Sherlock Holmes Edwardian Parodies and Pastiches I

by Bill Peschel

  “The problem turns out to be childishly simple,” he said. My astonishment was unmeasured. To me, the problem seemed absolutely baffling. The Unthankful Gentleman lifted his head out of his hands and made a gallant effort to cheer up.

  “First, as to your identity,” began the Eighth Wonder of the World. “Your use of the adjective alleged to qualify the noun Providence betrays the journalist, desirous to avoid a suit for libel. You are, then, a journalist.”

  “Holmes, you are nothing short of miraculous!” I cried.

  “Dry up, Watson,” he returned curtly. I shriveled.

  “The next question is: To what school of journalistic thought do you belong? I think we may refer you without debate to the pessimistic school. Now to narrow down the inquiry to the vanishing point. Your aversion from (I see you prefer the English preposition) turkey and cranberry sauce is a clue, and your use of the word academically is another. And as you are beyond question the dismallest, dankest, glummest, gloomiest gentleman it has ever been my pleasure to meet, I conceive you, sir, to be the editor of the Evening Post.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful!” I cried.

  “You are not mistaken,” said the Unthankful Gentleman, sepulchrally. “You have indeed recalled me to my identity, and I hope I shall not again so far forget myself. But, sir, the original object of my visit remains unaccomplished—”

  “Oh, as to that,” replied Holmes with a yawn, “your reason for participating in the observance of Thanksgiving Day is the peculiar advantage you possess over your lamented grandfather. You should be thankful that you are alive.”

  “A thousand thanks, my dear sir!” cried the once Unthankful Gentleman, in a voice now comparatively cheerful. “May I beg you to dine with me on November 30th at the Academic Club? It would be almost a pleasure.”

  “I regret to say,” replied Holmes, “that on November 30th I have an important engagement in Van Diemen’s Land. Good night, sir. Look out for the ninth step from the bottom; there’s a board loose. Good night.”

  “How in the world, Holmes,” I cried, when he returned to the laboratory, “how in the world shall you get to Van Diemen’s Land by November 30th?”

  “Tush, Watson,” he answered, with a mysterious smile.

  Catesbys’ Cork Lino Ad

  Anonymous

  Another unauthorized ad, this time featuring “Shomes” and “Potson” and giving an alternative explanation of his disappearance. This appeared in The Strand for December. It is reproduced without the excessive bolding and italicizing used to draw the hasty reader’s eye to the selling points of lino.

  When people leave off talking about the blessings of Catesbys’ Cork Lino, they start asking one another why Herlock Shomes has given up detective work, and so many false rumours are in circulation that I feel it my duty, as a medical man, to publish the true facts of the final exit of Herlock Shomes. You must know, then, that at about eight o’clock one Monday morning (rent time) I called on Herlock to get his opinion about the colour of some Catesbys’ Cork Lino I had chosen for my floors. The extraordinary man was breakfasting, and his fare was, you will hardly believe me, a Plato’ Lamb and Bacon. But Shomes was always peculiarly studious.

  “Herlock,” I said, “I have a question for you which—”

  “All the designs are equally good. Leave it to Catesby,” he interrupted, promptly, with his mouth full.

  “Hounds and Baskervilles! How did you guess my errand?”

  “By a simple process of deduction, my dear Potson. Everyone prefers to discuss Catesby’s Cork Lino rather than any other topic, and my landlady, Mrs. Hudson, was only a moment ago consulting me as to samples similar to those you are carrying in your hand.” The corners of his mouth stretched from ear to ear—a sure sign he was amused. “Today,” he went on, “I shall devote to tracking the missing Russian Chief of Tactics, General Kutusoff, who is somewhere in this country. General Kuropatkin wires that ‘one man may make all the difference.’ He implores me to spare no pains, and has sent a wax impression of the General’s foot. It is a yard long, so that I shall easily recognise the trail. Meanwhile, as it is necessary for me to be in good form, I’ll now play ‘Hiawatha’ two or three times on my violin and then—”

  At that point I left.

  Late that night, when I sat writing the strange case of “The South-Western Railway Guard Who Did Not Wear a Red Tie,” a message summoned me to Bow Street—I mean Baker Street.

  Directly I entered the room I felt something terrible had happened. “Potson,” said Herlock Shomes, sadly, “I wish to return you your long ulster, which I’ve been wearing for many years. It represents the conquest of Catesbys’ Cork Lino and the departure of dust. I shall never wear this garment again.”

  “You are not yourself,” I muttered, hoarsely.

  “Potson,” he continued, “Catesbys’ Cork Lino has brought my career as a detective to an end. It ended the reign of floor scrubbing, and it now ends the reign of all signs of dust. I am unable to fulfill my promise to the Russian Army, which must struggle on without the General with the large feet. The fact is, Catesbys’ Cork Lino has rendered useless my famous foot and finger-print investigations, on which I entirely rely. To-day I have examined, with my powerful magnifying glass, palaces, cottages, country houses, London flats. All in vain. Catesbys’ Cork Lino is on every floor, and unlike dust-ridden oilcloth or carpet, the Lino keeps scrupulously clean and does not harbor a particle of dust. Not a trace of a footprint is allowed to remain on it, because it is so easy to clean. It can be kept spotless without the slightest trouble or toil, and the occupation of Shomes is gone. Catesby has beaten me, Potson; but I bear him no grudge. I used to think a lot of Moriarty, I now see that Catesby is the greatest man on earth. I beat Moriarty, Catesby has beaten me.”

  I was deeply moved, and could only nod my assent; for, from a medical point of view, I knew that Catesby, by lightening the labour of the households, was conferring health and strength on countless British housewives. And so, the end of Herlock. Still, if you cannot have always with you Herlock Shomes, you can have—“Catesbied” Homes.

  The Adventure of the Missing Bee

  P.G. Wodehouse

  In “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” published in December’s issue of The Strand, Watson informed us that Holmes “has definitely retired from London and betaken himself to study and bee-farming on the Sussex Downs.” In that same month, “The Adventure of the Missing Bee” appeared in Vanity Fair, leading one to suspect that Conan Doyle tipped his cricket teammate of what was to come.

  (Sherlock Holmes is to retire from public life after Christmas, and take to bee-farming in the country.)

  “It is a little hard, my dear Watson,” said Holmes, stretching his long form on the sofa and injecting another half-pint of morphia with the little jewelled syringe which the Prince of Piedmont had insisted on presenting to him as a reward for discovering who had stolen his nice new rattle; “it is just a little hard that an exhausted, overworked private detective, coming down to the country in search of peace and quiet, should be confronted in the first week by a problem so weird, so sinister, that for the moment it seems incapable of solution.”

  “You refer—?” I said.

  “To the singular adventure of the missing bee, as anybody but an ex-army surgeon equipped with a brain of dough would have known without my telling him.”

  I readily forgave him his irritability, for the loss of his bee had had a terrible effect on his nerves. It was a black business.

  Immediately after arriving at our cottage, Holmes had purchased from the Army and Navy Stores a fine bee. It was docile, busy, and intelligent, and soon made itself quite a pet with us. Our consternation may, therefore, be imagined when, on going to take it out for its morning run, we found the hive empty. The bee had disappeared, collar and all. A glance at its bed showed that it had not been slept in that night. On the floor of the hive was a portion of the insect’s steel chain, snapped. Everything pointed to sinister v
iolence.

  Holmes’ first move had been to send me into the house while he examined the ground near the hive for footsteps. His search produced no result. Except for the small, neat tracks of the bee, the ground bore no marks. The mystery seemed one of those which are destined to remain unsolved through eternity.

  But Holmes was ever a man of action.

  “Watson,” he said to me, about a week after the incident, “the plot thickens. What does the fact that a Frenchman has taken rooms at Farmer Scroggins’ suggest to you?”

  “That Farmer Scroggins is anxious to learn French,” I hazarded.

  “Idiot!” said Holmes, scornfully. “You’ve got a mind like a railway bun. No. If you wish to know the true significance of that Frenchman’s visit, I will tell you. But, in the first place, can you name any eminent Frenchman who is interested in bees?”

  I could answer that.

  “Maeterlinck,” I replied. “Only he is a Belgian.”

  “It is immaterial. You are quite right. M. Maeterlinck was the man I had in my mind. With him bees are a craze. Watson, that Frenchman is M. Maeterlinck’s agent. He and Farmer Scroggins have conspired and stolen that bee.”

  “Holmes!” I said, horrified. “But M. Maeterlinck is a man of the most rigid honesty.”

  “Nobody, my dear Watson, is entirely honest. He may seem so, because he never meets with just that temptation which would break through his honesty. I once knew a bishop who could not keep himself from stealing pins. Every man has his price. M. Maeterlinck’s is bees. Pass the morphia.”

  “But Farmer Scroggins!” I protested. “A bluff, hearty English yeoman of the best type.”

  “May not his heartiness be all bluff?” said Holmes, keenly. “You may take it from me that there is literally nothing that that man would stick at. Murder? I have seen him kill a wasp with a spade, and he looked as if he enjoyed it. Arson? He has a fire in his kitchen every day. You have only to look at the knuckle of the third finger of his left hand to see him as he is. If he is an honest man, why does he wear a made-up tie on Sundays? If he is an upright man, why does he stoop when he digs potatoes? No, Watson, nothing that you can say can convince me that Farmer Scroggins has not a black heart. The visit of this Frenchman—who, as you can see in an instant if you look at his left shoulder-blade, has not only deserted his wife and a large family, but is at this very moment carrying on a clandestine correspondence with an American widow, who lives in Kalamazoo, Mich.—convinces me that I have arrived at the true solution of the mystery. I have written a short note to Farmer Scroggins, requesting him to send back the bee and explaining that all is discovered. And that,” he broke off, “is, if I mistake not, his knock. Come in.”

  The door opened. There was a scuffling in the passage, and in bounded our missing bee, frisking with delight. Our housekeeper followed, bearing a letter. Holmes opened it.

  “Listen to this, Watson,” said Holmes, in a voice of triumph.

  “‘Mr. Giles Scroggins sends his compliments to Mr. Sherlock Holmes, an’ it’s quite true, I did steal that there bee, though how Mr. Holmes found out, Mr. G Scroggins bean’t able to understand. I am flying the country as requested. Please find enclosed 1 (one) bee, and kindly acknowledge receipt to

  ‘Your obedient servant

  ‘G Scroggins

  ‘Enclosure.’”

  “Holmes,” I whispered, awe-struck, “you are one of the most remarkable men I ever met.”

  He smiled, lit his hookah, seized his violin and, to the slow music of that instrument, turned once more to the examination of his test tubes.

  * * *

  Three days later we saw the following announcement in the papers: “M. Maeterlinck, the distinguished Belgian essayist, wishes it to be known that he has given up collecting bees and has taken instead to picture postcards.”

  Sherlock Holmes, Jr., Meets Santa Claus

  Anonymous

  This heartwarming holiday tale of an Americanized son of Watson playing with the son of Sherlock appeared in the Dec. 25 edition of the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

  The Watson boy enters the Sherlock Holmes woodshed and found Sherlock Holmes, Jr. busily engaged deducing the fact that there was a wood pile in front of him, and he was expected to saw and split enough fuel to last a week.

  “Sherl,” said the Watson boy, “do you believe in Santa Claus?”

  “Do I believe it? Cert. Why, don’t you know how I got on his trail last Christmas and ran him down?”

  “No! You didn’t tell me about it. How was it?”

  “Well, pa an’ ma had been telling me all the time that I ought to be a good boy an’ do all the chores as quick and well as I could and go to bed early an’ all that sort of thing, an’ so I did just like pa does when he begins deducing.”

  The Watson boy sat down on the sawbuck and looked at Sherlock Holmes, Jr. with undisguised admiration.

  “What did you deduce?” he asked.

  “In the first place I didn’t deduce anything until Christmas day. The night before, I hung up my stocking like I always do, an’ then I went to bed an’ kept one eye open.”

  “One eye open?”

  “Yep, that’s the way all good detectives sleep, you know.”

  “My! Wasn’t you afraid something would drop in your eye?”

  “No, of course not. So along about midnight, I heard stealthy footsteps in the hail. Now I reasoned to myself, there can’t be footsteps without feet to make them. And there can’t be feet without they belong to someone—”

  “There’s three feet in a yard,” argued the Watson boy.

  “But they don’t make footsteps,” scornfully replied the Holmes boy. “They can’t make footsteps, can they?”

  The Watson boy was silenced and the other resumed.

  “So I kept on listening, and pretty soon the footsteps got right close to my room an’ I hopped out of bed an’ ran to the door.”

  “What did you see? Did you see Santa Claus?”

  “No, I saw pa there in his pajamas. He had his arms full of toys and things.”

  “So it was him that you heard?”

  “No, I told him what I had been listening to an’ how I had reasoned it all out, an’ he patted me on the head and said I’d make a great detective some day, an’ that he had heard the same thing an’ had come to the hall to investigate, and there was Santa Claus sure as you live, an’ pa said he took the presents from Santa Claus an’ was bringing them to me.”

  “But that don’t prove there is a Santa Claus,” said the Watson boy from his place on the sawbuck.

  “It don’t? Look here, pa took me out in the yard the next morning an’ showed me where Santa had slid around in the snow before he got into the house, an’ went through a long string of talk just like he does to your pa when he is ferreting out some big mystery, an’ by jinks, pa had it all dead to rights about Santa.”

  “But how did you deduce?”

  “Easy. Pa’s been busted ever since, and ma didn’t get a single thing she wanted, an’ pa got a smoking jacket that fits him like a baby’s shirt would, an’ don’t look the least like the one Gillette wears, an’ a pair of slippers built for steamboat awnings; so there must be a Santa Claus. Because nobody else but a stranger would come around at night an’ leave such a lot of misfits.”

  The Adventure of the Double Santa Claus

  Bert Leston Taylor

  Taylor’s fourth Holmes story of the year was on a Christmas theme and timed to run in Puck’s Dec. 28 issue.

  Being the three hundred and forty-ninth adventure in the never-to-be-Forgotten Return of Sherlock Holmes

  It was the night before Christmas. Prey to a depression I could not shake off, I sat alone in my old lodgings in Baker Street. I had not seen Sherlock Holmes for six weeks, and I feared the worst. Holmes, I knew, had received a letter from Dr. Conan Doyle, threatening him with death, but he treated it lightly. Doyle had threatened him before, and it had come to nothing. “Watson,” he said, with his enigmatic smil
e. “Watson, I am immortal.”

  I was unable to share his optimism. Dr. Conan Doyle was a desperate man, who, harassed by editors, would stop at nothing. As the weeks passed and no word of Holmes reached me, suspicion that my friend was no more grew into certainty, and I mourned for him in the laboratory where so often I had watched him busy over test tubes. Never again, I thought, should I hear his familiar sharp in-drawing of the breath: never again should I meet him at Paddington for the 11:15 train, or run about London to insert want ads in the newspapers at his command; never again hear him say, “Watson, there has been devilish work here” or “Come, Watson, our task is finished” or “You remember, Watson, what Goethe said” or “Can your patients spare you for a few days, Watson?”

  I glanced moodily at the Persian slipper in which Holmes kept his tobacco; at the wash pitcher which held his supply of matches. I was even more sharply reminded of his absence by the reflection that my medical practice was picking up again.

  A rap at the door cut short my meditations. Hopefully I sprang up, only to taste disappointment. An expressman had arrived with a trunk. On it was tacked a card, a message in Holmes’ handwriting. It read: “In case of accident, notify Dr. Watson, Baker Street, London.”

  One glance at the contents of the trunk, and I fell back with a cry of horror. A human body, horribly mangled, as if by an explosion of dynamite, was before me! Dr. Conan Doyle had kept his word! He had blown up Sherlock Holmes, and he had made a complete job of it!