Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(2)

The death of Charles Dickens in June 1870 precipitated the single greatest mass arrival of such characters in the Caxton’s history. Mr. Torrans, the librarian at the time, at least had a little warning of the impending influx, for—as was traditional when new characters were about to join the Caxton—he had recently received a large quantity of pristine Dickens first editions in the post, each carefully wrapped in brown paper and string, and without a return address. No librarian had ever quite managed to figure out how the books came to be sent; old George Scott, Mr. Torrans’s predecessor, had come to the conclusion that the books simply wrapped and posted themselves, although by that stage Scott was quite mad, and spent most of his time engrossed in increasingly circular conversations with Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby, of which no good could possibly have come.

Of course, Mr. Torrans had been anticipating the appearance of the Dickens characters long before the death of the author himself and the subsequent arrival of the first editions. Some characters were simply destined for the Caxton from the moment that they first appeared in print, and Mr. Torrans would occasionally wander into the darker realms of the Caxton, where rooms were still in the process of formation, and try to guess which figures were likely to inhabit them. In the case of Dickens, the presence of a guide to the old coaching inns of Britain provided a clue to the future home of Samuel Pickwick, and a cheap bowl and toasting fork would serve as a reminder to Oliver Twist of the terrible early start to life that he had overcome. (Mr. Torrans was of the opinion that such a nudge was unnecessary under the circumstances, but the Caxton was mysterious in its ways.)

In fact, Mr. Torrans’s only concern was that the characters might include rather more of the unsavory sort than he might have preferred—he was not sure what he would do if forced to deal with a Quilp, or a Uriah Heep—so it came as a great relief to him when, for the most part, the influx was largely restricted to the more pleasant types, with the exception of old Fagin, who appeared to have been mellowed somewhat by the action of the noose. Hanging, thought Mr. Torrans, will do that to a man.

But the tale of the Dickens characters is for another time. For the present, we are concerned with one of the stranger stories from the Caxton’s annals, an occurrence that broke many of the library’s long-established rules and seemed destined, at one point, to undermine the entire delicate edifice of the institution.



In December 1893, the collective imagination of the British reading public suffered a shock unlike any in recent memory with the publication in the Strand Magazine of “The Final Problem,” in which Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his beloved Sherlock Holmes, sending him over a cliff at the Reichenbach Falls following a struggle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty. The illustrator Sidney Paget captured the hero’s final moments for readers, freezing him in a grapple with Moriarty, the two men leaning to the right, clearly on the verge of falling, Moriarty’s hat already disappearing into the void, foreshadowing the inevitable descent of the two men.

The result was a disaster for the Strand. Many readers immediately canceled their subscriptions in outrage, almost causing the collapse of the periodical, and for years after, staff would refer to Holmes’s death only as “a dreadful event.” Black armbands were allegedly worn by readers in mourning. Conan Doyle was shocked by the vehemence of the public’s reaction, but remained unrepentant.

It’s fair to say that Mr. Headley, who by that point had succeeded Mr. Torrans as the librarian upon the latter’s retirement, was just as shocked as anyone else. He was a regular subscriber to the Strand, and had followed the adventures of Holmes and Watson with both personal and professional interest: personal in the sense that he was an admiring, engrossed reader, and professional because he knew that, upon Conan Doyle’s death, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson would inevitably find their way to the Caxton. Still, he had been looking forward to many more years of their adventures, and so it was with no small amount of regret that he set aside the Strand after finishing “The Final Problem,” and wondered what could have possessed Conan Doyle to do such a thing to the character who had brought him both fame and fortune.

But Mr. Headley was no writer, and did not profess to understand the ways of a writer’s mind.



Let us step away from the Caxton for a moment, and consider the predicament of Arthur Conan Doyle in the year of publication for “The Final Problem.” In 1891, he had written to his mother, Mary Foley Doyle, confessing that “I think of slaying Holmes . . . and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.” In Conan Doyle’s case, those “better things” were historical novels, which he believed more worthy of his time and talents than what he described as the “elementary” Holmes stories, the choice of that word lending an unpleasing ambiguity to Holmes’s own use of the term in the tales.

Here, then, was the apparent reason for killing off Holmes, but upon Conan Doyle’s death a peculiar piece of manuscript was delivered to the Caxton Private Lending Library, tucked into the 1894 first edition of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, the volume that concluded with “The Final Problem.” It was written in a hand similar to Conan Doyle’s own, although with discernible differences in capitalization, and with an extensive footnote relating to the etymology of the word professor that was untypical of the author.

Attached to the manuscript was a letter, clearly written by Conan Doyle, detailing how he woke one morning in April 1893 to find this fragment lying on his desk. According to the letter, he wondered if it might not be the product of some form of automatic writing, for he was fascinated by the possibility of the subconscious—or even some supernatural agency—taking control of the writer in order to produce work. Perhaps, he went on to speculate, he had arisen in the night in a semiconscious state and commenced writing, for aspects of the script resembled his own. Upon the discovery of the manuscript he examined his right hand and discerned no trace of ink upon it, but was astounded to glance at his left and find that both the fingers and the edge of his palm were smudged with black, a revelation which forced him to seek the comfort and security of the nearest chair.