In short, Fusco concludes, Holmes had nothing more than a “good practical knowledge of British law,” as would be expected of a detective who frequently dealt with the law and the police.

69 Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) completed the first volume of Lieder ohne Wortes (Songs Without Words), a book of music for the pianoforte, in 1830. There were eight volumes in all, the last of which was finished in 1845. Several scholars speculate that because Holmes played the violin and not the pianoforte, he must have been working out simple melodies for the unmusical Watson, not tackling full transcriptions of the pieces.

70 In the essay “Sherlock Holmes and Music,” Harvey Officer, composer of the Baker Street Suite for violin and piano, challenges Watson’s recollection by attesting that Holmes could have played neither “sonorous and melancholy” chords nor “fantastic and cheerful” ones while playing a violin “thrown across his knee.” “Chords on a violin,” Officer explains, “are not natural to the instrument. They can only be played when the violin is held strongly in its accustomed position, and even then they are not the violin’s most expressive sounds. It is preeminently the instrument of melody, not of harmony.”

But William Braid White, a musicology expert, considers that a seated Holmes may have “placed the tail piece of the violin against his middle, holding his left arm under it and the fingers of that arm on the fingerboard in the usual way. This would bring the violin to a position nearly at right angles to his body as he sat in the chair, leaving his right arm and hand free to use the bow, and the left arm and hand, as before remarked, equally free for the fingerboard.” When Holmes produced these chords, White concludes, he was reminding himself of, and perhaps practising, the famous “Chaconne” (at any rate, the introductory parts of it) from Johann Sebastian Bach’s D Minor Sonata for violin, which, he apparently believes, any listener would characterise as “fantastic and cheerful.”

Rolfe Boswell, among others, points out that Watson never says that Holmes placed a violin across his knee, but rather a fiddle. This could well have been the medieval fiddle, which was flat and oval and had five strings; or any bowed, stringed instrument in the violin family, all of which are termed in the vernacular “fiddles.” Boswell favors the latter interpretation, arguing that Holmes’s instrument of choice was the viola.

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Scene from a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (ca. 1881).

71 Emanuel Berg takes Watson’s wording here (a series as compensation for the trial upon his patience) to indicate that the “series of favourite airs” were the work of William Schwenk Gilbert (1836–1911) and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842–1900), the lyricist and composer of our most enduring comic operas. Watson’s preference, according to Berg, would have been for those works between Trial by Jury (March 25, 1875) and Patience (April 23, 1881), a period of productivity that included H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) and The Pirates of Penzance (1879). Guy Warrack suggests that Mendelssohn’s Auf Flügeln des Gesanges might well have been another of Watson’s favourites.

72 G. Lestrade, as he signs a letter in “The Cardboard Box,” a policeman assigned to Scotland Yard, appears in fourteen of Watson’s published accounts. While Holmes upheld a friendly attitude toward Lestrade and his brethren, he disdained their methods. Holmes called Lestrade the best of the professionals (The Hound of the Baskervilles), the “pick of a bad lot” (A Study in Scarlet), lacking in imagination (“The Norwood Builder”), and normally out of his depth (The Sign of Four).

Lestrade frequently patronised Holmes’s methods yet evidently bore a secret respect for Holmes. At the conclusion of “The Six Napoleons,” Lestrade, congratulating Holmes on his successful investigation, remarks, “We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.” L. S. Holstein, who has conducted a thorough analysis of Lestrade’s career, places him at around forty at the time of the affair reported in A Study in Scarlet; and Lestrade continues to interact with Holmes as late as “The Three Garridebs” (1902). From this, Holstein concludes that Lestrade was born sometime between 1844 and 1846, making him ten or twelve years older than Holmes. Aside from the mention of Lestrade’s first initial, there are no indications of what the detective’s first name might be; nor is there any clear consensus among scholars on the pronunciation of “Lestrade.”

73 R. K. Leavitt observes, in “Nummi in Arca or The Fiscal Holmes,” that these clients were Holmes’s daily fare, not the more profitable Reginald Musgraves. “Holmes very soon outgrew his dependence upon [such clients], though he continued (be it said to his credit) to interest himself in such cases all through his years of affluence.”

74 Despite a lack of concrete evidence either here or elsewhere in the story, William S. Baring-Gould declares that this is “the famous Mrs. Hudson,” Holmes’s faithful landlady, who is mentioned by that name throughout the rest of the Canon. Baring-Gould and other scholars further assert that the landlady’s first name is Martha. They make this claim based on the text of “The Lion’s Mane,” in which the retired Holmes refers to “my old housekeeper,” who tends to him in Sussex Downs, and “His Last Bow,” in which Holmes speaks of a “dear old ruddy-faced woman” who is “Martha, the only servant I have left.” William Hyder, in “The Martha Myth,” disputes these assumptions, concluding on the basis of Watson’s descriptions that Mrs. Hudson, Holmes’s Sussex housekeeper, and Martha are in fact three separate women.

As to Mrs. Hudson, little is known about her personal life. Vincent Starrett speculates, in “The Singular Adventures of Martha Hudson,” that she was a young widow who took up housekeeping after her marriage ended for reasons unknown. “But,” Starrett laments, “no whisper of her life before that day in 1881, when Holmes first called upon her, has ever been revealed.