NOTES
WARNING: In compiling these notes it has sometimes been unavoidable that crucial elements of the plot have been given away. Readers encountering these stories for the first time might therefore prefer to read these notes afterwards.
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
First published in the Strand magazine in July 1891. The title was probably inspired by Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème (1848). Alternative titles: ‘A Scandal of Bohemia’ (which was Conan Doyle’s original title when the story was published in the Chicago Inter-Ocean); ‘A Bohemian Scandal’ (New Orleans Daily Picayune); and ‘Woman’s Wit’(Baltimore Weekly Sun). Conan Doyle ranked ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ fifth in the list of his twelve favourite Holmes stories (excluding those that appeared in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes), as revealed in the Strand in June 1927. The story is set in 1888 in Holmesian time.
1. Irene Adler: There is a River Adler in Bohemia. Models for Irene Adler include Ludmilla Hubel, a singer who became involved with Archduke Johann Salvator of Tuscany (nephew of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef); Lola Montez, mid-nineteenth-century mistress of Ludwig I of Bavaria; Elizabeth Anne Howard, mistress of Napoleon III; and Lillie Langtry (1853–1929), British actress and society beauty who had an affair with Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, in the 1880s.
2. whole Bohemian soul: Using the word ‘Bohemian’ to mean ‘unconventional’ dates back to the early nineteenth century; Conan Doyle thought himself something of a Bohemian in his youth. In 1878 when he was twenty he stayed in Maida Vale, west London, with relations and wrote that he was ‘too Bohemian for them and they too conventional for me’. On moving to Southsea in 1882 to set up as a general practitioner, he felt that he was ‘a most awful Bohemian from knowing so few ladies’.
3. Odessa: Russian port on the Black Sea and birthplace of Pushkin.
4. the Trepoff murder: General Fedor Fedorovich Trepov(1812–89), Governor of St Petersburg 1866–78, was shot on 24 January 1878 by V. I. Zasulich after ordering the flogging of the Nihilist agitator Bogolinbov. The story is told in the Holmesian pastiche ‘The Adventure of the Seven Clocks’ from The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Adrian M. Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr.
5. Trincomalee: City in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and a British naval base from 1795 to 1957.
6. reigning family of Holland: The Dutch monarch in 1888 was William III who ruled 1849–90.
7. gasogene: Soda syphon.
8. half a crown: Two shillings and sixpence, the equivalent of what would now be 12½ pence. The coin, first known under that name during the reign of Henry VIII, passed out of the British currency in 1970.
9. Let us glance at our Continental Gazetteer: Probably the Gazetteer of the World, first published in 1885.
10. Eglow, Eglonitz… Egria. It is in a German-speaking country: Eglow and Eglonitz are fictitious. Egria, also known as Eger, is now Cheb in the far west of what was then Bohemia and is now the Czech Republic. It was at the centre of the late nineteenth-century Pan-German Schonerer movement, which opposed Czech nationalism and giving the Czech language equal status with German.
11. Carlsbad: Carlsbad or Karlsbad is now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. Karl Marx famously visited Carlsbad to use the renowned spa waters.
12. Wallenstein: Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein(1583–1634), Duke of Friedland, Sagan and Mecklenburg, was a Bohemian general assassinated in Egria after being suspected of treason during the Thirty Years War.
13. paper mills: Egria was a textile rather than a paper-making area.
14. Bohemia: It was then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later came under the auspices of Germany, then Czechoslovakia, and is now part of the Czech Republic.
15. brougham: A four-wheeled carriage named after the essayist and designer Henry Brougham(1778–1868).
16. A hundred and fifty guineas: Pre-decimalization, the guinea had the value of one pound and one shilling (now £1. 05p). It took its name from the Guinea coast in Africa where the gold used to mint it was mined. Although the coin was last issued in 1813 during the reign of George III it was still in use for pricing various luxury goods and doctors’ fees in the twentieth century, and today is often used in valuing race-horses.
17. I am lost without my Boswell: James Boswell (1740–95), essayist, journalist and biographer, whose close relationship with Dr Johnson resulted in his Life of Johnson, probably the best-loved biography in the English language. Contrast Holmes’s praise for Watson in this instance with his derisory ‘you have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales’ in the later ‘The Copper Beeches’.
18. thick, hanging lip: A well-known feature of the Habsburgs, rulers of Austria-Hungary.
19. the great House of Ormstein: Fictitious.
20. Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Falstein, and hereditary King of Bohemia: ‘Wilhelm’ was the name of the contemporary German kaiser; ‘Gottsreich’ is German for ‘God’s kingdom’; ‘Cassel-Falstein’ is probably based on Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost province of Germany. The kings of Bohemia were not always hereditary, and in the Middle Ages were often elected by noblemen. The Bohemian throne was subsumed into that of Austria in 1526, but in 1619 Calvinists took control and chose as their new king Elector Palatine Frederick, who was married to Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England. Their grandson, George Louis, Elector of Hanover, became George I of England in 1714. By the nineteenth century there was no longer a king of Bohemia and the territory had become part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Historically the best-known ‘king’ of Bohemia was Wenceslas (c. 907–29), subject of the Christmas carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’, who was actually a duke.
Holmes scholars are divided over the prototype for the King of Bohemia. At the end of the nineteenth century the Austro-Hungarian throne was occupied by Emperor Franz Josef von Habsburg (1830–1916), Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary, who, having been born in 1830, is too old to fit the bill (we are later told that the King of Bohemia is thirty). His son, the Grand Duke Rudolph (1858–89), fits the age requirement but as a bit of a rake would not have been worried about such a photograph and in any case was married in 1881. Rudolph died in a hunting accident in 1889, the year after the one in which the story is set. Franz Ferdinand (1863–1914), Emperor Franz Josef ’s nephew, also fits the age requirement. He became heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne following Rudolph’s death and didn’t marry until 1900. It was his assassination by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in 1914 that sparked the First World War.
Other Holmesologists have suggested Crown Prince Wilhelm von Hohenzollern of Prussia (1859–1941), later Wilhelm II of Germany, who had an affair with an American opera singer; or even Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. Although his age in 1888 (forty-seven) would preclude him he was no stranger to scandal and affairs (for instance, with the actress Lillie Langtry). Edward is also the likely model for the figure whose name is a ‘household word all over the earth – one of the highest, noblest, most exalted names in England’ who in ‘The Beryl Coronet’ (see below) seeks to pawn one of the crown jewels.
21. Prague: Then capital of Bohemia, now capital of the Czech Republic.
22. Hebrew Rabbi: Is there any kind of rabbi other than a Hebrew one? The rabbi in question is either Nathan Adler, Chief Rabbi of the United Congregations of the British Empire until 1890, or his son Hermann who succeeded him as Chief Rabbi.
23. La Scala: Well-known Milan opera house.
24. Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen, second daughter of the King of Scandinavia: Saxe-Meningen was a duchy in Germany. The King of Scandinavia, i.e. of Norway and Sweden as a united kingdom, was then Oscar II.
25. the Langham: The Langham Hotel, Portland Place, central London, was then probably London’s most luxurious hotel and was where Conan Doyle was commissioned to write what became the second Holmes novella, The Sign of Four, after a meeting with the American literary agent Joseph Stoddart in the hotel in August 1889. (Oscar Wilde, also present at the meeting, was commissioned to write The Picture of Dorian Gray as a result.) In the twentieth century the Langham was taken over by the BBC, whose head offices are based opposite, but has since reverted to a hotel. It features elsewhere in the Holmes canon as the hotel where Mary Morstan’s father, Captain Morstan, stays in The Sign of Four and as the base of the Hon. Philip Green in ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’ from His Last Bow.
26. St John’s Wood: An exclusive inner London suburb which lies one mile north of Baker Street. In the late nineteenth century St John’s Wood was noted for its brothels (Algernon Swinburne used to visit one in Circus Road) and the homes of the mistresses of wealthy men. Briony Lodge and Serpentine Avenue are fictitious.
27. Was the photograph a cabinet: A cabinet photograph was 3⅞ × 5½ inches in size.
28. the two crimes which I have elsewhere recorded: i.e. those recorded in the first two Holmes novellas, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.
29. a glass of half-and-half: A mix of two types of beer, usually mild and bitter.
30. the Inner Temple: One of the Inns of Court in central London occupied by law students and barristers, of which four, the Inner and Outer Temple, Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn, remain.
31. hansom cab: A two-wheeled covered carriage drawn by one horse, and named after its designer, J. A. Hansom (1803–82).
32. Gross and Hankey’s in Regent Street: Fictitious.
33. St Monica in the Edgware Road: Fictitious, but possibly based on St Mark’s just off Edgware Road on Old Marylebone Road. Edgware Road is the name given to the part of the ancient Roman Road of Watling Street (the north-west route out of London, now the A5), that runs between St John’s Wood Road and Marble Arch.
34. landau: A two-seat four-wheeled covered vehicle named after the German town where it was first constructed.
35. It was twenty-five minutes to twelve: Until 1886 marriages had to be solemnized before noon. Then the deadline was extended to 3 p.m., but not for Roman Catholic churches.
36. in search of a best man: In English law two witnesses are required for a wedding service.
37. sovereign: Gold £1 coin named after the effigy of the ruler as inscribed on the obverse. It was last coined in England in 1917.
38. the Park: Presumably Regent’s Park, which is situated to the south-east of St John’s Wood.
39. Mrs Turner: A strange inconsistency as at all other times the landlady is Mrs Hudson.
40. Mr John Hare: Victorian/Edwardian actor-manager (1844–1921) associated from 1879 to 1888 with the St James’s Theatre off Piccadilly.
41. tossed my rocket into the room: This recalls the scene in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ in which a ‘pretended lunatic’ in the pay of Dupin fires a musket in the street.
42. Darlington Substitution Scandal: It was expounded upon as a short story in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, Adrian M. Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr.
43. the Arnsworth Castle business: The story is fleshed out in ‘The Adventure of the Red Widow’ from the above volume.
44. Charing Cross: The terminus of the South-Eastern Railway, on the Strand. The station also features on a number of occasions in the Holmes canon including ‘The Golden Pince-Nez’, ‘The Abbey Grange’ and ‘The Second Stain’ from The Return of Sherlock Holmes and ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ from His Last Bow.
A CASE OF IDENTITY
First published in the Strand in September 1891. The story could be set in 1887.
1. most stale and unprofitable: ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable/Seem to me all the uses of this world.’ Hamlet, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet I.ii.133.
2. Irene Adler papers: Referring to the previous story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, except that there were no papers (though some letters are mentioned). However, the case centred on a photograph.
3. reigning family of Holland: The House of Orange.
4. coquettish Duchess-of-Devonshire fashion: As in Gainsborough’s 1783 portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish (1757–1806), a well-known society beauty of the day.
5. Tottenham Court Road: Amajor traffic route which runs north from the eastern end of Oxford Street to Somers Town, the area around Euston Station. It is on Tottenham Court Road that Holmes finds the broker who sells him a Stradivarius in ‘The Cardboard Box’ (included in some editions of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes), and where Morton and Waylight’s is situated in ‘The Red Circle’ from His Last Bow. Henry Baker loses his goose in ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ (see below) on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Goodge Street.
6. Leadenhall Street: Major street, to the north-east of London Bridge in the City of London, that takes its name from the covered Leadenhall Market which still stands and which originally had a leaden roof.
7. St Saviour’s near King’s Cross: The church stood on the north-west corner of Maple Street and Whitfield Street in what is now Fitzrovia.
8. St Pancras Hotel: Flamboyant and grandiose red-brick Gothic building fronting St Pancras Station. It was built to the design of George Gilbert Scott in 1872 and is now seen as a quintessential Victorian masterpiece despite being pilloried by previous generations for its outré appearance. The building was a hotel until 1935 when it was converted to offices, but is now mostly deserted, awaiting restoration.
9. 31 Lyon Place, Camberwell: A fictitious address in what is a mainly working-class suburb of south-east London three miles from the centre.
10. Fenchurch Street: A small, bustling City turning which converges with Leadenhall Street by Aldgate Pump and is best known for the eponymous railway terminus, opened in 1841 for the London and Blackwall Railway.
11. Balzac: Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), French novelist best known for Le Père Goriot (1834).
12. There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace: The Persian saying Holmes uses is not one attributed to Hafiz (Shams-ud-Din Mohammed, fourteenth-century Persian poet). Horace is Quintus Horatius Flaccus (63–8 BC), Roman poet best known for Odes and Satires.
THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE
First published in the Strand in August 1891. Conan Doyle ranked ‘The Red-Headed League’ second in the list of his twelve favourite Holmes stories (excluding those that appeared in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes), as revealed in the Strand in June 1927. The story is set in 1890.
1. the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland: This line would have confused those who read the story when it first appeared in the Strand as it refers to ‘A Case of Identity’ which at that time, owing to a mix-up, had been received but not published by the Strand.
2. a square pierced bit of metal: Although we later discover this to be a Chinese coin, China did not mint any square coins. Until the end of the nineteenth century there was only one coin in currency in China, the tsein, which was round but did have a small square hole cut in the centre.
3. Freemason: The Free and Accepted Masons are one of the world’s best-known secret societies; its rituals are based on the ancient practices of stonemasons and its aims include ‘keeping a tongue of good report, maintaining secrecy and practising charity’. Conan Doyle was a member of the Phoenix Lodge, No. 257, Portsmouth.
4. arc and compass breastpin: This should be ‘square and compass breastpin’, the emblems of masonry.
5. peculiar to China: At the time tattooing was considered abhorrent in China and used mainly for marking criminals. Fishes would not have been used.
6. Omne ignotum pro magnifico: ‘Everything unknown passes for something splendid’, Tacitus, from The Life and Character of Julius Agricola (c. ad 98). Tacitus was a favourite of Conan Doyle, who avidly collected second-hand editions of his books when he was a medical student in Edinburgh.
7. Lebanon, Penn.: City in Pennsylvania, eight miles north-west of Philadelphia.
8. Pope’s Court, Fleet Street: This is probably Poppins Court, which runs north off Fleet Street at its eastern end, although some scholars have cited Pope’s Head Court, which could then be found on the western side of Chancery Lane north of Fleet Street. If the League’s office was in Pope’s Head Court then it would have been Chancery Lane rather than Fleet Street that was filled with red-heads after the publication of the advert.
9. Morning Chronicle: Georgian-and Victorian-era newspaper, once edited by Gladstone.
10. 27 April 1890. Just two months ago: But at the beginning of the story Watson calls upon Holmes ‘in the autumn of last year’.
11. Coburg Square, near the City: Based on Charterhouse Square, which is named after the Carthusian monastery founded there in 1370 and was later occupied by Charterhouse school until it moved to Surrey in 1875. The few remaining medieval buildings and their antiquated-looking rebuilt neighbours are now used by St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
12. coster’s orange barrow: The barrow of a costermonger, a street hawker of fruit and vegetables.
13. copy out the Encyclopedia Britannica: A plot development inspired by the Oliver Wendell Holmes story ‘The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table’(1858), in which a man memorizes the first volume of the encyclopedia. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was first published in Edinburgh in 1771.
14. that I might get on to the B’s before very long: Assuming that Wilson would have been working from the 1875 edition of the encyclopedia, which doesn’t reach ‘Attica’ until p. 794 of Volume II, it is unlikely that he could have written quite as much as he claimed in two months.
15. The Red-Headed League is Dissolved Oct. 9, 1890: It would have made more sense for the League to keep Wilson away from his shop until some time after it had accomplished its nefarious task than allow him the opportunity to seek help. Note that it is now supposedly October even though Wilson has done eight weeks of work on the encyclopedia, having begun soon after his interview in April.
16. the gentleman at No. 4: The League was based at No. 7.
17. his name was William Morris: A strange choice, given that this is of course the name of the major Victorian artist, writer and designer (1834–96).
18. 17 King Edward Street: The building, then the address of a carpet-maker, has since been demolished. The street was once known as Stinking Lane on account of the rubbish from nearby markets which collected there.
19. But he could nothelp me in anyway: Surely Spaulding/Clay as ‘the fourth smartest man in London’, according to Holmes’s later description, should have tried harder to placate Wilson given his need not to arouse the latter’s suspicions.
20. to say nothing of the minute knowledge… letter A: But surely as far as Holmes was concerned Wilson’s knowledge would be purposeless? When in A Study in Scarlet Watson shows his astonishment at Holmes’s claim that he wasn’t aware that the earth travelled round the sun, Holmes replies that now he knows he will do his best to forget it so that he doesn’t lumber his ‘brain-attic’ with unnecessary information.
21. Sarasate: Spanish violinist Pablo Martín Melitón Sarasate y Navascues (1844–1908). Though linked regularly with St James’s Hall Sarasate did not play in London in October 1890.
22. St James’s Hall: The hall, which opened in 1858, was situated at the north-east end of Piccadilly between Swallow Street and Piccadilly Circus. It was demolished in 1905 and replaced by a hotel.
23. as far as Aldersgate: Aldersgate Station was renamed Barbican in 1968 following the construction of the adjacent Barbican luxury high-rise flats. The name Aldersgate, that of one of the original City gates, survives in Aldersgate Street, the name given to the A1 as it enters the City.
24. Three gilt balls: The pawnbroker’s sign adapted from the arms of the wealthy Medici family of Lombardy, merchants and bankers who ruled Florence in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
25. to the Strand: The Strand is the main thoroughfare linking the City of Westminster with the City of London, but its inclusion is amusing given that it is the name of the magazine in which the story was first printed.
26. Third right, fourth left: Various commentators have pointed out that there is no square in London from which the Strand could be reached using these directions.
27. The road in which we found ourselves: If Saxe-Coburg Square is based on Charterhouse Square, then Holmes and Watson are now on Aldersgate Street.
28. It is a hobby… exact knowledge of London: Adapted from Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, chapter 20: Sam Weller’s ‘knowledge of London was extensive and peculiar’.
29. the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank: There was a branch of the County & Westminster Bank at 134 Aldersgate Street (now a branch of the NatWest). However, if this is the bank which features in the story it’s odd that Holmes doesn’t mention Aldersgate Station in his list of businesses and premises.
30. black-letter editions: Heavy black Gothic or German type used in the early days of printing.
31. Kensington: Luxurious west London district two miles south-west of Baker Street which developed around the court of Kensington Palace.
32. pea-jacket: Not, as commonly believed, meaning a green jacket but a jacket whose name originated in the Dutch pie or pij – coat.
33. Sholto murder and the Agra treasure: i.e. the story recounted in The Sign of Four.
34. rubber: Whist, not bridge as would be the case today, bridge not being invented until the early years of the twentieth century.
35. Farringdon Street: It is strange that Farringdon Street is mentioned, given that it would not be a significant landmark on the journey from Baker Street to Charterhouse Square (on which Saxe-Coburg Square was based).
36. It is our French gold: Conan Doyle may have been reading an article which appeared in Tit-Bits (which like the Strand was owned by George Newnes) on 28 February 1891 entitled ‘A Journey with a Million of Money’, which told how gold bullion was transferred from the Bank of England to the Bank of France.
37. thirty thousand napoleons: A napoleon was a 20-franc gold coin.
38. partie carrée: A party of four. Nowadays the term is used as a euphemism for a wife-swapping quartet.
39. Jump, Archie, jump, and I’ll swing for it: An odd thing to say which has caused Holmes scholars much consternation. Is Clay sarcastically referring to the noose that awaits him for murder or murders he may have committed if Archie’s blundering allows him to be caught, or is he simply advising his accomplice and himself on the best method of escape?
40. derbies: Slang for handcuffs.
41. running a tunnel: In 1890 the Toronto Telegram reported on the story of four men and a woman who for eight months burrowed a tunnel 3 feet high and 53 feet long 8 feet underground from the basement of their house towards a nearby bank, but were discovered with only a few feet to go.
42. ennui: A contemporary usage: in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891 edn), Lord Henry Wotton muses ‘The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian.’
43. L’homme… c’est tout: The quote should be ‘L’Homme n’est rien, l’œuvre tout’ – ‘Man is nothing; work is everything’, which Flaubert wrote in a letter to George Sand in December 1875.
THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY
First published in the Strand in October 1891. Alternative title: ‘The Mystery of Boscombe Valley’(St Louis Post-Dispatch). The story could be set in or around 1888.
1. Boscombe Valley: There is a small valley, the Boscombe Chine, near Bournemouth, Dorset.
2. Paddington: London terminus for the Great Western Railway, situated on Praed Street just west of central London.
3. long grey travelling-cloak and close-fitting cloth cap: Sidney Paget drew the ‘closefitting cloth cap’ as a deerstalker in his Strand illustration, thereby introducing one of the best-known Holmes images.
4. Boscombe Valley is a country district not very far from Ross, in Herefordshire: There is no Boscombe Valley near Ross, a market town on the River Wye in Herefordshire.
5. the Colonies: Australia comprised six colonies before federation in 1900.
6. who have retained Lestrade: Implying that Lestrade, the Scotland Yard detective, has gone into private practice. Yet we soon discover (see below) that Lestrade acting in his official Scotland Yard capacity is convinced of McCarthy’s guilt.
7. Cooee: An aboriginal call now in common use.
8. my pocket Petrarch: Francesco Petrarca (1304–74), Italian poet.
9. broad gleaming Severn: The River Severn, the longest river in Britain, rises in North Wales and flows east and south for 210 miles before entering the Bristol Channel.
10. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard: Now Lestrade is a representative of the official force rather than working in a private capacity, as previously implied.
11. Twenty-nine: Barometric pressure is measured according to the height of a column of mercury in a glass tube. Twenty-nine would imply rain.
12. Victoria: The smallest state in Australia.
13. yellow-backed novel: Cheap popular novels were often bound in a hard yellow cover at that time.
14. Ah, thereby hangs a rather painful tale: ‘Well, thereby hangs a tale’, Mistress Quickly from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor I.iv.144; ‘And thereby hangs a tale’, Jaques from Shakespeare’s As You Like It II.vii.28;‘And thereby hangs a tale’, Grumio from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew IV.i.51.
15. George Meredith: English novelist and poet (1828–1909), author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). Conan Doyle gave a talk entitled ‘The Genius of George Meredith’ to the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society in November 1888.
16. Ballarat: Third-biggest city in Victoria, Australia.
17. It is obvious: But the town could just as easily have been Ararat, fifty-four miles north-west of Ballarat.
18. Assizes: Chief county court held quarterly until 1971, when assizes were replaced by crown courts.
19. One day a gold convoy came down from Ballarat: There were two famous gold robberies in the mid-nineteenth century in Australia: the McIvor Gold Robbery of 1853 and the Eugowra Escort Robbery of 1862, following which a man called Turner was arrested.
20. Baxter’s words… ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes’: The saying should be attributed not to Richard Baxter (1615–91) but to John Bradford (c. 1510–55), the Protestant martyr, who on seeing criminals being led to execution supposedly exclaimed: ‘But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford.’
THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS
First published in the Strand in November 1891. Alternative titles: ‘Adventure of Five Orange Pips’ and ‘The Story of Five Orange Pips’(St Louis Post-Dispatch). Conan Doyle ranked ‘The Five Orange Pips’ seventh in the list of his twelve favourite Holmes stories (excluding those that appeared in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes), as revealed in the Strand in June 1927. The story is set in 1887.
1. the adventure of the Paradol Chamber: Lucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol (1829–70), French writer, shot himself in a room of a Washington, D.C. hotel in July 1870. There is a Holmesian pastiche of the incident by Alan Wilson in the Sherlock Holmes Journal vol. V, no. 2 (Spring 1961), pp. 45–50, and vol. V, no. 3 (Winter 1961), pp. 78–82.
2. the British barque Sophy Anderson: There was no ship of that name.
3. the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa: A fictitious island but an amalgam of the names of the Hebridean islands Ulva and Staffa.
4. the Camberwell poisoning case: Apastiche, ‘The Adventure of the Gold Hunter’, is featured in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Adrian M. Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr.
5. Clark Russell’s fine sea stories: Clark Russell (1844–1911), who wrote many maritime novels, was described by Swinburne as ‘the greatest master of the sea’. Watson may have been reading A Sea Queen (1883), which contains the passage ‘shrieked like tortured children at the hall-door and the window-casements, and roared like the discharge of heavy ordnance in the chimneys’ and therefore may account for the preceding simile, ‘the wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney’.
6. Horsham; Horsham is in Sussex and therefore not in the south-west. It is revisited by Holmes and Watson in ‘The Sussex Vampire’ from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.
7. clay and chalk mixture: Openshaw would not get such a mixture on his feet from Horsham, which stands in a sand and clay belt. Holmes’s observation is based on a real-life incident in which Conan Doyle’s Edinburgh University tutor Joseph Bell, partly the model for Holmes, noted that a patient had crossed Bruntsfield Links as his boots contained some red clay which could be found nowhere else in the city.
8. at the time of the invention of bicycling: There is no particular date for the invention of bicycling; however, pedals were introduced in the early 1840s.
9. the war: The American Civil War (1861–5).
10. Jackson’s army: Thomas Jonathan Jackson (1824–63), also known as Stone wall Jackson, was a Confederate general mortally wounded at Chancellorsville.
11. Hood: John Bell Hood (1831–79), Confederate general who took charge of the Atlanta campaign and was beaten by G. H. Thomas at Nashville in January 1865, after which he resigned his post.
12. Lee: Robert Edward Lee (1807–70), known as Robert E. Lee, general-inchief of the defeated Confederate armies in the Civil War.
13. extending the franchise to them: Although such a move was ratified by the Republicans in 1870 it was not enacted.
14. Pondicherry: A city in south-east India.
15. K.K.K.: The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865 as a result of the South’s defeat in the American Civil War. Its early aims were to nullify Congress laws that might put Southern whites under the control of Northerners supported by black voters, and it won popularity amongst Confederate leaders including Robert E. Lee. It later mutated into the well-known modern-day version, a ritual-ridden, ultraviolent, murderous society infamous for the outlandish garb worn by its adherents: white headdress, mask and robe. Conan Doyle may well have learnt something of the Klan from a conversation with the black civil rights leader Henry Highland Garnet on board the Mayumba in 1882. By the time the story was written anti-Klan forces in the USA were hopeful of convicting former Confederate leaders for Klan activities. There is no evidence that the Klan had been using orange pips to convey messages.
16. brought in a verdict of suicide: Unlikely. Who commits suicide by drowning himself in a two-foot puddle?
17. reconstruction of the Southern states: The Southern states excluding Tennessee were occupied by Union troops after refusing to accept new conditions of government.
18. carpet-bag politicians who had been sent down from the North: Politicians from the North moved to the Southern states after the Civil War with, it was said, few possessions other than those which could be wrapped up in a carpet-bag. They were forced out when conservative Democrats recaptured control of the ex-Confederacy states in the 1870s. The term ‘carpet-bagger’ has since been used as an insulting term for politicians who move to an area with which they have little accord to stand for office under a likely winning ticket.
19. one of the forts upon Portsdown Hill: There is a red-brick fort on Portsdown Hill which looks down on Portsmouth, the city where Conan Doyle lived in the 1880s.
20. Fareham: A town four miles west of Portsmouth across Portsmouth Harbour.
21. This is no time for despair: ‘Nil desperandum’, from Horace, Odes I, vii.
22. Waterloo: The terminus on the south bank of the Thames for the London and South Western Railway, which opened in 1848. Prior to this the line finished at Vauxhall and so commuters wanting to get to and from central London had to put up with the inconvenience of a two-mile trip by bus, cab or boat.
23. Cuvier: Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier(1769–1832), French statesman, philosopher, naturalist and pioneer of the science of comparative anatomy. In Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) Dupin introduces Cuvier’s description of the ‘Ourang-Outang’ of the East Indian Islands as he solves the crime.
24. It was a singular document: Watson compiled the list in chapter 2 of A Study in Scarlet and then threw it into the fire ‘in despair’, which probably explains why his recollection of it is so hazy.
25. Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero: The original read: ‘Knowledge of Philosophy. – Nil. Knowledge of Astronomy. – Nil. Knowledge of Politics. – Feeble’.
26. geology profound: The original read: ‘Knowledge of Geology. – Practical but limited’.
27. chemistry eccentric: The original read: ‘Knowledge of Chemistry.– Profound’.
28. anatomy unsystematic: The original read: ‘Knowledge of Anatomy. – Accurate, but unsystematic’.
29. sensational literature and crime records unique: The original read: ‘Knowledge of Sensational Literature. – Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.’
30. self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco: There is no mention of this in the original list included in A Study in Scarlet.
31. the American Encyclopedia: Probably the American Cyclopedia (New York, 1873–6).
32. A name derived: The name Ku Klux Klan was, in fact, chosen at a committee meeting at which someone suggested the Greek kukloi, circle, at which point, so the story goes, another member shouted ‘Ku Klux’. Klan was then added.
33. in the year 1869, the movement rather suddenly collapsed: The Klan was disbanded in 1877 after federal troops were withdrawn from the South. It was revived as a more blatant white-supremacy force in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1915.
34. Waterloo Bridge: Built in the 1810s by John Rennie and originally named Strand Bridge, the name was changed after the Battle of Waterloo. Rennie’s bridge was demolished in 1936 and replaced six years later.
35. I should send him away to his death: Thus John Openshaw becomes one of only two Holmes clients to die despite contacting Holmes for help, the other being Hilton Cubitt in ‘The Dancing Men’ in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
36. The Embankment: Built alongside the northern bank of the Thames between Westminster and Blackfriars Bridge, and opened by Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1870.
37. Lloyd’s registers: Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, which began in 1764.
38. Albert Dock: Royal Albert Dock, Silvertown, seven miles east of central London on the north side of the river, built 1880.
39. Gravesend: Port on the Thames in Kent, twenty-four miles east of London and generally accepted as the boundary between the Thames as a river and as an estuary. Gravesend was the first stop on the river for ships coming to the Port of London, where sea captains were exchanged for river captains.
40. the Goodwins: Dangerous shoals off the coast east of Dover, once thought to be an island which had sunk. In the eleventh century the territory was claimed by the Earl of Godwine.
THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP
First published in the Strand in December 1891. Alternative title: ‘The Strange Tale of a Beggar’ (Philadelphia Inquirer). Probable sources include a Tit-Bits article of 17 January 1891 entitled ‘A Day as a Professional Beggar’, in which a journalist poses as a beggar, equipping himself with matches to avoid arrest for vagrancy. Andrew Lang in ‘The Novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’, Quarterly Review (July 1904), noted the similarity between the story and W. M. Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Mr C. J. Yellowplush (1861), in which Frederic Altamont spends eight hours a day in the City on mysterious business. The story is set in 1889.
1. Theological College of St George’s: Fictitious, although there was a Theological College of St Joseph.
2. De Quincey’s description: i.e. the descriptions of taking opium by Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859), Manchester-born essayist and associate of the Lake Poets, whose best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was first published in London Magazine in 1821.
3. James: As Watson’s full given name is John H. Watson this solecism has caused Holmesologists much consternation. Some have claimed that James is a wife’s pet name; others that it is an Anglicized version of Watson’s middle name, which could be Hamish (the ‘H.’ is never revealed); that it is a playful nod to Holmes’s description of Watson as his (James) Boswell; that Mrs Watson is referring to their bull-pup; or even that Watson married Mrs Cecil Forrester, not Mary Morstan, at the end of The Sign of Four, and that she is referring to a stepson called James. But it seems more likely that Conan Doyle simply made a mistake. As Richard Lancelyn Green noted, the author had a friend in Portsmouth called James Watson and once wrote a letter to the editor of the Strand in which he referred to Watson as James.
4. Upper Swandam Lane: Fictitious (see next note).
5. east of London Bridge: We later learn that the den backs on to Paul’s Wharf, which has since been demolished; it lay by the river directly south of St Paul’s Cathedral and west of London Bridge.
6. slop-shop: A shop selling clothes and bedding for sailors.
7. Lascar: Urdu; an east Indian sailor.
8. dog-cart: A two-wheeled open vehicle with two seats back-to-back, the rear able to be shut to form a box for carrying a dog.
9. Lee, in Kent: Lee, seven miles south-east of central London, was incorporated into the London borough of Lewisham in 1906.
10. He had no occupation, but was interested in several companies: St Clair is in some ways reminiscent of Dickens’s Alfred Lammle, from Our Mutual Friend, who ‘goes into the City… [and] oscillates on mysterious business between London and Paris’. In this case St Clair oscillates between Lee, the Bar of Gold and Threadneedle Street.
11. Cannon Street: Terminus for the South Eastern Railway, built in 1866 as an extension of the line from London Bridge and thereby bringing commuters closer to the City.
12. Capital and Counties Bank: Conan Doyle’s and Holmes’s own bank, as we discover in ‘The Priory School’, from The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
13. Fresno Street, which branches out of Upper Swandam Lane: Possibly Bennet’s Hill, which branches out of Upper Thames Street.
14. vestas: Matches named after the Roman goddess of fire.
15. Threadneedle Street: Home of the Bank of England, which is occasionally described as ‘the old lady of Threadneedle Street’. The turning, home of London’s merchant tailors, was originally Three-Needle Street.
16. a small angle in the wall: There is such an angle at no. 51.
17. our short drive, starting in Middlesex… ending in Kent: In 1889, the year in which the story is set, the County of London came into being. Prior to this a building located near Paul’s Wharf would have been in Middlesex, the nearest crossing-point on the south side would have been in Surrey, and Lee, ‘seven miles’ drive from London’, in Kent.
18. mousseline-de-soie: Soft silk fabric.
19. I am not hysterical, nor given to fainting: But earlier, on seeing the blood upon the window above the Bar of Gold, Mrs St Clair had fainted.
20. Gravesend postmark: See ‘The Five Orange Pips’, note 39.
21. Charing Cross: The junction of Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, named after the village of Cherringe, where Edward I installed one of several crosses in memory of his wife Eleanor along the route of her funeral procession from Lincoln to Westminster in 1291.
22. Gladstone bag: A leather travelling bag which opens wide, named after the Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone(1809–98).
23. Wellington Street: Home of the Lyceum theatre, outside which Holmes and Watson wait for Mary Morstan’s party in The Sign of Four. The office of Dickens’s All the Year Round and Household Words magazines was based here in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.
24. Bow Street: When the novelist and barrister Henry Fielding was appointed a magistrate based in Bow Street in 1749 he appointed six ‘thief-takers’ to aid the largely ineffectual parish constables and watchmen. They came to be known as the Bow Street Runners, Britain’s first police force. In 1839 they were disbanded and replaced by the Metropolitan Force.
25. The man’s face peeled off under the sponge: In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) a sailor is spotted entering the Wheel of Fortune in Shore Lane, near Lower Thames Street. When he fails to reappear Sergeant Cuff and the police break down the door and find a man dressed as a sailor dead on the bed. Sergeant Cuff then pulls off the man’s black wig and beard.
26. I am illegally detained: Why is St Clair/Boone not charged with wasting police time?
27. green-room: Room in a theatre originally painted green where actors wait to enter the stage.
28. and fixed one side of my lip: Reminiscent of Victor Hugo’s L’Homme qui rit, from the 1870 novel of the same name, whose lips were scarred when he was a child causing him to perpetually smile.
29. dollars: A dollar was until recently slang for five shillings (25p).
30. squalid beggar: The Capital and Counties Bank where St Clair/Boone has £220 to his credit was at 39 Threadneedle Street near the ‘small angle in the wall’ where he begs.
31. varied by silver: In W. M. Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Mr C. J. Yellowplush Frederic Altamont journeys to the City every day but refuses to reveal what he does during the eight hours he spends there. When his wife discovers a silver Queen Anne sixpence in the money he gives her she surmises that he sweeps the road by Cornhill.
32. That note: Reminiscent of Émile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq (1869), in which the Count disguised as a tramp is taken into custody but is able to send a message to his wife by code.
THE BLUE CARBUNCLE
First published in the Strand in January 1892. Alternative title: ‘The Christmas Goose that Swallowed the Diamond’ (Philadelphia Inquirer). The title was probably inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Great Carbuncle’, and the plot by an article in Cassell’s Saturday Journal (25 April 1891) in which a diamond slips into the muzzle of a gun while the owner is grouse shooting, but is spotted missing before the weapon is fired. The owner then ruminates on the possibility of the stone becoming embedded in the ‘inside of a bird… [astonishing] the cook when she came to prepare it’. Tit-Bits contained an article on 5 September 1891 entitled ‘Clever Diamond Smuggling’, in which a smuggler hides three diamonds in meat and feeds them to a dog to evade American customs officers. The story could be set in or around 1887.
1. commissionaire: i.e. a member of the Corps of Commissionaires, originally wounded soldiers for whom civilian employment was found as door-keepers or caretakers.
2. billycock: A round, felt hat named after William Coke, the first wearer of such a hat.
3. Goodge Street: A side-street leading from Tottenham Court Road towards the Middlesex Hospital. There is a tube station called Goodge Street but it is on Tottenham Court Road, a short distance north of the junction with Goodge Street.
4. some thousands of Bakers, and some hundreds of Henry Bakers: In the 1890 directory there were only seven Henry Bakers in London and only 139 Bakers in all.
5. a man with so large a brain must have something in it: An assumption linked to the then fashionable belief in phrenology, the study of the shape and size of the skull. Some scientists believed that there was a correlation between the size of the brain and the depth of intellect, and the brains of deceased criminals, madmen, writers and politicians were often weighed.
6. If this man ordered one, it is a sign of a certain amount of foresight: Or the sign of a good salesman.
7. perspired very freely, and could, therefore, hardly be in the best of training: Everybody perspires so this reasoning is faulty, although one wonders whether Conan Doyle, who was in reasonably good training given his penchant for demanding sports, examined his own hat.
8. crop: Part of a bird’s oesophagus in which food is stored.
9. It cuts into glass as though it were putty: Which proves nothing; so does glass.
10. blue carbuncle: A carbuncle is a garnet which comes in a variety of colours, but never blue.
11. the Hotel Cosmopolitan: Fictitious.
12. Assizes: See ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, note 18.
13. run down to the advertising agency: Conan Doyle originally inserted the name of a real advertising agency, Willing’s, but the Strand’s editors chose not to allow them a free plug.
14. Oh, in the Globe, Star, Pall Mall… and any others that occur to you: A roster that seems barely credible now when there is only one evening paper in London, the Evening Standard.
15. banks of the Amoy River in Southern China: There is no Amoy River in China but Amoy is a Chinese city on the River Kiulung.
16. forty-grain weight: Gems are weighed in carats, not grains.
17. crystallized charcoal: Holmes, a chemist, should know that charcoal, which consists of carbon, crystallizes as a diamond, not as a carbuncle, which would consist of amalgams of metals such as calcium, iron, magnesium and manganese as well as silicon. Or perhaps the so-called blue carbuncle is a blue diamond.
18. Scotch bonnet: Scottish headgear made out of soft wool also known as a tam o’shanter, named after the hero of Burns’s eponymous poem (1790).
19. disjecta membra: Latin, ‘the limbs of the dismembered’, from ‘Invenias… disjecti membra poetae’ – ‘You will find… the limbs of the dismembered poet’, Horace, Satires I, iv, line 62;it refers to finding traces of a poet’s original words after translation.
20. Alpha Inn near the Museum: Since the pub is in Bloomsbury and the museum the British Museum, the Alpha is either the Museum Tavern at 49 Great Russell Street or the Plough at 27 Museum Street. The latter is more likely as Alpha is the first star in the constellation of the Plough.
21. doctors’ quarter: Private consultancies can still be found in prestigious addresses on Harley Street, in Marylebone to the east of Baker Street.
22. Bloomsbury: Dignified district around the British Museum and London University, best known for the early twentieth-century Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers which included Virginia Woolf.
23. Covent Garden Market: Primarily a fruit and vegetable market and not a place where one would go for geese. The market, which gave its name to the area, stood there from 1656 to 1974 when it moved to Battersea. It was originally a garden belonging to the abbey or convent of St Peter, Westminster.
24. Now then, Mr Cocksure: One of a number of avian puns and jokes in the story. Earlier, a hat is described as a ‘billycock’, Holmes wonders whether he should ask Mrs Hudson to examine the crop of a woodcock he is going to have for supper; Breckinridge, who has his head ‘cocked’, describes Holmes as Mr Cocksure, and will prove him to be a goose once he shows him the sales ledger; later Holmes lets the thief go rather than make a ‘gaol-bird’ of him.
25. 117 Brixton Road: Brixton Road is a major traffic route connecting Kenning-ton and Brixton two miles south of central London. No. 117 was a real house, which is surprising given that Conan Doyle rarely used real addresses, but it may have been chosen as it then stood on the corner of Brixton Road and what was then (another) Baker Street.
26. 7s.6d.: the equivalent of 37½ pence.
27. 12s.: The equivalent of 60 pence.
28. Pink ’Un: The sports sections of some newspapers were printed on pink paper to differentiate them from the rest of the paper or other editions of the paper. Some sporting papers are still printed in this fashion.
29. The King of Proosia: The King of Prussia at that time was Wilhelm II(1859–1941), grandson of Queen Victoria, who was German kaiser during the First World War. A number of London pubs were called the King of Prussia at this time.
30. Pentonville: Pentonville Prison, Caledonian Road, half a mile north of King’s Cross Station.
31. Kilburn: A shabby suburb lying two miles north-west of Baker Street.
32. I would take my goose now, and in it I would carry my stone: T. S. Blakeney in ‘Some Disjecta Membra’ (Sherlock Holmes Journal 4.3 (Winter 1959), pp. 101–3) explains how John Wrott, steward of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister, used to send tenants’ rents to his master inside geese to hoodwink highwaymen.
33. without ever having touched the wealth: The theme of the thief trying to retrieve a stolen jewel he has hidden is used again in ‘The Six Napoleons’ from The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
34. its solution is its own reward: But who will get the reward money from the Countess of Morcar – Holmes or Peterson? If the former, then Holmes is not committing a felony but compounding it.
THE SPECKLED BAND
First published in the Strand in February 1892. Alternative title: ‘The Spotted Band (New York World). A probable source was an article in Cassell’s Saturday Journal of 14 February 1891, in which an explorer is woken by the noise of a boa constrictor making its way down the wall from a ventilation shaft. Conan Doyle referred to the tale in a letter to his mother. He also considered ‘The Speckled Band’ to be the best Holmes story (excluding those that appeared in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes), as revealed in the Strand in June 1927; as did the Strand ’s readers, readers of the Observer the same year, and the Baker Street Irregulars in a 1944 poll and at their hundredth-anniversary dinner in 1959. The story is set in 1883.
1. Stoke Moran: Fictitious, although there is a Stoke D’Abernon three miles from Leatherhead in Surrey.
2. Dr Grimesby Roylott: John A. Hodgson in ‘The Recoil of the Speckled Band’, Poetics Today, 1992, suggested a pun with Grimesby Roylott standing for ‘crimes by Roylott’, and Stoke Moran as an anagram of ‘snake o’mort’, but notes that ‘such Poesque name games are not typical of Conan Doyle’.
3. dog-cart: See ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, note 7.
4. Leatherhead;A Surrey town on the River Mole eighteen miles from London.
5. Waterloo: See ‘The Five Orange Pips’, note 22.
6. in the days of the Regency: From 1811 to 1820, the last nine years of the reign of George III, George, Prince of Wales (later George IV), ruled as Prince Regent.
7. Crewe: A town in Cheshire which has the greatest conglomeration of railway lines anywhere in England.
8. a cheetah and a baboon, which wander freely over his grounds, and are feared by the villagers: Cheetahs would not attack humans, and are often domesticated in India. Baboons are found only in Arabia and Africa, not India.
9. Crane Water, near Reading: Crane Water is based on Virginia Water, a man-made lake designed by the Duke of Cumberland in the 1750s. Reading is an important town by the Thames in Berkshire, thirty-six miles south-west of London.
10. Doctors’ Commons: Properly known as the College of Advocates and Doctors of Law, Doctors’ Commons ceased to function after the passing of the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), the Court of Probate Act(1857) and the High Court of Admiralty Act (1859). The buildings, which stood on Queen Victoria Street near Blackfriars, were demolished in 1867. Conan Doyle should have sent Holmes to Somerset House on the Strand to get his data.
11. Eley’s No. 2: Conan Doyle probably meant a Webley’s No. 2,.320 bore, a small pistol ideal for dealing with characters like Grimesby Roylott. Webley pistols, however, were marketed with Eley .320 on the barrel to avoid confusion with the Smith & Wesson .32, as Major Hugh Pollard explained in the catalogue to the 1951 Sherlock Holmes Exhibition.
12. trap: A one-horse, two-wheeled carriage on springs.
13. Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession: Palmer is William Palmer who was executed in 1856 for poisoning John Parsons Cook, and Pritchard is Edward William Pritchard, a Glasgow doctor hanged in 1865 for poisoning his wife and mother-in-law.
14. It is a swamp adder!: There is no Indian swamp adder; it is probably meant to be Russell’s viper, an Indian snake.
15. He has died within ten seconds of being bitten: There is no snake whose bite could kill so quickly. The speed of Dr Roylott’s death is inconsistent with that of Julia Stoner who ‘slowly sank and died’.
16. the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another: ‘He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it’, Ecclesiastes 10: 8;‘Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein’, Proverbs 26: 27.
17. threw it into the iron safe: A snake wouldn’t be able to survive locked in a safe.
18. Then I thought of the whistle. Of course, he must recall the snake: Snakes, being deaf, would not be able to hear a whistle.
19. crawl down the rope: Although a snake could crawl down a rope it could not crawl back up one into Roylott’s room.
THE ENGINEER’S THUMB
First published in the Strand in March 1892. Alternative title: ‘A Strange Adventure’ (Baltimore Weekly Sun). The story is set in 1889.
1. Colonel Warburton’s madness: There is a pastiche of this by Rolfe Boswell in the Baker Street Journal vol.XII, no. 2, new series (June 1962), pp. 85–98; one by Norman W. Ward in The Best of the Pips; and one by Adrian M. Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr, ‘The Adventure of the Sealed Room’, in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes.
2. at no very great distance from Paddington Station: i.e. still near Baker Street.
3. 16A Victoria Street: An address at which a number of civil engineers were based in 1891. Victoria Street has Victoria Station at its western end and Westminster Abbey at its eastern end.
4. I suppose that everyone finds his first independent start in business a dreary experience: Conan Doyle received no patients after setting himself up as an oculist at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, Marylebone, in 1891, and spent much of his time writing the Sherlock Holmes stories. Soon after, he gave up the practice.
5. Colonel Lysander Stark: The name is based on the Edinburgh-born Leander Starr Jameson (1853–1917), a well-known figure in late nineteenth-century African politics who was premier of Cape Colony from 1904 to 1908. There is a character called Lysander Starr in ‘The Three Garridebs’ from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.
6. Eyford, in Berkshire: Fictitious, but similar in name to Twyford, five miles north-east of Reading.
7. fuller’s earth: A mixture of clays, consisting of hydrated silicates of magnesium, calcium and aluminium, which is used to absorb oils and grease.
8. chinchilla beard: A grey beard said to resemble the hair of a chinchilla, a small South American rodent.
9. coming down upon me: There are a number of possible sources for the idea of machinery descending on a trapped individual: Tit-Bits of 12 September 1891 contained a story, ‘In the Engine Room’, in which an engine descends on an engineer while he is examining it from below. He is saved by the swift response of a doctor. Wilkie Collins wrote a story, ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’, for Charles Dickens’s Household Words magazine in February 1852, in which the top of a four-poster bed comes down and crushes the drugged sleeper.
10. a small panel: A rather unbelievable deus ex machina.
11. Large masses of nickel and of tin were discovered: But strangely no mercury, an essential catalyst.
THE NOBLE BACHELOR
First published in the Strand in April 1892. Alternative titles: ‘The Story of the Missing Bride’ (Philadelphia Inquirer); ‘The Adventures of a Nobleman’ (St Louis Post-Dispatch); ‘Adventures of a Noble Bachelor’ (Atlanta Constitution). Conan Doyle later revealed that he thought this to be his least favourite Holmes story. The story could be set in or around 1886.
1. Lord St Simon: The peer is the second son of the Duke of Balmoral and should properly be described as ‘Lord Robert St Simon’, or even ‘Lord Robert’, but not ‘Lord St Simon’.
2. my own marriage: To Mary Morstan, as revealed in The Sign of Four, although William S. Baring-Gould supposes an earlier, unmentioned marriage (The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Clarkson N. Potter (1960), vol. I). Dorothy L. Sayers once quipped: ‘There is a conspiracy afoot to provide Watson with as many wives as Henry VIII.’
3. jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs: Watson’s wound has moved. In A Study in Scarlet he mentions being ‘struck on the shoulder’. In The Sign of Four he nurses a ‘wounded leg’. Now the bullet is affecting a nameless limb.
4. tide-waiter: A customs officer who waited for ships to come in with the tide.
5. Lord Backwater: There is a Lord Backwater in ‘Silver Blaze’, from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, whose horse, Desborough, runs against Silver Blaze in the Wessex Cup.
6. Grosvenor Mansions: The block was in Victoria Street and has since been demolished.
7. He picked a red-covered volume: Who’s Who, Burke’s Peerage or Debrett.
8. Azure, three caltrops in chief over a fess sable: A caltrop was an iron ball equipped with four spikes so that whichever way it landed one spike would protrude. Caltrops were used in battle to obstruct the enemy.
9. They inherit Plantagenet blood by direct descent, and Tudor on the distaff side: Rolfe Boswell, in ‘A Connecticut Yankee in Support of Sir Arthur’ (Baker Street Journal 2.2 (April 1947), pp. 119–27), explained that the only house that fulfils these requirements was that of the Dukes of Beaufort. Conan Doyle’s mother, Mary, could trace her ancestry back to the ancient house of Percy-Louvain, three times linked by marriage to the Plantagenets.
10. Grosvenor Square: A square in Mayfair which was created in 1725 and was one of the most fashionable addresses in London before the twentieth century. It is now best known as the address of the US Embassy.
11. Morning Post: Leading society newspaper of the time.
12. Westbury House: There is no Westbury House in Mayfair, but there is a Westbury Hotel on Conduit Street.
13. St George’s, Hanover Square: Built by John James in 1724 and named for George I, the church, which is on St George Street near Hanover Square, was known for its society weddings in the nineteenth century. Hanover Square, built in 1731, was named after the royal house instigated by George Louis, Elector of Hanover, when he became George I. It was originally intended to be named Oxford Square.
14. Lancaster Gate: A luxurious street and square to the north of Hyde Park.
15. Petersfield: A town in Hampshire sixteen miles north of Portsmouth, which grew around the wool trade.
16. The King of Scandinavia: The peninsula containing Norway and Sweden was united under the rule of Oscar II from 1872 until 1905.
17. Lady St Simon: The nobleman’s wife should properly be called ‘Lady Robert’, not ‘Lady St Simon’. D. Martin Makin noted how Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey took it as a sign of intelligence that Aggie Twitterton knew his wife should be called Lady Peter.
18. jumping a claim: Miners’ slang for taking something which another person has already claimed.
19. Hyde Park: A large park to the immediate west of central London and popular with upper-class society. It was named after the manor of Hyde and first enclosed by Henry VIII, who hunted there in the sixteenth century. Charles I bestowed it to the public.
20. a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau’s example: Ralph Waldo Emerson in his address at the funeral of the American poet and essayist Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) mentioned a phrase Thoreau had used in his Journal: ‘Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.’
21. the year after the Franco-Prussian War: i.e. 1872.
22. pea-jacket: See ‘The Red-Headed League’, note 32.
23. the Serpentine: An artificial lake in Hyde Park used by bathers in the summer. Harriet Westbrook, first wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned in the Serpentine in 1816.
24. pâté de foie gras pie: An unusual dish made of fatted goose liver and mentioned in Thackeray’s The Yellowplush Papers: ‘He sent me out… for wot’s called a Strasburg-pie – in French, a “patty defau graw”.’
25. Arabian Nights: Reminiscent of the scene in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Narrative of the Spirited Old Lady’, from More New Arabian Nights, in which a body of men enter Colonel Geraldine’s house carrying hampers, bottle-baskets and boxes and then disappear ‘as though the whole affair had been a vision’.
26. McQuire’s camp: Conan Doyle favoured this spelling of McGuire and used it regularly when referring to the Molly Maguires, indirect subjects of The Valley of Fear.
27. Gordon Square: A square in Bloomsbury named after Lady Georgiana Gordon, the sixth Duke of Bedford’s second wife.
28. folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years: The monarch being George III and the minister Lord North. The failure of George III and Lord North, his prime minister, to remove the duty from tea was one of the grievances that led to the American War of Independence, which began in 1775. The British officially recognized American independence in 1783.
29. the same world-wide country: In the late nineteenth century the idea of a federation of the English-speaking world was briefly popular.
30. In the second one which I visited in Northumberland Avenue: Northumberland Avenue, which connects Victoria Embankment and Trafalgar Square, was built in 1876 on the grounds of the demolished Northumberland House. It features a number of times in the Holmes canon. ‘The Illustrious Client’ from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes begins with Holmes and Watson using Neville’s Turkish Baths on Northumberland Avenue. Mr Melas in ‘The Greek Interpreter’ from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes earns his money acting for Orientals who stay in the Avenue’s hotels. There were three hotels on Northumberland Avenue in the 1890s: the Grand, Victoria and Metropole.
31. 226 Gordon Square: The numbers of a square would never reach that high.
THE BERYL CORONET
First published in the Strand in May 1892. Alternative titles: ‘The Mystery of the Beryl Coronet’ (Cincinnati Commercial Gazette); ‘The Story of the Beryl Coronet’(San Francisco Examiner). The story could be set in or around 1890.
1. bow-window: There were no bow windows in the houses on Baker Street and so the description offers no clue as to the identity of no. 221B.
2. the Metropolitan station: Baker Street Station on what was then the Metropolitan Railway.
3. of the banking firm of Holder & Stevenson: Based on the Glyn family, according to Dr Julian Wolff ’s Practical Handbook of Sherlockian Heraldry (1955).
4. one of the highest, noblest, most exalted names in England: A number of Holmes commentators have claimed the figure is based on Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII.
5. the beryl coronet: Beryl, a silicate mineral, is composed mostly of the metal beryllium.
6. Streatham: A south-west London suburb, halfway between Charing Cross and Croydon.
7. farthing: In pre-decimal currency, a quarter of a penny. It was legal tender until 1961.
8. Do you go out much in society?… care for it: Adapted from Charles Pooter’s ‘No, candidly, Mr Merton, we don’t go into Society, because we do not care for it’, from George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody, the first extract appearing in Punch in 1888.
9. my own son do: A passing remark which has caused commentators much fun. The American detective writer Rex Stout mused in his piece ‘Watson was a Woman?’ (Saturday Review of Literature, 11 March 1941) that Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey was Holmes’s son, while Manly Wade Wellman suggested that Holmes junior was Jeeves, Bertie Wooster’s infamous butler. A number of American newspapers ran a comic strip called ‘Sherlock Holmes Junior’ from 1911 to 1914.
10. And now I must fly to my dear boy: But what about the state of the coronet, which has been twisted out of shape and from which a piece has been broken off? How does Holder hope to get this repaired in time to hand it back to the noble exalted name?
THE COPPER BEECHES
First published in the Strand in June 1892. Alternative titles: ‘Adventures of the Copper Beeches’ (St Louis Post-Dispatch); ‘The Copper Breeches’ [sic] (Minneapolis Journal). The plot came from Conan Doyle’s mother, who suggested a story about a girl with ‘beautiful golden hair, who, kidnapped and her hair shorn, should be made to impersonate some other girl for a villainous purpose’. The story could be set in or around 1889.
1. You have degraded… into a series of tales: Contrast with Holmes himself in ‘The Blanched Soldier’, from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: ‘Having taken my pen in my hand, I do begin to realize that the matter must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader.’
2. outside the pale of the law: But Neville St Clair (in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’) would surely have been successfully prosecuted for wasting police time.
3. a weaver by his tooth: Weavers were in the habit of cutting the thread with their teeth and would probably have a dental defect.
4. a compositor by his left thumb: A compositor set type ready to print and might have had a callus on the tip of the thumb from holding the type down.
5. Montague Place: Conan Doyle had rooms on this Bloomsbury street, at no. 23, in 1891 when he first moved to London. The property was demolished when Senate House, the University of London’s administrative headquarters, was built in the 1930s.
6. Violet Hunter: The first of several Violets in the canon. There is a Violet Smith in ‘The Solitary Cyclist’, from The Return of Sherlock Holmes; a Violet Westbury in ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’, from His Last Bow; and a Violet de Merville in ‘The Illustrious Client’, from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.
7. sweating – rank sweating: i.e. as in a sweat shop where one works hard for little pay.
8. Winchester: Cathedral city in Hampshire, and the capital of England in Saxon times.
9. dog-cart: See ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, note 7.
10. Bradshaw: Manchester printer George Bradshaw (1801–53), who drew up the first railway timetable in 1839.
11. Black Swan Hotel: It stood on Winchester High Street and was recommended in the 1897 Baedeker. The Black Swan was demolished in 1934.
12. acetones: There are no acetones as such, just acetone, CH3COCH3, a colourless sweet-smelling liquid solvent.
13. Aldershot: Hampshire town associated with the military since 1854. It features again in ‘The Crooked Man’, from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
14. locus standi: Latin, ‘rightful position’.
15. Walsall: A Midlands town eight miles north-west of Birmingham in the heart of what is known as the Black Country.
SILVER BLAZE
First published in the Strand in December 1892. The story could be set in or around 1890.
1. Dartmoor: It would be hard to find a more unsuitable place for racing stables than these 365 square miles of rolling moorland outcrop in Devon.
2. King’s Pyland: Probably Princetown, Dartmoor town and home of Dartmoor Prison.
3. Paddington: See ‘The Boscome Valley Mystery’, note 2.
4. fifty-three and a half miles an hour: The two fastest trains on the line, the Zulu and the Flying Dutchman, were given 87 minutes to get from Paddington to Swindon, a distance of 75 miles, for which they needed to average a speed of just over 51 miles an hour.
5. Silver Blaze: Michael Harrison suggested in Immortal Sleuth that a possible source for the story was the Mordaunt scandal in 1869 involving a Sir Frederick Johnstone, owner of the horse, St Blaise, which in 1881 won the hat-trick of the Derby, the Oaks and Ascot Gold Cup.
6. Isonomy stock: Isonomy was the horse that won the Cambridgeshire in 1878, and the Manchester Plate and Ascot Gold Cup in 1879 and the following year.
7. Penang lawyer: A walking stick made from wood imported from Penang island off the coast of Malaysia.
8. landau: See ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, note 34.
9. vestas: See ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, note 13.
10. long-cut Cavendish: Flavoured tobacco pressed into cakes, named after the maker.
11. Weiss and Co., London: At the time a real firm that specialized in optical instruments.
12. To the curious incident of the dog… That was the curious incident: Probably the most famous Holmesism, apart from the apocryphal ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’.
13. Winchester: See ‘The Copper Beeches’, note 8.
14. drag: Private stagecoach drawn by four horses.
15. four-and five-year-olds: There are no races reserved for four-and five-year olds. Conan Doyle was criticized for the racing details in ‘Silver Blaze’ – there is no mention of trainers, weights, pedigrees, ages of the horses or the time of the race – and he admitted in Memories and Adventures: ‘Sometimes I have got upon dangerous ground where I have taken risks through my own want of knowledge… I have, for example, never been a racing man, and yet I ventured to write “Silver Blaze,” in which the mystery depends upon the laws of training and racing. The story is all right… but my ignorance cries aloud to heaven.’ A journalist in a sporting paper claimed that half of the characters would have been put in gaol and the other half warned off the turf if they had behaved as outlined in the story. Nevertheless Ellery Queen was captivated by the story and claimed it as ‘one of the five leading Sherlockian short stories’.
16. Fifteen to five: The same as 3–1, and a term which is nowadays rarely used.
THE YELLOW FACE
First published in the Strand in February 1893. Originally intended title: ‘The Livid Face’. The story was inspired by a meeting between Conan Doyle and the black civil rights leader Henry Highland Garnet on board the Mayumba in 1882. The story could be set in or around 1888.
1. the affair of the second stain: Conan Doyle later wrote ‘The Second Stain’ which appeared in the Strand in December 1904 and was later included in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
2. the Park: Probably Regent’s Park near Baker Street, or possibly Hyde Park.
3. seven-and-sixpence: The equivalent of 37½ pence.
4. brown wide-awake: A soft felt hat with a broad brim.
5. Atlanta: Now capital of Georgia, the city was captured and burned by General William T. Sherman in 1864 during the American Civil War.
6. but the yellow fever broke out badly: There was never a bad outbreak of yellow fever in Atlanta, which lies about a thousand feet above sea level and does not have the kind of damp climate on which yellow fever thrives.
7. I have seen his death certificate: Stuart C. Rand pointed out in ‘What Sherlock Didn’t Know’ (Atlantic Monthly, November 1945) that the state of Georgia and the city of Atlanta didn’t issue death certificates until 1914.
8. Pinner, in Middlesex: A district of north-west London, to the west of Harrow, named after the Pin, a tributary of the River Colne.
9. Norbury: Conan Doyle had moved to Norwood, two miles south-east of Norbury, in 1891.
10. the station: Norbury Station is situated on London Road, the A23, which further north becomes Brixton Road, where James Ryder secretes the gem in the throat of one of his sister’s geese in ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
11. Jack: Why does Grant Munro’s wife call him Jack? Perhaps she is suffering from the same strain of absent-mindedness that makes Watson’s wife call him James in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
12. Crystal Palace: Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace built of iron and glass to house the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park was the most progressive and far-sighted building of its age; it shocked the Victorians at a time when the fashion for revivalist Gothic was at its height. After the Exhibition the Crystal Palace was dismantled and re-erected in a part of Sydenham, two miles north of Doyle’s Norwood home, that henceforth became known as Crystal Palace. The palace burned down in 1936 and the remnants were removed in 1941 during the Second World War, when it was considered to be helpful to enemy planes.
13. I cut myself off from my race in order to wed him: The state of Georgia passed a law in 1865 which forbade marriage between ‘white persons and persons of African descent’. John Hebron and Effie may have married outside Georgia, but even so the union would not have been tolerated once they had arrived in Atlanta.
THE STOCKBROKER’S CLERK
First published in the Strand in March 1893. The story could be set in or around 1889.
1. marriage: See ‘The Noble Bachelor’, note 2.
2. Paddington district: By the end of the nineteenth century the area around the railway terminus for trains serving the West Country was fashionable, and the grand stucco houses immediately south of the station on Norfolk Square and Sussex Gardens would have appealed to someone like Watson. Nowadays many of those houses have been converted into hotels and the Paddington area is shabby, as are the districts surrounding most of London’s other railway termini.
3. St Vitus’s Dance: Popular name for acute chorea, which involves irregular involuntary contractions of the muscles. The name ‘St Vitus’s dance’ is medieval in origin and dates back to the dance mania epidemics associated with religious hysteria in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when people in the German Rhenish provinces made pilgrimages to the Chapel of St Vitus in Swabia as the saint was supposedly able to provide a cure.
4. I trust that Mrs Watson has entirely recovered from all the little excitements connected with our adventure of the Sign of Four?: Mrs Watson, then Miss Mary Morstan, was the heroine of that Holmes novella.
5. Birmingham: Conan Doyle studied pharmacology in the great Midlands city at various times between 1879 and 1882.
6. Cockneys: Technically those born within the sound of Bow Bells, i.e. the bells of St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, in the City of London. The term Cockney has for centuries been used in a semi-insulting sense to describe anyone born in London, especially the East End, who speaks with a proletarian accent. In the nineteenth century cockneys were notorious for confusing the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ with the voiced bilabial semivowel /w/, a trait which afflicts Sam Weller, amongst others, in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers: ‘Now Villam, run ’em out. Take care o’ the archvay, gen’l’men… Not a wery nice neighbourhood this.’ Nowadays cockneys typically confuse the linguodental fricatives /θ/ (the ‘th’ in ‘thin’) and /δ/ the ‘th’ in ‘there’) with the voiced and unvoiced labiodental fricatives /f/ and / v/, as in the cockney riddle ‘How many fevvers on a frush’s froat?’/‘Five fousand free hundred and firty-free’. The word ‘cockney’ is derived from ‘cocks’ eggs’, a slang term for the misshapen eggs laid by fowls.
7. Volunteer regiments: These were set up in the 1860s to counter the threat of invasion. The regiments subsided after the Territorial Army was established in 1907, but Conan Doyle took part in re-establishing them before the First World War.
8. lost my crib: Cockney slang for ‘lost my job’.
9. Drapers’ Gardens: An alleyway in the City half a mile north of the Bank of England, now subsumed into the grounds of Richard Seifert’s National Westminster Bank building.
10. Venezuelan loan: The South American country had financial difficulties at the end of the nineteenth century, following defaults in repaying public debts.
11. came a nasty cropper: Cockney slang for ‘suffered failure’.
12. Lombard Street: A City thoroughfare, near the Bank of England, lined with banks. Its name derives from the Italian merchants who used to frequent the area.
13. I dare say E.C. is not much in your line: E.C. is the Eastern Central postal division, used here as slang for ‘the City’.
14. The screw: The salary.
15. Potter’s Terrace: A fictitious address.
16. sheeny: A derogatory term for a Jew.
17. Ayrshires: Railway stock for the Glasgow and South-Western Railway.
18. New Zealand Consolidated: The company went into liquidation in 1900.
19. British Broken Hills: A mining company in Australia.
20. 126B, Corporation Street: The ‘B’ for ‘bis’, ‘twice’, signifies that this is an upstairs address, as is 221 B Baker Street.
21. New Street: A major street in Birmingham and the location of the city’s main railway station.
22. Day’s Music-Hall: It stood on Hurst Street, Birmingham, until 1893; the building was demolished following wartime bombing in 1951.
23. Bermondsey: Working-class riverside district of south-east London to the immediate south-east of London Bridge. The name comes from ‘the island of Beormund’.
24. Capture of the Criminal: A newspaper would not find a man guilty prior to his visit to a court of law.
THE GLORIA SCOTT
First published in the Strand in April 1893. A possible source for the plot, according to Donald A. Redmond in Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources (1982), was the hijacking of the brig Cyprus in August 1829 after it left Tasmania with forty convicts on board. The story is one of only two in the canon in which Watson appears but plays no dramatic role, acting purely as narrator of past events. The other is ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ (see below). The story could be set in or around 1874.
1. during the two years that I was at college: Meaning that Holmes spent two of his three university years in college. Readers never discover which university Holmes attended but it is tacitly understood to be either Oxford or Cambridge, the latter featuring in ‘The Missing Three-Quarter’ from The Return of Sherlock Holmes as ‘this inhospitable town’. Christopher Morley in ‘Was Sherlock Holmes an American?’ noted how Sidney Paget’s illustrations for the story in the Strand of April 1893 indicate that Holmes could be wearing a light-blue ribbon on his straw hat and was therefore at Cambridge.
2. Bar fencing and boxing: Conan Doyle, a keen boxer, was invited to referee the world heavyweight contest between Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson in 1909, but declined.
3. Donnithorpe: Fictitious.
4. long vacation: From the beginning of July to the end of September.
5. Langmere: In the Norfolk Broads, wide expanses of water in the flat countryside.
6. callosities: Hardening of the skin caused by excessive use. In The Sign of Four Holmes claims he has written a ‘curious little work’ upon the subject of one’s trade shaping one’s hand.
7. I saw that ‘J.A.’ had been tattooed in the bend of the elbow: In ‘The Red-Headed League’, from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Holmes reveals that he has ‘made a small study of tattoo marks and… even contributed to the literature of the subject’.
8. Why, dear me, it is surely Hudson!: One of the three Hudsons in the Holmes canon, the 221B landlady being the most famous, the other being Morse Hudson, the Kennington art-dealer in ‘The Six Napoleons’, from The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Christopher Morley in ‘Was Sherlock Holmes an American?’ (pp. 5–15) amusingly suggested that the seafaring Hudson of the Gloria Scott was the estranged husband of the Baker Street landlady Mrs Hudson.
9. I’m just off a two-yearer in an eight-knot tramp: i.e. a two-year service on a freight-carrying craft.
10. organic chemistry: J. H. and Humfrey Michell suggested in ‘Sherlock Holmes the Chemist’ (Baker Street Journal, 2.3 (July 1946), pp. 245–52) that Holmes went to London to be near the Harrow chemical works set up by the chemist W. H. Perkin, who in 1856 had created a mauve dye derived from coal-tar which didn’t run when washed. Within a few years mauve-dyed ladies’ clothes were all the rage.
11. for the north: Norfolk, being in East Anglia, would never be referred to as the north, even though technically it is north of London.
12. dog-cart: See ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, note 7.
13. Fordingbridge: Hampshire town.
14. one of those ingenious secret codes: In ‘The Dancing Men’, from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Holmes claims he is ‘fairly familiar with all forms of secret writings’ and is the author of a ‘trifling monograph upon the subject’ in which he analyses 160 ciphers.
15. Falmouth: Coastal town in Cornwall which has the third-largest natural harbour in the world.
16. N. lat. 15° 29’, W. long. 25° 14’: Just off the Cape Verde Islands.
17. bound for Australia: Transportation of felons to New South Wales, the main penal colony, ended in 1840 but was resumed in 1844 and continued haphazardly until 1851. Transportation to Tasmania ended in 1853, but criminals continued to be sent to Western Australia until 1868.
18. Crimean War: The Crimean War took place from 1853 to 1856, with Russia on one side and Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire on the other.
19. new clippers: Fast sailing vessels with overhanging bow and tall masts developed in America from about 1840.
20. dibs: Slang for ‘money’, the word originating c. 1800 probably from the children’s street game dibstones.
21. the Bay: The Bay of Biscay.
22. junk: A type of salted beef given to sailors.
23. found no difficulty in believing: Surely a captain picking up survivors would be rather more suspicious?
24. Terai: As wamp in India north of the Ganges by the foot of the Himalayas.
THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL
First published in the Strand in May 1893. Conan Doyle ranked ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ eleventh on his personal list of the twelve best Holmes stories (excluding those that appeared in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes), as revealed in the Strand magazine in June 1927. The story is one of only two in the canon in which Watson appears but plays no dramatic role, acting purely as narrator of past events. The other is ‘The Gloria Scott’ (see above). The story could be set in or around 1875.
1. hair-trigger: A dangerous pistol with a secondary trigger, the slightest pressure on which releases the main trigger. It is banned in shooting and would not be of much use in detective work.
2. patriotic V.R.: V.R. for ‘Victoria Regina’, ‘Queen Victoria’, who celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 1887. When in 1893 a joint Conan Doyle/J. M. Barrie collaboration on a comic opera fell flat, Barrie wrote a Holmesian parody of this line which ran: ‘Holmes was amusing himself with a little revolver practice. It was his custom of a summer evening to fire round my head, just shaving my face, until he had made a photograph of me on the opposite wall…’
3. somewhere in these incoherent memoirs: In A Study in Scarlet.
4. Montague Street: A small street between the British Museum and Russell Square. When Conan Doyle first moved to London in 1891 he took rooms at 23 Montague Place to the immediate north-west of Montague Street. The house was demolished when the University of London built its huge administrative headquarters, Senate House, in the 1930s. The story fails to reveal at which number Montague Street Holmes lived.
5. a scion of one of the very oldest families: See ‘The Noble Bachelor’, note 9.
6. I am member: i.e. Member of Parliament.
7. Don Juan: Don Juan Tenorio of Seville, nobleman and philanderer, subject of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), Byron’s eponymous epic satire (1819–24) and George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903), amongst other works.
8. You will leave my service tomorrow: A trifle harsh, one would suggest.
9. What was the month?/The sixth from the first: When the story was first published in the Strand this couplet was missing. It was inserted for the book version in Britain but omitted from most American book versions. As for the sixth month from the first, when the ritual was drawn up in the seventeenth century the year started on 25 March. This was changed in 1752, when the Gregorian calendar was adopted in England, resulting in eleven days being skipped.
T. S. Eliot was so enamoured of the ritual that he contrived a scene around it in his play about Thomas à Becket, Murder in the Cathedral (1935). When Thomas arrives in Canterbury one of the Tempters urges him to submit to King Henry’s will. When Eliot was accused of plagiarizing ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ for this scene, he replied in a letter to a reader, which was quoted in the Times Literary Supplement of 28 September 1951, that his use of the Musgrave Ritual was deliberate.
10. We took no pains to hide it: If so, why is Brunton dismissed for poring over it?
11. It was nine feet in length: Professor Jay Finley Christ claimed in his essay ‘Musgrave Mathematics’ (Client’s Second Case-book, pp. 14–19) that if a rod of six feet threw a shadow of nine feet in latitude 51°N (Sussex), then the sun was practically due west and 33.7° above the horizon and the time could not have been later than 4.20 p.m. – something which would happen only once a year around the time of the summer solstice in June, and so could not have been six months from the first, when the ritual was drawn up.
12. having first taken the cardinal points by my pocket-compass: The location of magnetic north, now some thousand miles from the North Pole, moves about seven miles every year and by the late 1870s (the period in which the story is set) it would have been some 20° to the west of where it lay in the 1650s when the ritual was devised.
13. It was the figure of a man: Musgrave earlier claimed that the whole house had been searched ‘from cellar to garret’ to find the missing Brunton. Since Musgrave knew this cellar was there, why had it not been searched? But then again a man as slow-witted as Musgrave, who has had so enticing a document in his possession for years without seeking a solution, would probably overlook ‘unlikely’ places during a search.
14. It is nothing less than the ancient crown of the Kings of England: Nathan L. Bengis, in the essay ‘Whose Was It? An Examination into the Crowning Lapse of Sherlockian Scholarship’ (Baker Street Journal 3.2 (April 1952), pp. 69–76), claimed this must have been the Crown of St Edward, also known as King Alfred’s Crown, which was worn by James I and Charles I at their coronations. It was listed in an inventory of British regalia in 1649, the year that Charles was executed, as being of ‘gould wyer worke, sett with slight stones’ and therefore could easily have become misshapen; ‘gould’ was not an alternative spelling of gold but a less valuable metal fashioned to resemble gold, which in the 220 years since Sir Ralph Musgrave had secreted the crown could easily have become tarnished.
THE REIGATE SQUIRES
First published in the Strand in June 1893. Original title: ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squire’. Alternative title used in many editions: ‘The Reigate Squire’. Conan Doyle ranked the story twelfth on his personal list of the twelve best Holmes stories (excluding those that appeared in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes), as revealed in the Strand in June 1927. The story is set in 1887.
1. Baron Maupertuis: The name is based on that of the French mathematician Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), who attempted to measure the earth for Louis XV. His work on genetics inspired H. G. Wells to name The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) after him.
2. Hotel Dulong: Fictitious, but there was a Hôtel Dubost at 19 Place Carnot.
3. Reigate, in Surrey: A town twenty-two miles south of London in the Vale of Holmesdale (sic).
4. Pope’s Homer: The translation of Homer’s Iliad issued in 1715 by the great Augustan poet Alexander Pope (1688–1764) was one of the first books Conan Doyle bought as a medical student at Edinburgh University; when the choice was between lunch or a second-hand book, the latter occasionally won.
5. to crack two cribs: Slang meaning to burgle two houses.
6. the fine old Queen Anne house: Queen Anne ruled Britain from 1707 to 1714, a time when Palladian architecture was popular.
7. the date of Malplaquet: The battle of Malplaquet took place on 11 September 1709, when Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy defeated the French in the French village of the same name, during the War of the Spanish Succession.
8. You may not be aware that the deduction of a man’s age from his writing: Richard Lancelyn Green in Baker Street Dozen revealed that Alexander Cargill, an Edinburgh-based handwriting expert, sent Conan Doyle an article he had written, ‘Health in Handwriting’, in which he claimed that the age of the writer could be estimated from his or her handwriting, and suggested that he used it as the basis for a story. Conan Doyle thanked him and admitted, ‘I am almost afraid to write to you, for fear you should discover imbecility in the dots of my i’s, or incipient brain softening in my capitals.’
9. twenty-three other deductions: Including such phenomena as whether the writers were left-handed or right-handed; the type of pen, paper, quality of paper, whether the writing had been blotted and so on.
THE CROOKED MAN
First published in the Strand in July 1893. The story could be set in or around 1889.
1. hansom: See ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, note 31.
2. Aldershot: See ‘The Copper Beeches’, note 13.
3. the Royal Mallows: Probably based on the Royal Munster Fusiliers, 101st and 104th regiments, that had been with Clive in India and had many Irish members, though the Royal Munsters had no role in the Crimean War.
4. the Mutiny: The Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, a revolt by 35, 000 Indian soldiers in the Bengal Army of the British East India Company. It developed into a war which raged until the British under Colin Campbell took Delhi.
5. the old 117th: The highest number of a line regiment of the British Army at the time was that of the 109th, the Prince of Wales Leinster Regiment, as D. Hinrich noted in ‘The Royal Mallows (1854–88)’, Sherlock Holmes Journal 6.1 (Winter 1962), pp. 20–22.
6. Guild of St George: Probably modelled on the Catholic St Vincent de Paul Society, to which Conan Doyle’s parents once belonged.
7. florin: When Edward II issued gold currency in 1344 the basic unit was the florin. However, the gold in the coin was worth more than its value and so it was withdrawn and not issued again until the reign of Queen Victoria when it reappeared as a silver coin worth two shillings.
8. Baker Street boys: Holmes’s band of helpers, also known as the Baker Street Irregulars.
9. cantonments: Army fortresses at the centre of the European quarter of an Indian city.
10. Bhurtee: Possibly Allahabad, a holy Hindu city in India where the Ganges meets the Jumna.
11. General Neill: General James George Smith Neill (1810–57), who relieved Allahabad in June 1857.
12. the small affair of Uriah and Bathsheba: Uriah, a Hittite soldier in the Israelite army, was married to Bathsheba. David, King of Israel, coveted Bathsheba and sent Uriah to battle where he was killed. He then seduced the mourning Bathsheba who bore him a son.
13. first or second of Samuel: The story appears in II Samuel 12.
THE RESIDENT PATIENT
First published in the Strand in August 1893. The story could be set in or around 1886.
1. Scylla and Charybdis: In Homer’s Odyssey Book XII Scylla is a monster with six heads, twelve feet and the howl of a dog, who lives in a cave by the sea and leaps out to snatch seamen from ships. Charybdis, who lives opposite Scylla, swallows the water and the ships sailing on it.
2. It had been a close, rainy day in August’: These lines, up to ‘had you not shown some incredulity the other day’ (p. 418), are not included in some versions of ‘The Resident Patient’ but appear in ‘The Cardboard Box’, a Holmes short story which Conan Doyle suppressed from inclusion in book form despite its publication in the Strand in January 1893. ‘The Cardboard Box’ eventually appeared in the compilation His Last Bow in 1917.
3. New Forest: William I’s hunting forest in Hampshire, where Conan Doyle often holidayed and in which he partly set his historical novel The White Company (1891). In 1955 Conan Doyle’s remains were reinterred at Minstead in the forest.
4. This is beyond anything which I could have imagined: Holmes’s success in breaking in on Watson’s thoughts echoes Dupin’s mind-reading achievement in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), at which point the narrator replies: ‘This is beyond my comprehension.’ Holmes mentions having read Poe a few lines later. In Through the Magic Door Conan Doyle described Poe as ‘the supreme original short story writer’.
5. General Gordon: Charles George Gordon (1833–85), best known as British Governor of the Sudan in the 1870s, who was later murdered in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.
6. Henry Ward Beecher: The charismatic New York preacher(1813–87) who was a supporter of Abraham Lincoln and instrumental in the campaign to keep Kansas free from slavery. His sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
7. Civil War: The American Civil War.
8. through Fleet Street and the Strand: Fleet Street was until recently the centre of the British newspaper industry. With the Strand it forms the main east – west route from the City of London to the City of Westminster.
9. 403 Brook Street: Brook Street is named after the Tye Bourne Brook, which runs underneath the road. It is no longer associated with medical establishments and the numbers don’t reach as high as 403.
10. I am a London University man: Watson, we learn in the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, took his ‘degree of Doctor of Medicine’ at London University.
11. King’s College Hospital: The hospital stood in Portugal Street to the north of the Strand from 1839 until 1913 when it moved to Denmark Hill, south-east London.
12. the Cavendish Square quarter: Cavendish Square is just north-west of Oxford Circus. The nearby concentration of private medical consultancies is now known as the Harley Street area, after the street which contains many of the most expensive establishments. Brook Street is not in this district, but lies on the Mayfair (south) side of Oxford Street.
13. Lady Day: 25 March, named in honour of the Virgin Mary.
14. guinea: See ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, note 16.
15. the West End: Comprising the central London districts of what are now Soho, Mayfair, Marylebone, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, Westminster and Covent Garden.
16. brougham: See ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, note 15.
17. Oxford Street: The main shopping street running east–west through central London, named after Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford.
18. Norah Creina: Chapter 12 of The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osborne (1892) is called ‘The Norah Creina’. There is also an Irish song concerning the wreck of the Nora Crionna.
THE GREEK INTERPRETER
First published in the Strand in September 1893. The story could be set in or around 1888.
1. obliquity of the ecliptic: i.e. the angle between the plane of the earth’s orbit and the equator, approximately 23° 27’, but gradually diminishing. Conan Doyle heard Major-General Alfred Wilks Drayson give a lecture on the subject in Portsmouth in February 1884.
2. atavism: Resemblance to a grandparent or remote ancestors rather than one’s father or mother, a theme which Conan Doyle revisited in The Hound of the Baskervilles with the notion that certain Baskervillian characteristics were handed down through the generations.
3. Vernet, the French artist: There was a family of Vernets, French painters, which included Antoine Charles Horace (called Carle) Vernet (1758–1836), who painted the Marengo battle scene for Napoleon; and his son, émile Jean Horace Vernet (1789–1863), who specialized in sentimental and patriotic pictures and did battle scenes for Napoleon III. Either could be the model for a great-uncle of Holmes.
4. Mycroft: Conan Doyle probably took the name from that of two cricketing brothers, Thomas and William Mycroft, who played for Derbyshire at the end of the nineteenth century.
5. Diogenes Club: Named after Diogenes of Sinope (412–322 BC), a leading philosopher of the Cynics group who considered human pleasure and affection to be a source of weakness. Conan Doyle based the Diogenes on the Athenaeum in Pall Mall (founded in 1824 by John Croker, who first coined the term ‘Conservative’), which was then renowned for its hostility to strangers, who would be ushered into a small room by the entrance where they would have to conduct their conversations in whispers.
6. Regent Circus: Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus were both originally known as Regent Circus when built in 1819.
7. Pall Mall: This once grand road which links St James’s Palace with Trafalgar Square contains a number of gentlemen’s clubs which grew out of seventeenth-century coffee houses. Pall Mall takes its unusual name from the croquet-like game pell-mell, which the aristocracy used to play in nearby St James’s Park, and has been home to Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott.
8. Whitehall: A metonym for the buildings and offices of government, many of which are situated on or near the road named Whitehall which links Trafalgar Square and Parliament Street. Whitehall takes its name from Henry VIII’s palace, which stood there.
9. Save in the Strangers’ Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, permitted: J. M. Barrie, passing through the Athenaeum one day, asked an elderly member whether it was worth dining in the restaurant. The latter immediately burst into tears; it was the first time anyone in the club had spoken to him since he had become a member.
10. We had reached Pall Mall as we talked, and were walking down it from the St James’s end: Given that Holmes and Watson have walked from Baker Street to ‘Regent Circus’ (whether that be Piccadilly Circus or Oxford Circus, both are east of Pall Mall), it would be impossible for them now to be walking down Pall Mall from the St James’s (i.e. the western) end.
11. the Carlton: The Carlton Club, the leading Conservative Party club, then based at 94 Pall Mall and now at 69 St James’s Street, was founded in 1832 as the Conservatives’ base for opposing the Reform Bill in the wake of their general election defeat.
12. ‘An old soldier, I perceive,’ said Sherlock… this is a little too much’: The Holmeses’ banter is evidently based on the well-known conversation between Conan Doyle’s Edinburgh University teacher Joseph Bell (to whom The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was dedicated) and a patient who came to see him one day:
[Bell:] ‘Well my man you’ve served in the army.’
[Patient:] ‘Aye, sir.’
‘Not long discharged?’
‘No, sir.’
‘A Highland regiment?’
‘Aye, Sir.’
‘A non-com. officer?’
‘Aye, Sir.’
‘Stationed at Barbados?’
‘Aye, Sir.’
13. Mr Melas: Thelma Beam and Emmanuel Digalakis pointed out in the Canadian Holmes 13.3 that Conan Doyle probably named Melas after one Basilios Melas, a well-known linguist who moved in fashionable London circles in the 1830s.
14. Orientals who may visit the Northumberland Avenue hotels: See ‘The Noble Bachelor’, note 30.
15. Kensington: See ‘The Red-Headed League’, note 31.
16. Charing Cross: See ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, note 20.
17. and up the Shaftesbury Avenue: Shaftesbury Avenue connects Piccadilly Circus with the southern part of Bloomsbury and is named after Lord Shaftesbury (1801–85), the philanthropist who worked to combat poverty in the area.
18. five sovereigns: Five pounds. See also ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, note 37.
19. St Vitus’s Dance: See ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’, note 3.
20. Wandsworth Common: A narrow expanse of open land, considerably reduced in size since the story was written, which lies half a mile south of the Thames and four miles south of central London.
21. Clapham Junction: A railway junction in south-west London which claims to be the busiest in the world.
22. Victoria: The station opened in 1862 as the terminus for the London, Chatham and Dover Railway.
23. J-pen: A pen with a short broad nib.
24. Beckenham: Suburb of south-east London, historically in Kent.
25. Lower Brixton: There is no Lower Brixton.
26. Scotland Yard: The headquarters of the Metropolitan Police was then based on Derby Gate, just west of Westminster Bridge.
27. life-preserver: A short bludgeon made of cane or whalebone with a lead block at one end.
THE NAVAL TREATY
First published in the Strand in October–November 1893. The story could be set in or around 1887.
1. my marriage: See ‘The Noble Bachelor’, note 2.
2. The Adventure of the Second Stain: Unlikely to be the same story first published under that name in the Strand in 1904 and collected in book form in 1905 in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, since the facts of that case could never have been explained to the French police, as Watson subsequently claims.
3. The Adventure of the Tired Captain: There is a Holmes pastiche based on this reference in the Sherlock Holmes Journal vol. IV, no. 1 (Winter 1958) and vol. IV, no. 2 (Spring 1959).
4. his mother’s brother was Lord Holdhurst: The latter was probably based on Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury (1830–1903), Conservative prime minister 1885–6, 1886–92 and 1895–1902;and Phelps on Salisbury’s nephew Arthur James Balfour(1848–1930), who succeeded his uncle as Conservative prime minister in 1902 (thereby giving rise to the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’).
5. Briarbrae: Possibly Inchcape House, now demolished.
6. Woking: A large Surrey town, twenty miles south-west of London, which grew following the opening of the railways.
7. Waterloo: See ‘The Five Orange Pips’, note 22.
8. secret treaty between England and Italy: There was a secret treaty in 1887, the year in which some Holmesologists believe the story is set, following which the Italians were allowed a free hand to seize Libya in exchange for Italy’s allowing Britain a free hand in the Sudan.
9. the Triple Alliance: The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy was established in 1882 in order that Germany and Austria-Hungary would come to the aid of Italy if it was attacked by France.
10. Charles Street: Now King Charles Street, which runs parallel to Downing Street off Whitehall.
11. Ivy Lane: Fictitious.
12. Huguenot extraction: The Huguenots were French Protestants who were persecuted in the sixteenth century and to some extent in the seventeenth. In 1685 the Edict of Nantes, which had secured their status, was revoked and they were expelled from France.
13. Coldstream Guards: The regiment of General Monk which in 1660 crossed the River Tweed at Coldstream on the Scotland–England border on their way to London to help restore the monarchy of Charles II.
14. What a lovely thing a rose is!: Suggestive of Sergeant Cuff ’s love of roses in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868).
15. The Board schools: Schools run by the local boards of education and financed through levying a rate on local householders, as constituted following the 1870 Education Act.
16. I’ve been making a few independent inquiries: Holmes has been with Watson all the time since hearing of Phelps’s predicament and has had no opportunity within the confines of the story to make any ‘independent inquiries’.
17. Bertillon system of measurements: Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) devised a system for identifying criminals by measuring parts of the body and the bones. It was dropped early in the twentieth century when the use of fingerprints became more widespread.
18. three of the reigning houses of Europe: The fictitious House of Ormstein, rulers of Bohemia, as related in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes;the House of Orange, rulers of Holland, alluded to in the same story; and the kings of Scandinavia as mentioned in ‘The Noble Bachelor’, also from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
19. Ripley: A Surrey village four miles south-east of Woking.
20. had my tea at an inn: Probably the Talbot, which, according to Michael Harrison in In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes (1958), was at that time ‘dozing through the recession between the passing of the stagecoach and the coming of the cycle and motorcycle’.
THE FINAL PROBLEM
First published in the Strand in December 1893. Conan Doyle ranked ‘The Final Problem’ fourth on his personal list of the twelve best Holmes stories (excluding those that appeared in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes), as revealed in the Strand in June 1927. The story is set in 1891.
1. Journal de Genève: Swiss paper published in French in Geneva.
2. Reuter’s: Telegraphic news agency established by P. J. von Reuter in the 1850s and still the best-known of its kind in the world.
3. three cases: According to William S. Baring-Gould these are ‘Wisteria Lodge’ (included in His Last Bow), ‘Silver Blaze’ (from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes) and ‘The Beryl Coronet’ (from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes).
4. air-guns: First developed by Güter of Nuremberg in 1530.
5. Aye, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing!: One of a number of Holmes allusions incorporated into the T. S. Eliot poem ‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat’, from the 1939 collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Macavity himself is described as very tall and thin (like Holmes), as a card cheat (like Colonel Sebastian Moran in ‘The Empty House’ from The Return of Sherlock Holmes) and as the Napoleon of crime (the best-known description of Moriarty, which occurs later in this story). Other similarities include a rifled jewel-case (the theft from the Countess of Morcar in ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), a treaty missing from the Foreign Office (the plot of ‘The Naval Treaty’, see above) and some lost Admiralty plans (as in ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ from His Last Bow).
6. Royal Family of Scandinavia: See ‘The Noble Bachelor’, note 16.
7. Binomial Theorem: The theorem, first outlined by Isaac Newton in a letter dated 13 June 1676 to H. Oldenburg, states that for numbers a, b and n
Though daunting, the theorem is crucial to understanding permutations and is used in a watered-down form by bridge players for calculating the likelihood of how the opponents’ cards might fall, by those who make multiple bets such as ‘yankees’ on horse-races, and by those who want to delve into the intricacies of the football pools.
8. Napoleon of crime: Eliot gave Macavity this appellation in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (see note 5 above).
9. from Bentinck Street on to the Welbeck Street crossing: Bentinck Street and Welbeck Street are two small streets in Marylebone to the east of Baker Street.
10. Lowther Arcade: An arcade of small shops including many selling toys which stood on the Strand opposite Charing Cross Station. It was demolished in 1904 and replaced by a bank.
11. Mortimer Street: Watson at various points in the canon has practices in Paddington and Kensington, a good distance from Mortimer Steet, Fitzrovia, or any other turning with ‘Mortimer’ in its name, so its inclusion in the text is rather strange.
12. They had evidently taken the precaution of watching you: Why has Holmes arranged to flee with Watson knowing that the first thing the Moriarty gang would do would be to track Holmes’s ever naïve associate? Some commentators have suggested that Holmes wanted to be followed so that he could lure Moriarty into a trap away from England and English law. Watson is, of course, necessary as the narrator.
13. They have secured the whole gang with the exception of him: And, it would seem, without Colonel Sebastian Moran, stalker of Holmes in the comeback story, ‘The Empty House’, and Moriarty’s confederate at the Reichenbach Falls who throws rocks at Holmes.
14. Meiringen: A village in the Hasli Valley also known as the ‘front garden of the Bernese Oberland’, which was almost destroyed by fire in 1891. The River Aare, which flows through Meiringen, forms the Reichenbach Falls.
15. the Grosvenor Hotel in London: Hotel adjacent to Victoria Station which opened in 1861 (now the Grosvenor Thistle).
16. Rosenlaui: A village to the south of Meiringen.
17. the falls of Reichenbach… It is, indeed, a fearful place: In August 1893 Conan Doyle and his wife, Louisa, visited Switzerland and saw the Reichenbach Falls, ‘a terrible place, and one that I thought would make a worthy tomb for Sherlock, even if I buried my bank account along with him’. According to Richard Llancelyn Green in The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (1983) the idea of a dramatic climax to Holmes’s life came about while Conan Doyle and the Revd Silas K. Hocking were exploring the Swiss mountainsides. When Conan Doyle admitted that he hadn’t yet thought out a way to get rid of Holmes, Hocking exclaimed: ‘Why not bring him out here… and drop him down a crevasse? That would finish him off effectually and save all the trouble and expense of a funeral.’
18. Davos Platz: District of Davos, a Swiss health resort where Conan Doyle skied at a time when the practice was all but unknown in England. He wrote up his experiences in the Strand, to the amazement of readers.
19. Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless: A claim which doesn’t really fit in with the nature of the falls, below which the Aare becomes reasonably calm before flowing into Lake Brienz. A corpse could well be washed up in the lake, or in one of the streams, as indeed the bodies of unsuccessful climbers often are.
20. the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known: Watson’s last words are reminiscent of Phaedo’s on the death of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo: ‘Such was the end, Echecrates, of our comrade, who was, as we may say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the best and wisest and most upright man.’