The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 1.6
The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 1.6
Featuring Phantom Zone villains, the Wright 'brothers' and flamingo hypotheses
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Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Holmes makes bold deductions about a country doctor.
And now, the story continues…
He had risen and paced the room as he spoke. Now he halted in the recess of the window. There was such a ring of conviction1 in his voice that I glanced up in surprise.
“My dear fellow, how can you possibly be so sure of that?”
“For the very simple reason that I see the dog himself2 on our very door-step, and there is the ring of its owner. Don’t move, I beg you, Watson. He is a professional brother3 of yours, and your presence may be of assistance to me. Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill4. What does Dr. James Mortimer, the man of science, ask of Sherlock Holmes, the specialist in crime? Come in!”
The appearance of our visitor was a surprise to me, since I had expected a typical country practitioner. He was a very tall, thin man, with a long nose like a beak5, which jutted out between two keen, grey eyes, set closely together and sparkling brightly from behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was clad in a professional but rather slovenly6 fashion, for his frock-coat was dingy and his trousers frayed7. Though young, his long back was already bowed, and he walked with a forward thrust of his head and a general air of peering benevolence. As he entered his eyes fell upon8 the stick in Holmes’s hand, and he ran towards it with an exclamation of joy. “I am so very glad,” said he. “I was not sure whether I had left it here or in the Shipping Office9. I would not lose that stick for the world10.”
This should not be confused with the rings of conviction that surround the Phantom Zone villains in the opening scenes of Superman: The Movie, as the Krypton council delivers their grim verdict.
In modern detective circles, this ‘I’ll just take a sneaky peek through the window’ manoeuvre from Holmes is known as a ‘Baker Street Swindle’.
While Holmes is speaking metaphorically here, professional brothers were, in fact, commonplace in the era. The so-called Wright Brothers, for example, weren’t biologically related, with Orville having been hired by Wilbur to lend an air of fraternal legitimacy to his scatterbrained only child aeronautical ventures.
Conan Doyle is working incredibly hard to make this moment a dramatic one. A bold literary ploy, given that he’s primarily talking about a man coming to retrieve a misplaced stick.
At this stage in the paragraph, Conan Doyle would like the reader to at least countenance the possibility that Dr Mortimer is a flamingo.
‘Professional but rather slovenly’ was a common dress code for weddings or charity balls or coal mine canary funerals.
Around about now, we should be abandoning the flamingo hypothesis.
Well-to-do gentlemen of the nineteenth century would often replace their biological eyes with glass ones that, with practice, they could learn to pop out of their head to express delight or surprise or lust for a cartoon rabbit dressed as a lady.
The Shipping Office is where Londoners would often go if they wanted to register their interest in ‘shipping’ a romance between fictional characters (eg Heathcliff and Catherine or Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy or Ebenezer Scrooge and The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.)
An obvious lie, given his carelessness with the stick so far. Maybe Mortimer’s not to be trusted. Maybe he is a flamingo.