Wisteria Lodge

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of His Last Bow, published in 1917. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

“Wisteria Lodge” is an odd story in the canon. It honestly reads as if someone else besides Doyle wrote it, emulating some parts of Doyle’s style ham-fistedly while explicitly ignoring other parts of the Holmes style. The simplest example of this shows up right out of the gate, with the story being set in March 1892 although this is during the Great Hiatus!

The larger and more insidious deviation from the Holmes formula is Inspector Baynes. Even though Inspector Gregson (from Scarlet and “The Greek Interpreter”) is mentioned, we meet a now Inspector, who right away makes a thoroughly detailed examination of a note that is a pitch-perfect emulation of Holmes’ own methods. He compliments Holmes, who is pleased by the compliment, but Baynes plays his cards close to his chest… exactly as Holmes does. In fact, Baynes appears to make an error, arresting the wrong person, before revealing that it was a ruse to lure out the real criminal. In essence, at every point Baynes out-detects Holmes, and yet Holmes seems impressed rather than irritated with this official policeman. This is the only time in the official canon that we see this kind of competent policeman, which makes the strange near-parody of Holmes stand out in the canon all that much more.

And yet, some of the classic touches we expect from a Holmes story by this point come up. For example, Watson makes a reference to “the game is afoot,” and makes two explicit references to past cases (“The Red-Headed League” and “The Five Orange Pips”). Holmes even insults Watson’s stories twice:

“If you cast your mind back to some of those narratives with which you have afflicted a long-suffering public…”

As well as:

“You are like my friend, Dr. Watson, who has a bad habit of telling his stories wrong end foremost.”

There’s also a stray reference – “we locked up Colonel Carruthers” – that points to a separate thread in the canon that I hadn’t noticed before. There are actually a large number of criminal Colonels in the canon:

• Colonel Barclay (“The Crooked Man”)
• Colonel Dorking (“Charles Augustus Milverton)
• Colonel Emsworth (“The Blanched Soldier”)
• Colonel Openshaw (“The Five Orange Pips”)
• Colonel Stark (“The Engineer’s Thumb”)
• Colonel Upwood (Hound of the Baskervilles)
• Colonel Walter (“The Bruce-Partington Plans”)
• Colonel Warburton (“The Engineer’s Thumb”)
• And of course Colonel Moran (“The Empty House”).

There is a passing reference to voodoo, perhaps the earliest literary reference to it, but it doesn’t save this story from feeling like a badly-researched Holmes pastiche instead of a proper story in the canon.

Speaking of odd stories, the next one is “The Cardboard Box,” which I mentioned skipping over way back in Memoirs because it wasn’t printed in American versions until His Last Bow.