The original antepenultimate case for the world’s first consulting detective; the perfect time to introduce some new lore, what?

Big brother is watching in…

‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893)

The Case

Summoned from his bed late at night, Greek interpreter Mr. Melas is taken in a blacked-out carriage to an undisclosed location where he is asked to interpret a series of entreaties and threats for a Greek man who is clearly being held against his will. Returned to Wandsworth Common and warned to tell no-one what he has seen, Melas of course tells one of his confrères at the Diogenes Club the following day — a man with the surname Holmes…

The Characters

Mycroft Holmes, professional idler; you’ve never heard of him.

Mr. Melas, late of Athens; interpreter by trade.

Harold Latimer, ne’er-do-well; not big on secrecy.

The Timeline

Nothing in the story indicates a timeline to me, but one imagines — viewing the canon as a series of remembrances by a man who actually experienced these things — that it must be, at the time of writing, the most recent of Watson’s experiences with Holmes. But that’s pure conjecture on my part.

The Tropes

Only really the game of deductions between Sherlock and Mycroft, which is all the more fun for being explained afterwards:

“An old soldier, I perceive,” said Sherlock.

“And very recently discharged,” remarked the brother.

“Served in India, I see.”

“And a non-commissioned officer.”

“Royal Artillery, I fancy,” said Sherlock.

“But with a child.”

“Children, my dear boy, children.”

Mycroft became something of a trope in later Holmes pastiches — everyone seems to feel the need to cram him in at some point, along with the Irregulars, Irene Adler, and Moriarty — but at this stage he’s simply a startling development in Sherlock’s character.

Points of Interest

Mr. Melas doesn’t exactly strike one as a likely member of the Diogenes Club. If his first response is to immediately seek out another member of that establishment — “[T]he most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one.” — that should be enough to get his disbarred, surely?

A sovereign is worth about £600 in today’s money, which means Melas is paid £3,000 to keep his mouth shut. Frankly, I’d want about ten times that if I witnessed a similar scene — any criminals take note. Please.

Difficult not to wonder if the journey Latimer takes Melas on in the blacked-put carriage wasn’t in part the motivation for a similar journey in The Mystery of 31 New Inn (1912) by R. Austin Freeman. You can imagine Freeman having great fun trying to devise the method he uses for finding out the eventual location of that journey, though Thorndyke in that story has the advantage that the experience is repeated.

One has to wonder, too, how Latimer and his cohorts were communicating with Paul Kratides before calling on Melas. The implication is that Kratides has been starved and maltreated for some time. “For many years I have been the chief Greek interpreter in London,” Melas tells us, but is this mere hubris and there are, in fact, others who have been consulted first? Or was Paul Kratides kept completely in the dark for months before Melas showed up to explain it all to him?

Also, I’m sorry, but there’s no way Mycroft goes along on that chase to the house in the hope of finding Sophy. Sure, we have less characterising of him from Doyle than we do from the writers who would follow him, but having taken the time to paint him as indolent — “He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right…” — we then have Mycroft running to Baker Street, racing to Scotland Yard, haring up to Beckenham, running upstairs to see the two men left to die. Nah, mate, not having it.

Hilarious, too, to note that Mycroft is to Sherlock what most of the amateur detectives who would come to dominate the looming Golden Age are to the police who let them tag along: “What is to me a means of livelihood is to him the merest hobby of a dilettante.”

Who the hell is J. Davenport? And, while Sherlock didn’t always resolve his cases — c.f. The Engineer’s Thumb’ (1892) — this one really does lurch to a stop, eh? Doyle clearly needed a break from these, and it shows.