random sherlock holmes

Sunday, November 11, 2007 3:18 AM

I have in the past remarked elsewhere that such humble efforts as I have made over the years to chronicle the cases of my friend Sherlock Holmes were met, despite the widening they caused to both his reputation and his clientele, by the Detective himself with at best a shrug and at worst a diatribe on the folly of romanticism and the need for cold objectivity, the application of which would produce something resembling lecture notes – or perhaps his own abstruse monographs.

I met such tirades as best I could – though I will admit they were the cause of some asperity between us – and an unstated factor in the continued absence of my wife from the Baker Street lodgings he frequented and which we once had shared.

Over the years however, I had grown used to these outbursts of Holmes’, his moods and manners and had learned to look beyond the surface of his words in order to uncover whatever the true cause of his unquiet might be. A small act of detection of which he was himself not unaware for he would often lean back with a droop of his eyelids and a twitch at the corner of his lips to remark, “Ah, Watson – if I am ever guilty of underestimating your particular talents it is only perhaps to balance the profligate hyperbole surrounding your descriptions of my own.”

It was indeed in such a mood that I discovered Holmes, one nondescript October morning. It was immediately clear to me that he was engaged, if not actively on a case then at least on some puzzle or experiment of his own, for the sitting room air was fusty with the nastiest of his tobacco and the place was littered with newspapers left where they had been dropped.

Perhaps to distract himself, he had picked up a copy of the Strand magazine and, unfortunately for me, had just finished reading when I arrived.
“Ah – the very Boswell!” He cried upon my entry and with heavy sarcasm.
“Holmes,” I acknowledged, moderating in turn the warmth of my greeting.
There was a strained theatrical silence while I awaited his next salvo. He moved across to the window, making a play of toying in a desultory fashion with the curtains and peering at the street scene below. Then, “But it really won’t do!” he ejaculated.

I kept my quiet, studying his narrow back.

“To the general public, those that read your yellow accounts of my work at any rate – I am something more than a detective – and something very less than a man. I have become a mannered collection of gestures and props – a pipe, a hat, a pose – all as expected and all, as the bard would say - ‘signifying nothing.’ You have, I fear, struck me to the quick however with your latest flowery indictment.”
My temper was, I will admit, roused by his words, even as I began to look for clues around the room as to what might be bothering the man. “You go too far, Holmes,” I admonished, “and your outburst is somewhat hypercritical. You accuse of me of catering to the common – and look askance at my taste for popular fiction – yet you yourself, for all your intellectual pursuits, are fond indeed of trawling the agony columns and such of the gossip inclined broadsheets.”
“HA! Again a habit, no doubt expected of me by your readers. How many crimes have I uncovered in those murky waters, sifted at no small cost to my time and patience?”
I had removed my hat and coat by this time and sat myself down, somewhat stiffly.
“But what is the specific nature of my slander against you this time?” I asked.
Holmes turned back from the window and looked at me narrowly. “It as, as usual, a cumulative effect… but one phrase does nag at me – I am ‘the fixed and unvarying point in a changing age… Phssshaw! This summons up the case neatly enough – I am now considered a figure of such rigid and unbending habits that even Scotland Yard believe me to be thoroughly covered in the dust of a bygone era – even as I struggle to prod them towards the deductive methods of the future. Was it not I who obtained a gramaphone – you do not own one yet – was it not I who demanded the installation of a telephone – and who in any case has never sent a let

COMMENTS: 2

Back to Blog Roll