Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 56 short stories about Sherlock Holmes, solidly 15 of which must be among the most prized creations in the genre. The other 41, then, vary somewhat.
Today, easily forgotten amidst far more accomplished fare, we have…
‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’ (1893)
The Case
After unsuccessfully seeking work for some time, clerk Hall Pycroft — echoes of last week, with it being uncertain if Hall is his forename — finally secures a desirable position, only for Arthur Pinner of the Franco-Midland Hardware Company, Ltd to appear and offer him even better terms. All Pycroft need do is not tell is new employers he won’t be turning up, and go to Birmingham to meet with the other member of this little firm to assure himself of the validity of the offer. And all would have been happy in the world, too, if only the two men Pycroft speaks to didn’t have the same gold tooth…
The Characters
Mr Hall Pycroft, stockbroker’s clerk; you’re hired! Twice!
Arthur Pinner, financial agent; a good man is hard to find.
Harry Pinner, occupation uncertain; up to his neck in something.
The Timeline
We’re clearly post-The Sign of Four (1890) since Holmes enquires after Watson’s new wife and the perils of the “excitements” she endured therein, making the lady in question Miss Mary Morstan. So it must be 1888 or 1889, at a guess. I’m not sure why I bother to keep track of this, since I’m not building up a chronology and I’ve no doubt that others have done so with far greater rigour than I’d ever commit to the task.
The Tropes
As far as I can tell, nothing. No disguises are donned — a mere nom de guerre doesn’t count — no famous declarations made, no unrecorded cases mentioned. This could almost be a Martin Hewitt story, he says with a shudder.
Points of Interest
Interesting to note how much DNA this shares with the far more famous ‘The Red-Headed League’ (1891) — featuring (spoilers…?) a man paid for a bogus job to keep him out of the way so that others may commit a crime where he would ordinarily be — even down to him being given a tedious task (here, making a list of all the hardware sellers in Paris) to occupy his days. And yet this is so much less memorable, lacking a good hook and compelling characters, showing how much difference those things make, especially in a short story.
I made a note to look up what it meant that Arthur Pinner had “a touch of the sheeny about his nose” only to discover that it appears to be a pejorative term for a Jew. I wonder if this reference has been allowed to remain in modern editions of these stories only because the slang is so outdated and so no-one has thought to look it up. Though, given the over-studied nature of Sherlockian texts, it seems unlikely that someone else hasn’t looked this up online at some point…I mean, c’mon.
I assumed “a comet vintage” was a misprint of some sort, but, no, it turns out that a comet passing close to the Earth was thought to improve the quality of grapes and thus result in superior wine. Look, the Victorians were marvellous engineers, but goddamn they held some weird beliefs. Not, of course, that any other age has been entirely free of those.
~
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 
“Sheeny” is also used in England meaning shiny – from “sheen” – so there may well have been no antisemitic reference.
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I would like to believe this, but that it is a specific reference to the character’s nose makes it far more likely that something unpleasant is being inferred. “He had a shiny nose” is an irrelevance that I doubt Victorian fiction would revel in, but it really did seem important to writers of this era and beyond (and, yes, before) whether someone was or might be Jewish.
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Sorry – my earlier reply went mad…I was going to add again from The Oxford SH..which says the sheeny comment is “an insensitive vulgarity” being a derogatory expression for a Jew. It also mentions in addition that there is emphasis on the supposed family affection of Jews (Pinner’s extreme behaviour at the end). In the first book edition of Memoirs it was capitalised “Sheeny”. So it looks fairly bad for ACD in this regard.
Dashiell Hammett apparently included a criminal character called Sheeny Holmes in 1927 in a short story in the Black Mask.
The duping element of this story (and the Red-headed league) gets recycled in another outing in a later Casebook story. Behind the times for racial attitudes but ahead of his time for recycling was Sir Arthur…
Honestly, these Oxford editions contain such amazing top trivia!
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The events of this story would have played out the same if Holmes had never gotten involved. The whole thing screams “Written to meet a publishing deadline.”
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Yes, in revisiting these stories I’ve come to realise that actually very few from these first two collections are classics. Interesting how many strong stories Doyle wrote after Holmes’ “death”, as if he had to be over the original thrall of the character in order to do some of his best work.
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