Our New Fellow Lodger

I have a certain friend who makes my life interesting on occasion. Like Watson, I sit at home, working on my chronicles of fact and fancy, some nights choosing to nod over a good book. But every now and then the phone rings, and I get the modern version of "Come, Watson, comet The game is afoot!" My long-suffering wife sighs as I dash out the door, just as Watson's did, and I wind up embroiled in some odd little adventure involving the mysterious death of a tropical fish or something equally unfathomable. This is, after all, Peoria in its doldrums and not London at its most prominent.

My friend's latest adventure did not include me until the very end, but the Sherlockian overtones of the matter were amazing. A neighbor of my friend witnessed what she thought was an attempted murder. Those strange people who lived just down the street were trying to kill one of their family members and make it look like an accident, she said. They were using Moriarty's Bentinck Street method - substituting a car for a two-horse van. And just as it failed for Moriarty, so did the bogus traffic accident fail here.

When the B.S. method didn't get the job done, these villains moved from the Moriarty school to the style of Wilson Kemp. Kemp's favorite method of murder had at least a 50% effectiveness rate in the Canon when fully followed. These rascals made all the right moves early on: They packed up all their furnishings and trapped their victim inside the house they were deserting. But they were just a little too fond of their Weber grill, taking it with them instead of leaving it inside the house with charcoal burning. Even without the poisonous charcoal vapors that did in Paul Kratides in GREE, their poor victim would still starve to death in time.

The modern day Sherlock Holmes of this case, my adventurous friend, soon decided to make her move. Accompanied by the neighbor who originally spotted the skullduggery, she slipped around the deserted house to find an opening.

“Well, I think that under the circumstances we may enter without an invitation," Gregson said in GREE after Holmes got a window open. The same philosophy applied here.

And like Mr. Melas in GREE, the intended victim was taken out of the deserted house just in time. Now we wait for a curious newspaper cutting to reach us from Buda-Pesth about onsome villains meeting a tragic end.

How did I get involved in this matter, you ask? Well, the sweet young lady who survived two heinous attempts on her is life has taken up residence here at Old Riding Place with Kathy and me. She is very well-mannered, except for a habit of waking us at 5:15 every morning. At this moment, she's sleeping on my old sleeping bag just a few feet from where I write this. Oh, and she is a calico cat.

After a hiatus of well over ten years, we have re-entered the world of Sherlockians with a cat. I know a lot of Sherlockians with cats. There was even a cat deerstallker though I can't imagine a cat sitting still for it being strapped to its head. But I've never understood the Sherlockian/cat connection.

Neither Holmes nor Watson ever owned a cat. In fact, almost all of the cats mentioned in the Holmes stories either live with, or are compared to, villains. Tonga, Sir Eustace Brackenstall, and Baron Adelbert Gruner were all compared to cats. And there appear to have been cats living with Charles Augustus Milverton, young Jonas Oldacre, Grimesby Roylott ("a cheetah is just a big cat," Holmes proclaimed), and spymaster Von Bork.

Why then, so many Sherlockians with cats? I don't know about everyone else, but in my case I think one comparison can be made. Look at that last list again. Young Jonas oldacre just had a cat so he could toss it in with a bunch of birds and watch what followed. Roylott had a cheetah. But Von Bork and Milverton both had something else in common other than cats. Their households both were inhabited by women of note, Martha and Agatha, who both probably made their presence felt. I'm no Canonical villain, but the influence of three different women did persuade me to adopt a cat again.

That . . . and a definite Sherlockian factor. I'm a sucker for a Canonical reference every time.

(This column appeared in the April 1992 issue of Plugs & Dottles.)