Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #22. Arthur Conan Doyle

of the Norwood Builder.

      Another resemblance between the two sleuths is their attitude toward justice. If Mycroft Holmes occasionally is the British government, his younger brother often puts himself above the law entirely by letting the criminal go. “Well, well,” he quips in The Adventure of the Three Gables, “I suppose I shall have to compound a felony as usual.” He usually justifies such actions by reference to a higher law. “I suppose that I am commuting a felony,” he concedes in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, “but it is just possible that I am saving a soul.” H.M. allows the criminals to escape in The Punch and Judy Murders, Behind the Crimson Blind and The Cavalier’s Cup for a much less elevated reason—he simply happens to like them. In Behind the Crimson Blind, he even blows up a ship in the harbor to help the villain (not a murderer) escape. In several other cases he enables a killer to escape in a different way—through suicide.

      Beyond the character of H.M. himself, the Merrivale corpus evokes the Canon through both blatant and subtle call-backs in the dialogue.

      “You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes,” observes a character in The Punch and Judy Murders. Lady Virginia Brace in The Cavalier’s Cup challenges Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters with, “Couldn’t you deduce that, like Sherlock Holmes, from my first name?” In The Peacock Feather Murders, a character asks, “Will you continue with your Holmesian analysis, or do you think it would spoil your effect if I merely confessed?” In none of these instances, be it noted, was the speaker addressing Sir Henry Merrivale.

      In Death in Five Boxes, the male romantic lead (Carr books always have one, along with a matching female) warns that a certain line of thought would be “theorizing without data.” (“It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts,” Sherlock Holmes famously said in The Adventure of the Second Stain.) Later, another man in that novel suspects the female romantic lead of being subject to “certain pawky humors.” He seems to regard that as a flaw, whereas Holmes clearly meant it as a compliment when he said at the beginning of The Valley of Fear that Watson was developing “a certain pawky humour.”

      Although H.M. himself eschews logic elsewhere, his bookseller friend Ralph Danvers uses decidedly Sherlockian logic in discussing the central problem of Night at the Mocking Widow with his old friend of H.M.:

      “If you have stated the circumstances correctly, it is beyond the bounds of human reason and therefore impossible.”

      “Uh-huh,” H.M. agrees.

      “Then somehow (unwittingly, that is) the circumstances have not been correctly stated!”

      Everyone remembers Holmes’s often-stated dictum that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” But Holmes also said in The Adventure of the Priory School, “It is impossible as I have stated it and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong.” Surely Danvers must have had this observation in mind.

      The Canonical roots of a simple four-word sentence in My Late Wives are equally obvious. “I am Roger Bewlay” is almost as dramatic as the powerful “I am Birdy Edwards!” from The Valley of Fear. (And is it just a coincidence that one of the victims in My Late Wives lived at Crowborough, the East Sussex town where Arthur Conan Doyle lived out his last years?)

      When the killer in The Red Widow Murders confesses under the false impression that he is going to die and thus insures that he will die via hanging, Chief Inspector Masters confides, “And I can’t say, between ourselves, that it’s very likely to weigh heavily on my conscience.” As most of will never forget, Sherlock Holmes says almost exactly the same thing regarding Dr. Roylott’s demise at the end of The Adventure of the Speckled Band.

      Dialogue aside, echoes of Baker Street permeate the adventures of Sir Henry Merrivale in ways big and small:

      Bill Cartwright smokes “a curved pipe of the Sherlock Holmes variety” in And So to Murder. H.M. also smokes a pipe in some of the early books, although he is seldom seen in the later ones without a vile black cigar. We know from a Paget illustration of The Greek Interpreter that Mycroft was also a cigar smoker.

      The Cavalier’s Cup, in the H.M. novel of that name, is kept in the vaults of Cox & Co. bank in London. This is the same institution where Dr. Watson deposited his battered tin dispatch box with those priceless notes of his unrecorded cases. One wishes that the manuscript of The Cavalier’s Cup had been left there as well. This is the last and weakest of the book-length H.M. adventures. The supposed comic relief, Signor Ravioli, talks like Chico Marks. “I’m-a-Dr. Watson,” he declares, putting on a black felt hat which he seems to think is Watsonian.

      Although described as a “whisky-only” or a whisky and punch drinker in other books, the old man and a friend share a bottle of Beaune in The Red Widow Murders, evoking Dr. Watson’s Beaune-soaked lunch in The Sign of Four. And the description of the murder victim’s body in The Punch and Judy Murders strongly recalls that of Bartholomew Sholto in the same Holmes novel. His bald head is leaned against his shoulder with a grin on his face.

      The name of a typist in My Late Wives, Mildred Lyons, inevitably recalls Laura Lyons, also a typist, of Baskervilles fame. The Sherlockian salute is subtler than the name of the winsome Maureen Holmes in Behind the Crimson Blind, but unmistakable nonetheless.

      The unconventional, unforgettable Sir Henry Merrivale appeared in 22 novels, one novelette and one short story between 1934 and 1956. Sherlockians would find them well worth seeking out, for there is much that they will find familiar in the wacky world of H.M.

      d

      Dan Andriacco, a long-time Sherlockian, is the author of Baker Street Beat: An Eclectic Collection of Sherlockian Scribblings and nine Holmes-themed mystery novels and collections. His amateur sleuth, Sebastian McCabe, and brother-in-law Jeff Cody appear most recently in Bookmarked for Murder. A frequent contributor to SHMM, Dan blogs at www.DanAndriacco.com

1 Only in the third to last novel do we learn her name, Clementine, and that she is a blond former chorus girl. “Clemmie’s years and years younger than I am.”