The Sherlockian (2 page)

“Welcome, Harold,” said a voice behind him. Someone tousled the deerstalker cap on his head. “Welcome to the Baker Street Irregulars.”

These words, which Harold had hoped to hear for so long, sounded foreign and strange now as he finally heard them. All these people— two hundred bodies, laughing and joking and patting backs—they were all clapping for Harold. This Harold. Harold White, twenty-nine years old, with the slight belly, with the thick eyebrows, with the astigmatism, with the sweaty, shivering hands.

Harold couldn’t believe that he really deserved all this. But he did. He belonged here.

The Baker Street Irregulars were the world’s preeminent organization devoted to the study of Sherlock Holmes, and Harold was its newest member. Harold had published his first article in the
Baker Street Journal,
the Irregulars’ quarterly publication, two years earlier. “On the Dating of Bloodstains: Sherlock Holmes and the Founding of Modern Forensics,” Harold had titled the piece. It had explored the historical connections between Holmes’s first experiments in
A Study in Scarlet
with the work of Dr. Eduard Piotrowski. (“Dr. Piotrowski, practicing in Kraków in the 1890s, beat in the heads of baby rabbits and recorded the patterns made by the blood bursting from their skulls. Holmes’s experiments were similarly gory, though he at least had the decency to use his own blood, as well as the labors of his own skull,” Harold had written. He thought this was his most amusing line in the piece.) Harold had published two other articles after, in smaller Sherlockian magazines. Tonight was his first time at the Irregulars’ invitation-only annual dinner. Just to be included among the guests at the Irregulars’ dinner was an immense honor—but to be offered membership, at such a young age, with such a small history of scholarship to his name? Harold couldn’t think of another Irregular who’d been offered membership this quickly, after only one dinner.

Harold White, in the cheap black suit that hung loosely on the shoulders, in the chicken-stained tie, was in the middle of the proudest moment of his life. He adjusted the plaid deerstalker hat that rested magnificently on his head. The hat was by far his favorite possession. He’d owned it since he was fourteen years old, since he had first become obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and dressed as the famed detective for Halloween. As his love of Holmes grew from childish infatuation to mature study, what had once been a costume prop eventually became day-to-day clothing. He’d worn the hat proudly at his graduation from Princeton, even temporarily sewing a tassel on top for the occasion. As Harold moved from his nervous teens to his tedious twenties, the hat served him well through the cocktail parties, the autumn picnics, the friends’ weddings that cropped up more and more often. He had worn it when he accepted his first career-oriented job as a New York publisher’s assistant. He had worn it as he separated from his longest-lasting girlfriend, Amanda, about whom Harold never spoke.

The Irregulars’ dinner, held this year at the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-fourth Street, fell amid a grand week of Sherlockiana. For four days around January 6, Holmes’s birthday, all the world’s societies devoted to the celebration of Sherlock Holmes gathered in New York. Lectures, tours, book signings, sales of Victorian antiques and firstedition printings—for a Sherlock Holmes devotee, it was heaven.

Of the hundreds of Sherlockian societies in attendance, however, the Baker Street Irregulars were by far the oldest, the most senior, and the most exclusive. Truman and FDR had claimed membership, as had Isaac Asimov. Only the Irregulars, and their few guests, could attend the annual dinner, and their rare invitations were the object of heated cravings from Sherlockians the world over. The Irregulars were even responsible, as everyone knew, for deducing January 6 as the day of Holmes’s birth. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had never actually written the date January 6 in the “Canon”—that is, the four novels and fifty six short stories that make up all the original adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But an extensive, Talmudically deep reading of these tales allowed Christopher Morley, one of the founding Irregulars, to propose January 6 as the most likely candidate for Holmes’s birthday. All the other organizations were considered “scion” groups of the Irregulars and needed an official sanction from the Irregulars in order to form. Applications for membership in the Irregulars did not exist—if you distinguished yourself in the field of Sherlockian studies, they would find you. And if the leader of the Irregulars deemed you qualified, you would be presented with a shilling piece as a sign of your membership—like the coin, the faded and ancient silver, that Harold squeezed between his whitening knuckles.

The applause dissipated into chatter. Chairs were pushed back from the dining tables, white linen napkins draped across the plates of halfeaten chickens and boiled vegetables. Tumblers of scotch were downed in long gulps. Hands were shaken. Good-byes were offered.

Harold felt suddenly foolish, clutching his shilling. He had fantasized about this moment since he’d first learned of the Irregulars. And now it was over. He wondered what he would have to do next to have this feeling back. He wanted so much to hold on to his successes and not let them fade away into the dull clamor of normal life. Harold watched servers collect the silverware, sweeping the dirty forks and dull butter knives into plastic tubs.

Harold lived in Los Angeles and worked as a freelance literary researcher. His primary employers were movie studios, whose legal departments hired him to defend against charges of copyright violation. If an angry novelist sued the makers of the summer’s biggest action blockbuster, claiming that they had stolen the idea from his little-read political thriller of twenty years back, it was Harold’s job to write a brief saying that no, in fact
both
works took their basic plot elements from a lesser-known Ben Jonson play, or one of Dostoyevsky’s difficult short stories, or another work that was similarly obscure and similarly in the public domain. Harold’s name was well used and well lauded in the legal departments of the studios, except in the rare cases when they would sue one another.

Harold’s main qualification for this position was that he had read everything. He had simply read more books—more fiction—than anyone else whom either he or his employers had met. This had been accomplished, at his age, via an acute ability to speed-read. As a child, as he ploddingly read through the pages of every Sherlock Holmes mystery, his desire—his animal need—to know what happened next posed a problem: It took him longer to get through the stories than he could bear. So he taught himself to speed-read from a mail-order self-help book. His fellow students would tease him about this ability, as they found it unthinkable that anybody could read a four-hundredpage novel in two hours and still have any significant amount of information retention. But Harold could. And he would prove it to them, reading books alongside his peers and letting them quiz him about plot elements and descriptive passages. Sure enough, Harold retained more information, more quickly, than anyone he had met at his grade school in Chicago, in his college years at Princeton, or in his adult life since.

“Harold!” came a deep and resonant voice from behind. A set of hands squeezed Harold’s shoulders. He turned and looked up into the face of Jeffrey Engels. A snow-haired Californian with a nearly permanent grin etched into his cheeks, Jeffrey was easily the best-liked and most respected Sherlockian in the room. Harold suspected that it was Jeffrey, in fact, who had campaigned for Harold’s investiture in the Irregulars. But he knew better than to ask, as Jeffrey would never tell him, one way or the other.

“Thank you,” said Harold.

Jeffrey ignored Harold’s comment. His usual grin was gone, replaced with a dour stare.

“This affair has taken a grave turn,” said Jeffrey quietly.

“To what?”

“To murder!” replied Jeffrey.

C
HAPTER 3

The Final Problem

“You know a conjuror gets no credit

when once he has explained his trick.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

A Study in Scarlet

September 3,1893

Arthur killed Sherlock Holmes by the light of a single lamp.

Encased behind the heavy wooden doors of his study, Arthur wrote quickly. The oil lamp atop his writing desk glowed pale yellow over the book-lined walls. Shakespeare, Catullus, even, as Arthur would admit freely, Poe. His favorites were all there, but Arthur rarely consulted them. He wrote confidently. He was not the sort of writer who spread his sources across his desk like bedsheets, clinging to them tightly, consulting, soiling, pinching.
Hamlet
lay on its shelf—third from the bottom, a quarter of the way around the room clockwise from the door—and if, when Arthur quoted it for another pithy aphorism from Holmes, he quoted inaccurately . . . well, such was fiction.

Murder tasted sweet on Arthur’s lips. He salivated. His pen, heavy between his stubby fingers, did not scratch the paper. It stroked the pages, filling each one top to bottom with black ink. The plot, the confounding little puzzle of tricks and then treats, had been worked out well in advance.

At this, the middle point of his career, Arthur was unquestionably England’s great composer of the mystery story. Indeed, as the States had failed to produce a mystery author of any caliber since Poe had invented the form, Arthur thought it not unreasonable to say that he was the most accomplished in the world. There was a trick to mystery stories, of course, and Arthur wasn’t embarrassed to admit that he knew it. It was the same trick practiced by a thousand amateur parlor magicians and face-painted circus jugglers: misdirection.

Arthur laid the facts of the crime before his readers clearly, calmly, and efficiently. No important detail was left out, and—yes, here was the mark of the true craftsman—not too many unimportant details were left in. It’s an easy feat to confuse the reader with a mountain of unnecessary characters and events; the challenge, for Arthur, was in presenting a clean and simple tale, with only a few notable characters to keep straight, and yet still to obscure the solution from the reader. The key was in the prose, in the way the information was laid out. Arthur kept the reader’s mind on the exciting, exceptional, and yet fundamentally
unimportant
facts of the case, while the salient details were left for Holmes to work upon, as if by magic.

It was a game for Arthur, putting together these plots. It was he against his audience, the writer locked in endless combat with his readers, and only one would emerge victorious. Either the reader would guess the ending early or Arthur would confound him to the final page. It was a test of wits, and a war that Arthur did not often lose.

Why, of course, if the reader were smart enough, he could figure the whole thing through after just the first few pages! But in his heart Arthur knew that his readers didn’t really
want
to win. They wanted to test their wits against the author at full pitch, and they wanted to lose. To be dazzled. And so Arthur’s struggle was long, and moreover it was bloody exhausting. He had come to realize that putting together a decent mystery was an infernally tedious affair. And, his having labored at this mill for some years now, the tedium had engendered in him such a hatred for Holmes as he could no longer contain. Now his hatred extended beyond just the rat-faced detective: It carried over to the readers who adored him so. And now thankfully, at last, in his final Holmes story, Arthur would be done with them all for good.

Late as the hour was, Arthur heard the rambunctious banging of children upstairs. He could hear, faintly, the maid Kathleen telling them to hush up before they woke their mother. Touie would be sound asleep by now, as she had been most of the day. Her consumption was not much worsening, but the clean Swiss
föhn
had done little to improve her health. She rarely left the house. Journeys into the city were simply out of the question. Against her frailty, though, Arthur had become determined. He would take care of poor, dear Touie, his bride since she was nineteen. And if they should have to keep separate bedrooms, for her health, and if nannies would be required to look after the children, and if she had now wilted into the winter of her own private quarters . . . well, so be it. Arthur would write. He had liked to keep regular, daytime hours for his work, but tonight was different. Some writing one had to do in the dark.

Arthur’s pen did not hasten as he moved on to the final page. He made the same broad strokes he always had. The words came to him, first in his head—the orderly noun, the clarifying verb, the occasional but welcome adjective—one by one, and he dutifully recorded them onto the darkening sheet. He did not go back over his sentences once they were on the page. He did not scratch out words, like his good friends Mr. Barrie and Mr. Oliver, endlessly replacing them with their freshest
mot juste.
Such was the mark, Arthur felt, of an indecisive hand. He did not consult his previous paragraphs for where to go next. He simply knew.

His fingers were steady as he came to the last bit of his story. A letter from beyond the grave, to be opened after its sender had passed on. “The best and the wisest man whom I have ever known,” Arthur wrote. A fitting tribute; a fine farewell. He placed a light period after “known” and turned the sheet onto its predecessors. He carefully pressed the stack into a tidy, perfect rectangle and flipped the pages over. “The Final Problem,” read the title at the top of page one.
Indeed,
thought Arthur. And then, queerly, he smiled. He even allowed himself a chortle, as he was alone. Without his wife, or his children, or even his mother knowing, Arthur was, for the first time in years, finally free.

He stood. He stumbled happily to the door. And then— Oh! He’d almost forgotten.

Arthur practically skipped back to his desk. What had come over him? You’d be excused for thinking he was a love-struck teenager, on his way to call on his
amore.

Arthur unlocked the bottom-left drawer beneath his desk and removed one dark, leather-bound book from a stack of many. He opened the book and flipped through to the bottom of a page already quite filled with his ink. He plucked up his pen and recorded the date. And then, though most evenings Arthur would spend an hour recording all the day’s events and all of his most private thoughts, tonight he committed only two words to his diary.