Sherlock Holmes In America (41 page)

The German sneered across his beer. “Do you think you can impress me with this belligerence?” he asked with a deprecatory laugh. “Look around this room; there are twenty men I could hire to work for us. Why do I need you?”

I noticed there were four empty pint glasses in front of Morey. Two went flying as he gestured wildly. “Damn you, I thought we were on the same side!” he shouted.

“Simply because the enemy of my enemy can be my friend does not mean that you and I have to like each other,” replied the German. “Quite the contrary.”

Morey's face flushed and he started to rise. I could not let him do anything rash, not with my revenge so near to hand. I needed a diversion and the pint of Guinness in my left hand would do nicely.

The stout splashed him from head to toe. Enraged, he leapt up, the Prussian temporarily forgotten. Feigning unawareness in my senility, I passed through the side door, the one the urchins used to nip in and out of as they dragged foaming growlers back to their drunken fathers at home.

“You there! Old man!” he screamed, but pretending deafness, I ignored him. The room jeered as he struggled to his feet.

I was in the alley and waiting for him when he burst through the door. Cap off, upright and cold as death was I. “McKenna!” he said, staggering back against the door. This was just the effect I had hoped to produce, for our confrontation needed to be quick and final; the intrusion of strangers would have been most unhelpful at this point.

“Go for it,” I said.

He went for it.

I fired two shots to his one. Both mine found their mark. His did not.

Morey's body sagged, then sat heavily as his life's blood ebbed away. I could hear pounding on the other side of the door as the pub's denizens were roused by the commotion. I waited just long enough to watch the light in his eyes flicker out and then into the rubbish went the elderly McKenna's hat, stick, coat, and as much else as I could strip off in the few moments allotted to me, revealing the oil-stained, motor-car tradesman's garb beneath.

I walked round to the front of the pub and entered just as a few men had managed to push the body aside and force open the door. As the hue and cry for the police went up, I took a seat near the German and tugged ever so slightly on my goatee. He looked at me and gave me a small nod of acknowledgement, but not of betrayal.

“What'll it be, sir?” asked the barmaid.

“Nothin',” I replied, my Irish-American accent plain. “I've changed me mind.” I nodded in the direction of the German: “Good evening to you, fine sir,” and took my leave.

For a short while, the local constabulary were very much mystified, especially when they discovered the old clothes and the American revolver, but they were used to drunken Irishmen murdering each other, and quickly lost interest in the case, and so I made my way across the Irish Sea and on to London without further incident. The next day, I was back on the South Downs, among my bees, making some observations upon the segregation of the queen.

Sussex, July 1914

It did not surprise me when Martha announced Mr. Mycroft Holmes. By rights, I ought not to have received him. That such a conniving mind could comfortably reside within such a portly and indolent exterior . . . I realized that, not for the first time, I had underestimated my own brother.

It had been, I had to admit, sheer genius on his part to insinuate me into the Irish-American underworld of Birdy Edwards's own hometown, and send me to the one person who could have successfully infiltrated me into the mob. But how did he know she would? I took the letter, stained with her blood, from my billfold and, smoothing it out, laid it flat upon my study table. “Show Mr. Holmes in,” I said.

“Sherlock!” he exclaimed, as if he had half-expected never to see me again. He extended his hand, but I let it dangle, as we said in Chicago.

“I brought this back to you,” I said, gesturing toward the letter. “Full circle.”

For a moment, my brother was something he almost never was: nonplussed. The sight of the blood—her blood—on the letter, I believe, unnerved him. But he quickly regained his composure.

“We had had our eye on the girl for some time,” he began. Was there a hint of apology in his manner? “Ever since the tragedy of Birlstone, in fact. After the death of her father, we sent her small anonymous remittances and made sure our agents looked in on her from time to time. In fact, it was we who suggested the alias, McParland, to protect her from the Moriarty gang's American henchmen. A most conflicted, troubled young woman. A tragedy.”

I said nothing. My silence was remonstrance enough.

“Damn it, Sherlock, what could I do? If I had told you what His Majesty's Government was about, you would have refused outright, Asquith or no Asquith; after all, you'd already turned Grey down. And I knew that your love of a mystery would keep you in the Great Game, as it were. And you have done brilliantly. I am very proud of you.”

At last, I found my tongue, and it was all I could to tame it. “All of this—for what? For me to ‘keep tabs' on a few Fenians? And at what cost?” I felt myself growing hot under the collar. “If His Majesty's government cannot watch a few sad-sack revolutionaries in Dublin, then what hope is there for it?”

Mycroft looked me up and down, as if I were still his younger brother, playing with tin soldiers and hobbyhorses in our bedroom so many years ago. “You still don't understand, do you?” he said at last.

At this point I must confess that I lost my temper. “What is there to understand?” I cried, clutching at the letter. “Your own words condemn you!”

His eyes shuttled back and forth inside his head, and not for the first time was I reminded of the very strong affinity, intellectually speaking, between Mycroft Holmes and the late Professor Moriarty. Both of whom now had the blood of the McParland family on their hands. I looked down at the letter, her red bloodstains fading, the paper already taking on the appearance of parchment, receding into history along with what was left of my heart.

“We—
I
—trusted her to do the right thing. And so, it appears, she did. Read it aloud, please.”

My hands were shaking as I looked at the epistle. “‘My dear Miss Edwards: The gentleman who bears this letter is the man who both saved your father from the gibbet and yet condemned him to death. He is in need of a redemption that only you can provide. Do with him as you will.'”

There was nothing further to read, but the letter's contents did not end there. At the bottom, instead of a signature, there was simply a mark: a triangle within a circle. Her blood had swamped this bit, rendering it a dark brown stain, like the brand I had seen on Birdy Edwards, and the corpse at Birlstone. Like the brand I now bore on my back. The Trinity and Eternity. The solution to the final problem.

I let the missive flutter to the ground. At last, I understood.

“This has nothing to do with the Fenians, Sherlock. Or the Irish. It was always about the Germans, who mean to have war, and war they shall get. They would never have trusted an English turncoat, especially not one of recent vintage. Furthermore, although you were retired, we needed you out of the country, that the memory of Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and the South Downs might fade. But an Irish-American named James McKenna . . . ”

“Is dead,” I said. “And dead he shall stay.” My promise to Maddie overrode everything, even my loyalty to the Crown, even my blood ties to my brother. Sherlock Holmes's undying loyalty was and always would be to England, but Jim McKenna would never betray her. There was another sort of loyalty, that which Maddie had taught me, and if that were the higher, then so be it.

“Very well, then. May he rest in peace. But there is now a nobleman of the Hun persuasion in fact, who very much desires to meet with you. In fact . . . coincidentally... he is living not far from here. I think you take my meaning.”

I smiled, reflecting the memory of her last smile, a memory that would never leave me. Where Mycroft was concerned, there was never a coincidence; in the chess game of life, he was always two moves ahead. “What is this
Junker
's name?”

Mycroft exhaled in relief. “Von Bork. Funnily enough, a colleague of your friend, von Herling, whom you encountered in Skibbereen. You shall enter his service on the morrow.”

So Maddie had not died in vain. For King and Country, and for the United States of America, she would always live. “Agreed,” I said, my nostrils flaring. Truth to tell, I was looking forward to a second encounter with the sneering Prussian and his agent in my country.

Business settled, he rose to leave. “One last question,” Mycroft said, on his way out the door. “If James McKenna is dead, by what name shall you call yourself?”

“Altamont,” I replied.

Michael Walsh

Michael Walsh, the former music critic of
Time
magazine, is the author of the novels
Exchange Alley
,
As Time Goes By
(the prequel/ sequel to the movie
Casablanca
), and
And All the Saints
, a winner of the 2004 American Book Awards for fiction. His latest novel,
Hostile Intent
, was published in September 2009 by Kensington Books. Under the name “Michéal Breathnach,” he contributed “The Coole Park Problem” to
Ghosts in Baker Street
. For good measure, he co-wrote with Gail Parent the 2002 hit Disney Channel movie
Cadet Kelly
.

F
ew figures embody both a place and an era like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Fewer still conceal such a welter of internal contradictions beneath such a confident—but deeply misleading—exterior.

The very image of the late Victorian British Empire, Conan Doyle was born in Scotland's capital, Edinburgh, and came to consider himself the very soul of Englishness, and yet—on both his father's and his mother's side—was descended from a long line of Irishmen, and Catholics to boot. A Catholic in a Presbyterian city—no matter its large number of his co-religionists; an Irishman in England; and an Englishman to the world: it is little wonder that these stresses would so bedevil their author that only his most famous creation could give them voice, and resolution.

“I am half Irish, you know,” Conan Doyle once said, explaining an outburst of temper, “and my British half has the devil of a job to hold the hotheaded rascal in.” So far, so stereotypical: the image of the quicktempered Hibernian was one already long established in the British hierarchy of racial classification. And, indeed, Conan Doyle himself seemed to accept the conventional archetypes of Irishness, using them as a kind of handy shorthand to explain some “un-English” behavior or other. Stumping for a Liberal Unionist candidate, he recalls in
Memories and Adventures
that he found himself being pushed on stage to address an audience of three thousand: “I hardly knew myself what I said, but the Irish part of me came to my aid and supplied me with a torrent of more or less incoherent words and similes which roused the audience greatly, though it read afterwards more like a comic stump speech than a serious political effort.” Temper and the gift of the gab: two hallmarks of the stage Irishman, which Conan Doyle obviously, desperately, did not want to be.

For at the same time, he was dead set against Gladstone's policy of Home Rule for the perennially fractious colony of Ireland. As Britain moved inexorably toward the twin crises of the Great War and the Easter Rising, Conan Doyle, at the peak of his literary fame, was essentially a collaborator with the enemy.

It is my contention in this brief monograph that Conan Doyle's distaste for his own Irishness, lightly and comically alluded to in the excerpts above, was in reality deep-rooted and far-reaching. It is largely masked in his letters, now available in
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters
,
¹
but we need not trouble ourselves with mere mundane reality. The proof is precisely where it ought to be: in the Canon, which is a veritable feast of anti-Hibernian sentiment that would make the most bigoted Englishman blush. Do we want a villain? And not just any villain, but the Napoleon of Crime, the spider at the center of a vast web of criminality that affects all England? Very well, Conan Doyle—through the amanuensis of a sturdy Scotsman, Dr. John Hamish Watson—gives us a corker in Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime.

Does Moriarty want a second? A man of ruthless cunning and one of the finest shots in the Empire? Very well, then—Colonel Sebastian Moran is just your man. Throughout the Canon, Irishmen are nearly always portrayed in an unflattering light, as men of either overt criminality or, at the very least, violence. In addition to Moriarty and Moran, consider McMurdo, the former prizefighter and servant to Bartholomew Sholto in
The Sign of the Four
who, tellingly, had once boxed with Holmes. “If instead of standin' there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I'd ha' known you without a question.”

McMurdo—a name with deep significance for Conan Doyle, as we shall see—oft recurs (or perhaps “occurs,” given the sequencing of the stories) in the Sherlock Holmes novel that is itself a veritable symphony of anti-Hibernian sentiment; I refer, of course, to
The Valley of Fear.

In this novel, which no Irishman or Irish-American can read without shuddering, we find proof positive of not only Conan Doyle's self-loathing, but his active support of the forces that would crush the brave Irish men and women of Vermissa Valley. Adumbrating Liam O'Flaherty's classic about the Irish revolution,
The Informer
, Conan Doyle presents us with a “hero” who goes by a number of names, including Jack McMurdo, Birdy Edwards, and John Douglas. This traitor, working for the despised and brutal Pinkerton Agency, infiltrates the Scowrers in a Pennsylvania coal town, where they are fighting for justice, and eventually breaks them. Like Gypo Nolan, Edwards flees his treachery and heads for California, where he strikes gold. Later, in England as “Jack Douglas,” he is acquitted of murder, but is eventually lost overboard as he flees again, this time by sea. So, in a sense, the story does have a happy ending after all.

What are we to make of this?

These are very deep waters, indeed. And without resorting to armchair psychoanalysis, it seems clear that Conan Doyle, in a successful attempt to penetrate English society, masked himself
à la
Birdy Edwards—and later, most ominously, as Holmes himself—and yet felt such a sense of self-loathing that he was forced to confess his sins to his alter ego, Dr. Watson.

And so it is in the pages of the Canon that we see the Conan Doyle psychodrama played out, where the Irishman battles the Englishman with the Scotsman as referee. And the Irishman—or in one particular case, the Irishwoman—always loses.

There is no question that his Celtic heritage was a source of endless fascination for Conan Doyle. Edinburgh has, since the Irish exodus of Black '47, hosted a large Irish minority, as do several other British cities, including most prominently Glasgow and Liverpool. Looked down upon, often despised, the Irish were to the English what the Africans and the Indians were to eighteenth- and ninetheenthcentury Americans: a dark and savage people, by turns childlike and murderous, given to song and dance but appallingly prone to sudden outbursts of the most appalling violence. Incapable of controlling their thirst for drink—“the Creature,” in Irish parlance—they were clearly second-class citizens (if indeed citizens at all).

The Doyle family had been in Britain for generations, but the Foley family—Sir Arthur's beloved mother was the Irish-born Mary Foley—brought him close to his origins. “My real love for letters, my instinct for storytelling, springs from my mother, who is of Anglo-Celtic stock, with the glamour and the romance of the Celt very strong marked.” (Even when discussing his own mother—“The Mam”—Conan Doyle felt compelled to resort to Irish stereotype.)

But that was the happy face of the Celts. The dark side, the Creatureobsessed, was symbolized by none other than his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, whose powerful thirst damaged a promising career as an artist—the wreck of whom we have visible evidence in the six drawings he made for his son's
A Study in Scarlet
, featuring a bearded Sherlock Holmes.

So . . .
Mor
iarty,
Mor
an, Mc
Mur
do, even
Mor
gan the poisoner. All Irish names, each one beginning with some variant of “mor,” the linguistic signifier of distress and death. The most powerful resonance of all, of course, is the Irish phrase
An Gorta Mor—
the Great Hunger—referring to the famine of the mid-nineteenth century, which changed, changed utterly, the fate of That Most Distressful Nation.

Can you see the pattern emerging here?

Mordred. Fata Morgana. Even Tolkien's fictional Mordor—each of these Celtic formulations indicates danger and darkness. For Tolkien, “Mordor” was the Black Land, an etymological throwback to the roots of our common tongue and the source of our word “murder.” Clearly, in the works of Conan Doyle, the prefix “mor” immediately indicates that the person named is not to be trusted, is not only dangerous but
mur
derous—someone with whom an interaction may well be fatal.

So let us now consider three Canonical stories of the utmost significance to our discussion:
The Final Problem
,
The Adventure of the Empty House
, and
His Last Bow
. And then let us conclude with a fourth that may well feature the most surprising character in all the Canon. Someone who puts Moriarty and Moran in the shade—Sherlock's most dangerous opponent, but one without whom he could never have survived the plunge over the Reichenbach Falls. Someone who is, in many respects, the most crucially overlooked figure in the Canon—which is exactly the way Conan Doyle wanted it.

In many ways,
The Final Problem
is the most straightforward of the lot, and certainly makes an ideal curtain-raiser to this discussion of anti-Hibernianism. I need not recount the story here; suffice it to say that it not only introduces us, in person, to Professor James Moriarty, it also engenders a whole discussion of precisely how many Moriartys there actually are, and whether they are all named James. Certainly, the Professor is an unlovely physical specimen, devisor of a binomial theorem of genius or not. Physically, he resembles a reptile, and upon meeting Holmes he promptly insults him by expressing disappointment in the size of his frontal development. (Of course, we have only Holmes's word for this, since Watson can only report the hearsay encounter from Sherlock's testimony.)

But the Professor is the
primus inter pares
of declared Sherlockian villains, and there can be no question of the mortal danger he poses to Holmes. Holmes, on the verge of rounding up Moriarty's gang, convinces Watson to travel with him to the Continent, where Holmes has his final confrontation with his now-discomfited nemesis.

And so Moriarty dies. But like his shape-shifting predecessor, Fata
Mor
gana, he is almost immediately reincarnated in the form of his henchman, Sebastian Moran, who (we learn in
The Empty House
) bombards Holmes with boulders as the Great Detective scrambles away from the Reichenbach abyss. Holmes imagines he hears the late Professor's voice screaming at him from the bottom of the falls, and then suddenly Moran appears, bent on malevolence, as if summoned from the depths of Hell. His subsequent attack on Holmes from the empty house in London is entirely to be expected, but Holmes outwits him and the “second most dangerous man in London” is captured and charged with the murder of the Hon. Ronald Adair.

Then something entirely miraculous happens. Holmes and Watson are restored to their old rooms in Baker Street, which despite fire and gunshots are found to be in essentially pristine condition, maintained by Mycroft Holmes and Mrs. Hudson, with “all the old landmarks in their places,” including the chemical corner, the acid-stained table, the scrapbooks, the violin, the pipe rack, and the Persian slipper.

And Holmes's encyclopedia of biographies, where in addition to Morgan the poisoner, Merridew of abominable memory, and Matthews, who knocked out one of Holmes's teeth, we find Colonel Sebastian Moran, London-born son of Sir Augustus Moran, the former British Minister to—Persia.

By now, it's clear that the combination of murder and magic, so quintessentially Celtic, is powerfully at play here. Like Conan Doyle himself, Professor Moriarty and Colonel Moran have a patina of Britishness to overlay their Irishness, but Hibernianism in the blood can take the strangest forms, and in this case it took the form of two respectable “Englishmen” who were, of course, really disguised Irishmen. Exactly like Conan Doyle himself.

And so we come to
His Last Bow
, that moody, mysterious and moving
ave atque vale
, written in the third person—as if by Conan Doyle himself—in which all of the Literary Agent's obsessions can at last be viewed in full flower. Secret identities. Irishness as a marker of betrayal. A false identity, as false as that of “Birdy Edwards” during the Pinkerton man's undercover work in Vermissa Valley. Holmes learned American gangland slang in Chicago, joined an Irish secret society in Buffalo, and got into trouble with the constabulary in Skibbereen as he polished his anti-English credentials. Then (in collusion with Martha, the ever-faithful Mrs. Hudson), he sprang the trap on the German spy, von Bork. And when the imperious kraut vows vengeance, how does Holmes respond? “The old sweet song. How often have I heard it in days gone by”—an allusion to the famous American popular chanson written by the Irish-American James L. Molloy in 1884, “Love's Old Sweet Song.”