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  COPYRIGHT 1944, BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT

  TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PORTIONS

  THEREOF IN ANY FORM

  Published March 1944

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  The Misadventures

  of Sherlock Holmes

  Illustrations

  Society of Infallible Detectives.

  A tall man.

  Deeply concentrated gaze.

  The Great Detective.

  Introduction

  Ellery Queen

  Sherlock Holmes Biography

  Kenneth Macgowan

  PART ONE: By Detective-Story Writers

  THE GREAT PEGRAM MYSTERY

  HOLMLOCK SHEARS ARRIVES TOO LATE

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE CLOTHES-LINE

  THE UNIQUE HAMLET

  HOLMES AND THE DASHER

  THE CASE OF THE MISSING LADY

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE ILLUSTRIOUS IMPOSTOR

  THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MR. JAMES PHILLIMORE

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE REMARKABLE WORM

  PART TWO: By Famous Literary Figures

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE TWO COLLABORATORS

  A DOUBLE-BARRELLED DETECTIVE STORY

  THE STOLEN CIGAR CASE

  THE ADVENTURES OF SHAMROCK JOLNES

  PART THREE: By Humorists

  THE UMBROSA BURGLARY

  THE STRANGER UNRAVELS A MYSTERY

  SHYLOCK HOMES: HIS POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS

  MADDENED BY MYSTERY

  AN IRREDUCIBLE DETECTIVE STORY

  PART FOUR: By Devotees and Others

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE TABLE FOOT

  THE SIGN OF THE “400”

  OUR MR. SMITH

  THE FOOTPRINTS ON THE CEILING

  THE END OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE NORCROSS RIDDLE

  THE MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS JEWEL

  THE RUBY OF KHITMANDU

  HIS LAST SCRAPE

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE MURDERED ART EDITOR

  THE CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL MURDER

  THE CASE OF THE MISSING PATRIARCHS

  THE CASE OF THE DIABOLICAL PLOT

  CHRISTMAS EVE

  THE MAN WHO WAS NOT DEAD

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  End Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  Dear Reader:

  This is one of the Queens speaking . . .

  I want to tell you the unforgettable circumstances that led to my first meeting with Sherlock Holmes.

  When I was a child my family lived in a small town in western New York. I didn’t realize it then, but I was given a colossal gift early in life—a Huckleberry Finn-Tom Sawyer boyhood spent, by a strange coincidence, in the very town in which Mark Twain lived shortly before I was born.

  Does any man with a spark of boyhood still in his heart ever forget his home town? No—it’s an unconquerable memory. Most of us never return, but none of us forgets.

  I remember we had a river at our hack door—the gentle Chemung. I remember how, in the cycle of years, the spring torrents came down from the hills; how they overflowed our peaceful valley—yes, over the massive concrete dikes that towered with grim Egyptian austerity above the shallow bed of the Chemung. I remember how old man river burst through our back door, flooding our kitchen and parlor, driving us—temporary refugees—to our top floor. Happy days for a wide-eyed boy, proud in his hip-boots and man’s sou’wester, with the prospect of daily trips by rowboat—voyages of high adventure—to the nearest grocer!

  I remember the unpaved streets—the heavily rutted road that slept in the sun before our house. I have a queer memory about those ruts. Every 4th of July we boys would plant our firecrackers deep in the soft earth of those ruts. Then we’d touch our smoking punks to the row of seedling fuses, run for cover, and watch the “thunderbolts” (that’s what they were called in those days) explode with a muffled roar and send heavenward—at least three feet!—a shower of dirt and stones. It wasn’t so long after the Spanish-American War that we couldn’t pretend we were blowing up the Maine—in some strangely perverted terrestrial fashion only small boys can invent.

  I remember the long walks to and from public school—three miles each way, in summer mud and winter drifts; the cherry trees and apple trees and chicken coops and dogs—the long succession of dogs ending with that fine hunter that was killed by a queer-looking machine called an “automobile.” I remember the all-day trips to the brown October hills, gathering nuts; the wood fires and the popping corn; the swimming hole that no one knew about but ourselves; the boyhood secret society and its meeting place in the shed behind my best friend’s house. We called it “The League of the Clutching Hand”—can you guess why?

  But I started to tell you how I first met Sherlock Holmes. Somehow I cannot think of Holmes without succumbing to a wave of sentimental nostalgia. I find myself fading back far, far back in the remembrance of things past.

  As a boy my reading habits were pure and innocent. I confess now that I never read a Nick Carter until I was past thirty. My literary childhood consisted of Horatio Alger and Tom Swift and the Viking legends and the multi-colored Lang fairy books and—yes, the Oz stories. I can reread the Oz stories even today—and I do. Somehow crime and detection failed to cross my path in all those happy days, except in the movies—“The Clutching Hand, remember? The closest I might have come to blood and thunder would have been tom sawyer, detective—I say “might have come,” because oddly enough I have no recollection of tom sawyer, detective as part of my early reading.

  When I was twelve years old my family moved to New York City. For a time we lived with my grandfather in Brooklyn. It was in my grandfather’s house, only a few weeks after my arrival in fabulous New York, that I met Sherlock Holmes. Oh, unforgettable day!

  I was ill in bed. In those days I was afflicted periodically with an abscess of the left ear. It came year after year, with almost astronomical regularity—and always, I remember, during the week of school exams. My grandfather had an old turnip of a watch that he used to place flat against my left ear, and it always astounded him that, even after the ordeal-of having had my ear lanced, I still couldn’t hear his Big Ben tick.

  I was lying in bed, a miserable youngster, on just such a day as Dr. Watson has so often described—a “bleak and windy” day with the fingers of winter scratching at the window pane. One of my aunts walked in and handed me a book she had borrowed at the near-by public library.

  It was THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES.

  I opened the book with no realization that I stood—rather, I sat—on the brink of my fate. I had no inkling, no premonition, that in another minute my life’s work, such as it is, would be born. My first glance was disheartening. I saw the frontispiece of the Harper edition—a picture of a rather innocuous man in dress coat and striped trousers holding the arm of a young woman in bridal gown. A love story, I said to myself—for surely this unattractive couple were in a church about to be married. The quotation under the illustration—“The gentleman in the pew handed it up to her”—was not encouraging. In fact, there was nothing in that ill-chosen frontispiece by Sidney Paget to make a twelve-year-old boy sit up and take notice—especially with his left ear in agony.

  Only an unknown and unknowable sixth sense prompted me to turn to the table of contents—and then the world brightened. The first story—A Scandal in Bohemia—
seemed to hold little red-blooded promise, but the next story was, and always will be, a milestone.

  A strange rushing thrill challenged the pain in my ear. The Red-Headed League! What a combination of simple words to skewer themselves into the brain of a hungry boy! I glanced down quickly—The Man with the Twisted Lip—The Adventure of the Speckled Band—and I was lost! Ecstatically, everlastingly lost!

  I started on the first page of A Scandal in Bohemia and truly, the game was afoot. The unbearable pain in my ear—vanished! The abyss of melancholy into which only a twelve-year-old boy can sink—forgotten!

  I finished the adventures that night. I wasn’t sad—I was glad. It wasn’t the end—it was the beginning. I had knocked fearlessly on the door of a new world and I had been admitted. There was a long road ahead—even longer than I dreamed. That night, as I closed the book, I knew that I had read one of the greatest books ever written. And today I realize with amazement how true and tempered was my twelve-year-old critical sense. For in the mature smugness of my present literary judgment, I still feel—unalterably—that the adventures is one of the world’s masterworks.

  I could not have slept much that night. If I did, I merely passed from one dreamworld to another—with the waking dream infinitely more wondrous. I remember when morning came—how symbolically the sun shone past my window. I leaped from bed, dressed, and with that great wad of yellow-stained cotton still in my ear, stole out of the house. As if by instinct I knew where the public library was. Of course it wasn’t open, but I sat on the steps and waited. And though I waited hours, it seemed only minutes until a prim old lady came and unlocked the front door.

  But, alas—I had no card. Yes, I might fill out this form, and take it home, and have my parents sign it, and then after three days—three days? three eternities!—I could call and pick up my card.

  I begged, I pleaded, I implored—and there must have been something irresistible in my voice and in my eyes. Thank you now, Miss Librarian-of-Those-Days! Those thanks are long overdue. For that gentle-hearted old lady broke all the rules of librarydom and gave me a card—and told me with a twinkle in her eyes where I could find books by a man named Doyle.

  I rushed to the stacks. My first reaction was one of horrible and devastating disappointment. Yes, there were books by Doyle on the shelves—but so few of them! I had expected a whole libraryful—rows and rows of Sherlock, all waiting patiently for my “coming of age.”

  I found three precious volumes. I bundled them under my arm, had them stamped, and fled home. Back in bed I started to read—a study in scarlet, the memoirs (with a frontispiece that almost frightened me to death), The Hound of the Baskervilles. They were food and drink and medicine—and all the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s men couldn’t put Ellery together again.

  But my doom had been signed, sealed, and delivered in the adventures. The books which followed merely broadened the picture, filled in the indelible details. That tall, excessively lean man. His thin razor-like face and hawk’s-bill of a nose. The curved pipe, the dressing gown. The way he paced up and down the room, quickly, eagerly, his head sunk upon his chest. The way he examined the scene of a crime, on all fours, his nose to the ground. The gaunt dynamic figure and his incisive speech. The gasogene, the Persian slipper, and the coal scuttle for the cigars. The bullet-pocks on the wall, the scraping violin. The hypodermic syringe[1]—what a shock to my fledgling sensibilities! The ghostly hansom cab with a twelve-year-old boy clinging by some miracle of literary gymnastics to its back as it rattled off through the mist and fog . . .

  Reader, I had met Sherlock Holmes.

  This is now both Queens speaking . . .

  To think of Sherlock Holmes by any other name,[2] as Vincent Starrett has said, is paradoxically unthinkable. And yet in this book you will meet him under a host of aliases.

  It is interesting to note that the name, as we know it today, did not come to Doyle’s mind in a lightning flash of inspiration. Doyle had to labor over it. His first choice, according to H. Douglas Thomson,[3] was Sherrington Hope. Only after considerable shuffling and reshuffling did Doyle hit on that peculiarly magical and inexplicably satisfying combination of syllables which is now so permanent a part of the English language.

  There seems to have been a halfway mark when the name was Sherrinford Holmes, which Vincent Starrett claims to have been the first form,[4] substantiating this claim with a reproduction of a page from Conan Doyle’s old notebook[5] in which “Sherrinford Holmes” can be clearly deciphered in his creator’s own handwriting. But there is no proof that the notebook page represents Doyle’s earliest thinking,[6] since in his autobiography[7] Sir Arthur makes the statement: “First it was Sherringford Holmes; then it was Sherlock Holmes.” Note the additional “g” in the first name: this is unsupported by the notebook page and must be interpreted either as a trick of Doyle’s memory or another evolutionary stage harking back to Thomson’s “Sherrington.”[8]

  It has been said too that Doyle finally chose the surname “Holmes” because of his great admiration for Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American essayist, poet, and physician; and “Sherlock” because he once made thirty runs against a bowler of that name and thereafter had a kindly feeling for it. Both are mere beliefs, though almost universally accepted. It is significant that Doyle revealed no details whatever in his autobiography as to the true origin of the final name.

  As a general rule writers of pastiches retain the sacred and inviolate form—Sherlock Holmes—and rightfully, since a pastiche is a serious and sincere imitation in the exact manner of the original author. But writers of parodies, which are humorous or satirical takeoffs, have no such reverent scruples. They usually strive for the weirdest possible distortions and it must be admitted that many highly ingenious travesties have been conceived. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how much of a purist one is, the name Sherlock Holmes is peculiarly susceptible to the twistings and misshapenings of burlesque-minded authors.

  That is why you will meet in this volume such appellative disguises as

  Sherlaw Kombs

  Picklock Holes

  Thinlock Bones

  Shylock Homes[9]

  Hemlock Jones

  Purlock Hone

  Holmlock Shears

  Herlock Sholmes

  Shamrock Jolnes

  Solar Pons

  Shirley Holmes

  and, by comparison, such moderately warped Watsonisms as

  Whatson

  Potson

  Whatsoname

  Jobson

  Whatsup

  We cannot bring you anything new of Sherlock—you’ve read all there is. By the time this book is published, the newly discovered short story, The Man Who Was Wanted, may have been given to the world by the Doyle estate—and you will have devoured that. And that’s all there is, there is no more. We are realists enough to face the hard fact that there is no Cox’s Bank—not in this world; that there is no dispatch-box in its legendary vaults containing the documents of unrecorded cases. They are lost to us forever.

  Someone has said that more has been written about Sherlock Holmes than about any other character in fiction. It is further true that more has been written about Holmes by others than by Doyle himself. Vincent Starrett once conjectured that “innumerable parodies of the adventures have appeared in innumerable journals.”[10] There aren’t that many, of course; but a half dozen or more full-length volumes have been devoted to Holmes’s career and personality, literally hundreds of essays and magazine articles, a few-score radio dramas, some memorable plays, many moving-picture scripts—and to put it more accurately, numerous parodies and pastiches.

  We bring you the finest of these parodies and pastiches. They are the next best thing to new stories—unrecorded cases of The Great Man, not as Dr. Watson related them, but as some of our most brilliant literary figures have imagined them. These “misadventures” —these Barriesque adventures that might have been—are all written with sincere reverence, des
pite the occasional laughter and funpokings, which are only a psychological form of adoration—or, perhaps, downright envy. The old proverb—“imitation is the sincerest flattery”—reveals in a single laconic sentence the comprehensive motif of this book.

  You will see Holmes through the eyes of Mark Twain, O. Henry, Bret Harte, Sir James Barrie, Stephen Leacock, and lesser lights—all Devotees of Doyle and Sycophants of Sherlock, all humble Watsons paying homage from their own 221B, the eternal sanctuary of perpetual youth.

  And finally, an explanation for certain omissions—“missing misadventures.” We have not failed to consider the inclusion of three pastiches in which Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of Charles Dickens’s Edwin Drood. The first of these, by Andrew Lang, appeared in “Longman’s Magazine,” London, issue of September 1905. The second, by Edmund Lester Pearson, is contained in Chapter III of the author’s the secret book (New York, Macmillan, 1914). The third, by Harry B. Smith, appeared in “Munsey’s Magazine,” December 1924, and was later published in book form.[11] After many pipefuls of indecision we came to the conclusion that all three are too specialized in treatment and content matter to appeal to the general reader.

  Nor have we overlooked Corey Ford’s The Rollo Boys with Sherlock in Mayfair; or, Keep It Under Your Green Hat. This is to be found in the author’s Three Rousing Cheers for the Rollo Boys[12] and in the January 1926 issue of “The Bookman.” As the tide indicates, Mr. Ford contrived a triple-barreled parody of the Rover Boys, Sherlock Holmes, and Michael Arlen. But the satirical emphasis was almost exclusively on Aden’s literary style in his famous book, the green hat, and so fails to maintain contemporary interest.

  Regretfully we have been forced to exclude the pastiches written by H. Bedford Jones. This popular author once wrote a series of stories revealing the “true facts” in Watson s unrecorded cases an imaginary dip into that “travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross. But after writing the series, H. Bedford Jones decided to remove Sherlock—thus disenchanting the stories—and sold most of them as “ordinary” detective tales. We have had the pleasure of reading three of Mr. Jones’s “recorded” cases—The Adventure of the Atkinson Brothers (referred to by Watson in A Scandal in Bohemia),[13] The Affair of the Aluminium Crutch (referred to in The Musgrave Ritual),[14] and The Adventure of the Matilda Briggs (referred to in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire).[15]