Just Whose Adventures Are These?

By Alessandro Fortiz

Gypped again, I say!

A man cannot be too careful with his money in this day and age. Plastic promises and marketing stratagems worthy of Napoleon make it necessary for the penny-watching shopper to get every possible bit of value for his shopping dollar. One of the best means of getting such sought-after value is to, go with those tried-and-true products that have been on the market for decades and have not been found wanting. Following this philosophy, I recently picked up a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes at my local paperback dealer.

What a coup, I thought. For a mere sixty-five cents I was promised SCAN, REDH, IDEN, FIVE, SPEC, and "seven other unforgettable Holmes adventures." My delight at such a marvelous buy lasted through all of the above-named stories and three others, until coming to an abrupt halt. ENGR was no adventure of Sherlock Holmes. It was an adventure of a hydraulic engineer named Victor Hatherley, with Sherlock Holmes thrown in at the beginning and the end in the same manner that television shows run pilots for spin-offs under the guise of a real episode.

I was shocked. it is certainly fortunate for Conan Doyle and Watson that they both disappeared from the public eye before Consumer rights came on the scene. Both of them would have been verbally horsewhipped in its pages, I am sure of it, for trying to foist such a sham upon the trusting reader. Observe what they try to pass off as an "adventure."

Five pages into the story, Holmes first appears, welcomes two visitors, and eats breakfast (a mundane eggs and bacon, at that). Another five pages pass as Hatherley rambles on about his own experiences, and finally, Holmes asks a few questions. The detective is then not to be heard from again for nearly nine pages, at which point Hatherley finally shuts up. Holmes takes a book off the shelf, takes a train ride to Berkshire, and gets to see a house that's on fire. Case closed.

Where is the adventure in that? Sherlock Holmes doesn't come within a mile of anything close to a criminal. He exerts neither his mind nor his body. Cheat! Cheat, I say! He doesn't even make any money from the matter. Watson and Doyle are simply padding their pocketbooks on this one.

Having been so offended by this spurious Holmes adventure, I set about rating the other stories contained in The Adventures as adventures in which Sherlock Holmes participates. The Fortiz Sherlockian Adventure Rating, as I call it, is based on the assignment of point scores to the various attributes that add to the adventure of a tale. For example, the points awarded for danger to Sherlock Holmes on any given case are: 3 points for mortal danger, 2 points for physical threat, 1 point for physical discomfort, and O points for a totally comfortable case.

Other point values are as follows: Leaves London (2), leaves 221B (1), meets head of state (2), meets celebrity (1), physically exerts self (1), uses weapon (3), threatens to use weapon (2), carries weapon (1), engages in chase (1), breaks law (1), uses disguise (1), gets healthy reward (1), and performance in solving a case (O through 4). One point is assigned to a case meriting police involvement, and just to make sure that an adventure is a true adventure of Sherlock Holmes, 1 point is added for each 10% of the pages of a story in which Holmes appears in the flesh.

Rating results are not too surprising, SCAN and REDH scoring highest with 22 and 23 points, respectively. TWIS, BERY, SPEC, NOBL, BOSC, IDEN, BLUE, and COPP run through the teens in roughly that order. All in all, a basic consistency of adventure is maintained. ENGR scores lowest of the entire group, much as expected, with a rating of 8.

The surprise of the survey is the low score for FIVE, its 10 point rating coming dangerously close to that of ENGR. Under close scrutiny, there is actually very little adventure in this story. Holmes even lets his client wander off to his death, but it's John Openshaw's death that helps give the story an illusion of adventure. The vague looming threat of the Ku Klux Klan, while no members of that group are ever actually encountered, also adds to the false sense of adventure. But even a false sense of adventure is better than none, so we may forgive Watson and Doyle for including this one. Perhaps they were fooled as well. Just what the author-agent pair's motives were for slipping in the spurious ENGR eludes us. Were they just trying to fulfill a contract and ran short of real adventures? Or did they have a "Victor Hatherley, Hydraulic Engineer" series in mind as a spin-off? Whatever the reason, their misrepresentation will not slip by today's keen-eyed consumers. I myself am urging all Sherlockians to write any and all publishers of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and demand that truthful labeling be hereafter used on all forthcoming editions. A burst or banner proclaiming "With One Adventure of Victor Hatherley" would do nicely, I should think, and all counts of Holmes's adventures should be altered from twelve to eleven.

I suppose that I'll go on and purchase The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and the rest at this point, but I think I'll be skimming the contents carefully before'I buy, just to make sure they are all memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, that he does return in Return, and that The Hound of the Baskervilles does contain a dog. I've heard unpleasant rumors concerning the Hardwick sequel to that book . . . .

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, September 1989)