A curious affair indeed, as this is a story that goes in a couple of directions I didn’t anticipate. We begin traditionally enough, with Watson describing Holmes in one of his drug-soaked longueurs between cases. But then one of Watson’s calls – to attend upon a visiting American who has been beaten up during the theft of a painting, presumed a Titian, he had brought to London for verification – turns into one of Holmes’s clients. And from there we take several twists and turns before a revelation at the end not of who was behind the theft of the painting (though that’s included) but of the dual investigation that was going on all this time.

You see, this isn’t primarily a Sherlock Holmes mystery but one starring the American detective Miss Butterworth, the creation of Anna Katherine Green. Something very alert readers (not me!) will have twigged to in the name of the hotel manager being Gryce, since Ebenezer Gryce was the main detective created by Green. (Inspector Whicher gets name-dropped too, but that’s just a throwaway.) Anyway, it’s Miss Butterworth who really solves the case and then has to explain it all to Holmes. This puts him out to the point where he is said to be furious at her condescension, but she tells him he shouldn’t sulk because nobody’s perfect. I have to say though in Holmes’s defence that he has no reason to feel one-upped because Miss Butterworth had been investigating the case for months before he got involved, and she had far more personal information about what was going on.

Sara Paretsky, the creator of V. I. Warshawski, is obviously making a feminist point here, but it’s not one that I found took anything away from the story, which was enjoyable all the way through and stands well enough on its own.

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It’s curious the way the Lord Peter Wimsey stories by Dorothy Sayers are so different in tone from the novels. To be sure the novels have a comic spirit to them, but the stories, at least in the early going, dial this way up. You can tell as much just from the titles, which seem intent on wearing their silliness as a badge. They can also be clever too though, as in this story and “The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question,” where there’s a pun that you’re not expecting.

This is also not a true mystery story. A society woman approaches Lord Peter and asks him if he can retrieve some stolen jewelry. But she knows who stole it, and Lord P doesn’t doubt her, so all that happens is that Lord P has to figure out a way to trick the thief into giving the jewels back. You may think of stories like “The Purloined Letter” or “A Scandal in Bohemia,” but in those cases Dupin and Holmes respectively have to find out where the item in question is. That takes some detection skills. Here Lord Peter just has to find a way to blackmail the blackmailer, and that turns more on sleight of hand than ratiocination.

Another thing that got me wondering here is the way Sayers presents Lord Peter as not just a toff and a dandy but effeminate. This despite the fact that he served with distinction on the Western front in the Great War, has a love of motor cars, and can manage himself in a fist fight with local roughs. But his first appearance in this story is that of “a young man, attired in a mauve dressing-gown of great splendour, from beneath the hem of which peeped coyly a pair of primrose silk pyjamas.” I think the pyjamas go with his “sleek, straw-coloured hair.” In any event, if an author described a character in this manner today you would immediately catch the implication that he was gay, and that might have been true in the 1920s as well. But Lord Peter isn’t gay, he’s just eccentric. I’m not sure what Sayers was about in drawing him this way. Perhaps it was to show why people so often underestimate him, which is something he frequently turns to his advantage. But then are the silk pyjamas only meant to be a disguise?

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While reading Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism I came across an account of contemporary conspiracy thinking, and how such ideas as that of George Soros as evil puppet-master “could never have taken root if multiple economic and social crises, not to mention the unpunished ruling class crime wave preceding the financial crash, hadn’t established the orectic conditions for their uptake.” In other words, people had to be first primed to believe things that there was little evidence for. They had to want to believe, which is what “orectic” refers to.  The dictionary definition is “relating to appetite or desire.” It’s not a word I’d encountered before, but comes from the Latin for stimulating appetite and the Greek for desire.

I didn’t know “orectic,” but it made me think of an obscure word that I do use occasionally for desire: esurient. This comes from the Latin esurire (to be hungry) and has the meaning of hungry or, more often, greedy. I remember first coming across it when reading Will Durant’s History of Civilization, in a description of greedy heirs waiting for the deaths of their parents as “esurient ghouls.” That’s always stuck in my head. But orectic, which has a similar meaning, was new to me. I don’t think either word is used much now, though spellcheck recognizes esurient while orectic is flagged.

Words, words, words

In The Hound of the Baskervilles Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hadn’t really brought Sherlock Holmes “back” after killing him off in the story “The Final Problem” since The Hound had been set sometime before  Holmes and Moriarty took their plunge from the Reichenbach Falls. With this story, however, Doyle finally had some explaining to do.

I think he does so with real skill. Holmes’s survival is accounted for with a wave of the hand. When Moriarty grappled with him at the edge of the cliff above the Falls, Holmes used a baritsu maneuver to flip his enemy and save himself. Apparently baritsu (“the Japanese system of wrestling”) might have been based on the then new British mixed martial art of Bartitsu (a combination of “ju-jitsu” with the name of the guy who developed it, Barton-Wright). Contemporary readers may have been intrigued, but despite attempts at its revival I think Bartitsu is only a historical footnote today.

The mechanics of Holmes’s survival aside, what I found most impressive about what Doyle does here is the way he threads the plot of “The Final Problem” (which had been published ten years earlier) with what’s going on here. After his presumed death, Holmes had stayed in hiding in order to hunt down the rest of Moriarty’s gang, making this story a pretty direct sequel. His fear of an assassin with an air gun is even worked back into the plot as an essential point. Sure you can pick holes in various places as you go along, and various editors have, but they’re points that I had no problem ignoring. Meanwhile, the shift from the main mystery, a locked-room murder, to the capture of Moriarty’s Number Two (“the second most dangerous man in London”) is nicely done.

Though he doesn’t have much to say for himself, Colonel Moran’s face tells a story. Watson reads his physiognomy like a medical text:

It was a tremendously virile and yet sinister face which was turned towards us. With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil. But one could not look upon his cruel blue eyes, with their drooping, cynical lids, or upon the fierce, aggressive nose and the threatening, deep-lined brow without reading Nature’s plainest danger-signals.

Physiognomy is now seen as a pseudo-science, but in 1903 the idea was still current. Holmes, however, is prepared to take these matters a speculative step further:

There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans. I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree. The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of his own family.

Watson immediately responds that this is “surely rather fanciful.”

“Well,” Holmes admits, “I don’t insist upon it.”

It is indeed a fanciful theory, and one that expands quite a bit on the notion that comes up in The Hound of the Baskervilles where Holmes sees something in the portrait of Hugo Baskerville that reminds him of the face of Stapleton, calling it “an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual.” What he’s arguing here though is less like a regressive gene resurfacing than an instance of the theory of embryo recapitulation, where “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” only occurring on the family level rather than that of the species. I’m sure this is an idea that doesn’t bear much looking into, but I love the way Holmes himself dismisses it as unimportant anyway. What is important is that the great detective is back: “once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complex life of London so plentifully presents.”

Who says that? Watson? No, it’s Holmes, referring to himself in the third person! He really was setting the pattern for a modern celebrity.

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