At the start of spring the opportunity presented itself to meet up with Holmes at our old Baker Street abode which he had kept on for occasional trips to London. It was occasioned by his need to repair the storm-damaged roof of his farmhouse. For a fleeting period we could again inhabit the site of our old adventures. The Capital’s winter fogs were dispersing under the gathering warmth. Munificent daffodil harvests from distant Guernsey and Devon tumbled into Paddington a hundred boxes at a time for the Covent Garden flower market. The Aneroid Enamel Face Banjo barometer hanging in the hallway at 221B, Baker Street - the jewel in our landlady’s possessions - seldom dipped below 30 inches. We put away the bitter cold of winter such as I had encountered at Holmes’s farm on the close-cropped turf and rusting quiet of the Sussex Downs. To recline on his veranda between October and May admiring a distant view of the English Channel required the fortitude of Scott of the Antarctic.
Most mornings after our return to Baker Street, Holmes rose late, lit up the first pipe of the day and settled himself in his chair. He seemed to be passing through an unusually serene period. The breakfast things, their work done, awaited removal - a tub of Burgess’s Genuine Anchovy Paste, a packet of Pall Mall Turkish cigarettes and an empty toast-rack. I was happy once more to exchange medicine for biography. I had recalled the faithful Anstruther to manage my practice in my absence. But what of new adventures? Each day my comrade turned to his notes for a work long in gestation (which his admirers await to this day), a textbook he claimed would ‘focus the whole art of detection’ into a single volume. An hour or so later he would reach for the commonplace book which I flatter with the title ‘Great Index’ and continue catching up on two years’ cross-referencing. To keep up-to-date with additions and losses and changes of residence required perpetual pasting of newspaper clippings. The Index contained notes on cases which interested him, many transcribed from the crime pages of the Daily Telegraph or recent editions of Criminals of Europe and America. Under ‘A’, Holmes recorded the machinations of Irene Adler, the New Jersey-born contralto. Her name was sandwiched between an affable Hebrew Rabbi named Hermann Adler and a staff-commander who had written a monograph on deep-sea fishes.
By noon Holmes would tire of cross-referencing and exchange the Great Index for the acid-charred bench of chemicals, dipping into this or that bottle, drawing out a few drops of each with his glass pipette. Every so often he would emit an explosive guffaw of delight like the cork popping from a bottle of champagne. I presumed he was working on yet another ordeal poison. Well into the night he tinkered with apparatus the equal of a well-stocked university laboratory - Leyden jars, Liebig condensers, watch glasses, evaporation dishes. Pungent gases filled the room and began a slow march out into the landing.
He spent one entire day on the sofa browsing through Out Of Doors, a little chocolate and silver volume by the famous observer J.C. Wood. I had become accustomed to living with equanimity on the slopes of a volcano but the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him was dissipating fast. Could the indolent man before me be the same person I quoted in The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge, whose mind was ‘tearing itself to pieces’ because it was not connected up to the work for which it was built? In busier times the front-door bell or telephone would ring many times in the day. Not now. Where were the visiting cards, their texture, style of engraving, even the hour of delivery able to convey a subtle and unmistakable intelligence? Noting my boredom Holmes murmured, ‘Watson, my dear friend, the lion isn’t always on the hunt’.
Despite the arrival of the daffodils and the cyan skies my thoughts were far from spring-like. A month earlier, a Neal Cannetty had arrived to take me to lunch at The Criterion, an envoy from Norman Hapgood, the Editor of Collier’s, The National Weekly. He was on a mission. His grating obsequiousness reminded me of Dickens’s oleaginous character Uriah Heep. We worked our way through a delightful consommé de gibier, followed by lamb cutlets served with carottes nouvelle a la crème. A dessert of Charlotte russe, with its ratafia-soaked sponge fingers, was accompanied by dollops of flattery as rich as the Grand Gougère.
Replete, my host sat back. In a tone similar to my bank manager’s (and the equal in insincerity), Cannetty assured me for his part it was a pleasure to meet me. The American Editor had nothing particular in mind. There was just one thing. My chronicles (while remarkably pleased as the Editor was with them) would benefit from a tiny embellishment.
‘A tiny embellishment?’ I returned.
Cannetty’s lips fluttered in his corpulent face like the Scarlet Peacock butterfly of Trinidad and Tobago. He nodded.
‘A small embellishment, yes.’
‘On the matter of - ?’
‘Corpses.’
The American readership was complaining. Dead bodies made an appearance in hardly more than one-in-three of my chronicles. So sparingly did I dole out the victims that in Sherlock Holmes And The Case of the Dead Boer At Scotney Castle the corpse didn’t put in an appearance until Page 72 -worse, it was the only death in the plot. To put it bluntly, Mr. Cannetty told me, there were not enough dead colonels with ivory paper knives thrust into their midriffs to fill the ice-boxes of a small country coroner in Alabama. Couldn’t I make London’s East End a little more exotic? Bring in some dacoits and Thuggees? In short, couldn’t I make my deathless stories a little less deathless?
I agreed with him. It was a problem. Nevertheless, the scarcity of corpses in English villas or upon distant moors could hardly be laid at the feet of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I apologised volubly for the undeniable fact: there had indeed of late been a most unfortunate dearth of murders dating back almost to the day in 1901 when Edward became King. England herself needed to buck up and do better. The hangman and Old Bailey judges were being put out of work. Even the Home Secretary was upset. The Whitechapel murders were now, alas, a distant memory. Would America like to send us some bullet-pocked villains surplus to Chicago’s requirements and let them loose on London’s theatre district?
I finished working my way through a second helping of the Charlotte russe and threw my napkin down on the table. Besides, I said, I too had a bone to pick. I disliked his employer’s habit of corrupting my chronicles with unauthorised changes, inexplicable omissions and transpositions of letters and words. Most of all, switching weather in contradiction to records in The Times.
My thoughts returned to Holmes. I racked my brains. What could I do to gain his consent to a photograph at the exact spot he threw his greatest foe to his death? Unwisely I had taken the Strand publisher’s proffered advance of a hundred guineas without first broaching the matter with the subject of the photograph. The advance had evaporated like haze before a tropical sun. The twenty-one £5 notes had been put to good use, settling my tabs at the Junior United Service Club.