A Study in Scarlet
Meeting Room B, British Museum, London
Sponsored by The Strand Magazine
First Published in November, 1887
Sponsored by The Strand Magazine
First Published in November, 1887
The First Seminar
|
Herbert Greenhough Smith — The Strand Editor & Moderator
Arthur Conan Doyle — Author and Watson’s Literary Agent Dr. John H. Watson —Colleague and Biographer of Sherlock Holmes Dr. Stamford — Watson’s Friend from St. Bartholomew's Hospital Inspector Lestrade — Scotland Yard Inspector Mr. Wiggins — Leader of the Group of Boys Hired by Holmes |
Seminar Transcript
SMITH: Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome. My name is Herbert Greenhough Smith, and will serve as Moderator. The Strand Magazine is proud to sponsor today’s gathering — the first in a series of twenty-six seminars, each dedicated to one of the stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. It is, we think, a worthy undertaking, and it seems only fitting that we begin at the beginning. Thirteen years ago, "A Study in Scarlet" introduced the world to a most singular consulting detective of Baker Street, and we at The Strand were proud to play our own part in the adventures that followed. Tonight we celebrate that origin, and with it, the launch of what promises to be a most rewarding journey through the complete works — all twenty-six of them. Arthur, would you be kind enough to tell us how it all began?
DOYLE: Thank you, Smith. It is a question I am glad to answer — and one I owe it to both these gentlemen to answer honestly. My contribution to the Holmes stories was craft: the arrangement of events, the pacing, the dramatic shaping that a bare case record cannot provide. But the reasoning — the method — that singular, almost frightening quality of mind that readers find so extraordinary? That is Holmes's entirely. I did not invent it. I could not have invented it. I simply had the extraordinary good fortune to be the man he and Watson permitted to set it down. As for Watson — I confess I have, in certain interviews, allowed him to be characterized as a narrative convenience. A foil. A lens through which the great man might be admired. I have always been ashamed of that, and I am more ashamed of it now, sitting beside him. The warmth in those stories — the decency, the loyalty, the humanity that readers have responded to for decades — I did not manufacture any of that. It is Watson's. Every word of it is genuinely, completely his. I was merely wise enough not to get in its way.
WATSON: I have heard this account before, and I confess I am never quite certain whether to be flattered or mildly insulted by the last remark.
Laughter from the audience
DOYLE: I mean it in the kindest possible spirit, Watson. A narrator who is too clever never lets the reader feel clever themselves. Your particular gift is that you are perceptive enough to observe everything and intelligent enough to make sense of half of it.
Laughter from the audience
SMITH: Before we dive into tonight's story, allow me to introduce our special guests. Joining Dr. Watson and Arthur are Dr. Stamford, Inspector Lestrade, and young Wiggins — each of whom played a pivotal role in the tale we're about to explore. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Doctor Watson, "A Study in Scarlet" opens, as so many of the Holmes stories do, with you — your circumstances, your history, your state of mind. You had just returned from Afghanistan.
WATSON: I had. I was invalided home after sustaining a wound at the Battle of Maiwand in the summer of 1880. A Jezail bullet, which struck my shoulder and grazed the subclavian artery — I was fortunate to survive it, and more fortunate still that my orderly, Murray, threw me across a pack horse and conveyed me to safety. I was sent back to England to recuperate, and found myself in London with a pension of eleven shillings and sixpence a day and no earthly idea what to do with myself. It is not a comfortable situation, to have been accustomed to the camaraderie of military life and suddenly find oneself quite alone in the greatest city in the world.
SMITH: And it was precisely that condition of solitary drift that led you, by happy accident, to encounter our next guest. Dr. Stamford, you were Watson's colleague at Barts, is that right?
STAMFORD: His junior, more precisely. I had been a dresser at St. Bartholomew's while Watson was in practice before he took his commission. I remembered him well, though I daresay he had not given me much thought during his years abroad. I was walking through the Criterion Bar — quite by chance, you understand, I had stopped in out of the rain — when I spotted him at the far end of the room. He looked, if I may say so, Watson, rather drawn. I was glad to see a familiar face.
WATSON: As was I, Stamford, believe me. I had spoken to almost no one of consequence for the better part of a fortnight.
STAMFORD: We lunched together at the Holborn, and he mentioned at some point that he was looking for rooms. He couldn't afford what he wanted on his own. And I said — I remember saying this quite distinctly — it was a curious coincidence, because I happened to know a fellow who was in just the same fix. A chap I knew at the hospital. He had found the perfect rooms in Baker Street but needed someone to go halves with him.
SMITH: And that fellow was, of course, Sherlock Holmes. Did you know him well, Stamford?
STAMFORD: Not well, no. He was a difficult man to know well. He turned up at the chemical laboratory at odd hours — sometimes very late in the evening — and he had a manner about him that discouraged ordinary conversation. He was not unfriendly, precisely, but he was... focused. He had clearly no interest in small talk, and most of the fellows at the hospital found him rather unsettling. There was a period when he was conducting experiments on human corpses — beating them, as I recall, to determine the extent to which bruising could occur after death. Not the sort of thing that endears a man to his fellow researchers.
DOYLE: I do recall constructing that detail with some glee, I must admit.
Murmurs from the Audience
WATSON: I will say that when Stamford introduced us at Bart's, Holmes's first words were rather remarkable. He shook my hand, looked me over, and said, "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Just like that. No greeting, no pleasantry. I hadn't said a word about myself. I stood there completely dumbfounded.
STAMFORD: I saw Watson's face at that moment. It was priceless. He looked as though he had been addressed by a ghost.
SMITH: And of course, Holmes had reasoned it out entirely from visual observation — the tan, the military bearing, the injured arm. Arthur, how important was it to you to establish that method of Holmes's from the very first encounter?
DOYLE: It was everything. I wanted the reader to understand from the first page, before any crime had occurred, before any mystery was presented, exactly what kind of mind they were dealing with. That single exchange at Barts is, in some ways, the most important passage I ever wrote in connection with Holmes. It sets the contract between the reader and the detective: this man will not guess, he will not intuit, he will not have lucky premonitions. He will reason from evidence to conclusion, and if the reader pays close enough attention, they ought to be able to follow the chain themselves.
SMITH: Wonderful. Now, let us move forward to the crime itself. Inspector Lestrade, you were the Scotland Yard man on the case. Can you tell us how the investigation at Lauriston Gardens presented itself to you initially?
LESTRADE: Certainly. We received word in the small hours of the morning that a man had been found dead in an empty house in Brixton. Constable Rance had discovered him on his rounds. The dead man was a well-dressed American, subsequently identified as Mr. Enoch Drebber of Cleveland, Ohio. There was blood on the floor, a considerable amount of it, but no wound on the body that could account for it. The man appeared to have died of shock or some form of seizure. On the wall, written in blood, was the word RACHE.
SMITH: And what did Scotland Yard make of that inscription?
LESTRADE: My colleague Gregson was of the opinion that it was an incomplete word — that the killer had been interrupted before he could finish writing "Rachel." We had our men looking into whether there was a woman of that name connected to Drebber. I confess I was not entirely satisfied with that theory myself.
WATSON: Holmes, of course, declared almost immediately that "RACHE" was the German word for revenge, and that anyone who wasted time looking for a woman named Rachel was on a fool's errand. He said it rather pointedly, as I recall.
LESTRADE: He did say it pointedly. Mr. Holmes was not always the most diplomatic of collaborators. But I have been in this work long enough to acknowledge when a man is right. The Rachel line of inquiry came to nothing, just as he predicted.
DOYLE: I will say, Inspector, that I based the rivalry between Holmes and the official police on something I felt quite strongly, which was that intelligence in the detection of crime was being significantly undervalued. There were extraordinary men at Scotland Yard. But the system did not always reward deduction. It rewarded industry, persistence, orthodoxy. Holmes represented a different mode of investigation entirely, and it seemed to me that friction between those modes was both realistic and dramatically rich.
LESTRADE: I take no offence at that, Arthur. And I'll admit there are moments in my career when I've wished I had Mr. Holmes's particular faculties. The Lauriston Gardens case was certainly one of them. The body told him things it did not tell us. He found a wedding ring near the body that Gregson and I had entirely missed. He identified the blood as not belonging to the victim. He identified the killer's height, his age, his approximate weight — from footprints, from the depth of the impressions in the earth, from the length of the stride. I had never seen anything like it.
SMITH: Watson, you were present for much of this investigation. What was it like to watch Holmes at work in those early days, when his methods were still entirely new to you?
WATSON: Bewildering, at first. Then, gradually, astonishing. He would pick up some fragment — a footprint, a cigar ash, the particular angle at which a hat was placed — and from it draw a conclusion that seemed, until he explained it, quite impossibly bold. The explanation always made it seem obvious in retrospect. That was perhaps the most disconcerting quality of it: how obvious it all seemed once you heard the reasoning. You felt you ought to have seen it yourself, and wondered why you had not.
DOYLE: That is precisely the sensation I was trying to create in the reader. The momentary sense that they might have kept up with Holmes, followed by the humbling realization that they had not.
SMITH: Now — and I am rather looking forward to this portion of the seminar — I should like to turn to Mr. Wiggins. Mr. Wiggins, you led what was called in the story the Baker Street Irregulars. Can you tell us a little about that arrangement, in your own words?
WIGGINS: Well, sir, it wasn't what you'd call a formal arrangement, like. Me and the other lads, we used to knock about Baker Street quite a lot — running errands, holding horses, that sort of thing. Mr. Holmes, he noticed us one day — couldn't say exactly when it was, but he came out of 221B and he had a look at us and he said, something like, you lot get everywhere and nobody pays you any mind, which is more than can be said for the police. He offered us a shilling a day and a guinea to whichever of us found what he was after. Well, a shilling a day was very good money, sir, for boys like us.
SMITH: And in the Lauriston Gardens case, what was it that Holmes set you to find?
WIGGINS: A cab, sir. A four-wheeler. He had worked out that whoever did the killing had driven to that empty house in a cab, and he had a description of the driver — a tall man, elderly, with a weathered face and a brown coat, he said. He described the cab as a four-wheeler, not a hansom. He wanted us to find that particular cab in all of London. We spread out across the city, the whole lot of us, checking every rank and yard and mews.
WATSON: And they found it. Or rather, the driver came to Baker Street himself, in the end. Holmes had sent word through the Irregulars that the cab was wanted, and the driver — Jefferson Hope, as we later discovered — came to collect what he thought was a fare. Holmes and I were waiting for him.
WIGGINS: I was there when he came in, sir. I brought the message that he was on his way up. Big fellow he was, very strong looking. I didn't think Mr. Holmes could hold him, but hold him he did, between himself and the Doctor, until Lestrade arrived with the handcuffs.
LESTRADE: I received Holmes's message and came at once. I will confess I was not entirely prepared for what I found — Holmes, Watson, and this enormous American locked in a very vigorous struggle in the sitting room of 221B. We got the cuffs on Hope eventually, though he nearly overpowered all three of us. For a man of his age — he was in his fifties, I believe — he was remarkably powerful.
SMITH: Arthur, the story then takes a very striking structural turn. We leave London entirely and travel back in time to the American frontier — to Utah, to the Mormon settlements, to the story of John Ferrier and his daughter Lucy. What led you to that decision?
DOYLE: I wanted Jefferson Hope to be more than a murderer. I wanted him to be a man the reader could understand, and even, to some degree, sympathize with. That required the reader to have witnessed what he had witnessed — the flight across the salt flats with the Ferriers, the cruelty of the Mormon elders, the death of John Ferrier, the forced marriage and subsequent death of Lucy, who was the woman Hope loved. I needed to show the origins of his revenge, not merely its execution. The double narrative structure was a deliberate choice. I was aware that some readers found the shift jarring, and I have never entirely disagreed with that criticism, but I felt the moral weight of the story required it.
WATSON: When Hope confessed the full circumstances to us, I confess my emotions were quite mixed. Holmes remained characteristically detached — he regarded the case as a problem to be solved and had solved it. But I found Hope's account deeply affecting. He had carried this purpose for twenty years. Twenty years. He had crossed half the world twice in pursuit of the two men he held responsible for Lucy Ferrier's fate.
LESTRADE: As a policeman, I cannot make allowances for that sort of thing, whatever the provocation. Hope murdered two men. The law cannot inquire too carefully into a man's motives when determining that he committed the acts in question. But speaking as a man rather than as an officer — well. I can say that I found the case a troubling one, and I am not easily troubled.
SMITH: Hope died before he could be brought to trial, as the story relates.
LESTRADE: He did. An aneurism, the doctors said. He had known his heart was in a very bad way — he had been told he had not long to live. I sometimes think that the certainty of his own approaching death gave him a kind of freedom in pursuing his revenge that a healthier man might not have had. He had nothing to lose.
SMITH: Watson, I want to ask you something that I suspect the audience is wondering. Holmes did not always credit his contribution adequately. In "A Study in Scarlet," when the case was resolved, the newspapers gave most of the credit to Gregson and Lestrade. How did Holmes respond to that?
WATSON: With perfect equanimity. That surprised me more than anything else about him in those early days. He said, to the effect, that the work itself was its own reward — that he required no external recognition, only that the problem be interesting and the solution be correct. I have lived with that man for many years now, in one way or another, and I believe he meant it entirely. He is not without vanity in some respects, but he is genuinely indifferent to the sort of public credit that most men prize above everything else.
DOYLE: I think that quality — the preference for the intrinsic satisfaction of the work over any public reward — is one of the things that has made Holmes enduringly attractive to readers. He is not ambitious in the conventional sense. He is not climbing any social ladder. He is simply, purely, interested in the puzzle.
SMITH: Dr. Stamford, I want to come back to you with a question I suspect you have been asked before. When you introduced Watson to Holmes that day at Barts, did you have any sense that you were setting in motion something of rather extraordinary consequence?
STAMFORD: [With a laugh.] No, sir. I thought I was helping a friend find affordable rooms. That was the full extent of my ambition in the matter. I remember walking away from Barts that afternoon thinking, well, I hope they get along tolerably, they seemed a reasonable fit. I had no notion that they would become the most famous lodging companions in the history of England, nor that Watson would end up writing books about it, nor that Arthur would become famous all over the world on the strength of the connection. I occasionally reflect on it and find it rather extraordinary that a chance meeting in the Criterion Bar could lead to all of this. But that is how life arranges itself, I suppose. The great hinge moments rarely announce themselves as such.
DOYLE: That is very beautifully put, Stamford.
WIGGINS: If I may, — and I hope it's not too forward — I'd say something similar about Mr. Holmes himself, from the other end of things. He saw boys that nobody else paid any attention to, and he made use of them in a way that treated them seriously, like. He paid fair, he said please and thank you, which not everyone does with street lads, and he made it clear that the work we did was real work that mattered. I've had men who employed me since who didn't treat me with the same respect that Mr. Holmes showed when I was eleven years old and running about in the mud. I've never forgotten that.
WATSON: Holmes would be thoroughly embarrassed to hear you say that, Wiggins.
WIGGINS: I know it, Doctor. Which is partly why I say it.
Laughter from the audience
SMITH: I am afraid we must begin to draw toward a close. Before we do, I would like to give each of our guests an opportunity for a final thought on "A Study in Scarlet." Inspector Lestrade, would you lead us off?
LESTRADE: Gladly. I have been a policeman for a very long time, and I have worked on a great many cases that never came to anything like a tidy resolution. What strikes me about this case — when I am being honest rather than professional — is that it was one in which the truth, the whole truth, was actually arrived at. We knew not only what had been done, and who had done it, but why, and what had been done to him first. That completeness is rarer in police work than the public imagines. I am grateful to Mr. Holmes for providing it, whatever our professional differences over the years.
STAMFORD: I find myself with a rather peculiar emotion about the whole business, which is one of responsibility. Not guilt — I could not have known. But responsibility, of a benign kind. Everything that Watson and Holmes did together began with me saying, I know a fellow you should meet. I find that quite a lot to carry. In the nicest possible way.
WIGGINS: Mine's simple enough, sir. I'm proud of the work we did. We found that cab. Nobody else would have found it half as quick. And I think those of us who were Irregulars — the ones who are still living, anyway — we feel a kind of ownership over this story that the other stories don't give us in quite the same way. This was where it started. This is the one that tells you what Baker Street was.
WATSON: I have told and retold portions of this story so many times that it sometimes seems as though it happened to someone else. But when I consider it freshly, I am struck by how much turned on how little. A rainy afternoon in London. A friend I hadn't seen in years. A set of rooms that needed splitting. Had any of those small contingencies been different, I would never have met Sherlock Holmes, and my life would have been immeasurably the poorer for it.
DOYLE: I shall close with this. When I wrote "A Study in Scarlet" from Dr. Watson’s excellently written notes, I was a young doctor with a struggling practice and a great deal of time on my hands. I did not know whether anyone would read it. I did not know whether Holmes would live beyond a single story. I simply wrote the character as fully as I could, and trusted that the readers would take him as he was. They did — you did — with a generosity and enthusiasm that has never ceased to move me.
SMITH: Arthur, Dr. Watson, Inspector Lestrade, Dr. Stamford, and Mr. Wiggins — on behalf of The Strand Magazine and of everyone in this room, thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the first of our seminars is concluded. Good day to you all.
Sustained applause
DOYLE: Thank you, Smith. It is a question I am glad to answer — and one I owe it to both these gentlemen to answer honestly. My contribution to the Holmes stories was craft: the arrangement of events, the pacing, the dramatic shaping that a bare case record cannot provide. But the reasoning — the method — that singular, almost frightening quality of mind that readers find so extraordinary? That is Holmes's entirely. I did not invent it. I could not have invented it. I simply had the extraordinary good fortune to be the man he and Watson permitted to set it down. As for Watson — I confess I have, in certain interviews, allowed him to be characterized as a narrative convenience. A foil. A lens through which the great man might be admired. I have always been ashamed of that, and I am more ashamed of it now, sitting beside him. The warmth in those stories — the decency, the loyalty, the humanity that readers have responded to for decades — I did not manufacture any of that. It is Watson's. Every word of it is genuinely, completely his. I was merely wise enough not to get in its way.
WATSON: I have heard this account before, and I confess I am never quite certain whether to be flattered or mildly insulted by the last remark.
Laughter from the audience
DOYLE: I mean it in the kindest possible spirit, Watson. A narrator who is too clever never lets the reader feel clever themselves. Your particular gift is that you are perceptive enough to observe everything and intelligent enough to make sense of half of it.
Laughter from the audience
SMITH: Before we dive into tonight's story, allow me to introduce our special guests. Joining Dr. Watson and Arthur are Dr. Stamford, Inspector Lestrade, and young Wiggins — each of whom played a pivotal role in the tale we're about to explore. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Doctor Watson, "A Study in Scarlet" opens, as so many of the Holmes stories do, with you — your circumstances, your history, your state of mind. You had just returned from Afghanistan.
WATSON: I had. I was invalided home after sustaining a wound at the Battle of Maiwand in the summer of 1880. A Jezail bullet, which struck my shoulder and grazed the subclavian artery — I was fortunate to survive it, and more fortunate still that my orderly, Murray, threw me across a pack horse and conveyed me to safety. I was sent back to England to recuperate, and found myself in London with a pension of eleven shillings and sixpence a day and no earthly idea what to do with myself. It is not a comfortable situation, to have been accustomed to the camaraderie of military life and suddenly find oneself quite alone in the greatest city in the world.
SMITH: And it was precisely that condition of solitary drift that led you, by happy accident, to encounter our next guest. Dr. Stamford, you were Watson's colleague at Barts, is that right?
STAMFORD: His junior, more precisely. I had been a dresser at St. Bartholomew's while Watson was in practice before he took his commission. I remembered him well, though I daresay he had not given me much thought during his years abroad. I was walking through the Criterion Bar — quite by chance, you understand, I had stopped in out of the rain — when I spotted him at the far end of the room. He looked, if I may say so, Watson, rather drawn. I was glad to see a familiar face.
WATSON: As was I, Stamford, believe me. I had spoken to almost no one of consequence for the better part of a fortnight.
STAMFORD: We lunched together at the Holborn, and he mentioned at some point that he was looking for rooms. He couldn't afford what he wanted on his own. And I said — I remember saying this quite distinctly — it was a curious coincidence, because I happened to know a fellow who was in just the same fix. A chap I knew at the hospital. He had found the perfect rooms in Baker Street but needed someone to go halves with him.
SMITH: And that fellow was, of course, Sherlock Holmes. Did you know him well, Stamford?
STAMFORD: Not well, no. He was a difficult man to know well. He turned up at the chemical laboratory at odd hours — sometimes very late in the evening — and he had a manner about him that discouraged ordinary conversation. He was not unfriendly, precisely, but he was... focused. He had clearly no interest in small talk, and most of the fellows at the hospital found him rather unsettling. There was a period when he was conducting experiments on human corpses — beating them, as I recall, to determine the extent to which bruising could occur after death. Not the sort of thing that endears a man to his fellow researchers.
DOYLE: I do recall constructing that detail with some glee, I must admit.
Murmurs from the Audience
WATSON: I will say that when Stamford introduced us at Bart's, Holmes's first words were rather remarkable. He shook my hand, looked me over, and said, "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Just like that. No greeting, no pleasantry. I hadn't said a word about myself. I stood there completely dumbfounded.
STAMFORD: I saw Watson's face at that moment. It was priceless. He looked as though he had been addressed by a ghost.
SMITH: And of course, Holmes had reasoned it out entirely from visual observation — the tan, the military bearing, the injured arm. Arthur, how important was it to you to establish that method of Holmes's from the very first encounter?
DOYLE: It was everything. I wanted the reader to understand from the first page, before any crime had occurred, before any mystery was presented, exactly what kind of mind they were dealing with. That single exchange at Barts is, in some ways, the most important passage I ever wrote in connection with Holmes. It sets the contract between the reader and the detective: this man will not guess, he will not intuit, he will not have lucky premonitions. He will reason from evidence to conclusion, and if the reader pays close enough attention, they ought to be able to follow the chain themselves.
SMITH: Wonderful. Now, let us move forward to the crime itself. Inspector Lestrade, you were the Scotland Yard man on the case. Can you tell us how the investigation at Lauriston Gardens presented itself to you initially?
LESTRADE: Certainly. We received word in the small hours of the morning that a man had been found dead in an empty house in Brixton. Constable Rance had discovered him on his rounds. The dead man was a well-dressed American, subsequently identified as Mr. Enoch Drebber of Cleveland, Ohio. There was blood on the floor, a considerable amount of it, but no wound on the body that could account for it. The man appeared to have died of shock or some form of seizure. On the wall, written in blood, was the word RACHE.
SMITH: And what did Scotland Yard make of that inscription?
LESTRADE: My colleague Gregson was of the opinion that it was an incomplete word — that the killer had been interrupted before he could finish writing "Rachel." We had our men looking into whether there was a woman of that name connected to Drebber. I confess I was not entirely satisfied with that theory myself.
WATSON: Holmes, of course, declared almost immediately that "RACHE" was the German word for revenge, and that anyone who wasted time looking for a woman named Rachel was on a fool's errand. He said it rather pointedly, as I recall.
LESTRADE: He did say it pointedly. Mr. Holmes was not always the most diplomatic of collaborators. But I have been in this work long enough to acknowledge when a man is right. The Rachel line of inquiry came to nothing, just as he predicted.
DOYLE: I will say, Inspector, that I based the rivalry between Holmes and the official police on something I felt quite strongly, which was that intelligence in the detection of crime was being significantly undervalued. There were extraordinary men at Scotland Yard. But the system did not always reward deduction. It rewarded industry, persistence, orthodoxy. Holmes represented a different mode of investigation entirely, and it seemed to me that friction between those modes was both realistic and dramatically rich.
LESTRADE: I take no offence at that, Arthur. And I'll admit there are moments in my career when I've wished I had Mr. Holmes's particular faculties. The Lauriston Gardens case was certainly one of them. The body told him things it did not tell us. He found a wedding ring near the body that Gregson and I had entirely missed. He identified the blood as not belonging to the victim. He identified the killer's height, his age, his approximate weight — from footprints, from the depth of the impressions in the earth, from the length of the stride. I had never seen anything like it.
SMITH: Watson, you were present for much of this investigation. What was it like to watch Holmes at work in those early days, when his methods were still entirely new to you?
WATSON: Bewildering, at first. Then, gradually, astonishing. He would pick up some fragment — a footprint, a cigar ash, the particular angle at which a hat was placed — and from it draw a conclusion that seemed, until he explained it, quite impossibly bold. The explanation always made it seem obvious in retrospect. That was perhaps the most disconcerting quality of it: how obvious it all seemed once you heard the reasoning. You felt you ought to have seen it yourself, and wondered why you had not.
DOYLE: That is precisely the sensation I was trying to create in the reader. The momentary sense that they might have kept up with Holmes, followed by the humbling realization that they had not.
SMITH: Now — and I am rather looking forward to this portion of the seminar — I should like to turn to Mr. Wiggins. Mr. Wiggins, you led what was called in the story the Baker Street Irregulars. Can you tell us a little about that arrangement, in your own words?
WIGGINS: Well, sir, it wasn't what you'd call a formal arrangement, like. Me and the other lads, we used to knock about Baker Street quite a lot — running errands, holding horses, that sort of thing. Mr. Holmes, he noticed us one day — couldn't say exactly when it was, but he came out of 221B and he had a look at us and he said, something like, you lot get everywhere and nobody pays you any mind, which is more than can be said for the police. He offered us a shilling a day and a guinea to whichever of us found what he was after. Well, a shilling a day was very good money, sir, for boys like us.
SMITH: And in the Lauriston Gardens case, what was it that Holmes set you to find?
WIGGINS: A cab, sir. A four-wheeler. He had worked out that whoever did the killing had driven to that empty house in a cab, and he had a description of the driver — a tall man, elderly, with a weathered face and a brown coat, he said. He described the cab as a four-wheeler, not a hansom. He wanted us to find that particular cab in all of London. We spread out across the city, the whole lot of us, checking every rank and yard and mews.
WATSON: And they found it. Or rather, the driver came to Baker Street himself, in the end. Holmes had sent word through the Irregulars that the cab was wanted, and the driver — Jefferson Hope, as we later discovered — came to collect what he thought was a fare. Holmes and I were waiting for him.
WIGGINS: I was there when he came in, sir. I brought the message that he was on his way up. Big fellow he was, very strong looking. I didn't think Mr. Holmes could hold him, but hold him he did, between himself and the Doctor, until Lestrade arrived with the handcuffs.
LESTRADE: I received Holmes's message and came at once. I will confess I was not entirely prepared for what I found — Holmes, Watson, and this enormous American locked in a very vigorous struggle in the sitting room of 221B. We got the cuffs on Hope eventually, though he nearly overpowered all three of us. For a man of his age — he was in his fifties, I believe — he was remarkably powerful.
SMITH: Arthur, the story then takes a very striking structural turn. We leave London entirely and travel back in time to the American frontier — to Utah, to the Mormon settlements, to the story of John Ferrier and his daughter Lucy. What led you to that decision?
DOYLE: I wanted Jefferson Hope to be more than a murderer. I wanted him to be a man the reader could understand, and even, to some degree, sympathize with. That required the reader to have witnessed what he had witnessed — the flight across the salt flats with the Ferriers, the cruelty of the Mormon elders, the death of John Ferrier, the forced marriage and subsequent death of Lucy, who was the woman Hope loved. I needed to show the origins of his revenge, not merely its execution. The double narrative structure was a deliberate choice. I was aware that some readers found the shift jarring, and I have never entirely disagreed with that criticism, but I felt the moral weight of the story required it.
WATSON: When Hope confessed the full circumstances to us, I confess my emotions were quite mixed. Holmes remained characteristically detached — he regarded the case as a problem to be solved and had solved it. But I found Hope's account deeply affecting. He had carried this purpose for twenty years. Twenty years. He had crossed half the world twice in pursuit of the two men he held responsible for Lucy Ferrier's fate.
LESTRADE: As a policeman, I cannot make allowances for that sort of thing, whatever the provocation. Hope murdered two men. The law cannot inquire too carefully into a man's motives when determining that he committed the acts in question. But speaking as a man rather than as an officer — well. I can say that I found the case a troubling one, and I am not easily troubled.
SMITH: Hope died before he could be brought to trial, as the story relates.
LESTRADE: He did. An aneurism, the doctors said. He had known his heart was in a very bad way — he had been told he had not long to live. I sometimes think that the certainty of his own approaching death gave him a kind of freedom in pursuing his revenge that a healthier man might not have had. He had nothing to lose.
SMITH: Watson, I want to ask you something that I suspect the audience is wondering. Holmes did not always credit his contribution adequately. In "A Study in Scarlet," when the case was resolved, the newspapers gave most of the credit to Gregson and Lestrade. How did Holmes respond to that?
WATSON: With perfect equanimity. That surprised me more than anything else about him in those early days. He said, to the effect, that the work itself was its own reward — that he required no external recognition, only that the problem be interesting and the solution be correct. I have lived with that man for many years now, in one way or another, and I believe he meant it entirely. He is not without vanity in some respects, but he is genuinely indifferent to the sort of public credit that most men prize above everything else.
DOYLE: I think that quality — the preference for the intrinsic satisfaction of the work over any public reward — is one of the things that has made Holmes enduringly attractive to readers. He is not ambitious in the conventional sense. He is not climbing any social ladder. He is simply, purely, interested in the puzzle.
SMITH: Dr. Stamford, I want to come back to you with a question I suspect you have been asked before. When you introduced Watson to Holmes that day at Barts, did you have any sense that you were setting in motion something of rather extraordinary consequence?
STAMFORD: [With a laugh.] No, sir. I thought I was helping a friend find affordable rooms. That was the full extent of my ambition in the matter. I remember walking away from Barts that afternoon thinking, well, I hope they get along tolerably, they seemed a reasonable fit. I had no notion that they would become the most famous lodging companions in the history of England, nor that Watson would end up writing books about it, nor that Arthur would become famous all over the world on the strength of the connection. I occasionally reflect on it and find it rather extraordinary that a chance meeting in the Criterion Bar could lead to all of this. But that is how life arranges itself, I suppose. The great hinge moments rarely announce themselves as such.
DOYLE: That is very beautifully put, Stamford.
WIGGINS: If I may, — and I hope it's not too forward — I'd say something similar about Mr. Holmes himself, from the other end of things. He saw boys that nobody else paid any attention to, and he made use of them in a way that treated them seriously, like. He paid fair, he said please and thank you, which not everyone does with street lads, and he made it clear that the work we did was real work that mattered. I've had men who employed me since who didn't treat me with the same respect that Mr. Holmes showed when I was eleven years old and running about in the mud. I've never forgotten that.
WATSON: Holmes would be thoroughly embarrassed to hear you say that, Wiggins.
WIGGINS: I know it, Doctor. Which is partly why I say it.
Laughter from the audience
SMITH: I am afraid we must begin to draw toward a close. Before we do, I would like to give each of our guests an opportunity for a final thought on "A Study in Scarlet." Inspector Lestrade, would you lead us off?
LESTRADE: Gladly. I have been a policeman for a very long time, and I have worked on a great many cases that never came to anything like a tidy resolution. What strikes me about this case — when I am being honest rather than professional — is that it was one in which the truth, the whole truth, was actually arrived at. We knew not only what had been done, and who had done it, but why, and what had been done to him first. That completeness is rarer in police work than the public imagines. I am grateful to Mr. Holmes for providing it, whatever our professional differences over the years.
STAMFORD: I find myself with a rather peculiar emotion about the whole business, which is one of responsibility. Not guilt — I could not have known. But responsibility, of a benign kind. Everything that Watson and Holmes did together began with me saying, I know a fellow you should meet. I find that quite a lot to carry. In the nicest possible way.
WIGGINS: Mine's simple enough, sir. I'm proud of the work we did. We found that cab. Nobody else would have found it half as quick. And I think those of us who were Irregulars — the ones who are still living, anyway — we feel a kind of ownership over this story that the other stories don't give us in quite the same way. This was where it started. This is the one that tells you what Baker Street was.
WATSON: I have told and retold portions of this story so many times that it sometimes seems as though it happened to someone else. But when I consider it freshly, I am struck by how much turned on how little. A rainy afternoon in London. A friend I hadn't seen in years. A set of rooms that needed splitting. Had any of those small contingencies been different, I would never have met Sherlock Holmes, and my life would have been immeasurably the poorer for it.
DOYLE: I shall close with this. When I wrote "A Study in Scarlet" from Dr. Watson’s excellently written notes, I was a young doctor with a struggling practice and a great deal of time on my hands. I did not know whether anyone would read it. I did not know whether Holmes would live beyond a single story. I simply wrote the character as fully as I could, and trusted that the readers would take him as he was. They did — you did — with a generosity and enthusiasm that has never ceased to move me.
SMITH: Arthur, Dr. Watson, Inspector Lestrade, Dr. Stamford, and Mr. Wiggins — on behalf of The Strand Magazine and of everyone in this room, thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the first of our seminars is concluded. Good day to you all.
Sustained applause