Sometimes the Holmes canon surprises me; I have very fond memories of certain stories, while others are almost a complete blank.

Today, one of those blanks — which evinces many of the fine qualities of Doyle’s writing, and shows the Holmes canon to be as forward-thinking as it was popular, it’s…

‘The Reigate Squires’ (1893)

The Case

Recovering from an intense case in which he “outmanoeuvred at every point the most accomplished swindler in Europe”, Holmes heads to Reigate in Surrey for the country airs. Here, an unusual theft at one country house and the murder of a coachman at another country squire’s estate will coalesce into one case as sinister motives are brought to light.

The Characters

Colonel Hayter, British Army, ret’d; more of a lover.

Inspector Forrester, police; keen to witness genius first-hand.

Mr. [Redacted] Cunningham, landowner; locked in legal strife.

Mr. Alec Cunningham, son of the above; bad at making up stories.

The Timeline

It is 14th April 1887 when Watson receives a telegram about Holmes’ condition following his recent, exhausting efforts. By the time he travels to see his friend, and three days pass before they’re back in Baker Street…then they head down to Reigate…let’s say the shooting herein occurs on the night of 23rd/24th April 1887. Although 24th April 1887 was a Sunday, and would policemen work on a Sunday?

The Tropes

Beyond that opening reference to the huge crime Holmes has helped avert — the “whole question of the Netherland-Sumatra Company and of the colossal schemes of Baron Maupertuis” being “too recent in the minds of the public” and “too intimately concerned with politics and finance to be fitting subjects for this series of sketches” — there’s nothing of note, except a few comments about deductions which I’ll expand on below.

Points of Interest

The inclusion of a facsimile of the section of the note received is surely one of the earliest pieces of verbatim evidence in the annals of crime fiction. Am I right in saying that there’s a floorplan coming up in one of these stories, too? The age of precise presentation of necessary information to the reader — a.k.a. “playing fair” — is slowly dawning…

Interestingly, the image of the scrap of note in my Penguin edition, pictured above, is too small to be legible, and so I had to resort to my other two editions of the Memoirs to read what the scrap actually says. Why on earth do I have so many copies of the Holmes canon? Oh, and I have an ebook edition, too. What the hell?!

I always thought it odd that people in classic crime stories would burn the envelopes of any incriminating letters they received. I don’t get many letters any more, but as a young man I would always keep the envelopes to ensure the letters didn’t get sullied by being kept loose in a drawer or similar. These days I recycle my envelopes, of course, but that wasn’t an option for the Victorians, I guess.

Twice in this story, Watson — well, Doyle — uses the phrase “shrugged his shoulders”. What other body part, pray tell, does one shrug? Mind you, since we’re also told that Holmes’ hotel room was “was literally ankle-deep with congratulatory telegrams”, perhaps an exactness of expression isn’t something one should look for here…which — see the above comments regarding verbatim evidence — seems odd.

Doyle asserting that there are family likenesses in handwriting is surely as bad as Agatha Christie insisting that someone can dress up like their cousin and fake handwriting to make it look like someone else had dressed up like the person they were dressed up as and faked their handwriting to look like fake handwriting faked by someone else (or whatever it is she asserts in that book). Had I been on the scene, I would have demanded that Holmes come good on other “twenty-three other deductions” that could be made from a handwriting sample of eight words.

Also, doesn’t Acton admit — in front of witnesses — that his claim to half the Cunningham estate is unjust? “[I]f they could have found a single paper — which, fortunately, was in the strong-box of my solicitors — they would undoubtedly have crippled our case”. So he knows he’s in the wrong? What a dick.

We never find out what Holmes thinks is “obvious” from the recent theft from Acton’s house of “an odd volume of Pope’s ‘Homer,’ two plated candlesticks, an ivory letter-weight, a small oak barometer, and a ball of twine”. Presumably that was a genuine theft, but why would someone take such a weird medley of objects? It veers into ground similar to ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ (1893), but I really want to read the story of that crime.