The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (42 page)

ONE OF THE
greatest bookmen in the history of American letters, Christopher Morley (1890–1957) was a novelist, poet, short story writer, journalist, dramatist, and literary critic. Virtually all his work had a gentle kindness of spirit and deep-seated morality. More than any other subject, however, his work exulted in books and the joys they could impart. He was an editor of
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
and a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club for nearly three decades.

His first novel,
Parnassus on Wheels
(1917), is a tender romance about a bookseller and the horse-drawn bookshop with which he travels throughout New England. A near-sequel is
The Haunted Bookshop
(1919), which is a bit more sprightly and involves the same gently heroic bookseller and an assassination attempt on President Woodrow Wilson.

Aficionados of Sherlock Holmes will forever be in Morley's debt on several fronts. First, before there was a
Baker Street Journal
, the one literary home for Sherlockian essays, anecdotes, and other information (real and imagined) was in Morley's “The Bowling Green” column for the New York
Evening Post
, beginning in 1920, and then for
The Saturday Review of Literature
from 1924.

Doubleday hired Morley to write the introduction to the Memorial Edition of
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
in 1930, the year Arthur Conan Doyle died. “In Memoriam” remains arguably the single greatest essay ever written about Holmes and Watson. A few years later, in 1934, he was the prime force behind the formation of the Baker Street Irregulars, one of dozens of clubs he organized, the most famous for many years having been the Three Hours for Lunch Club.

“Codeine (7 Per Cent)” was first published in the November 1945 issue of
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
; it was first published in book form in
To the Queen's Taste
, edited by Ellery Queen (Boston, Little, Brown, 1946).

I HADN'T SEEN
Dove Dulcet, former literary agent and amateur detective, for a long time—not since he went into Naval Intelligence in '39. But last winter the Baker Street Irregulars, that famous club of Sherlock Holmes devotees, invited him to be a guest at their annual dinner. Dulcet is shy and would have preferred not to speak, but of course he was called on and made a very agreeable little impromptu which I supposed the B & O from Washington had given him time to think out.

What Dulcet did was propose a toast to Sherlock Holmes's unknown sister. She was a good deal younger than either Mycroft or Sherlock, he suggested. The basis of his fancy was Sherlock's famous remark to Miss Hunter when she was offered that dubious position as governess at the Copper Beeches. “It is not the situation which I should like to see a sister of mine apply for,” said Sherlock Holmes. Dulcet maintained that no man would say that unless he actually
did
have a sister; and offered ingenious suggestions why Watson had never mentioned her.

The Irregulars, who were getting a bit noisy by then (it was late in the evening), accused Dulcet of being “whimsical,” and chaffed him a good deal. There's something in Dove's innocent demeanor, his broad bland face and selvage of saffron-colored hair under an ivory scalp, that encourages good-natured teasing. He was twitted about the supposed inefficiency of our Intelligence Services—how G
₂
, for instance, was caught actually moving its offices on D-Day, with all its phones and devices cut off so they didn't even know what was happening. He replied that maybe that was exactly what G
₂
wanted people to think; perhaps they had Planned It That Way. He suggested gently (he speaks in a voice so soft that people really keep quiet in order to listen) that sometimes the Intelligence people work longer ahead than we suppose. I noticed that he paused then a moment, as though he had more to say and thought better of it. “And now, gentlemen,” he concluded, “you'll pardon me if I excuse myself and retire. I've got one of those delicious fin de siècle rooms here at the old Murray Hill and I can't wait to get to it. You know the kind of thing, a big brass bedstead, and lace drapes, and a rose-colored secretary with wonderful scroll work.” Of course this gave the stags a laugh, and I caught a small private wink from him as he sat down. So presently I followed him up to his room.

“That was an ingenious surmise of yours,” I said, “about Holmes having a sister.”

“No surmise at all,” he said. “I knew her. Or rather, to be exact, I know her daughter. Violet Hargreave; she works for me.”

“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “
Hargreave
? The New York Police Department? As mentioned in
The Dancing Men
?”

“Of course. Violet's mother married Sherlock's friend, Wilson Hargreave. She was Sibyl Holmes, one of the Holmeses who stayed in this country. I didn't want to mention names at your dinner. In our kind of job you don't do it. When I went into Intelligence I took Violet with me. She's absolutely indispensable. Wonderful
gift for languages; we use her mostly as an agent overseas.”

If I had asked further questions Dove would have shut up; he always says that the first shot you take in Government work is a transfusion of clam-juice. But we are very old friends and he trusts me. He poured me a drink and then fetched his wallet from under his pillow.

“I had this in my pocket tonight,” he said, taking out a letter. “I would have loved to mention it when one of your members was talking about cryptography, codes, ciphers, and so on. The best codes are the simplest, not methodical at all but based on some completely personal association. She's safe at home now, so I can show you how Violet used to get her stuff out of Berlin when it wasn't easy. Sometimes it was only a few words on a picture postcard; the Nazis never seemed to suspect anything so naïve as that. When she had more to say she used some stationery she swiped from the Museum of Natural History, to look professional, and then overprinted a new letterhead.”

I examined the paper. At the top of the sheet was the legend A
MERICAN
M
USEUM OF
N
ATURAL
H
ISTORY
, and under it:

Professor Challenger's Expedition

Oceanic Ornithology

c/o
S.Y.
Matilda Briggs

“She couldn't get much on a postcard, not with a handwriting like that,” I said, glancing at the lines of large heavily-inked script. “Very different from the small neat hand of her uncle.”

“She has several handwritings, as occasion requires. Go ahead and read the letter.”

It went thus:

Dear Friend:

Everything very interesting, and German scientists most helpful. Hope to come back by way of Pacific, Hawaii and Alleutians, studying migrations of gulls and goonies. If can take Kodiak will have wonderful pictures. Goonies
(phalacrocorax carbo,
a kind of cormorant, dangerous to lighthouse keepers) have regular schedule, fly Midway or Wake in October, Alleutians in June. Hope to get mail at Honolulu before you take up Conk-Singleton papers
.

Yours always
,

Violet H. Hargreave

“She really is an ornithologist, isn't she,” I said.

“So the Berlin censor thought, as he let it come through. Does nothing else strike you?”

“Well, I haven't got my convex lens,” I said. “Are there any secret watermarks in the paper? The only thing I notice is that surely a scientific investigator should spell geography correctly. Isn't there only one
l
in Aleutians?”

“Good man. Of course that would tickle the German censor; he'd just think another ignorant American. You can be quite sure any member of the Holmes family would know how to spell. That's our private signal. Whenever Violet spells something wrong I know there's a double meaning. So the gulls and goonies are Japs.”

“Say, she's good! And the allusions to the Holmes cases—sure, I get it. Cormorant and lighthouse keeper—that suggests politician; the story of
The Veiled Lodger
; it means get this warning across to the government. But what about Conk-Singleton?”

“Don't you remember the end of
The Six Napoleons
? Holmes says, before you get out the Conk-Singleton papers
put the pearl in the safe
. Just what we didn't do with Pearl Harbor.”

“But what's the date of this letter?” I exclaimed. “Why, it's spring of '41, six months before Pearl Harbor.”

“I told you we have to work ahead of time,” Dove said. “Violet had just been tipped off, in Berlin, about the secret terms of the German–Japanese alliance. Hitler told the Japs he'd be in Moscow by Christmas, they'd be perfectly safe to strike in December. And you can check those
goony dates, which by the way are correct for the bird migrations. The Japs landed at Attu and Kiska in June, just as she said.”

“I always wondered what they thought they could do up there on those godforsaken rocks.”

“Maybe they were attracted by the name of that group. Ever notice it on the map? The Rat Islands.”

I was beginning to get the inwardness of this Baker Street code. “Goodness, even the name of the yacht,
Matilda Briggs
—in the
Sussex Vampire
; why, yes, that was the story of the Giant Rat of Sumatra—”

“For which the world
is not prepared
,” Dove finished for me.

“Golly, the State Department must have turned handsprings when you decoded this for them.”

Dove was discreetly silent.

I looked over the letter once more. “Kodiak…they thought she meant Kodak. I suppose you couldn't make any mistake, it was sure to refer to the Japanese?”

“Well, there Violet was really cute. You spoke of the handwriting.”

“Yes, she must have used a very broad pen, a stub.”

“She picked up the idea from her Uncle Mycroft. Don't you remember his immortal remark, in
The Greek Interpreter
—about the letter written with a J-pen, that is a stub pen—by a middle-aged man with a weak constitution.”

“I guess that's me,” I said feebly. “Still I don't get it.”

“J-pen, Japan.”

We finished what Dove called our auld lang snort. I was thinking hard. “Whenever you get a letter with a wrong spelling,” I said guiltily, “do you suspect a secret meaning?—Gosh, do you suppose when broadcasters mispronounce a word on the radio it's really a code?”

“Get out of here,” said Dove. “I want my rest.”

AUTHORS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
parodies and pastiches have taken many liberties with the character but few were as controversial as the decision made by Laurie R. King (1952– ) to marry him, a condition in which few readers of the canon expected to find him. Nonetheless, the series about Mary Russell and Holmes has gone on to be so admired and loved by readers that the books have become regulars on national bestseller lists.

When Mary was fifteen years old, she encountered an elderly gentleman who she soon came to know was Sherlock Holmes, retired and keeping bees in Sussex. He mentors her in her early years as a crime solver, and they develop a close friendship, resulting in a marriage arrangement seven years after that first meeting. Mary Russell was introduced in
The Beekeeper's Apprentice
(1994), the first of more than a dozen adventures.

With Leslie S. Klinger, King has coedited several Sherlock Holmes works of nonfiction (the two-volume
The Grand Game
, 2011–2012) and two anthologies of short stories inspired by the Holmes canon:
A Study in Sherlock
(2011) and
In the Company of Sherlock Holmes
(2014).

King has also produced a second successful series of detective novels featuring Kate Martinelli, a lesbian police officer in San Francisco, introduced in
A Grave Talent
(1993), which won the Edgar Award for best first novel of the year, as well as the (British) Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Dagger for best first novel. Among King's seven novels in neither series is
Califia's Daughters
(2004), a science fiction novel released under the pseudonym Leigh Richards.

“Mrs. Hudson's Case” was originally published in
Crime Through Time
, edited by Miriam Grace Monfredo and Sharan Newman (New York, Berkley, 1997).