Chapter Thirteen - I Can’t Believe This

Listening to Professor Malcolm Whippet of Licking Falls State College, the first speaker of the afternoon session, was like suffering a Chinese water torture of words.

Whippet was a frail figure in his late sixties, medium height, thin, with a high forehead, fringes of gray hair, age spots on his head and hands, and gray-green eyes. He was so slight he hardly seemed to be there at all.

Whenever he had to turn the pages of the paper he was reading, he stopped his nasal monotone to lick his fingers. After a few introductory comments (“Let us begin with the obvious - Sherlock Holmes was an American”), Professor Whippet’s presentation on “Nick Carter, Alias Sherlock Holmes” turned out to be a pastiche, an imitation Holmes story. Whippet lacked, however, a few tools of the storyteller’s art, such as a sense of pace, an ear for dialogue, and a rudimentary notion of plot. Also, he couldn’t write.

“‘Yes, my faithful Watson, it is quite so!’” he read. “‘All these years I have concealed my true identity even from you. I am indeed Nicholas Carter, the famous American detective!’”

Putting a hand over my mouth to stifle an impolite sound, I looked around the room to see how this was going over with the Sherlockian set. A lot of people were shifting in their seats, including Lynda and Matheson. They were still sitting next to each other and Lynda wasn’t sending any lovesick looks my way, contrary to my sister’s observation.

Mac had deposited himself in a wingback chair next to me at the back of the room. I leaned over to tell him, “I can’t believe this. How do this guy’s students stand it?”

“Students?” Mac repeated with dismay. He raised an eyebrow. “Surely you jest. Professor Whippet has tenure, not students. Do not demean the man’s achievements, Jefferson. It takes considerable talent to make Sherlock Holmes this boring. I had no idea he had it in him.”

Whippet droned on. I looked at my watch: two-eleven. When it seemed like half an hour had passed, I looked at it again: two-fourteen. Would it never end? It did, finally, but not until the speaker had run five minutes over his allotted time and brought into his story Mycroft Holmes (revealed as one of Nick Carter’s operatives), Grover Cleveland, Fu-Manchu, Jack the Ripper, Count Dracula, Oscar Wilde, the Prince of Wales, and Tinker Bell.

When the concluding cliché had been uttered, the applause of a grateful crowd shook the room. Nobody called for more.

Next up on the program was a man Mac introduced to my surprise as Lars Jenson, the most prominent Swedish publisher of the Sherlock Holmes stories. I’d known he was coming, of course - from a conference in New York, not directly from Sweden. But I had never connected his name with the stoop-shouldered fellow from the rare book room, the one with the whitish-blond hair hanging over one eye à la Carl Sandburg. Dressed in a double-breasted blue suit, pink shirt, wide paisley tie, and socks with little clock designs on them, he didn’t look like my idea of a publisher.

When he opened his mouth, Jenson sounded like the Swedish Chef on The Muppet Show. Approximately every other word started with either a “y” or a “v” sound, which made it hard to figure out what he was saying. There was something about Sherlock Holmes helping the King of Scandinavia on two occasions, and Holmes and Watson visiting Norway at the end of one of their adventures. And Holmes, if I caught it right, once adopted the guise of a Norwegian explorer. But don’t expect me to give you quotes.

All the while he talked, Jenson kept playing with a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He’d put them on, yank them off, put them on, yank them off. There seemed no rhyme or reason to it, since he didn’t use the glasses to read from notes. For awhile I was fascinated, trying to figure out a pattern. But it started giving me the heebie-jeebies until finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and I left.

Out in the corridor, haunted by that Swedish Chef voice coming over the loudspeaker, I flipped out my iPhone. After posting a quick tweet (“Last two speakers at Doyle-Holmes colloquium truly unbelievable”), I called a certain cell phone number. Graham Bentley Post answered with his names - all three of them - on the third ring.

“This is Thomas Jefferson Cody,” I informed him, not to be outdone in the multiple names department. “I’m calling from St. Benignus College and I’d like to talk to you about the Woollcott Chalmers Collection.”

“Indeed?” His voice turned warmer, say three degrees. “I have already had some discussions of that nature with Mr. Pfannenstiel. They have not been fruitful.”

“I know,” I said. “When and where can we meet?”

He suggested six-thirty and dinner at the restaurant in the Winfield, which is top-notch, but I planned to stick with the colloquium right through the seven o’clock banquet in the President’s Dining Room. Post had an appointment at a private home on Everly Street until after five o’clock, so we agreed to meet at five-thirty at the nearby main branch of the Sussex County Public Library.

“I hope you’ll have some news for me, Mr. Cody,” Post said.

“That goes double,” I assured him.

As I disconnected, I wondered why Post hadn’t even mentioned the theft last night. It seemed a remarkable oversight - unless he’d been deliberately avoiding the subject.

My spot on the couch at the back of the Hearth Room had been swiped by a man in a string tie, so I slipped into a chair in the last row. I was in front of Mac and lined up almost exactly behind Lynda and Matheson, who leaned over to whisper things to her with alarming frequency - alarming to me, anyway.

Dr. Queensbury had the lectern, discussing Sherlock Holmes and cocaine. Still wearing the deerstalker cap, he paced and postured like the great detective himself as he quoted alternatively from the Holmes stories and from the British medical journals of the day. I wrote down some of his more memorable points:

“Watson mentions Holmes’s use of cocaine only five times, and all of them in stories appearing between 1890 and 1893.”

“In 1890 cocaine was still considered a therapeutic agent. It was a non-prescription drug. Not until the middle of the decade did Freud reject it.

“It has been questioned, however, whether Holmes really used cocaine at all. Perhaps he was just having Watson on.”

Queensbury’s talk had at least one outstanding virtue: It was only about fifteen minutes long. Even after he took questions from the floor the program was running ahead of schedule. Queensbury sat down, amid applause, and there was an awkward gap when he wasn’t replaced at the lectern. I looked behind me but the master of ceremonies, Mac, was no longer there either. Finally, my sister Kate stood up and announced that it was time for an “interval” or break between sessions.

The flow of the crowd went in two directions - either out the doors (heading for such amenities as coffee, the restroom, or a place to smoke outside) or toward the back of the room, where the bald man was selling books and what I would call trinkets.

As I stood up to stretch my longish legs, I heard somebody behind me at the book table say:

“I have that book!”

“British or American edition?” another voice asked.

“Both.”

Stirring stuff, but where in the world was Mac? I wanted to tell him about my appointment with Graham Bentley Post. Queensbury’s talk coming up short obviously had caught Mac off guard. Looking around the room I still didn’t see his huge form.

“Jeff!”

I sure liked that voice. Renata Chalmers, flashing that thousand-watt smile at me, nudged her way through some of the reveling Sherlockians until she stood at my side. She pushed a wild strand of black hair out of her eye and stuck her hands into the pockets of her dress-for-success suit.