Shoscombe Old Place

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

So, here we are, the last story ever written for the canon. It has been a long tour with a lot of bumps and delays, but we end on… well, a fairly ambiguous note. At least it isn’t “The Mazarin Stone.”

We find another Yard detective — this time, Merivale. Merivale is the only policeman Holmes calls friend, and only one of three men that he considered a friend in the entire canon (the others are Charlie Peace and, of course, Watson). Holmes uses more card-playing references, but seems to have forgotten all that he knew about horse-racing from “Silver Blaze,” enough though this story is dates after that one (roughly around 1902). However, we finally get confirmation of Watson’s gambling habit, which previously had only been eluded to:

“By the way, Watson, you know something of racing?”

“I ought to. I pay for it with about half my wound pension.”

We see Holmes observing dogs, praising microscopes, and waxing poetic about fishing, and we get another reference to “Queer Street” (the previous one was in “The Second Stain”). He does not, however, take the law into his own hands, and seems positively against the idea, claiming that it “was my duty to bring the facts to light, and there I must leave it. As to the morality or decency of your conduct, it is not for me to express an opinion.” Perhaps even more unusual, Watson becomes surprisingly snobbish. His reluctance to accept Sir Robert as a murderer is at odds with not only his previous comments about Sir Robert nearly murdering someone, but also at odds with the line of upper class villains he’d encountered previously (including Moriarty!)

There are a couple of references to “Jews” in this story, but it’s really Victorian slang for “moneylender,” although it was still quite likely that the moneylenders in question were actually Jewish. Oh, casual racism.

The Veiled Lodger

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

This is the shortest of the stories, so there’s not a lot to say. It’s also not a mystery at all. Not in the “it was a pretty simple problem” sense, but in the “Holmes and Watson do nothing but listen to other people” sense. Holmes does nothing, because there is nothing to do.

Granted, there are some cool bits. I love the return to vague references that imply a word outside the stories, as when Watson talks about the attempts to destroy his papers. I enjoy Holmes’ blatent sarcasm as he says “Mrs. Merrilow does not object to tobacco, Watson, if you wish to indulge your filthy habits.”

As I make my way through the canon, I’ve largely abandoned any sane attempt to date the stories. However, there’s a problem in this story that I just can’t let slip past. In the story, Watson claims that Holmes was in active practice for 23 years, and that Watson was taking notes for only 17 of them. Holmes’ part of this is simple: Assuming you don’t count the three years of the Great Hiatus as being “active practice,” and you add 26 to the retirement year of 1903, you get 1877. This coincides with “The Musgrave Ritual,” which many chronologists set at 1879. However, Watson joined Holmes in 1881 or 1882, which only accounts for four or five years. There are a lot of theories to account for the missing year or two (the most plausible of which being that Watson didn’t actually take notes of the cases for a while, although this does contract “A Study in Scarlet”), but at the end of the day I have to accept that it’s just an error and be irritated by it.

Which is fine. The whole story irritates me. It’s not terrible, but it certainly isn’t good.