Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10, Page 2

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  Lenny Picker has had his own pastiche “in the works” over several decades and two continents. He can be reached at [email protected].

  ASK MRS HUDSON, by Mrs Martha Hudson

  Dear Mrs Hudson,

  May I ask where you purchase your kitchen supplies in London? I don’t mean the foodstuffs, but the dishware and related appliances, etc.? I am just setting up house for a newly-knighted Peer, and wish to do him proud!

  Annalee Newitz

  * * * *

  Dear Mrs Newitz,

  At the risk of sounding rather traditional, I find that Harrods has most everything I need. Certainly the quality is reliable, and the selection is most agreeable. However, one does not always care to push through the considerable crowds found in such a large and popular store, and in such cases I visit a Chinese importer by the name of Mr Chen, who has a charming little shop in Limehouse. He is from Shanghai, and speaks only Mandarin, but the few words of English he knows are enough to make commerce with him quite agreeable.

  In fact, I often prefer dealing with him, since I am able to avoid the mindless chatter British sales people often hurl at me while I am trying to decide what type of cheese cloth to purchase. I find it most annoying, and Mr Chen spares me such falderal, watching patiently as I sort through his wares to find what I need. He has the most marvelous pigtail, which he wears braided down his back—it reaches nearly to his waist. And his wife is quite beautiful—one of those Chinese women whose skin seems made of polished brass, it is so smooth and flawless. Her English is considerably better than his. Occasionally she offers me tea, and I feel quite honoured to share a pot of jasmine or lotus tea with her while her husband wraps the goods I have purchased.

  Speaking of which, if you are in search of tea tins, certainly you should pay a visit to Mr Chen’s shop. Harrods may do for everyday practical supplies, but if you wish to present your gentleman with something truly special, you must look through Mr Chen’s selection of Chinese and Japanese wares. They are hand painted, and the one I bought has a lovely floral motif, and in the background one of those curved bridges you see in Oriental silk paintings. I also purchased the most ingenious spice box of Japanned tin—it has a gold border and radiating compartments. As you no doubt are aware, there is a great passion amongst society people for all things Oriental, and your peer will be most impressed with your ingenuity at finding such cunning objects.

  If you do visit Mr Chen, please convey my regards. Tell his wife that Martha Hudson looks forward to taking tea with her soon.

  Yours truly,

  Mrs Hudson

  * * * *

  Dear Mrs Hudson,

  I wonder whether you ever absorbed Mr Holmes make a mistake?

  Geoffrey Clennam

  Newcastle upon Tyne

  * * * *

  Dear Mr Clennam,

  Mr Holmes rarely makes mistakes, though I perceive you have made one—that is, assuming you mean “observe” rather than “absorb.” It is difficult to imagine absorbing a mistake, though I have no doubt certain Americans would prove me wrong.

  But to be quite serious, yes, I have observed such a thing—it was, in fact, a curious and rather amusing incident. It was while he was recovering from the shock to his system engendered by his defeat of Professor Moriarty. He was having bad dreams—reliving that fateful day at Reichenbach, I think, though he never admitted it to me.

  And so when I chanced to come upon him one morning in his sitting room, a tea tray in my hands, I concluded he had suffered yet another restless night. I observed him sorting through his collection of papers, all the while muttering to himself. The room was in unusual disarray, even for him, and judging by the beard stubble and puffy pockets beneath his eyes, I was fairly certain he had not slept at all. Mr Holmes was normally a most fastidious man, so when I saw him in that condition, I knew something was amiss.

  However, he ignored my inquiry as to his state of well-being (as he often did).

  “Mr Holmes, are you quite well?” quoth I.

  “Harrumph,” quoth he (or something to that effect).

  “I’ve brought your tea,” I said.

  He gave no answer, but tossed a few sheets of newspaper airborne, and stomped into the bedroom. I set the tray on the dining table and prepared to leave. I was stopped short by the sound of his voice from the next room.

  “Mrs Hudson!”

  With a sigh, I crossed to the bedroom and stood at the door, watching as he pawed through the contents on top of his bureau. “Yes, Mr Holmes?”

  “Where the devil is the concert programme from last night?” he demanded, hands on his hips. He presented quite the picture, clad in his mouse-coloured dressing gown, his hair disheveled, a day’s growth of beard stubble upon his chin. I almost burst out laughing, but the frazzled expression on his face stopped me.

  “Well, Mr Holmes,” said I, “I suppose it’s wherever you left it when you came in last night. I was sound asleep at the time.”

  “Yes, yes, I know that—the question is, where did I leave it?”

  “Perhaps it’s in the pocket of your overcoat,” I suggested.

  “Capital idea!” he exclaimed, brushing past me on his way to the front room. Seizing the garment from the bentwood coat rack, he rifled through the pockets, producing a crumpled programme from the Royal Albert Hall, which he and Dr Watson had attended the previous night. He held it aloft triumphantly. “Why, Mrs Hudson, I could kiss you!” he cried.

  “That is quite unnecessary,” I replied, blushing. Such effusions are so unlike Mr Holmes that it caught me quite off guard. “But perhaps you could tell me why that particular programme is of such importance to you.”

  “Ah! It is a matter of settling a bet,” said he, eagerly scanning the text of the document.

  My famous tenant had his vices, as is well known, but gambling was not one of them. “What sort of bet?” I inquired.

  “The sort that one does not care to lose,” he remarked.

  I was afraid he had, in a moment of weakness, made a rash wager. “What is at stake?” I asked, rather fearing the answer.

  “Dinner at the Savoy,” he replied carelessly.

  “Well, thank goodness for that!” I said, aware that perspiration had gathered on my brow. “I was afraid you had—”

  He looked at me quizzically, then burst out laughing. “My dear Mrs Hudson—you thought I had—oh, really, that is too amusing!”

  “Well,” said I huffily, “it may be amusing to you, Mr Holmes, but since I rely upon your monthly rent, I assure you—”

  “And you shall have it, and dinner at the Savoy as well!” he cried, pointing to the programme. The second half of the concert was devoted to the music of the American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk. His music was very popular in London at the moment, and I recognized the name. The list of pieces presented was printed in order, but the third line simply read, “To Be Determined.”

  “What does this have to do with—?” I began, but at that moment the door burst open and Dr Watson appeared, quite out of breath.

  “‘The Dying Poet!’” he exclaimed.

  Mr Holmes frowned at him. “My dear fellow,” he began, but Dr Watson cut him off.

  “The composition we heard last night was ‘The Dying Poet,’” he said, “not ‘The Dying Swan!’”

  “I still say you are wrong,” Holmes rejoined.

  “What does the programme say?” said Watson.

  Holmes tossed it aside. “It is of no help whatsoever.”

  “I have just come from the Royal Albert Hall,” Watson declared, “and they assured me that the piece Mr Balakirev played was indeed ‘The Dying Poet.’”

  Mr Holmes looked unconvinced.

  “If you don’t believe me, come along with me and hear it with your own ears,” Watson insisted.

  “That will not be necessary,” Holmes replied stiffly. “I can rely upon your word.”

  “What is this all about?” I said.

&
nbsp; “We attended a concert last night,” Watson replied, “the second half of which was devoted to the music of—”

  “Yes, yes, I know—Louis Gottschalk,” I interrupted. “What has a bet to do with all this?”

  “In the back of the hansom cab afterwards Holmes insisted that the third piece was called ‘The Dying Swan,’ whereas I thought I recognized it as ‘The Dying Poet.’ So we made a bet on the spot—whoever was wrong would pay for dinner at the Savoy.”

  Holmes turned to me. “Will you do the honour of accompanying us, Mrs Hudson?”

  I felt my face redden. “Why, Mr Holmes—”

  “Oh, do come along, Mrs Hudson,” Dr Watson said. “Otherwise I fear Holmes here will sulk the entire evening.”

  “If you insist,” said I.

  “Shall we say seven o’clock?” said Holmes.

  “Very well,” I replied. “And now I’d best be seeing about some eggs and sausage for your breakfast.”

  “Thank you, Mrs Hudson—I’m starving,” said Dr Watson.

  “And you, Mr Holmes?”

  “I’m not hungry,” he replied moodily.

  I chuckled. “I daresay that will change when you inhale the aroma of a chive omelet and some lamb sausage.”

  And with that, I hustled myself downstairs into the kitchen, where I prepared a rather splendid breakfast, if I do say so myself.

  It was not as splendid as the meal we dined on that night, however—oysters and game cock and blueberry pudding, with copious amounts of wine, ruby port and brandy for dessert. I woke up with quite the headache the next day, but it was worth it. Dr Watson told some stories of his combat days—we also found out how he came to know the music of Mr Gottschalk so well. It seems he had an encounter in medical school with a charming young lady from New Orleans, what the Americans might call a “Creole,” and she played the piano quite credibly. ‘The Dying Poet’ was one of her favorites, and he declared he must have heard it a dozen or more times during the period he knew her.

  None of this served to repair Mr Holmes’s bruised pride, however—it was some time before he went to another concert with the good doctor.

  And that is the story in its entirety, my dear Mr Clennam. I rather doubt it will appear in one of Dr Watson’s tales, but I can still see the look of satisfaction on the good doctor’s face. He had so few victories over Mr Holmes, that I have no doubt he especially savoured this one, trivial though it was. I personally think Mr Holmes was still rattled after his encounter with the Professor, hence his lapse of memory, but I did not say so at the time, preferring not to raise the spectre of his recently dead nemesis. You will perhaps agree with me that some things are better left unsaid.

  Yours very truly,

  Martha Hudson

  ELDRITCH, MY DEAR WATSON, by Darrell Schweitzer

  The H.P. Lovecraft—Sherlock Holmes Connection

  “As for ‘Sherlock Holmes’—I used to be quite infatuated with him!” wrote the horror master H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to his friend Alfred Galpin in 1918, “I read every Sherlock Holmes story published and even organized a detective agency when I was thirteen, arrogating to myself the proud pseudonym of S.H. This P.D.A. [Providence Detective Agency—DS]—whose members ranged between nine and fourteen years in age, was a most wonderful thing—how many murders and robberies we unraveled! Our headquarters were in a deserted house just outside of the thickly settled area, and we enacted, and ‘solved,’ many a gruesome tragedy. I still remember our labours in producing artificial ‘bloodstains on the floor!!!’”1

  As S.T. Joshi remarks in his monumental biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence, this letter gives us one of the most pleasing glimpses of the young author, before the nervous “collapse” of his later teens, playing detective with the neighborhood kids, perhaps with a little more brilliance and determination than most—it is clear that Lovecraft was the leader in all this—but nevertheless behaving very much like a normal boy for perhaps the first and only time in his life.

  * * * *

  Lovecraft went on in a letter to August Derleth in 1931:

  “But I may remark that I, too, was a detective in my youth—being a member of the Providence Detective Agency at an age as late as 13! Our force had very rigid regulations, & carried in its pockets a standard working equipment consisting of police whistle, magnifying glass, electric flashlight, handcuffs (sometimes plain twine, but “handcuffs” for all that!), tin badge, (I have mine still!!!), tape measure (for footprints), revolver, (mine was the real thing, but Inspector Munroe (at 12) had a water-squirt pistol while Inspector Upham (at 10) worried along with a cap-pistol) & copies of all newspaper accounts of desperate criminals at large—plus a paper called The Detective, which printed pictures and descriptions of outstanding “wanted” malefactors…. We shadowed many desperate-looking customers, & diligently compared their physiognomies with “mugs” in The Detective, yet never made a full-fledged arrest. Ah, me—the good old days!”2

  * * * *

  It is just as well that Detective Lovecraft a.k.a. “S.H.,” did not show off his quite genuine pistol while stalking a suspect. Those were indeed more innocent times, when parents did not think too seriously about letting their 13-year-old play with a real pistol, even one which was (presumably) in less than working order.

  This great fascination with Sherlock Holmes and with mystery fiction was, quite clearly for Lovecraft, a phase. In both letters, the larger context is a discussion of juvenile tastes and former habits. Lovecraft’s fascination with detective stories was not restricted to the Sherlock Holmes stories either. He read an enormous amount of general pulp fiction between about 1905 and 1914, including virtually every issue of Argosy and All-Story during this period, which contained much detective fiction. As a child he had been by all indication an avid reader of dime-novels and other juvenile mysteries of the period (some of which was published in a format similar to a modern comic book, although mostly text), following the exploits of Nick Carter, King Brady, and other largely-forgotten heroes. Many of his earliest attempts at fiction were detective stories of a sort, such as “The Mystery of the Grave-yard” (1898 or 1899, i.e., written when Lovecraft was eight or nine) which is nothing less than a miniature dime-novel, with very short chapters, some no more than fifty words.

  But, certainly as he grew a little older, Sherlock Holmes was his favorite, and he definitely (as is clear from his letters) read the first three Holmes novels, and the collections The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. He did not read the later Canon, as far as we can tell, ever. He read some of Doyle’s supernatural work, though affording him no more than one sentence, a longish sentence in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” singling out “Lot No. 249” and “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’” for praise. Overall, despite his dismissing Doyle’s later Spiritualist writings as “senile drivel,” Lovecraft seems to have regarded the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories as a very competent storyteller, and particularly good reading for younger folks.

  But detective fiction, by and large, was something he felt he had outgrown as he reached adulthood. In a 1929 letter to Derleth he expresses doubt that S.S. van Dine’s Philo Vance would have much appeal for him, remarking, “I hate these laboriously whimsical & artificially mannered fiction-heroes—they are so mechanical that these lose all touch with reality & become grotesque bores.”3 He does promise to look into Father Brown sometime, though there is no indication he ever did. In other letters, mostly to persons other than Derleth, he expresses less than complete enthusiasm for Derleth’s detective novels, although he does courteously praise Derleth’s Holmes-pastiche Solar Pons series.

  * * * *

  If it were merely the case that H.P. Lovecraft enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes series in his youth and then lost interest, there would be no point in writing this article. The only question is what this circumstance—the early enthusiasm for Holmes on the part of HPL—means.

  Essentially
, Lovecraft and detective fiction had a philosophical parting of the ways. In 1914, as a result of letter exchanges between Lovecraft and other readers in the pages of The Argosy, Lovecraft discovered amateur journalism, and for the first time in his life came into wide contact with other literary-minded persons. This broadened his tastes and outlook enormously. But more to the point, Lovecraft’s interest had always been toward the cosmic. Another of his boyhood obsessions was astronomy, and it was the intensive study of this subject, together, no doubt, with the experience of staying up nights peering into the depths of infinity through his telescope that convinced Lovecraft that, ultimately, mankind had only a very small, even trivial role to play in the cosmos at large. As if that were not enough, at precisely this time astronomers had just determined that those swirling “nebulae” they had been observing were in fact other galaxies, made up, not of clouds of gas, but of billions of stars, and located much further away than previously thought. So, if anything, the depths of infinity had just gotten considerably larger.

  For Lovecraft, then, the fascination (and the aesthetic attraction) was in the vast sweep of time and space. He sought the cosmic in fiction, in his own and in what he read. Lovecraftian horror stems largely from the characters’s realization of their own helpless and trivial role in the cosmic scheme of things. It is as if anyone could say abstractly that the history the Earth might be written out as a 300-volume encyclopedia, and the history of mankind occupies only the bottom half of the last page—but Lovecraft genuinely felt this. As a consequence, for all he might admire Holmes’s brilliance and rationality and the deft artistry of the Doyle stories, which clearly stood for him head and shoulders over most other such fiction, the actual plots of detective stories failed to hold his interest.

  * * * *

  In that same 1931 letter to Derleth, a couple of paragraphs earlier, he had explained, “I never acquired an interest in the peep-show contrasts & ignominies empirically classified as ‘scandal’—perhaps because of a cosmic perspective which felt no vast difference betwixt one sort of inane behavior and another sort of inane behavior on the part of terrestrial puppets.”4 In other words, if organic life itself is to be seen, as Lovecraft saw it, as a chemical-electrical phenomenon which may have occurred briefly on one particular fly-speck planet in a vast and chaotic universe, then it didn’t particularly matter who politely poisoned whom in an English country-house or made off with milady’s jewels. The mature Lovecraft didn’t find mere crime to be of sufficient dramatic interest.