{"title":"The Fall of the House of Musgrave","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474431293.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474431293.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"In Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle recounted how his Edinburgh lecturer, Joseph Bell, provided the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes’s methods of reasoning: ‘It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.’ But Bell was not the only source for Holmes. His literary model was Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘masterful’ Parisian detective, Le Chavalier C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), and reappeared in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844). Poe was one of the most powerful literary influences on Doyle’s writing.","PeriodicalId":269389,"journal":{"name":"The Case of Sherlock Holmes","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131416880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Worst Man in London","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Augustus Milverton, blackmailer of society women in the 1904 story that bears his name, is assumed by critics to be based on a real person – but which real person is open to doubt. The favourite is Charles Augustus Howell, a larger-than-life associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (whose members knew him as ‘Owl’), friend to James McNeill Whistler and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and one-time secretary to John Ruskin. However, it is by no means established that Howell was, in Lancelyn Green’s words, a ‘scoundrel and blackmailer’. He certainly seems to have fallen out with a lot of people, but the more outlandish stories about his life and death – Oscar Wilde may be the source for the claim that Howell was found dying outside a Chelsea public house ‘with his throat cut and a ten shilling piece between his clenched teeth’ – may be urban myths rather than actual facts: his death certificate, for instance, records that he died of pneumonia.","PeriodicalId":269389,"journal":{"name":"The Case of Sherlock Holmes","volume":"10 4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129745696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Pick of a Bad Lot","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"A week or so after moving into 221B Baker Street, Watson observes that his fellow lodger Sherlock Holmes receives visits from ‘many acquaintances, and those in the most different classes of society’. Among these visitors, Watson is introduced to a ‘little sallow, ratfaced, dark-eyed fellow . . . who came three or four times in a single week’ (Study, 17). This is a Mr Lestrade, whom Holmes later reveals to be ‘a well-known detective’ who ‘got himself into a fog recently over a forgery case’ (20). Lestrade would go on to appear, or at least be mentioned, in a further twelve stories, making him the most frequently trans-textual character in the saga apart from Holmes and Watson themselves, and possibly Holmes’s landlady Mrs Hudson.","PeriodicalId":269389,"journal":{"name":"The Case of Sherlock Holmes","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126683942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Scandal in East Yorkshire","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Holmes is frequently employed by a client in order to avert, or suppress a scandal. While secrecy is the client’s objective, the scandal itself is – usually – revealed to the privileged reader. This is exemplified by the very first Holmes short story, whose scandalous subject is even declared in its title. When the King of Bohemia employs Holmes to save his forthcoming marriage to Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen, second daughter of the King of Scandinavia, full details of the incriminating evidence – letters and a cabinet photograph1 – are revealed in a comic catechism between Holmes and the King: ‘If this young person should produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their authenticity?’ ‘There is the writing.’ ‘Pooh, pooh! Forgery.’ ‘My private note-paper.’ ‘Stolen.’ ‘My own seal.’ ‘Imitated.’ ‘My photograph.’ ‘Bought.’ ‘We were both in the photograph.’ ‘Oh, dear! That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an indiscretion.’ (Adventures, 13)","PeriodicalId":269389,"journal":{"name":"The Case of Sherlock Holmes","volume":"118 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133978818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Oaths and Secrets","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474431293.003.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474431293.003.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Organised criminality and violence appear frequently in the Holmes stories. A Study in Scarlet imagines Brigham Young’s nascent Mormon state as a tightly knit conspiratorial organisation, exerting uncompromising control over its membership even beyond its notional borders. An ideological conspiracy of a very different kind lies behind the surreal menace of ‘The Five Orange Pips’, in which the Ku Klux Klan enforces its organisational rules through fear-inducing symbols, followed by swift and merciless punishment. The clues in this story reveal the organisation’s global reach: at their home in Horsham, the Openshaws receive letters from the Klan postmarked Pondicherry, Dundee and East London; Holmes discovers that the murderers of John Openshaw are led by the captain of the barque Lone Star, registered in Savannah, Georgia. The Sicilian Mafi a is behind the theft of the Borgia Pearl in ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons’ (1904), and ‘The Red Circle’ features another Italian crime syndicate.","PeriodicalId":269389,"journal":{"name":"The Case of Sherlock Holmes","volume":"158 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127388839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"This Circle of Misery and Violence and Fear","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0016","url":null,"abstract":"‘The Cardboard Box’ is a strange story with an unusual textual history. First published in the Strand Magazine in January 1893, it was the only story of the series left out of the fi rst English edition of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (published by George Newnes later the same year). It made it into the first American edition, published by Harper in 1894, only to be removed from later American editions. Its disappearance from the Memoirs led to some significant cutting and pasting: a nineteen-paragraph exchange between Holmes and Watson in Baker Street was taken from the opening of ‘The Cardboard Box’ and moved to ‘The Adventure of the Resident Patient’ (1893), where it replaced one and a half paragraphs of introductory material, changing the setting of ‘The Resident Patient’ from a ‘boisterous’ autumn to a boiling summer (and causing some strange meteorological phenomena in the process).","PeriodicalId":269389,"journal":{"name":"The Case of Sherlock Holmes","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128417967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Discreetly Shadowed Corners","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474431293.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474431293.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"In a famous passage at the beginning of ‘A Case of Identity’, Holmes imagines surveying the inner workings of the households of London from the air: If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. (Adventures, 30) Besides the clear reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this passage alludes to a French reinterpretation of an ancient myth which, as Anthea Trodd and others have shown, fascinated Victorian writers: Alain-René Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (1707) takes the figure of Asmodeus from Hebrew myth and turns him into a satirical figure who leads ‘a favoured human companion on a roof-top excursion of Madrid, and lifts the roofs of the houses to expose the secret crimes habitually being enacted beneath’.","PeriodicalId":269389,"journal":{"name":"The Case of Sherlock Holmes","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114664141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Rock of Gibraltar","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474431293.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/EDINBURGH/9781474431293.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Marital unhappiness is a persistent theme of the Holmes stories, from the first (A Study in Scarlet) to several of the last (‘The Adventure of the Retired Colourman’ and ‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’, both published in 1927). A Study in Scarlet begins as a detective story but its backstory is, as we have seen, a melodrama of forced marriage and domestic tyranny. ‘A Case of Identity’ concerns a courtship that is an elaborate deception, and the story opens with a digression on the ‘Dundas separation case’. This is reported in a newspaper as a ‘husband’s cruelty to his wife’, prompting Watson to claim that he knows the details without even reading the article: ‘There is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent nothing more crude.’ However, Holmes has investigated the case and reveals that it is actually more unusual: ‘The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife’ (Adventures, 31).","PeriodicalId":269389,"journal":{"name":"The Case of Sherlock Holmes","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129946752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Giant Rat of Sumatra","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0021","url":null,"abstract":"The late story ‘Thor Bridge’ opens with a celebrated passage in which Watson reveals the existence of ‘a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box with my name, John H. Watson, MD, Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid’ (Case-Book, 23) in the vaults of the Charing Cross branch of Cox and Co. bank. This was a real bank, founded in 1758 and which specialised as an army agency, responsible for army logistics and payments to officers and men: for its military customers it would have taken care not only of salaries but also of tax, insurance and bills, and it had branches across British India as well as the British Isles. For a former Indian Army doctor, therefore, it would have been a logical choice for placing an account, and its branch at 16–18 Charing Cross was, during the First World War, one of the busiest banks in the world, open all hours for men returning from the front.1 Its wartime expansion could not be sustained and it was taken over by Lloyd’s Bank in 1923, the year after ‘Thor Bridge’ was published in the Strand, although Lloyd’s later sold its Indian operations which eventually became Cox and Kings travel agent, and which flourishes to this day.","PeriodicalId":269389,"journal":{"name":"The Case of Sherlock Holmes","volume":"126 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131653995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Nobler Man Never Walked the Earth","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most problematic characters in any Holmes story is Steve Dixie, the black gangster who bursts into Holmes’s room at the beginning of ‘The Three Gables’. He is a man of contradictions, simultaneously ridiculed and full of menace. His size and apparent physical aggression – ‘his sullen dark eyes’ have ‘a smouldering gleam of malice in them’ (Case-Book, 133) – are in counterpoint to his comic appearance: Watson remarks on his ‘very loud grey check suit with a flowing salmon-coloured tie’ (133). Instructed by his superior to warn Holmes that his life is at threat ‘if he go down Harrow way’ (134), he enters like ‘a mad bull’ and twice threatens Holmes with physical violence: ‘It won’t be so damn fi ne if I have to trim you up a bit’ (133); ‘you’ll get put through it for sure if you give me any lip’ (134).","PeriodicalId":269389,"journal":{"name":"The Case of Sherlock Holmes","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131819408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}