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SHERLOCK HOLMES FOR CROWN AND COUNTRY, by Dan Andriacco

The Great Detective in Public Service

A slightly different form of “Sherlock Holmes for Crown and Country: The Great Detective in Public Service” was originally delivered as a talk at the inaugural meeting of the Diogenes Club of Washington, D.C., on September 20, 2014. Author Dan Andriacco had always been fascinated by the number of spy stories in the Canon. As a boy he fantasized about putting them together into a small anthology. Instead, he wrote about them.

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When Sherlock Holmes hung out his shingle as the world’s first consulting detective, his original clients were what he called “government detectives” and private ones who needed his unique help. But over the years he also served crown and country on numerous occasions—although not always both at the same time. This should not be surprising in one whose patriotism was reflected in the V.R. design of the bullet holes on the wall at 221B.

Leaving aside the sometimes contentious issue of chronology, the first published case in which Holmes’s client is a government official is “The Naval Treaty.” Watson’s old school fellow Percy “Tadpole” Phelps, working at the Foreign Office through the influence of his mother’s brother, appeals to the doctor to get Holmes on the case of a secret naval treaty which had been stolen on his watch.

This treaty between Italy and Great Britain is of enormous importance, says Percy’s uncle, Lord Holdhurst: “The French or the Russian embassy would pay an immense sum to learn the contents of these papers.” Alfred Hitchcock would have called that a McGuffin, his name for the goal or valuable object that the protagonist pursues in a story. Think “The Purloined Letter” or The Maltese Falcon. The Bruce-Partington Plans, the Mazarin Stone, the Beryl Coronet, Baron Gruner’s diary, and the provocative letter at the heart of “The Adventure of the Second Stain”—all of which Holmes sought for Crown or country—are also McGuffins.

Watson’s description of Lord Holdhurst, the foreign secretary and “future premier of England,” is quite telling: “Standing on the rug between us, with his slight, tall figure, his sharp features, thoughtful face, and curling hair prematurely tinged with grey, he seemed to represent that not too common type, a nobleman who is in truth noble.” As Watson hints here, not all noblemen—and not all cabinet ministers—are portrayed so positively in the pages of the Canon.

The dramatic high point of “The Naval Treaty” comes when Holmes has Mrs. Hudson serve up the missing treaty on a breakfast plate. Some commentators have called this cruel, but Watson describes Holmes as having at this point “a mischievous twinkle.” It’s all in good fun for Holmes. But Phelps, just recently recovered from nine weeks of brain fever, is only saved from fainting dead away by having brandy poured down his throat. Fortunately for him, Watson was always equipped with medicinal liquor for just such emergencies.

When he sufficiently recovers, Phelps kisses Holmes’s hand (surely an odd way to show appreciation) and then blesses the detective for saving his honour. Holmes responds: “Well, my own was at stake, you know. I assure you it is just as hateful to me to fail in a case as it can be to you to blunder over a commission.”

In other words, Holmes claims self-interest. But I think he doth protest too much. For later on he says that if Scotland Yard finds the bird has flown, “all the better for the government. I fancy that Lord Holdhurst, for one, and Mr. Percy Phelps for another, would very much rather that the affair never got as far as a police-court.” By implication, the patriotic Holmes puts the good of the state over enhancing his professional reputation by notching up another case he solved.

In the opening paragraph of “The Naval Treaty,” Watson refers to “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” which he said “deals with interests of such importance and implicates so many of the first families in the kingdom that for many years it will be impossible to make it public.”

And in fact he never did, most scholars agree. “The Adventure of the Second Stain” that Watson wrote later takes place during some autumn while he is still or again living in Baker Street, not the July after his marriage to Mary Morstan as did the one mentioned in “The Naval Treaty.” It is clearly a different case with the same name.

Watson calls it “the most important international case which he (Holmes) has ever been called upon to handle.” Appropriately, the client is no minor Foreign Office official out of Watson’s past. The Prime Minister himself, to whom Watson assigns the pseudonym of Lord Bellinger, calls on Holmes at Baker Street, along with the Right Honourable Trelawney Hope, Secretary for European Affairs. A saber-rattling letter from a foreign potentate—often identified by commentators as Kaiser Wilhelm II—has disappeared. If the letter becomes public, war almost certainly will result. The Prime Minister appeals to Holmes and Watson’s honour—there’s that word again!—and to their patriotism, “for I could not imagine a greater misfortune for the country than that this affair should come out.”

Critics have noted the parallels between this affair and that of “The Naval Treaty.” In each case a document of international consequence—the McGuffin—has been lost. And in each case the document was hidden beneath a carpet, although not permanently in “The Adventure of the Second Stain.”

If Holmes experienced déjà vu, he did not say so. Rather, he emphasized how difficult the case was: “Every man’s hand is against us and yet the interests at stake are colossal. Should I bring it to a successful conclusion, it will certainly represent the crowning glory of my career.” He did, and it did, and yet Holmes attempted to hide the achievement from his client in order to protect the honour of a lady. But Lord Bellinger was no fool, which leads to a marvelous closing scene:

The Premier looked at Holmes with twinkling eyes.

“Come, sir,” said he. “There is more in this than meets the eye. How came the letter back in the box?”

Holmes turned away smiling from the keen scrutiny of those wonderful eyes.

“We also have our diplomatic secrets,” said he and, picking up his hat, he turned to the door.

One suspects that Holmes had secrets from Watson as well. Surely—as commentators have speculated—his older brother Mycroft must have sent the Prime Minister to Baker Street on that occasion. But only in “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” does the indolent co-founder of the Diogenes Club himself appear at 221B. Sherlock Holmes decides then that it is finally time to tell Watson the truth about Mycroft’s unique role at Whitehall.

“You told me that he had some small office under the British government.”

Holmes chuckled.

“I did not know you quite so well in those days. One has to be discreet when one talks of high matters of state. You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he is the British government.”

Mycroft arrives in a state of high agitation. His normal bored demeanour gone, he strives to impress upon his sibling the importance of the case: “You must drop everything, Sherlock. Never mind your usual petty puzzles of the police-court. It’s a vital international problem that you have to solve.” Mycroft even tries a carrot, “If you have a fancy to see your name in the next honours list—” But only after he assures Mycroft that “I play the game for the game’s sake” does the great detective agree to look into the matter.

Mycroft’s last push is an appeal to patriotism: “In all your career you have never had so great a chance of serving your country.” The response? “Well, well!” says Holmes, shrugging his shoulders. Perhaps that was a pose, an attempt to appear blasé before his big brother. As the case nears its end, Holmes strikes a much different note to Watson: “If time hangs heavy, get foolscap and a pen and begin your narrative of how we saved the State.”

Before they can do that, however, Holmes suborns Watson into burglary. At first the good doctor resists—which he did not do in “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

“I don’t like it, Holmes.”

“My dear fellow, you shall keep watch in the street. I’ll do the criminal part. It’s not a time to stick at trifles. Think of Mycroft’s note, of the Admiralty, the Cabinet and the exalted person who waits for news. We are bound to go.”

My answer was to rise from the table.

“You are right, Holmes. We are bound to go.”

He sprang up and shook me by the hand.

“I knew you would not shrink at the last,” said he and for a moment I saw something in his eyes which was nearer to tenderness than I had ever seen.

Apparently Holmes chokes up when he is about to commit a felony. Later, he confesses his law-breaking to his brother and to Inspector Lestrade. The Scotland Yarder warns him that some day his penchant for burglary will get him and Watson into trouble. “For England, home and beauty—eh, Watson?” Holmes responds in the words of a Royal Navy toast. “Martyrs on the altar of our country.”

Instead of suffering martyrdom, though, Holmes eventually is called to Windsor where he receives a remarkably fine tie-pin “from a certain gracious lady.” Watson, pushing his own deductive talents to their limits, tells us, “I fancy that I could guess that lady’s august name and I have little doubt that the emerald pin will forever recall to my friend’s memory the adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans.”

That was in that hallowed year of 1895. In 1902, Holmes refused a knighthood (“The Adventure of the Three Garridebs”). Why refuse, given that he accepted the French Legion of Honour (“The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez”)? I suspect that Holmes thought that service to crown and country was its own reward. But why was that knighthood-worthy adventure never told? Perhaps it was too sensitive, the same reason that we have been deprived the story of “the lighthouse, the politician and the trained cormorant”—which was surely another affair of state.

The last recorded meeting of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson took place on the evening of August 2, 1914, “the most terrible August in the history of the world.” We know about it from the account originally published in The Strand under title of “His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes.”

In this fourth espionage story in the Canon, it is Holmes who is the spy. During two years of undercover work in America and Ireland, he has supplied the master spy Von Bork with false plans and arranged for some of the German’s best men to be arrested. Posing as an Irish-American named Altamont, Holmes has disguised his rather public face by adopting what Watson calls “that horrible goatee.” “These are the sacrifices one makes for one’s country,” says Holmes, pulling at his little tuft. “To-morrow it will be but a dreadful memory.”

Watson asks him how he got lured away from his bees. “Ah, I have often marveled at it myself. The Foreign Minister alone I could have withstood, but when the Premier also deigned to visit my humble roof—” One can’t help but think that Altamont is engaging in a bit of blarney here. That was at least the third Prime Minister to visit Holmes at home; the old sleuth-hound should have been used to it by then. But he goes on:

“It has cost me two years, Watson, but they have not been devoid of excitement. When I say that I started my pilgrimage at Chicago, graduated in an Irish secret society at Buffalo, gave serious trouble to the constabulary at Skibbareen and so eventually caught the eye of a subordinate agent of Von Bork, who recommended me as a likely man, you will realize that the matter was complex.”

No doubt the great detective’s well-honed burglary skills came in handy at Skibbareen! Anthony Boucher suggested with great plausibility that Holmes learned about being an undercover agent from Birdy Edwards (The Valley of Fear). Perhaps some day the Irish and American adventures that Holmes merely sketches out in this story could receive a more complete treatment, similar to the second half of The Valley of Fear.

After two solitary years of acting a part, Holmes brings in Watson for the end-game. Surely this was not merely because he valued the doctor’s skills as a chauffeur. No, it was a tribute to their friendship, their many years as comrades in arms. And at the end they stand on the terrace for perhaps their last quiet talk together, and some of the most memorable lines in the entire Canon:

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. Start her up, Watson, for it’s time that we were on our way. I have a check for five hundred pounds which should be cashed early, for the drawer is quite capable of stopping it if he can.”

The Basil Rathbone film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror ends with this quote up to “when the storm has cleared.” It also features Von Bork as a Nazi agent. After the great critical success of Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in 20th Century Fox’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Universal acquired the franchise and in 1942 brought it into the 20th century. Bluntly stated, the first three Universal pictures—The Voice of Terror, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, and Sherlock Holmes in Washington, are World War II propaganda films. In The Voice of Terror, for example, a young woman named Kitty, reminiscent of Kitty Winter, gives a rousing appeal for help to a pub full of ruffians: “England’s at stake. Your England as much as anyone else’s! No time to think about what side we’re on—there’s only one side, England, no matter how high or how low we are.” The film was immediately followed by a pitch to buy war bonds.

David Marcum, writing in the winter 2013 issue of The Baker Street Journal, made the ingenious suggestion that these films were actually adventures of Solar Pons, the latter-day Holmes clone, and his Watsonian associate Dr. Parker. “Pons’s and Parker’s names were changed to Holmes and Watson for easier familiarity to the 1940s movie-going public.” Well, that would at least explain Rathbone’s bizarre hair-do in those three movies, the reason for which has been a Sherlockian mystery for more than seventy years!

Ouida Rathbone, Basil’s wife, in 1953 combined elements of all four canonical spy stories, plus “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Final Problem,” and “The Adventure of the Empty House” into a play called “Sherlock Holmes: A Drama in Three Acts.” It closed after just two evening performances and one matinee. This stitched-together Frankenstein of a work demonstrates that great source material—dialogue ripped from the stories—doesn’t necessarily make for a great play. You still need a plot. Mrs. Rathbone seems to have missed that1.

Spy stuff involving international intrigue and foreign agents was not the only opportunity Holmes had to serve the crown.

In “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” and “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” Holmes indirectly serves the interests of the same exalted personage. The clue to that connection, if you need one, is that Alexander Holder—the unhappy custodian of the Beryl Coronet—refers to “my illustrious client.” Surely the gentleman in question was then the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.

In both of these cases, as in the spy stories, Holmes’s task is to retrieve a McGuffin. The Beryl Coronet, a magnificent piece of jewelry, is “one of the most precious public possessions of the empire”—and yet the playboy prince pawns it to get ready cash! In “The Illustrious Client,” the object of the quest is the dirty diary of another playboy, Baron Gruner, which Holmes sees as the only way to tear Violet De Merville’s affections away from the scoundrel.

Unsurprisingly, Holmes turns to burglary once again to get his hands on the diary. And once again he gets away with it. The story closes with these words: “Sherlock Holmes was threatened with a prosecution for burglary, but when an object is good and a client is sufficiently illustrious, even the rigid British law becomes human and elastic. My friend has not yet stood in the dock.”

How illustrious? When Sir James Damery refuses to reveal the name, Holmes demurs: “I am accustomed to have mystery at one end of my cases, but to have it at both ends is too confusing. I fear, Sir James, that I must decline to act.” And yet, he does act—even though Sir James never gives up the name. But at the end of the case, Watson glimpses the armorial bearings of their ultimate client on the brougham that picks up Sir James. He tries to blurt out the name to Holmes, but the latter stops him. “It is a loyal friend and a chivalrous gentleman,” says Holmes. “Let that now and forever be enough for us.” We can be sure, though, that Miss De Merville’s friend was royal as well as loyal.

“The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” is a favorite story of many Sherlockians. “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone,” by contrast, ranks dead last on most lists. Its plot is onion-skin thin and much of the dialogue wooden. However, it is within the topic at hand because the case again involves royal jewelry. For a change, someone other than Holmes has committed a burglary—the hundred-thousand-pound burglary of the Crown Diamond, also called the Mazarin Stone. The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, and a reluctant Lord Cantlemere hire Holmes to get it back by any means necessary.

Billy the page can get along with the Prime Minister and has nothing against the Foreign Secretary, but he can’t stand Lord Cantlemere. “Neither can Mr. Holmes, sir,” Billy tells Watson. “You see, he don’t believe in Mr. Holmes and was against employing him.” Holmes gets his revenge in the end by slipping the recovered Mazarin Stone into the politician’s own overcoat and pretending to find it there. Like a certain monarch, Cantlemere is not amused. In fact, he lives up to Billy’s description of him as “a stiff ’un.” But ultimately he is forced to acknowledge the nation’s debt to Holmes and to withdraw his skepticism about the sleuth’s professional powers. Holmes, not entirely mollified, twists the knife a bit as he dismissively refuses to explain how he got the diamond back:

“This case is but half-finished; the details can wait. No doubt, Lord Cantlemere, your pleasure in telling of this successful result in the exalted circle to which you return will be some small atonement for my practical joke. Billy, you will show his Lordship out, and tell Mrs. Hudson that I should be glad if she would send up dinner for two as soon as possible.”

Why did Holmes even take the Mazarin Stone case in the face of Cantlemere’s skepticism and their clear mutual dislike? Possibly an ego-driven desire to prove the skeptic wrong was a factor. But, surely, so was patriotism. For Sherlock Holmes was not a man to let “the folly of a monarch or the blundering of a minister” (“The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”) keep him from answering the call of duty. For no matter the personalities involved, he always stood ready to be of service… to crown and country.

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Dan Andriacco, a long-time Sherlockian, is the author of Baker Street Beat: An Eclectic Collection of Sherlockian Scribblings and nine Holmes-themed mystery novels and collections. His amateur sleuth, Sebastian McCabe, and brother-in-law Jeff Cody appear most recently in Bookmarked for Murder. A frequent contributor to SHMM, Dan blogs at www.DanAndriacco.com.

1 This is the author’s opinion. I have a copy of her play and mean to anthologize it; I find it rather charming. By the way, not only was Nigel Bruce too ill to play Watson but he died on the show’s opening night. —Marvin Kaye

|SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY MAGAZINE

for crown and country |

|SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY MAGAZINE

for crown and country |

|SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY MAGAZINE

for crown and country |

|SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY MAGAZINE

for crown and country |