The St. Helena Tragedy

“It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.”

There are perhaps no more awful words in the Sherioekian Canon than those at the beginning of “The Final Problem.” We get a more detailed account later on, but that beginning is the death knell, the bell tolling for a lost hero. And if those are the most tragic words in the Canon, what passage would take second place? I would like to suggest the following: “Jack has been lost overboard in gale off St. Helena. No one knows how accident occurred.”

For who, next to Sherlock Holmes, was more of a hero than Jack Douglas of The Valley of Fear?

He was a different breed, this Douglas, a.k.a. Edwards, a.k.a. McMurdo. Not a solver like Holmes, Jack Douglas was an infiltrator, more like Vinnie Terranova or the Scarlet Pimpernel, a man who places himself at the very heart of evil, so that he can pluck the cancer out at its very source. There are even those who say Sherlock Holmes took Douglas as his inspiration when he later assumed the role of Altamont in taking on the German spy network.

And if Holmes followed Douglas’s lead in the Von Bork affair, what if the master also used a Jack Douglas trick on an earlier occasion . . . like at the falls of Reichenbach?

In The Valley of Fear an assassin from Douglas’s past by the name of Ted Baldwin comes after Jack Douglas with plenty of help from Professor Moriarty himself. Moriarty’s man Porlock is the first to suggest that the professor is involved in a plot against Douglas. And later, when the police are baffled, trying to catch a killer who looks like every other man in the neighborhood, the hand of Moriarty surfaces again, as Inspector MacDonald says of the criminal: “He is at present reported from Leicester, Nottingham, Southampton, Derby, East Ham, Richmond, and fourteen other places. In three of them — East Ham, Leicester, and Liverpool — there is a clear case against him, and he has actually been arrested. The country seems to be full of the fugitives with yellow coats.”

This is a little more than the usual, Scotland Yard inefficiency. This sudden flurry of bicyclists in yellow coats has a very contrived feeling about it... almost like it was planned from the start.

Consider for a moment, the situation of Ted Baldwin, the American assassin. He’s come to the godfather of English crime for help in killing a man in territory that’s unfamiliar to him. If he is to succeed, he needs two things. The first is the exact whereabouts of a man he once knew as McMurdo. The second (and the thing usually not as well thought out by criminals less than Moriarty) is a secure escape route.

How better to conceal the escape of a man in a bright yellow coat on a bicycle than with a herd of yellow-coated men on bicycles? There can be no doubt Baldwin was to have transferred his coat and bicycle to another man (and one with an air-tight alibi at that!) earlier on and slip away. Moriarty’s fingerprints are all over the genius of the thing!

But let’s get back to Jack Douglas. Having faced down a gang of ruffians, thwarted assassins, and generally dealt with every assault thrown at him. Jack Douglas was then supposedly killed and thrown overboard as he fled to South Africa. Malarkey, I say!

Re-read Ivy Douglas’s calmly worded note to Sherlock Holmes: “Jack has been lost overboard in gale off St. Helena. No one knows how accident occurred.” How did Moriarty’s assassins get the jump on a wary former Pinkerton? Obviously not in his sleep, or else his wife would have been roused. And it’s hard to believe someone just threw him overboard without the sort of struggle that would have brought notice from others on the ship. And how could anyone even know he was lost overboard if no one was around to know how the accident occurred?

Why would Ivy Douglas tell Sherlock Holmes of the “accident” if she wasn’t going to ask for his help in finding the culprits? Unless she was merely sending Holmes a message, confirming something the detective had previous knowledge of: that he was going to have help in bringing down Professor Moriarty.

When Jack Douglas encountered the Scowrers of Vermissa Valley, he knew that it was his job to deal with them. Could such a man, encountering Moriarty’s empire, do anything less?

St. Helena, like Reichenbach, was perhaps not so tragic a place after all.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, January 1998)