Sherlock Holmes Edwardian Parodies and Pastiches I

by Bill Peschel

The doomed man, ruined by his own self-complacency, merely smiled in his superior manner, not noticing the eager look with which Doyle awaited his answer.

  “Wrong entirely. I neither wrote any telegram, nor spoke any message, since I left London.”

  “Ah, no,” cried Doyle. “I see where I went astray. You merely inquired the way to my house.”

  “I needed to make no inquiries. I followed the rear light of the automobile part way up the hill, and, when that disappeared, I turned to the right instead of to the left, as there was no one out on such a night from whom I could make inquiry.”

  “My deductions, then, are beside the mark,” said Doyle hoarsely, in an accent which sent cold chills up and down the spine of his invited guest but conveyed no intimation of his fate to the self-satisfied later arrival.

  “Of course they were,” said Holmes, with exasperating self-assurance.

  “Am I also wrong in deducting that you have had nothing to eat since you left London?”

  “No, you are quite right there.”

  “Well, oblige me by pressing that electric button.”

  Holmes did so with much eagerness, but, although the trio waited some minutes in silence, there was no response.

  “I deduct from that,” said Doyle, “that the servants have gone to bed. After I have quite satisfied all your claims in the way of hunger for food and gold, I shall take you back in my motor car, unless you prefer to stay here the night.”

  “You are very kind,” said Sherlock Holmes.

  “Not at all,” replied Doyle. “Just take that chair, draw it up to the table, and we will divide the second swag.”

  The chair indicated differed from all others in the room. It was straightbacked, and its oaken arms were covered by two plates, apparently of German silver. When Holmes clutched it by the arms to drag it forward, he gave one half articulate gasp, and plunged headlong to the floor, quivering. Sir George Newnes sprang up standing with a cry of alarm. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remained seated, a seraphic smile of infinite satisfaction playing about his lips.

  “Has he fainted?” cried Sir George.

  “No, merely electrocuted. A simple device the Sheriff of New York taught me when I was over there last.”

  “Plunged headlong to the floor, quivering.”

  “Merciful heavens! Cannot he be resuscitated?”

  “My dear Newnes,” said Doyle, with the air of one from whose shoulders a great weight is lifted, “a man may fall into the chasm at the foot of the Reichenbach Fall and escape to record his adventures later, but when two thousand volts pass through the human frame, the person who owns that frame is dead.”

  “You don’t mean to say you’ve murdered him?” asked Sir George, in an awed whisper.

  “Well, the term you use is harsh, still, it rather accurately sums up the situation. To speak candidly, Sir George, I don’t think they can indite us for anything more than manslaughter. You see, this is a little invention for the reception of burglars. Every night, before the servants go to bed, they switch on the current to this chair. That’s why I asked Holmes to press the button. I place a small table beside the chair and put on it a bottle of wine, whisky and soda, and cigars. Then, if any burglar comes in, he invariably sits down in the chair to enjoy himself, and so you see, that piece of furniture is an effective method of reducing crime. The number of burglars I have turned over to the parish to be buried will prove that this taking off of Holmes was not premeditated by me. This incident, strictly speaking, is not murder, but manslaughter. We shouldn’t get more than fourteen years apiece, and probably that would be cut down to seven on the ground that we had performed an act for the public benefit.”

  “Apiece!” cried Sir George. “But what have I had to do with it?”

  “Everything, my dear sir, everything. As that babbling fool talked, I saw in your eye the gleam which betokens avarice for copy. Indeed, I think you mentioned the January number. You were therefore accessory before the fact. I simply had to slaughter the poor wretch.”

  Sir George sank back in his chair well nigh breathless with horror. Publishers are humane men who rarely commit crimes; authors, however, are a hardened set who usually perpetrate a felony every time they issue a book. Doyle laughed easily.

  “I’m used to this sort of thing,” he said. “Remember how I killed off the people in The White Company? Now, if you will help me to get rid of the body, all may yet be well. You see, I learned from the misguided simpleton himself that nobody knows where he is to-day. He often disappears for weeks at a time, so there really is slight danger of detection. Will you lend a hand?”

  “I suppose I must,” cried the conscience-stricken man.

  Doyle at once threw off the lassitude which the coming of Sherlock Holmes had caused and acted now with an energy which was characteristic of him. Going to an outhouse, he brought the motor car to the front door, then, picking up Holmes and followed by his trembling guest, he went outside and flung the body into the tonneau behind. He then threw a spade and a pick into the car and covered everything up with a waterproof spread. Lighting the lamps, he bade his silent guest get up beside him, and so they started on their fateful journey, taking the road past the spot where the sailor had been murdered, and dashing down the long hill at fearful speed toward London.

  “Why do you take this direction?” asked Sir George. “Wouldn’t it be more advisable to go further into the country?”

  Doyle laughed harshly.

  “Haven’t you a place on Wimbledon Common? Why not bury him in your garden?”

  “Merciful motors!” cried the horrified man. “How can you propose such a thing? Talking of gardens, why not have buried him in your own, which was infinitely safer than going forward at this pace.”

  “Have no fear,” said Doyle reassuringly, “we shall find him a suitable sepulchre without disturbing either of our gardens. I’ll be in the centre of London within two hours.”

  Sir George stared in affright at the demon driver. The man had evidently gone mad. To London, of all places in the world. Surely that was the one spot on earth to avoid.

  “Stop the motor and let me off,” he cried. “I’m going to wake up the nearest magistrate and confess.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Doyle. “Don’t you see that no person on earth would suspect two criminals of making for London when they have the whole country before them? Haven’t you read my stories? The moment a man commits a crime he tries to get as far away from London as possible. Every policeman knows that, therefore, two men coming into London are innocent strangers, according to Scotland Yard.”

  “But then we may be taken up for fast driving, and think of the terrible burden we carry.”

  “We’re safe on the country roads, and I’ll slow down when we reach the suburbs.”

  It was approaching three o’clock in the morning when a huge motor car turned out of Trafalgar Square, and went eastward along the Strand. The northern side of the Strand was up, as it usually is, and the motor, skilfully driven, glided past the piles of woodpaving blocks, great sombre kettles holding tar, and the general débris of a re-paving convulsion. Opposite Southampton Street, at the very spot so graphically illustrated by George C. Haité on the cover of the Strand Magazine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stopped his motor. The Strand was deserted. He threw pick and shovel into the excavation, and curtly ordered his companion to take his choice of weapons. Sir George selected the pick, and Doyle vigorously plied the spade. In almost less time than it takes to tell it, a very respectable hole had been dug, and in it was placed the body of the popular private detective. Just as the last spadeful was shovelled in place, the stern voice of a policeman awoke the silence, and caused Sir George to drop his pick from nerveless hands.

  “What are you two doing down there?”

  “That’s all right, officer,” said Doyle glibly, as one who had foreseen every emergency. “My friend here is controller of the Strand. When the Strand is up he is responsible, and it has the larg
est circulation in the—I mean it’s up oftener than any other street in the world. We cannot inspect the work satisfactorily while traffic is on, and so we have been examining it in the nighttime. I am his secretary; I do the writing, you know.”

  “Oh, I see,” replied the constable. “Well, gentlemen, good morning to you, and merry Christmas.”

  “The same to you, constable. Just lend a hand, will you?”

  The officer of the law helped each of the men up to the level of the road.

  As Doyle drove away from the ill-omened spot he said:—

  “Thus have we disposed of poor Holmes in the busiest spot on earth, where no one will ever think of looking for him, and we’ve put him away without even a Christmas box around him. We have buried him for ever in the Strand.”

  The Adventure of the Jersey Girl

  Bill Peschel

  In his remaining years, Mark Twain devoted his energies to dictating his memoirs, a monumental outpouring of stories and opinions that he told, not in chronological order, but as they came to him. Although he embargoed them for a century, excerpts were printed in his lifetime. Currently, The Mark Twain Project at the University of California has been working to publish the complete Autobiography.

  But not everything has been collected. Around 2000, I bought a box of old papers at a warehouse auction in Carlisle, Pa. There was nothing about the box that suggested there were treasures within. It contained a jumble of handwritten papers, receipts, advertising circulars, crumbling newsprint, and other ephemera. It certainly held no value to its original owner, who had scrawled “BURN THIS” on the side.

  An examination of the pages, however, revealed that they were nothing less than Mark Twain’s tales of his adventures with Sherlock Holmes and his circle. Dictated to a secretary as part of his autobiography, he chose for some reason not to publish them. Apparently, the box was given to a maid who, instead of following instructions, took the box home. Perhaps she frugally intended to use the paper to light her household fires. Eventually, the box was sealed and stored and passed through the family over the years until it was disposed of in Carlisle.

  This is the fourth story to be transcribed and edited for publication. “The Adventure of the Whyos,” was published as an ebook single. “The Humorist’s Curse” appears in The Early Punch Parodies of Sherlock Holmes, and “The Adventure of the Stomach Club Papers” in Sherlock Holmes Victorian Parodies and Pastiches, 1888-1899. Each volume in the 223B Casebook Series will contain another story.

  “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.” When I read that passage in A Scandal in Bohemia, I blushed for him. He must have met many women in Baker Street, in as many shades of color and morality. If he paid attention to them as people instead of puzzles to solve, he would not have made such an extraordinary statement. Or maybe Watson got it wrong, which wouldn’t surprise me. He was an impetuous and decisive lad when I knew him back in ’67, always haring off on a new line by instinct and without thinking.

  I can speak as an authority on Irene Adler because I knew the woman, and while I am not ass enough to call her the woman, she certainly was a woman. More so than most, even. She was—but now I see I have plunged too deep into my story, so let me back out, recover my breath, and try again.

  I met Miss Adler in Heidelberg. I had taken the family to Europe to gather material for a travel book that would become A Tramp Abroad. Don’t go ciphering through it for her. Read as hard as you can, but not a ghost of her you will find unless you know the whole story of the count, the no-account, the castle, the duel, the—but there I go, getting ahead of myself. I have never told this story. I was afraid even to confine it to my notebooks. It would not bring credit to anyone, least of all to myself. If I were not writing my autobiography for posterity, to be read a century in the future when no one alive today will care, I would remain as silent as the grave.

  It occurs to me now that the times I have found myself in improbable and dangerous situations have been at the hands of Holmes. If ever a person was marked for trouble, it was him, even when he was not at his post ferreting out wrong-doers. When I add up the suppressible parts of my life that involve him, Watson, Mycroft, Miss Adler, and his other associates, it inspires me to wonder about the morals of the deity who cursed them.

  I see that now I’ve gone sideways in my story, so let me start again. As I said, I had brought my family and servants to stay for several months in Heidelberg. We lived in the Hotel Schloss, on a hill above the noble ruin of Heidelberg Castle, which itself overlooked the town that nestled alongside the swift Neckar River. It was a pretty location. The river had spent millennia cutting a gorge with steep ridges and sweeps of wooded foliage stretched unbroken all the way to the summit.

  Our hotel had a peculiar feature that in a just world would be recreated in any building which held a commanding view. This was the presence of long, narrow parlors clinging to the outside of the building. We had two of these bird-cages attached to our corner room. One looked downriver over the castle and town, and the other looked upriver. It was a peaceful feeling to stand there on a summer night, smoking a cigar, feeling the warm breeze, and hearing the rumble of the Neckar over her dikes and dams. At your feet the massive block of the Castle rose from the trees, broken and beaten-down in places, functioning in others, but always bearing proudly its mantle of royal authority. Beyond it the intricate cobweb of streets were lit by the twinkling of gas lamps and the row of lights on the bridges flung shimmering lances across the water. The effect made it appear as if the land was shaped by stars scattered by the creator’s hand.

  How the days faded from one to the next! I had rented a room across the river for my study and I would stay there until 4 p.m., scribbling at the story or translating one of the German fairy tales to drop in where needed, then walk back across the bridge, through the narrow streets and up past the Castle to the hotel. I was not lionized as I was in London. I could walk the town like a Parisian flaneur marveling at the charming views and taking notes for the next day’s writing. The evenings were spent in my glassed-in bird-cage, smoking my cigars in the company of Livy and the children and watching Heidelberg shift its coat from auburn to gold to copper, fading to night, as comforting a feeling as Adam and Eve must have experienced in the garden.

  My downfall began with an errand. My longtime friend from Hartford, the Rev. Joe Twichell, was expected in Heidelberg in a few days. We intended to spend several days tramping about the Black Forest region in pursuit of the book and meet up with the family in Lausanne, Switzerland. But Livy had heard rumors in town that an opera was about to break out, and I was dispatched to seek news of the riot and, if true, to procure tickets to it. The family has a passion for theatre. They would probably enjoy it more if I were not in attendance. I can appreciate a show if my subconscious would let me. I had a surfeit of theatres when I was a reporter for the San Francisco Call. I would have a full day’s work, and always finish up by going to seven theatres every evening. I had to write something about each of them, and I could only afford ten minutes here, a quarter of an hour there. The result is when I go to a playhouse now and I have been there about fifteen minutes or half an hour, I fidget around, thinking, “I shall get all behind if I stay here any longer.”

  Then there’s opera, which I would enjoy more if there were less singing. An opera performed with a total absence of singing would represent the acme of the art.

  I abandoned my desk early the next day and ambled down the road and into town, prepared to exercise my German to find the opera house. My ability with the language is perfect: I always understand what it is about, and it always does not understand me. I’ve aired my views on the awful German language before and the intervening years have not altered my opinions. I learned well enough to read the newspapers but ciphering speech required more time than I could devote. The language has a perverse sense of humor. It delights in making females out of words that are without dispute male and the reverse. It agreeably considers a woman to be fe
male until she becomes a wife, when she is neutered. A fish is always a male, no matter how it conducts itself to another fish. The language also enjoys creating new words by slamming together the words that make up its constituent parts, turning them into mountain ranges of letters that fence off part of the page. And when two words of different genders collide for the first time, only heaven will know which will dominate.

  It took numerous questions to passers-by and an impromptu aria to demonstrate to one mutton-headed Heidelberger what I sought, and I was directed to a building at Theaterstrasse 10.

  Compared to the grand houses I’ve seen, the opera house in Heidelberg was but a town hall with ambitions. It was a modest brick structure of three stories. The only sign it gave of its occupation was through the generous installation of doors and steps in the front. Inside there was a row of ticket cages, one of which was occupied by a man. I directed my inquiry to him. My luck was bad: There were tickets available for the last performance of Tristan and Isolde, two nights hence. If Twichell was on schedule, I would see him that afternoon, take in the noise, and leave for the Black Forest the next day. I secured the box and palmed my change when a door from the auditorium crashed opened followed by a whirlwind.

  Walking backwards was a young woman who was very tastefully dressed and very beautiful except for the anger than inflamed her cheeks. She was softly hissing a stream of German toward the finely dressed tall gentleman pursuing her. She had her arms open to him; clearly she was pleading, and he was angrily denying her words with vigorous chops of his hand. He also stabbed the ground with his cane, giving him the air of an elegant stick insect. I could only grasp a few words, but none that made any sense of the source of the troubles, before she turned to flee him and crashed into me.

  My pfennigs and marks scattered like grain seeds in a whirlwind, and to keep myself from falling I held her tightly. She repaid the clutch with interest, and the heavy folds of her dress provided an admirable counterweight that kept me from conferring with the floor. I was close enough to smell her jasmine, and as she was my height I could see into her rich alluring brown eyes.