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“I’M THE OLD MAN”

H.M. and the Brothers Holmes

by Dan Andriacco

“I’m the old man,” announced H.M., suddenly inflating his chest and assuming an air of aloof majesty which would have done credit to King Edward the Seventh having his portrait painted. “If there’s any flumdiddling of the police to be done, I’m the man to do it.” A spasm of ghoulish amusement crossed his face.

Thus speaks the unmistakable voice of Sir Henry Merrivale in My Late Wives (1946). Vain, profane, atrocious in grammar and outrageous in behavior, H.M.’s penchant for confronting and solving seemingly impossible crimes makes him one of great detectives of the Golden Age of mystery fiction. He is also one of the funniest.

“The Man Who Explained Miracles,” as he was called in the title of the only H.M. novelette, sprang from the incredibly fertile mind of John Dickson Carr, writing under the transparent pseudonym of Carter Dickson. Carr is well known to Sherlockians as the author of The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the co-author, with Adrian Conan Doyle, of half a dozen Sherlock Holmes pastiches in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes.

Although both H.M. and Holmes could be labeled “eccentric” by conventional standards and are both honored by France as members of the Legion of Honor, they would seem to have little else in common. In fact, it would be easy to list the ways in which they are different. Sir Henry is a baronet whose family has held the title for nine generations in a direct line, while Holmes is the descendent of country squires. The baronet is a fighting Socialist in the early days and a member of the Senior Conservatives Club later; Holmes is apolitical. H.M. has a never-seen wife who spends most of her time in the south of France1, two daughters, “two no good sons-in-law,” and at least one grandson in contrast to the bachelor Holmes. One could go on. A close reading of the Merrivale oeuvre, however, leads to the conclusion that Carr’s passion for Holmes had a profound impact on the creation of his own detective.

H.M. was born in 1871, making him a younger contemporary of Sherlock Holmes. He sometimes claims that the ancient top hat he sports in the early books (later replaced by a Panama hat, a bowler, or a tweed cap) was a gift to him from Queen Victoria herself, reminding us that he came to adulthood in the Victorian era. Sherlock Holmes, we can be assured from the Sidney Paget illustrations, also wore a top hat on the streets of London. But in The Plague Court Murders and The Unicorn Murders, the old man has a nickname that evokes the older Holmes brother—some of his underlings call him “Mycroft.”

The comparison between H.M. and M.H. goes beyond what Carr frequently calls the baronet’s “corporation” (i.e., paunch), the description of his hand in several books as “a big flipper,” his fondness for cigars and his Mycroft-like laziness in the early adventures. Like Mycroft, H.M. holds an ambiguous office in the British government. In The Plague Court Murders (1934), the first H.M. novel, narrator Ken Blake describes him as the former head of the Counter-Espionage Department who is now “tinkering with the Military Intelligence Department.” If Mycroft is the original “M” of the British Secret Service, as many pastiche writers (including me) have posited, then Merrivale is one of his successors.

H.M.’s Mycroft nickname traces back to a letter to Blake from one of the old man’s agents in Constantinople. The agent wrote: “I tell you, if our H.M. had a little more dignity and would always remember to put on a necktie and would refrain from humming the words to questionable songs when he lumbers through rooms of lady typists, he wouldn’t make a bad Mycroft. He’s got the brain, my lad, he’s got the brain …” And he employs it solving mostly “impossible” crimes. Whatever H.M.’s title or function at his Whitehall office overlooking the embankment, he is in reality from this first recorded exploit to the last an amateur sleuth and unofficial consultant to Scotland Yard—an unpaid Sherlock Holmes.

Another apparent link to the elder Holmes is Sir Henry’s membership in the Diogenes Club, which Mycroft helped to found for the convenience of “the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town.” Or is this a different Diogenes Club? Throughout the H.M. series, the old man’s membership is almost always mentioned in connection with a certain card game. “Poker players at the Diogenes Club do not get far in attempting to read his face,” is how Carr put it in The Gilded Man. One wonders how to say “ace in the hole” in Latin—or with no words at all. For according to The Red Widow Murders, the inexorable club rule enforced in the downstairs rooms (“except in the Visitors’ Room”) is: “Herein the brethren shall speak Latin or else keep silent.” In Mycroft’s club, according to brother Sherlock, the Diogenes had a somewhat different club rule: “No member is permitted to take the least notice of the other one.”

At any rate, the Diogenes Club is said to be a good spot for “sittin’ and thinkin’,” which is how H.M. often describes his method of sleuthing. Whereas Sherlock Holmes personifies logic, H.M. disdains it in The Unicorn Murders: “Believe me, I’ve seen a heap of logical explanations in my time; I know a feller named Humphrey Masters who can give you logical explanations enough to freeze your reason; and the only trouble with them is that they’re usually wrong.” So what is his method? “Method? Oh, I dunno. I just sit and think.” In practice, however, H.M.’s modus operandi are closer to those of the Great Detective than this humble description implies.

From early days in his career, for example, Holmes was “a walking calendar of crime,” as young Stamford calls him. And the world’s first consulting detective put this knowledge of historical crimes to good effect in solving new ones. Here he is doing that in his first case with Watson at his side, A Study in Scarlet:

“Then, of course, this blood belongs to the second individual—presumably the murderer, if murder has been committed. It reminds me of the circumstances attendant on the death of Van Jansen, in Utrecht, in the year ’34. Do you remember the case, Gregson?”

“No, sir.”

“Read it up—you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.”

Again and again over the years that follow, Holmes turns to his commonplace books for details of cases that he remembers filing away. In The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor, he calls this “the knowledge of pre-existing cases which services me so well.” And then he gives a practical demonstration: “There was a parallel instance in Aberdeen some years back and something on very much the same lines at Munich the year after the Franco-Prussian War.”

H.M., too, frequently calls on his vast knowledge of global crime to make observations significant to the solution of the case at hand. Near the end of Nine—And Death Makes Ten, for example, he says: “In France, years ago, the very same thing happened by accident: and very nearly cost one woman a whole lot of money because they wouldn’t believe she was herself. For years now I’ve been waitin’ for some clever blighter to apply the same dodge to deliberate crime, and lo and behold, somebody has.” Just so we know that the old man isn’t gulling us, the author cites the source in a footnote—Clues and Crime: The Science of Criminal Investigation by H.T.F. Rhodes. (Similarly, And So to Murder cites C.J.S. Thompson’s Poison Mysteries Unsolved to support a precedent to which H.M. alludes.)

Surprisingly, however, H.M. doesn’t compare the clue of the missing painting in The Curse of the Bronze Lamp to another portrait removed for exactly the same reason in The Hound of the Baskervilles. And yet we know that he was familiar with the Canon. In Night at the Mocking Widow, the old sinner literally throws a bunch of Russian novels out a window and tells a young girl named Pam to instead “read some fellers named Dumas and Mark Twain and Stevenson and Chesterton and Conan Doyle. They’re dead, yes; but they can still whack the britches off of anybody at tellin’ a story.” About forty pages later, Pam is clutching a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

H.M.’s knowledge of the Canon runs deep. He says in My Late Wives: “That was where the exquisiteness of this swine’s plans struck me in the seat of the pants like Patrick Cairns’s harpoon.” Cairns is, of course, the killer in The Adventure of Black Peter, a Sherlock Holmes story from that memorable year 1895, but that is not an analogy that would occur to a merely casual acquaintance of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Interestingly, both H.M. and Holmes evince a curious blind spot when it comes to finding helpful analogies in their own earlier adventures. The illusion that allows Frederick Manning to disappear from a swimming pool in A Graveyard to Let is essentially the same one employed by the lovely Lady Helen to vanish in The Curse of the Bronze Lamp just three books earlier, yet H.M. apparently never notices it. And if Holmes detected the obvious similarities among The Red-headed League, The Stock-broker’s Clerk and The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, he never says so. Nor does he compare The Adventure of the Six Napoleons to The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, The Adventure of the Second Stain to The Naval Treaty or the first half of The Valley of Fear to The Adventure of the Norwood Builder.

Another resemblance between the two sleuths is their attitude toward justice. If Mycroft Holmes occasionally is the British government, his younger brother often puts himself above the law entirely by letting the criminal go. “Well, well,” he quips in The Adventure of the Three Gables, “I suppose I shall have to compound a felony as usual.” He usually justifies such actions by reference to a higher law. “I suppose that I am commuting a felony,” he concedes in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, “but it is just possible that I am saving a soul.” H.M. allows the criminals to escape in The Punch and Judy Murders, Behind the Crimson Blind and The Cavalier’s Cup for a much less elevated reason—he simply happens to like them. In Behind the Crimson Blind, he even blows up a ship in the harbor to help the villain (not a murderer) escape. In several other cases he enables a killer to escape in a different way—through suicide.

Beyond the character of H.M. himself, the Merrivale corpus evokes the Canon through both blatant and subtle call-backs in the dialogue.

“You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes,” observes a character in The Punch and Judy Murders. Lady Virginia Brace in The Cavalier’s Cup challenges Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters with, “Couldn’t you deduce that, like Sherlock Holmes, from my first name?” In The Peacock Feather Murders, a character asks, “Will you continue with your Holmesian analysis, or do you think it would spoil your effect if I merely confessed?” In none of these instances, be it noted, was the speaker addressing Sir Henry Merrivale.

In Death in Five Boxes, the male romantic lead (Carr books always have one, along with a matching female) warns that a certain line of thought would be “theorizing without data.” (“It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts,” Sherlock Holmes famously said in The Adventure of the Second Stain.) Later, another man in that novel suspects the female romantic lead of being subject to “certain pawky humors.” He seems to regard that as a flaw, whereas Holmes clearly meant it as a compliment when he said at the beginning of The Valley of Fear that Watson was developing “a certain pawky humour.”

Although H.M. himself eschews logic elsewhere, his bookseller friend Ralph Danvers uses decidedly Sherlockian logic in discussing the central problem of Night at the Mocking Widow with his old friend of H.M.:

“If you have stated the circumstances correctly, it is beyond the bounds of human reason and therefore impossible.”

“Uh-huh,” H.M. agrees.

“Then somehow (unwittingly, that is) the circumstances have not been correctly stated!”

Everyone remembers Holmes’s often-stated dictum that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” But Holmes also said in The Adventure of the Priory School, “It is impossible as I have stated it and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong.” Surely Danvers must have had this observation in mind.

The Canonical roots of a simple four-word sentence in My Late Wives are equally obvious. “I am Roger Bewlay” is almost as dramatic as the powerful “I am Birdy Edwards!” from The Valley of Fear. (And is it just a coincidence that one of the victims in My Late Wives lived at Crowborough, the East Sussex town where Arthur Conan Doyle lived out his last years?)

When the killer in The Red Widow Murders confesses under the false impression that he is going to die and thus insures that he will die via hanging, Chief Inspector Masters confides, “And I can’t say, between ourselves, that it’s very likely to weigh heavily on my conscience.” As most of will never forget, Sherlock Holmes says almost exactly the same thing regarding Dr. Roylott’s demise at the end of The Adventure of the Speckled Band.

Dialogue aside, echoes of Baker Street permeate the adventures of Sir Henry Merrivale in ways big and small:

Bill Cartwright smokes “a curved pipe of the Sherlock Holmes variety” in And So to Murder. H.M. also smokes a pipe in some of the early books, although he is seldom seen in the later ones without a vile black cigar. We know from a Paget illustration of The Greek Interpreter that Mycroft was also a cigar smoker.

The Cavalier’s Cup, in the H.M. novel of that name, is kept in the vaults of Cox & Co. bank in London. This is the same institution where Dr. Watson deposited his battered tin dispatch box with those priceless notes of his unrecorded cases. One wishes that the manuscript of The Cavalier’s Cup had been left there as well. This is the last and weakest of the book-length H.M. adventures. The supposed comic relief, Signor Ravioli, talks like Chico Marks. “I’m-a-Dr. Watson,” he declares, putting on a black felt hat which he seems to think is Watsonian.

Although described as a “whisky-only” or a whisky and punch drinker in other books, the old man and a friend share a bottle of Beaune in The Red Widow Murders, evoking Dr. Watson’s Beaune-soaked lunch in The Sign of Four. And the description of the murder victim’s body in The Punch and Judy Murders strongly recalls that of Bartholomew Sholto in the same Holmes novel. His bald head is leaned against his shoulder with a grin on his face.

The name of a typist in My Late Wives, Mildred Lyons, inevitably recalls Laura Lyons, also a typist, of Baskervilles fame. The Sherlockian salute is subtler than the name of the winsome Maureen Holmes in Behind the Crimson Blind, but unmistakable nonetheless.

The unconventional, unforgettable Sir Henry Merrivale appeared in 22 novels, one novelette and one short story between 1934 and 1956. Sherlockians would find them well worth seeking out, for there is much that they will find familiar in the wacky world of H.M.

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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 Only in the third to last novel do we learn her name, Clementine, and that she is a blond former chorus girl. “Clemmie’s years and years younger than I am.”