Martin Greenberg - Sherlock Holmes In America

He spread out his hands, inviting us to appreciate his makeshift disguise. Seeing him without his false whiskers, his legs no longer bowed, floppy-brimmed hat no longer drooping over his prominent brow, I was amazed that we’d ever been duped. The makeup hadn’t been that heavy, really. He’d made little effort to conceal his features. No, much as it pains me to admit-and I’m sorely tempted to strike these lines out-it was the man’s superior acting that had carried the day.

[ The above paragraph was , in fact, inked out with a heavy hand, and the content of the expurgated section was only discovered after painstaking X-ray analysis of the original manuscript.-S.B.H. ]

“I assume Mr. Tabor told you about the lost silver map swindle at the reception last night,” the Whelp said. “It certainly couldn’t have been one of the other guests, as you took such pains not to converse with them. I myself heard of the scheme in an altogether more direct fashion: in the course of my explorations of Leadville, I was approached by not one but three ‘confidence men’ plying variations on the tale. They were all most admirable thespians in their own way, and more convincing than many an Iago or Shylock I’ve seen. In fact, for all your successes in the theatre, Mr. Sasanoff, I daresay you wouldn’t last a second as a buttoner in a public house. Your ‘Mr. Goodfellow’ had about him far too much of the actor’s West End and not nearly enough of the Cockney’s East.”

This slap was, at last, too much for Sasanoff, and his surprise boiled away with the searing heat of rage.

“You arrogant pup!” he thundered. “I’ll see to it you never appear on the stage again!”

The Whelp shrugged mildly.

“As you like it.” He turned to go, then stopped and glanced back over his shoulder. “Oh, and by the way-you may keep the watch. I bought it in Indianapolis for a dollar.”

And with that, his long legs carried him up the brushy incline slanting down from the road.

I never saw him again. Nor did I hear him spoken of until years afterward, and then in an entirely different (and eternally irritating) context.

For his part, Sasanoff refused to acknowledge the Whelp’s existence or even his absence after that day. Queries from our fellow actors he answered with icy stares and silence. It was as if the man had never been with our company at all.

“You will not reveal what happened here. Ever. To anyone,” Sasanoff growled as we trudged back to town in evening’s gathering gloom.

I placed my right hand over my heart.

“I will never tell another living soul,” I vowed solemnly.

It was, if I may allow myself a moment of immodesty, the finest performance of the day.

Robert Pohle is the coauthor (with Doug Hart) of Sherlock Holmes on the Screen (A.S. Barnes, 1977), and has made other contributions to Sherlockian filmography such as The Films of Christopher Lee . He is also a member of the Western Writers of America, and author or coauthor of a number of novels in that genre, including The Fledgling Outlaw (which features a Sherlockian vignette, and of which the late John Bennett Shaw, BSI, memorably wrote the author, “You do have everything in it except Bing Crosby as a drunken Irish priest!”) Robert lives in Florida with his wife, Maryann, and part of the year in New Mexico with his daughter, actress-singer Rita Pohle. Having once argued, in the presence of Dame Jean Conan Doyle, that Holmes never visited America before the period of His Last Bow , Pohle is astonished to have unearthed the present manuscript by Dr. Watson.

“Very sorry to knock you up before dawn, Watson,” said Holmes, handing me a steaming mug of tea, “but it’s the custom here in the West, you know-and we must get an early start if we’re to overtake him.”

“Thank you for not giving me any of that vile stuff that passes for coffee out here,” I replied.

“It’s the buffalo chips that give it body,” murmured Deputy Marshal Ames, stirring under his blanket. “Don’t go criticizin’ American coffee, Doc.”

“Don’t fret,” said Holmes, passing a mug his way, “I brewed you a cup of your own.”

“’Sides, you know you’re damn fortunate,” continued the Marshal, taking a gulp and then slurping the excess liquid from the corner of his moustache, “gettin’ either tea or coffee in Mormon country… let alone anything stronger,” he added, pouring a thin stream from a glass flask into his mug.

Neither the Marshal nor I realized yet that the rattlesnake slithering toward his heel was shortly to send me on the ride of my life.

But I get ahead of my story.

Readers of A Study in Scarlet will recall that Sherlock Holmes had apprehended an American from Utah named Jefferson Hope for the London murders of two of his fellow citizens named Drebber and Stangerson. Hope, it appeared, was seeking revenge for the death at their hands of his lost love Lucy Ferrier. The case never came to trial because Hope died in prison of an aortic aneurism the same night Holmes presented him in handcuffs to Inspectors Gregson and Lestrade of Scotland Yard.

Scotland Yard, and indeed all those who look after the wheels of justice, appeared satisfied that those wheels had turned fully. But Holmes was not; far from it. For there was an accomplice of Hope’s who got off scot-free: someone, apparently an athletic young man impersonating an elderly woman calling herself Mrs. Sawyer, who came brazenly into our very rooms at Baker Street in answer to a lure Holmes had placed in the newspapers, an advertisement for a “found” wedding ring.

“Mrs. Sawyer” gave us a patently mendacious story about the ring belonging to her “girl Sally” who would be in dreadful trouble with a brutish husband named Tom Dennis if it wasn’t recovered; but when Holmes followed her, clinging to the back of the cab, “she” gave him the slip by leaping out of it in full motion. And subsequently, when Holmes asked Hope who his accomplice had been, Hope had responded provokingly with a wink and replied, “I can tell my own secrets, but I don’t get other people into trouble!” Though Holmes acknowledged that Hope’s “friend” had done the job smartly, it still rankled him bitterly to leave this part of the case unclosed.

Finally, a ray of light appeared from a familiar quarter: a loud ring at the bell, an audible expression of resigned martyrdom from Mrs. Hudson, a patter of bare feet in the hall and on the stairs, a tap on our chamber door, and then the entrance of young Wiggins, with all the ceremony (or lack of it) befitting a minikin street Arab who was also chief of the Baker Street irregulars.

“Got ’er!” said Wiggins, with considerable satisfaction.

“Have you, by God!” cried Holmes, springing to his feet.

The boys, it transpired, had been circulating along the route Holmes had followed when he clung to the back of the four-wheeler. Holmes reasoned that the sight of an elderly lady rocketing from a moving cab might have excited comment-and indeed it had-and that a doorway that admitted a lady who exited as a gentleman might also have drawn curious eyes. This was the sort of territory where the irregulars were at their best, and it didn’t take many questions before the exact address was run to ground.

“Ladies into gents is an easy one,” said Wiggins.

“Is it really?” I asked.

“It’s common as a ha’penny upright,” said Wiggins.

“Good gracious!” said I.

“Capital!” cried Holmes.