The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part X by David Marcum

Author:David Marcum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sherlock holmes, mystery, crime, british crime, sherlock holmes fiction, sherlock holmes novel
ISBN: 9781787052864
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2018
Published: 2018-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

Capitol Murder

by Daniel D. Victor

For an educated human being to arrange an assassination, he must have a streak of the monster in him - even if the man he purposes to be slain is regarded by him and by multitudes as an enemy of God and man.

- David Graham Phillips, “The Assassination of a Governor”, The Cosmopolitan, April 1905

I

I suppose the appearance of yet another American should not have been too surprising. After all, so many of them have played significant roles in some of the most personal adventures of my friend and colleague Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Why, our very first investigation together, the case I titled A Study in Scarlet, involved the American Jefferson Hope and the Mormons of Utah. And Holmes himself will never forget Miss Irene Adler of New Jersey, the female adversary whose successes earned from him the distinctive accolade of “ the woman”. For that matter, I myself was shot in the leg by one James Winter, the notorious “Killer” Evans from Chicago.

I might add that my literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, who knows a thing or two about successful publishing, has always encouraged me to promote the American angle.

“It’s good for business, Watson,” he constantly reminds me. “Sprinkling your adventures with Americans broadens the market.” How else to interpret Sir Arthur’s delight upon meeting William Gillette, the American actor famous for depicting Holmes on stage, and who at the time of the encounter was fully dressed in ear-flapped travelling cap and long grey coat?

According to the reports, Gillette approached Sir Arthur with magnifying glass in hand, and after examining him closely, proclaimed, “Unquestionably an author!”

Though I myself could never see the resemblance, it was the American Gillette who popularized for the entire world the inaccurate notion that Holmes smoked a calabash pipe and always donned a deerstalker.

And yet, in spite of the hyperbole surrounding such American influences, I continue to marvel at the large number of Holmes’s investigations that truly did have connections to the United States. After all, with so many English trappings associated with the man - the Baker Street address, the London backdrop, Bradshaw’s Railway Guide (not to mention his generally stoic nature) - it is difficult to imagine a figure that more fully epitomises the British character than does Sherlock Holmes.

One need only glance at some of our most celebrated adventures, however, to discover just how much of Holmes’s career depended upon cases linked to the States. These include (to name but a few): “The Noble Bachelor”, featuring the ill-fated marriage of Hattie Doran from San Francisco; “The Problem of Thor Bridge”, dealing with a former American Senator; and “The Dancing Men”, involving the peculiar stick-figure code employed by American gangsters. Two cases, “The Five Orange Pips” and “The Yellow Face”, suggested the pernicious effects of Southern prejudice, and Holmes himself assumed the persona of an England-hating Irish-American before the onset of the Great War. And one must not

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