Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches II

by Bill Peschel

  The paper he exhibited read:

  We have gracy Golitely. Will hold her for ransome however she acts. Send fifty thousand dollers as we dirrect, or nevver look uppon your Aunt again!!!

  Kid Knapp.

  “What was her pet philanthropy?” asked Craig Kennedy, his brows meeting above his nose as he scowled out the words.

  “Oh, it was a worthy cause enough,” said young Ensign. “It was providing butlers for butlerless butler’s pantries. You know how every little one-horse house has its butler’s pantry. And they never even dream of getting a butler to put in it. Well, Aunt Gracie thought it a shame for good pantries to go to waste, and so she devoted her life to installing butlers in ’em, and willed her fortune to the cause. But all of a sudden she soured on it, and decided to leave her kale to me and Minna. Minna’s my wife. So Auntie came last night to settle up matters, and now she—she’s kidnaped. Of course, the Butlers’ Association is behind it. They employed Kid Knapp to do the deed, but they’re financing the scheme. Will you find her?”

  “Will we!” chorused the English-speaking detectives. But the French ones piped up: “Cherchez la femme!”

  “All right, chasses and cherchez,” said Holmes, which is harder to say than it looks.

  “Aren’t there any clues?” asked Rouletabille, shaking his round head around in a circle.

  “Here’s Aunt’s picture.” And Mr. Ensign drew a photograph from his pocket.

  It looked—well, you know what a photograph of a professional dancer looks like. It was a study in emotional motion. They all studied it for a long moment.

  “Your Aunt?” said Holmes doubtingly.

  “Well, my great-aunt,” corrected young Ensign. “She—”

  But nobody heeded him. They were photographing the finger-prints on the cardboard. Then Craig Kennedy said, abstractedly: “I suppose you haven’t a drop of her blood with you—no?—too bad. I’d like to try my seismospygamajig on it. That would—”

  “Some pearls!” commented Arsene Lupin, nodding at the jewelry-counter effect of Grace Golightly’s swan-like throat.

  “They were,” sighed the nephew, “but she sold them for the benefit of those boob butlers! I’d like to recover her before she sloughs off the rest of her dinky doodaddles. You know what theatrical people are!”

  “Any further clues?” saturnined Holmes.

  “Yes, here’s the broken cuff-link and the shreds of dark woolen material, picked up where the body wasn’t found. Oh, sirs, do you think you can restore to me my darling aunt?”

  The young man’s grief was pitiable, and Holmes said instantly: “Yes, of course. Those clues clear up the situation amazingly! I now see the abductor is a man of five-feet-nine, wears ten-and-a-half socks, parts his hair on one side, and had the measles when a child. Your aunt’s dress is a bit old-fashioned,” he observed coldly to his client.

  “Yes,” agreed Ensign, “but it’s better than nothing.”

  “Perhaps so,” said Lecoq. “Do we start now, Chief?”

  “Yes,” said Holmes with a slight shade of saturninity. “Go ahead, and cherchez that femme.”

  “Has the light snow fallen?” Dupin looked anxious.

  “Yes, of course; the footprints wait without. Go!”

  They went.

  Holmes trailed his white finger-tips from his left temple to his right one, and reaching for his violin, began to play “When We Were Twenty-one.”

  “Gracie Golightly!” he said reminiscently. “Was it in ‘The Black Crook,’ or—”

  “I say,” broke in Ensign, who hadn’t quite gone, “how did you know my watch had stopped?”

  “When you came in, you looked at your wristwatch and then at my clock. As your timepiece was ten hours behind, I deduced it had stopped; those cylinder toys don’t—”

  “Yes, I know. Now, about the getting on at Ninety-third Street and off at Twenty-eighth—”

  “Elementary—positively primary. They have just painted a fire-hydrant red at Ninety-third, and a mail-box green at Twenty-eighth. You absorbed a daub of each on your coat as you hustled by.”

  “Bah! You take all the fun out of it! Now, how did you know I had been hunting for my Aunt Gracie in kitchens?”

  “It’s Monday morning, and I smelled suds on you. I suppose you were hunting in still-butlerless pantries, and the ladies were doing their own washing.”

  “Exactly! Now I must get to the office. When can you present Aunt Gracie?”

  “Soon. I think. Don’t worry. I’ll telephone you when we catch Kid Knapp with the goods on. Au revoir, sir, and tell your wife not to wear her shoes too small for her.”

  “Bless my soul! How do you know she does that?”

  “Women always do. Good-day.”

  Ensign departed, and the young man who was understudying Watson said, “Marvelous, Holmes, marvelous,” but he did it so unenthusiastically that he had to practice it over two or three times.

  Skip we now over to where the detectives came home from their quest.

  One and all, they announced utter failure.

  Sherlock Holmes was disgusted. “You’re a nice lot of Infallible Detectives,” he saturnined at them. “I’ve a mind to resign as president of this society.”

  The others looked hopeful, but Holmes was a man of many minds, and they didn’t bank on his suggestion.

  “I went and camped out in a butler’s pantry in a small flat,” said Vidocq. “I thought, of course, she’d turn up there sooner or later.”

  “She can’t if she’s kidnaped,” protested Dupin. “Now, I went straight to the Butlers’ Association to ask ’em how about it, but they were that haughty and stuck-up, I couldn’t get an audience with them.”

  “Oh, I don’t care to hear your excuses,” President Holmes looked distrait and distraught. “If I’d thought you’d muff such a simple case, I’d have gone myself.”

  “I found a woman who was probably Miss Golightly,” said Dupin. “She said she wasn’t, but you know women can’t tell the truth if they try, so I dare say she was.”

  “Why didn’t you bring her?”

  “She wouldn’t come. You know what women are; if you want ’em to do anything, you just can’t make ’em do it.”

  “You can’t catch a woman,” declared Arsene Lupin positively. “You simply can’t do it.”

  “Then what becomes of the Detective’s motto, Cherchez la Femme, I’d like to know?” fairly screamed Lecoq. “I’ve worked along those lines for years—”

  “Never mind, Daddy Lecoq,” said Rouletabille, who was the youngest member of the Society. “Those lines are worn out. I say, ‘Set a femme to catch a femme.’ How’s that?”

  “Not bad,” said Vidocq. “But who? Kitty Ketcham?”

  “No! She’s no good at cherching. But I know a girl”—and Rouletabille looked wise—“who can turn this little trick for us. Her name is Fluffy Raffles.”

  “Name’s enough,” said Holmes shortly. “Telephone for her—now.”

  Rouletabille did so, and in the shortest possible time a vision beamed in the doorway.

  She was pretty, oh, Fluffy Raffles was pretty! Eyes the color of light blue merino, cheeks like pink satin pincushions, and hair a gold brick. Now you know just what she looked like.

  She was dressed in a filmy shimmering sheen of shuffy fliffon, and wore a garden hat, two sizes too big for her, with oodles of tiny pink rosebuds clinging clusteringly around it. This was her business suit. You ought to have seen her when she was dressed up!

  She took one of the seventeen chairs the men offered her—some were so distracted, they offered two at a time—and crossing her little white shoes (and even at that, they were big enough for her!), she said demurely (her little emery-cushion of a mouth was the kind that always spoke demurely): “Well?”

  She was dressed in a filmy shimmering sheen of shuffy fliffon, and wore a garden hat, two sizes too big for her, with oodles of tiny pink rosebuds clinging clusteringly around it. This was her business suit. You
ought to have seen her when she was dressed up!

  As fast as they could get themselves undazed from the effects of her strawberry-sundae voice, they laid the case before her.

  “Lemme see the photograph,” she said sweetly.

  They all flew for it, and she put the pieces together quickly, like a picture-puzzle.

  “Is that Gracie Golightly?” she exclaimed. “Why, I saw her once, when I was a kiddy in a middy—but she looked nicer’n that.”

  “She has gone off a little,” said Holmes, studying the portrait.

  “She’s gone off like hot cakes,” said Fluffy Raffles decidedly. “No matter. What do you want me to do?”

  “Is that Gracie Golightly?” she exclaimed. “Why, I saw her once, when I was a kiddy in a middy—but she looked nicer’n that.”

  “Cherchez la femme,” exclaimed Lecoq, glad to get back to his old formula.

  “All right!” And Fluffy flashed a smileful of pearls. “Lemme see—it’s—” She crooked her dimpled elbow and craned her pretty neck and twisted her mobile face and performed all the maneuvers necessary to see her wristwatch right side up, and then announced in triumph the time, twenty-seven minutes slow. But nobody corrected her; instead, each surreptitiously moved his watch-hands twenty-seven minutes backward.

  “Can you find her?” The Thinking Machine twined his fidgety digits in and out of each other.

  “Corsican,” said Fluffy, who talked in run-on lines, “but I don’t hafto go out by the day to do it. I’ll take it in.”

  Throwing off her ring-around-a-rosy hat, she settled herself comfortably at the telephone and asked to have tea sent in.

  While all the detectives flew to chercher the tea, Fluffy took the big, clumsy, heavy, telephone-book and called up number after number, as fast as she could keep the girl going. And they were all numbers of clockmakers or watch-menders or just plain jewelers.

  She stopped for tea between L and M, and asked for a glass of water between V and W, but after a while or so, she had called all there were.

  “Fiddle-de-fudge!” she exclaimed in a cunning little tantrum, “if I’d only begun the book at thuther end!” For it was at Zykowski that she struck the place she was after!

  Still, she had struck it, and with a demure smile she glanced up at Holmes and said: “Your Gracie girl is at Number 487 North Thirty-fourth Street.”

  “The eternal feminine,” said Holmes sententiously, “is simply an infinite capacity for finding things out.”

  “Marvelous, Holmes, marvelous!” exclaimed Watson’s understudy—with such unction that he had a raise at the end of the week.

  Holmes detailed all of the other detectives to go and secure the now-cherchered femme, but they wouldn’t budge.

  “Get her by telephone,” “Advise her nephew, and let him get her,” “Send an A.D.T.” “Go yourself,” and similar unsatisfactory returns came to Holmes’ mandate.

  Fluffy Raffles laughed and said:

  “Wellile go.” And then they all said they’d go too.

  So they went and got Gracie Golightly, and restored her to her watchfully waiting relatives, and then they all went to supper in a hall of dazzling light.

  “Tell us how you did it,” said Holmes, saturbenignly.

  “Well,”—and Fluffy added a half inch of scarlet to her smile—“you see, I noticed Gracie’s lack of really fatal beauty. That’s all right, uno—for her feet are her fortune, not her face. But while she’s terribly good to her mother, anner relatives anner butlers, she’s homely enough to stop a clock. So I just telephoned to see who had sent a hurry call to a clock-person to come and fix a lot of stopped clocks. And I found that Zykowski had been sent for for that very purpose. So I asked him who turned in the call—and there you are!”

  “Marvelous, Holmes, marvelous!” exclaimed Watson, who was back in his role.

  “And that’s what stopped young Ensign’s watch,” mused Rouletabille. “He saw his aunt for the first time in years, the night before, and his watch stopped then and there.”

  “Yes,”—Fluffy dimpled in her left cheek,—“and just the photograph of Gracie put my wrist-watch back twenty-seven minutes. I wish I’d worn my ankle-watch!”

  The Deep Mystery

  Anonymous

  Newspapers in this era were expected to entertain as well as enlighten. One enterprising syndicate offered “A Daily Novelette” feature that editors could throw on the page to fill space. This Holmesian example was found in the May 20 edition of The Oregonian.

  I.

  Sheerluck Bones, the great detective, sat in his office pasting imported cigar bands on a bunch of three-for-five cigars to put in his giveaway pocket, when Silas Dinglemore entered.

  “I want you to look into the finances of my daughter’s fiancé. He claims to have plenty of money. He says he owns a one-fifth interest in a pickle-house, but he talks more like a piker than a pickler.”

  “Oh—ah—a—ha!” said the great detective. “A baffling case. Indeed. Let me ponder for a second. Oh, ah, yes. Just send him to me. I will unravel the mystery.”

  II.

  Charles Scraplin Dosh entered the g.d.’s office.

  “Let me see your watch!” commanded the great detective.

  And Charlie handed over his double-barreled, repeating, self-filling, non-jeweled Ostermoose watch.

  And Sheerluck Bones opened the back of it to examine it with his 24-caliber magnifying glass.

  “Ahem. That will be all,” he said, and our hero vamoosed.

  III.

  “Yes. Give me Spoopendyx 0033. That you Mr. Dinglemore? Yes, this is Detective Bones. I find that while Mr. Dosh has had money right along, he hasn’t it now, because he has his watch back, and the two don’t go together. I examined the watch and find that there are 20 different pawnbrokers numbers upon the watch lid near the solar jingle spring and 13 more near the 40 h.p. 3-lb. skidderwheel. Therefore, he can’t have money and his watch at the same time.”

  After Silas Dinglemore came to he found his wife and daughter weeping softly.

  The Looking-Glass

  Anonymous

  One would not expect Holmes to possess the knowledge to offer make-up advice to women. Yet here we have him in the “Page for Women” section of the Sydney Morning Herald of July 18, discussing with Watson the problems the fairer sex encounter preparing for the day. Note that the anonymous author knew enough of the canon to recall Sherlock’s deductions about the position of Watson’s shaving mirror in “The Boscome Valley Mystery.”

  Sherlock Holmes, and his friend Dr. Watson, were sitting at a table in one of our popular tearooms, into which streams of women of all ages, were pouring, for it was 4 o’clock, the hour sacred to afternoon tea. Seeing the accustomed look of profound absorption on the great detective’s face, Watson waited, for he knew that an illuminating flash would presently be vouchsafed him, throwing a strong searchlight on the follies and fancies of the womenkind of to-day.

  “I perceive, Watson,” said Holmes at length, “that the architecture of the average dwelling-house of Sydney is sadly defective.”

  Marvelling at his friend’s perspicacity, the doctor waited for more wisdom, which presently came.

  “The lady who has just passed us,” the critic went on, “wearing a black velvet hat, with a big cerise rose in front, has made up the left side of her face much redder than the right. From this I deduce that she dresses in a badly lighted room, and that her dressing table is so placed that the light comes on her right. Consequently, she puts on more rouge than is necessary on the left cheek, which is in shadow. But in ‘plein air,’ as the French call it, the effect, as you see, is not good. The cerise patch on her left cheek does not even match the rose in her hat. Now, if the architect who built her house had known his business, he would have planned the dressing room so that the looking-glass must either stand in a bay window, which is the best position of all, or else that the light should fall over the left shoulder of the occupant of the room when she stand
s at her looking-glass. The dark bedroom is responsible for many bad complexions.

  “Women are accused of being vain, Watson, but it is their extreme diffidence and nervousness that cause them to try and mend their appearance. They look in the glass and see that they are, to use their own word, ‘frights,’ and without any scientific knowledge, or even much skill or taste, they set to work to whiten and raddle their faces in a light that a futurist artist would consider confusing.

  “No painter would lay brush to inanimate canvas in a bad light. His conceit or vanity would not allow him to work in unfavourable conditions. Yet a women apparently thinks that any old colour applied in any reckless way is better than her own, while her hair she really prefers to be of an unearthly hue. Take my tip, the true ideal of the complexion-menders is the pantomime dame, Mrs. Ali Baba, or Widow Twankey—they are the beauties. They can revel in Watteau brocades with short skirts and in impossible heels, with dinky handbags, and the latest hats with brightest trimming, in copper hair, contrasting with turquoise-blue frocks; in pinkest cheeks, glowing on each side above a ‘cupid’s bow’ of vermillion paint. But the dame, gaudy as she is, knows better than to consult ‘her’ looking-glass in any light but the very latest electrics. ‘Her’ artistic conscience would never allow her to make up in semi-darkness.

  “Observe this girl,” the sage went on “with the dead white face, so thickly floured that the natural sheen of the skin is quite covered as with a coat of whitewash, and with her lips a thin red line of blood. Is it pretty, that effect? No, it is not pretty, but it is supposed to be the sign of the ‘vampire woman.’ A course of moving pictures would bring her to that. To my trained mind, Watson, it presents only the conclusion that the white lady and others like her have minds absolutely uninformed on the subject of the laws of reflection and refraction. They do not know that no looking-glass, not even the best and most carefully made mirror, placed in good light, reflects truly. No woman’s complexion is really as bad as the looking-glass makes it out to be. If you doubt it, look at my face in that mirror opposite, and then at me.