Introducing Sherlock Holmes

Introducing Sherlock Holmes

The Great Detective According to Doyle

The real Sherlock Holmes behind the film and TV images: Nine landmark cases by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with background narration

by

WILLIAM HYDER

Copyright 2011 William Hyder

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The Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in this book are in the public domain. Original contents copyright © 2011 William Hyder Cover Art © 2011 Tom Roberts

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hyder, William

Introducing Sherlock Holmes: the great detective according to Doyle: meet the real Sherlock Holmes behind the film and TV images: nine landmark cases by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with background narration / by William Hyder.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859-1930--Characters--Sherlock Holmes. 2. Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious character). I. Title.

PR4654.H94 2011 823'.8 C2011-905686-0

George A. Vanderburgh, Publisher THE BATTERED SILICON DISPATCH BOX (TM)

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To Norma,

who enables me to do my best work.

CONTENTS

To Begin With

1. The Real Sherlock Holmes

2. Holmes at His Height: The Six Napoleons

3. Two Brothers

4. Career Advice: "The Gloria Scott"

5. A Tragedy in Sussex

6. New Directions

7. His First Bow: The Musgrave Ritual

8. Scandal at Scotland Yard

9. A Course of Lectures

10. Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet (opening chapters)

11. Forging a Partnership

12. A Word About Money

13. Early Days in Baker Street: The Speckled Band

14. Rescuing a Royal: The Beryl Coronet

15. The Arrangement

16. Meeting Mycroft: The Greek Interpreter

17. Failure: The Ripper Murders

18. Recognition: The Man With the Twisted Lip

19. The Later Years

20. Serving the Queen: The Bruce-Partington Plans

21. Sherlock Holmes Lives! Societies and Scholarship

How It’s Pronounced

What It Means

The Sherlock Holmes Adventures

Historical Sources

Acknowledgments

To Begin With...

Holmes! Is it really you? A stunned Dr. Watson exclaimed those words in The Adventure of the Empty House. For three years he had thought his friend, the world’s most famous detective, was dead.

Holmes had plunged into the depths of the Reichenbach Falls in the mountains of Switzerland, locked in hand-to-hand combat with his arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty. Watson had sadly reported this tragic news to his readers in an earlier narrative called The Final Problem.

Now here was Holmes, alive in Watson’s study, standing before the doctor and smiling in amusement.

******

No, Holmes had not really been killed in the Reichenbach Falls. He survived, returned to London, and pursued his distinguished career for many more years.

In a way he’s still alive today. The name of Sherlock Holmes is known not only by the world’s English-speaking people but by people of every nationality in every part of the globe. But how well do they know the real Sherlock Holmes?

The thin, hawk-nosed face ... the deerstalker cap and Inverness cape ... the pipe and the magnifying glass. These icons turn up in print advertisements and TV commercials, selling every product from insurance to automobiles. Even if no face is depicted — even if an ad shows nothing more than a pipe and a magnifying glass — the reader instantly thinks of Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes first appeared on the stage in 1899. Plays about him are still being written and performed today. His adventures were dramatized on the radio as early as 1930 in the United States, with the British Broadcasting Corporation following in 1943.

Cartoonists have depicted Holmes in comic books and cartoon strips. Writers of pastiches (novels that try to imitate the style of the original Holmes adventures) have taken him up in a balloon, flown him to Dallas to look into the assassination of President Kennedy, and even sent him into space.

The hero of silent movies produced from 1900 into the 1920s, Holmes became even more popular in talking pictures. With the coming of television he turned up in dramatic series and made-for-TV features. Now, in the 21st century, he continues to pursue his investigations on multiplex theater screens.

Millions of people are familiar with the keen, energetic Holmes portrayed in the movies by Basil Rathbone ... the neurotic, uptight Holmes of Granada TV’s Jeremy Brett ... Robert Downey Jr.’s scruffy, unshaved Holmes on the wide screen ... Benedict Cumberbatch’s computer-era Holmes in the BBC television series.

Faced with these many and varied apparitions of the great detective, some of his admirers find themselves echoing Dr. Watson’s words: Holmes! Is it really you?

Because all these imaginative and entertaining portrayals are merely illusions — shadows of a single, primal figure.

The real Sherlock Holmes — the brilliant, conflicted, ego-driven Victorian who struggled with a drug habit — is more fascinating than any of the later imitations. He lives in stories published by a British novelist and historian, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And he’s well worth getting to know.

In this book we introduce the authentic Sherlock Holmes, not the imitations of stage, screen, television, radio, and pastiche. Of the sixty cases reported by his friend and colleague, Dr. John H. Watson, and brought to the reading public by Conan Doyle, we present nine that illustrate landmarks or turning points in Holmes’s career.

Dr. Watson is silent about many aspects of Holmes’s life — his parents, his early life, his education, his reasons for becoming a detective. To fill these gaps we offer biographical assumptions drawn from a long study of the great detective and his Victorian world. The result is a continuous account of Holmes’s career with Doyle, the master storyteller, providing the basic narration.

Many writers have investigated Holmes’s life and career and come up with valuable deductions. The ones we are particularly indebted to are given credit in the text and listed at the back of the book. So are our sources of historical background.

Now it’s time to meet the real Sherlock Holmes.

CHAPTER 1

The Real Sherlock Holmes

In a case called The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, Sherlock Holmes forces his way into the house of a suspected murderer called Peters and threatens the man with a pistol. Suspected murderer or not, Holmes's actions are illegal under British law, so Peters sends for the police:

A sergeant and a constable stood in the doorway. Holmes drew his card from his case.

This is my name and address. This is my friend, Dr. Watson.

Bless you, sir, we know you very well, said the sergeant. But you can't stay here.

Of course not. I quite understand that.

Arrest him! cried Peters.

We know where to lay our hands on this gentleman if he is wanted, said the sergeant, majestically, but you'll have to go, Mr. Holmes.

… A minute later we were in the street once more… The sergeant had followed us…

I expect there was good reason for your presence there. If there is anything I can do —

In this and many other cases we see Holmes exercising some unexplained authority over the British police. He takes charge of crime scenes, directs criminal investigations, walks off with evidence, breaks into houses without a warrant, and occasionally even lets criminals go free.

How did Holmes gain this extraordinary power? That is one of many questions that we’ll attempt to answer in the following chapters.

Sherlock Holmes handled hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases in his career. His colleague Dr. John H. Watson selected sixty of them to write up. In these sixty narratives he tells us everything we know about the man.

Watson is frank about his friend’s characteristics, both good and bad. Holmes is basically unsociable, occasionally rude and arrogant, but he has cheerful and amiable moods. He can even be charming when he wants to be.

Despite his bohemian lifestyle and his offhand attitude toward authority, Holmes has the Victorian Englishman’s acute class consciousness. He affects a cool, unemotional manner, but hints of a complex inner life occasionally break through.

Today Holmes would be considered bipolar. Alert and energetic when busy on an investigation, he sometimes sinks into depression between cases. To the modern reader his wary attitude toward women, his hostility to what Watson calls the softer passions, would suggest some serious trauma he experienced early in his life.

Holmes has keen powers of observation and deduction which he has developed with long practice. Fascinated by the rapid and varied scientific developments of his age, he has founded his career on applying science to crime detection. He likes to describe himself as a consulting detective — the only one in the world.

But although he thinks of himself as a man of science and makes a lifelong hobby of chemical research, he has a strong theatrical streak. He sometimes pursues his investigations in disguise. He has been known to pose as an elderly and asthmatic seafaring man, a venerable Italian priest, a drunken groom, a young plumber — even, on one occasion, an old woman.

He enjoys bringing his investigations to a close with sudden revelations and melodramatic climaxes. And he is something of a charlatan, given to saying things — things that may not be true

— merely to achieve an effect.

******

Most of Holmes’s career took place in the 1880s and 1890s, when Queen Victoria was on the throne of Great Britain. The world he inhabited was very different from our own.

Victorian London was a horse-drawn metropolis, a place of gaslight and fog. Steam-powered trains and the telegraph were accepted features of life, and Holmes made frequent use of both. Telephones and electric lights turn up in a few of his later cases.

By 1900 crude motion pictures were being developed, but they make no appearance in the Holmes adventures. The automobile and the radio are mentioned only in his last case, one he took on years after he had retired. Airplanes were beyond the horizon, television and computers not even thought of.

The Victorians lived in a society of class distinctions, with many well defined levels between the richest and the poorest. One of the things that marked class differences was the way people dressed. The higher the class, the bigger the wardrobe. Among the aristocracy and nobility, every activity and every time of day called for its own costume.

Holmes is often portrayed wearing an Inverness cape and a deerstalker cap. Actually he would have worn these only on visits to the country. As a professional man he would have spent most of his time in a frock coat and top hat. (The Jeremy Brett television series was accurate about this.)

Educated Victorians behaved and spoke more formally than we do today, but their basic needs and drives were no different from ours. When they stole and murdered, they were actuated by motives modern detectives are thoroughly familiar with. Sherlock Holmes was also familiar with them: money, power, jealousy, sex, and revenge.

******

The Holmes adventures are among the earliest detective stories. Later writers have created more sophisticated plots and have written more accurately about forensic science and police procedures.

But if the Holmes adventures have been outdone as mysteries, they are unsurpassed as great stories. Conan Doyle’s power to capture the attention and sweep the reader along has not diminished in the past century. His writings are rich with imaginative situations, vivid descriptions, and memorable characters.

As a welcome contrast to the nervous, energetic, brilliant Sherlock Holmes, we meet his friend and colleague, the solid, reliable Dr. John H. Watson. Watson accompanies Holmes on his investigations, prods him into flights of deduction, notes down all the clues and details, and writes up the cases for publication.

In his narratives we find a panorama of Victorian personalities: a duke and a cab driver, a general’s daughter and a prostitute, a banker and a pubkeeper, a cabinet minister’s wife and a woman who grew up in a circus troupe.

Naturally Holmes has to deal with a variety of villains. We meet the brainy John Clay, who claims to be the illegitimate grandson of a royal duke and masterminds a bank robbery. There are strong-arm men like Harold Latimer, who uses his good looks to seduce a Greek girl who is visiting England and uses his muscles to overpower the brother who comes looking for her.

And there is the suave, smiling Charles Augustus Milverton, who has made a fortune by blackmailing society women.

In London, and in his travels on the Continent, Holmes encounters French, German, Swiss, Italian, and Russian characters, as well as people from the far corners of the British Empire: India, Australia, Canada.

It is always a joy to me to meet an American, he once said, and he meets many of them in his work: a Pinkerton detective who has tracked a Mafia boss to London; a woman who has fled to England to escape the Chicago gang that her late father headed; a former Texas senator who made a fortune in gold mining and now wants to ditch his middle-aged wife for a younger woman.

The people who come to Holmes for help often have bizarre tales to tell. A suburban husband reports that his Central American wife was seen sucking blood from their baby’s neck. He is convinced that she’s a vampire.

An office clerk is hired by a businessman in London and sent to Birmingham to work for his brother. The clerk suspects the two brothers are really the same man, and he wonders why.

An unmarried middle-aged woman unexpectedly receives, in the mail, a box containing two human ears.

While introducing us to the people and circumstances of Holmes’s investigations, Watson also treats us to vivid descriptive writing. In a case called The Sign of Four, he tells how he, Holmes, and a Scotland Yard inspector chased a pair of criminals down the River Thames in a police boat:

The furnaces roared, and the powerful engines whizzed and clanked, like a great metallic heart. Her sharp, steep prow cut through the still river water and sent two rolling waves to right and to left of us. With every throb of the engines we sprang and quivered like a living thing. One great yellow lantern in our bows threw a long, flickering funnel of light in front of us. Right ahead a dark blur upon the water showed where the Aurora lay, and the swirl of white foam behind her spoke of the pace at which she was going. We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other. Voices hailed us out of the darkness, but still the Aurora thundered on, and still we followed close upon her track.

******

Sherlock Holmes has featured prominently in books, plays, comic strips, print advertisements, and radio dramas, but by far the most powerful force in making him known around the world has been the moving image — film and television.

As all script writers and directors know, movies have to move. Films about Sherlock Holmes often emphasize physical action — pursuing criminals, fighting hand-to-hand, brandishing and firing pistols. These elements are not prominent in the original Holmes adventures, but they do occur.

Watson once remarked that his friend was one of the finest boxers of his weight that I have ever seen. In a case called The Solitary Cyclist Holmes gets into a pub brawl with a criminal from South Africa called Jack Woodley.

Woodley’s vicious back-hander catches him by surprise, but Holmes’s straight left eventually wins the fight. He emerges with a cut lip and a discoloured lump upon his forehead, but, as he tells Watson with satisfaction, Mr. Woodley went home in a cart.

In The Sign of Four, Holmes, Watson, their client Mary Mor-stan, and a man called Sholto are trying to get into the mansion of Sholto’s brother late at night. Guarding the gate is a boxer named McMurdo. He’s willing to let Sholto in, but he insists that his employer has given him no orders about admitting anyone else:

He pays me well to do my duty, and my duty I’ll do. I don’t know none o’ your friends.

Oh, yes, you do, McMurdo, cried Sherlock Holmes genially. ... Don’t you remember the amateur who fought three rounds with you at Alison’s rooms on the night of your benefit four years back?

Not Mr. Sherlock Holmes! roared the prizefighter. God’s truth! How could I have mistook you? If instead o’ 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 question.... In you come, sir, in you come — you and your friends.

A later chapter in The Sign of Four shows Holmes packing a gun. He and Watson are tracking a fugitive called Jonathan Small and some unknown but potentially dangerous companion. As they walk Holmes produces a revolver and loads it. Jonathan I shall leave to you, he tells Watson, but if the other turns nasty I shall shoot him dead.

At the climax of the adventure --the chase down the River Thames quoted above – Holmes and Watson get to use their weapons. Jonathan Small’s mysterious companion, crouched in the stern of the leading boat, is a pygmy armed with a blowpipe. Our pistols rang out together, Watson writes. He whirled round, threw up his arms, and with a kind of choking cough, fell sideways into the stream.

When the chase is over and Small is in custody, Holmes and Watson discover their narrow escape:

See here, said Holmes, pointing to the wooden hatchway. We were hardly quick enough with our pistols. There, sure enough, just behind where we had been standing, stuck one of those murderous darts which we knew so well. It must have whizzed between us at the instant we fired. Holmes smiled at it and shrugged his shoulders in his easy fashion, but I confess that it turned me sick to think of the horrible death which had passed so close to us that night.

Holmes occasionally carries a pistol in later cases, but he prefers to rely on a hunting-crop loaded with lead. It is Watson, the former military man, who goes armed. But Watson shows us his civilized attitude toward firearms in The Hound of the Baskervilles, when he holds back from firing at an escaping convict: A lucky long shot of my revolver might have crippled him, but I had brought it only to defend myself if attacked, and not to shoot an unarmed man who was running away.

******

Sherlock Holmes movies sometimes call attention to Holmes’s use of narcotics. Watson makes only a few guarded references to this matter, but they tell us a great deal.

When he began sharing rooms with Holmes, as he relates in A Study in Scarlet, Watson noticed that Holmes would occasionally lapse into a state of lethargy. The possibility that his new friend was addicted to the use of some narcotic crossed his mind, but he dismissed it as unlikely.

That was in 1881. Seven years later, in The Sign of Four, Watson had no doubts. Which is it to-day, morphine or cocaine? he asked in exasperation. Holmes replied, It is cocaine, a seven-per-cent. solution.

Using cocaine was not against the law in Great Britain at that time, but as a medical man and a concerned friend, Watson warned Holmes of the possible dangerous effects of the habit and urged him to give it up. Holmes calmly brushed him off, complaining that he had no investigation on hand to keep him busy. My mind rebels at stagnation, he declared.

Watson didn’t drop the matter. In an 1896 case called The Missing Three-Quarter the doctor wrote, For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. He added this ominous comment: I was well aware that the fiend was not dead, but sleeping.

And Holmes did show a tendency to backslide. The very next year, in The Devil’s Foot, we find him on the verge of a physical breakdown which Watson attributes to constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own.

We can guess what the doctor means by the tactful word indiscretions.

******

Both Holmes and Watson liked to use the expression the official police. Police are official by definition, so why insist on the adjective? Presumably Holmes thought of himself as an unofficial member of the law enforcement community. The excerpt from The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, quoted at the beginning of the chapter, plainly indicates that he had some unwritten understanding with London's Metropolitan Police.

How did that come about? What was the nature of the arrangement?

We can answer the first question by examining a scandal that rocked Scotland Yard in the 1870s and prompted the complete reorganization of the Yard’s detective force. The details are given in Chapter 8.

The answer to the second question, and to many others, lies in what history tells us about the life and politics of Victorian England. Holmes’s career was shaped by the public events of his time. So was the career of his elder brother, Mycroft Holmes.

Sherlock, for example, must have had personal dealings with Howard Vincent, who created Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department in 1878, after the scandal mentioned above, and headed it until 1884. He also must have known James Monro, who took over the C.I.D. from Vincent and ran it until 1888.

The position of Mycroft Holmes is even clearer. In a case called The Bruce-Partington Plans, Sherlock revealed to Dr. Watson that his older brother was Britain’s top intelligence analyst: [O]ccasionally he is the British Government. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange.... Again and again his word has decided the national policy.

This tells us that Mycroft Holmes had a close relationship with the man who served as both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Great Britain during much of the late Victorian era: Lord Salisbury. Salisbury’s obsessive involvement in world affairs kept Mycroft busy. His lack of attention to events in Britain provided an opportunity for Mycroft’s younger brother.

******

Nine Sherlock Holmes adventures form the nucleus of this book, but many references to Holmes’s other cases turn up in our commentary. We hope these references and quotations will inspire the reader to seek out the cases and enjoy them in full. A list of the sixty Holmes adventures is printed at the back of the book.

Some of the words, phrases, and names in Dr. Watson’s narratives will probably be unfamiliar to today’s readers. They are explained in a list of definitions at the end of the paperback edition and in links to the definitions in the electronic edition. To retain the full flavor of Watson’s writing we have kept the British spelling.

Now, before we look into Holmes’s family origins and early life, let’s watch him in action at the peak of his fame and influence.

CHAPTER 2

Holmes at His Height: The Six Napoleons

By the end of the 19th century Sherlock Holmes had been dealing with crime and criminals for more than twenty years. Here is a case from 1900 narrated, as usual, by his friend and colleague Dr. John H. Watson, and given to the reading public by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It gives a clear picture his working relationship with London’s Metropolitan Police, a relationship he had taken a great deal of trouble to build up — and to keep from public knowledge.

The Six Napoleons

It was no very unusual thing for Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, to look in upon us of an evening, and his visits were welcome to Sherlock Holmes, for they enabled him to keep in touch with all that was going on at the police headquarters. In return for the news which Lestrade would bring, Holmes was always ready to listen with attention to the details of any case upon which the detective was engaged, and was able occasionally, without any active interference, to give some hint or suggestion drawn from his own vast knowledge and experience.

On this particular evening, Lestrade had spoken of the weather and the newspapers. Then he had fallen silent, puffing thoughtfully at his cigar. Holmes looked keenly at him.

Anything remarkable on hand? he asked.

Oh, no, Mr. Holmes, nothing very particular.

Then tell me about it.

Lestrade laughed.

Well, Mr. Holmes, there is no use denying that there is something on my mind. And yet it is such an absurd business, that I hesitated to bother you about it. On the other hand, although it is trivial, it is undoubtedly queer, and I know that you have a taste for all that is out of the common. But, in my opinion, it comes more in Dr. Watson’s line than ours.

Disease? said I.

"Madness, anyhow. And a queer madness too! You wouldn’t think there was anyone living at this time of day who had such a hatred of Napoleon the First that he would break any image of him that he could see."

Holmes sank back in his chair.

That’s no business of mine, said he.

Exactly. That’s what I said. But then, when the man commits burglary in order to break images which are not his own, that brings it away from the doctor and on to the policeman.

Holmes sat up again.

Burglary! This is more interesting. Let me hear the details.

Lestrade took out his official notebook and refreshed his memory from its pages.

The first case reported was four days ago, said he. "It was at the shop of Morse Hudson, who has a place for the sale of pictures and statues in the Kennington Road. The assistant had left the front shop for an instant, when he heard a crash, and, hurrying in, found a plaster bust of Napoleon, which stood with several other works of art upon the counter, lying shivered into fragments. He rushed out into the road, but, although several passers-by declared that they had noticed a man run out of the shop, he could neither see anyone nor could he find any means of identifying the rascal. It seemed to be one of those senseless acts of hooliganism which occur from time to time, and it was reported to the constable on the beat as such. The plaster cast was not worth more than a few shillings, and the whole affair appeared to be too childish for any particular investigation.

"The second case, however, was more serious and also more singular. It occurred only last night.

"In Kennington Road, and within a few hundred yards of Morse Hudson’s shop, there lives a well-known medical practitioner, named Dr. Barnicot, who has one of the largest practices upon the south side of the Thames. His residence and principal consulting-room is at Kennington Road, but he has a branch surgery and dispensary at Lower Brixton Road, two miles away. This Dr. Barnicot is an enthusiastic admirer of Napoleon, and his house is full of books, pictures, and relics of the French Emperor. Some little time ago he purchased from Morse Hudson two duplicate plaster casts of the famous head of Napoleon by the French sculptor Devine. One of these he placed in his hall in the house at Kennington Road, and the other on the mantelpiece of the surgery at Lower Brixton. Well, when Dr. Barnicot came down this morning he was astonished to find that his house had been burgled during the night, but that nothing had been taken save the plaster head from the hall. It had been carried out, and had been dashed savagely against the garden wall, under which its splintered fragments were discovered."

Holmes rubbed his hands.

This is certainly very novel, said he.

I thought it would please you. But I have not got to the end yet. Dr. Barnicot was due at his surgery at twelve o’clock, and you can imagine his amazement when, on arriving there, he found that the window had been opened in the night, and that the broken pieces of his second bust were strewn all over the room. It had been smashed to atoms where it stood. In neither case were there any signs which could give us a clue as to the criminal or lunatic who had done the mischief. Now, Mr. Holmes, you have got the facts.

They are singular, not to say grotesque, said Holmes. May I ask whether the two busts smashed in Dr. Barnicot’s rooms were the exact duplicates of the one which was destroyed in Morse Hudson’s shop?

They were taken from the same mould.

Such a fact must tell against the theory that the man who breaks them is influenced by any general hatred of Napoleon. Considering how many hundreds of statues of the great Emperor must exist in London, it is too much to suppose such a coincidence as that a promiscuous iconoclast should chance to begin upon three specimens of the same bust.

Well, I thought as you do, said Lestrade. On the other hand, this Morse Hudson is the purveyor of busts in that part of London, and these three were the only ones which had been in his shop for years. So although, as you say, there are many hundreds of statues in London, it is very probable that these three were the only ones in that district. Therefore, a local fanatic would begin with them. What do you think, Dr. Watson?

There are no limits to the possibilities of monomania, I answered. "There is the condition which the modern French psychologists have called the idée fixe, which may be trifling in character, and accompanied by complete sanity in every other way. A man who had read deeply about Napoleon, or who had possibly received some hereditary family injury through the great war, might conceivably form such an idée fixe and under its influence be capable of any fantastic outrage."

That won’t do, my dear Watson, said Holmes, shaking his head; "for no amount of idée fixe would enable your interesting monomaniac to find out where these busts were situated."

Well, how do you explain it?

I don’t attempt to do so. I would only observe that there is a certain method in the gentleman’s eccentric proceedings. For example, in Dr. Barnicot’s hall, where a sound might arouse the family, the bust was taken outside before being broken, whereas in the surgery, where there was less danger of an alarm, it was smashed where it stood. The affair seems absurdly trifling, and yet I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day. I can’t afford, therefore, to smile at your three broken busts, Lestrade, and I shall be very much obliged to you if you will let me hear of any fresh developments of so singular a chain of events.

The development for which my friend had asked came in a quicker and an infinitely more tragic form than he could have imagined. I was still dressing in my bedroom next morning, when there was a tap at the door, and Holmes entered, a telegram in his hand. He read it aloud: —

"Come instantly, 131 Pitt Street, Kensington. — Lestrade."

What is it, then? I asked.

Don’t know — may be anything. But I suspect it is the sequel of the story of the statues. In that case our friend the image-breaker has begun operations in another quarter of London. There’s coffee on the table, Watson, and I have a cab at the door.

In half an hour we had reached Pitt Street, a quiet little backwater just beside one of the briskest currents of London life. No. 131 was one of a row, all flat-chested, respectable, and most unromantic dwellings. As we drove up we found the railings in front of the house lined by a curious crowd. Holmes whistled.

By George! it’s attempted murder at the least. Nothing less will hold the London message-boy. There’s a deed of violence indicated in that fellow’s round shoulders and outstretched neck. What’s this, Watson? The top steps swilled down and the other ones dry. Footsteps enough, anyhow! Well, well, there’s Lestrade at the front window, and we shall soon know all about it.

The official received us with a very grave face and showed us into a sitting-room, where an exceedingly unkempt and agitated elderly man, clad in a flannel dressing-gown, was pacing up and down. He was introduced to us as the owner of the house—Mr. Horace Harker, of the Central Press Syndicate.

It’s the Napoleon bust business again, said Lestrade. You seemed interested last night, Mr. Holmes, so I thought perhaps you would be glad to be present now that the affair has taken a very much graver turn.

What has it turned to, then?

To murder. Mr. Harker, will you tell these gentlemen exactly what has occurred?