The Bruce-Partington Plans

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.

We continue with the strange presentation of His Last Bow by going back to a story published three years previous to “The Red Circle,” and perhaps one of the best stories in the canon – “The Bruce-Partington Plans.” This story has everything: iconic images of Holmes and London, a further peek and evolution into established parts of the canon, a great case with Holmes being clever (but not too clever), and some fantastic writing by Doyle. In fact, this story is so entrenched in the canon that I sometimes confuse it with another story about espionage, “The Naval Treaty,” thinking that the revelations about Mycroft appear there instead of here.

In fact, let’s start with Mycroft. Holmes gives his well-known statement that Mycroft is the British government at times, and proceeds to explain his unique position (which, in modern times, seems an awful lot like a relational database in a computer system). There’s rather a lengthy quote about Mycroft in the story, but it really does cover what a unique man he is:

“He has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living. The same great powers which I have turned to the detection of crime he has used for this particular business. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearing-house, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other. They began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience; now he has made himself an essential.”

As for iconic Holmes moments, this story has loads of them. It starts with four days of dense yellow fog – the fog-covered streets of London are a common image associated with Sherlock Holmes, but like his deerstalker hat, it’s not one that actually appears all that often, this being one of the few times that it does. We have a scene of Holmes complaining about how dull the London criminal is, and his stance that “[i]t is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.” He gets frustrated with how slow people around him appear to be, and he ignores a chance at high honors just for the thrill of the puzzle and the chase (“I play the game for the game’s own sake…”). He writes a monograph (this time about the music of the Middle Ages, focusing on the polyphonic motets of Lassus). He even quotes his famous maxim about eliminating the impossible and the remaining improbabilities being the truth.

Canon watching:

• We have another mention of the mysteriously nameless maid at 221B.
• Lestrade has a part in this story. The description of his lean, nervous form next to Mycroft’s ponderous inertia is strikingly opposite.
• This case is set in 1895, and we see a measure of the fame Holmes has gained – Watson mentions that Holmes was received with respect “which my companions’ card always commanded.”
• Hugo Oberstein is mentioned again after his appearance in “The Adventure of the Second Stain.” Interesting, he’s one of the few minor characters in the canon who is mentioned casually in one story, only to come back with a stronger role in a later one.

The submarine plans at the heart of the story were actually a great military innovation at the time. There was an interesting race towards a usable submarine in the late 1800s, but the first viable submarine did not come about until Germany’s U-1 in 1905, fully ten years after the time this story is set in (but three years before it was published).

“The Bruce-Partington Plans” is considered by some to be an early precursor to the spy thriller, not yet developed into a genre in its own right. But regardless, it is one of the best Holmes stories, and possibly one of the best mystery stories ever.