter. As I tell ye he was a man without guile, an’ he wint about his jooties as modestly as ye go about ye’ers. I don’t think in th’ long run he made much more thin ye do. Wanst in a while, he’d get hold iv a good bunch iv money, but manny other times afther dhrillin’ all night through a steel dure, all he’d find ‘d be a short crisp note fr’m th’ prisidint iv th’ bank. He was often discouraged, an’ he tol’ me wanst if he had an income iv forty dollars th’ month, he’d retire fr’m business an’ settle down on a farm.

  “No, sir, criminals is th’ simplest crathers in th’ wide wide wurruld—innocent, sthraight-forward, dangerous people, that haven’t sinse enough to be honest or prosperous. Th’ extint iv their schamin’ is to break a lock on a dure or sweep a handful iv change fr’m a counter or dhrill a hole in a safe or administher th’ strong short arm to a tired man takin’ home his load. There are no mysteryous crimes excipt thim that happens to be. Th’ ordh’nry crook, Hinnissy, goes around ringin’ a bell an’ disthributin’ hand-bills announcin’ his business. He always breaks through a window instead iv goin’ through an open dure, an’ afther he’s done annything that he thinks is commindable, he goes to a neighborin’ liquor saloon, stands on th’ pool table an’ confides th’ secret to ivrybody within sound iv his voice. That’s why Mulligan is a betther detictive thin Sherlock Holmes or me. He can’t put two an’ two together an’ he has no powers iv deduction, but he’s a hard dhrinker an’ a fine sleuth. Sherlock Holmes niver wud’ve caught that frind iv mine. Whin th’ safe iv th’ Ninth Rational Bank was blowed, he wud’ve put two an’ two together an’ arristed me. But me frind wint away lavin’ a hat an’ a pair iv cuffs marked with his name in th’ safe, an’ th’ polis combined these discoveries with th’ well-known fact that Muggins was a notoryous safe blower an’ they took him in. They found him down th’ sthreet thryin’ to sell a bushel basket full iv Alley L stock. I told ye he was a simple man. He ralized his ambition f’r an agaracoolchral life. They give him th’ care iv th’ cows at Joliet.”

  “Did he rayform?” asked Mr. Hennessy.

  “No,” said Mr. Dooley; “he escaped. An’ th’ way he got out wud baffle th’ injinooty iv a Sherlock Holmes.”

  “How did he do it?” asked Mr. Hennessy.

  “He climbed over th’ wall,” said Mr. Dooley.

  Finley Peter Dunne, Vanity Fair caricature, 1905.

  The Whims of Erasmus

  W. Carter Platts

  William Carter Platts (1864-1944) was a newspaperman, humorist, and fisherman who managed to combine all three occupations as a freelance writer. He wrote for magazines such as Country Life, The Field, and Fry’s Magazine, was angling editor for The Yorkshire Post, and wrote books such as Angling Done Here! (1897) and Betwixt the Ling and the Lowland (1901). He also chronicled in several books the adventures of Erasmus Tuttlebury, a suburban Everyman for whom nothing goes right, such as when he attempts to emulate the great detective’s methods in this chapter from The Whims of Erasmus (1902).

  Having successfully captured the fancy of the British public, Sir Conan Doyle’s famous hero, rather late in the day, perhaps, scooped Mr. Tuttlebury into his band of worshipers.

  Hitherto Sherlock Holmes had been but a name to Erasmus Tuttlebury; now that, through a chance volume placed in the latter’s hands, he had become intimate with the great detective’s marvelous adventures, Sherlock Holmes had become a burning personality—a fascinating reality perched upon a massive pedestal, round which Mr. Tuttlebury crept reverently in his stocking feet, so to speak, as with uplifted eyes he gazed enviously at the great glorious halo of popularity that flamed around the head of the people’s pet, and figuratively, dared to wonder if it might not fit himself—that is, of course, if it were filed down to six-and-seven-eighths size.

  “Humph! Finest literary creation of the n
ineteenth century!” he observed enthusiastically to Mrs. Tuttlebury one evening as he closed the book.

  “Who?—what?” inquired Mrs. Tuttlebury, dropping half a dozen stitches in her knitting.

  “Sherlock Holmes.”

  “I’ve some sort of idea that I’ve heard that name before, Erasmus,” chirped Mrs. Tuttlebury. “Oh, I know now! It was in the pantomime of ‘Robinson Crusoe’—one of the scenes was laid in ‘Sherlock Holmes’s cupboard’, wasn’t it?”

  “Cupboard? Sher—? Jee-rusalem, Maria, you mean ‘Davy Jones’s Locker!’”

  “Well, I knew there was a ‘lock’ and a ‘Holmes’ or a ‘Jones’ or something in it!” murmured Mrs. Tuttlebury with a triumphant smile. “Well, dear, who was this Sherlock Jones who had the finest literary cupboard in the last century?”

  “Holmes, Maria!—finest literary creation!” cried Tuttlebury. “He was the ideal of cultivated observation—sort of double-barreled human microscope with an X-ray attachment for seeing what was going on in the dark through a brick wall! He was the perfection of inference and the grand master of the science of deduction!”

  “What’s deduction, Erasmus?”

  “Taking—er—taking one from another, Maria.”

  “Oh, I understand,” lisped Mrs. Tuttlebury, cheerfully; “but I didn’t recognize it by that name; we always used to call it simple subtraction when I was a girl.”

  “I wasn’t talking about sums,” growled Tuttlebury, impatiently. “I was referring to ideas. You see it’s like this—suppose I borrow Johnson’s copy of ‘Inquire Within.’ There’s some trifling peculiarity—say, an accidental ink-blot—about the book which catches my attention, and from that apparently insignificant point I work back logically, step by step, from effect to cause, through a chain of sequences, until I know what year it was that Johnson’s boy had the measles!”

  “I don’t see how you could possibly do that,” ventured Mrs. Tuttlebury.

  “It’s possible enough.”

  “But, how can it be possible,” persisted Mrs. Tuttlebury, “when he never had the measles? Mrs. Johnson told me so herself. Now, if you’d said whooping-cough—”

  “But it was only a supposititious case—entirely imaginary,” jerked in Mr. Tuttlebury.

  “Imaginary?” echoed Mrs. Tuttlebury, indignantly. “It was a most serious case, and they had to take the poor little chap on to the moors seven times and wheel him down to smell at the gasworks four times before he was better! Mrs. Johnson’s mother says it was the worst kind of whooping-cough—”

  “Who the dickens was talking about whooping-cough?” roared Mr. Tuttlebury.

  “I was,” replied Mrs. Tuttlebury, meekly; “and it seems to me, Erasmus, that there’s something out at the gathers somewhere about your fancy science that can logically tell from a blot in somebody’s book when somebody else had the measles that never had it and can’t tell what I’m talking about when I’m saying it all the time!”

  Tuttlebury maintained a brilliant silence for some time after that, while Mrs. Tuttlebury contentedly went on knitting. But his brain was not inactive. He was determined to give her a convincing exposition of the science of deduction; and he watched her narrowly, waiting to pounce upon the first opportunity. It came. Mrs. Tuttlebury, lost in thought, paused in her knitting. Her gaze traveled from one object to another, and became fixed there. Tuttlebury turned on the intelligence department of his brain and set it deducting full steam ahead.

  “Yes, they spread out over a good deal of ground,” he observed, quite casual like. And Mrs. Tuttlebury dropped her jaw and seventeen stitches in her knitting, as she shot bolt upright in her chair, and gasped,—

  “Good gracious, Erasmus! However did you know what I was thinking about?”

  “Pooh!” sniffed Tuttlebury, loftily, airily giving space a gentle backhander with his left hand, “easy enough—mere child’s play! They do spread over a lot of ground, eh?”

  “Yes,” assented Mrs. Tuttlebury, in wonder.

  “As a matter of fact,” went on Tuttlebury, with refreshing cocksuredness, “they cover nearly an acre.”

  “Nearly a—” gasped Mrs. Tuttlebury incredibly.

  “Yes,” he went on serenely, “nearly an acre. To be precise, an acre all but half a rood and thirty-four yards; I’ve seen the exact measurements today. Now, I’ll just show you how I came to know that you were thinking of the new district hospital buildings!”

  “But I wasn’t thinking of the hospital buildings! I—I—I was only thinking what big feet you got, Erasmus!” blurted out Mrs. Tuttlebury. “And when you said they covered an acre all but—”

  “You were not thinking of the hospital buildings?”

  “No.”

  “Then you ought to have been doing so, Maria!” snorted Tuttlebury, emphatically. “I saw you notice that mud mark on the carpet, and then you turned your eyes from that to my boots, which ought to have made you ask yourself where I’d got the mud, and that should have caused you to remember that I’d told you. I’d been this afternoon to see the buildings in course of erection, and that the ground was very dirty, and that ought to have set you thinking of the buildings. It’s all clear as daylight—couldn’t be plainer! It’s not the science of deduction that’s at fault; it’s you Maria!”

  And Mrs. Tuttlebury picked up the stitches in her knitting while Mr. Tuttlebury picked up his book.

  The following evening Mr. Tuttlebury, who had been detained at his office at Leeds beyond his usual time, burst into the house in a state of white-hot indignation.

  “My goodness, Erasmus! Whatever’s the matter?” cried Mrs. Tuttlebury, in alarm.

  “Matter!” he exclaimed. “Outrage is the matter! A dastardly outrage has been committed almost at our gate! And the victim an innocent child, too! You know Farmer Gosenford’s man, Jim—the one who came to look after our horse while we had him? Well, I came across his little girl close to our gate, crying like—like watering cans—said her mammy had sent her down to ‘The Cow and Kettle’ with fourpence in a jug for a quart of vinegar, and as she came back past the gap in the hedge just down the road, somebody suddenly clapped one hand over her eyes, and grabbed the jug with the other, and swigged off the whole quart, before thrusting the empty jug back into her hand, and giving her a shove along, so that she had no chance of recognizing her assailant in the dark! Cowardly scamp! I hope he’ll suffer the pangs of remorse!”

  “I should think he’s more likely to suffer the pangs of stomach-ache first. A quart of vinegar!—good gracious!” ejaculated Mrs. Tuttlebury, when her husband, suddenly relaxing into something approaching a grin, hurriedly explained,—

  “Well, it wasn’t vinegar. You see, Maria, Jim told me in confidence once that his wife was a bit of a tartar—‘holy terror’ he called her—and bossed the show, so that the poor beggar has hardly a soul to call his own; and certainly has no money. She takes jolly good care of that—says he isn’t to be trusted with any. Won’t let him show his face inside a public-house—says if he must have beer he shall have it at home, where he can’t rob his family by running up a score. So about every other evening she sends the girl to ‘The Cow and Kettle’ for a quart of beer, but for fear the child might get into the way of tasting on the road, she’s a private understanding with the landlord that it’s to be called ‘vinegar,’ see?”

  “Yes. And what did you do, Erasmus?”

  “Do? Gave the child fourpence to enable her to go back for some more, and told her to tell her father I’d make it in my way to see the police and put the affair in their hands. And so I will. I’ll—But if I do, they’ll only make a mess of it. Crustaceous crumpets, Maria, I’ll follow this thing up myself! Of all the despicable, sneaking villainies, robbing a kid is about the lowest form! But I’ll track the vile brute! Let him beware, for Mr. Sherlock Holmes-Tuttlebury is on his trail!”

  “It must have been some low, ignorant tramp! Nobody else would do such a thing!” cried Mrs. Tuttlebury, conclusively.

&nbs
p; “My dear, Maria, when shall I ever get you to look at things reasonably,” expostulated Mr. Sherlock Holmes-Tuttlebury. “Now, the case presents features absolutely staring you in the face which makes it utterly impossible that your theory can be correct. Let us marshal the facts so far as we know them—The villainous skunk who committed the outrage was in possession of the knowledge that the child was coming along with the jug, or he would not have been waiting for her. He knew that the jug did not contain vinegar, or he wouldn’t have drunk it. It is also perfectly clear that it wasn’t money he was in want of, or he’d have waylaid the child on her way to ‘The Cow and Kettle,’ and collared the coppers. Then, too, it’s equally clear that the rascal was a man with some reputation for gentility to maintain; that it was solely beer he wanted, and wouldn’t risk his reputation by being seen in a local public-house; therefore, he must be someone well known in this neighborhood, and who has, at present, no beer in his own house.”

  “It’s wonderful however you do it, Erasmus!” gasped Mrs. Tuttlebury, in admiring wonder.