The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (12 page)

ONE OF THE
most ingenious and influential authors of the golden age of detective fiction (the two decades between the world wars), Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971) has been sadly neglected, unknown to all but serious aficionados of the mystery genre. He founded London's prestigious Detection Club, reserved for only the best of the best authors of mystery fiction.

His professional writing life began with humorous stories, articles, and books using A. B. Cox as the byline, producing sketches for
Punch
, many later collected as
Jugged Journalism
(1925), and such trifling novels as
Brenda Entertains
(1925) and
The Professor on Paws
(1926). His first detective novel,
The Layton Court Mystery
(1925), published anonymously, introduced Roger Sheringham, one of the more original, and more fallible, amateur detectives of the era.

In
The Second Shot
(1930), Sheringham provides irrefutable logic to identify the killer, only to have the real murderer explain why he committed the crime. A similar scenario plays out in Cox's most famous book,
The Poisoned Chocolates Case
(1929). His primary achievement in these clever tours de force was to establish the importance of psychological evaluation—of the criminal, the detective, and even of the victim.

This was a major step toward the modern detective story, which is more concerned with the
why
of a crime than the
who
or the
how
. This was brought to its greatest heights in the first two books that Cox wrote under the Francis Iles pseudonym.
Malice Aforethought
(1931) is based on the real-life Armstrong case in which a cowardly doctor kills his detestable wife. The murderer is known from the start, much like an episode of the
Columbo
television series, but the reader's interest is held by how the crime is planned and whether it will go unpunished. Julian Symons wrote, “If there is one book more than another that may be regarded as the begetter of the postwar realistic crime novel, it is this one.”

Even more significant is
Before the Fact
(1932), a psychological study of a potential murderer as seen through the eyes of his intended victim. The novel served as the basis for the great Alfred Hitchcock film
Suspicion
(1941), though the ending was changed to protect Cary Grant's image of movie innocence.

“Holmes and the Dasher” was originally published in
Jugged Journalism
(London, Herbert Jenkins, 1925).

IT WAS A
pretty rotten sort of day in March, I remember, that dear old Holmes and I were sitting in the ancestral halls in Baker Street, putting in a quiet bit of meditation. At least Holmes was exercising the good old gray matter over a letter that had just come, while I was relaxing gently in an armchair.

“What-ho, Watson, old fruit,” he said at last, tossing the letter over to me. “What does that mass of alluvial deposit you call a brain make of this, what, what?”

The letter went something like this, as far as I can remember; at least, I may not have got all the words quite right, but this was the sort of gist of it, if you take me:

Jolly old Mr. Holmes,—I shall be rolling round at about three o'clock to discuss a pretty ripe little problem with you. It's like this. Freddie Devereux asked me to marry him last night, as I can prove with witnesses; but this morning he says he must have been a bit over the edge (a trifle sozzled, if you get me), and that a proposal doesn't count in the eyes of the rotten old Law if made under the influence of friend Demon Rum, as it were. Well, what I mean is—what about it? In other words, it's up to you to see that Freddie and I get tethered up together in front of an altar in the pretty near future. Get me?

Yours to a stick of lip salve
,

Cissie Crossgarters

“Well, Watson?” Holmes asked, splashing a little soda into his glass of cocaine. “As the jolly old poet says—what, what, what?”

“It seems to me,” I said, playing for safety, “that this is a letter from a girl called Cissie Crossgarters, who wants to put the stranglehold on a chappie called Devereux, while he's trying to counter with an uppercut from the jolly old Law. At least, that is, if you take my meaning.”

“It's astounding how you get at the heart of things, Watson,” said Holmes, in that dashed sneering way of his. “But it is already three o'clock, and there goes the bell. If I'm not barking up the wrong tree, this will be our client. Cissie Crossgarters!” he added ruminatively. “Mark my words, Watson, old laddie, she'll be a bit of a dasher. That is, a topnotcher, as it were.”

In spite of his faults I'm bound to say that Holmes certainly is the lad with the outsize brain; the fellow simply exudes intuition. The girl
was
a topnotcher. The way she sailed into our little sitting room reminded me of a ray of sunshine lighting up the good old Gorgonzola cheese. I mean, poetry and bright effects and whatnot.

“Miss Crossgarters?” asked Holmes, doing the polite.

“Call me Cissie,” she said, spraying him with smiles. Oh, she was a dasher all right.

“Allow me to present my friend, colleague and whatnot, Bertie Watson,” said Holmes, and she switched the smile onto me. I can tell you, I felt the old heart thumping like a motorbike as I squeezed the tiny little hand she held out to me. I mean, it was so dashed small. In fact, tiny, if
you get me. I mean to say, it was such a dashed
tiny
little hand.

“Well?” said Holmes, when we were all seated, looking his most hatchet-faced and sleuthiest. “And what about everything, as it were? That is, what, what?”

“You got my letter?” cooed the girl, looking at Holmes as if he were the only man in the world. I mean, you know the sort of way they look at you when they want something out of you.

“You bet I did,” said Holmes, leaning back and clashing his finger tips together, as was his habit when on the jolly old trail.

“And what do you think of it?”

“Ah!” said Holmes, fairly bursting with mystery. “That's what we've got to consider. But I may say that the situation appears to me dashed thick and not a little rotten. In fact, dashed rotten and pretty thick as well, if you take me. I mean to say,” he added carefully, “well, if you follow what I'm driving at, altogether pretty well dashed thick and rotten, what?”

“You do put things well,” said the girl admiringly. “That's just what I felt about it myself. And what had I better do, do you think?”

“Ah!” said Holmes again, clashing away like mad. “It's just that particular little fruity point that we've got to think over, isn't it? I mean, before we get down to action, we've got to put in a bit of pretty useful meditation and whatnot. At least, that's how the thing strikes me.”

“How clever you are, Mr. Holmes!” sighed the girl.

Holmes heaved himself out of his chair. “And let me tell you that the best way of agitating the old bean into a proper performance of its duties is first of all to restore the good old tissues with a little delicate sustenance. In other words, what about something rather rare in tea somewhere first?”

“Oh, yes!” cried the girl. “How lovely!”

“Top-hole!” I said enthusiastically. I mean, the idea tickled me, what?

Holmes looked at me with a dashed cold eye. “You're not on the stage for this bit of dialogue, dear old laddie,” he remarked in the way that writer chappies call incisively.

They trickled out together.

It was past midnight before Holmes returned.

“What ho!” I said doubtfully, still feeling a bit sore, if you understand me.

“What ho!” said Holmes, unleashing his ulster.

“What ho! What ho!”

“What ho! What ho! What?”

“I mean, what about Freddie Devereux?” I asked, to change the conversation.

“That moon-faced lump of mediocrity? What about him?”

“Well, what about him? About him and Miss Crossgarters, as it were. I mean to say, what about them, what?”

“Oh, you mean what about them? Well, I don't think he'll trouble her much more. You see, Cissie and I have got engaged to be married, what? I mean, what, what, what?”

CANADA'S GREATEST HUMORIST
, Stephen Butler Leacock (1869–1944) was born in England. When his family moved to Canada seven years later, “I decided to go with them,” as he later wrote. In the early part of the twentieth century, he was the most famous humorist in the English-speaking world, according to
The Canadian Encyclopedia
(though this may come as a surprise to the many aficionados of Mark Twain). It seems precisely the correct credential for the position he subsequently held: professor of political economy and longtime chair of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University.

Leacock was a prolific writer of nonfiction, mainly histories of Canada and England, and biographies, including of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, but they are forgotten today, and if he is remembered at all, it is for his humorous stories and verse. He was a great champion of the
New Yorker
's Robert Benchley and was a favorite humorist of comedians Groucho Marx and Jack Benny.

As a parodist, Leacock more than once turned to Sherlock Holmes (leaving him unnamed, called only The Great Detective). Other stories were “Maddened by Mystery, or The Defective Detective” (1911), “The Great Detective” (1928), and “What Happened Next?” (1937).

“An Irreducible Detective Story” was first published in
Further Foolishness: Sketches and Satires of the Follies of the Day
(New York and London, John Lane; Toronto, Gundy, 1916).

THE MYSTERY HAD
now reached its climax. First, the man had been undoubtedly murdered. Second, it was absolutely certain that no conceivable person had done it.

It was therefore time to call in the great detective.

He gave one searching glance at the corpse. In a moment he whipped out a microscope.

“Ha! Ha!” he said, as he picked a hair off the lapel of the dead man's coat. “The mystery is now solved.”

He held up the hair.

“Listen,” he said, “we have only to find the man who lost this hair and the criminal is in our hands.”

The inexorable chain of logic was complete.

The detective set himself to the search.

For four days and nights he moved, unobserved, through the streets of New York scanning closely every face he passed, looking for a man who had lost a hair.

On the fifth day he discovered a man, disguised as a tourist, his head enveloped in a steamer cap that reached below his ears.

The man was about to go on board the
Gloritania
.

The detective followed him on board.

“Arrest him!” he said, and then drawing himself to his full height, he brandished aloft the hair.

“This is his,” said the great detective. “It proves his guilt.”

“Remove his hat,” said the ship's captain sternly.

They did so.

The man was entirely bald.

“Ha!” said the great detective, without a moment of hesitation. “He has committed not
one
murder but about a million.”

FEW WRITERS IN
the history of American literature have maintained as long-standing a position of popularity, as well as critical recognition, as Stephen Edwin King (1947– ). Born in Portland, Maine, he graduated from the University of Maine with a BA in English. He sold stories to various publications, including
Playboy
. Heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and the macabre stories published by EC Comics, he specializes in writing horror and supernatural fiction but has also published books in other genres, including mystery, western, and science fiction.

The first three pages of the manuscript of his first book,
Carrie
(1973), about a girl with psychic powers, were thrown into a wastebasket and famously rescued by his wife, Tabitha, who encouraged him to finish it. It was published in a modest hardcover edition but then had great success as a paperback, launching a career of such spectacular magnitude that King is a celebrity as recognizable as a movie star or athlete—not commonplace for authors.

In addition to numerous novels and short stories, King has written screenplays and nonfiction, proving himself an expert in macabre fiction and film. More than one hundred films and television programs have been made from his work, most notably
Carrie
(1976),
The Shining
(1980),
Stand by Me
(1986, based on the novella “The Body”),
The Shawshank Redemption
(1994, based on the short story “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”), and
The Green Mile
(1999).
Under the Dome
(2009), one of his longest novels, served as the basis for a popular television series of the same name that premiered in June 2013.

“The Doctor's Case” was originally published in
The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Carol-Lynn Rössel Waugh (New York, Carroll & Graf, 1987).

IT WAS A WET
, dreary afternoon and the clock had just rung half past one. Holmes sat by the window, holding his violin but not playing it, looking silently out into the rain. There were times, especially after his cocaine days were behind him, when Holmes could grow moody to the point of surliness when the skies remained stubbornly gray for a week or more, and he had been doubly disappointed on this day, for the glass had been rising since late the night before and he had confidently predicted clearing skies by ten this morning at the latest. Instead, the mist which had been hanging in the air when I arose had thickened into a steady rain. And if there was anything which rendered Holmes moodier than long periods of rain, it was being wrong.

Suddenly he straightened up, tweaking a violin string with a fingernail, and smiled sardonically. “Watson! Here's a sight! The wettest bloodhound you ever saw!”

It was Lestrade, of course, seated in the back of an open waggon with water running into his close-set, fiercely inquisitive eyes. The waggon had no more than stopped before he was out, tossing the driver a coin, and striding toward 221
B
Baker Street. He moved so quickly that I thought he should run into our door.

I heard Mrs. Hudson remonstrating with him about his decidedly damp condition and the effect it might have on the rugs both downstairs and up, and then Holmes, who could make Lestrade look like a tortoise when the urge struck him, leaped across to the door and called down, “Let him up, Mrs. H.—I'll put a newspaper under his boots if he stays long, but I somehow think—”

Then Lestrade was bounding up the stairs, leaving Mrs. Hudson to expostulate below. His colour was high, his eyes burned, and his teeth—decidedly yellowed by tobacco—were bared in a wolfish grin.

“Inspector Lestrade!” Holmes cried jovially. “What brings you out on such a—”

No further did he get. Still panting from his climb, Lestrade said, “I've heard gypsies say the devil grants wishes. Now I believe it. Come at once if you'd have a try, Holmes; the corpse is still fresh and the suspects all in a row.”

“What is it?”

“Why, what you in your pride have wished for a hundred times or more in my own hearing, my dear fellow. The perfect locked-room mystery?”

Now Holmes's eyes blazed. “You mean it? Are you serious?”

“Would I have risked wet lung riding here in an open waggon if I was not?” Lestrade countered.

Then, for the only time in my hearing (despite the countless times the phrase has been attributed to him), Holmes turned to me and cried: “Quick, Watson! The game's afoot!”

On our way to the home of Lord Hull, Lestrade commented sourly that Holmes also had the
luck
of the devil; although Lestrade had commanded the waggon-driver to wait, we had no more than
emerged from our lodgings when that exquisite rarity clip-clopped down the street: an empty hansom cab in what had become a driving rain. We climbed in and were off in a trice. As always, Holmes sat on the left-hand side, his eyes darting restlessly about, cataloguing everything, although there was precious little to see on
that
day…or so it seemed, at least, to the likes of me. I've no doubt every empty street-corner and rain-washed shop window spoke volumes to Holmes.

Lestrade directed the driver to what sounded like an expensive address in Saville Row, and then asked Holmes if he knew Lord Hull.

“I know
of
him,” Holmes said, “but have never had the good fortune of meeting him. Now it seems I never shall. Shipping, wasn't it?”

“Shipping it was,” Lestrade returned, “but the good fortune was all yours. Lord Hull was, by all accounts (including those of his nearest and—ahem!—dearest), a thoroughly nasty fellow, and as dotty as a puzzle-picture in a child's novelty book. He's finished practicing both nastiness and dottiness for good, however; around eleven o'clock this morning, just”—he pulled his turnip of a pocket-watch and looked at it—“two hours and forty minutes ago, someone put a knife in his back as he sat in his study with his will on the blotter before him.”

“So,” Holmes said thoughtfully, lighting his pipe, “you believe the study of this unpleasant Lord Hull is the perfect locked room I've been looking for all my life, do you?” His eyes gleamed skeptically through a rising rafter of blue smoke.

“I believe,” Lestrade said quietly, “that it is.”

“Watson and I have dug such holes before and never struck water yet,” Holmes said, and he glanced at me before returning to his ceaseless catalogue of the streets through which we passed. “Do you recall the ‘Speckled Band,' Watson?”

I hardly needed to answer him. There had been a locked room in that business, true enough, but there had also been a ventilator, a snake full of poison, and a killer evil enough to allow the one into the other. It had been devilish, but Holmes had seen to the bottom of the matter in almost no time at all.

“What are the facts, Inspector?” Holmes asked.

Lestrade began to lay them before us in the clipped tones of a trained policeman. Lord Albert Hull had been a tyrant in business and a despot at home. His wife was a mousy, terrified thing. The fact that she had borne him three sons seemed to have in no way sweetened his feelings toward her. She had been reluctant to speak of their social relations, but her sons had no such reservations; their papa, they said, had missed no opportunity to dig at her, to criticize her, or to jest at her expense…all of this when they were in company. When they were alone, he virtually ignored her. And, Lestrade, added, he sometimes beated her.

“William, the eldest, told me she always gave out the same story when she came to the breakfast table with a swollen eye or a mark on her cheek; that she had forgotten to put on her glasses and had run into a door. ‘She ran into doors once and twice a week,' William said. ‘I didn't know we had that many doors in the house.' ”

“Hmmm!” Holmes said. “A cheery fellow! The sons never put a stop to it?”

“She wouldn't allow it,” Lestrade said.

“Insanity,” I returned. A man who would beat his wife is an abomination; a woman who would allow it an abomination and a perplexity.

“There was method in her madness, though,” Lestrade said. “Although you'd not know it to look at her, she was twenty years younger than Hull. He had always been a heavy drinker and a champion diner. At age sixty, five years ago, he developed gout and angina.”

“Wait for the storm to end and then enjoy the sunshine,” Holmes remarked.

“Yes,” Lestrade said. “He made sure they knew both his worth and the provisions of his will. They were little better than slaves—”

“—and the will was the document of indenture,” Holmes murmured.

“Exactly so. At the time of his death, his worth was three hundred thousand pounds. He never asked them to take his word for this; he had his chief accountant to the house quarterly to detail the balance sheets of Hull Shipping…although he kept the purse-strings firmly in his own hands and tightly closed.”

“Devilish!” I exclaimed, thinking of the cruel boys one sometimes sees in Eastcheap or Piccadilly, boys who will hold out a sweet to a starving dog to see it dance…and then gobble it themselves. Within moments I discovered this comparison was even more apt than I thought.

“On his death, Lady Rebecca Hull was to receive one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. William, the eldest, was to receive fifty thousand; Jory, the middler, forty; and Stephen, the youngest, thirty.”

“And the other thirty thousand?” I asked.

“Seven thousand, five hundred each to his brother in Wales and an aunt in Brittany (not a cent for
her
relatives), five thousand in assorted bequests to the servants at the town-house and the place in the country, and—you'll like this, Holmes—ten thousand pounds to Mrs. Hemphill's Home for Abandoned Pussies.”

“You're
joking
!” I cried, although if Lestrade expected a similar reaction from Holmes, he was disappointed. Holmes merely re-lighted his pipe and nodded as if he had expected this, or something like it. “With babies dying of starvation in the East End and homeless orphans still losing all the teeth out of their jaws by the age of ten in the sulphur factories, this fellow left ten thousand pounds to a…a boarding-hotel for
cats
?”

“I mean exactly that,” Lestrade said pleasantly. “Furthermore, he should have left
twenty-seven times
that amount to Mrs. Hemphill's Abandoned Pussies if not for whatever happened this morning—and whoever who did the business.”

I could only gape at this, and try to multiply in my head. While I was coming to the conclusion that Lord Hull had intended to disinherit both wife and children in favor of an orphanage for felines, Holmes was looking sourly at Lestrade and saying something which sounded to me like a total
non sequitur
. “I am going to sneeze, am I not?”

Lestrade smiled. It was a smile of transcendent sweetness. “Oh yes, my dear Holmes. I fear you will sneeze often and profoundly.”

Holmes removed his pipe, which he had just gotten drawing to his satisfaction (I could tell by the way he settled back slightly in his seat), looked at it for a moment, and then held it out into the rain. I watched him knock out the damp and smouldering tobacco, more dumbfounded than ever. If you had told me then that I was to be the one to solve this case I believe I should have been impolite enough to laugh in your face. At that point I didn't even know what the case was
about
, other than that someone (who more and more sounded the sort of person who deserved to stand in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace for a medal rather than in the Old Bailey for sentencing) had killed this wretched Lord Hull before he could leave his family's rightful due to a gaggle of street cats.

“How many?” Holmes asked.

“Ten,” Lestrade said.

“I suspected it was more than this famous locked room of yours that brought you out in the back of an open waggon on such a wet day,” Holmes said sourly.

“Suspect as you like,” Lestrade said gaily. “I'm afraid I must go on, but if you'd like, I could let you and the good doctor out here.”

“Never mind,” Holmes said. “When did he become sure that he was going to die?”

“Die?” I said. “How can you know he—”

“It's obvious, Watson,” Holmes said. “It amused him to keep them in bondage by the means of his will.” He looked at Lestrade. “No trust arrangements, I take it?”

Lestrade shook his head.

“Nor entailments of any sort?”

“None.”

“Extraordinary!” I said.

“He wanted them to understand all would be theirs when he did them the courtesy of dying, Watson,” Holmes said, “but he never actually intended for them to have it. He realized he was dying. He waited…and then he called them together
this morning…this morning, Inspector, yes?”

Lestrade nodded.

“Yes. He called them together this morning and told them that he had made a new will which disinherited them one and all…except for the servants and the distant relatives, I suppose.”

I opened my mouth to speak, only to discover I was too outraged to say anything. The image which kept returning to my mind was that of those cruel boys, making the starving East End curs jump with a bit of pork or a crumb of crust from a meat pie. I must add it never occurred to me to ask if such a will could not be disputed before the bar. Today a man would have a deuce of a time slighting his closest relatives in favor of a hotel for pussies, but in 1899, a man's will was a man's will, and unless many examples of insanity—not eccentricity but outright
insanity
—could be proved, a man's will, like God's, was done.

“This new will was properly witnessed?” Holmes asked, immediately putting his finger on the one possible loophole in such a wretched scheme.

“Indeed it was,” Lestrade replied. “Yesterday Lord Hull's solicitor and one of his assistants appeared at the house and were shown into his study. There they remained for about fifteen minutes. Stephen Hull says the solicitor once raised his voice in protest about something—he could not tell what—and was silenced by Hull. Jory, the third son, was upstairs, painting, and Lady Hull was calling on a friend. But both Stephen and William saw them enter and leave. William said that when the solicitor and his assistant left, they did so with their heads down, and although William spoke, asking Mr. Barnes—the solicitor—if he was well, and making some social remark about the persistence of the rain, Barnes did not reply and the assistant seemed to actually cringe. It was as if they were ashamed, William said.”

Well, there it was: witnesses. So much for
that
loophole, I thought.

“Since we are on the subject, tell me about the boys,” Holmes said, putting his slender fingers together.

“As you like. It goes pretty much without saying that their hatred for the pater was exceeded only by the pater's boundless contempt for them…although how he could hold Stephen in contempt is…well, never mind, I'll keep things in their proper order.”

“How good of you, Inspector Lestrade,” Holmes said dryly.

“William is thirty-six. If his father had given him any sort of allowance, I suppose he would be a bounder. As he had little or none, he took long walks during the days, went out to the coffeehouses at night, or, if he happened to have a bit more money in his pockets, to a card-house, where he would lose it quickly enough. Not a pleasant man, Holmes. A man who has no purpose, no skill, no hobby, and no ambition (save to outlive his father), could hardly be a pleasant man. I had the queerest idea while I was talking to him—that I was interrogating an empty vase on which the face of the Lord Hull had been lightly stamped.”