The World’s Greatest Detective sure does very little in the way of detecting sometimes, doesn’t he?
Still, everyone needs an off week, as Arthur Conan Doyle was clearly having when he wrote…
‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ (1892)
The Case
Approached by the Germanic Colonel Lysander Stark and sworn to secrecy, hydraulic engineer Victor Hatherley is engaged to visit Colonel Stark’s house in the country late one evening in order to assess why his hydraulic press isn’t operating as it should. The evening is not without incident: warned that his life is in danger, Hatherley inspects the press, identifies the problem, and is then nearly crushed to death before, fleeing the house, having his thumb cut off and waking up several miles away. Might Sherlock Holmes be able to explain the reasons for this most exhilarating of evenings?
The Characters
Victor Hatherley, engineer; something wicked his way comes.
Colonel Lysander Stark, undeclared profession; machine on the Fritz.
Inspector Bradstreet, Scotland Yard; somehow less famous than Lestrade.
The Timeline
Watson places these events in “the summer of [18]89, not long after my marriage”. In terms of stories in the canon to date, this places these events this after ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘A Case of Identity’, ‘The Speckled Band’, and ‘The Five Orange Pips’. Other stories will, of course, be introduced having occurred around this time, but that’s all we can say for certain at this juncture.
The Tropes
Only a mention of an unrecorded case — that of “Colonel Warburton’s madness” which “may have afforded a finer field for an acute and original observer”. This sort of feels like an admission on Doyle’s part that what he has written isn’t an especially interesting tale, and certainly not one worthy of Holmes’ apparent talents.
Points of Interest
I had never heard of fuller’s earth before, and it’s certainly an unusual MacGuffin to throw into such a slight tale.
Equally, a chinchilla beard, the research of which resulted in me spending many happy minutes looking at pictures of the world’s second-best rodents (the answer to your question is capybara). I still have no idea what that style of beard would be.
Given that Holmes is free to refuse cases that do not intrigue him, and that there is rarely any mention made of a fee being earned from those he does pursue, I’ve always assumed he had some independent wealth that enabled him to live as he pleases. Yet here we learn of him saving up “plugs and dottles” from his smoking throughout the preceding day, “all carefully collected and dried upon the corner of the mantelpiece”. So, y’know, maybe he’s not as rich as I’ve assumed. on the other hand, look after the pennies…
Also, that Holmes is up early in the morning seems out of keeping with his habits as we’ve come to expect them from elsewhere in the canon. in preceding story ‘The Speckled Band’ Watson makes it clear that it’s a rare thing indeed for Holmes to be up at an early hour, yet here he’s enjoying a pre-breakfast pipe — terrible for the palate, I’m sure — like he was born to it. I’m over-thinking this, aren’t I? Man, Sherlockian scholarship must drive people crazy.
Interesting, too, that this is another case — after ‘The Five Orange Pips’ (1891) — in which Holmes’ involvement achieves precisely nothing. Even the revelation that Stark’s crew are coiners seems to have occurred to Inspector Bradstreet, and the villains get away with their loot…so, really, Holmes is arguably beaten here, hein?
~
The Sherlock Holmes canon by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on The Invisible Event
A Study in Scarlet (1887)
The Sign of Four (1890)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1892):
- ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891)
- ‘A Case of Identity’ (1891)
- ‘The Red-Headed League’ (1891)
- ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ (1891)
- ‘The Five Orange Pips’ (1891)
- ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (1891)
- ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ (1892)
- ‘The Speckled Band’ (1892)
- ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ (1892)
- ‘The Noble Bachelor’ (1892)
- ‘The Beryl Coronet’ (1892)
- ‘The Copper Beeches’ (1892)
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1894):
- ‘Silver Blaze’ (1892)
- ‘The Yellow Face’ (1893)
- ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’ (1893)
- ‘The “Gloria Scott”‘ (1893)
- ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ (1893)
- ‘The Reigate Squires’ (1893)
- ‘The Crooked Man’ (1893)
- ‘The Resident Patient’ (1893)
- ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893)
- ‘The Naval Treaty’ (1893)
- ‘The Final Problem’ (1893)
The Invisible Event 
I think Holmes charges according to what his client can pay and that there is one story where he charges a rich man an absolute fortune. I happen to have seen this quote today from A Study in Scarlet where Holmes defends the article he has had published about his deductive abilities saying “(they) are really extremely practical – so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese”.
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I have this impression, but could not cite examples; rest assured, I shall keep an eye out.
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Several of the Holmes stories are melodramas in which the involvement of Holmes is a minor element: ‘The Three Orange Pips’ is another, as you observe, and so are ‘The Gloria Scott’ and ‘The Greek Interpreter’. I suspect that this was for economic reasons: the popularity of his character meant that Doyle could earn more for a story if it had Holmes in it, and so when Doyle had a good idea for a story, there was a temptation to add Holmes and so double his fee.
A case where we have some documentary evidence for this process is that of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Doyle’s first letter (c. 28 April 1901) to Herbert Greenhough Smith, the editor of The Strand Magazine, did not mention Holmes and asked for “my usual £50 per thousand [words] for all rights”, but a few weeks later he wrote to Greenhough Smith again, this time offering “the alternative that it should be without Holmes at my old figure or with Holmes at £100 per thou.”
The big problem, in my opinion, with ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ is the ridiculous idea that the hydraulic press described in the story, so large that “the ceiling of this small chamber is really the end of the descending piston”, should have been designed for stamping coins. I guess that Doyle’s idea was to present a more realistic version of the descending-ceiling deathtrap from William Mudford’s ‘The Iron Shroud’ (1830) or Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1842), but a coin press won’t do.
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Yes; it must also be pretty difficult to come up with meaty criminous plots of the ‘Twisted Lip’ variety when you consider how quickly Doyle put out these stories — so I’m more than willing to allow him a few quiet months. It’s just (for some reason…) interesting how much the Holmes quality varies in these. My memory is that they were all rigorous tales of detection and skulduggery…and they’re really not.
I didn’t know that the original plan for Hound of the Baskervilles was for it not to feature Holmes. It makes sense, given when it was written and how little he actually features in it, but the novel has become so synonymous with the detective that it’s sort of wild to think there was ever a notion that it not include him.
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As you say, this isn’t the best Holmes story, but as a kid, this was one of my favorites. The bald melodrama doesn’t fit the series, but it sure was exciting. The idea of being pehfurq ol n cerff reminds me of some of a certain Poe story, and Doyle had the skill to pull it off almost as well. But maybe not in a Holmes story… (After all, we know how things turn out, since the story begins with Hatherley telling Holmes about his experience, so the outcome is never in doubt. To be really effective as melodrama/horror, it would be better if we followed the events as they happened, which, is incompatible with the structure of a Holmes story.)
Also, glad to know I’m not the only one who was puzzled about what a chinchilla beard looks like.
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“chinchilla beard”
Sounds like that godawful thing Kenneth Branagh wears as Poirot. It sure looks like an animal glued to his face.
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😄
It’s surprising how much you can learn about old facial hairstyles from classic crime fiction; I was reading something in which someone had a “Newgate fringe” recently and that…is not what I thought it might be.
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