The Same Again

I hope you all liked the reprise of an earlier blog, but I hadn't actually visited Ross before I wrote the first one!

Doctor Watson and Ross-on-Wye

    I felt so encouraged by the news from MX Publishing today that I took time out to trace John H. Watson's movements when he was left behind in the hotel at Ross while Holmes and Lestrade went to Hereford Jail to interview young McCarthy in what the Doctor has called 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery.' There's quite a lot about this investigation in my latest book to be re-issued: "In Search of Doctor Watson" but, alas, not mch remains of what he saw in the  'pretty town' after crossing 'the broad gleaming Severn.' The Great Western Railway Locomotive Engine Shed is now a cafe 'which is part of a garden centre, but the Station and the 'Hereford Arms' have completely disappeared under an untidy Industrial Estate. The old weighbridge and the Coal Office is now a recycling centre, but it is still possible to see the remains of a viaduct at a junction called Five Ways in the centre of the Town; and in a garden nearby preserved examples of broad gauge (7ft.) and standard gauge (4 ft. 8 inches) track.
    'Yellow-backed' novels were sold at all railway bookstalls and Watson, after seeing his friend off and wandering for a while round the streets,  is left at the hotel reading one while he waits for Holmes to return from Hereford. "But the puny plot of the story was so thin, however, when compared with the deep mystery through which we were groping...that I at last flung it across the room." 

Doctor Watson's Railway Journeys (1)

   "Have you a couple of days to spare? Have just been wired for from the West of England in connection with Boscombe Valley tragedy. Shall be glad if you will come with me. Air and scenery perfect. Leave Paddington by the 11.15."

   Standing outside his house, complete with a hastily packed valise, one blast of the whistle carried in every gentleman's waistcoat pocket will bring Watson a four-wheeler, and two a hansom. In his first recorded railway journey with Holmes they are off to Hereford. Holmes will spend part of the journey reading newspapers, scattering them on the floor before rolling them into a ball and throwing it onto the luggage rack after the train has passed Reading. The date is between 1889 and 1894, and the train the 11.15 to Gloucester and from there to Ross-on-Wye. Watson doesn't mention changing trains anywhere along the route but one was probably necessary. The pair will make a lunch stop at Swindon. This was unavoidable before 1895 as the Great Western Railway had a contract with a catering firm which obliged it to stop its trains in Swindon for at least twenty minutes.

   After dealing with the newspapers Holmes gives Watson a run-down of the case but then retires behind his 'pocket Petrarch'. Was his companion bored? He says, "It was nearly four o'clock when we at last, after passing through the beautiful Stroud Valley and over the broad, gleaming Severn, found ourselves at the pretty little country town of Ross." Lestrade meets them at the station and takes the pair to 'The Hereford Arms'. Later, Holmes is reluctant to travel to the murder scene that evening. Instead he goes with the Inspector to Hereford jail to interview the prime suspect in 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery'.

   After seeing them off, Watson returns to the inn and tries to interest himself  in one of the 'yellow-backed ' novels sold at all station bookshoops. But "The puny plot of the story was so thin...when compared with the deep mystery  through which we were groping, and I found my attention wander so continually from the fiction to the fact, that I at last flung it across the room."     

The Outstanding Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by Gerard Kelly

Those fans of Sherlock Holmes (and they would appear to be in the majority) who dislike any deviation from the canonical style of the orginal detections will love this book. The reader can almost hear Sherlock himself speaking from the comfort of his armchair by the fire in Baker Street. The stories are good. Some are very good: and all are enhanced by the author's own illustrations. While these lack the tautness of Sidney Paget, their fuzzy outlines give them an eldritch quality which is quite pleasing, and one is used with great effect on the cover of what is a very well-produced article. Something  which we have come to expect from this publisher. My favourite story is perhaps the very short 'The Disappearance of the Good Ship Alicia', if one accepts that a whole vessel and its crew can become buried in the sand. The research here is familiar, and not so self-consciously 'clever' as in some of the other tales. Codes abound for Sherlock to solve, and riddles - some well-known, others invented by the writer, and all making 'The Musgrave Ritual' seem very small beer indeed. There are investigations which sound positively Dickensian, and one at least which is certainly not for the squeamish or for the recently bereaved. Altogether a good buy!

The Case of the Grave Accusation A Sherlockian Adventure by Dicky Neely Editor Paul R. Spiring

This is not so much a book as a 'conceit'. Holmes and Watson 'come off the [Victorian] page' and into our world to defend their creator against the charges of plagiarism, adultery and incitement to murder. It reads like a piece of ephemera, and as such sits somewhat uneasily with Mr. Spiring's careful and solid scholarship - so one is not surprised to learn that the tale first appeared in a (now defunct) Texas newspaper. Having said that, the whole thing is great fun - and was writtten well in advance of the Cumberbatch/Freeman 'modernisation' of the canon by the BBC. We have Sherlock showing Watson "a truly marvellous invention" called a desktop computer, and bringing him a suit of clothes "more in keeping with  the contemporary fashion." Watson says that, although showers were around in his day, "they were nothing like this one, which produced torrents of hot water for so long as I desired. What luxury!" The pair have travelled to Devon to refute the allegations of  'Roger la Pelure d'Ail' (a pseudonym for the real-life Rodger Garrick-Steele who in 2000 wanted Bertram Fletcher Robinson's body exhumed to prove he had been poisoned by Doyle because he was about to reveal himself as the real author of The Hound of the Baskervilles). Paul Spiring ably refutes this in a series of contemporary notes after Holmes and  Watson give d'Ail his come-uppence and then return "to the pages of books that were written long ago." Altogether a very refreshing piece of hokum which must (and should) be popular with all Sherlockians, and sell like the proverbial hot cakes.

Shall We Join The Ladies?

   Fictional female detectives in the nineteenth and early twentieth century had to have a very pressing reason for entering what was mainly a male preserve. Loveday Brooke, for example, was desperately poor. And as late as 1898 Dorcas Deane ("A real sob-sister was Dorcas") worked to support an artist husband who had gone blind. Even so, some women still  didn't escape becoming social outcasts, which is probably why the gloriously named Miss van Snoop made only one appearance. Florence Cusack, however, was an exception. Young, beautiful and wealthy, she travelled from country to country  trying  to clear her dead husband's name in a series of stories and (most unusually) "ended up in the arms of her narrator."
   Madelyn Mack, "the delightful, golden-haired and beautiful college girl" invented by the American writer  Hugh C. Weir, had to earn her own living and decided to copy Sherlock Holmes, referring to her "dissecting-room experiences" and using expressions which do credit to him as a model. She was also fond of staging dramatic denouments. But her admiration for the man wasn't exactly unqualified. In fact, she became somewhat dismissive of him. There were, said Miss Mack, only two rules in detection: hard work and common sense. "Not uncommon sense, like our friend Sherlock Holmes." However, like Sherlock, Miss Mack had "a grip of steel" and was not averse to drug-taking. Only she went in for coca berries as a stimulant rather than cocaine. She also had her 'Watson'. Miss Noraker ('Nora') was on hand to ask questions, and to say things like "I'm afraid I don't quite follow you. There is nothing at all out of the ordinary that I can catch." And, like John H. Watson, she doesn't  always know where Madelyn is  or what she's  up to. Nevertheless, Nora  too is prepared to go anywhere with little or no notice and at any time of the day or night. Her reference to "the tyrant of our city editor's desk" implies that she also wrote up Madelyn's investigations in the best Watsonian manner. Unlike the little helper of "Lady Molly of Scotland Yard." Mary appears to be a servant of some sort and has the very irritating habit of  referring to her employer as "my dear lady" at the end of every sentence. She sounds even more admiring than the Watson. But the road was being well-paved for today's feisty forensic females.

Let's Hear it For Bohemia!

"The rough-and-tumble of Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man"- Watson in 'The Musgrave  Ritual.'

"It was not a collection of residential flats, but rather the abode of Bohemian bachelors" - Watson in 'The Three Garridebs.'

As Holmes went out to pursue the elusive Mrs. Sawyer, Watson passed the time "skipping over the pages of Henri Murger's Vie de Boheme." A Study in Scarlet.

Murger's sketches of the true bohemian life, which he had lived himself, enjoyed enormous success as a series of newspaper articles. These later came out in book form, as a play and finally, half a century later, an opera by Puccini. Talented young artists, writers and sculptors with no money hung out in a derelict farm- house near the Barriere d'Enfer (one of the gates of Paris) coming regularly into the City hoping to earn the price of a cup of coffee at the Cafe Momus. Murger later became respectable, deserting the Momus for the Cafe Riche but continuing to write novels which painted the really bohemian existence in the grimest of colours. It led, he said, to The Academy, the hospital or the morgue. There was nothing for it but extremely hard work, and young men without talent who simply wanted to sample the life did so knowing they could return home after a short, romantic and not too painfully poor stay in a garret, drinking in noisy taverns with genuine artists and sleeping with little grisettes.As soon as the game palled they could go home, as Murger put it, "to marry their cousins and set up as solicitors in a town of thirty thousand souls where, sitting by the fire in the evening, they boasted of their poverty-stricken artist days with all the exaggeration of travellers describing a tiger-hunt."