RG

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

US: August 1908 (as “The Singular Experience of Mr. J. Scott Eccles”)

UK: September 1908

COLLECTION

His Last Bow, 1917

CHARACTERS

John Scott Eccles Respectable English bachelor.

Aloysius Garcia Young Spaniard living in Surrey.

Garcia’s cook Chef at Wisteria Lodge.

Inspector Gregson Scotland Yard policeman.

Inspector Baynes Provincial policeman.

Don Murillo Neighbor of Garcia.

Miss Burnet Governess at Henderson’s house.

Lucas Henderson’s secretary.

This story was originally published in The Strand Magazine under the title “A Reminiscence of Sherlock Holmes,” and split into two halves: “The Singular Experience of Mr. John Eccles” and “The Tiger of San Pedro.” Later editions compiled the full text under the title “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge.”

According to Watson, the case begins on a bleak day in March 1892, but this date is squarely within the so-called “Great Hiatus”, which fell between 1891 and 1894, and so either the doctor, or Conan Doyle, must have been mistaken.

RG

Released in 1928, this silent Jean Epstein film of “The Fall of the House of Usher” hints at the Gothic atmosphere also present in Wisteria Lodge.

Grotesquery and intrigue

The tale opens with Holmes receiving a telegram: “Have just had most incredible and grotesque experience. May I consult you?” He asks Watson how he would best define the word “grotesque,” and to Watson’s suggestions of “strange” and “remarkable,” Holmes adds, “some underlying suggestion of the tragic and the terrible.” He then retrospectively characterizes two of his past cases, “The Red-Headed League” and “The Five Orange Pips”, as being more than a little grotesque. In this exchange, Conan Doyle is alluding to Edgar Allan Poe, a past master of the compulsively atmospheric short story, and author of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Poe’s fictional French detective, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, was an acknowledged inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. This case, however, draws more parallels with Poe’s earlier story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), with its dark and sinister house, which is exactly what Conan Doyle’s Wisteria Lodge turns out to be.

When the sender of the telegram, the highly respectable John Scott Eccles, reaches 221B Baker Street, he professes an antipathy to the business of private detection, but says he does not know where else to turn. This begins a coolness between Holmes and his client, which is contrasted with the sleuth’s high opinion of Inspector Baynes, who arrives shortly after with the familiar Gregson of Scotland Yard. Against all convention, Baynes, from the local Surrey Constabulary, proves to be a worthy rival for Holmes, and his methods elicit respect and a proud twinkle in the eye of the great detective.

"My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built."

Sherlock Holmes

RG

The 1988 television adaption of “Wisteria Lodge,” starring Jeremy Brett, differs from the original tale and sees the Tiger of San Pedro killed on a train while escaping Holmes.

A bewildering dinner date

Eccles has come directly from Wisteria Lodge in Surrey, where he was an overnight guest of Aloysius Garcia—a young Spaniard with whom he had recently struck up a friendship. Eccles had not enjoyed the visit: he found Garcia’s home rather disquieting, and the chain-smoking, nervous agitation displayed by his normally upbeat host had not helped. Garcia’s mood had worsened on reading a note that his servant delivered to him during dinner, and Eccles was relieved to turn in for the night. But his reprieve was short-lived, for he was surprised to be woken at 1am by his host asking him if he had rung the bell. Eccles said that he had not, and Garcia apologized for disturbing him.

Events had taken an even stranger turn the following morning. Eccles found the house deserted—there was no trace of Garcia, nor the surly servant who had served dinner, nor the gigantic cook who had prepared it. What he does not know is that Garcia was murdered in the early hours on the common near his home. A note found by Baynes on the dead man’s body confirmed Eccles’s presence at the lodge and explains the police’s interest in him. Yet, satisfied by the Englishman’s clear respectability, they soon eliminate him as a suspect.

Baynes then produces another note, the one delivered to Garcia during dinner—although he had thrown it on the fire, it got caught in the grating, where the inspector had spotted it. Holmes is impressed by the policeman’s sharp eye and his canny, Holmesian diagnosis that the handwriting in the note, a woman’s, does not match the address on the reverse side. The note itself is cryptic, and at first Holmes is baffled. He later deduces that the first part must be a signal, and the second an appointment ; he also concludes that Garcia must have been heading for a large house near his own when he was killed, and decides to list such properties.

RG

The cryptic note found in the hearth at Wisteria Lodge at first confused Holmes, who thought that it referred to racing colors, and that it was written by a jealous husband. He later deduces that it details the layout of what must be a large house nearby, with each part of the note revealing an important aspect of the property.

Alibi material

Holmes ponders the unnaturally sudden friendship between Eccles and Garcia, and wonders why the Spaniard’s servants had fled. He concludes that while Eccles is “not a man likely to be congenial to a quick-witted Latin,” he is nevertheless “the very type of conventional British respectability.” That is, someone who might be counted on to provide an alibi.

That evening Holmes, Watson, and Baynes head to Wisteria Lodge, an old, tumbledown place looming “pitch-black against a slate-coloured sky.” There, the constable on guard reports being spooked earlier by a huge, devilish figure at the window. Baynes also has some peculiar and grotesque things to show Holmes—a small shriveled humanoid figure on the kitchen sideboard; the limbs and body of a large white bird in the sink; a zinc pail full of blood; and a platter covered in pieces of charred bone.

Unexpected teamwork

From here on in, Holmes and Baynes indulge in some friendly competition, each man following his own leads, and the resolution of the case becomes an instance of perfect, if inadvertent, cooperation. When the “devil” who had startled the constable returns to Wisteria Lodge, he is found to be Garcia’s cook, and Baynes charges him with murder. Holmes is certain the inspector has the wrong man, but it transpires that Baynes’s move was straight out of the detective’s own box of tricks: his false arrest of the cook later flushes out the real culprit, a wealthy local man called “Henderson”—in fact a fugitive former Central American dictator named Don Murillo, who had been in hiding in Britain with his family.

Murillo, the notorious “Tiger of San Pedro,” had led a brutal regime for over a decade, his name striking fear into the hearts of people across Central America, until he was deposed by a popular uprising and escaped to Europe, his ill-gotten fortune intact. Garcia, part of an organization set on bringing justice to this “lewd and bloodthirsty” tyrant, had indeed invited Eccles to his house to provide an alibi for the night he intended to kill Murillo.

The mysterious note found in the hearth at Wisteria Lodge had been written by “Miss Burnet,” the governess in Murillo’s household. Acting undercover, and secretly working with Garcia, she was in fact Signora Victor Durando, whose husband had been killed by Murillo in San Pedro. Her cryptic note was to explain that the coast was clear for Garcia to attack, and where in the house he could find the former tyrant. Unfortunately for them, however, Murillo’s secretary, Lucas, had caught her writing the note, locked her away in a room, and addressed and sent the note himself—hence the different handwriting. He then intercepted Garcia on the common, killing him before he could fulfill his mission.

"This fellow is a perfect savage, as strong as a cart-horse and as fierce as the devil."

Inspector Baynes

RG

Described as looking like a hungry beast, the devilish appearance of the cook, illustrated by Arthur Twidle in The Strand Magazine, was a ploy by Conan Doyle to give the story a sense of horror.

The tyrant escapes

From his appearance, Holmes had known only that Henderson—or Murillo—was “either a foreigner or has lived long in the tropics,” but the presence of two foreign households in one sleepy Surrey village was enough to put him on alert. He had therefore hired Murillo’s fired gardener, John Warner, to watch the house and to report back on developments. What he had not realized, however, was that Baynes was also on to Murillo’s true identity. The two detectives’ plans then converge when the tyrant, believing he is safe because the cook has been arrested, decides to escape by train, heading to the station with Lucas and a heavily sedated Miss Burnet in tow. But Warner follows them, and when the governess manages to break free from her captors, the gardener rescues her and delivers her to Holmes. Baynes explains that he had a plainclothes policeman at the station all week, but it was Holmes’s man who saved the day. When the governess recovers, she reveals the full story of Murillo and San Pedro’s band of freedom fighters.

Although, ultimately, Murillo and Lucas manage to escape from Holmes and Baynes at the station, Watson reports Murillo’s murder in Madrid six months later—clearly at the hands of Garcia’s organization. But what of the lurid remains in Garcia’s kitchen, and of the “devil” that had frightened the constable? In fact the devil was merely Garcia’s cook trying to collect his personal belongings, and the mention of his “savage” activities is a red herring, used to embellish the “grotesque” atmosphere. In fact, “Wisteria Lodge” is one of the earliest works of English literature to feature depictions of voodoo—religious rites practiced mainly in the West Indies.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
44.212.39.149