Sherlock Holmes: The American Years (2 page)

Students of the life of Sherlock Holmes quickly discern that there are few certainties. We accept the convention of using the names “Sherlock Holmes” and “John H. Watson” for the Great Detective and the Good Doctor, knowing full well that the real identities of these individuals were concealed behind aliases with the connivance of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We can deduce that Holmes’s year of birth was likely 1854, Watson’s a few years earlier. We know with reasonable assurance that the partnership of the two commenced in 1881; that in 1891, Holmes disappeared at the Reichenbach Falls, only to return in 1894; and that in late 1903 or 1904, Holmes retired. In his twenty-three years of active practice (according to his own accounts), he handled well
over 500 cases of note, although records of only 56 have been made public. Two postretirement cases are chronicled, one in 1907 or 1908, and one commencing in 1912 and ending on the eve of the Great War in 1914.

The world’s first consulting detective has left us little information about his ancestry and youth. His parents were “country squires,” his grandmother the sister of Vernet, the French artist. He has a brother, Mycroft, seven years his elder. He spent two years at college, then took rooms in Montague Street in London, where he endured months of inaction. He frequented the British Museum, handled small matters for largely unmemorable clients (although “The Musgrave Ritual,” which belongs to this period, is surely one of Holmes’s greatest triumphs, solving a disappearance/murder and restoring a long-lost national treasure in one stroke), and dreamed of greatness. One may long to know more of the Tarleton murders, Vamberry, the wine merchant, the old Russian woman, the singular affair of the aluminum crutch, or Ricoletti of the club foot and his abominable wife, but the annals of Dr. Watson are silent on these matters.

Of course the United States and Americans are frequently mentioned in the recorded tales of Holmes’s life and work. One scholar counts fifteen cases involving American characters or scenes. American villains appear on English shores in
A Study in Scarlet
, “The Five Orange Pips,” “The Dancing Men,” “The Red Circle,” “The Three Garridebs,” and
The Valley of Fear.
Holmes is engaged by an American client in “Thor Bridge” and comes to the aid of two Americans in “The Noble Bachelor,” much to the consternation of his English client. “It is always a joy to meet an American,” Holmes exclaims in that case, “for I am one of those
who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.” In “The Dancing Men,” probably in 1898, he claims at least one American friend, Wilson Hargreave of the New York Police Bureau, suggesting an earlier unreported visit to the United States. It is definite that Holmes visited America in 1912, in the guise of an Irish American named Altamont, beginning with a stay in Chicago, then moving to Buffalo.

Interest in the United States was nearly universal. During the Victorian era, the United States expanded remarkably, acquiring Texas, California, and other southwestern territories from Mexico, and the northwestern lands that became the states of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon from England. An enormous system of roads, canals, and railroads was developed, and German and Irish immigrants, as well as Chinese laborers, poured into the country before the Civil War. Then came the polarization of the country over the issue of slavery (abolished by England in 1833), and the resultant Civil War took a terrible toll on both sides. The South counted on English support, expecting that cotton exports would be the determining factor. England delayed, and although it recognized the Union and the Confederacy as belligerents, the hoped-for diplomatic recognition of the South as an independent nation never occurred.

Many English families, with relatives in both the North and the South, had mixed sympathies. Following the war, relations with the United States normalized, and as the American economy boomed, England benefited from transatlantic trade. In the decade
following the war, eastern and southern European immigrants began to enter the United States in record numbers. Eastern cities continued to grow explosively, but many immigrants joined the great American westward migration. Travel to America, although tedious, became relatively commonplace. Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, made numerous trips to the United States to visit friends (such as Rudyard Kipling, who settled in Vermont), promote his books, and speak to the American public on a variety of topics. Yet it was still viewed as a sufficiently exotic land for Conan Doyle to see a market for three books reporting on his American visits, the last published in 1924.

Despite the intercourse between America and England, misconceptions and myths about America persisted in English minds and made their way into the Sherlockian canon. For example,
A Study in Scarlet
is a tale of evil Mormons forcing Lucy Ferrier into polygamy. This reflects the contemporary fears of white slavery, spread in W. Jarman’s popular sensationalized memoir
U.S.A., Uncle Sam’s Abcess; or, Hell upon Earth for U.S., Uncle Sam
(Exeter: privately printed, 1884) and the Rev. C. P. Lyford’s sober-seeming
The Mormon Problem
(New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1886). The geography of
A Study in Scarlet
is distorted as well, with American mountains and deserts placed where none exist. “The Five Orange Pips” reflects a misunderstanding about the continued existence of the Ku Klux Klan in America as late as the 1890s. America is also viewed as a haven for criminals, including Abe Slaney (“The Dancing Men”), the quintessential Chicago gangster presaging Al Capone; counterfeiter “Killer” Evans (“The Three Garridebs”); and mafioso Giuseppe Gorgiano (“The Red Circle”), who relocates to America from Italy.

In Vincent Starrett’s seminal collection of Holmesian essays,
221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940), Christopher Morley famously pondered, “Was Sherlock Holmes An American?” Although Morley’s examination of the question is inconclusive, he suggests that Holmes’s mother may have been American. Holmes may have traveled in the United States between college and Montague Street, Morley points out, and he would have been interested in the opening of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1876 and the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Other scholars concur with the idea that Holmes visited America, although the trip “proven” is usually, by amazing coincidence, to the scholar’s hometown! More seriously, in an article entitled “The Early American Holmes” (
Baker Street Journal
29, no. 4 [Dec. 1979]), Wayne Melander gives an absorbing account of his suppositions with respect to a visit by Holmes to the United States in 1876. Melander contends that the trip extended as far west as Denver and included excursions to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Kansas, Boston, and the Vermissa Valley (see
The Valley of Fear
for the location of the latter).

No less than Franklin Delano Roosevelt asserted that Holmes was an American. In a letter dated December 18, 1944, to Edgar W. Smith, then head of the Baker Street Irregulars, Roosevelt wrote:

On further study I am inclined to revise my former estimate that Holmes was a foundling. Actually he was born an American and brought up by his father or a foster father in the underground world, thus learning all the tricks of the trade in the highly developed American art of crime.

At an early age he felt the urge to do something for mankind. He was too well known in top circles in this country and, therefore, chose to operate in England. His attributes were primarily American, not English. I feel that further study of this postulant [sic] will bring good results to history.

On March 19, 1945, Roosevelt again wrote to Smith:

I am delighted to know that my postulate with reference to Holmes’s criminal background in America brought such heated discussion and debate. It only goes to show that interest in the whole field of Sherlockiana is perennial.

Although new material has been published shedding light on many aspects of the life of Dr. Watson’s friend Conan Doyle, much remains hidden about the histories of Watson and Holmes, their families, and their American connections. Until more definitive evidence is discovered, students of the Great Detective and the Good Doctor must be satisfied with speculations such as those in this collection.

—L
ESLIE
S. K
LINGER

Once again I am called upon to justify our poor efforts to emulate the Master. In one sense no justification is possible; the four novels and fifty-six short stories have created a world much beloved by those of us forced to dwell in this one and visit Sherlock Holmes and his domain only through the pages of a book, or watch pale approximations of the stories acted out for us on the stage or screen. Some think that to expand on the works of the Master is to profane his memory.

But in another sense, no justification is necessary. Only four novels? A scant fifty-six short stories? How can we be expected to subsist on such meager fare? The canon must be expanded. There must be a never-ending supply of Holmes stories just as there must be air and
water. And they must be the finest Holmes stories that we can create. Not the true quill of the Master perhaps, but still nourishing to a parched and hungry soul.

Every year or so it is incumbent upon us to entreat the finest authors of our time to dwell for a while in the land of Holmes and return and report their findings.

Gathered and transcribed within the pages of this book are the contents of a box crammed full of adventures. There are reminiscences and memoirs from across the vast expanse of North America: cities, villages, countryside, states, and territories; settled townships, badlands, and raw frontier. Whether written with pen and ink on foolscap and preserved in the vaults of the Chicago Stockman’s Bank or laboriously printed on ironed butcher paper with the stub of a thick lead pencil and wrapped in oilcloth to lie unread in an ironbound wooden trunk full of rusted farrier’s tools, they are alike in recording the American exploits of a young Englishman named Sherlock Holmes.

In his native United Kingdom, Holmes was to achieve a measure of fame as a successful consulting detective who pioneered many of the forensic techniques still in use today.

Exactly when Holmes came to the United States can only be conjectured, but it was certainly within a year or two of his leaving Midlothian University (or possibly, as some would have it, Cambridge—this is in dispute, as is whether he received a degree or merely left to pursue his own interests). And the precise date of his return to London is unknown, but it was certainly within a year of his meeting with Dr. John Watson, who was to become his erstwhile collaborator and amanuensis.

That he spent some years across the Atlantic is without doubt;
his knowledge of the language, manners, and customs of the United States doth witness it. So it was reasonable to assume that a search of the diaries and memoirs of the 1870s and early 1880s might reveal some glimpse of such a memorable man. And so it has proved.

If I may digress for a moment from the world we have created back into the world we gratefully leave behind:

Creating new stories set in the world of Sherlock Holmes is an entertaining exercise for a writer, albeit one full of peril. I am now torn between writing, “The entertainment is easy to understand, but the peril?” and, “The peril is easy to understand, but the entertainment?” Perhaps I should back off and take each separately.

The entertainment: The fiction writer is a creator of worlds. This sounds like unlimited freedom and power—deus ex scrivener, as it were. But unlike God—as far as we know, anyway—this creator has a gaggle of people looking over his shoulder and critiquing every stream and meadow, every fish and fisherman, every plot device and character trait. “That Bishop Lumley whom you introduce on page twelve,” says the chubby little woman with the piercing eye and the wart in an unlikely place, “he don’t behave like no bishop I’ve ever been acquainted with, and I’ve made a study of bishops.” Or as the man with the twisted lip and the old leather flying helmet with oversized goggles points out, “You have Dick Dennison piloting a Ventrix autogyro to the North Pole in September, 1927, when everybody knows the Ventrix autogyro didn’t go into production until April of 1929.”