AHMM, March 2008
Page 17
4 People who tended to “take lodgings” were generally bachelors, spinsters, widows, out-of-towners, or working people who had missed their trains out of London. All sought economical accommodations and were willing to sacrifice some degree of privacy. Unless one was willing to pay top dollar, the quality of the rooms and service was certainly not up to the level of a hotel, and landladies could be both solicitous and baldly opportunistic, charging extra for any variety of amenities. “Lodging houses,” declared Punch magazine cheekily in its January-June 1842 issue, “[a]re distinguished by square inscriptions wafered to squares of glass, which usually intimate a desire on the part of the exhibitors (generally blooming widows) to share their domiciles with a ‘single gentleman.’ When introduced to the lady, she declares that everything is ‘clean and comfortable’ especially the window-curtains, whose colour cannot be seen for the dust; and the bed-room which was fumigated by the last lodger with tobacco smoke."
Still, Mrs. Warren's sole lodger may count himself fortunate (or sufficiently well funded) to have avoided the typical London boarding house, where the residents were more numerous and the scene slightly more disorderly. London Characters and the Humorous Side of London Life (1870), by Henry Mayhew et al., described such an environment as “neither public nor private,” a living situation in which “individual freedom is lost, and, instead of living an independent life as at an hotel, the members of a ‘circle’ find themselves surrounded by such amenities as may be supposed to belong a rather large and singularly disunited family."
5 A fictitious newspaper.
6 “But surely a letter (which could have been addressed simply to Mrs. Warren's lodger, without a name) would have been more secret than a newspaper entry that could be read by anyone!” remarks D. Martin Dakin. He proposes that the lodger garnered a sort of thrill out of acting clandestinely and courting risk—a tendency that Holmes, for that matter, often displayed himself.
7 This reference to the Daily Gazette was to the Daily Telegraph in the original manuscript, the agony columns of which Holmes referred to in “The Six Napoleons.” Watson apparently determined, for reasons unknown, to change the name of the actual newspaper; he slipped up and used the real name in the manuscript, only to correct his slip-up later.
8 The word “that” appears in the Strand Magazine and American texts; it has been amended to “there” in the English first edition of His Last Bow.
9 For some reason, the word “lawyer” appears here in the manuscript in place of “lodger.” Watson may have had legal problems on his mind at the time of writing up his notes, presumably in late 1910 or early 1911. By that time, Watson's writings had been widely published and pirated (in America especially), and Watson must have had frequent need to consult his solicitors.
10 This sentence and the previous sentence have been added to the manuscript.
11 The phrase is “a beautiful woman” in the manuscript.
12 He has apparently already done so, unless the attack on Mr. Warren was mere hooliganism.
13 The manuscript reads nineteen, which under no circumstances could be correct. Watson apparently checked the results against his notes later.
14 See “The Secret Message,” page 137, for a discussion of the cipher.
15 In the manuscript, this question was followed by the line, “Scribbling a note, he rang for Mrs. Warren and directed her to drive with it instantly to Scotland Yard.” Apparently Watson subsequently recollected the true events and corrected the manuscript. Spencer Kennedy notes that if in fact Mrs. Warren had delivered the note, Holmes and Watson would not have met the Pinkerton agent, and it is probable that Watson's realisation of this spurred his memory.
16 See also “The Empty House,” in which Holmes misquotes in a slightly different manner Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene 3.
17 The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was founded by Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884),a Scotsman who emigrated to Illinois in 1842. He settled in West Dundee, near Chicago, and opened up a cooper's shop there. An ardent abolitionist, Pinkerton allowed his shop to serve as one of the many stations on the Under-ground Railroad.
While chopping wood one day on an uninhabited island in Fox River, Pinkerton stumbled upon evidence that led to the arrest and capture of a gang of counterfeiters. His pivotal role in bringing down the gang resulted in his being named deputy sheriff of Kane County in 1846, then the first city detective of Chicago's police force. But Pinkerton quickly saw that he would never make his fortune as a cop. In 1850, he left the Chicago force to start his own private detective agency, the first of its kind in Chicago and one of only a handful in the country.
Pinkerton National Detective Agency specialised in train robberies and achieved many spectacular successes, including no less than the thwarting of an 1861 assassination attempt on President-elect Lincoln in Baltimore. During the Civil War, Pinkerton worked for the Union side, heading an organisation that gathered intelligence on Confederate activity. After the war, detectives from the Pinkerton Agency infiltrated and broke up the Molly Maguires, an Irish-American secret society that controlled Pennsylvania's coal-mining industry (events central to The Valley of Fear).The sign above the door of the agency featured the motto “We Never Sleep” accompanying an illustration of an eye, an indelible image that gave rise to the term “private eye.” Among the sixteen books attributed to Pinkerton (as part of “Allan Pinkerton's Detective Stories") are The Molly Maguires and the Detectives(1877), viewed by many historians now as a highly biased work on the labour dispute, and Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches(1879).
It is unlikely that Pinkerton himself and Holmes ever met, although some scholars posit a trip to America by Holmes prior to the 1881 events of A Study in Scarlet.While Holmes may have been intrigued by the idea of establishing an “agency” (a term he himself uses in “The Sussex Vampire"), he would likely have been appalled at Pinkerton's lack of education in the “science of detection,” which Holmes essentially invented.
Many chronologists place the events of “The Red Circle” in 1902, at which point Pinkerton's sons, Robert and William, would have been in charge, having taken over the agency upon Pinkerton's death in 1882. Clearly, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was eminently qualified to investigate the events at hand. But who, exactly, is the Pinkerton client in this case?
18 “The mystery, on true Sherlockian principles, is that there are no caves on Long Island,” writes Christopher Morley, the quintessential New Yorker, in “Was Sherlock Holmes an American?” W. E. Edwards suggests that the word was “cove,” noting that Glen Cove is a landmark for the golfer and the starch-manufacturer. David H. Galerstein, in “A Solution to the Long Island Cave Mystery,” proposes a man-made cave on the north shore of Long Island.
Other scholars challenge the assumption that Long Island, NY, was meant: Long Island, Tennessee, and Long Island, Alabama, are suggested. D. Martin Dakin proposes that Cave (spelled with a capital) was the name of the criminal or victim involved. William Ulrich makes the interesting suggestion that the “Cave” referred to was a term used to describe a cell of the Bohemian Brethren, a secret society, located on Long Island.
In “Case Closed: The Long Island Cave Mystery,” appearing in Mandate for Murder, however, Steven T. Doyle demonstrates that this must refer to the “Brentwood Cave Man” mystery detailed in a series of articles appearing in The Brooklyn Eagle commencing in July 5, 1891. The articles detail the capture of the notorious robber Thomas Richardson and the discovery of Richardson's use of a cave near Jamaica, Long Island, as his hideout.
19 In the manuscript, Holmes responds,"What, the Black Hand Captain?” Evidently Watson (perhaps fearing reprisal) determined at this point to conceal the identity of the organisation of which Gorgiano was a member and changed the title of the manuscript.
20 “There has never been anything in the world absolutely like Notting Hill,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904). “There will never be anything q
uite like it to the crack of doom.” Formerly open countryside that was built up with houses, villas, and shops, Notting Hill was an area “at once urban and suburban,” in the words of historian Peter Ackroyd, cyclically cursed with periods of rejuvenation and decline. Ackroyd quotes an 1860s issue of Building News in describing the beleaguered neighbourhood as “a graveyard of buried hopes ... naked carcasses, crumbling decorations, fractured walls, slimy cement. All who touch them lose heart and money by the venture.” In a further display of its feast-or-famine history, the neighbourhood, the setting for the fluffy eponymous romantic comedy film Notting Hill (1999), now epitomises what one long-time resident, British filmmaker Stephen Frears, in a recent Los Angeles Timesinterview, calls “trendy-spendy” London, with shops selling $300 eyeglasses and cafes serving spaghettini with caramelized squid.
21 The concept that a British citizen should not be compelled to incriminate him- or herself had existed since the mid-seventeenth century, when it was written into British common law. At that time, both interrogation and the trial process were handled by the courts; with the introduction of the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829, the task of interrogation was transferred from the magistrates to the police. Yet official policy on the rules of police interrogation remained somewhat muddled until 1912, when passage of the Judges’ Rules established the administrative guideline (but not concrete law) that, prior to questioning a suspect, a police officer had to inform him or her of the right to remain silent.
Even though informing a suspect of these rights may not have become standard procedure until 1912, the London police did attempt to adhere to an unofficial protocol in the years before. Eight years prior to the passage of the Judges’ Rules, Lord Brampton, in an “Address to the Police on their Duties,” reproduced in the Police Code of 1904, carefully delineated between the process of investigation and that of interrogation. He explained that when one was attempting to discover the perpetrator of a crime, asking questions of any person who might have had relevant information was acceptable. The rules changed, however, at the moment arrest was imminent. Lord Brampton wrote that when “a Constable had a warrant to arrest, or is about to arrest a person on his own authority, or has a person in custody for a crime, it is wrong to question such person touching the crime of which he is accused.... On arresting a man a Constable ought simply to read his warrant, or tell the accused the nature of the charge upon which he is arrested, leaving it to the person so arrested to say anything or nothing as he pleases.... [H]e ought not, by anything he says or does, to invite or encourage an accused person to make any statement, without first cautioning him that he is not bound to say anything tending to criminate himself, and that anything he says may be used against him."
Although Signora Lucca apparently was not herself a suspect (but see note 23), Holmes here was apparently thinking of the general rule of British law that a spouse might not be compelled to testify against his or her spouse.
22 The Carbonari (Italian for “Charcoal Burners") were members of a secret political society that was active in early nineteenth-century southern Italy and may have originated with the Freemasonry. These dissidents first began agitating for political freedom during the reign of Gioacchino Murat, Napolean's brother-in-law and the king of Naples(1808-1815). Ingeneral, while the Carbonari tended to advocate Italian unification and some form of constitutional and representative government, a more precise agenda was never defined.
As with the Freemasonry and other secret societies, the Carbonari had their own ritual language, gestures, initiation ceremony, and hierarchy (in this case, made up of “apprentices” and “masters"). Their revolutionary fervour spread from Naples to like-minded areas such as Piedmont, the Papal States, Bologna, Parma, and Modena; and to other countries, including Spain and France. In 1831, the nationalist Risorgimento movement was formed and eventually subsumed most of the Carbonari.
Violent uprising and assassination attempts characterized the
Carbonari movement, but still, the political aims of the group seem at odds with the “dreadful” terrorist society Signora Lucca describes here. This incongruence may be explained by the fact that in the manuscript, Gennaro is linked to “the famous Camorra” rather than to the Carbonari. The Camorra remained in existence through the end of the nineteenth century and had an agenda that was more criminal than political, and therefore it is likely that Gennaro was in fact ensnared by the Camorra rather than the Carbonari. Watson, fearing repercussions for his portrayal of Gennaro's terrifying countryman, must have thought better of his initial candour and altered the reference to a Neapolitan society far less likely to seek retribution.
In “Secret Societies of Some Sort: Mafia, Camorra, and Carboneria,” appearing in Mandate for Murder, Gianluca Salvatori explores the history of these organisations in more detail.
23 Daniel Griffin concludes that Emilia lied about who was pursuing whom, that she had run off with Gorgiano and that Gennaro Lucca pursued them. John Hall, in Sidelights on Holmes,poses much the same theory, except that in his version, Lucca killed his wife, disguised himself as a woman, killed Gorgiano, and then emerged as “Signora” Lucca, to test the waters as to his own safety.
24 In “My Name is Barelli—Augusto Barelli,” appearing in Mandate for Murder, Enrico Solito convincingly argues that one Giuseppe Maria Mirabelli was the real Augusto Barelli, father of “Emilia Lucca,” and suggests that Emilia was actually Mirabelli's daughter Clotilde. Domenico Bonanno, an Italian-born New York fruit importer, was the actual “Tito Castalotte,” and his brother Giuseppe Bonanno was likely concealed as “Zampa,” the partner of “Castalotte.” Solito also proposes that the Red Circle was orginally a benevolent political group, but with Gorgiano at its head, the organisation abandoned its political ideals and became a criminal society.
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