Hidden Threads in Sherlock Holmes, Volume 2

By Ted Stetson and Gail Stetson

This volume completes the fascinating deep dive into the fifty-six Sherlock Holmes short stories begun in the acclaimed Hidden Threads in Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1. It illuminates the adventures collected in the Return and reveals intriguing motifs concealed in the underappreciated later stories. Who would have expected to find hidden within the stories social, medical, scientific, literary, artistic, and sporting themes spanning six continents? Each mystery is a puzzle to be unraveled.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ted Stetson
• Release date: Nov 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215548257

Ted Stetson

Ted Stetson is a member of SFWA. He was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island and went to Seton Hall and Hofstra. He graduated from the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas. He was awarded First Place by the Florida Literary Arts Council and First Place in the Lucy B. McIntire contest of the Poetry Society of Georgia. His short fiction has appeared in Twisted Tongue, MysteryAuthors.com, Future Orbits, State Street Review, and the anthologies; One Evening a Year, Mota: Truth, Ruins Extraterrestrial Terra, Ruins Terra and Barren Worlds. His books include: Night Beasts, The Computer Song Book.

Book preview

Introduction

In a letter to his mother, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote:

April 6, 1893

All is very well down here. I am in the middle of the last Holmes story, after which the gentleman vanishes, never never to reappear. I am weary of his name. The medical stories also are nearly finished, so I shall have a clear sheet soon. Then for playwriting and lecturing for a couple of years.

The Adventure of the Final Problem, appeared in the December 1893 issue of the Strand Magazine. There has been much speculation regarding Holmes’ activities between the spring 1891 events related in The Final Problem and his reappearance in April 1894. In The Adventure of the Empty House, Holmes tells a gobsmacked Watson the exotic places he had visited—Tibet, unnamed regions in the guise of a Norwegian explorer, Persia, Mecca, Khartoum and, more recently, the south of France.

Less attention is given to what Arthur Conan Doyle got up to during this period, a period that, in real time, started in April 1893 and lasted until he began writing The Hound of the Baskervilles in March 1901. What did his anticipated "playwriting and lecturing for a couple of years" turn out to be?

On May 13, 1893, the play he had written with J.M. Barrie, Jane Annie; or, the Good Conduct Prize, opened at the Savoy Theatre and his one-act play, Foreign Policy, was performed as part of a five-play offering at Terry’s Theatre in London. In 1894, A Story of Waterloo, his moving one-act play from A Straggler of ’15, starring and produced by Henry Irving, opened to rave reviews. In 1899, his three-act play, Halves, aka Brothers, was performed in Aberdeen, and then toured Britain finishing up with a two-month run in London. Lastly, Sherlock Holmes opened in London then was rewritten and performed by William Gillette.

In addition, Conan Doyle lectured. Through the balance of 1893, he continued to give monthly talks at the Upper Norwood Literary and Scientific Society. The following year, he toured America giving lectures and readings of his work. In 1897, his literary lectures focused on Irish literature. He ran for MP in Central Edinburgh in 1900 and spoke on civic issues. His talks in 1900–1901 focused on the Boer War

Conan Doyle followed the 1894 trip to America with several visits to Switzerland for Louisa’s health; then, he took her and his sister, Lottie, to Egypt for six months. In 1900, he traveled to South Africa and worked for five months setting up and attending patients at the Langman Hospital until another physician arrived to relieve him.

In addition, Conan Doyle wrote more than four dozen stories, among them the charming Brigadier Gerard series that includes Uncle Bernac and he completed five other novels:

1894 The Parasite

1895 The Stark Munro Letters

1896 Rodney Stone

1897 The Tragedy of the Korosko

1899 A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus

Conan Doyle’s break was eight years, not two, but his accomplishments are astonishing.

The August 1901–April 1902 serialization of The Hound of the Baskervilles in the Strand Magazine thrilled Sherlock Holmes fans, only to leave them wanting again. Then, in the spring of 1903, Collier’s Weekly offered him £6,000 for six new Holmes stories. The editor, Norman Hapgood, wanted all rights. Knowing he could get an additional £3000 in the UK, he replied that he would sell the American rights for that figure. At the time, the rate of exchange was about one GBP for five USD. They finally agreed on $45,000 for thirteen stories, which is why The Return of Sherlock Holmes collection is a baker’s dozen.

*****

Chapter 25

The Adventure of the Empty House

"Holmes! I cried. Is it really you?"

Fig 3: With a snarl he turned upon his heel

Many Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts consider the mysteries collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes among the best of the Holmes short stories. The first of these, The Adventure of the Empty House, appeared in the October 1903 issue of the Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle numbered it sixth among his favorites because it successfully deals with Holmes’ supposed death and reappearance. He had more time to write this story. As a result, the hidden threads are more numerous and complex.

The events take place almost a decade before. Watson explains his delay. Only now, at the end of nearly ten years, am I allowed to supply the missing links which make up the whole of that remarkable chain. The most important aspect of the story is, of course, Holmes’ reappearance ending the Great Hiatus, a term coined in 1946 by Edgar W. Smith, BSI.

Holmes disguises himself as an old bookseller then reveals himself to Watson. Having presumed him dead for three years, Watson faints. Holmes apologizes for the shock as well as the pain he had caused his dear friend and explains he had taken advantage of his rumored demise to track down Moriarty’s confederates. He returns now because he heard of Ronald Adair’s murder and Moriarty’s most dangerous confederate, Col. Sebastian Moran, is still at large. Moran knows Holmes is alive and in London and intends to kill him. Note that he is yet another villain whose name starts with ‘M’.

This is a strong story, full of suspense and, although motor cars now roamed the streets of London and Victoria no longer graced the throne, some things never change. The main character of The Adventure of the Empty House is not who you think it is. Hidden in plain sight is Rudyard Kipling.

Many of Kipling’s poems had appeared in the Scots’ Observer. Even before the 1890 publication of Barrack-Room Ballads, they were popular in British households. Kipling had followed Ballads with the 1892 novel, Captains Courageous. His short story collection, The Jungle Book, published in 1894 and The Second Jungle Book published in 1895 brought fame. He wrote pieces that engaged both adults and children. Conan Doyle is speaking of these when Holmes calls Watson’s writings little fairy tales. It is no surprise that, during his lifetime, the British bought over seven million of Kipling’s books.

Conan Doyle praised Kipling’s work in essays later collected in Through the Magic Door and listed The Man Who Would Be King as one of the finest short stories ever written.

He devoted a stanza to Kipling in his 1893 poem An Alpine Walk:

Spoke of Kipling—his command

Over life in all its phases,

How he held within his hand

All the cards from kings to aces.

Passing swift from passion’s frown

Back to comedy’s grimaces;

So we walked from Engelberg

With the wind upon our faces.

The Adventure of the Empty House concerns the murder of a young man, the Honourable Ronald Adair, a habitual card player. In 1890s London there were over sixty gentlemen’s clubs. Watson tells us that Adair was a member of the Baldwin, Cavendish and Bagatelle card clubs. Kipling’s cousin, Stanley Baldwin, MP later became Prime Minister. Cavendish was a kind of tobacco and Tabaqui the jackal is a character in The Jungle Book. In addition, Cavendish is a popular variety of bananas and bananas originated in Southeast Asia, primarily India. There was no Bagatelle club. However, the word Bagatelle has several meanings:

A game in which small balls run down a board bouncing left and right against pins and ending in holes worth various points. (A forerunner of Pachinko.)

A trifle, a matter of small significance.

A light musical piece.

The third meaning fits here, a reference to Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. The British Empire was in a constant state of war somewhere in the world and these ballads are a collective anthem to the soldier, his bravery and sacrifice. Often patriotic, these sometimes melancholic, but frequently exuberant poems captured the imagination of the British public. Rudyard Kipling was offered the honor of Poet Laureate more than once, but he refused it. The ballads, all of Kipling’s poetry, became part of the fabric of British culture and the rest of the English-speaking world.

Consider Kipling’s The Recessional, a hymn published on July 17, 1897 in the Times in honor of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The poem refers to the battles fought for power in foreign lands. Only thirty lines long, this prayer includes the phrase Lest we forget! eight times. It is an exhortation to remember God has dominion over the world, and asks Him to watch over us. Lest we forget! has become the Remembrance Sunday clarion call to honor service members who died in the line of duty.

The Wiffenpoof Song, sung for more than a century by a select Yale a cappella choir, is an adaptation of Kipling’s barrack-room ballad Gentlemen-Rankers. Another ballad, Mandalay, became On the Road to Mandalay.

One of the best-known poems is the seventh selection in the 1892 Barracks-Room Ballads edition, Gunga Din, especially the famous closing line: You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

The books Holmes carries as part of his used books seller disguise point to Kipling. The first is The Origin of Tree Worship. Nowhere was tree worship more pervasive than in India. At the turn of the 20th century, there was evidence of tree worship in almost every village. Villagers often protected a clump or grove of trees and believed it was wrong to cut or harm them. Other trees deemed malevolent were given a wide berth.

Celtic people, especially Druids, worshipped trees as well. One of Kipling’s best-known poems is the ballad, A Tree Song. It begins:

Of all the trees that grow so fair,

Old England to adorn,

Greater are none beneath the Sun,

Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,

(All of a Midsummer morn!)

Surely we sing no little thing,

In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

The next book in Holmes’ stack, British Birds, alludes to Kipling’s dark poem, Birds of Prey March. First published in 1895 in the Pall Mall Gazette, it tells the story of British soldiers marching single file onto a troop transport ship knowing many of them will die on a foreign shore, their bones picked clean by kites, eagles and crows.

The third book, Catullus, refers to the Roman poet by that name. Catullus wrote poetry in the meter known as Sapphic stanza, devised around 600 B.C. by female Greek poet, Sappho. Kipling attempted the difficult meter, as had Tennyson and Swinburne.

John Bunyan wrote the last book, The Holy War, before his more famous Pilgrim’s Progress. Kipling greatly admired Bunyan, writing The ‘eathen in 1895. It celebrated the transformation of a raw recruit into a fine soldier, similar to the sinner’s journey to the gates of heaven in Pilgrim’s Progress. Later, in 1917, Kipling wrote The Holy War, a poetic homage to Bunyan. In addition, Holmes …paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum. Khartoum is the capital of Sudan. Kipling’s poem, The Holy War, refers to the Mahdist War and the fierce Beja fighters the British engaged in the Sudan.

The title of his poem Fuzzy-Wuzzy is derogatory, but in the 19th century, the poem was wildly popular and understood as Kipling intended it, a rollicking music-hall song praising the superior ability of the Sudanese foe. The origin of the children’s poem, Fuzzy-Wuzzy was a bear lies in this poem.

Kipling was a music hall enthusiast and this exchange between Holmes and Watson is a typical bit of repartee:

"Well, then, about that chasm. I had no serious difficulty in getting out of it, for the very simple reason that I never was in it."

"You never were in it?"

"No, Watson, I never was in it."

Holmes tells Watson he …spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpelier, in the south of France. Conan Doyle deliberately spells Montpelier with one ‘l’, like the capital of Vermont. In 1894, he and Louisa visited America and stopped at the Kipling home in Dummerston, Vermont. He taught Kipling to play golf and upon his return sent him a pair of skis, the first in the state. The two had much in common, but their temperaments were different as chalk and cheese.

The Shakespearean quotes are part of the Kipling motif. During his childhood in India, the Kipling family had Shakespeare nights during which their conversation consisted almost entirely of Shakespearean quotes. Kipling admired William Shakespeare. Of the All that glitters is not gold speech from Merchant of Venice, Act II, scene 7, he wrote I can give you nothing equal to this. To my mind it has never been surpassed, nor will it ever be.

Conan Doyle continues the Anglo-Indian Kipling thread with many references to India. Holmes says, I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa and spending some days with the head lama. By 1858, Britain ruled India, either directly through the East India Company or indirectly through its support and control of local leaders. Spiritually, India claimed Tibet and there were disputes over the border where India considered part of the country to be theirs. In December 1903, two months after the publication of this story, Indian officers and British soldiers made an incursion into Tibet.

For many, Kipling’s The Jungle Book defined exotic India and that meant tigers and hunting. The word tiger(s) appears seven times in The Adventure of the Empty House. From the second half of the 19th century through the early decades of the 20th century, tiger hunting in India was popular. Maharajahs had long hunted them and now rich foreigners, often British, joined them. In 1900, there were approximately 100,000 tigers in Asia, mainly in India. They were a threat to villagers and hunting them was deemed a beneficial act rather than an indulgence.

Conan Doyle was not fond of hunting. In his 1924 Memories and Adventures, he wrote:

I cannot persuade myself that we are justified in taking life as a pleasure.

Then he added: But there is another side of the question as to the effect of the sport on ourselves—whether it does not blunt our own better feelings, harden our sympathies, brutalize our natures.

The supreme beast in The Jungle Book is Shere Khan. Shere Khan, loosely translated as Tiger King, causes Mowgli’s separation from his human parents. In Tiger, Tiger, Shere Khan stakes out a village, intending to capture and kill Mowgli upon his return. Tabaqui, the jackal, is forced to give up his whereabouts. Mowgli, the man-cub, and his wolf brethren trap Shere Khan in a canyon then stampede a herd of buffalo, killing him.

The M volume of Holmes’ reference advises that Moran is the author of Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas. The western Himalayas run through India. Colonel Moran also wrote Three Months in the Jungle.

Holmes presents Colonel Moran. I have not introduced you yet, said Holmes. This, gentlemen, is Colonel Sebastian Moran, once of her Majesty’s Indian Army, and the best heavy-game shot that our Eastern Empire has ever produced. I believe I am correct, Colonel, in saying that your bag of tigers is still unrivalled?

He refers to the Colonel as a shikari, a Hindi word for big-game hunter. The word ‘hunt’ is used several times including I knew not what wild beast we were about to hunt down in the dark jungle of criminal London.

Just as Mowgli was bait for Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, so is Holmes, or at least his wax silhouette, the draw for Moran. Mowgli lured Shere Khan into a trap and the buffalo trample him; Holmes lures the great hunter and, with Watson’s assistance, subdues him until the police close in.

An integral part of hunting is guns. Conan Doyle has Moran use an air gun, but with a twist. The colonel uses a soft-nosed bullet. Big game hunters often used exploding bullets due to their superior stopping power. These were manufactured in the late 1890s at the British Arsenal in the Dum-Dum manufacturing section of Kolkata. Conan Doyle may have read about them in the December 19, 1896 issue of the British Medical Journal.

As he often does, Conan Doyle includes a medical reference, brilliantly combining it with a literary reference:

You may have heard of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. Then, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpelier in the south of France is more than a hint at Vermont.

In The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter, he had written about coal tar, coal gasses and charcoal to lead us to Jean-Marie Charcot, the great professor of anatomy and founder of modern neurology. George Sigerson was an Irish physician who studied diseases of the nervous system under Charcot. Doctor Sigerson was also a scientist and poet. His main contribution, however, was his leadership in the late 19th-century revival of Irish literature.

Sigerson taught himself Irish when he was a student. In 1894, his address before the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin was included in a book, The Revival of Irish Literature. He speaks of the diaspora of the Irish population, but asserts that Ireland will always be their homeland. He said, A few years in a National School, and the boy who emerged from a smoky and squalid cabin, shared with a pig, is turned into a clean and shapely youth, fit to wrestle with the world, and perhaps to win the match.

Sigerson’s belief in the transformative power of an education steeped in Irish literature is similar to the transformation outlined by John Bunyan in Pilgrim’s Progress and later, in Kipling’s poem, "The ‘eathen."

Along with W.B. Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Charles Gavan Duffy and others, George Sigerson contributed to the renaissance of Gaelic literature and culture. Conan Doyle loved his parents, both of whom were Irish; he had been reared Catholic. He visited and played with his Irish cousins and in 1881–1882, holidayed with friends in Lismore, County Waterford. He nodded empathetically in earlier stories at the suffering of the Irish people and wrote of the bravery of Irish soldiers in the service of Her Majesty.

At the same time, Fenian violence disturbed him. Conan Doyle’s clever use of Cavendish serves another purpose; it allows him to inject a bit of history, referring to the real-life murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish on the first day of his appointment as Chief Secretary of Ireland.

Lord Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke were killed in Phoenix Park, Dublin on May 6, 1882 during their walk to the Chief Secretary’s Lodge. Burke was the real target. Lord Cavendish was there to make peace with the Irish, but it was not to be. He is buried in the family plot near Chatsworth House where gardener, Sir Joseph Paxton, had developed the Cavendish variety of bananas almost half a century before. The perpetrators were hung and the act only increased ill will in England.

Conan Doyle lightens the subtext of The Adventure of the Empty House with three minor topics. The first of these is Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. From 1835–1883, Madame Tussaud’s (the apostrophe was used back then) was located on Baker Street. It outgrew that location and moved to its current location on Marylebone Street. The museum housed some four hundred wax figures including those in the popular Chamber of Horrors. Conan Doyle was close friends with the Tussauds. They threw a lavish dinner honoring him in 1903.

As he will again in The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone, Holmes uses a wax bust to trick Colonel Moran. Watson describes it as …the strange dummy which had played so important a part in the evening’s adventures. It was a wax-coloured model of my friend, so admirably done that it was a perfect facsimile.

Mrs. Hudson aids the illusion by crawling to the figure on her knees to re-position it every fifteen minutes. Actually, she is performing a shadow play, an ancient form of entertainment from Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Shadow plays involve moving backlit cutouts or puppets behind a screen. Conan Doyle included multiple iterations of words relating to shadow plays including play, shadow, light and act, as well as candles, lantern, screen and blind(s).

The Adventure of the Empty House contained a sport, big game hunting, but another pastime is also central to the plot and subtext—Whist. On the night of his murder, Ronald Adair played Whist then Moran shot him with a soft-nosed bullet, the kind used to bring down big game. Holmes recovers the bullet Moran used on the wax bust; it is the same type. Holmes offers a plausible motive for Moran murdering Adair, pointing out the curious manner in which Adair had laid out stacks of money on the table. The Adventure of the Empty House is rife with Whist terms like hand, pass, play and card, game and honours—the top four cards in the trump suit. He inserts deal, dummy, leader, rubber and partner.

Further, there is an additional, more subtle reason for Conan Doyle weaving in this thread. The story includes the vigil Holmes and Watson and the two police officers kept. He used ‘silent’ four times and ‘silence,’ twice, as they quietly watched and waited for Moran to show his hand. Whist! Be