Research-reading Sherlock: Holmes and Money Crimes
In the last post, I discussed currency in the Victorian period, and how the Holmes stories give precise information on the price of everything from geese to violins. Arthur Conan Doyle was just as specific about the price of crime, and the profit, at least for Sherlock Holmes!
Holmes’s reputation was such that among those who hired him for their necessary investigations were the highest and mightiest of the kingdom—literally, in the “Adventure of the Illustrious Client.” In that story, Holmes and Watson commit fraud and burglary in service to “the illustrious client” who turns out to be King Edward VII.
In fact, the British king was not Holmes’s only royal client. The King of Bohemia came in disguise and paid him 1000 pounds to prevent blackmail by the enchanting and nefarious opera singer Irene Adler. While Sherlock foiled the extortion, he does not get the culprit. Miss Adler was one of the few who escaped his traps. The king offers him an emerald ring as a bonus, but Sherlock demands in compensation only one thing—the photo of the temptress forever enshrined in his memory as “THE woman”.
Another Dangerous Woman
The highest and the mightiest clients were disproportionately the victims of blackmail, and these stories reveal how much Victorians were willing to pay to avoid scandal. The blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton made a handsome living paying servants for proof of adultery and indiscretions and then selling the evidence back to the noble miscreants—or releasing it to the voracious gossip columnists. He once “paid seven hundred pounds to a footman for a note two lines in length, and that the ruin of a noble family was the result.” The price of avoiding such scandal was exactly ten times that, with Milverton charging a bride 7000 pounds to return her indiscreet pre-engagement billets-doux.
When Holmes pointed out the bride could not pay that amount, Milverton responded with a pretense of sympathy and a warning: “Now, you remember the sudden end of the engagement between the Honourable Miss Miles and Colonel Dorking? Only two days before the wedding there was a paragraph in the Morning Post to say that it was all off. And why? It is almost incredible, but the absurd sum of twelve hundred pounds would have settled the whole question.”
This is another story, by the way, where Sherlock was bested by a strong-minded woman. He and Watson break into Milverton’s house, intending to steal back the blackmail material. But someone else had also broken in—a vengeful lady with a pistol and a determination. They watched in shock as the elegant attacker accused Milverton of destroying her husband and shothim. Then, when Milverton fell to the ground, “The woman looked at him intently and ground her heel into his upturned face. She looked again, but there was no sound or movement.”
Sherlock usually had no use for women, but in this case, he might conclude what Kipling wrote a generation later: “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
Beware of Crooks Bearing Gifts
In several stories, Conan Doyle used financial anomalies as clues to crimes. For example, the young governess in “Copper Beech” tells Holmes a new employer has offered her 120 pounds a year—but only if she cuts her long red hair. Was that as minimal an amount as it sounds to modern readers, or was it generous? In fact, it was so much higher than the customary 40 pounds a year, that Sherlock correctly concluded the employer must be involved in some criminal scheme. He was right—the employer meant to use the governess to impersonate his own daughter so that he could steal her inheritance.
There are several other stories where an outsized salary enticed a poor man to unwittingly participate in a crime. For example, in his previous position, the Stockbroker’s Clerk got 3 pounds a week (that is, 150 or so a year). Another office suddenly offered him 500 pounds a year (3 times as much), and that was all Holmes needed to know there was a criminal scheme taking place. Similarly the Red-headed Man was offered 4 pounds a week for part-time work, which was more than he was making in his pawn-broking business. He too was unknowingly caught up in a crime.
This was a common plot device for Conan Doyle, where poor person snapped at an extravagant offer, only to find that it was a trick. The most extreme example is in “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb.” The young engineer was offered 50 guineas for a night’s work, which was almost twice what he made in two years of running his own business. But of course, that sum carried a great cost—he lost his thumb in the machinery he was forced to run. It turned out his employer needed him to fix the press that was stamping out counterfeit coins.
This was a real theme in the Sherlock stories: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” And that’s a lesson most of us have to learn, though hopefully not with such pain as the poor engineer experienced!
Back here in the 21st Century, I’m watching the White River rise (see my backyard below) along with the tornado alerts. Come hell or highwater, I’m retreating again to the 19th Century. Now that I’ve finished research-reading Sherlock, I’m moving onto a more elegant but still clever series of stories—the Palliser and Barchester novels by Anthony Trollope. Next blog post series will explore the question: Was Trollope a sexist who thought women needed a husband more than they needed the vote? Or was he a feminist far ahead of his time, who learned from his romance-writer mother the essential truth that… women are people too?
Alicia Rasley
