California at Berkeley.
Watson describes Mycroft’s body as “gross,” his fat hand “like the flipper of a seal.” His habits are unvarying and unathletic — “Jupiter is descending,” says Holmes when his brother condescends to call. Otherwise, “Mycroft has his rails and he runs on them. His Pall Mall lodgings, the Diogenes Club, Whitehall — that is his cycle.” (The Diogenes Club, described in “The Greek Interpreter,” is a club — which Sherlock Holmes finds “soothing” at times — for unclubbable men, forbidden by by-law to take any notice of one another, or to talk, save in the Strangers’ Room.) But his detective powers are immense. “It was Adams, of course,” he says to his more active brother about a case the latter has been working to solve. Action, of course, is “not my métier,” but theorizing and thought from an armchair — in that, Mycroft Holmes excels. The passage from “The Greek Interpreter” in which the brothers compete in deductions about a stranger on the street is a classic, so much so that Doyle used it as one of his “readings” when he lectured in North America in 1894:
“An old soldier, I perceive,” said Sherlock.
“And very recently discharged,” remarked the brother.
“Served in India, I see.”
“And a non-commissioned officer.”
And so on. Not for nothing has it been suggested that Nero Wolfe, the corpulent, chair-bound detective created by Rex Stout in Fer-de-Lance (1934), The Doorbell Rang (1965), and several dozen other novels, is a relative of Mycroft Holmes.
MRS. HUDSON. The best appreciation of Holmes’s landlady, Mrs. Hudson, is an article by Vincent Starrett that appeared in the 1944 anthology Profile by Gaslight. He writes of her possible background, her management of the house at 221B Baker Street, her staff, and her loyalty to Holmes, shown particularly in her patience with his foibles. Other writings about her have interpreted her relationship with the detective in various ways, some suggesting that it was peculiarly personal. Certainly the kind of devotion seen in “The Empty House,” in which she repeatedly crawls to Holmes’s wax bust “on my knees” and in danger of her life to adjust its position, suggests something more than the usual relationship between tenant and landlady.
But “landlady” may be slightly misleading. In story after story, Mrs. Hudson is presented as the “housekeeper,” and it seems possible that rather than owning the house outright, she had it on a long-term lease and proceeded to rent rooms to gentlemen. Watson does speak, in “The Dying Detective,” of Holmes’s “princely” rental payments to her. On the other hand Holmes frequently treats her as an employee, demanding refreshment and ignoring scheduled mealtimes, and abuses the fabric of the building when it suits him. The most famous instance is his indoor target practice, in which he shoots the initials V.R. (for Victoria Regina) into the wall — an activity which must at least have filled the house with plaster-dust.
There may well have been a housemaid at 221B, although she is never mentioned, and certainly there was Billy the pageboy, at least during some periods. Other staff are uncertain; Holmes in “Thor Bridge” speaks of a “new cook,” which may imply that there had been a former cook, or may mean that Mrs. Hudson had finally delegated the kitchen duties to an employee. Breakfast may have been her forte, for it is mentioned in story after story, and in “The Naval Treaty” Holmes offers the high praise that Mrs. Hudson has “as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman,” a comment that has led to the general impression that she was in fact Scots. Then there is the famous reference in “A Scandal in Bohemia” to “Mrs. Turner,” one of those cruxes that Sherlockians love; it has been variously interpreted as meaning a cook, a temporary replacement while Mrs. Hudson was holidaying or unwell, or simply absent-mindedness on someone’s part.
Of the woman herself we know little, not even her first name, although without evidence she has been identified with the “Martha” who is the housekeeper in “His Last Bow.” Holmes once speaks of her cronies, but their identity is as unknown as Mrs. Hudson’s taste in amusement, food, or furnishings. Even her physique can only be inferred from a reference to her “stately tread.” What matters to the reader of the Sherlock Holmes tales is her reliable maintenance of the house in Baker Street, and her presence (in only fourteen of the sixty stories) as the motherly figure without whom the sometimes childlike Holmes would be lost in London. For that role, readers remember and honour her. Vincent Starrett again: “It is proverbial that landladies never die.”
BILLY. The pageboy of 221B Baker Street appears in ten of the stories, only three times by name. The “Billy” who ushers in visitors in The Valley of Fear, circa 1889, can hardly be the same boy who is there for “Thor Bridge” and “The Mazarin Stone” more than a decade later. A succession of boys is the obvious explanation, and it may be as few as two of them, since the appearances are clustered, most in stories that take place in the 1880s, two in the early 1900s. Among the latter is the passage in “The Mazarin Stone” that has made Billy the object of great affection among readers:
It was pleasant to Dr. Watson to find himself once more in the untidy room of the first floor in Baker Street.... Finally, his eyes came round to the fresh and smiling face of Billy, the young but very wise and tactful page, who had helped a little to fill up the gap of loneliness and isolation which surrounded the saturnine figure of the great detective.
“It all seems very unchanged, Billy. You don’t change, either....”
A mythical character can remain unchanged for a quarter of a century; perhaps Billy now deserves that title.
THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS. The youngsters who helped Holmes in a few cases would be of the smallest importance to modern readers had not the American Sherlockians of the 1930s chosen the name “Baker Street Irregulars” for their organization. They might almost have been the same people, for the children of (say) 1890 were middle-aged folks in 1934, when the American BSI had its beginning.
But the original Irregulars were Londoners (one presumes Cockney accents), urchins or “street arabs” in the contemporary phrase. They are seen in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, where their wages are fixed at one shilling a day (around $5 in modern buying power), and their leader is Wiggins. After these two early cases they return only in “The Crooked Man,” when the leader is Simpson, the earlier generation of boys having presumably grown past the age when they could be of use to Holmes as unobtrusive spies. In one other case, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes uses a boy (Cartwright), but as a lone agent on Dartmoor rather than as the leader of a London gang.
“Irregulars” are combatants not from the regular army (George Washington used the word about his own ragged troops). Applying it to the boys of Baker Street (and there may have been girls too; the text is indefinite), Holmes means investigators who are independent of the police. He uses the same word in “Lady Frances Carfax” to mean himself and Watson.
Throughout the tales, Watson is made to drop hints about other cases in which Sherlock Holmes was engaged. Usually he makes mention of the other business that was under way at the time, but sometimes he compares the current case to some other, and on several occasions Holmes does the same thing, drawing both on his direct experience and on his reading.
Such allusions range from the generic (“a very commonplace little murder,” Holmes calls his current business in “The Naval Treaty”) to the memorable:
As I turn over the pages, I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker. Here also I find an account
