Monthly Meeting Minutes – 8th April 2020

Due to the coronavirus (COVID19) outbreak

this meeting of the Shingle of Southsea was cancelled.

As are all future meetings until the lockdown is lifted.

This is in accordance with government guidelines on social distancing and is to keep the member of The Shingle of Southsea safe from the possibility of infecting himself.

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) has very kindly emailed in the following presentation which he would have delivered at this evening’s meeting if it had gone ahead.

We hope that this will help members pass the time until normal meetings can be recommenced.

A Study in Similarity

By Paul Thomas Miller

The similarities between some of Holmes’s cases have been noted many times by many people. Perhaps three of the most famous of these similarities is the remove-a-man scheme featured in The Red-Headed League (REDH), The Stockbroker’s Clerk (STOC) and The Three Garridebs (3GAR).

In each of these three stories a man is conned to get him out of the way so some nefarious deed may be committed which required his absence.

Much has been written about the reason behind these parallels. Some have suggested that this is evidence that the stories are fiction. They are proof that the stories are made up by someone with a limited imagination. Someone who can’t come up with wholly new plots has cobbled together something superficially fresh from old parts. These people are fools to a man.

Consider Watson’s own words:

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes was in active practice for twenty-three years, and… during seventeen of these I was allowed to cooperate with him and to keep notes of his doings… I have a mass of material at my command.”

We can hardly imagine Watson running out of source material and beginning to make things up.

Worse, some people will suggest, Watson did  not write any of the stories. The Literary Agent; Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the stories. Watson and Holmes are mere figments of Doyle’s imagination. Poppycock. A quick look at all three men’s life stories reveals Doyle as by far the least likely to exist. His biography is entirely untenable. As I have written elsewhere, I believe Doyle was the figment of Watson’s imagination – a device to lend an air of fiction to the tales which might otherwise have legal ramifications for the consulting detective (consider the burglars and murderers Holmes helped get away with crimes).

I agree that the stories of REDH, STOC and 3GAR bear the mark of all having been contrived by the same man, but I believe we can find that man elsewhere in The Canon.

In The Final Problem Holmes explains who Professor Moriarty is to Watson and we learn a great deal. It bears a little scrutiny.

“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.”

If Moriarty is responsible for so much cleverly concealed crime and Holmes is solving so many mysteries, it is certain that Holmes would have encountered more of Moriarty’s handiwork than the couple of times we are explicitly given in The Canon.

Moreover, if there were lots of occasions Holmes dealt with plans organised by Moriarty, Watson is very likely to have recorded more of them than the couple of times we are explicitly given in The Canon. That is, there are most probably several stories in The Canon which have Moriarty at their back, even though we are unaware of it.

Consider this statement from Holmes to Watson:

“Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed—the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organized and carried out.”

Those are very specific crimes Holmes refers to. After a little cogitation, I find myself believing that Holmes purposely referenced crimes which he knew Moriarty was behind. They are also crimes which he knew Watson had a record of. For instance, “A paper to be abstracted” may apply to The Second Stain or The Naval Treaty. “A house to be rifled” might possibly refer to The Beryl Coronet. But “A man to be removed” is the interesting one for us. Note he says “removed”. Not “killed”. This is Holmes talking to Watson about how vile Moriarty is. He has no need of euphemism. When he says “a man to be removed” he is referring to cases where people are lured away from a location for some nefarious reason. The cases in question are most assuredly REDH, STOC and 3GAR.

This is the reason Watson’s stories seem similar: they are all the work of Moriarty. It is the Professor’s  lack of originality which we can detect here – not Watson’s. And it is understandable - one can imagine Moriarty having a range of ingenious templates for schemes which he could adapt for specific purposes. Clearly these three stories began with the consultation of Moriarty and the use of the same remove-a-man template.

Our next consideration must be dates. As ever, I shall work from the chronology I created myself (available from Amazon, titled “Watson Does Not Lie”).  Moriarty died on 4^th May 1891. STOC was played out in 1889 and REDH took place in 1890. No issues there, then. 3GAR, however, took place in 1902. This is most unfortunate for my theory. But not fatal. If we examine the text we can find the adjustment we require.

The criminal in 3GAR is briefly described by Holmes:

“James Winter, alias Morecroft, alias Killer Evans… Aged forty-four. Native of Chicago. Known to have shot three men in the States. Escaped from penitentiary through political influence. Came to London in 1893.”

We know from The Valley of Fear, set in 1887, that Moriarty had dealings with American crime gangs. (It will be recalled that Moriarty assisted the surviving Scowrers in locating and eventually killing Birdy Edwards.) It is possible, then, that Killer Evans was one of Moriarty’s contacts in the United States.

There is circumstantial support for this theory. Remember that Holmes says of Moriarty’s schemes in The Final Problem:

“The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defence. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught—never so much as suspected.”

Suddenly we can imagine how “political influence” managed to keep Killer Evans free when he shot three people. The “political influence” was some blackmail or bribe organised by Moriarty. We can also imagine that the home town of his malevolent benefactor might seem like an attractive prospect years later when America became too hot to hold him. Sure, Moriarty had been dead two years by then, but so was the menace of Holmes. At least as far as the public knew.

It is my contention that Moriarty used the remove-a-man scheme far more frequently than was wise. More than the three instances we have record of. And in more than one country. Working as Moriarty’s Chicago agent, Killer Evans learnt the ruse long before he employed it to get Nathan Garrideb out of his home. So, while Moriarty didn’t draw up the specifics of the Garrideb case, he was still the posthumous progenitor of the plan.

This is why REHD, STOC and 3GAR bear such similarity. They were all devised by the world’s greatest ever consulting criminal – Professor James Moriarty.