Introduction

Sherlock Holmes is an admirable man, but whatever coziness he possesses comes mostly from the Baker Street scene— the light and warmth inside holding the cold and dark outside at bay, Mrs. Hudson hurrying upstairs with food and drink at the tinkling of a bell, and of course comfortable old Dr. Watson in the armchair before the fire, reading the latest issue of The Lancet or writing up one of Holmes's cases for the Strand magazine. Perhaps Holmes is hard at work looking up some telltale data in his commonplace books, or conducting an experiment in his chemical corner that will prove a man's innocence or guilt. Or perhaps he is unoccupied at the moment, and at leisure, a condition he detested—moodily passing the time by playing the violin until a frantic knock at the door and rush of footsteps up the stairs brings him his next client and case.

It is easy for us to imagine Holmes and Watson that way. It is far less easy for those who have read the stories carefully to imagine much more jollification at Baker Street. Not even at Christmastime, for Holmes and Watson are proper, reserved English professional gentlemen of the late Victorian age. They address each other by their surnames, not their Christian names, they observe the proprieties of their era and class, they maintain a reticence about their personal lives and feelings that is scarcely understandable to the modern world of today, where public display of feeling and emotion is hard to avoid even by those who would wish to.

So it is with the Christmas adventure of Sherlock Holmes that we have from Dr. Watson's pen. "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" appeared in the Strand magazine for January 1892. And it was, as Christopher Morley, founder of the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes's greatest admirers, wrote, "a Christmas Story without slush." It takes place not on Christmas itself, but two days after, and Watson, married at the time and living elsewhere, stops by Baker Street to call upon his friend and wish him "the compliments of the season." Just that: the compliments of the season. No caroling, no gaudily wrapped presents, "no lachrymose Yule-tide yowling," to quote Morley again. Even at Christmastime, their sense of restraint is well in place, and Watson never lets the Christmas spirit that animates this story get out of hand.

Even so—and perhaps because of that—"The Blue Carbuncle" is one of the best tales in the Holmesian Canon. There is a lost hat, from which Holmes is able to make the most striking deductions about its owner. There is a Christmas goose, lost along with the hat the night before by the unknown man, that turns up with a precious jewel in its crop. And there is the certainty, when the owner of the hat and goose shows up to claim them, that he knows nothing whatever about the blue carbuncle, which has been stolen from the Countess of Morcar at the Hotel Cosmopolitan. The goose came from the goose club at the Alpha Inn, near the British Museum. And so, through the cold and frosty streets of London that night go Holmes and Watson, on a journey of detection that takes them to the Alpha Inn, Covent Garden market, and back to Baker Street before the mystery is solved, and an innocent man, in jail accused of the theft, is set free.

The true culprit is also set free, by Sherlock Holmes. "After all, Watson, I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies," says he. "Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward."

Sherlockian scholars love to analyze Watson's stories, and "The Blue Carbuncle" is no exception, particularly since it seems to harken back to earlier Christmases. When Holmes and Watson visit the Alpha Inn to learn where its goose club procured its birds, they depart with a remarkably hearty farewell to the pub's proprietor, from Holmes, of all people. "Here's your good health, landlord, and prosperity to your house!" One scholar has pointed out that the Alpha Inn—believed to be the Museum Tavern, at the corner of Museum and Great Russell streets—may have been Holmes's own local during his early years in London, for he had lived in that neighbourhood then, he told Watson elsewhere, in Montague Street around the corner from the British Museum. Holmes was in active practice as the world's first consulting detective for twenty-three years, and Watson was associated with him for seventeen of those, but several of them were before Watson came onto the scene—solitary years for the young Holmes, living in a rented room there in Bloomsbury, studying the various aspects of his unshaped profession at the British Museum and at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and learning on foot the geography of the world's largest city. Holmes was alone and poor then, and Christmas is the time of year, Charles Dickens tells us in "A Christmas Carol," when want is most keenly felt. Perhaps a few of his first Christmases in London were spent at the Alpha Inn nearby, where some company could be borrowed, and cheer purchased, for an hour or two at a time. It was only later, when Watson came along, and they took rooms together in Baker Street, and Mrs. Hudson saw to their wants, that Christmas was no longer as solitary as it once had been.

"The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" is a Christmas story that has stood the friends of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson in good stead for over a century now. But there is no denying the fact that it is only one Christmas of the many that the two great friends and companions shared. Perhaps the stories in this volume are some of the others.

Jon Lellenberg  Christmas 1995