Sherlock Holmes Edwardian Parodies and Pastiches I

by Bill Peschel

  “Guess?” interrupted Padlock Jones. “There was no guessing about it. It was deduction. When you told me that the boy was petted by father, mother, grandmother, and six aunts, I was drawn irresistibly to the conclusion that the man who would carry off such a spoiled child and not return him in a hurry—say fifteen minutes at the outside—must be a lunatic.

  “Therefore, I telephoned to all the lunatic asylums to find out whether any lunatic had escaped lately. The Bronx Asylum replied that a man had got away from the keepers last Tuesday, that they had just located him, and would have him in an hour. The second time I went to the telephone, I was informed that the lunatic had been captured and that a four-year-old boy was with him.

  “You know the rest. Easy, wasn’t it?”

  Spuyten Duyvil, opposite the northern tip of Manhattan Island, 1890.

  Sherlock Holmes and Brigadier Gerard

  Anonymous

  Of Conan Doyle’s creations, Sherlock is undoubtedly the most popular. A strong case for second place could be made for Brigadier Etienne Gerard of the Hussars of Conflans—“gay-riding, plume-tossing, debonair, the darling of the ladies and of the six brigades of light cavalry.”

  Gerard was inspired by Conan Doyle’s friendship with George Meredith (1828-1909), an author much admired in his day whose reputation sank under the weight of his dense, ornate prose. Their shared interest in the Napoleonic era led Meredith to suggest reading a new translation of The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot. Marbot (1782-1854) fought for Napoleon and was wounded at Waterloo. While Conan Doyle found the baron’s stories hard to believe, he was inspired by the man’s joie de vivre and unconquerable spirit to create Gerard. The first series of stories appeared in The Strand in 1894 and were an immediate success, although not on the scale of the Holmes stories. In September 1903, the second series of stories were published in book form, followed by this parody from the Oct. 3 issue of Tit-Bits.

  Sherlock Holmes, lounging on his shabby sofa in his yellow figured dressing-gown, was poking a charge of threepenny shag into his blackened clay pipe and gazing introspectively at the shot-punctured ceiling when the door was thrust open and an old, white-haired gentleman strode into the room. Though his furrowed face evidenced extreme age, in his eye still gleamed the light of martial ardour, and he carried himself with the bearing of a soldier who had earned medals. Clicking his heels together on the mat, he raised one hand in a salute and struck himself on the chest with the other.

  Sherlock glanced at him through the corner of his eagle eye and, striking a match, proceeded to fill the room with the pungent fumes of smouldering shag.

  “Good morning, Brigadier,” he said. “Take the arm-chair. After all you’ve gone through you must be very tired. Let me see, now. You left the Gare du Nord at 3 p.m. yesterday, caught the night packet at Dieppe, had a rough passage and a stiff dose of mal-de-mer, travelled up to London Bridge with a pretty brunette, got nearly run over at the Mansion House, wandered along Cheapside, Fleet Street, the Strand, and, after being directed by three different policemen, finally took a cab at Charing Cross, and here you are. To what do I owe—?”

  “Peste!” snapped the Brigadier, impatiently. “I am not your biographical friend Watson. You cannot astonish Etienne Gerard with your inferential synthesis. Are we not both threads from the same ‘Strand’? I come to ask you why I, Gerard, am cut off thus abrupt, while you, Holmes, whom everyone thought spun out to a finish, are taken up and spliced into yet a longer yarn?”

  “The doctor prescribes rest, Etienne. You are growing old,” remarked Sherlock, coolly.

  “Old,” cried the soldier, springing from the chair in his indignation. “Sir Age cannot wither nor volumes stale the infinite variety of Etienne Gerard. I have but touched on the many incidents of my honoured and eventful career. In my last narration, I did but say goodnight. I am still very much alive, while, by all the canons of fiction, after that jump with Moriarty, you should be dead as a stone.”

  Sherlock allowed himself to smile.

  “Gerard,” he said, “I gave you credit for more perspicacity. Did you think that vice would thus triumph over virtue? Moriarty was a tough nut, I own. The tussle with him it was that knocked me off my legs for so long. For some time the doctor himself gave me up as one dead. But my destined end was not then, and, thanks to his wonderful skill and the lengthy rest, Sherlock is now himself again. Holmes is Holmes once more.”

  “It does not become me, Gerard, to boast, but I have been in some tolerably tight places myself and have survived to tell the tale,” said Etienne. “That dive with the Professor, though, beats all I ever did. Everybody imagined you’d taken a drop too much at last. ‘It was a glorious and fitting end to the career of the great Baker Street sleuth-hound,’ they said. Aye, such an end as I, Etienne Gerard, would not have despised, had fate ruled it so. But there, you English—it is ever the same. You are wiped out utterly, so—and, hey presto! We find you at your old game somewhere where you are least expected. I could tell you of a score of incidents which happened in the Peninsular—”

  “Save them, Gerard,” said Sherlock. “They’ll make good reading when I have had my final conge.”

  “How many conges is it proposed you should have?” queried the soldier, acrimoniously.

  “Sir, do you take me for a professional singer?” cried the lynx-eyed unraveller. “My life, be it short or long, is in the hands of the doctor. If you feel aggrieved, talk to him. Fact is, Gerard, you’re getting garrulous. You’ve been at it now, my swashbuckling Gascon, on and off for nearly nine years, and the doctor thinks a change would be beneficial. The fiat has gone forth, and you must quit the stage.

  “You’ll excuse me now, won’t you? I am expecting my friend Watson every minute. There’s an interesting little story connected with this pellet of Gorgonzola cheese I have caged under the tumbler which I have promised to give him. It was discovered in the hollow tooth of the dead man. He had mysteriously disappeared. Search was futile until I arrived on the scene. The secret, however, was solved as soon as I got on the scent. Au revoir, Brigadier. Be merciful to the ladies.”

  “Sir,” said Gerard, with head uplifted proudly and hand on breast, “the ladies will remember the gallant bearing of Etienne Gerard when the tale of Sherlock Holmes’s police work has been forgotten; like the newspaper report of a week ago. I—”

  His further utterance was choked by a paroxysm of coughing.

  Sherlock, with intent, had knocked over the tumbler. The gallant Brigadier, who had many a time led a forlorn hope, was compelled to beat a hasty retreat as the blended fumes of ancient Gorgonzola and threepenny shag pervaded the room.

  “Ha, ha, ouh” he spluttered, backing for the door. “Mon – dieu – ouh, ha, ha! This fellow—to supplant me—Etien—”

  His voice died away down the stairs, and Sherlock, with a wink, replaced the tumbler and threw open the windows.

  When Watson arrived with his notebook he found him playing Chopin’s “Funeral March” on his fiddle, with his eyes closed and the seraphic expression of a Christmas-tree cherub on his pallid face.

  The Stolen Diamonds

  W.L. Riordan

  Newspaperman William L. Riordan (1861-1909) wrote two Padlock Jones parodies for The New York Times, this one published on Oct. 11 and the following one on Oct. 25. He is best remembered for shaping the monologues of politician George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, the corrupt Democratic Party machine that ruled New York off and on for nearly a century, into Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics (1905).

  Padlock Jones picked up the shoe which our early morning visitor had inadvertently left behind him.

  “Tell me, doctor,” he said, “what do you make of these? As we missed the man and have no idea who he is or what was his errand, let us try to construct him out of these shoes.”

  I was no longer surprised at anything that Padlock Jones said or did, so I kept quiet and awaited developments.

 
“The owner of the shoes,” he began, speaking with as much certainty as if he were describing a person who stood before him, “is a man of careless habits. He is absent-minded. He is—”

  “But how can you guess all that?” I interrupted in amazement.

  “Guess? I never guess. I deduce,” replied Padlock Jones. “Please do not interrupt me again. I will explain my process of deduction when I am through. I have said that the man is careless and absent-minded. How old is he? I should say that he has reached or passed middle age. He is fond of his ease and likes to lean back in his chair and rest his legs on a table or desk. He usually rides in the elevated trains, comes down town about 8:30 in the morning, and—”

  “Come now!” I broke in, thinking that he was having a joke on me. “That is going a little too far.”

  “Not at all,” Padlock Jones replied. “I am absolutely sure of my facts. The trouble with you is that you see but do not observe. Why, my deductions are simplicity itself. How do I know that the man is careless and absent-minded? Would anybody who was not careless and absent-minded make a call and leave his shoes behind him? His age? Don’t you see how the leather protrudes to make room for bunions and don’t you know that these plagues do not usually afflict young men? How do I know that he is fond of resting his legs on some object above his head? Look at the backs of his shoes. The leather is almost worn through. As to his traveling on the elevated about 8:30 a.m., see how the toes of his shoes are scraped where people stood on them. All easy, isn’t it, when you know how?”

  Just at that moment there was a loud rap at the door and a middle-aged man rushed in, exclaiming: “I forgot my shoes here when I called this morning and—”

  “Here they are,” said Padlock Jones, politely handing them to him. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

  Our visitor put on the shoes slowly and then, resting his feet on the desk, began: “I have been robbed of $3,000 worth of diamonds by a young woman employed in my jewelry store. I don’t want to go to the police. They never find anything. I heard of your wonderful work in discovering ‘who hit Billy Patterson,’ and finding out ‘where is my boy to-night,’ and I concluded that if anybody could trace this woman and recover the diamonds, you could.”

  “Give us the facts,” said Padlock Jones, taking in a fresh supply of cocaine and apparently sinking into profound slumber.

  “It was this way,” the jeweler explained. “The young woman is the daughter of a deceased friend of mine who was in the same business. When he died, I took her into my store for friendship’s sake and because she had acquired a remarkable knowledge of the quality and value of precious stones. She had charge of all the diamonds, and I had full confidence in her. At noon yesterday, she went out to lunch, as usual, but she did not return. I thought at first that she had been detained in some way, but as the time for closing up approached and she did not appear, I became uneasy and looked into the diamond case. A glance was sufficient to show me that a diamond breastpin, several bracelets, and a plate of rings were missing.

  “I did not care to raise an alarm until I had investigated, so I hastened to the girl’s home and inquired for her. She had not been there since morning. I made one discovery, however—namely, that she had met a young man at the corner when she left home after breakfast and had started down town with him. Subsequent inquiries revealed the fact she had been seen with a young man of the same description on Broadway about lunch time.

  “I went to the girl’s home again at midnight, but she had not returned, and she did not come to the store this morning. Nobody else could possibly have taken the diamonds but her. It is clear that she went off with them at the lunch hour, instigated, probably, by the young man. Whether she has already left town or not I don’t know. I do know that if the jewels are not recovered, I am ruined. Can’t you help me, Mr. Jones?”

  Padlock Jones picked up some newspapers from the table and began looking over them without a word in reply. Our visitor stared at him and repeated his question.

  Suddenly, Padlock Jones dropped the papers, chuckled, and said: “Go straight up to Beagle’s store. At exactly noon ascend to the third floor, walk down the side aisle, north, till you come to a big crowd of pushing, perspiring women, and there you will find your lady of the diamonds. No, I won’t answer any questions now. You have no time to spare. Drop in this evening and let me know how you get on. Jotson, pass the cocaine.”

  In a few seconds, Padlock Jones’s eyes closed, and I knew it would be of no use to question him.

  Three hours later, the jeweler rushed into the room, shook my friend’s hand violently, and exclaimed: “It turned out just as you said. She was there, right in the middle of a mob of women who were trying to get at a silk counter. When I laid my hand on her shoulder, she broke down and confessed. It was the old story. She was in love with the young man, who is doubtless a scamp, and took the diamonds at his suggestion to provide money for the wedding. She had pawned them, and was to marry the man this evening and leave the city at once. She gave me the pawn tickets and nearly all the money she got on the jewels, and I let her go for the sake of her family. But, Mr. Jones, how on earth did you know that she would be at that store and at that counter at noon?”

  “Ha! ha!” laughed Padlock Jones. “I have never had a simpler case. I am surprised that you should have come to me at all. Here was a young woman who made off with $3,000 worth of diamonds yesterday and who must have plenty of money in her purse to-day. Here is an advertisement of Beagle’s in this morning’s papers that they will sell for three hours only to-day—from 12 to 3 p.m.—twenty-two-dollar silk waists at $9.99. Is not the deduction plain? Would your young woman or any other young woman with money miss that sale even if she risked state prison by going to the store? I thought not, and I was about right, wasn’t I? Oh, for a case that has at least an appearance of mystery in it!”

  A Bedlamite

  W.L. Riordan

  This is the second of two Padlock Jones parodies by newspaperman William L. Riordan (1861-1909). It appeared in the Oct. 25 edition of The New York Times.

  “Observe that man walking ahead of us,” said Padlock Jones as we turned into Candlestickmaker Street on the way to our lodging.

  “I say, observe the man,” he continued. “Don’t merely look at him, that will tell you nothing. Observe him, and tell me what you make of him.”

  “He seems to be an ordinary portly businessman, rather in a hurry,” I ventured, “but we would meet a dozen such men in two or three blocks. I notice nothing peculiar about him.”

  “You mean to say that you cannot even tell where he comes from?” asked Padlock Jones gazing at me with unaffected surprise.

  “I cannot,” I replied, rather nettled.

  “Well, well, Jotson, I fear I will have to give you up as a pupil in the science of deduction. I thought I observed in you signs of almost human intelligence in that little affair of the stolen diamonds, but it seems that even I can be mistaken. Anyhow, I will try you once more. Now, observe that man again. Can’t you see that he is from Brooklyn?”

  “I can’t say I do,” I answered.

  “Ha, ha!” laughed Padlock Jones. “This is an example of the A B C of my science. Don’t you see how he walks with squared elbows, as if he were trying to force his way through a crowd? Now, nobody does that except a football player in daily practice or a man who is accustomed to cross the Brooklyn Bridge in the rush hours. His age and build preclude the idea that he plays football now, whatever he may have done a quarter of a century ago. Isn’t the deduction plain?

  “But that is not all. Put on your glasses and look at the seams of the man’s coat. Don’t you see that they are stretched almost to the bursting point, and that the coattails are perceptibly dragged down? That is an infallible indication of recent and regular participation in Brooklyn Bridge crushes. It is possible to be mistaken once in a hundred times about the elbows, but you can’t be mistaken about those seams and coattails. If I were asked in a court of ju
stice to give still further proof I would say confidently: ‘Let that man remove his shirt and you will find bruises under the fourth rib and,—but hello! Our Brooklynite is making for our den!”

  So he was. A few minutes later, he was standing before us in Padlock Jones’s study, saying. “I have come to see you, Mr. Jones, about a painful matter. I am John W. Hawkins—”

  “Of Brooklyn,” my friend interrupted.

  “Ah, you have heard of me?” queried our visitor.

  “Never,” replied Padlock Jones. “Only one of my little deductions. Now, what can I do for you?”

  After an embarrassing silence, Mr. Hawkins said: “I have a son, just of age: a handsome boy, but he has been—er—feeble-minded from boyhood. About two months ago I was advised to send him to a sanitarium near Central Park—here is the address—and I determined to try it. I received somewhat favorable reports of his condition till this morning, when the physician in charge of the sanitarium telephoned me that the boy had disappeared. I did not care for the publicity that would attend a police search, and I thought that such a search would be fruitless anyhow. So, having heard of your marvelous success in finding the elusive north pole without leaving your room, I come to you for help. The boy is altogether harmless, but I fear he may come to harm in this great city after having lived so long in the quiet glades of Brooklyn.”

  “Pass the thinker, Jotson,” was Padlock Jones’s only comment, as he bared his arm for the cocaine. Having taken in the usual supply, he yawned, threw his feet over the desk, and said: “Come in at 8 o’clock this evening, Mr. Hawkins, and I will lead you to the boy all right. No, not a word now. Good day.”

  At the appointed time Mr. Hawkins was on hand. Padlock Jones led us to the street, hailed an automobile, pushed us in, and called out: “To the Circle!”