The Priory School

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Return of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1905. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

Amusingly, although the last story was about a cyclist, this story has the most enduring controversy about bicycles – specifically, bicycle tire (or, more accurately, “tyre”) tracks. William S. Baring-Gould, one of the most respected Sherlockian scholars, complained “Much, perhaps too much, has been written about these tyre tracks.” So let’s write some more about them.

The controversy comes from the scene in which Holmes deduces which direction a bicycle was riding based on the impressions the tyres left in the mud (specifically, how the weight of the rear wheel obliterates the front wheel impressions). I admit my own reaction on reading this was “it should be obliterated the same way regardless of what direction the bike’s going,” and that seems to be the conclusion of a number of Sherlockians. The correspondence on this point was so intense even in Doyle’s time that he remarked on it in his autobiography Memoirs and Adventures. Doyle was tired of the criticism and tried to refute it by conducting tests with his own bicycle, and found that while his correspondents were correct about that specific observation, there were other ways to tell which way the bicycle was headed. A number of other Sherlockians have pointed out similar evidence that there are a number of ways to determine a bicycle’s direction independent of the depth of the tyre’s impression. In the end, Doyle was actually wrong and admitted as such, but the idea that Holmes was able to deduce which direction the bicycle was going in is still sound.

Aside from this one deduction, there’s a lot of interesting points in this story. This is the third story in a row that starts off light and entertaining (in this case, the humorous entrance of Thorneycroft Huxtable, M.A., Ph.D., which is probably the most awesome name in the entire canon) but turns into a more somber and darker affair. We learns lots of fun little details about our two heroes, like the fact that Watson occasionally smokes cigarettes (they’re only mentioned twice: in this story and in Hound) and that Holmes banks at The Capital and Counties Bank, Oxford Street branch. We get more tantalizing glimpses into apocryphal cases such as the case of the Ferrers Documents and the Abergavenny murder. We even learn a bit about the strict legal nature of noble inheritance.

But one of the more interesting points is the lengthy discussion between Holmes and the Duke at the end of the story. Holmes again demonstrates that his own moral opinions on justice supersede a literal interpretation of the law:

“I must take the view, your Grace, that when a man embarks upon a crime he is morally guilty of any other crime which may spring from it.”

This is consistent with our view of Holmes from previous stories such as “The Blue Carbuncle.” And yet, while he refuses to take the Duke’s subtle bribe of twelve thousand pounds to keep silent, he is not only persistent about collecting the promised six thousand pounds, but marks the cheque as being more interesting than the obfuscatory horseshoes from the Middle Ages which nearly defeated him. In this scene he comes across as uncharacteristically mercenary, but I think it’s consistent. Holmes is very much a man that is happy to implement his own justice on people, and in this case he may have thought that taking the Duke’s money (which amounts to over $100,000 in current spending power) might have been the only kind of punishment he would have understood. But even I confess that’s somewhat sketchy logic – the whole scene doesn’t match up perfectly with what we know of Holmes, but it does feel more like we’re uncovering new depths of his character rather than seeing an inconsistency of vision.

And now, on to the inevitable confusion about case timing. Given that there’s a reference that the Duke of Holdernesse had been Lord Lieutenant of Hallamshire “since 1900″ and a mention of May 13th implies that the case is probably set in 1901, which is the outer edge of the post-Hiatus timeframe. And yet, in “The Blanched Soldier” (coming up) Holmes himself mentioned he was “clearing up the case which my friend Watson has described as that of the Abbey School, in which the Duke of Greyminster was so deeply involved”. This sounds very much like this case (albeit with a different Duke’s name), but “The Blanched Soldier” is set in 1903!

But I’m not going to let that bother me, because this story has a great quote about Huxtable which shows Doyle’s underappreciated comic style:

We had sprung to our feet, and for a few moments we stared in silent amazement at this ponderous piece of wreckage, which told of some sudden and fatal storm far out on the ocean of life.