Being the second set of a dozen short stories which appeared in The Strand magazine December 1892 – November 1893, and took Holmes to still greater fame.
Holmes and Freud (England versus Europe)
In the Adventure of the Yellow Face Holmes tells Grant Munro:
‘…my friend and I have listened to a good many strange secrets in this room, and … have had the good fortune to bring peace to many troubled souls.’
which makes me think straightaway of Freud: Sherlock and Sigmund both being freelance consultants hired to solve puzzles which more traditional doctors/policemen cannot treat. Freud’s fearless and epoch-making investigations of the psyche and its origins in sex and violence couldn’t make be a bigger contrast with Conan Doyle’s cosy crimes – a bit of horse-stealing or treasure-finding or bank-robbing or counterfeiting all sorted in time to be home at Mrs Hudson’s for tea and crumpets. They may both clearly date from the same fin-de-siècle culture with its fascination for the decadent, for the criminal and transgressive, but Holmes is jolly good chap English nursery games compared to the terrifying investigations Freud made and which embarrass our culture to this day.
Compare the English writers of the day (Stevenson, Kipling, Wells, Conan Doyle, Haggard) and their ripping tales of derring-do, or Wilde’s sparkling fairy tales, with the psychological depth of Europeans like Freud, Chekhov, Maupassant or Mallarmé, Ibsen or Strindberg. Compare Elgar to Mahler. Or Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s dark-eyed Arthurian maidens to the sophisticated psychology of Klimt or Munch.
The return of the repressed
In Freud it is repressed drives and instincts which return in dreams and neurotic symptoms. In Holmes it is peoples’ past lives which catch up with them, so often from adventures abroad: the Australian convict, the black America child, the rival soldiers during the Indian Mutiny. Abroad is seen as more primitive, primal, a place where men commit crimes and make huge fortunes, a place where more instinctive drives can flourish. Upon returning to Blighty, names must be changed and past liberties repressed, hushed, silenced. Half of these cases aren’t about crimes at all, they’re about people petrified their squeaky clean Anglo reputations will be damaged.
Cornucopiousness
Again, Conan Doyle uses the old technique of making throwaway references to numerous other cases to build up the sense of Holmes’s vast achievements and far-flung fame. Watson breezily refers to: the Tarleton murders, the case of Vamberry the wine merchant, the adventure of the old Russian woman, the singular affair of the aliminium crutch, Ricoletti of the club foot and his abominable wife (in The Musgrave Ritual, p.97) or the adventure of the Second Stain and the adventure of the Tired Captain (in The Naval Treaty, 199).
This has the effect of making Holmes seem famous even as his real-life fame increased, a kind of echo.
The stories
Silver Blaze
Clients: none. The prizewinning racehorse goes missing and it turns out was being led into the moor to be hobbled by its own trainer John Straker who owed money to support a fancy woman. King’s Pyland, Devon.
The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
(Omitted from English editions because it eals with adultery! This story is in His Last Bow in American editions of the canon) Client: Susan Cushing.
The Adventure of the Yellow Face
Client: Grant Munro. A strange yellow face at the window of the cottage across the fields and his wife mysteriously disappearing. It is to see her black child from her first, American, husband. Norbury, south London.
The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk
Client: Hall Pycroft is puzzled to be offered a job in Birmingham days after accepting one in London. He goes and meets the badly disguised same man who interview him in London. Holmes realises they’ve decoyed Pycroft so the crooked brother can go take his place at a big merchant bank in the City. Indeed, they see in the papers that a massive robbery was foiled though the interviewer had murdered the bank’s nightwatchman. In a melodramatic twist the Birmingham brother tries to hang himself.
The Adventure of the Gloria Scott
Watson tells us this was Holmes’s first case. Client: Victor Trevor was a friend of the generally anti-social Holmes at college and invited him to his home in the Norfolk Broads where he met old Trevor a landowner and JP. It emerges OT has been living in fear and Victor tells him about a good-for-nothing chav named Hudson who came to stay and terrorised the household. Old Trevor dies of apoplexy after receiving a letter from an old colleague, Beddoes, Hudson has gone to stay with. In a letter to his son he explains he and Beddoes were convicts involved in the mutiny on the prison ship Gloria Scott which is blown up. They are picked up and taken on to Australia, make their fortunes, change their names and return to decent lives in Britain. But Hudson knows the true story and returns to haunt them.
The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
Client: Reginald Musgrave. An old family tradition turns out to be disguised instructions as to how to find King Charles I’s crown. Musgrave’s butler had realised as much but, having gained entry to the cellar where it was, had the heavy stone flagstone slammed shut on him by the wronged housemaid who fled. Hurlstone.
The Adventure of the Reigate Squires
Clients: none. Recovering from a big case, Holmes and Watson go for a rest cure near Reigate where a spate of burglaries climax in the murder of the butler to the Cunninghams, found with a tear of paper in his hand. Holmes is able to show there was no burglary, and the Cunninghams murdered their own servant who had discovered it was they who’d burgled their neighbour Major Acton in an effort to settle a land dispute between them. They try to strangle Holmes but are arrested on the spot.
The Adventure of the Crooked Man
Client: Major Murphy. ‘Excellent!’ I cried. ‘Elementary,’ said he. Colonel Barclay is heard arguing with his wife in a locked room at his villa near Aldershot, there is a piercing scream, and he is found dead. Goes back 30 years to the Indian Mutiny when he and handsome Henry Wood, in the same regiment, were both in love with Nancy. The town was besieged. Barclay arranged for handsome Henry to go for help but betrayed him into the hands of the waiting mutineers who horribly tortured him and sold him into slavery. Thirty years later the twisted wreck Wood reappears, along with the scampering mongoose he does tricks with, and his mere appearance gives Barclay a fatal heart attack.
The Adventure of the Resident Patient
Client: Arguably Dr Percy Trevelyan (Trevelyan was sent to Sherlock Holmes by Mr. Blessington). Trevelyan is a poor doctor whom a mysterious man approaches and offers to invest in his career; he sets him up in rooms and all he wants is 3/4 of the doctor’s income in return. After years of success Trevelyan is visited by a Russian count and his son; while he consults the father the son goes snooping, then both disappear. The next day, surprisingly, they return. It turns out to be an elaborate scam by the great Worthingden bank robbers – climaxes with Blessington apparently committing suicide, as usual all the signs of a great horror and fear on his face. Harley Street, London.
The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter
Client: Mr. Melas. First mention and appearance of Mycroft Holmes, fat and slothful and founder member of the Diogenes Club for the terminally anti-social. Mr Melas was kidnapped by a creepy small man with pointy moustache and scary giggle, taken in a sealed coach to a house in grounds where he has to translate for a walking skeleton of a man his face bound with bandages. He is dropped back on Wandsworth Common. He goes to the police then Mycroft. Someone replies to a newspaper advert revealing the house is in Beckenham, south London, where they arrive to find the two baddies and the woman they’re holding hostage long gone, and the skinny man and Mr Melas dying in a sealed room with a charcoal fire.
The Adventure of the Naval Treaty
Client: Percy Phelps is a promising young diplomat asked by his uncle the Foreign Secretary to copy out a naval treaty with Italy. He leaves his room to go get coffee and is talking to the commissionaire when the bell in his room rings, he returns to the room to find the treaty gone. Panic and a mental collapse, he returns to the family home in Woking where he is nursed by his sweetheart for 10 weeks until Holmes arrives. Turns out it was the fiancee’s brother who is in debt due to gambling on the Stock Exchange. Holmes confronts him as he removes the treaty from where he’d hidden it in the sick man’s room.
The Final Problem
Clients: none. Holmes appears in Watson’s rooms saying he has finally uncovered the mastermind behind most of London’s crimes, the Napoleon of Crime, Professor Moriarty. He will die happy if he has eliminated Moriarty. He describes a vivid encounter where the two cleverest men in England realise they are set on collision course. If he can just stay safe till the following Monday, the trap will be sprung, Moriarty and his accomplices arrested. So Holmes flees with Watson to the Continent and moves about. But at a walk near the Reichenbach Falls Watson is called back to the hotel by what turns out to be a fake medical emergency, leaving Moriarty to trap Holmes on the cul-de-sac path to the Falls. Here he allows him, conveniently, to write a last message to Watson, before the two fight and both fall into the raging waters.
Moriarty
There was some fatefulness in Conan Doyle’s intentions, or some magic in his touch, that even when he tries to get rid of Holmes as an albatross round his neck, tired and fed up with the character, he comes up with an out-of-the-blue, jimmy-rigged plot contraption of an evil mastermind of crime to provide a fitting end to his master detective, even then he hits fictional gold and Moriarty – in reality little more than a plot device – has himself become a fictional icon.
Cover of ‘The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes’, 1894 (Wikimedia Commons)
Books & Boots 