Sherlock Holmes and The Mystery Of Einstein's Daughter

Endnotes

Watson’s Army career in India and Afghanistan commenced with a medical degree from the University of London. The college validated credentials earned through hospital study rather than offering medical instruction of its own.

The Cullinan Diamond was named after Sir Thomas Cullinan, the mine-owner. At 3,106-carats, contemporary estimates of its value if cut into a dozen marketable stones were around £150,000, the equal in today’s money of £45 million. The stone was bought by the Transvaal government and presented to King Edward VII on his birthday. The task of transporting the stone to London involved a diversionary tactic worthy of Holmes. The rumour was deliberately spread that the diamond was being transported to England on a steamboat. Detectives crammed aboard. The stone on the ship was a glass replica. The real diamond was sent to England in a plain box via parcel post (albeit registered).

Strand Magazine. Except for the first two Sherlock Holmes novels, all the detective stories had their first UK publication in the Strand, a monthly magazine founded at the beginning of 1891 by Sir George Newnes, the creator (in 1881) of Tit-Bits, the weekly paper of miscellaneous information and entertainment. The Strand was introduced as a more respectable product, with the title taken from the fashionable West End thoroughfare. So, for instance, issues often contained short stories translated from the French or Russian, and it was - for Conan Doyle - a mark of success that his stories were included in this prestigious publication.

The Ghost of Grosvenor Square: by failing to explain this interesting case Watson does himself a disservice. After being shown around the site of a crime, a Mayfair mansion, he deduced the intruder was garrotted by a sightless man who knew the house well. Scotland Yard put out an international arrest order for the mansion’s owner, an American, who had fled the country and was indeed blind.

The Criterion, a famous restaurant located near Piccadilly Circus. Arthur Conan Doyle set a very early meeting (late 1880 or early 1881) between Holmes and Watson in the Criterion Long Bar, later a convenient meeting spot for the Suffragettes.

‘Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard’: a propaganda painting by Jacque-Louis David depicting Napoleon in his famous crossing of the Alps. In reality Napoleon crossed the Alps on a mule, not a magnificent horse. Mules have better balance and traction, are lower to the ground, and do better in cold weather.

The Prince Regnant of Bulgaria. A central character in Sherlock Holmes and The Case of The Bulgarian Codex where Holmes was commissioned to find a stolen ancient manuscript of very considerable importance.

Hegira. Migration of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina, here used as ‘journey’.

Rara avis. A rare or unique person or thing.

En cas où. ‘just in case’

Redresseur de destins. A rectifier of destinies.

Junior United Service Club: a gentleman’s club in London founded in 1827 and based at 11 Charles Street. Membership was restricted to former or serving officers in the Navy or Army with at least five years active service. Unlike its senior, the United Services Club in Pall Mall, its fees were moderate, which was why it was attractive to Dr Watson.

Doctor Honoris Causa: Honorary Doctorate. These started to be granted by universities across Europe (including Oxford and Cambridge) in the fifteenth century. The ceremony usually includes a eulogistic statement in Latin and/or Greek justifying the grant by the University Orator, opening with the word ‘Whereas’ and the concluding statement with ‘Therefore’. Those granted doctorates ‘honoris causa’ do not usually thereafter term themselves Doctor unless they have a separate academic doctorate. In November 1919, on the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the University of Rostock, Albert Einstein and Max Planck (German physicist and Nobel laureate, 1858-1947) were awarded honorary doctorates, Einstein for Medicine ‘in recognition of the enormous work of his mind’, the only honorary doctorate Einstein was given in Germany. Einstein was granted a doctorate ‘honoris causa’ by Princeton University in 1921 and by Oxford in 1931.

‘Drumming a tattoo on his knee with his fingers’: this tell-tale habit has been used by several authors to give the villain away, for instance, Sir Edmund Appleton in Scottish author John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay. Hannay was an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations.

Penang Lawyer. Walking stick having a bulbous head and made of the stem of an East Asiatic palm (Licuala acutifida).

2/8d and 3/6d. Two shillings and eight pence, i.e. two pennies over a half-crown. Some calculations estimate the purchasing power of 2/8d in 1905 as approximately GBP41.74 or US$67.64 in 2013. Three shillings and sixpence - calculations based on the purchasing power of 3/6d suggest its purchasing power would be GBP54.78 or US$88.77.

The double rifle. This Victorian development excels over other repeating firearms by allowing a split-second, secondary shot on large, dangerous game without having to work the firearm’s action. This can be a matter of life or death for the shooter when a large, dangerous animal chooses to charge, especially in close quarters or in thick cover. The double rifle rapidly became the weapon-of-choice of many professional White Hunters in India and especially in Africa, both now and when the author lived in Africa.

Tractarian: members of the Anglican High Church movement were also sometimes known as Tractarians. This High Church link in Watson’s background is not widely known - and here, in prompting a Nonconformist clergyman (let alone Sherlock Holmes) to display Biblical knowledge based on the Old Testament, he was being mischievous. Many Nonconformist ministers had never been to Oxford or Cambridge and were not likely therefore to have the detailed knowledge of the Scriptures in their original formats.

Churchwarden clay pipes: these are characterised by an extremely long stem, up to 20 inches in length.

The Colonial and Continental Church Society. A Protestant missionary society, created by the amalgamation of two early nineteenth century societies in 1851: it specialised in sending out clerically-qualified schoolmasters and catechists to areas such as Catholic Europe and Russia as well as North America - unlike the better-known societies such as the Church Missionary Society which specialised in locations outside Europe.

Norfolk Suit. During the Edwardian period, the Norfolk jacket remained fashionable for shooting and rugged outdoor pursuits. Made of sturdy tweed or similar fabric it featured paired box pleats over the chest and back, with a fabric belt. When worn with matching breeches (U.S. knickerbockers), it became the Norfolk suit, with knee-length stockings and low shoes suitable for bicycling or golf, or for hunting with sturdy boots or shoes with leather gaiters.

The pictorial postcard: this was introduced into Britain in 1894 and became particularly popular with Edwardians, throughout the Empire, including India. In Britain, most were sold for a half-penny. With up to ten deliveries a day in urban areas, it was nearly as synchronous as the Twitter and Twitpic of today and often as relaxed and conversational in tone. As late as 1908 a priggish character in a story remarked: ‘I have always been brought up to think it rather rude to send postcards, unless they are picture ones for people to put in their albums’.

Frederick Scholte. Tailoring was softened in the early twentieth century by Savile Row’s Frederick Scholte especially when he developed the English drape. Scholte became the Duke of Windsor’s (King Edward VIII’s) tailor. The Duke commented ‘Scholte had rigid standards concerning the perfect balance of proportions between shoulders and waist in the cut of a coat to clothe the masculine torso.... These peculiar proportions were Scholte’s secret formula.’

‘Omnis intellectualis scientia’ etc. Aristotle. Metaphysics, v. 1. Translates roughly as ‘All intellectual knowledge, whether or not generated by him, is concerned with its causes and the principles behind its rules.’

Olympia Academy. Einstein met regularly to read and discuss books on science and philosophy with other friends in Bern, all yet unknown to the academic world. They called themselves the Olympia Academy, mocking the official bodies that dominated science.

Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of England. Holmes would have known that this famous law book was utilised by the American ‘traitor’ General Benedict Arnold during the War of Independence to communicate messages designed for British eyes.

Michele Besso. Until only a few years before his death, Einstein was - to put it mildly -frugal in acknowledging the work of others in the field, including contemporaries such as Jules Henri Poincaré. The one exception was life-long friend, engineer Michele Besso, valuable to Einstein as a sounding board. This earned Besso the famous acknowledgment in the special relativity paper of 1905. Nevertheless, Besso’s help in a technical problem concerning Einstein’s paper on the perihelion problem was never publicly acknowledged. Little did Einstein know at that point that his friend and admirer would preserve these earlier calculations for posterity.

Gemütlich. The term is often argued to be difficult to translate, but the broad sense is that it represents something or someone comfortable, cosy or easy to be informal with.

Displaced hip. As Michele Zackheim points out in Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, Mileva Marić’s displaced hip was a congenital condition widespread in the Balkans, occurring in more than a fifth of the population, mostly female and mostly the left hip.

The ambitious Einstein. In real life too, Einstein was notably ambitious from extreme youth. Describing the Einstein about to take up the post at the Swiss Patents Office, Biographer Albrecht Fölsing wrote, ‘There probably never was a young man about to enter a modest post with, at the same time, such high-flying plans as Albert Einstein, when he arrived in Bern in February 1902.’ Fölsing added, ‘And the most astonishing thing is that his hopes came true.’

Anti-Semitism. In my novels set in the Edwardian period such as the Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter I have portrayed Holmes’s and Dr. Watson’s attitude towards the Jews as standard for their period. There is little material in Conan Doyle’s works indicating the pair was closely acquainted with anyone of Jewish descent. In The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place the word Jew is synonymous with moneylender, a usage dating from the Middle Ages when only Jews were allowed to be bankers in the Christian world. Holmes is said to have bought his Stradivarius violin from a ‘Jew broker’ in the Tottenham Court Road.

Salto mortale. The most dangerous somersault in the circus.

-ić . Most Serbian surnames (like Bosnian, Croatian and Montenegrin) have the surname suffix -ić This is often transliterated as -ic or -ici. In history, Serbian names have often been transcribed with a phonetic ending, -ich or -itch. This form is often associated with Serbs from before the early 20th century: hence a name like Milanković would usually be referred to, for historical reasons, as Milankovitch.

Scarlet Fever. This was the most dreaded form of streptococcal infection. Simply hearing the name and knowing it was present in the community was enough to strike fear. Even when not fatal, the disease caused large amounts of suffering to those infected. In the worst cases, all of a family’s children could die over a week or two. Dr. Charles Tait, later Archbishop of Canterbury, lost five of his six children in a month in 1856.

Marionette Shows/Puppetry. As yet undetermined, puppetry may have originated in India about 4,000 years ago. In Sanskrit plays, the narrator is called ‘Sutradhar’ or ‘holder of strings,’ which is similar to a puppeteer. Early Indian puppet shows dealt with religious themes and political satires. By 1730, Japanese puppetry had become so complex that each puppet had to be operated by three puppeteers. Puppets made their first emergence in Europe through Greece. Puppet plays were shown at the Theatre of Dionysus at Acropolis. This gave rise to the Commedia dell’arte tradition. Italian marionette shows produced tragedies like ‘Dr. Faust’. For centuries puppetry catered for adults rather than children. In Victorian Britain adult works were overshadowed by the violent Punch and Judy shows for children’s entertainment. Nowadays puppetry very much includes works for adults, for example the National Bunraku Puppet Theatre in Osaka which has developed the art of ningyo joruri Bunraku, specifically adult drama. See www.osaka-info.jp/en/search/detail/sightseeing_1953.html.

Marionette: a puppet controlled from above using wires or strings. The term used to distinguish theatre of this nature from other forms such as finger, glove, and shadow puppetry and is derived from ‘little Mary’ - one of the first figures to be made into a marionette was the Virgin Mary. A marionette’s puppeteer is called a manipulator. Puppets performances, although already popular in the early 1600s, became the primary theatrical medium in England in 1642. When Cromwell and the Puritans governed the Commonwealth, theatre doors were locked tight. The marionettes kept playing because they did not seem important enough to ban. From 1642 until a couple of years after Cromwell’s death in 1658, puppet theatre was the only public entertainment on offer. See www.currentmiddleages.org/artsci/docs/Champ_Bane_Marionette.pdf.

Tarantass: a low-slung, four-wheeled carriage, common in Russia and also found in other parts of eastern Europe.

Rusalka: this translates as a female ghost, associated with the unquiet dead who died violently

Oracle at Delphi. From wikispaces: ‘Oracles were believed to have unique access to the gods of a particular religion and through this access were often able to see into the future. The most revered oracle in ancient Greece was located at the town of Delphi in the temple of Apollo, the god of prophecy. The prestige of this oracle made Delphi the most important, influential, and wealthy sacred place in the entire Greek world.

For at least a thousand years, the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle offered divine guidance on issues ranging from the founding of colonies to declarations of war, as well as advice on personal issues. Rulers of Greece, Persia, and the Roman Empire made the arduous journey to this mountainous site.’

See http://farrington1600.wikispaces.com/file/view/DelphicOracle.pdf

Edith Durham. In the Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter Miss Durham is found happily painting in Serbia. In real life, she was considered the century’s prime interpreter of Albania. According to Charles King (Times Literary Supplement, 4 August 2000, pp. 13-14) she was ‘the most important writer on that culture since J. C. Hobhouse journeyed through the Albanian lands with Byron.’ She was adored among the Albanians themselves, who knew her as Kralica e Malësorevet - the Queen of the Highlanders.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: the Brothers Grimm were nineteenth century German nationalists, who used their academic and linguistic skills to travel through ‘Germany’ (then more a geographical than a political state term), collecting folk tales to show the cultural unity of Germany. From their tales, we have such stories as Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White.

The Pig War: also known as the Customs War, this was an economic conflict which really did take place between the Habsburg Empire and the Kingdom of Serbia in 1906-1909, in which the Habsburgs imposed a customs blockade on Serbian pork. The conflict was crucial in escalating tensions between the two sides in the early twentieth century, running up to the decision of the Habsburg Empire on a final (and ultimately unsuccessful) military strike at Serbia in 1914, leading to the assassination at Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the overt cause of World War I.

The Edalji case. George Edalji was a half-British, half-Indian lawyer solicitor from the West Midlands who became world-famous in 1907 when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle campaigned to have him declared innocent of maliciously mutilating a pony. Edalji was of Parsee heritage on his father’s side. It was partially as a result of this case that the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907, so Conan Doyle not only proved Edalji innocent, his work helped establish a way to correct other miscarriages of justice. It is discussed in Crime News in Modern Britain by Judith Rowbotham, Kim Stevenson and Samantha Pegg. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Verlaine, Paul: Verlaine was a French poet, writing at the end of the nineteenth century (he died in 1896). He is most strongly associated with the Symbolist movement. His poetry (as well as his lifestyle) was considered ‘decadent’. Towards the end of his life he converted to Roman Catholicism. By the 1890s he was considered the ‘Prince of Poets’ by his French peers.

In bocca un lupo! - Italian for good luck.

‘Si non è vero, è ben trovato.’ ‘(Even) if it isn’t true, it’s well contrived.’

Enceinte. Even as late as the 1930s the respectable remnants of Victorian England considered it vulgar to use the word ‘pregnant’, and enceinte was preferred in polite circles.

Three-Body Problem. The challenge in taking a set of data that specifies the positions, masses and velocities of three bodies and determining the motions of those bodies. Historically, the first specific three-body problem to receive extended study involved the Moon, Earth and Sun.

Love Letters between Mileva and Albert Einstein. Though those included in this tale were composed for the purpose, there are surviving letters between the two which permits the use of this narrative device as a key element in the plot. The surviving letters are now in the Albert Einstein Archives, Edmund J Safra Campus, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Singer Sargent, John. An American artist, hugely popular in the Edwardian period, he completed the oil A Parisian Beggar-Girl in 1880 in the Realism style. A favourite model of his, Carmela Bertagna, was probably the sitter. In 1910 Sargent did paint a waterfall, probably in the Tyrol:

1905: this was the year which saw Einstein’s invention of the mass-energy equation in its original form L=mV² (he rewrote it as E=MC² in a 1907 paper). 1905 was to become known in Physics as Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis, like Isaac Newton’s Annus Mirabilis of 1666. Launching Special Relativity on a startled world did not bring the 26-year-old Einstein instant fame and certainly not wealth because of lack of proof to satisfy the many Doubting Thomases, including the Nobel Committee. Among scientists, with two or three exceptions such as Max Planck and H.A. Lorentz, the remarkable papers Einstein rolled out during the year, especially the two concerning Special Theory, roused long-lived opposition, even hostility, especially among many of the Elders of the European scientific Establishment, not just among paid-up members of the ‘Anti-Relativity Company’ such as the German anti-Semites Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark who loathed ‘Jewish Physics’. Einstein’s Special Theory, later known as Special Relativity, would not be confirmed until well into the 1930s.Eventually Relativity became one of the two pillars of modern physics, alongside quantum mechanics. It is still a source of wonderment that the 26-year-old Albert Einstein produced such astounding theories. Hermann Minkowski was Einstein’s maths professor at the Zurich Polytechnic, later a professor at Göttingen. He told professional colleagues, ‘I really wouldn’t have thought Einstein capable’ of such work.

The Tesla Memorial Society of New York has campaigned for many years for recognition of the part Mileva Marić played in Relativity and Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis of 1905. See www.teslasociety.com/Mileva.htm.

Albert Einstein married Mileva Marić in a Berne registry office in January 1903 when their daughter Lieserl was a year old. By 1912 Einstein had become contemptuous and rude towards Mileva. He demanded a divorce. Mileva refused. In 1919, Einstein gained her consent to a divorce by promising her the money from the Nobel Prize it was widely anticipated he would win. Einstein immediately married his cousin Elsa. The Nobel Prize came in 1921 ‘for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect’. In return for financial support, Einstein seems to have stipulated that Mileva would never discuss their past scientific work with anyone, otherwise financial support would cease. Mileva put most of the money she received from Albert towards bringing up their two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard, especially after Eduard developed severe schizophrenia as a young adult and needed extensive hospitalisation for the rest of his life. In later years exchanges between Albert and Mileva grew more cordial. She died in Zurich in 1948. Einstein died in New Jersey seven years later. In 2005 Mileva Marić was honoured in Zurich by the ETH (the former Zurich Polytechnikum).

Zorka Marićbegan in real life increasingly to live up to the description ‘loony’. Her father hid a large amount of money in an abandoned wood-stove in the back-garden. One day, when no-one was around, Zorka started a fire in the stove and the money was lost in its entirety.

Dr. Johann Büttikofer did exist and he did get an Honorary degree from Berne for discovering in the Liberian interior the first complete pygmy hippopotamus specimens known to science. He donated them to the Natural History Museum of Leiden.

Lieserl’s grave-site has never been found. The author Tim Symonds believes she was buried secretly under the porch of one of the former Marić family homes as portrayed in his novel the Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter.

Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (George Newnes, 1894). Episode XXIII in the Strand Magazine, ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, the case took place in 1893. Dr. Watson refers a letter to Holmes from an old schoolmate, now a Foreign Office employee from Woking, who has had an important naval treaty stolen from his office.

Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Five Orange Pips’, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (George Newnes, 1892). Episode V in the Strand Magazine ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, it appeared in November 1891. Conan Doyle later ranked the story seventh in a list of his twelve favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. A young Sussex gentleman named John Openshaw has a strange story: in 1869 his uncle Elias Openshaw had abruptly returned to England to settle on an estate in Sussex after living for many years as a planter in Florida and serving as a Colonel in the Confederate Army. It commences in truly classic Watson fashion: ‘When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years ‘82 and ‘90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave.’

Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, His Last Bow. Some Later Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (John Murray, 1917), appearing in the Strand Magazine in December 1913. Now back in medical practice, Watson is called to 221B Baker Street to tend Holmes, who is apparently dying of a rare Asian disease contracted while he was on a case at Rotherhithe. Mrs. Hudson says that he has neither eaten nor drunk anything in three days. Watson is shocked, having heard nothing about his friend’s illness. Although widely considered among the lesser of Doyle’s 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories, as always it contains nuggets such as the opening lines: ‘Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering woman. Not only was her first-floor flat invaded at all hours by throngs of singular and often undesirable characters but her remarkable lodger showed an eccentricity and irregularity in his life which must have sorely tried her patience’.

Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client’, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (John Murray, 1927), appearing in the Strand Magazine in two parts in February and March 1925. A ‘Sir James Damery’, presumably of legal fame, comes to see Holmes and Watson about an illustrious client’s problem (the client’s identity is never revealed, although Watson finds out at the end of the story). Old General de Merville’s daughter Violet has fallen madly in love with Austrian Baron Adelbert Gruner. Both Sir James and Holmes are convinced the Baron is a murderer, the victim being his last wife, though he was acquitted of her murder because of a legal technicality and a witness’s untimely death. She met her end in the Splügen Pass. Wonderful lines from it include ‘Both Holmes and I had a weakness for the Turkish bath. It was over a smoke in the pleasant lassitude of the drying-room that I have found him less reticent and more human than anywhere else’.

Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Musgrave Ritual’, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (George Newnes, 1894), and Episode XVIII in the Strand Magazine ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, is among the best-loved of all the stories and - unusually - narrated by Sherlock Holmes himself, but as one affectionate critic, M. W. Tooley, put it back in 1980, ‘Unfortunately it is also one of the richest depositories of strange anomalies and questionable clues. The more we investigate the details and circumstances the more inexplicable they become.’ Could it have been Holmes’s recounting which led to so many anomalies and questionable clues? By contrast, aficionados rate The Boscombe Valley Mystery highly because of the way Conan Doyle builds up the character of the murderer so completely.

Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (George Newnes, 1892), and Episode IV in the Strand Magazine ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (George Newnes, 1902). Originally serialised in the Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it is set largely on Dartmoor in Devon in England’s West Country and tells the story of an attempted murder inspired by the legend of a fearsome, diabolical hound. The third of Conan Doyle’s four Sherlock Holmes novels, it contains an arresting comment by a James Mortimer M.R.C.S., a House-surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital who brought the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville to Holmes’s attention. When Holmes solves the case, Mortimer says to him, ‘You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes...A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available’.