A slim but nonetheless impressive collection of new Sherlock Holmes short stories has recently come my way. Paula Hammond’s new book is entitled Eliminate the Impossible, after Holmes’s famous remark, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’
There’s a deal of improbability in these yarns, among them a case of apparently spontaneous combustion, a shooting presided over by the Angel of Mons and the apparition of Lady Hatton holding her heart in her hands in the self-same Bleeding Heart Yard where centuries before she had sold her soul to the devil. With his customary disdain for the supernatural, Holmes manages to blow away the fogs of irrationality to reveal the very physical explanations for these events.
What I particularly enjoyed, apart from the tales themselves, were the notes following each story, showing them to be grounded in historical accuracy. Real people make appearances, usually with their names changed. Thus Hiram Maxim, inventor of the Maxim machine gun, appears as Dodson Hughes; Hannah and John Courtoy, whose Egyptian style mausoleum is one of the sights of Brompton cemetery in London appear here as Hannah and John Chester (deceased).
The Courtoy mausoleum in Brompton cemetery
There’s fascinating and sometimes grisly incidental detail, too, regarding the combustibility of pigs or the fact that in certain circumstances quicklime preserves bodies rather than destroys them, the deleterious effect of prolonged ultra-low frequency sounds on the human brain, causing fear, vertigo, disorientation and even heart attacks, used to sinister effect in certain regimes to this day.
The story in the collection that particularly caught my attention, since I myself am in the process of finishing a new Mrs Hudson novel set in Constantinople, is The Case of the Impossible Assassin, in which Holmes and Watson travel via the Orient Express to the then Turkish capital. It’s an intriguing tale and one which, I am relieved to say, bears no resemblance to my own story, apart from the setting.
What is a well-established fact, however, is that Sultan Abdul Hamid II was a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes. When Sir Arthur and his new wife, Jean, honeymooned in Constantinople in 1907, the Sultan conferred on him the Order of the Medjidie (second class) and on Jean The Order of the Chefakat, which (spoiler) Mrs Hudson too may hope to receive quite soon.
All in all, a thoroughly engaging collection. I shall certainly look out for more of Paula Hammond’s books.
Sherlock Holmes: Eliminate the Impossible by Paula Hammond, edited by David Marcum (MX publishing, 2024)
Almost from the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, the character of the detective caught the public imagination so much that parodies and pastiches abounded. Many were written by journalists or students for magazines, and in some cases their authorship has not been recorded. Conversely, some were by people who went on to become famous, such as JM Barrie and the youthful PG Wodehouse.
Conan Doyle must not have minded these gentle parodies for both these gentlemen became his friends. They all played cricket together. Wodehouse indeed said towards the end of his long life ‘Conan Doyle was my hero… I was a Doyle man and I still am.’ There are said to be hundreds of references to Sherlock Holmes in Wodehouse’s work. Moreover, Wooster and Jeeves might well be seen as a variation on the theme, while Wodehouse’s somewhat effete character Psmith, with his ‘Sherlock Holmes system’ actually voices the expression, ‘Elementary my dear Watson’, often erroneously attributed to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock.
The humour of these pieces – hardly subtle, let it be said – often resides in the detective’s preposterous deductions based on the most unlikely of evidence:
‘The visit of this Frenchman – who, as you can see in an instant if you look at his left shoulder-blade, has not only deserted his wife and large family, but is at this very moment carrying on a clandestine correspondence with an American widow, who lives in Kalamazoo, Mich.’… [The Adventure of the Missing Bee, from Vanity Fair December 1904]
Wodehouse – Plum to his friends [right, aged 22 in 1903] – wrote other Sherlockian parodies, some concerning the detective Burdock Rose, residing in Grocer Square (geddit?) with his sidekick Dr Wotsing, whose mastery of deductive techniques begins to overshadow those of the great man, to the latter’s considerable annoyance. These include The Strange Disappearance of Mr Buxton-Smythe and The Adventure of the Split Infinitive, both published in ‘Punch’ and readily available to read on line via The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia and elsewhere.
When in 1903 Conan Doyle, succumbing to the demands of his readers, resurrected Sherlock Holmes from the waters of the Reichenbach Falls, parodists went into overdrive, foremost among them, Plum. He composed lyrics to be sung to the theme of Archie from The Toreador, if that particular ditty springs readily to anyone’s mind:
Oh, Sherlock Holmes lay hidden more than half a dozen years
He left his loving London in a whirl of doubts and fears
For we thought a wicked party
Of the name of Moriarty
Had dispatched him (in a manner fit to freeze one)
They grappled on a cliff-top, on a ledge six inches wide;
We deemed his chances flimsy when he vanished o’er the side.
But the very latest news is
That he merely got some bruises.
If there’s a man who’s hard to kill, why he’s one.
Oh, Sherlock, Sherlock he’s in town again,
That prince of perspicacity, that monument of brain.
It seems he wasn’t hurt at all
By tumbling down the waterfall…
Imitation, as they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. Parodies and pastiches of the Canon continue to the present day. David Marcum in particular should be singled out for his work in assembling great collections of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (parodies NOT included), from MX publishing. I was honoured to be featured in Part XX, with my story The Case of the Short-Sighted Clown. More volumes will appear later this year. It doesn’t seem likely that the well will dry up any time soon.
As all good Sherlockians know, Christmas features in one of Conan Doyle’s stories, The Blue Carbuncle, where the famous jewel ends up in… well, I won’t spoil it for the rest of you. But it made me wonder how many more Christmas Holmes stories are out there.
If the answer had been a snow ball, it would have knocked me for six.
It seems nearly everyone who has written a story about the famous detective has at least one set at Christmas. First and foremost, among David Marcum’s estimable ongoing series, the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part V of November 2016 is devoted to the festive season. It contains thirty new Holmes stories, with tantalising titles, among them The Case of the Christmas Trifle and The Adventure of the Christmas Stocking and what has to be my favourite, A Perpetrator in a Pear Tree.
My researches led me to another discovery. We are all aware of the fourteen films made between 1939 and 1946 starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson, but what I didn’t know before was that the pair also made 220 episodes of an ‘old-time’ radio show, ‘The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’. It was broadcast from Hollywood and on Armed Forces Radio Service.
The notion is that Watson has retired to California and is regularly visited by a guest to whom he recounts an adventure from the past. The episode I found on YouTube was entitled The Night before Christmas, and was aired on December 24 1945. There are also frequent references to Petri wine, sponsors of many of these episodes.
Watson has been prevailed upon to dress up as Santa Claus to give presents to Mrs Hudson’s nieces, Holmes intending to stay home and work on a monograph analysing teeth marks on pipes (‘Fascinating,’ says Watson dryly). But then, Lord Widdicombe, a friend of Holmes, arrives, not to play their usual game of chess or to discuss medieval pottery, but with a note rather conveniently sent from thieves threatening to steal the valuable gifts his lordship intends to present to his relations. Mayhem and confusion ensue.
The story is dramatized with a variety of accents. Holmes, Watson and Lord Widdicombe are British to the core. Mrs Hudson is decidedly Scottish, but everyone else has an American accent, which is somewhat disconcerting since the adventure supposedly takes place in London in 1886.
If the sound effects to our sophisticated ears are clunky, the play remains a charming and diverting curiosity. I’ll certainly be listening to a few more of those old broadcasts.
Susan Knight 