Martin Greenberg - Sherlock Holmes In America

“We- I -trusted her to do the right thing. And so, it appears, she did. Read it aloud, please.”

My hands were shaking as I looked at the epistle. “‘My dear Miss Edwards: The gentleman who bears this letter is the man who both saved your father from the gibbet and yet condemned him to death. He is in need of a redemption that only you can provide. Do with him as you will.’”

There was nothing further to read, but the letter’s contents did not end there. At the bottom, instead of a signature, there was simply a mark: a triangle within a circle. Her blood had swamped this bit, rendering it a dark brown stain, like the brand I had seen on Birdy Edwards, and the corpse at Birlstone. Like the brand I now bore on my back. The Trinity and Eternity. The solution to the final problem.

I let the missive flutter to the ground. At last, I understood.

“This has nothing to do with the Fenians, Sherlock. Or the Irish. It was always about the Germans, who mean to have war, and war they shall get. They would never have trusted an English turncoat, especially not one of recent vintage. Furthermore, although you were retired, we needed you out of the country, that the memory of Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and the South Downs might fade. But an Irish-American named James McKenna… ”

“Is dead,” I said. “And dead he shall stay.” My promise to Maddie overrode everything, even my loyalty to the Crown, even my blood ties to my brother. Sherlock Holmes’s undying loyalty was and always would be to England, but Jim McKenna would never betray her. There was another sort of loyalty, that which Maddie had taught me, and if that were the higher, then so be it.

“Very well, then. May he rest in peace. But there is now a nobleman of the Hun persuasion in fact, who very much desires to meet with you. In fact… coincidentally… he is living not far from here. I think you take my meaning.”

I smiled, reflecting the memory of her last smile, a memory that would never leave me. Where Mycroft was concerned, there was never a coincidence; in the chess game of life, he was always two moves ahead. “What is this Junker ’s name?”

Mycroft exhaled in relief. “Von Bork. Funnily enough, a colleague of your friend, von Herling, whom you encountered in Skibbereen. You shall enter his service on the morrow.”

So Maddie had not died in vain. For King and Country, and for the United States of America, she would always live. “Agreed,” I said, my nostrils flaring. Truth to tell, I was looking forward to a second encounter with the sneering Prussian and his agent in my country.

Business settled, he rose to leave. “One last question,” Mycroft said, on his way out the door. “If James McKenna is dead, by what name shall you call yourself?”

“Altamont,” I replied.

Michael Walsh, the former music critic of Time magazine, is the author of the novels Exchange Alley , As Time Goes By (the prequel/ sequel to the movie Casablanca ), and And All the Saints , a winner of the 2004 American Book Awards for fiction. His latest novel, Hostile Intent , was published in September 2009 by Kensington Books. Under the name “Michéal Breathnach,” he contributed “The Coole Park Problem” to Ghosts in Baker Street . For good measure, he co-wrote with Gail Parent the 2002 hit Disney Channel movie Cadet Kelly .

Few figures embody both a place and an era like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Fewer still conceal such a welter of internal contradictions beneath such a confident-but deeply misleading-exterior.

The very image of the late Victorian British Empire, Conan Doyle was born in Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, and came to consider himself the very soul of Englishness, and yet-on both his father’s and his mother’s side-was descended from a long line of Irishmen, and Catholics to boot. A Catholic in a Presbyterian city-no matter its large number of his co-religionists; an Irishman in England; and an Englishman to the world: it is little wonder that these stresses would so bedevil their author that only his most famous creation could give them voice, and resolution.

“I am half Irish, you know,” Conan Doyle once said, explaining an outburst of temper, “and my British half has the devil of a job to hold the hotheaded rascal in.” So far, so stereotypical: the image of the quicktempered Hibernian was one already long established in the British hierarchy of racial classification. And, indeed, Conan Doyle himself seemed to accept the conventional archetypes of Irishness, using them as a kind of handy shorthand to explain some “un-English” behavior or other. Stumping for a Liberal Unionist candidate, he recalls in Memories and Adventures that he found himself being pushed on stage to address an audience of three thousand: “I hardly knew myself what I said, but the Irish part of me came to my aid and supplied me with a torrent of more or less incoherent words and similes which roused the audience greatly, though it read afterwards more like a comic stump speech than a serious political effort.” Temper and the gift of the gab: two hallmarks of the stage Irishman, which Conan Doyle obviously, desperately, did not want to be.

For at the same time, he was dead set against Gladstone’s policy of Home Rule for the perennially fractious colony of Ireland. As Britain moved inexorably toward the twin crises of the Great War and the Easter Rising, Conan Doyle, at the peak of his literary fame, was essentially a collaborator with the enemy.

It is my contention in this brief monograph that Conan Doyle’s distaste for his own Irishness, lightly and comically alluded to in the excerpts above, was in reality deep-rooted and far-reaching. It is largely masked in his letters, now available in Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters [1] , but we need not trouble ourselves with mere mundane reality. The proof is precisely where it ought to be: in the Canon, which is a veritable feast of anti-Hibernian sentiment that would make the most bigoted Englishman blush. Do we want a villain? And not just any villain, but the Napoleon of Crime, the spider at the center of a vast web of criminality that affects all England? Very well, Conan Doyle-through the amanuensis of a sturdy Scotsman, Dr. John Hamish Watson-gives us a corker in Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime.

Does Moriarty want a second? A man of ruthless cunning and one of the finest shots in the Empire? Very well, then-Colonel Sebastian Moran is just your man. Throughout the Canon, Irishmen are nearly always portrayed in an unflattering light, as men of either overt criminality or, at the very least, violence. In addition to Moriarty and Moran, consider McMurdo, the former prizefighter and servant to Bartholomew Sholto in The Sign of the Four who, tellingly, had once boxed with Holmes. “If instead of standin’ there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I’d ha’ known you without a question.”

McMurdo-a name with deep significance for Conan Doyle, as we shall see-oft recurs (or perhaps “occurs,” given the sequencing of the stories) in the Sherlock Holmes novel that is itself a veritable symphony of anti-Hibernian sentiment; I refer, of course, to The Valley of Fear.

In this novel, which no Irishman or Irish-American can read without shuddering, we find proof positive of not only Conan Doyle’s self-loathing, but his active support of the forces that would crush the brave Irish men and women of Vermissa Valley. Adumbrating Liam O’Flaherty’s classic about the Irish revolution, The Informer , Conan Doyle presents us with a “hero” who goes by a number of names, including Jack McMurdo, Birdy Edwards, and John Douglas. This traitor, working for the despised and brutal Pinkerton Agency, infiltrates the Scowrers in a Pennsylvania coal town, where they are fighting for justice, and eventually breaks them. Like Gypo Nolan, Edwards flees his treachery and heads for California, where he strikes gold. Later, in England as “Jack Douglas,” he is acquitted of murder, but is eventually lost overboard as he flees again, this time by sea. So, in a sense, the story does have a happy ending after all.