An Irregular Qyarterly

of Sherlockiana
STEVEN RoTHMAN ~ EmToR

VoL. 61, No.3 AuTUMN20II

T H E BAKER STREET IRRE GULARS

 Now Available from BSI Books

The Orand Oame

A CELEBRATION OF
SHERLOCKIAN SCHOLARSHIP
EDITED BY LAURIE R. KING AND LESLIE S. K LINGER

THE GRAND GAME is based on the

The Grand Game lovely fantasy played by scholars and

Sherlockians that Sherlock Holmes
was a real person, and that the sixty
SHERLOCKIAN ScHOLARSHIP Canonical tales were actually wriuen
.,.,._.,
Vou..Oooa
,_., by Dr. Watson and reflect true histor-
ical events. O f course, the only prob-
1.-io R.JChoa _, ~ s. D.-
lem is that the good doctor was fre-
quently careless in keeping straigh t
the dates and details from one story
to the next, leaving the path open for
scholars to explain the discrepancies
and inconsistencies.
As a result, numerous vexing ques-
tions have stimulated the specula-
tions of distinguished scholars for
more than a century, and many of
the best o f these appear in this vol-
ume of classic articles covering the
years rgo2 - r959· It includes articles
by such luminaries as Ronald Knox,
A.A. Miln e, Do rothy L. Sayers,
Chri stopher Morley, Rex Stout,
Anthony Boucher, Red Smi th , and
even Franklin D. Roosevelt. T he sixty-six articles contained in this remarkable book
are among the best examples of "the Grand Game" to be produced during the first six
decades of the twen tieth century.
A companion book (Volume Two), con taini ng a rticles written between t g6o and
201 0 , will be published later in 201 1. A special slipcased, two-volume limited edition o f
the set is planned for later in 20 1I.

The ~rand ~arne

Edited by Lauri e R. King and Leslie S. Klinger
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Volume 61 Number 3 Autumn 2011
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The Editor’s Gas-Lamp .............................................................................5
Before the Canon: Watson’s “Reminiscences” ........................................6
William Hyder
Knowledge of Art.—Nil. .........................................................................13
Nick Dunn-Meynell
Holmes Steampunked: A Conversation with the Team behind
The Young Sherlock Holmes Adventures.................................................23
Tom Ue
The Great Perennial Problem: The Religion of Sherlock Holmes .....32
James McGrory
The Morcar Curse ...................................................................................40
Michael Pollak
The Blue Carbuncle: A Possible Identification.....................................45
Harrison Hunt
Sherlock Holmes’s Automobile..............................................................49
Jens Byskov Jensen
Art in the Blood ......................................................................................54
Scott Bond
The Commonplace Book........................................................................55
Baker Street Inventory............................................................................57
“Stand with me here upon the terrace . . .” ..........................................59
The Sherlock Holmes Society of London Mini-Festival Weekend ......66
Julie and Mike McKuras
Whodunit? ...............................................................................................68
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 “The kind of September”
The recent death of actor John Wood filled us with, appropriately, an
autumnal sadness. Wood played the title role in the 1974 revival of William
Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes on Broadway where it ran for over a year.
Sherlock Holmes hadn’t been seen on Broadway for almost ten years since
the musical Baker Street had folded. For many of us (even those of us who
had considered ourselves serious Sherlockians for years) that production
was the first time we had seen Holmes in the flesh (albeit impersonated).
Those were heady times for the Sherlockian world. Nicholas
Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution spent 30 weeks on The New York Times’
bestseller list—often at or near the top position. It is, like most best-
selling books, a very good read; but it is also an intelligent contribution
to the greater Sherlockian world. Suddenly huge numbers of readers
were exposed to some of the ideas that fill Sherlockian conversations.
Large numbers of people were made unsure about Holmes’s reality.
And often when we entered a bookshop there would be a new book
about Holmes. Bliss. Yes there was a price to pay: we had to spend years
trying to explain Holmes’s and Conan Doyle’s connections to drugs.
Was he a coke addict? Quick answer was and is always no.
Scion societies began to be formed in every town. The older
Sherlockian groups—many of which had been quietly drinking and
talking since the 1940s—suddenly found themselves besieged with
would-be members, often more than they could absorb. The book
quickly was turned into a wonderful movie, which, in turn, created yet
more Sherlockians. And they required more groups.
And it looks like we are living through a similar period with the tel-
evision series and the movie and its sequel. It will be interesting, instruc-
tive, and enlightening to see how the new wave attracted to Holmes will
impact the Sherlockian world. (Cumberbitches anyone?)
5
 Before the Canon:
Watson’s “Reminiscences”

by William Hyder

ON PAGE 1 OF Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887,1 just under the

title A Study in Scarlet, we find this note: “(Being a reprint from
the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., late of the Army Medical
Department.)”2 The phrase “a reprint from the reminiscences” tells
us two things: A Study in Scarlet was originally part of a larger body of
writing in which Watson recalled incidents of his life, and this larger
body of work was published before A Study in Scarlet was reprinted in
Beeton’s in late 1887. Where were these reminiscences published? And
what periods of his life, what incidents in his career, did Watson rem-
inisce about?
A number of Sherlockians have suggested answers to these ques-
tions. H. B. Williams wrote an essay, “Dr. Watson’s Pamphlet,”3 which
Ronald Burt De Waal summarizes:

A shorter version of Stud first appeared in a privately published pam-

phlet by Watson that must also have contained a brief account of
Watson’s boyhood, schooling, and army life. “The Country of the
Saints” was added to Watson’s story by an editor or staff writer of
Beeton’s Annual in order that the story would be long enough to
appear in the Annual.4

Taking a grander view, Edgar W. Smith postulated a “volume con-

taining the Reminiscences” and visualized it as “a fine, sturdy product . . .
nicely bound and neatly printed, and probably privately published
along about the year 1885.”5 We cannot agree with Smith’s suggestion
that the book’s tile is The Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. As print-
ed in Beeton’s, the phrase is not italicized or enclosed in quotation
marks, nor is the “R” in reminiscences capitalized (although it is in
some later editions).
In 1885 Watson was in no position to pay for a “nicely bound and
neatly printed” private publication, or probably even the pamphlet sug-
gested by Williams. As late as 1888 he described himself, in The Sign of
the Four, as having “a weak leg and a weaker banking account.” The fact
that he put so much energy into writing suggests an attempt to make,
not spend, money.
6
 If the reminiscences were not a book, what were they? A. A. Milne
offered a suggestion in a humorous piece, “Dr. Watson Speaks Out.” He
imagined Watson, late in life, making trenchant but not very compli-
mentary remarks about Holmes and their famous collaboration. Of his
own early career the doctor was made to say,

I had always been fond of writing, and my descriptions of the Afghan

Campaign as sent home in weekly letters to my Aunt Hester at
Leamington, and by her submitted to the Leamington Courier, had
received considerable editorial commendation, although, owing to
the exigencies of space and an unexpected local interest in some trou-
ble at the gas-works, they had been denied actual publication.6

Here we have an example of the ancient tradition (which unfortunate-

ly persists) of regarding Watson with amused condescension and using
him as a figure of fun. But Milne does make a plausible suggestion
about the form the reminiscences took: a series of articles.
Trevor Hall had the same idea. After considering and rejecting the
possibility that the reminiscences were printed in book form, Hall con-
cluded that they appeared in installments in an English magazine in
1887, and that the sections devoted to A Study in Scarlet were reprinted
later that year in Beeton’s.7 It was Hall’s belief that these writings
appeared under the general heading of “The Reminiscences of John H.
Watson, M.D.” But it also seems possible that they took the form of
unconnected pieces, written between 1881 and 1886 to eke out
Watson’s wound pension of eleven shillings and sixpence a day,8 and
printed in a variety of magazines or newspapers—wherever Watson was
able to place them.
These pieces—even A Study in Scarlet, which must have been origi-
nally written and published as a serial—would not have paid very well.
To cite a comparable case, Conan Doyle recalled that his own early sto-
ries brought in “£4 on an average.”9 On the other hand, short pieces
would have been easier to sell than a book. Such a body of work, even
if scattered among a number of periodicals, could appropriately be
described as “the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.”—using the
small “r,” as Beeton’s did.
Let’s put aside for now the question of where Watson’s articles
might have appeared and consider what they might have contained.
Here are Edgar Smith’s suggestions:

Along with his account of the first adventure he shared with his
room-mate [i.e., A Study in Scarlet], we would find in it [the handsome
volume he postulated] an assortment of the doctor’s earlier writings:
something, of course, about his experiences with women extending
over many nations and three separate continents, and a more detailed

7
 report on the things he did and saw in India, including, we must hope,
a definitive account of how and where his wound-stripe or stripes
came to be won. There was much he had to say: he was only 33 when
he wrote, but, being the man he was, there was enough for him to call
what he set down his “Reminiscences.”10

These are all likely possibilities. In a later article Smith suggested anoth-
er: In addition to Watson’s first collaboration with Holmes, the reminis-
cences “may well have contained others . . . including some which have
elsewhere been denied to us. . . .”11
An intriguing idea. Perhaps, Smith is saying, some of the adventures
that Holmes and Watson experienced in the years following A Study in
Scarlet had been treated in print before their later republication in the
Strand. Perhaps they included some of the supposedly unrecorded
adventures—such as that of Mrs. Farintosh and the opal tiara.12
Smith’s suggestions would answer a question that has troubled a
number of scholars. “I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became
his chronicler,” Mycroft Holmes told Watson in “The Greek
Interpreter.” Yet according to most chronologists, that adventure took
place in 1888, when only A Study in Scarlet had been published (and to
a relatively small readership at that). The earlier publication of some of
the adventures in one or more magazines might give substance to
Mycroft’s remark.
Which cases could these have been? They must have occurred
after A Study in Scarlet was solved and before Watson wrote his
account of it—in other words, between 1881 and 1886.13 The only
adventure Watson specifically places in those years is “The Speckled
Band,” which he dates April 1883. For any others we must turn to the
chronologists.
In The Date Being—? compiled by Andrew Peck and Leslie Klinger,
fifteen chronologies of the Canon are tabulated. If we search for
adventures assigned to the years 1881–1886, we find that three stand
out: “The Beryl Coronet” is placed in that period by 12 of the 15
chronologies, “The Yellow Face” by 10 of the 15, and “The Resident
Patient” by nine.14
Let us pause now and summarize the subjects that Watson might
have dealt with in his reminiscences (in addition to his narrative about
A Study in Scarlet):

Suggestions by H. B. Williams:
. Watson’s boyhood. (The doctor told Mary Morstan in The Sign of the
Four that he had been to Australia. A. Carson Simpson concluded
that Watson spent his boyhood there and suggested that his father
was an engineer engaged in building railways.15 This would have

8
 made great copy.)
. His school days. (Watson mentions these briefly in “The Naval
Treaty” and “The Retired Colourman.”)
. His army life. (Described in A Study in Scarlet, with passing references
in a few later adventures.)
Suggestions by Edgar W. Smith:
. Some of the adventures we are familiar with from their later appear-
ance in the Strand. (As we have seen, these would have included “The
Speckled Band” and possibly “The Beryl Coronet,” “The Yellow
Face,” and “The Resident Patient.”)
. Some of the adventures that Watson mentioned in passing in his
later writings.
. An elucidation of Watson’s remark in The Sign of the Four about “an
experience of women which extends over three continents and many
separate nations.”
. Further details of Watson’s service in India and Afghanistan, and
clarification of his ambiguous statements about the location of his
wound—in the shoulder16 or in the leg? 17
To those topics we might add a few more:
. Watson’s days as a medical student and his service as a house physi-
18
cian at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.
. His possible later military service. A number of writers have pointed out
that relatively few of Holmes’s cases can be placed with any confidence
in the years 1881–1886, i.e., between the action of A Study in Scarlet and
the time Watson wrote his narration of it. (As we have seen, “The Speck-
led Band” is the only case that is definite, and only three others seem
likely.) Two writers have suggested that Watson returned to active serv-
ice with the British Army, served another tour of duty in India and
Afghanistan, and there picked up his second wound.19 This too would
be a wonderful story, especially as told by a writer as gifted as Watson.
. A journey back to Australia. A clue to this possibility can be found in A
Study in Scarlet. “I had neither kith nor kin in England,” Watson states,
which suggests that he did have family elsewhere. In The Sign of the Four,
which the chronologists place in 1887 or 1888, Watson shows Holmes a
watch left to him by his elder brother, who has just died. Christopher Red-
mond suggested that Watson had gone back to Australia around 1885 or
1886 to care for the brother in his final illness and wind up his affairs.20
. A sojourn in California. In a play, Angels of Darkness, 21
written by
Conan Doyle, we find Watson living in San Francisco, practicing
9
 medicine, and presumably marrying. Conan Doyle attempted to
tailor his script to the theatrical requirements of the day, using
stock melodramatic devices and introducing stereotyped black and
Asian characters for comic relief. The result is clumsy, offensive,
and (fortunately for Watson’s reputation) unbelievable. Conan
Doyle wisely set the work aside unfinished. It may be that he based
the action loosely on some facts of Watson’s life, but his play strikes
at least one reader as totally fictional. We can probably scratch this
topic from our list.
Without doubt, however, Watson’s pre-Holmes adventures would
have provided him with plenty to write about. If all or even some of his
reminiscences could be found they would be well worth reading.
But what magazines or newspapers did his reminiscences appear in,
and why haven’t the legion of Holmesian scholars in England ever
unearthed them? And why would Beeton’s (and possibly the Strand)
reprint material that had been published only a few years earlier in
other, presumably competitive, English periodicals? The answer to
these difficulties might be that Watson’s early writings were not pub-
lished in England.
Elsewhere22 I have disagreed with Christopher Redmond’s sugges-
tion that Watson went to Australia in the early 1880s to nurse a dying
brother. There is no doubt, however, that Watson had at one time lived
in that colony. He said so in The Sign of the Four.23 He probably had
friends or relatives still living there, and he would have had some knowl-
edge of Australian newspapers and magazines. I suggest, therefore, that
the series of autobiographical sketches that Beeton’s summarized as “the
reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.” were sent to friends or relatives
in Australia and submitted by them to Australian periodicals.
A bit of research by Sherlockians living in the Antipodes—or even
by English scholars who live within reach of Colindale, in north
London, where the British Library maintains its vast files of internation-
al periodicals—might produce some surprising and gratifying results.

NOTES
1. Beeton’s Christmas Annual. 1887 Centenary Facsimile Edition,
Pagham, West Sussex: Conan Doyle Books, 1987.
2. This statement has appeared in virtually all subsequent English and
American editions of A Study in Scarlet. The capitalization varies con-
siderably from one edition to another. The statement is omitted
from at least one edition: The Original Illustrated ‘Strand’ Sherlock
Holmes, Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Editions, 1989.
3. H. B. Williams, “Dr. Watson’s Pamphlet,” Client’s Case-Notes edited by
Brian R. MacDonald, Indianapolis: The Illustrious Clients, 1983,
pp. 12–13.

10
 4. Ronald Burt De Waal, The Universal Sherlock Holmes, Toronto: Metro-
politan Toronto Reference Library, 1994, C8081, p. 441.
5. Edgar W. Smith, “A Bibliographical Note,” The Editor’s Gas-Lamp,
Baker Street Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan. 1959), p. 4.
6. Milne, “Dr. Watson Speaks Out,” Seventeen Steps to Baker Street edited
by James Edward Holroyd, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967,
p. 26.
7. Trevor H. Hall, Sherlock Holmes: Ten Literary Studies, London: Gerald
Duckworth & Co., 1969, pp. 11–17. Hall makes the improbable sug-
gestion that Watson’s writings were published in an obscure maga-
zine called the Strand, which failed some time before 1890, when
the better-known Strand Magazine was founded.
8. A Study in Scarlet.
9. Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, London: John Mur-
ray, 1930, p. 87.
10. Smith, “A Bibliographical Note.”
11. Edgar W. Smith, “Christmas in 1887,” The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Baker
Street Journal Christmas Annual 1960, p. 315.
12. “The Speckled Band.”
13. Although A Study in Scarlet was published late in 1887, it was written
in 1886 or earlier. Conan Doyle, Watson’s agent, has related how in
1886 he submitted it unsuccessfully to several publishers until fi-
nally the manuscript was bought by Ward, Lock & Co., who held it
over to the following year. See Conan Doyle, pp. 89–91.
14. Andrew J. Peck and Leslie S. Klinger, “The Date Being—?” A Com-
pendium of Chronological Data, Expanded and Revised, New York:
Magico Magazine, 1996. The chronologies differ as to the date and
even the year of these three adventures, but they agree in placing
them in the period 1881–1886. Eight other adventures get a hand-
ful of votes apiece: “The Second Stain” 4, “The Greek Interpreter”
4, “Silver Blaze” 3, “Charles Augustus Milverton” 3, “Shoscombe Old
Place” 2, “The Cardboard Box” 2, “The Noble Bachelor” 2, The
Hound of the Baskervilles 1.
15. A. Carson Simpson, “A Chronometric Excogitation,” Baker Street
Journal Christmas Annual 1959, pp. 273–279.
16. A Study in Scarlet.
17. The Sign of the Four.
18. William Hyder, From Baltimore to Baker Street, Toronto: Metropolitan
Toronto Reference Library, 1995, pp. 51–52. Essays on these mat-
ters might have suggested to Conan Doyle the stories he later wrote
about his own early medical career, which were collected in Round
the Red Lamp.
19. Henry T. Folsom, “Seventeen Out of Twenty-Three,” Baker Street
Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Mar. 1964), pp. 24--16. Pierson Parker,

11
 “Jezail, Jezail,” Baker Street Journal, Vol. 30, No. 2 (June 1980),
pp. 70–74.
20. Chris Redmond, “Art in the Blood: Two Canonical Relatives. II.
‘The History of My Unhappy Brother,’” Baker Street Journal,
Vol. 15, No. 2 (June 1965), pp. 87–89.
21. Arthur Conan Doyle, Angels of Darkness: A Drama in Three Acts, New
York: The Baker Street Irregulars in cooperation with the Toronto
Public Library, 2001.
22. Hyder, pp. 47–48.
23. “I have seen something of the sort on the side of a hill near Ballarat,
where the prospectors had been at work.” The Sign of the Four. In-
credibly, several writers have refused to believe Watson’s explicit
statement: “[T]he Australian hypothesis will not bear serious
scrutiny.” Winthrop Wetherbee, “The Third Continent: Further
Light on Dr. Watson,” Baker Street Journal, [n.s.], Vol. 2, No. 3
(July 1952), pp. 125–128. “[T]he remark may involve no more sig-
nificance than that Watson had seen a picture of the Ballarat dig-
gings. . . .” Ian McQueen, Sherlock Holmes Detected, New York: Drake
Publishers, 1974, p. 15. “His mention of Australia is probably some-
thing he saw in a photograph.” Michael J. Riezenman, “Thoughts on
the Canonicity of The Sign of the Four,” Baker Street Journal, Vol.
60, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 12–14.

12
 Knowledge of Art.—Nil.
by Nick Dunn-Meynell

In The Hound of the Baskervilles a long-suffering Watson complains

grumpily of having had to endure two interminable hours of Holmes
pontificating on art, “of which he had the crudest ideas,” from leaving
a Bond Street exhibition of what Watson calls “modern Belgian mas-
ters” to finding themselves at Sir Henry Baskerville’s hotel.
Why such contempt? Despite Holmes later making it clear that he
and Watson never see eye to eye on art, it is tempting to blame his
friend’s disgust on that one exhibition. What if it were of the truly mod-
ern Belgian masters of that time? What if the star of the show were
Félicien Rops, whose more extreme works—such as a naked Magdalene
actively engaged in the energetic appreciation of a crucified phallus—
would have been regarded as criminally obscene by the authorities and
the man in the street alike? 1
It is unlikely that an exhibition of such art would have been per-
mitted. This was a time when a cast of Michelangelo’s David required
the addition of a fig leaf before Queen Victoria could be allowed to
inspect it—with or without her magnifying glass. Many wished to
ensure that it would always be 1895, hence the trial of Oscar Wilde
that year. Scratch the surface of 1895 and the danger of the world
exploding was all too apparent. Freud began publishing his works of
investigation into the cesspool of the subconscious that year, aided in
his dangerous work by the discreet use of cocaine. The barbarians
were at the gate, and good men had to put their shoulders to the door
to keep them out.
Nor is it likely that a fashionable New Bond Street gallery such as
the Salon Parisien, which exhibited Belgian art annually from 1886 to
1892, would have disturbed its clientele with what we would now regard
as the real modern Belgian masters of their day.2 It is far more proba-
ble that there would have been nothing more shocking than, say, Alfred
Stevens’s The Present with its elegantly dressed beauty smiling upon a
Macavity of a mystery cat. Such a work would have struck Watson and
most respectable Victorians as entirely charming. Today it is hidden
away in the bowels of the National Gallery.
Had the Salon Parisien hanged Rops it might have been visited by
an unaesthetic policeman or two, if not by a mob bent on enlarging the
limited titles of our inns with The Dangling Belgian as a signpost. Is that
why the Salon closed in 1892? Is Watson’s impossible dating of The

13
Hound to that year correct? Did the crafty doctor bide his time and then
report the show to the authorities to ensure its closure?
There are two points to bear in mind. Firstly, Watson probably
never encountered or even suspected the existence of the real avant-
garde art of his day. It was never dreamt of in his philosophy. We can
perhaps compare his case with that of the Bohemian Thaddeus Sholto
in The Sign of the Four. Here is a supposedly serious connoisseur who
regards Corot as of “the modern French school.” Corot was not even a
living artist. Had Sholto ever heard of the Impressionists? And what,
then, are we to expect of dear old man-in-the-street Watson? Had he fol-
lowed Holmes’s methods and rummaged about in the fireplace he
might well have found a scrap of paper headed “John H. Watson—His
Limits. Knowledge of Modern Art—Nil.”
Secondly, Watson makes no comment upon the exhibition except
to mention it as the catalyst for Holmes’s tedious and incessant dron-
ings. These only begin after they have left the exhibition. Even if they
directly related to the exhibition, it does not follow that Holmes loved
it and Watson hated it. Why could it not have been the reverse?
Watson might have been charmed by conventional images of fashion-
able beauties at balls while Holmes snorted his contempt. Since
Watson does not say what either of them thought of the exhibition we
cannot suppose that it mattered that much. Watson’s disgust at
Holmes’s ideas on art would seem to run much deeper. Deep
waters—and rather dirty?
Watson’s disgust is so very different from his usual admiration for
Holmes. That might itself be a clue. It could be that while Watson
thinks Holmes’s method artful when applied to crime, it is itself a crime
to apply it destructively to art. As an art lover Holmes places himself in
a false position. So Watson may have thought, giving as much credence
to Holmes’s ideas on art as he does to Holmes’s ideas on women.
There is a Sherlockian bookplate designed by C. Constantini in
1984 that shows Holmes with his magnifying glass investigating a
female corpse. That is how Watson might have viewed Holmes’s clinical
consideration of art.3
How are we to explain Watson’s revulsion when it is likely that on
some occasions both men could approve of the same work? In The Valley
of Fear Holmes speaks with enthusiasm of Greuze, an enthusiasm he
shares with Professor Moriarty. Now, Greuze is a very sentimental artist
famous for depicting adolescent girls who combine an actual or appar-
ent innocence with strong sexual appeal. The police would never have
raided a Greuze exhibition in Watson’s day, though given the age of the
average Greuze girl they might well today. Innocence in the Wallace
Collection is an excellent example of his work, depicting an adolescent
girl stroking a lamb and unintentionally baring a great deal of innocent
flesh as the strap of her dress slips down.
14
 What on earth would Holmes have seen in that? What would
Professor Moriarty have seen in it? And since it is quite obvious what
Watson would have seen in it, how could he question the eye-to-eye
approval of his friend and his friend’s greatest enemy?
As for Holmes, it is to his credit that he can apparently see beyond
the sentimental subject matter to the underlying technical skill.
Doubtless Moriarty as the author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid could
also find out the hidden order of art, though in his case there might
have been some more personal reason for his need to have a Greuze
girl. And that might have been of interest to Holmes, too.
We should note one obvious point. It could not have been
Greuze’s Innocence that hung overhead Moriarty as he wove his webs.
Innocence was and is in the Wallace Collection. In fact it could not
have been a known Greuze at all. Such a work would have advertised
either that he was very wealthy or that he was a thief. No, Moriarty’s
painting must have been an unknown Greuze, one that the casual
observer would naturally think by some imitator of Greuze. It says
much for Holmes’s connoisseurship that he knew it for what it was:
an unknown original.
Besides, what would Moriarty want with Innocence, this man who
does not even own the Bible that the devil himself quotes from? He
would have desired the services of a fallen angel as his muse. What
would that fallen angel have looked like? Hidden away unseen in the
London National Gallery is a study for an unfinished Greuze that sug-
gests the artist thought to supply Innocence with a somewhat question-
able companion. Let us call her Experience.
This girl is far more knowing and her sheepish companion is
accordingly more nervous. It has the troubled look of one that knows it
could shortly be called upon to fulfill the ultimate destiny of a sheep. It
clearly fears for its neck as this Delilah caresses it with those dainty
hands just made to wield sheers. If Greuze ever painted a finished
Experience she was probably meant for some Baron Gruner, one whom
we may imagine turning the pages of his love diary while Experience
smirked down upon him as if to say, “I don’t know much about art, but
I know what you like.”
It is this unrecorded painting of fallen Innocence with the droop-
ing eyelids of the cocaine addict that the professor would seem to have
somehow come to possess, possibly as payment for the convenient
demise of some unsuspecting sacrificial lamb. How, for example, did
Baroness Gruner come to groan her last at the Splugen Pass? It would
have been poetic justice if the victim of the Reichenbach Falls had ear-
lier sent another to a like death.
The subject matter of the painting might well have been as inter-
esting to Holmes as its style. What more fitting work, he might say, to
find behind the desk of Moriarty? A budding Belle Dame sans Merci.
15
And perhaps something more? Could she represent the woman in the
professor’s life and dreams? The one woman to have outwitted him
before passing on into the night? Good night, Professor James
Moriarty.
Such things are not impossible. The master thief Adam Worth
would seem to have had a like relationship with the so-called Stolen
Duchess, Gainsborough’s portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire. He
kept her hidden beneath his bed for years. He could not bring himself
to part with her until she was the one card he had left to play.4 That
queen of hearts with a rosebud in her hand represented what he might
steal but could never wholly possess: the Kitty that in real life escaped a
Macavity’s claws. She was his rosebud.
Why might Watson be repelled by such a reading of Moriarty’s
Greuze and what it could have meant to the professor? We recall the
conversation between the good doctor and his friend as they are on
their way to the Copper Beeches and Violet Hunter shorn of her locks
to satisfy the too-amiable Jephro Rucastle. Looking out of their com-
partment window Watson cries out with joy at the sight of the rolling
hills around Aldershot, “Are they not fresh and beautiful?” But Holmes
shakes his head gravely. “I must look at everything with reference to
my special subject.” The smiling countryside fills Holmes with horror
at the thought of what might go on behind the pleasing mask of a
sunny face.
And this horrifies Watson. To object to love as grit on the lens of
a precision instrument is one thing. But has not Holmes’s profession
entered into his heart like a splinter of the distorting mirror in the
story of the Snow Queen, so that everything is seen perversely? One
thinks of Holmes’s revulsion at the intrusion of gross sentimentality
into A Study in Scarlet, “Lucy was silent, but her blushing cheek and
her bright happy eyes, showed only too clearly that her young heart
was no longer her own.” How Holmes must have hated those bright,
happy eyes. Such stuff, the literary equivalent of Greuze far from his
worst, repels Holmes as it might do many a modern reader. And such
revulsion repels Watson.
What could Watson object to in Holmes’s comments upon the
Baskerville collection of family portraits? “That’s a Kneller, I’ll swear,
that lady in the blue silk over yonder, and the stout gentleman with the
wig ought to be a Reynolds.” Holmes is playing the game of the connois-
seur able to identify an artist’s work by family resemblances invisible to
the ordinary observer. His eyes have been trained to strip away trim-
mings and seek out the crucial features. What could Watson possibly
find distasteful about that?
Holmes thinks he has the answer. “Watson won’t allow that I
know anything of art, but that is mere jealousy, because our views
upon the subject differ.” That sounds odd, though it is just possible
16
that there might be an element of truth to it. For Holmes to be able
to tell the true from the false in the realm of beauty might irritate
one who regards himself as a connoisseur of beauty in all its forms.
Watson can endure and admire Holmes’s superiority to him in the
realm of reason because he can always console himself with the
knowledge that he is Holmes’s superior in the field of beauty. It
would be unwelcome to have Holmes claim superiority in that
sphere too.
Or Watson may simply rebel against Holmes’s cold-blooded appli-
cation of his methods to art. Holmes would not have been the only
one to attempt to systematize connoisseurship and not the only one
to have been criticized for it. The art historian Giovanni Morelli, who
shared Holmes’s admiration for Cuvier’s system of scientific classifica-
tion, sought to identify the works of artists from seemingly trifling and
neglected details.
All artists will develop a kind of personal handwriting and short-
hand stylization in the depiction of, say, the ear that will be unique
to them. Morelli’s dismissal of the unsystematic investigator who fails
to consider this is reminiscent of Holmes’s impatience with the
Inspector Lestrades of this world: “[W]ithout method, the most
experienced connoisseur will ever waver in his judgment and never
be quite sure of his facts.” He insisted, “[T]he eye requires long, very
long practice, to learn to see correctly.”5 In short, it is not enough for
the art lover to see; they must see systematically; they must observe.
This was the conclusion of Morelli, the former medical student
taught to keep patients under observation and consider their symp-
toms with the utmost care. He felt paintings deserved no less. “It is
the first quality of a criminal investigator that he should see through
a disguise.” What Holmes says of the detective in The Hound of the
Baskervilles is equally true of the art expert striving to distinguish the
fake from the original.
Morelli’s approach is by no means foolproof. It might suffice to
tell a Van Gogh from a Gauguin, but when applied to, say, Veronese’s
Family of Darius before Alexander one encounters a problem. The ears
of the chief players in that work are individualized, though two or
more characters do have similar ears that hint at family resem-
blances. Could these be portraits of members of the same family?
Holmes, the author of two short monographs on ears for The
Anthropological Journal, would be able to clear up the question.6 But
Watson, intent only on the appreciation of the beauty of the work,
might be appalled by such an approach in the same way as he is
sometimes shocked by Holmes’s tendency to treat a corpse over-clin-
ically at a murder scene. One might say that it is Holmes’s bedside
manner with the deceased as with the great work of art that Watson
could find distasteful.
17
 Perhaps the most annoying thing of all for Watson would be if
Holmes brought his skills as a detective to the symbolic interpreta-
tion of paintings, as if each were created in accordance with a code
to be broken: the Da Vinci code, the Raphael code, and so on. That
is all very well when investigating a murder. Is it really appropriate
in the case of a work of art? That might well be Watson’s rhetorical
question.
Well, would it be? Watson is happy to declare that the stage lost a
fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when Holmes became
a specialist in crime. It does not occur to him that art lost a great inves-
tigator when Holmes renounced the art in his blood.
That is fine in theory. Could Holmes’s methods really be applied to
works of art in practice? Let us put them to the test. We will consider
how Holmes might indeed have solved some problem with a work of art
that was puzzling investigators in his own day.
In 1890 the London National Gallery acquired a Holbein paint-
ed in 1533. With a brilliance that suggests they may have been
advised by Inspector Lestrade they called it Still Life with Two Figures,
for the elementary reason that at the center of the composition was
a table laden with objects and to its sides were two men. But who
were the two men? In 1890 nobody knew. It would be ten years
before the brilliant detective work of Mary Hervey would finally
identify them.7
Yet she overlooked one vital clue that would have told her imme-
diately who the man to the left of the table was, where he was and
why he was there. Had Holmes strolled into the National Gallery in
1890 to see its latest acquisition he would have recognized the signif-
icance of the detail in a moment. For all we know he may have done
so, but being somewhat preoccupied with the problem of the
Napoleon of Crime he would not seem to have troubled to tell any-
one. Perhaps, though, he found time to write a monograph on the
application of his methods to works of art with examples during his
subsequent travels. It may yet turn up in a tin box in some Tibetan
monastery.
And what was this vital clue? It was the gentleman’s right foot. What
could even Holmes gather from a perfectly commonplace foot? We
know his methods. Let us apply them, however ploddingly we follow in
his footsteps.
The foot itself shows no malformation. The man does not even
have an artificial leg. The right shoe is no more wrinkled than the left
and he has not put his shoes on the wrong feet for the simple reason
that at that time there were no left and right indoor shoes. They were
interchangeable, like slippers. What, then, would have attracted
Holmes’s eye?
The man’s right foot is placed at the precise center of the first cir-
18
cle of the patterned floor. We deduce that there are nine circles to this
pavement altogether, three by three. The location of the foot might
mean nothing at all.
What would Holmes ask himself next? Where such a distinctive
floor patterned with nine circles might be found. One example
might spring to mind. During his investigation of the Vatican
cameos case he would perhaps have found time to visit the Sistine
Chapel. Now, not one visitor in a thousand looks down at the pave-
ment as well as up at the ceiling to where the fingers of God and
Adam nearly touch. Holmes would have. He would have seen a
mosaic pattern of nine circles representing the heavenly spheres
directly below those two fingers: the macrocosm of creation beneath
the microcosm of man.
Where had he seen something like that pavement before?
Somewhere nearer home. Just down the road from the National Gallery
is Westminster Abbey, near to where Holmes discovered the solution of
the Second Stain. Before the Abbey’s high altar is the sanctuary’s
Cosmati pavement with its central pattern of nine circles.
In 1533 the artist Holbein was working in England. The Abbey
pavement would therefore be the likelier candidate. What might this
right foot at the center of a circle signify? A short walk to St. James’
Square for a little research in the Diogenes Club’s library and perhaps
a hint or two from the encyclopedic Mycroft would quickly have sup-
plied the answer.
What had made the sanctuary pavement unique was its inscription.
This was probably destroyed during the English reformation but lucki-
ly it had been copied. It tells the Reader, for so he is addressed, that this
is a map of all creation. Each circle represents a heavenly sphere and
each is to be given a value of three. For our purpose that is enough,
though Holmes might well have gone deeper.
The obvious possibility would then have occurred to him that the
man’s right foot was so placed at the center of a circle representing a
sphere with a value of three to signify his sphere of influence. His
sphere of influence, then, would have to be “Three.” But what could
that mean? A pun, perhaps?
If we recall in “The Final Problem” that from the winter of 1890
to the early spring of 1891 Holmes was engaged by the French gov-
ernment “upon a matter of supreme importance,” we can be sure that
the answer would have come to this descendant of a French grand-
mother soon enough. The French for three is trois. That is pro-
nounced like Troyes, a place in France. This gentleman’s sphere of
influence must be Troyes.
But what might the governor of Troyes be doing in England in
1533? Business, perhaps? But what business would bring him to
Westminster Abbey? What happened of importance in the Abbey in
19
1533? The coronation of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, as
queen of England. Jean de Dinteville, French ambassador to England,
took the place of honor at Henry VIII’s right hand side at that event,
concealed with the king behind a screen. And de Dinteville was the bail-
ly of Troyes: it was his sphere of influence.
Had Holmes applied his methods in 1890 the identities of the two
men in the painting might well have been determined ten years earlier
than was the case. Doubtless he would then have turned his attention
to the still unsolved problem of the concealed skull. Why should a hid-
den and distorted skull loom over the spot corresponding to that of the
heavily pregnant Anne Boleyn’s enthronement?
Holmes might have noted that the skull hides a hexagram that
Holbein seems to have added to the center of the floor pattern.
There is no hexagram at the center of the floor of Westminster
Abbey. The hexagram is the symbol for the occult: hidden knowl-
edge. This might have caused him to recall the tenth section of
Dialogus de Scaccario (Dialogue on the Exchequer), which is con-
cerned with “murdrum,” or hidden, meaning the payment of a fine
for a hidden killing. (Holmes could have come across this during his
study of early English charters at the time of “The Three
Students.” 8 )A hidden skull hides a symbol for hidden knowledge.
Could it be that the skull does not signify death in the abstract? But
Holmes stuck to the question of Moriarty.
We who know only Holmes’s choicest investigations can selfishly
rejoice that chance turned him to the investigation of crime. But for
every thrilling hour we are privy to there must have been days or weeks
or even months of waiting for something worthy of his genius to crop
up. Had his blood led him, he would have found in art an inexhaustible
treasure house of puzzles to challenge and occupy his mind. It is at the
very least a tragedy that, when no little problems of interest presented
themselves to him, his solution was to turn to the cocaine bottle as his
transcendental medicine. He should have visited the National Gallery
instead. But then he might never have left and we would never have had
A Study in Scarlet. We would have a testimonial to the paintings of
Whistler instead.

P.S. There is another explanation for Watson’s contempt for Holmes on

art after their visit to the Belgian exhibition. It is a total fiction. The
episode could have been introduced so that, when Holmes later looks
up eagerly at the portraits of the Baskervilles, we can suppose that it is
merely an expression of his interest in art. We fail to grasp how impor-
tant it is thanks to Watson’s earlier mention of Holmes’s love of art. If
so, this would imply that Watson is a great deal craftier a writer than we
give him credit for. His occasional apparent stupidity may actually be an
aspect of his craft—including his craft as a writer.
20
 NOTES
1. H. R. F. Keating, Sherlock Holmes: The Man and His World, London:
Thames and Hudson, 1979, pp. 90–91.
2. The Year’s Art, London: J. S. Virtue, 1887–1893.
3. William Elliott Butler, Sherlockian Bookplates, Cambridge: Silent
Books, 1992, p. 37. Reproduces the dubious and questionable
woodcut ex-libris by an Italian artist, C. Constantini, 1984.
4. Ben Macintyre, The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam
Worth, the Real Moriarty, London: HarperCollins, 1997, pp. 116–118.
5. Giovanni Morelli, Preface, Italian Masters in German Galleries, Lon-
don: George Bell and Sons, 1883, pp. ii–iii.
6. “The Cardboard Box.”
7. Mary Hervey, Holbein’s Ambassadors, London: George Bell and Sons,
1900.
8. Leslie S. Klinger, ed., The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 2, New
York: W. W. Norton, 2005, p. 1090.

“You must act man, or you are lost.” (FIVE)

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 The Grand Game:
A Celebration of Sherlockian
Scholarship, Volume Two, 1960–2009
Due January 2012

The second volume of The Grand Game, covering the past

half-century (1960–2009), will be published in January 2012. It
completes the carefully selected sampling of the best and most
important pieces of Sherlockian scholarship and speculation
since the inception of “the grand game” over a century ago.

The Grand Game, Volume II contains over 60 prime exam-

ples of Sherlockian criticism published during the last 50 years.
Like Volume One, it is edited with an introduction and com-
mentary by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger.

The Grand Game has been both a critical and commercial

success. Volume One contained many of the classic pieces of
“the higher criticism” published between 1902 and 1959.
Volume Two highlights contributions since 1960. The first vol-
ume contained articles by many notable early Sherlockians.
There are a great many recognizable names contained in
Volume Two, including Tupper Bigelow, William Baring-
Gould, Bernard Davies, Lord Donegal, Trevor Hall, and
Michael Harrison. Newer, important articles by Peter Blau,
Jack Tracy, David Hammer, Wayne Swift, and Nicholas Utechin
are also collected in the new volume.

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 HOLMES STEAMPUNKED:
A CONVERSATION WITH THE TEAM BEHIND
THE YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES ADVENTURES
by Tom Ue

Huw-J Davies is a graduate of the Kubert School and he holds a PhD

in Mythology from UCLA. An industry veteran who has worked tireless-
ly behind the scenes for some 25 years, Huw-J has racked up an impres-
sive roll call for employers including Film Roman, Warner Bros.,
Disney, Weinstein, Fox, Marvel, and Viacom. Now heading up Hayena
Studios, Huw-J teaches regularly from his base in London and has just
returned from directing Alice Cooper out in Los Angeles.
Owen Jollands graduated from the University of Warwick with a
master’s degree in Physics and has had many jobs across many industries.
Finding a creative outlet with Huw-J’s master-class and graduating from
the first intake, Owen went on to be the colorist for Hayena Studios and
is now working on the studio and his own artistic development.
Jane Straw was born to British and Nigerian parents and most of
her formative years were spent in Nigeria. She has been drawing all her
life and has always had an interest in art and design. Computer games
and two brothers were the biggest influence on her creativity and after
16 years in Nigeria she came back to the UK in December 2006 and
decided that comics was the career for her. She met Huw-J at the
London MCM Expo in 2008 and realized quickly that he was the right
person to be connected to. She joined his evening master-class later that
year and kept going back even after the course had finished. After con-
tinued mentoring he said he had a comic that he wanted her to work on
as inker. In December 2009, work began on The Young Sherlock Holmes
Adventures alongside Owen. After a month, however, original penciler
Yan had to go back to China so she took over the art on TYSHA. Now a
member of Hayena Studios, she is involved in lots of projects.

Tom Ue:XFirst off, congratulations on The Young Sherlock Holmes

Adventures! This first book is an excellent start to what promises to be
an engaging and extremely thoughtful series. What moved you to write
about young Sherlock?
Owen Jollands:XTYSHA was in development when I graduated the
first master class course with Huw-J, and, having been suitably
impressed with my coloring and my commitment, Huw-J offered me the
position.
23
Huw-J Davies:XI was always fascinated by Basil Rathbone’s Holmes
and loved Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original.
TU:XRecent years have brought a number of different stories about
young Sherlock including Andrew Lane’s and Shane Peacock’s series.
Have they affected your thinking about this character? How so?
OJ:X Although I am a huge fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original
works, I have steered clear of any further developments on the TYSHA
front. I think as a studio we all want our ideas to be as fresh and as orig-
inal as possible, which are helped along by the steampunk setting.
HD:XI have purposely avoided reading them. I don’t really like being
influenced by something so close to the project I am working on. For
example, I am writing an origin for the twin Arthurian swords, so I
avoided all films and fantasy books related to that subject. I want the
end product to be drawn from the source material so, with the swords
project as with Holmes, I look more to the root of the stories, including
the historical and social influences of the time. The nearest to anything
new I have looked at has been, of course, Downey Jr.’s portrayal and the
wonderful Moffat’s BBC version.
Jane Straw:XFrom a design perspective, I read the original Conan
Doyle book but that was years ago. And even working on TYSHA, I
didn’t read other takes. So no, they didn’t affect my thinking of the
character. I think more than anything our Sherlock Holmes inherited
his character from Huw-J’s thumbnails, which had a life of their own
and was fun to interpret into drawing.
TU:XDo you feel pressured that yours is one of the first comic book ver-
sions of a young Sherlock Holmes?
HD:XLots, ha ha.
JS:X No. The only pressure was trying to follow in a style already set by
another artist. After a while, I realized that I couldn’t do it, and I had
to do my own thing. I think that’s when the art in the book improved
and became consistent. Unfortunately, it was too late to go back and
change some things.
OJ:X Initially, the pressure I felt on this book was towards Huw-J and
meeting his standards and to Jane to do justice to her line work. Beyond
this, I think that there is a pressure also to do justice to the characters
involved. Not necessarily to turn them into clones of the ACD person-
alities but certainly to retain the core essence of each character and to
portray them to the very best of our abilities.
TU:XWhy set your series in a steampunk London?
OJ:X Steampunk London opens up a lot of new options for us and
allows us to pick and choose the history that we integrate and that
24
which we amend for our own purposes. Visually, the steampunk idea is
very appealing as well and as the universe develops we are really look-
ing forward to building on this.
TU:XWhat do you see as the enduring appeals of steampunk and of
London?
HD:XWhat could have been had Babbage been given the opportunity
to really shine, where would the Empire be, and how would the human
condition have been affected? The last 30 years have seen more techno-
logical progress than the whole of written history put together and the
growth rate is almost geometric, if this had happened back then. . . .

OJ:X London is one of the best-known cities in the world. It is packed

full of history both all of its own and from around the globe. There are
many famous landmarks and a lot of evocative design. The city has
grown organically over the centuries as well rather than being planned
from the get go and structured in the more sensible block structures of
other famous cities such as New York.
The steampunk lets us ask what if, and it lets us take a time not too
far removed from our own and play with technology, architecture, fash-
ion and even the attitudes of the people. I think it’s a “New Frontier”
ideology, which holds a great deal of appeal to us as a race.
TU:XHas working in London impacted your work? How so?
HD:XIt’s dirty, smelly, and uncomfortable. It’s challenging, and chal-
lenges always affect the way you look at life and how you relate what you
experience to storytelling and to writing.
OJ:X Working in London has its ups and downs. It’s difficult as a fledg-
ling studio as you have a very expensive city to navigate with many
stresses that can pile in on top of
you. On the other hand, there is so
much reference to draw on from
museums, the parks and even the
streets and tube.
TU:XThe Victorian period ends
with the death of Queen Victoria in
1901. Why set your story in 1905?
HD:XShe didn’t die! In our story,
her life was prolonged but that’s a
story that we are bringing out in
issue 4.
OJ:X Huw-J is the great story plan-
ner and is always thinking ahead on
the plot side of things. As I said ear-
25
lier, the steampunk setting allows us the freedom to play with the histo-
ry and follow the what-ifs that we want to explore.
TU:XSherlock makes quite a distinctive first entrance: he is decked in
goggles and riding a motorcycle. Tell us about designing Sherlock.
HD:XAgain, it was necessary to create a Sherlock that was true to the
source material but has a very unique “‘Hayena verse” feel to him. I out-
lined the characters’ parameters, did some sketches of how I felt he
should look, showed what I wanted, . . . then handed him over to Yan
and Jane. They worked their magic, and then, after a little tweak here
and there, Jane was given free rein to do her thing.
JS:X I was stepping into someone else’s shoes: Yan had already done
most of the design work so I had simply to follow. I still had to make
changes to Yan’s design though and he had not designed Malachi or
the London Vampire yet (despite constantly asking!). With all the char-
acters, the design is based on the personality. I always imagine Mal com-
ing from a well-to-do, almost aristocratic, family but wanting to be per-
ceived as “cool” by hanging around with Sherlock and James. So while
the other two go around with their collars up and their tie loose, Mal is
proper and primed and trying to fit in.
Since this series is set in steampunk, I had to think of ways of turn-
ing the ordinary into interesting stuff like the clock on the wall in their
room. I hope to take the steampunk a little further in the next book but
preserve the first’s style. The motorcycle was fun! I managed to prove a
penny-cycle steampunk bike could be done. When I saw Yan’s original
bike, I kept wondering why the front tire was “slightly bigger” and he
said it was based on the penny-farthing cycle. It didn’t work because the
wheel wasn’t significantly bigger so it just looked like an ordinary bike
with a wrong wheel on. Huw said I should redesign it, so I asked how
about a full-on penny-farthing cycle? He said it wouldn’t work (in terms
of mechanics and physics), but I sent through a sketch and he pretty
much said hell yeah!
OJ:X Color-wise, I found it all came very naturally—so much so that my
choices almost matched, tone for tone, Yan’s original concepts though
we worked independently.
TU:XWhy put Sherlock, James, and John in the Long Hall School for
Boys?
OJ:X We wanted a strong “base” that was quite versatile and the board-
ing school fits this requirement for a large number of authors.
TU:X221B Baker Street is translated into a spacious college room, that
is numbered 212B, and that is shared by Sherlock, James, Mal and,
eventually, Watson. Do you see this change as having a different effect
on the relationship between the characters?

26
HD:XCompletely. It forces
comraderie, tension, and
stress, and plays a pivotal
role in the relational
dynamics of the characters,
especially with the inclu-
sion of sexual dynamics via
the female cast member.
OJ:X We have big plans for
the relationships between
Holmes, James and Watson
– suffice to say again that
we are trying to give the
whole world our own feel
but that we also want
everything that happens to
happen for a reason.
TU:XLatin is integrated
very skillfully through the
translation exercise that the
boys do at school and the
message in blood on the
wall. In A Study in Scarlet,
Watson has claimed that
Sherlock has no knowledge
of literature despite his
immense knowledge of sensational literature. How relevant do you see
an education in Latin?
OJ:X Within the nature of the steampunk universe that we are crafting
and, I believe, within our own modern world, Latin retains relevance
for several reasons. I think that, emotionally, there is a romantic attach-
ment to the language and the feeling of history that comes with it.
There is a power to the language as well which stems from its place as a
foundation to our more modern dialects and its association with pow-
erful people and places such as the Roman Empire, kings and queens
of old, and the Catholic Church.
HD:XIt’s a basis for a lot of our current dialogue and it is often over-
looked. I think it has more value than it is given credit for.
TU:XWhy make James into what seems like Sherlock’s closest ally?
HD:XBecause your closest friends can hurt you far more than an obvi-
ous enemy. Holmes has a lot of lessons to learn along the way to
becoming a great detective and being hurt is one of those lessons.

27
OJ:X We wanted the events of the universe to hold relevance and to
happen for a reason. Huw-J wouldn’t want me to give much more away
here though.
TU:XAt this stage in the story, it’s unclear if James will follow his father
Professor Moriarty’s footsteps and become Sherlock’s nemesis or if
James will go on being Sherlock’s sidekick. Indeed, James’ decision to
have his father buried in a pauper’s grave suggests the latter. Is James’
ambiguous position here deliberate?
HD:XThat would be giving away too much, but let me just say that if
things progress as planned the character will indeed change.
Remember nothing is clear-cut and the motives for evil can sometimes
start in an attempt to do good.
TU:XMal is a fascinating character not least of all because he comes in
with a tray of teacakes after James chides Sherlock for his insensitivity
about James’ mother’s murder. Most of what Mal says is ignored by his
colleagues. This minor character quickly becomes central to the story.
Why make him one of the foci?
HD:XBecause it was unexpected and it lays the foundation for the
dynamics of the characters’ interactions.
OJ:X One of Huw-J’s favorite devices is to work in subtlety, something
that I think lends itself well to Sherlock. There are hints throughout the
story that Mal is perhaps more important than he at first seems to be.
Whether readers pick this up and unravel the mystery or are surprised
by the end doesn’t matter, it just means different readers will have dif-
ferent experiences.
TU:XThe original Sherlock Holmes Canon has been read as being
strongly masculine. Is the inclusion of Chetan, the daughter of a Professor
Mishra, and a sidekick, a deliberate move against such readings?
HD:XYes. Simply put there needed to be a feminine strong character to
pull away from the obvious devices of the original language
OJ:X Chetan has several roles but one of the elements Hayena is trying

28
to develop is that of strong, relevant female characters. Sara and Jane
will keep us on track here, I’m sure, but we want to make sure that, as
the stories develop, no one gets left out.
TU:XIn a pivotal moment in the story—when Sherlock follows Chetan
around London—you move from dialogue to third-person narration.
This change distances the reader and enables you, eventually, to cut
back and forth between Chetan dancing and the matron accosting
the—to avoid spoilers—murderer as s/he approaches Mal. Tell us
about this narrative change, and give us glimpse of what happened
behind the scenes of the three pages with all the cross-cutting.
HD:XThis was a deliberate move to create mood and texture to the
story while allowing the mystery of Mal’s involvement to remain hidden
until the right moment. A good storyteller never gives away everything
instantly but rather unfolds organically and, with the right timing, the
tapestry that he weaves.
OJ:X For me, this was one of the most fun elements of the story to
color. I experimented with a few options, particularly when it came to
Chetan’s dance scene. I tried a few panels with the crowd watching
included, but settled on just the focus of Chetan herself with the heat
and light responding to her movements. I was trying to contrast the
warmth of the atmosphere and moment in the temple with that of the
coldness of the school halls and the murder. I think that the crosscut-
ting between the two allowed us to show a deeper duality within life as
well and to demonstrate that principle of your own greatest moment
also being the very worst for someone else.
TU:XChetan is connected again and again to Felix Leiter, who intro-
duces himself to Sherlock, and who appears many times throughout the
book. Can you tell us more about this character and their connection?
HD:XTo be honest, if I give this away, I am giving away the plot of the
second book and that’s not going to happen. Let’s just say that the clues
are there.
OJ:X Felix is one of a host of secondary characters that is going to help
us tie the disparate stories together and bring the events of one charac-
ter’s story into another’s. Huw-J plays his cards close to his chest
29
though, so I can’t tell you much more. Suffice to say that his role will
become clearer as the stories progress.
TU:XLike Conan Doyle’s stories, The Young Sherlock Holmes Adventures
repeatedly gestures towards larger international relations, as evidenced
by both Professor Mishra’s return from India and the Indian quarters
in London. Tell us more about this international focus.
HD:XAgain book two and the idea of Victoria still being monarch play
heavily on this. But this is the second book, so spoilers are going to be
a no-no.
OJ:X Part of the thrill of building a universe is in the variety that you
can explore. To not make use of a global landscape would be, in my
opinion, very limiting. Global events give you much more scope and
freedom and when you talk about the Empire, as we have it, it doesn’t
mean anything unless you set that within the bigger global landscape.
TU:XRecent criticism about Conan Doyle’s short stories has revealed
how ambivalent they are about the relationship between England and
the wider world. Have these conversations informed your thinking
about the story?
HD:XNot really. There is a clear distinction in the universe where our
characters are playing out. The Empire still rules with an iron fist.
TU:XCan you tell us more about the “Revolutions Plans” to which Felix
refers? Can you give us a sneak-peek of what’s in store for Sherlock?
OJ:X Huw-J won’t let me.
HD:XThat last comment about empire is probably my biggest hint to
this.
TU:XOne of the most impressive things about The Young Sherlock Holmes
Adventures is its abundance in details. James has a poster of Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s immensely popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin or one of
its adaptations on his wall. Tell us a bit about the things that we might
not notice in a first reading.
HD:XHoudini didn’t give away his tricks! There will always be layers of
clues for future events laid into the stories along with little nods to the
characters’ roots. These we layer visually and verbally. But sometimes
it’s just us having fun and giving you more things to draw you into the
world and story.
After all, we want to immerse you into the world and enjoy the story.
We want you to care about the characters, not just to read and to drop
the book by the side of the loo. We want these books on your shelves for
you and your friends to read as well as your kids. I’m all about the kids
reading these stories and getting inspired to read the originals.

30
OJ:X There are many Easter eggs scattered around TYSHA book. Some
of these are scripted, such as the Felix Leiter character, and others are
drawn, but as the colorist and letterist, I really got to let loose and throw
in lots of little treats.
The wanted poster from the back gallery makes several appear-
ances in the story, as do references to two other graphic novels from
Markosia: Huw-J’s Freeman and Dark Mists. I’ve even slipped in a missing
notice for my own cat (fictional, the notice, not the cat) and several ref-
erences from the Sherlock Holmes and The Lost World books. You may even
be able to gather a couple of hints about the next book’s story line from
some of the sketch gallery pages at the back. Though I’m not letting
you know which ones. And, of course, as it’s my first book, and my girl-
friend was so supportive, she’s featured in my notes page holding our
cat and wearing a very funky hat.
JS:X The cameo by Phileas Fogg, but I’m not saying where! All credit
to Owen though. He seems to have been on a roll! There are some per-
sonal artworks from my portfolio dotted around too, which he slipped
in the main school hall along with a personal photo of his. Owen also
put in a script commending the person if they were able to read it at all!
You need a magnifying glass but I don’t know if even that will work.
TU:XThank you so much for your time and best wishes with this excit-
ing new series!

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31
 The Great Perennial Problem:
The Religion of Sherlock Holmes

by James McGrory

“Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evi-
dence before the world is to be sought in my life.”
—Thomas Jefferson

One of the unexplained, perhaps unexplainable, mysteries of the

Canon is the question of Sherlock Holmes’s standpoint on the issue of
religion, and I feel sure that most Holmesians must, at some point, have
pondered whether Holmes was a believer and, if so, with which religion
and denomination his affinities lay.
On the face of it, it would appear to be something of an anomaly
to ascribe belief in a supernatural entity to such a coolly rational scien-
tific individual as Holmes who, as Conan Doyle assured Joseph Bell,
was “as inhuman as a Babbage’s calculating machine.” Although the
comment was made in relation to Holmes’s asexuality, the remark has
a resonance in the sphere of thought too.
There was a tendency, in Holmes’s day, to conflate the term “ration-
al” with “scientific” to the point of synonymy: Terry Eagleton described
this empiricist view of the world as “a very English brand of common
sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste.”1
Holmes was a creature of his time, and he personified the methodology
of classical positivism: that is, the proposing of hypotheses which can be
framed, tested, and thereafter falsified or verified according to empiri-
cal data. He would also appear to be an exponent of the philosophical
paradigm known as Occam’s razor or lex parsimoniae, which Isaac
Newton defined as “admitting no more causes of natural things than
such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” It
could be said that Holmes fashioned his own replica of the razor in The
Sign of the Four: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Not only is it difficult
to imagine Holmes making a judgment without having analyzed the per-
tinent facts, but also there are innumerable recorded instances in the
Canon when he specifically warns against such intellectual folly, and
chastises those who transgress. Surely then, the assumption has to be
that a thinker with the calculating machine mentality of Holmes must
have been incapable of harboring a vestige of faith in the existence of a
metaphysical entity which is almost by definition unprovable?

32
 Perhaps it is not so simple. Is there not some degree of an oversim-
plification contained in the inference that what is rational must also be
scientific? To use a relevant example, the study of divinity may not be sci-
entific, but could it be accurately described as irrational?
On the question of Holmes’s stance towards religion the house is,
as with so many other elusive facets of his character, deeply divided.
There is a school of thought which says that the evidence shows him to
be a firm believer; conversely there are those who argue that since the
known facts do not, and perhaps cannot, unequivocally support belief
in a supernatural entity, Holmes’s empiricism must have led him to
doubt the proposition; and since it is equally philosophically impossible
to prove a negative, he can then only have been an agnostic at most.
Others go further and simply claim that he was a complete atheist. The
best way to assess those competing claims is to use the very method pre-
scribed and practiced by the great detective himself—by an appeal to
the facts.
From a close reading of the Canon, it becomes immediately appar-
ent that the contest between the pro faction (those who believe, so to
speak, in Holmes the believer) and the con faction (those who disbe-
lieve etc.) is evenly balanced. -On the whole, the canonical references
which appear to lend support to the views of the pros tend to be more
numerous, more direct, and generally less open to interpretation; those
which support an agnostic or atheistic view of Holmes tend to be more
oblique in character, and require some degree of—dare I utter the
word—deduction. There are, for example, a number of instances
where Holmes refers to his deity by its proper name. In “The Five
Orange Pips” he says, “If God sends me health, I shall set my hand upon
this gang.” In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” he exclaims, “God help
us!” and paraphrases what he believes to be Baxter’s words, “There, but
for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes,”2 and warns Turner that
he will have to answer for his deed “at a higher court than the Assizes.”
While visiting the invalided Percy Phelps in “The Naval Treaty,” he
delivers a near perfect sermon in the garden:

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,”

said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. “It can be built up
as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the
goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.”

Almost perfect, except surely for the epistemological error in pos-

tulating religion as being as accessible to “deduction . . . as an exact sci-
ence.” To his summary of “Sherlock Holmes—his limits” in A Study in
Scarlet, perhaps Watson ought to have added: “13. Knowledge of
Divinity.—Nil.” We know that the entire episode with the moss rose was
merely an act designed to trick the culprit by lulling him into a false
33
sense of security; nevertheless, even allowing for Holmes’s considerable
ability as an actor, the homily exudes something of the feeling of gen-
uine sentiment. In “The Cardboard Box” he asks Watson, somewhat
rhetorically in a speech which hints at the dichotomy of free will and
predestination, “What is the meaning of it?” and then attempts to
answer his own question: “It must tend to some end, or else our uni-
verse is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is
the great . . . perennial problem to which human reason is as far from
an answer as ever.”
In “The Crooked Man,” Holmes even provides us with an illustra-
tion of his biblical knowledge with characteristic modesty:

“Yes, David strayed a little occasionally now and then, you know, and
on one occasion in the same direction as Sergeant James Barclay. You
remember the small affair of Uriah and Bathsheba? My Biblical
knowledge is a trifle rusty, I fear, but you will find the story in the first
or second of Samuel.”

And who can forget his dramatic annunciation (at the end of “His
Last Bow”) of the arrival of “God’s own wind.” Holmes demonstrates his
belief in the existence of the powers of darkness too, for in The Hound
of the Baskervilles he mentions “the father of evil himself,” albeit without
in this instance naming him: still the Canon is littered with references
to “the devil,” “devilry,” “devilish,” and so on. The cumulative effect of
all these none too subtle hints is to compel the view of Holmes as a
mainstream Christian, although one anonymous Holmesian commen-
tator considered that his mention of “some little immortal spark” (The
Sign of the Four) has more in common with the notion of “divine spark”
of Greek Gnosticism. There are also those believe that his faith under-
went some transfiguration after his meeting with the Dalai Lama dur-
ing the great hiatus, and that he may have undergone a conversion to
Buddhism as a result. It has to be said, though, that there is little change
to be observed in his behavior following his own secular resurrection in
1894, which would indicate this: meat, wine, and tobacco continue to
be freely consumed by Holmes as before. Any canonical reference to
the deity after this date (as well as, for that matter, before it) is to God—
not to Buddha nor, pace those who suggest he may have been tempted
to adopt Islam or Judaism whilst on his travels, is it to Allah or Yahweh.
Arguably the most unequivocal statement of his faith comes at the end
of “The Red Circle,” “[It] . . . is a series of lessons with the greatest as
the last.” Taken together with the foregoing, the inference that Holmes
is a Christian believer is almost inexorable.
And yet, the pros do not have it all their own way. After all, it must
be admitted, the Canon is not exactly abounding in instances of
Holmes’s, or for that matter Watson’s, churchgoing habits: indeed,
34
attendances at church, whether for divine services, weddings, funerals
or baptisms, are conspicuously absent throughout. Of Watson’s wed-
ding ceremonies for instance, we know nothing, nor is there any allu-
sion to either of the Mrs. Watsons’ activities in the women’s guild type
charitable organizations which were a common feature of the times and
no doubt did much to occupy the time, dispel the ennui, and salve the
consciences of the mid-Victorian doctor’s and, if events recorded in
“The Crooked Man” are to be believed, colonel’s wives (the Guild of St.
George was instigated “... for the purpose of supplying the poor with
cast-off clothing”).
More significantly, Holmes in The Sign of the Four leaves Watson to
ponder “one of the most remarkable [books] ever penned. It is Reade’s
Martyrdom of Man.” This book was indeed remarkable for, among other
things, having been called a “bible for secularists”3 and for having been
publicly condemned by the Liberal prime minster, William Gladstone,
as irreligious because of such passages as: “All doctrines relating to the
creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and
his destiny after death, are conjectures . . . which uncivilized men have
devised, in order to explain the facts of life. . . .”4
The book was considered by reviewers of the time to be a direct
attack on Christian dogma, and William Winwood Reade was undoubt-
edly an atheist: for Holmes to be in possession of such a book, to be
familiar with its contents, and to recommend the work to Watson seems
utterly inconsistent with any conception of him as a believer. And in
“The Retired Colourman,” speculating not merely on the afterlife but
on all life and, perhaps anticipating the work of Samuel Beckett by sev-
eral decades, he asks that eternal philosophical question “is not all life
. . . futile?” This sounds even less like the meditation of a devout
Christian, and more like someone scourged with agonies of doubt.
So, the canonical evidence drawn from Holmes’s direct utterances
is, unsurprisingly, inconclusive. It is therefore perhaps in his works,
then, that his true ideology is to be found. Holmes’s fallibility as a mor-
tal and his failings as a Christian are all too evident as a few examples
will suffice to show: he rarely turns the other cheek; he does nothing to
prevent Leon Sterndale killing Mortimer Tregennis in vengeance, and
stands idly by whilst the blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton is elim-
inated by the anonymous “ruined woman” and then later refuses to
help the official police track down the murderer; he succumbs to the
temptation to play God himself on occasions such as when he allows
Captain Croker to cheat the gallows (“Vox Populi, Vox Dei”!) in “The
Abbey Grange” and in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” where he
absolves John Turner of the murder of McCarthy (albeit he must have
suspected that he was merely granting a short stay of execution); nor is
he averse to impersonating a clergyman where it serves his client’s
interests. Then, there is his besetting sin of Pride.
35
 Nevertheless he does appear to be motivated by the Christian val-
ues of charity (often preferring to work for nothing for poorer clients),
of forgiveness (“saving the soul” no less of John Ryder, in “The Blue
Carbuncle”) and concern for the weak (consider his sympathy towards
the beleaguered women of the Canon); he is unrepentant over the fact
that the laws of England come a poor second to his own strong moral
conscience, citing cases where he would do more real damage by expo-
sure of wrongdoers than by allowing the crime to go unpunished.
Despite the occasional doubt, he seems comfortable with the concept
of sin, the certainty of Divine judgment, the possibility of redemption,
and of inevitability of atonement in the afterlife.
On balance the evidence of the Canon seems to favor the pro fac-
tion. The nature of Holmes’s religious belief seems not to have been
one of blind faith and absolute certitude, but more akin to that which
is able to encompass reason alongside faith, argument as well sincere
doubt, and one in which there is tolerance, even admiration, for the
ideas of a Winwood Reade. Like Jefferson’s, his religion was a private
affair and its effect was to be felt in his deeds rather than in his words.
But to which denomination did he belong then? I suppose it is
scarcely necessary to state that he was not a Mormon, for he does noth-
ing to distance himself from Watson’s opinion of the Church of the
Latter Day Saints, a view which was in some ways as exaggerated as
Watson’s treatment of the Molly Maguires—for they were both perhaps
as much sinned against as sinning. There is certainly a valid argument
for taking him to be a Roman Catholic, perhaps a lapsed one, due to
his French antecedents on his mother’s side. Holmes undoubtedly had
a Jesuitical streak and often exhibited the “remorseless logic” of an
Aquinas; furthermore, he was clearly the consultant of choice amongst
the papacy of the time, both Roman and Coptic, for both their
Holinesses (Leo XIII in Rome, Kyrillos V in Alexandria) sent for him
when their own powers failed them. As Frederick Kerby points out, the
Roman Pontiff holds the unique canonical distinction of being the only
client who ever consulted Holmes twice!5 There is an equally valid argu-
ment that Holmes’s French ancestors may have been of the Huguenot
persuasion, although the statistical likelihood of this is small—in
Holmes’s day the Huguenots would have made up less than five percent
of the population of France.
Even allowing for the fact that events are colored by Watson’s rather
than Holmes’s perception, most of the good clergymen of the Canon
appear to be Anglican, whereas most of the rascals are Nonconformists,
though some of these are sham or unfrocked (deposed is the proper
term according to Otis Rice).6 On two occasions, Holmes casts aside any
fear of committing blasphemy and actually goes so far as to imitate a
clergyman: intriguingly, the character of the Nonconformist is
described (in “A Scandal In Bohemia”) by Watson as simple-minded
36
which may be read as a synonym for dim-witted, whereas that of the
Catholic priest (in “The Final Problem”) is portrayed as venerable.
“Holy” Peters (of “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax”) and the
unnamed “sham chaplain” aboard he Gloria Scott turn out to be com-
plete scoundrels—one gun-running and fomenting a mutiny, the other
a putative murderer—again the clear inference is that neither of these
is a follower of the Established Church. Frustratingly in the sole legiti-
mate religious event in the entire Canon which Holmes not only
attends but at which he actually plays a leading part (the Norton–Adler
marriage), there is no description of the church or even of the liturgy
which would render a clue as to the denomination, though the pres-
ence of a “surpliced clergyman” and the name of the parish (St.
Monica, the mother of Saint Augustine) tends to impart a high church
flavor to the episode.
One gains a distinct impression that Holmes was drawn to the larg-
er, broader type of religious organization, particularly the Anglican
church, which would be perfectly in keeping with his family
antecedents as country squires—it is quite impossible to imagine him
worshipping at one of the tin tabernacles of the day, and it is significant
that he never imitates an Anglican clergyman. Perhaps he felt it was not
strictly sacrilege to imitate the Roman Catholic or Nonconformist cler-
gy; but it was to imitate an Anglican one, as well as being, in his day,
technically illegal—not of course that that was a consideration which
would have particularly troubled his conscience in any case!
He was no evangelist and nowhere does he berate any church for
the failings of mortal men; he was tinged with doubt, drawn to human-
ism, and occasionally apostate, but it is nevertheless possible to see in
him a devout Anglican believer. Could this revelation shed some light
on an even more intractable problem, one that has probably vexed
Holmesian scholars to a greater extent over the years—which universi-
ty did Holmes attend?

Ecclesiastical Glossary
Church of England: the established church in England (but not in
Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland), whose Primate is the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and which traces its origins to St. Augustine of Canterbury in
circa CE 597. Colloquially referred to as “Anglican,” as it is formally the
mother church of the Anglican Communion. It encompasses both
reformed and traditional strands of doctrine: High Church or Anglo-
Catholic, Evangelical or Low Church, as well as having a history or doctri-
nal liberalism, and is often referred to as “a broad church.”
Nonconformist: generally refers to those reformed Christian denom-
inations outside the Established Church in England (excluding Roman
Catholics), including Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, etc.

37
Tin tabernacle: the colloquial meaning may be taken to be a refer-
ence to Nonconformist congregations which were often originally
housed in corrugated iron buildings during the upsurge in
Nonconformism during the middle of the 19th century, although strict-
ly speaking, all types of Christian denominations used these structures
when expedient. The implication is that congregations are very small.
Roman Catholic: the universal church whose Primate is the Pope,
Bishop of Rome, tracing its antecedents back to St. Peter the Apostle in
circa CE 30.
Huguenot: the French Protestant sect of Calvinists, originating around
the 16th century.
Coptic: a branch of the Oriental Orthodox Church, whose Primate is
the Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and which traces its origins back
to St. Mark the Evangelist in circa CE 43.

NOTES
1. Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” London Review of
Books, Vol. 28, No. 20 (19 Oct. 2006), pp. 32–34.
2. William S. Baring-Gould, ed., The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 2,
New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967, p. 152, note 28. Baring-Gould
points out that Holmes paraphrases the English reformer John
Bradford (1510–1555), not the English divine Richard Baxter.
3. Warren S. Smith, The London Heretics, 1870–1914, London: Consta-
ble & Co., 1967, p. 5.
4. Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, London: Trubner & Co.,
1872, p. 173.
5. Frederick M. Kerby, “The Forgotten Clergymen in the Canon,”
Baker Street Journal, [n.s.], Vol. 4, No. 4 (Oct. 1954), pp.
223–228. The cases were the death of Cardinal Tosca and the Vati-
can cameos.
6. Otis R. Rice, “Clergymen in the Canon,” Baker Street Journal,
[n.s.], Vol. 4, No. 3 (July 1954), pp. 133–143.

38
Your comprehensive guide
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39
Best Critical/Non-Fiction
 The Morcar Curse
by Michael Pollak

“The Blue Carbuncle,” Watson’s only story pegged to the Christmas

season, is a story about forgiveness—and there is much to forgive
beside the sniveling upper-attendant at the Hotel Cosmopolitan and his
female confederate. For beneath the story’s comic tale of goose-chas-
ing, there are deep, sinister undertones, undertones of great evil that
spans centuries and that has persisted until very recently. There is a rea-
son, which will soon be made apparent, that I am laying the facts open
at this time, rather than waiting until December, the conventional
month to discuss the tale.
We must forgive Watson, first of all, for serving up what is surely the
heaviest helping of misinformation, misdirection and flat-out error to
be found in any single story in the Canon. These howlers have been
exposed by a number of Sherlockians, and I will only summarize them.
Regardless of what gem the carbuncle really was—and there are
many theories—Holmes, with his profound knowledge of chemistry,
could never have referred to it as “this forty-grain weight of crystallised
charcoal,” as his loyal chronicler purports him to say. Gems, then and
now, are weighed in carats, not grains. A 40-grain weight works out to
12.62 English carats. The late Richard Lancelyn Green remarked that
the value of at least £20,000 quoted by Holmes as an estimate “would
be an improbable price for a stone of 12 carats (even if it were
unique),” noting that the Hope Diamond (roughly 45 carats) was val-
ued at £30,000 in 1887, the presumed year of the case.1
Diamonds are not crystallized charcoal. Diamond-bearing kimber-
lite ore is volcanic, not sedimentary. Diamonds are far older than any
tree, and they come from deep in the earth’s mantle where no buried
plant has gone. They are squeezed from carbon-bearing minerals, not
from cooked organic matter.
Sapphire, often thought to be the real identity of the stone, is
corundum or aluminum silicate, as is ruby. Garnet is traditionally but
not exclusively identified as carbuncle, and there are indeed blue gar-
nets,2 but a garnet is a mixture of many elements, usually including
iron; carbon is not among them.3 There is no Amoy River in southern
China, on whose banks the gem was supposedly found in 1867. There
is a city in China named Amoy, but a different river flows through it,
and no precious gem fitting the carbuncle’s description has ever been
found there. Pointing that out in “The Blue Enigma,” S. Tupper

40
Bigelow concluded in 1961: “No gem discovered up to now can possi-
bly satisfy the blue carbuncle on all accounts.”4
Whether the carbuncle was in fact a diamond, a blue garnet, a sap-
phire—the best examples in 1887 were coming from Ceylon—or blue
jade,5 the question remains: Why all the subterfuge and gemological
rigmarole? An occasional walking wound, or a James where a John was
expected, we can understand, but why, in “The Blue Carbuncle,” does
Watson appear to fall to pieces?
To unravel this mystery, we must look back 1,000 years to find the
consistent thread, and it lies in the name of Morcar—it sounds like
Mordor, doesn’t it?—but it is a Welsh boy’s name, meaning “dwells near
the sea.”6 The Morcar family appears twice in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles, and each time, it is steeped in ignominy and failure.
The first Morcar (960–1015), son of Arngrim, was a thane, and the
chief minister to Ethelred the Unready (the appellation Unready
meant “Ill-Advised”), the Anglo-Saxon king who managed to lose back
to the Danes all the lands that Alfred the Great and his children had
won. Ethelred gave Morcar lands in Derbyshire before he had to flee to
Normandy, but when Ethelred returned, after largely capitulating to
Canute and the other Norsemen, he is thought to have suspected
Morcar and Morcar’s brother of treason. In 1015, at a great council of
the Danish and English kingdoms at Oxford, he had the brothers mur-
dered and took their lands.7
Of special interest to Sherlockians is A Chronicle of England, B.C. 55-
A.D. 1485. This 1864 volume is significant because it was written and
illustrated by James E. Doyle, the uncle of our beloved Literary Agent.
Here is his account of the first Morcar’s death:

In the meantime, Ethelred, untaught by experience, had resumed

his ancient policy of treachery and blood. During the meeting of the
Witan [assembly of nobles] which he had assembled at Oxford, the
king caused two of the members, Sigefurth and Morcar, Danes of the
highest rank, to be murdered. Edric Streon invited the two earls to a
banquet, and had them struck down, in the middle of their carousing,
by assassins placed for the purpose.8

Their attendants took refuge in St. Frideswith’s church, but

Ethelred had it burned down with the attendants inside.
The second Morcar was the son and grandson of earls of Mercia.
His grandfather was Leofric. His grandmother was Lady Godiva.
Morcar became the earl of Northumberland in 1065 after the nobles
had ousted the previous earl, a tyrant named Tostig. What happened in
1066 was by no means obvious in advance; there were many contenders
for the crown, and Morcar and his brother guessed wrong on each roll
of the dice.
41
 In 1066, Tostig returned to Northumbria with the army of Harald
III Hardrada, King of Norway. Morcar and his brother Edwin suffered
a severe defeat by Tostig. After the death of Harold Godwinson at the
Battle of Hastings, the Witan passed over Edwin and Morcar in favor of
Edgar the Atheling, to whom they swore allegiance. But they could not
stop the invading forces of William of Normandy.9
It gets worse. Despite professing allegiance to William, and accom-
panying him to Normandy, Morcar got caught up in a Saxon revolt
against Norman brutality. Twice Morcar revolted against William. In
1068, he surrendered and was pardoned. In 1071, he joined a rebel-
lion on the Island of Ely, was captured and remained imprisoned until
1087, when the dying William ordered the release of all his prisoners.
After a brief spell of freedom, he was again imprisoned by William
Rufus and died in captivity that same year.10
Does all this seem a bit dreary? Lewis Carroll quite agreed; Morcar
is mentioned, as a supreme example of excruciating aridity, by the
Mouse in the Caucus-Race in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

“Ahem!” said the Mouse with an important air, “Are you all ready?
This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please!
‘William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was
soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been
of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and
Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria.—’”11

The name Morcar otherwise is lost to the mists of history until the
Countess of Morcar appears at the Hotel Cosmopolitan in December
1887, plagued, it seems, with very poor help.
A few observations: We know from the story that the carbuncle was
blue, weighed a little over 12 carats and was owned by the Countess of
Morcar. We know from both the story and history that the Morcar fam-
ily was cursed. And we know that Watson and Holmes appeared to have
abandoned their usual standards of precision.
I submit that Watson and Holmes knew exactly what they were
doing, that Watson was misdirecting the reader by agreement with
Holmes, and that Holmes was trying to save the Countess of Morcar’s
reputation. The glass fake in Henry Baker’s goose could not possibly
have escaped Holmes’s discerning eye. He would have realized at once
that the countess, true to her family curse, had fallen on hard times,
that she had sold the carbuncle to raise cash, and that, knowing her
maid, Catherine Cusack, was untrustworthy, she had dropped enough
hints and arranged enough convenient absences to persuade Catherine
to steal the “carbuncle” without trouble.12
But she didn’t count on Catherine’s having a partner in crime,
James Ryder, who would go to the trouble of framing an innocent man.
42
And she didn’t count on a flock of geese, or on Holmes, who had to
appear to solve a valuable gem heist in order to acquit both the ill-
starred plumber, John Horner, and the ill-starred countess. She also
undoubtedly did not count on having to pay out her thousand-pound
reward, which Holmes surely deserved.
And the real carbuncle? There was only one purveyor of fine gems
that a titled Victorian lady could approach with discretion: Garrard, the
royal jeweler.13 Money changed hands, and the gem went into Garrard’s
vault. But like Sauron’s ring, the carbuncle was cursed. It had already
been responsible for two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide, and sev-
eral robberies, as Holmes enumerated. The ring very likely went back
and forth between the company and a string of unfortunate buyers,
perhaps recut and trimmed a bit. And, like Sauron’s ring, it wanted to
be found.
Ninety-four years later, a young woman and her fiancé are shop-
ping for her engagement ring. Garrard shows her a tray of elegant
and very expensive rings from its regular catalogue, most of them fea-
turing a large diamond. An oblong-cut, diamond-girdled Ceylonese
sapphire, with a beautiful deep blue shade, seems to jump out at
her.14 She passes over the diamond rings and chooses the sapphire. It
was just so beautiful, Lady Diana Spencer explains later. We all know
how that turned out.
So, is the curse doomed to repeat itself? Is Kate and William’s mar-
riage destined to cool, or worse? If one believes in these things, we can
be confident that it will not. Kate Middleton’s ring was not a direct
bequest from Diana. After their mother’s death in 1997, the grieving
young brothers made a visit to Kensington Palace and selected memen-
tos from their mother’s possessions. Harry, age 12, chose the sapphire
ring, while William, 15, chose Diana’s £18,000 yellow gold Cartier
watch.15 And for the first time in the history of the Morcar jewel, an act
of unconditional charity was performed with it. Prince Harry gave his
mother’s ring to William so that William’s bride, the future queen,
might wear it. Evil has been defeated by love, the curse has been lifted,
and we owe it all to Prince Harry, the leading member of Britain’s Red-
Headed League.

NOTES
1. Quoted in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes edited by Leslie S.
Klinger, New York: W.W. Norton, 2005, Vol. 1, p. 204.
2. Philip Kasson, “The True Blue: A Case of Identification,” Baker
Street Journal, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Dec. 1961), quoted in The Anno-
tated Sherlock Holmes, edited by William S. Baring-Gould, Vol. 1, p.
456. For photographs of blue garnets, see www.civilminerals.com/
id105.html.
3. Cally Hall, Gem Stones, London: DK Publishing, 1994, pp. 58–62.

43
 4. S. Tupper Bigelow, “The Blue Enigma,” Baker Street Journal,
Vol. 11, No. 4 (Dec. 1961), pp. 203–214.
5. Pierre Pratte, “The Blue Carbuncle: A Question of Identity,” Wheel-
wrightings, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Jan. 1990), pp. 31–32.
6. “I Am Pregnant,” http://bit.ly/k4xsX9. A baby-naming site.
7. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, translated and collated by Anne Savage,
Crescent Books, 1995, p. 160.
8. James E. Doyle, A Chronicle of England, B.C. 55–A.D. 1485, London:
Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864, pp. 77–79.
9. Doyle, p. 99.
10. Doyle, p. 106.
11. Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll, pseud.), Chap. 3, “A Caucus-
Race and a Long Tale,” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Martin
Gardner, ed., The Annotated Alice (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
1960), p. 46, note 1: “Roger Lancelyn Green, editor of Carroll’s
diary, identifies this dusty passage as an actual quotation from Hav-
iland Chepmell’s Short Course of History (1862), pages 143–144.
Carroll was distantly related to the earls Edwin and Morcar, but
Green thinks it unlikely that Carroll knew this. (See The Diaries of
Lewis Carroll, Vol. 1, page 2.) Chepmell’s book was one of the books
studied by the Liddell children. Green elsewhere suggests that Car-
roll may have intended the Mouse to represent Miss Prickett, the
children’s governess.”
12. See P. C. Wren, Beau Geste, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1924.
13. “Heritage,” www.garrard.com/heritage. A history of Garrard.
14. “Kate Middleton’s Engagement Ring,” http://bit.ly/cCmJYK.
15. MSNBC, transcript of a broadcast on the ring: http://on.today.com
/ixXLUX.

44
 The Blue Carbuncle:
A Possible Identification

by Harrison Hunt

“It’s a bonny thing,” Holmes mused to Watson in “The Blue

Carbuncle,” “Just see how it glints and sparkles.” But what exactly was
the eponymous blue carbuncle, which wound up in Henry Baker’s
Christmas goose?
All that we know about “the valuable gem known as the blue car-
buncle,” as the newspaper Holmes was reading called it, is contained in
two brief sections of the story. Watson described it from personal obser-
vation as “a brilliantly scintillating blue stone, rather smaller than a
bean in size, but of such purity and radiance that it twinkled like an
electric point,” and that it “shone out like a star, with a cold, brilliant,
many-pointed radiance.” Holmes, relying on stories read in the newspa-
pers (and, undoubtedly, his index), stated that it was “remarkable in
having every characteristic of the carbuncle, save that it is blue in shade,
instead of ruby red . . . forty-grain weight of crystallized charcoal”—
approximately 121/2 carats1—was “absolutely unique”; worth more than
twenty thousand pounds; and “found in the banks of the Amoy River in
Southern China” less than 20 years before the adventure, which most
sources place in 1889.
These descriptions are the only clues we have to solving one part
of what S. Tupper Bigelow dubbed “the blue enigma”: that there is no
blue carbuncle.2 A carbuncle, according to the ninth and eleventh edi-
tions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, is a type of garnet, almandine,
which has been cut en cabochon (as an oval with an unfaceted, rounded
top and a flat base). Garnets are usually shades of red, with carbuncles
“of a deep red colour inclining to purple.” This deep red color gave
the carbuncle its name from the Latin carbunculus, a small burning
coal. While some garnets are brown, yellow, green, black, or even col-
orless, none is blue.3
So what could the Countess’s gemstone have been? Several
Sherlockians have wrestled with this question. Doyle Beckmeyer, in
1949, suggested it was a star sapphire, and William Waterhouse recently
theorized that it was a blue spinel. The most unusual hypothesis about
the carbuncle, and the least convincing, was advanced in 1966: that it
was a pigeon-blood ruby, which Holmes saw as blue because he was
color-blind. (Thus ignoring every instance when Holmes saw red per-
fectly well, and the fact that everyone, not just him, called the stone the
45
blue carbuncle.)4 The other theories also fall short. A star sapphire is not
“brilliantly scintillating,” and no a 121/2 carat star sapphire, or blue
spinel, or garnet, could possibly be described as “absolutely unique” or
be rare enough to be worth £20,000.5
I concur with Bigelow and several others, including Peterson the
commissionaire, that the blue carbuncle was a blue diamond, an iden-
tification apparently accepted by the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer
in 1892, when they retitled the tale, “The Christmas Goose that
Swallowed the Diamond.”6 As these earlier writers have pointed out, a
blue diamond clearly fits two of the descriptions of the gem: it is “crys-
tallized charcoal,” i.e., carbon, and if properly cut, is “brilliant.” What
of the rest of the story’s criteria for the stone? And why, as Bigelow
asked, did the Countess call it a blue carbuncle?
A key to answering these questions—here employing Holmes’s dic-
tum that when the impossible is eliminated, whatever remains, howev-
er improbable, must be the truth—is to realize that this cannot be a lit-
eral description. No carbuncle is blue; and a diamond cut en cabochon
would not shine with many-pointed radiance. The blue carbuncle is sim-
ply the gem’s name. Recall the newspaper description of the gem, which
Holmes read: “the valuable gem known as the blue carbuncle.” Many
diamonds have names; some derived from their owners, such as Hope,
Orloff, and Wittelsbach, others more fanciful: Mountain of Light,
Idol’s Eye, Blue Heart, and, perhaps, Blue Carbuncle.7
Which leads to the more difficult question of why it was called the
blue carbuncle. James Shearer II debated 50 years ago whether Holmes
was “calling the carbuncle a diamond with the characteristics of a car-
buncle, or a carbuncle with the composition of a diamond.” His answer
was, “Obviously the latter.”8 But I believe the real answer is the former:
a diamond with the characteristics of a carbuncle or, more properly, a
carbunculus. The blue carbuncle was a blue diamond, and all natural
blue diamonds possess a remarkable trait: After exposure to low-band
ultraviolet light, they phosphoresce in the dark, some appearing a
bright, fiery red, the color of burning coals.9 The blue carbuncle was a
blue diamond which could appear as red as a carbuncle.
This luminescent effect was described as occurring in white dia-
monds after exposure to sunlight as early as 1664, but they glow green-
blue, not red. For decades, it has been known that the famous Hope
Diamond phosphoresces red, and until recently it was assumed that it
was the only diamond to do so.10 I propose that the Countess of
Morcar’s diamond was found to possess this trait prior to the Hope
Diamond, truly making her stone “absolutely unique” and worth over
£20,000 at a time when the Hope Diamond, three and a half times its
size, was valued at £25,000.11
This leaves us with one final part of the description to puzzle out:
Where did the stone come from? “No ruby, sapphire or garnet has ever
46
been found in the whole of China,” Bigelow points out, nor are dia-
monds found there.12 The history of the diamond reported in the press
is, therefore, false, and was most likely invented by the diamond dealer
who sold the stone to the Morcars to shroud what was likely a shady
provenance. (Such jewels are, after all, the Devil’s pet baits, as Holmes
put it.) A good candidate is the Brunswick Blue, a blue diamond vari-
ously described as 103/4 or 133/4 carats, which was auctioned in 1873
and, the experts tell us, never heard of again.13 Perhaps they just looked
in the wrong goose.

NOTES
1. S. Tupper Bigelow, “The Blue Enigma,” Baker Street Journal,
Vol. 11, No. 4 (Dec. 1961), p. 209, twits Holmes for not knowing
that “gems are weighed in carats, not just in England, but every-
where, then and now.” However, diamonds in England were de-
scribed in terms of grains earlier in the 19th century, and possibly
later. One of these descriptions was as late as 1897: George Freder-
ick Kunz, “A Historic Diamond,” Century Vol. 54, No. 1 (May 1897),
p. 155. In any case, Holmes only would have known the weight of
the stone as given in his sources, which apparently used grains in
their descriptions.
2. Bigelow, p. 210.
3. Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., Vol. 10, New York: Charles Scrib-
ner’s Sons, 1878, pp. 81–82; Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., Vol. 1,
New York: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910, p. 712; Vol. 5, p. 313.
4. Bigelow, p. 203; William C. Waterhouse, “What Was the Blue Car-
buncle?” Baker Street Journal, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Winter 2004), p.
21; Jason Roubey, “The Adventure of the Bluish Carbuncle,” Baker
Street Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2 (June 1966), p. 72. For replies to
Roubey, see Nathan Bengis, “Letters to Baker Street,” Baker Street
Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sept. 1966), p. 176; and Thomas H. Dor-
wart, “Thoughts Concerning Certain Infamous Conclusions,”
Baker Street Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Dec. 1966), pp. 216-218.
5. For a comparative value, in 1878, “carbuncles . . . of large size, and
free from black spots . . . may be worth as much as twenty pounds
apiece.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., Vol. 10, p. 82.
6. Bigelow, p. 212; Philip Kasson, “The True Blue,” Baker Street
Journal, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Dec. 1961), p.200; Donald A. Redmond,
“Some Chemical Problems in the Canon,” Baker Street Journal,
Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sept. 1964), p.151, suggests the carbuncle was a blue
stone found inside a large black diamond called a carbonado.
Philadelphia Inquirer reference: Leslie S. Klinger, ed., The Adventures
of Sherlock Holmes, Indianapolis: Gasogene Books, 1998, p. 156.
7. Properly, “Blue Carbuncle.” The lack of capitalization, apparently
an editorial error carried over from the story’s initial publication,

47
 has added to the confusion surrounding the nature of the Count-
ess’s gem.
8. Quoted in Baker Street Journal, [n.s.], Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jan. 1953),
p. 63.
9. Sally Eaton-Magana et al., “Using Phosphorescence as a Fingerprint
for the Hope and Other Blue Diamonds,” Geology, Vol. 36, No. 1
(Jan. 2008), pp. 83–86, excerpted in the Smithsonian Institution
National Museum of Natural History Hope Diamond website; e-
mail, 19 Nov. 2010, from Dr. Eloise Gaillon, Smithsonian Institution
National Museum of National History, concerning phosphores-
cence of blue diamonds.
10. Amanda Thornburg, “UV Rays Shed New Light on the Hope Dia-
mond’s Mysterious Red Glow,” Smithsonian Institution Hope Dia-
mond website.
11. Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., Vol. 7, p. 167.
12. Bigelow, p. 213; Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., Vol. 7, p. 164.
13. “Great Diamonds of All Countries,” New York Times, 24 Nov. 1901;
“Brunswick Blue” entry, Smithsonian Institution Hope Diamond
website. See also François Farges, et al., “The French Blue and the
Hope: New Data from the Discovery of a Historical Lead Cast,” Gems
& Gemology, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 4–19; and Scott D.
Sucher, et al., “Possible ‘Sister’ Stones of the Hope Diamond,” Gems
& Gemology, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 28–35, for documen-
tation refuting the long-held belief that the Brunswick Blue was cut
from the French Blue along with the Hope Diamond.

48
 Sherlock Holmes’s Automobile
by Jens Byskov Jensen

The Canon does not mention that Sherlock Holmes drives an auto-
mobile. If he does, what make and model is it? Two cars appear in “His
Last Bow.” Baron Von Herling drives a “huge 100-horse-power Benz
car”1 and Dr. Watson is seen driving a Ford.2 More importantly, in this
story Holmes, in the persona of Altamont, is said to possess a technical
knowledge of automobiles. The communication in code passed
between Von Bork and Holmes is based on mechanical terms. Von Bork
shows a telegram to Von Herling:

“Will come without fail to-night and bring new sparking plugs.
“Altamont.”
“Sparking plugs, eh?”
“You see he poses as a motor expert and I keep a full garage. In
our code everything likely to come up is named after some spare part.
If he talks of a radiator it is a battleship, of an oil-pump a cruiser, and
so on. Sparking plugs are naval signals.”

Von Bork says that Altamont (Holmes) poses as a motor expert,

and indeed he did pose, but the knowledge may very well have
been real. There is nothing to suggest that it wasn’t. In fact, Dr.
Watson suggests as early as in The Sign of the Four that Holmes is of
a mechanical nature, when the good doctor exclaims: “‘You really
are an automaton—a calculating machine,’…‘There is something
positively inhuman about you at times.’” Holmes the robot? I think
not. However, a schematic thinker may seem calculating to his fel-
low man and is certainly likely to take an interest in mechanical
processes.
In “The Yellow Face,” Watson describes Holmes’s habits as being
simple to the verge of austerity. It is therefore rather difficult to imag-
ine Holmes in a Jaguar, Bentley, or Rolls-Royce. We will be looking for
a car of a much simpler yet functional and reliable nature. That the car
should be of English manufacture seems indisputable. A man who
adorns his living room wall with the patriotic VR for Victoria Regina
done in bullet pocks seems raised above suspicion when it comes to
driving a foreign vehicle.

49
 One might question Holmes’s patriotism since he refused the
knighthood offered to him by King Edward VII in June 1902 during
“The Three Garridebs,” but I fear that this would be unjustified. Some
might suggest that Holmes felt more loyal towards Queen Victoria,
from whom he received an emerald tie-pin in “The Bruce-Partington
Plans,” and less so towards her son and successor King Edward.
However, there is some distinction between a tie-pin and a knighthood,
and I believe Ian McQueen puts it very aptly:

Holmes was not, and never could be, identified with the establish-
ment. He was ready enough to answer the nation’s call when his coun-
try needed him, but he reserved the right to poke fun at authority,
even to act occasionally as a one-man court of appeal, when he
thought it justified. To have accepted the accolade, even towards the
end of his career, might have impaired his image among those ordi-
nary folk who, in their times of trouble, became his best-loved clients.
The power of Holmes lay in his eccentric individuality. A knighthood
might have altered all that.3

It is true that Holmes, we are told in “The Golden Pince-Nez,”

accepted the Order of the Legion of Honour from the French
President in 1894, but the French might not have understood
Holmes’s motives had he declined the offer, and this could have
endangered his good relations with the native country of his grand-
mother.
This establishes Holmes as a patriot as well as a man of modest
needs and wants. A man capable of spending several days and nights
in a Neolithic hut on Dartmoor provided nothing but a loaf of bread
and a clean collar (The Hound of the Baskervilles). Yet a man with an
extensive interest in chemical and mechanical developments, who
would be likely to follow the automobile industry closely. Such a man
would choose a small, modern automobile of English manufacture.
Still, one other aspect of Holmes’s character remains to be taken
into consideration before we can pinpoint his choice of car: his fas-
cination for and interest in Arabian and Asian cultures, habits, and
symbols. During his Hiatus, Sherlock Holmes traveled for two years
in Tibet, visited Lhassa, and passed through Persia, paying short vis-
its at Mecca and Khartoum, before returning to France and from
there eventually going back to England. Traveling through the
Middle East was hardly a comfortable or safe experience for a
European, so Holmes’s interest in foreign cultures must have influ-
enced his itinerary. Of course, his main object was to distance
between himself from London, but much more comfortable loca-

50
tions and tested routes of transportation could be suggested, such as
Australia or the United States.
When Sherlock Holmes faced Professor Moriarty at the
Reichenbach Falls he uses the art of baritsu as opposed to a regular fist-
fight. This seems like a good choice, as it turned out, and it may not
have been the method of attack that the professor was expecting. It is
another example of Holmes’s interest in foreign cultures, baritsu being
a variation of Japanese martial arts.
During “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Holmes shows yet another
sign of his fascination with Eastern customs:

He took off his coat and waistcoat, put on a large blue dressing-
gown, and then wandered about the room collecting pillows from
his bed and cushions from the sofa and armchairs. With these he
constructed a sort of Eastern divan, upon which he perched himself
cross-legged, with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box of matches
laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp I saw him sit-
ting there, an old briar pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly
upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him,
silent, motionless, with the light shining upon his strong-set aquiline
features.

The scene suggests a meditative almost religious atmosphere. The

cross-legged pose brings associations of Buddha and the curling smoke
brings reminiscences of a small temple in the Western Himalayas. Only,
Holmes’s long, lean features are as far from those of Buddha, as they
possibly can be, and with the curling blue smoke being produced by
shag tobacco from a briar root pipe, it is strongly suggested that we have
never left Kent after all.
Why is Sherlock Holmes’s fascination with foreign customs and
symbols important in his choice of automobile? Because if a small, mod-
ern motorcar exists of English manufacture with a slight touch of, say,
Asian lure, then surely this must be a vehicle which will seem attractive
to Holmes. Indeed, such a car exists.
In September 1934, the Morris Motor Car Company in Oxford
introduced its new model called the Pre-Series Eight.4 This was a small
yet comfortable motorcar with a four-cylinder, 23.5 British horsepower,
side-valve engine, thus very economical to drive. It introduced
hydraulic brake drums and an electric windscreen wiper, which made it
a very modern car at the time. The car was available in four different
body types: two-door saloon, four-door saloon, two-seat roadster, and
four-seat touring car, the two last mentioned being canvas-top sports-
type cars. The saloon models were also available with sliding sunroofs.

51
In 1934, prices ranged between £118 for the basic two-seat roadster and
£142 for the four-door saloon with sliding sunroof and leather seats.
Bumpers and indicators were £2 10s (£2.50) extra.5 This would be a
suitable little car for Sherlock Holmes to drive. However, the radiator
mascot would be a selling point for the detective: a chrome plated yin
and yang symbol.
Yin yang stems from Chinese philosophy, where it symbolizes the
interdependency of contrasting forces, such as good and evil, light
and dark, etc., in the natural world. “Ying yang are complementary
opposites that interact within a greater whole, as part of a dynamic
system,” thus maintaining balance6 One cannot help but think of
Holmes and Moriarty as such complementary opposites in that
dynamic city, that great cesspool, of London. Proudly displaying the
yin yang symbol on its chrome radiator, the Morris Eight Pre-Series
would be an ideal and suitable automobile for Holmes. In 1935, the
Morris Eight changed from Pre-Series to Series I. This change
involved minor mechanical alterations, but the radiator mascot was
also replaced. Instead of the yin yang, it became a red enamel badge
with a chrome figure 8, thus losing some of its appeal to Sherlock
Holmes.

NOTES
1. Jack Tracy, The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana, New York: Avon Books,
1979. German Karl Benz (1844–1929) designed and built the
first practical automobile with internal-combustion engine in
1885 and was engaged in the manufacture of Benz automobiles
from 1884 to 1926. Allen H. Butler suggests, in “Automobiles in
His Last Bow,” Baker Street Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Mar.
1988), that Von Herlin’s Benz is a 1912 model, “Prinz Heinrich.”
Markus Geisser, “Pferdestärken im Canon,” Reichenbach Journal,
No. 6 (Winter/Spring 1994), claims it to be a Benz Runabout
39/100 PS.
2. Butler identifies Watson’s car as a Model T Ford. John L. Benton,
“Dr. Watson’s Automobile,” Baker Street Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2
(June 1989), challenges this identification. Due to the mention of
the car having a spare seat, he concludes that it was a Morgan Three-
Wheeler.
3. Ian McQueen, Sherlock Holmes Detected, London: David & Charles,
1974, pp. 67–68.
4. Medlemsblad nr. 70 (Sommer 2009). The journal for members of the
Morris 8 Klub Danmark devoted this issue to the 75th anniversary
of the Morris 8 Pre-Series.

52
5. Operation Manual for the Morris Eight, Oxford: Morris Motors Ltd.
There were several Morris dealerships in Sussex so it would have
been easy for Holmes to purchase his motorcar.
6. The encyclopedia Gyldendals Opslagsbog, Vol. 4 (Gyldendalske
Boghandel, 1960), describes how yin yang is a central principle in
many branches of Chinese philosophy and martial arts, subjects
with which Holmes is undoubtedly familiar.

53
flrl in the Blood by Scott Bond

Sherlocldan Holiday Shopping Alertlll

The enterprising Dr. Watson, noting the current
popularity of rubber bathtub duckies, presents his new
line of canonical tub toys for your holiday shopping
pleasure. Want one? Better be nice.
The Christmas Annual has become, since its reintroduction, a series
of in-depth looks at bits of Sherlockian history and culture. Since they
are a part of the Journal, we have devoted very little space to them
over the years, although they merit it. However, a recent publication of
the Sherlock Holmes Society of London allows me to give the most
recent Annual a nod. In the place of their more usual guidebook, the
Society has published a special limited, signed edition of 120 copies of
the 2010 Annual by Nick Utechin (“The Ancient British Barrow”), for-
mer editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal. From Piff-Pouff to Backnecke: The
Full Story. Ronald Knox and 100 Years of “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock
Holmes” is an in-depth examination of Knox’s writing of his seminal
work and the circumstances surrounding its introduction to both
Oxford and the world. Utechin made some startling discoveries, adding
to our knowledge of the paper that served as spark-plug of all we are
and do as Sherlockians. In addition to the Annual itself, this publica-
tion includes Utechin’s follow-up pieces from the Spring 2011 issue of
the BSJ. Available for £9 UK/£10 Europe/$22 ROTW postpaid from
the Society’s website: Sherlock-holmes.org.uk.

Searching through our neighborhood independent bookshop

recently, we came across an attractive series, Melville House’s Art of the
Novella. What first caught our eye was Christopher Morley’s first novel,
Parnassus on Wheels, but we were equally delighted to spot The Hound of
the Baskervilles in its company. As its title claims, this is a series of short
fictions, attractively designed and affordably priced. The small paper-
backs measure 7 x 5 inches, just right for fitting in the pocket of a sport
coat, lighter than an iPad and smaller than a Kindle. This new edition
of The Hound is ideal for interesting someone in Holmes. Available at
bookstores or from the publisher’s website: www.mhpbooks.com.

55
Speaking of Christopher Morley, we sadly acknowledge the death in
June of his eldest child and only son, Father Christopher Morley, Jr.,
after a long illness. Father Morley had, only days before his death,
received two medals from the British government for his service as a
volunteer ambulance driver in North Africa during the Second World
War. (He had been unable to attend the ceremony immediately after
the War.) He later served in the US Army in France. After the War, he
taught English history at Cornell University and an Anglican seminary
in Japan, before becoming an Episcopalian priest. Though not a
Sherlockian, per se, Father Morley attended several BSI Dinners, and
kept a copy of the Canon in his sizable library until he moved into a
nursing home.

The personal libraries of writers have long fascinated us. The puz-
zle of how reading affects writing is a difficult one. So, we were amused
(and slightly amazed) to discover, while reading The Library of Henry
James by Leon Edel and Adeline Tintner, that Henry James had a first
edition copy of The Valley of Fear on the shelves at Rye House. It may
have been to remind him of his native land, since 1915 was the year
James became a citizen of his adopted country. It may be that James was
a secret Sherlockian. The location of the book is unknown.

The Baker Street Irregulars Archive at Harvard University’s

Houghton Library has been catalogued. (At least those materials that
have been processed and sent on to Houghton.) The 41-page finding
aid describes manuscripts, letters, books, recordings, photographs, and
such “realia” as Julian Wolff’s insignia of golden oak leaves from when
he was an officer in the US Army. And these are only the materials that
have been placed at Houghton after the Trust’s preliminary sorting and
description. There are many treasures due to arrive soon. Go to
http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu and search for “Baker Street Irregulars.”

56
A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Canon. Edited by
Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger. New York: Bantam Dell, 2011. 383
pp. $15.00. This volume collects stories by contemporary authors that
are less pastiche and more homage. These stories take place around the
edges of the Canon and make small feints of obeisance in its direction.
Yes, Holmes, Watson, and the Baker Street lodgings all make their
appearance, but quite often with a twist. For instance, S. J. Rozan’s “The
Men with the Twisted Lips” provides a backstory, of intrigue among the
wily opium dealers, for the familiar canonical one, and shows how
Holmes was really just a cat’s-paw for their revenge upon the rascally
Lascar. Phillip Margolin and Jerry Margolin take on the classic locked
room and the world of crazed collectors in “The Case of the Purloined
Paget.” Neil Gaiman offers a wonderful oriental tale in “The Case of
Death and Honey” and tells us exactly why Holmes took up beekeeping.
In “The Mysterious Case of the Unwritten Short Story,” Colin Cotterill
gives us a comic-book treatment that mocks uch collections, which he
wrote only for co-editor “Larry King.” Lee Child’s “The Bone-Headed
League” gives a hard-boiled take on the familiar. In “The Last of Sheila-
Lock Holmes,” Laura Lippman gives a bittersweet tale of adolescence
and deductive reasoning. This is a collection of Sherlockian crime sto-
ries to savor.

The Best of the Sherlock Holmes Journal, Vol. Two. Edited by

Nicholas Utechin. London: The Sherlock Holmes Society of London,
2011. 306 pp. £25 UK/ 12 Europe/$60 ROTW. This second anthology
collected from the pages of the SHJ appears in time to celebrate the
Society’s 60th anniversary and covers the period from 1969 to 1990, so
there may soon be a third volume. The articles come from a busy peri-
od in Sherlockiana covering the time from The Seven-Per-Cent Solution to
Jeremy Brett’s incarnation of Holmes. Some of the older scholars among
the Society’s members began to fade away during these years and
younger ones (now not at all young) began to take their places. Some of
the departed included are Mollie Hardwick, Lord Gore-Booth, Michael
Harrison, Jean Conan Doyle, and Roger Lancelyn Green. To the usual

57
mix of subjects—chronological conundrums, place and person identifi-
cations, understanding the Victorians—-Utechin has added a few well-
chosen obituaries and profiles of members. If you haven’t been able to
read your way through all 30 volumes of the SHJ, this collection offers a
wonderful selection. If you have been a subscriber for years, this will
allow you to be reacquainted with old friends. Available from the
Society’s website: Sherlock-holmes.org.uk.

Surrey with a Fringe: The Handbook of the Surrey &

Hampshire Weekend, 10 to 12 September 2010. Edited by Jonathan
McCafferty. London: The Sherlock Holmes Society of London, 2010.
58 pp. £10 UK/ 12 Europe/$28 ROTW. Among Sherlockian publica-
tions, the handbooks of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London stand
out for usefulness, humor, and a deep understanding of the subject at
hand. This latest volume edited by the Society’s current chairman is no
exception. However, it is exceptional in that rather than being a source
book for those on the tour, it is includes talks given and photographs
taken during the tour. Not only does it include new articles commis-
sioned for it, it also reprints two classics of place identification by
Geoffrey Stavert and Bernard Davies. Catherine Cooke follows the same
(bike) path, summing up the various theories of just where Chiltern
Grange was. Helen Dorey takes us on a lovely tour around George
Frederick Watts, the Pre-Raphaelite Symbolist painter, the Watts Gallery
and Memorial Chapel. McCafferty brings to life the Royal Aquarium,
which was associated with old Imperial Theatre where Violet Smith’s
father conducted the orchestra. Nick Utechin examines the advertise-
ments in the Strand and Collier’s. Available from the Society’s website:
Sherlock-holmes.org.uk.

The Case of the Grave Accusation by Dick Neely. London: MX

Publishing, 2011. 87 pp. $10.95. This brief book allows Holmes and
Watson to examine the accusation that Conan Doyle was responsible
for the death of Bertram Fletcher Robinson. Though not named,
Rodger Garrick-Steele and his odd arguments that so roiled the
Sherlockian world in 2000 come immediately to mind. Neely’s story is
complemented by an essay by Paul Spiring who, while disavowing
Garrick-Steele, has devoted much energy to resurrecting Fletcher
Robinson’s literary reputation and exhumed some interesting work
while doing so. Available from the publisher’s website:
mxpublishing.com.

58
“Stand with me here upon the Terrace . . .”

Thomas A. Stetak
(“The Head of the Police at Cleveland”)
Thomas A. Stetak died following a brief illness on 12 April 2010,
just 2 days before his 61st birthday. He graduated from Ohio University
in 1970 and was the owner of a company that restored historic build-
ings. Tom served on many local boards, was director of the Lorain
County Historical Society, and was an international lecturer on
Victorian history.
What set Tom apart, besides his always smiling, heavily bearded
countenance (a face and a beard that would have looked at home in
Holmes’s London), was his droll sense of humor. His presentation at
Autumn in Baker Street was titled “Occupational Clothing of Men in
the Canon,” and later that day he and Tom Stix presented Bob
Thomalen with a very singular and amusing gift. If you weren’t there,
ask someone who was. We laughed for days and still do when we think
of it. Tom was a master craftsman. He created a wooden 6-foot silhou-
ette of Holmes for Tom and Dorothy Stix, which graced their yard in
Norwood for years.
Tom received his investiture in 1990. Tom presided over Mrs.
Hudson’s Lodgers of Cleveland and leaves his wife Ruthann, who was
invested as “The Camberwell Poisoning Case” in 1994.
—Francine Kitts

59
 The Sherlock Holmes Society of
London Mini-Festival Weekend
by Julie and Mike McKuras

Although we are not citizens of England, for a short time in May

we considered ourselves two of the “loungers and idlers of the Empire”
(A Study in Scarlet) when we “gravitated to London” to participate in the
events celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Sherlock Holmes Society
of London. The London Mini-Festival Weekend, held 19–22 May 2011,
was a delightful and informative way to greet old friends, meet new
acquaintances, and honor the Society.
The celebration of this milestone anniversary began on Thursday,
19 May with a traditional afternoon tea at the House of Lords, spon-
sored by The Rt. Hon. Lord MacGregor. To enter, one must pass
through Black Rod’s Garden and the requisite security for the House
of Lords. Attendees gathered in a waiting area until the group was
called, and it was there that we had our first opportunity to say hello
to fellow Society members. At 3:30 we were led to the Cholmondeley
Room and the Terrace, which looks out onto the Thames, and greet-
ed by Lord MacGregor and Society chairman Jonathan McCafferty
(“Barrymore”). In his opening remarks, McCafferty welcomed every-
one and thanked Lord MacGregor as a complimentary member of
the Society. Tables were set with a selection of sandwiches, scones with
jam and cream, cakes, and pastries. One of the added pleasures of the
afternoon was seeing Georgina Doyle and sharing a table with her. We
all enjoyed the tea and the opportunity to stand on the terrace watch-
ing the river traffic as well as the buying opportunities presented at
the House of Lords gift shop.
In the early evening we took the short walk to the Savage Club,
housed in the National Liberal Club on Whitehall Place. Over 40 peo-
ple, drinks in hand, dined in the David Lloyd George Room. We were
joined by additional Society members who came for the Annual
General Meeting, which commenced after dinner. McCafferty and
Membership Secretary David Jones opened the meeting by remem-
bering the late Edward Hardwicke, described by McCafferty as the
man “who rehabilitated Dr. Watson,” and Jeremy Paul, both of whom
will be greatly missed. Visitors from abroad were recognized and the
minutes from the last meeting, or as they were described, “the great-
60
est work of fiction,” were approved. Treasurer Calvert Markham cov-
ered the treasurer’s report and the Chairman proclaimed there
would be “general jubilation” at the news there would be no rise in
subscription costs. He then thanked both Helen Dorey and Elaine
McCafferty (“Eliza Barrymore”) for their diligence and hard work on
the council while welcoming Ashley Mayo and Bob Ellis (“The
Illustrious Client”). Reports of upcoming events were given, including
the June cricket match, September trip to Oxford University, and
September 2012 trip to Switzerland where Society members would be
encouraged to dress in costume as they could “be thoroughly wicked
and no one can stop you.” (Good news indeed especially for a certain
chairman who has been known to assume the persona of Charles
Augustus Milverton . . . even at home.) Roger Johnson (“Pall Mall
Gazette”) then presented the third Tony and Freda Howlett Literary
Award to Alistair Duncan.
That evening was the debut of The Best of The Sherlock Holmes
Journal, Volume 2, edited by Nicholas Utechin (“The Ancient British
Barrow”). Nick discussed the book and thanked Bob Ellis for his pro-
duction work. With the formal business concluded, it was time for
Three Minute Problems. Ashley Mayo was the moderator and time-
keeper and, with a bemused expression, kept the program moving as
a number of speakers addressed their favorite story, which may or may
not be considered one of the best of the Canon. After an entertaining
evening, we adjourned for the night.
Friday afternoon 20 May, there was an informal gathering at the
Sherlock Holmes Collection at Marylebone Library. Unfortunately, we
were unable to attend, but 24 guests had the opportunity to visit the
library and view the exhibit of material about the 1951 Sherlock
Holmes Exhibition at the Festival of Britain.
That evening we met again at the House of Lords. (It’s not often
that Americans can say that.) We were old hands with the security pro-
cedures and soon found our group for a guided tour of the building.
After we were put into several groups for the tour, our guide took us
into the House of Lords, Central Lobby, House of Commons, St.
Stephen’s Hall, and Westminster Hall and explained the history and rit-
uals associated with this incredible center of government.
Guests then gathered for cocktails in the Cholmondeley Room
and the Terrace. McCafferty and event sponsor Baroness Rendell of
Babergh greeted us as we all turned our attention to the Diamond
Jubilee Dinner. Following an excellent dinner, Society President
Guy Marriott (“The Grand Hôtel du Louvre”) gave the Royal Toast
to the Queen and introduced the evening’s guest of honor, Freda
Howlett, one of the Society’s founders. Freda spoke of how wonder-
61
ful it was to celebrate the Jubilee with the planned events. In 1951,
when the Society was founded, their inaugural dinner was very dif-
ferent as rationing was still in place. Invitations were sent to the
members who formed the Society in the 1930s, and several of them,
including Ivar Gunn, were able to attend but Ronald Knox, whose
1911 paper was celebrated at Oxford this fall, refused the invitation;
he was busy translating the Bible and felt that “everything that could
be said about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson had already been
written in 1951.” Freda related that the planning for the Festival of
Britain’s Sherlock Holmes display led her to meet a young lawyer by
the name of Tony Howlett (“John Hector McFarlane”); they wed the
following year. He went on to serve as President as well as Chairman
of the Society. (He died in 2003.) What started as a group of about
20 people has now grown to over 1,000. Freda extended her thanks
to the current members for all of their hard work; and, at the
Chairman’s request, she toasted the Immortal Memory of Sherlock
Holmes.
McCafferty then extended his appreciation to Lady Rendell for her
sponsorship and awarded her with another year of complimentary
membership. He explained how Meetings Secretary Catherine Cooke
(“The Book of Life”) had “dragged the Thames’ muddy ooze” for jewels
from the Agra Treasure and presented Rendell with the Agra Treasure
Brooch, commissioned to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee.
Following the presentation, telegrams of congratulation were
read from the Japan Sherlock Holmes Club, the S. S. Mayday at
Belfast, and the Barcelona Sherlock Holmes Society. McCafferty,
beginning his third and final year in office, thanked Guy Marriott for
his good advice and warm friendship. He explained that every year,
as he reads the Honours list, he is surprised at the omission of
Marriott’s name but is hesitant to criticize the Queen for this over-
sight due to his current proximity to nearby dungeons. He then
awarded Marriott with a commemorative medallion. Following the
presentation, visitors from overseas were recognized. Leslie Klinger
(“The Abbey Grange”) was the guest speaker for the evening and
after his numerous credentials and accomplishments were cited,
McCafferty noted that only a small payment to Mr. Charles Augustus
Milverton would have prevented him from mentioning the speaker’s
appearance in Playboy. Klinger stated that “in the short time remain-
ing after Jonathan’s introduction,” he wanted to recount his memo-
ries of becoming a member of the Society and his firm belief that his
own work stood on “shoulders of giants such as the Howletts and
William Baring-Gould.” He went on to discuss the many strange
occurrences in his Sherlockian journeys and went so far as to relate
62
that some people he’s met have even insisted that Sherlock Holmes
was a fictional character. When he was hired by Warner Brothers as a
consultant for the upcoming sequel to Sherlock Holmes, he was told
there would be a screen credit and a fee; Klinger’s response was
“that’s wonderful but it will take me a while to get the money togeth-
er.” At an event at the Newberry Library, a woman thanked him for
letting her know there were books about Holmes, and now it was his
turn to thank the Sherlock Holmes Society of London for letting so
many more people know the same thing.
In closing the evening, McCafferty honored the benefactors of the
Society, “those who have passed us a great treasure, those who’ve
received it, and those who will receive it and pass it on in years to
come.” He then toasted “our benefactors” and presented Klinger with
an inscribed copy of The Best of The Sherlock Holmes Journal. The
evening concluded, and we exited the House of Lords. As we looked
up, the illuminated silhouette of Big Ben closed a memorable evening.
Saturday 21 May 21 was a bright, sunny day, perfect for the excur-
sion down the Thames River to Greenwich. At Embankment Pier a
large group boarded the riverboat traveling under Tower Bridge, past
the Tower of London, and the Globe Theatre; but unfortunately
there were no sightings of the Aurora. Once in Greenwich it was a
short walk to the Bar du Musée for a leisurely lunch, followed by a

L to R: Les Klinger, Guy Marriott, Freda Howlett,

and Jonathan McCafferty.

63
walking tour of this nautical city. We visited the Old Royal Naval
College, the Painted Chapel, and the National Maritime Museum.
Our tour guide pointed out “Holmesian film locations” as well as
those from the recently released Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger
Tides. After a short rest, we gathered at the busy Trafalgar Tavern,
described as “an illustrious Victorian pub, which was once frequented
by eminent gentlemen such as William Gladstone and Charles
Dickens.” Our group enjoyed drinks on the terrace before entering
the Trafalgar Club where we were served a light buffet. The highlight
of the evening was Laurence Owen’s presentation of The Hound of the
Baskervilles, which he described as “cinema for the ears.” Combining
sound effects, soft lighting and an original score, the production
caused many of the listeners to close their eyes and imagine them-
selves on the Devon moors. After the entertaining presentation, we
walked along the Thames to Greenwich Pier for our return riverboat
to the city.
Sunday 22 May was the final day of the mini-festival weekend and
following Holmes’s advice, it was decided that “something nutritious
at Simpson’s would not be out of place.” A large group chose to fol-
low his suggestion and gathered at this traditional dining spot on the
Strand. We were given yet another opportunity to make new acquain-
tances in the beautiful room as we dined. Following the luncheon, we

Christopher Frayling (l) chats with Michael Whelan.

64
left Simpson’s and found ourselves boarding a 1965 open-top double-
decker bus for a tour that took us by a number of sights associated
with Holmes. By mid-afternoon we arrived at Cavendish Square and a
large contingent took the opportunity to leave the bus and follow in
the footsteps of Holmes and Watson as we walked the “network of
mews and stables” as they did in “The Empty House.” Roger Johnson
was our guide and gave a clear picture of how difficult it must have
been to follow this singular route in the dark. He also noted that cred-
it for this adventure should be given to the late Bernard Davies (“A
Study in Scarlet”) as “his description of the route makes it easy for any-
one to follow.” Our trek eventually led us to the Sherlock Holmes
Hotel in Baker Street for afternoon tea. After more conversation and
refreshments, it was time to say goodbye as the mini-weekend con-
cluded.
We’re sure we share the sentiments of all those who attended and
would like to thank the Society for making sure we had such glorious
weather for the outdoor walks and tours. We give our special thanks to
Jonathan McCafferty who is credited with having, in the words of one
Society member, “master-minded all of the ideas and plans.” As Holmes
said of Charles Augustus Milverton, he “is a genius in his way.”
Nick Utechin, writing in the Summer 2001 issue of the Sherlock
Holmes Journal, asked, “How has the society existed for so long and so
successfully?” We both believe the events of the weekend answered that
question; the scholarship, friendship and enjoyment so evident in what-
ever they do guarantees that years from now, those who have received
the “great treasure” that Jonathan McCafferty spoke of so movingly will
be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Society.
If you are a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London,
when you receive notification of upcoming events and pilgrimages, you
would be wise to heed the summons Holmes sent to Watson in “The
Creeping Man”: “Come at once if convenient—if inconvenient come all
the same.”

65
 Letters to Baker Street
A star is born
As a former Mark Twain scholar
(my senior thesis in college, a
thousand years ago), I very much
enjoyed Mike Berdan’s fine article
tracing connections between
Samuel L. Clemens and Arthur
Conan Doyle. I just finished read-
ing the first volume of Twain’s
newly-published autobiography,
and there’s another second
degree of separation connection:
Twain recounts how Will Gillette
(evidently the child of a neighbor
in Hartford, Connecticut) got
part of his training by acting in
games of charades performed at
the Clemens home, mostly in
scripts written by the Clemens
children. Just a trifle. . . .
Leslie S. Klinger
1966 Newell Rd.
Malibu, CA 90265
Somebody bet on de bay
On 15 July 2011, the annual thor-
oughbred horse races, the “Silver
Blaze Sweepstakes” and the
“Professor Moriarty Memorial,”
were run in Aalborg, Denmark.
The late Henry Lauritzen (“The
Royal Family of Scandinavia”)
founded both races in 1963 and
1976 respectively, and they have
been run consecutively ever since.
This year something quite
extraordinary happened when the
66
Silver Blaze Sweepstakes was won by
jockey-trainer Ann-Charlotte K.
Nielsen on Dispol Snapper. What
made this spectacular was the fact
that Nielsen also won the race in
2009 on Moonlight Gambler and
in 2010 on Eboracum Dreams, thus
winning three consecutive Silver
Blaze races. This has, to my knowl-
edge, never occurred before any-
where in the world! Incidentally,
Nielsen also won the Professor
Moriarty Memorial in 2006 on
Moune Shine. To my knowledge,
nothing like it has ever occurred at
either side of the Atlantic.
Jens Byskov Jensen
Egtvedvej 132
DK-6000 Kolding
Denmark
Doctor Watson, I presume?
I was delighted to see your refer-
ence to Dr. John Watson, profes-
sor of philosophy at Queen’s
University, in the summer issue of
the BSJ. This particular Dr.
Watson was rather before my time,
but most of my undergraduate
education at Queen’s took place
in the building named for him,
Watson Hall, which houses the
departments of philosophy,
English, classics, and history (and
in those days also the school of
rehabilitation therapy, one of
whose students I dated for a while,
but that’s a story for which the
world is no longer prepared).
John Watson (1847–1939)
was, according to a potted biogra-
phy on the university’s web site,
“the last of the great Christian
idealists . . . the first philosopher
in Canada to achieve an interna-
tional reputation.” I am unable to
say whether he shared Sherlock
Holmes’s admiration for Jean
Paul Richter and Thomas Carlyle,
but he apparently impressed the
students of Queen’s mightily, to
the point that philosophy became
the most popular major in the
university.
Significantly, he was, as John
Watson of Baker Street also possi-
bly was, a Scot—but born in
Glasgow and educated at the uni-
versity there, so that he probably
did not cross paths with the
Edinburgh-born Arthur Conan
67
Doyle. It may be no more than
coincidence that they share a
name, for neither “John” nor
“Watson” is uncommon. If there
were “some hundreds of Henry
Bakers,” there are at least as
many John Watsons. The disam-
biguation page in Wikipedia,
which of course considers only
individuals important enough to
have their own entries in that
trustworthy book of reference,
lists 34 of them, of whom at least
three are Scottish. They include
an admiral, a couple of crick-
eters, and a “classical translator
and murderer,” but neither a
Hebrew rabbi nor the author of
any monographs upon the deep-
sea fishes.
Chris Redmond
523 Westfield Dr.
Waterloo, ON N2T 2E1
Canada
Scott Bond (“The Copper Beeches”) has shared his Holmes and Watson
with BSJ readers for decades. 5471 Riverport Dr., Columbus, OH 43221.
Nick Dunn-Meynell teaches English as a foreign language to executives
and specialists. His hobby is imagining Sherlock Holmes and Watson
engaged in dialogues on paintings and deciphering their secrets. 45 Galba
Ct., Brentford Dock, Brentford TW8 8QT, UK.
Harrison Hunt, a retired museum curator, is a member of the Three
Garridebs and Long Island Cave Dwellers. 113 North St., Catskill, NY 12414.
William Hyder (“A Most Valuable Institution”), a retired editor and colum-
nist of the Baltimore Sun, is the author of From Baltimore to Baker Street and
Introducing Sherlock Holmes. 5488 Cedar La., #C3, Columbia, MD 21044-1374.
Jens Byskov Jensen (“The Blanched Soldier”) wrote Fifty Years in Baker
Street. He is a member of the Hounds of the Baskerville (sic) and drives a
1934 Morris 8 Pre-Series. Egtvedvej 132, DK-6000 Kolding, Denmark.
James McGrory, under the pseudonym Seamus Duffy, is finishing The
Adventure of the Quator Coronati, a pastiche. 13 Crosbie St., Glasgow G20
0BQ, UK.
Julie McKuras (“The Duchess of Devonshire”), edits the Friends of the
Sherlock Holmes Collection Newsletter and co-edited with Sue Vizoskie
Sherlockian Heresies. Mike McKuras, an IT professional, is Julie’s un-neg-
lected spouse. 13512 Granada Ave., Apple Valley, MN 55124-7664.
Michael Pollak (“The Blue Carbuncle”), a staff editor on the
Metropolitan Desk at The New York Times, writes “F.Y.I.,” a question-and-
answer column about New York City life. His wife, Laurie Fraser Manifold,
A.S.H., is a 28th great-granddaughter of Lady Godiva. PO Box 387,
Shenorock, NY 10587.
Tom Ue is a doctoral fellow in English at University College, London, and
the 2011 Cameron Hollyer Memorial Lecturer. 33A Clandon House,
Clandon Gardens, London N3 3BD, UK.

68
 At long last, back in print!

AStudY ill
CRIIuloid
P RODUCER'S ACCOUNT of
A
jEREMY BRETT as SHERLOCK HOLMES

The definitive account of the d efinitive portrayal

of Sherlock Holmes on the screen, by the man who
created it. Available now from Gasogene Books!

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