On Conan Doyle by Dirda Michael

Author:Dirda, Michael.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

“Well,” cried Boss McGinty at last, “is he here? Is Birdy Edwards here?”

“Yes,” McMurdo answered slowly. “Birdy Edwards is here. I am Birdy Edwards.”

Was Eliot joking with his audience by choosing this climactic passage from The Valley of Fear? At least a little, I suspect. Nonetheless, Eliot reportedly reread the Holmes canon every couple of years, was an honorary member of the Trained Cormorants of Los Angeles, and looked—as Vincent Starrett observed—more like the Great Detective than many of the actors who played him.

Moreover, Eliot wrote at length about Holmes in the Criterion, modeled “Macavity, the Mystery Cat,” aka the Hidden Paw, after that other Napoleon of Crime, Professor James Moriarty, and in “East Coker” quite pointedly evoked the atmosphere of The Hound of the Baskervilles by alluding to the novel’s ominous Grimpen Mire: “in a dark wood, in a bramble / On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold.” While Eliot famously insisted that great poets steal, I was nonetheless taken aback when I first came across this striking exchange between Thomas Becket and a diabolical Tempter in Murder in the Cathedral:

THOMAS: Who shall have it?

TEMPTER: He who will come.

THOMAS: What shall be the month?

TEMPTER: The last from the first.

THOMAS: What shall we give for it?

TEMPTER: Pretence of priestly power.

THOMAS: Why should we give it?

TEMPTER: For the power and the glory.

In “The Musgrave Ritual”—one of Holmes’s earliest cases—an aristocratic family preserves for centuries a queer litany, which, of course, provides the key to a riddle and the solution to a strange disappearance:

“Whose was it?”

“His who is gone.”

“Who shall have it?”

“He who will come.”

(“What was the month?”

“The sixth from the first.”) . . . .

“What shall we give for it?”

“All that is ours.”

“Why should we give it?”

“For the sake of the trust.”

Wherever I turned, it seemed that I chanced upon Sherlockian allusions and echoes. When I spent part of a summer with Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson I recognized that the conversational interplay between the Great Cham and his biographer prefigured the back-and-forth at 221B Baker Street. (Lillian de la Torre ran with this idea in Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector.) During one Christmas break I picked up The Wind in the Willows and suddenly noticed that Rat clamps on a deerstalker before he goes searching for Mole in the Wild Wood. The two friends are then lost together in a snowstorm, when Mole trips over some unseen object:

“It’s a very clear cut,” said the Rat, examining it again attentively. “That was never done by a branch or a stump. Looks as if it was made by a sharp edge of something in metal. Funny!” He pondered awhile, and examined the humps and slopes that surrounded them.

The pair dig through the snow and uncover a doorscraper. Mole, like Watson, fails to perceive its significance. “But don’t you see what it means—you dull witted animal!” It means, of course, that there’s a door nearby, in this case, Badger’s door. At which point, Watson, I mean Mole, is finally impressed

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