This story was first published in 1925, making it one of the first efforts from A. B. Cox, a prominent golden age mystery writer probably best known today for the books he wrote under the pseudonym Frances Iles.

The fact that it is only two pages long is all I can think of to recommend it. It’s a trivial piece that’s basically just a single gag, and the gag doesn’t land. A “dasher” (I guess a looker, in modern terms) of a young lady named Cissie Crossgarters writes to Holmes complaining that the man who proposed marriage to her while under the influence of the Demon Rum doesn’t want to go through with it the morning after. One would have thought Cissie more likely to consult with a lawyer on a matter such as this, as there is no mystery to resolve, but it’s all just a set up to Holmes himself getting engaged to Cissie at the end.

This doesn’t sound like Holmes, and that’s the main problem I had with the story. For parody to work you have to take elements in the original and distort or exaggerate them in some way, not change them entirely. Cox makes a lot of play here about Holmes ending nearly everything he says to Watson with “what?”, “what, what?” or even “what, what, what?” I don’t know if Holmes ever talked like this in any of the canonical stories. I could be wrong, but the fact that I don’t recall him ever saying “what, what?” at least means it’s not something that ever stood out. So why did Cox want to run with it? I get that it’s a joke, but it’s a joke I don’t get.

Holmes index

This is another proto-Lew Archer story where the detective’s name was changed, by Macdonald himself, from Sam Drake to Lew Archer for publication in the aptly titled collection The Name Is Archer. It’s a long story that feels rushed in not being a novel. And when Macdonald feels rushed you know things are moving quickly. I think all of the action here takes place in under 24 hours, and it involves Archer visiting multiple locations, some several times, one fist fight (which Archer wins because there’s just no time for him to take another whupping and have to recover), and the discovery of two murdered bodies. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how the sheer amount of running around in an Archer novel is enough to make your head spin and “The Bearded Lady” is very much the same way. It’s like Archer needs to keep moving in order to think.

You get a double dose of other what-would-become-standard elements too. There’s not just one big house to visit but two: one the home of the Colonel – or wait, he’s an Admiral this time – and the other the fortress of a shady crime boss who is crippled in some grotesque way. The plot revolves around Archer trying to figure out who killed an old war buddy he’d come to San Marcos to visit, but there’s also a stolen Chardin to find. That would be the painter Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), which is something anyone who could read was presumed to know in 1948. And finally there are the twisted family dynamics. The way it works is all here in embryo: the no-good trophy mother-in-law (oversexed, alcoholic, “raddled with passion”) and the dangerously sexy daughter who is pretty poison to all the men she meets. At least I think she’s supposed to be sexy. How would you take a description of a girl who “filled her tailored suit like sand in a sack”? Is that a compliment?

It all goes by in a rush and I enjoyed every page of it. Though I did have to go back and re-read parts to understand what was actually going on. When Archer visits the crime boss’s mansion he’s taken to a library where “the walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling – the kind of books that are bought by the set and never read.” The boss is only a collector, you see. Is he ever going to take that Chardin out of his wall safe? Probably not. But some of us do read books by the set, so my notes on the Archer files will continue.

Archer index

After “The Final Problem” you could be forgiven for thinking it was over for Sherlock Holmes. Not so much because the famous detective had apparently plunged to his death from the top of the Reichenbach Falls, but because Doyle had said he was done with him. What’s more, there were good reasons for believing he meant it. Many of the stories he’d written leading up to that “final” episode had been uninspired efforts, not worth bothering with.  Doyle himself clearly wanted to move on.

Which makes it all the more surprising that he did bring Holmes back in his greatest adventure and, as Christopher Frayling puts it in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, “one of the greatest crime novels ever written . . . if not the greatest.” Normally, when a writer or any artist feels so checked out, you don’t expect them to bounce back. But perhaps the amount of downtime helped in this case. “The Final Problem” had come out in 1893 and The Hound of the Baskervilles was published in 1901. That was a lot of time off and it seems to have allowed Doyle to fully recharge. He did write several novels and numerous stories in the interim, little of which has lasted, but when he brought Holmes back (and that was not, initially, his plan) it was with a renewed sense of energy.

Doyle’s energy is mirrored by Holmes’s enthusiasm in taking up the Baskerville case. You can hear it in his voice when Dr. Mortimer tells him how he judged from the amount of cigar ash dropped on the ground how long Sir Charles had stood by a wicket-gate. “Excellent!” Holmes cries. “This is a colleague, Watson, after our own heart.” The analysis of footprints (which Mortimer has also observed) and cigar ash being two of Holmes’s three favourite go-to clues. The other, in case you’re interested, being handwriting, which also comes into play here.

A second jolt of excitement is felt when Holmes finds out that the killer who has been stalking Sir Henry in London told his cabman that he was a detective and that his name was Sherlock Holmes. “The cunning rascal!” Holmes exclaims. “I tell you, Watson, this time we have got a foeman who is worthy of our steel.” The game’s afoot and Holmes is loving it. As a reader, how can you not share his joy?

Aside from the form the clues take there are other familiar elements. Holmes talks about his method, for example, saying things like “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” It goes without saying that it is those unobserved-because-obvious things that are of supreme importance. Then a page later he tells us that “a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought.” This is a point he hasn’t pushed “to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions.” Unlike his point about observing the obvious I think we can take this as more of an eccentricity. He’s on firmer ground when he responds to Dr. Mortimer’s accusation of guesswork by claiming that his method inhabits “the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculations.” That’s excellent advice. But as a final example, his claim that “It is the first quality of a criminal investigator that he should see through a disguise” may make us think of how badly he was embarrassed in A Study in Scarlet when he didn’t recognize a healthy young man disguised as a little old lady.

There are also some slips, of the kind that keep annotators active. The most glaring of these is the way the hound is painted in phosphorous. Not bloody likely! But we should keep in mind that Doyle didn’t care very much about such mistakes. “I have never been nervous about details,” he wrote, “and one must be masterful sometimes.”

And it is a masterful performance. Despite Holmes himself disappearing from the middle part of the book the pace never flags as. Watson himself points to how, near the end of his stay at Baskerville Hall, “these strange events began to move swiftly towards their terrible conclusion.” Even having read this book many times I still find it a page-turner. The business with the stolen clothing is a great hook, as is the motif of the net, with Holmes and Watson as both the hunters and the hunted. There’s also an interesting class element to pick up on. When Mortimer names the “only men of education” in the neighbourhood we know these are the only real suspects, as early British detective fiction rarely paid much attention to the “peasants” (as they are always referred to here). And finally there’s the odd treatment of the escaped convict Selden. In film adaptations they often try to soften this character, as someone with the mind of a child or some such disability. But Doyle paints him as a wicked man, someone who was spoiled growing up and then sank “lower and lower” until he is now little better than a beast. In our only glimpse of him he appears as “an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions.” This does not, however, stop Watson and Sir Henry agreeing to allow him to escape. A reciprocal sense of loyalty to one’s loyal servants apparently went a long way.

A real treat then – in my opinion the best of the Holmes adventures and a landmark work in its own right. Because the story takes place before the events of “The Final Problem” it wasn’t necessary to explain Holmes’s escape, but I think it’s just as remarkable anyway how Doyle was able to bring him back from the dead.

Holmes index

Fun fact, when this story was first published in the U.S., in serial form, it was under the title “Murder at the Vicarage.” This despite the fact that Christie had already written a Miss Marple novel with the same name. I wonder what was going on there. Was she being lazy? Forgetful?

Another bit of background: the story was auctioned as part of a Westminster Abbey restoration appeal. Maybe that explains why the body is discovered in a church. Because otherwise I didn’t find the explanation for that part very convincing.

It is a terrible story. The only good part was the description of Miss Marple and Bunch as survivors of the linen sale. This was the first of the Marple stories where I honestly didn’t care what was going on and so wasn’t paying much attention when it came time for Miss Marple to wrap things up. A waste of time even for her biggest fans.

Marple index