54. The Adventure of the Second Stain (1904)

Detail from Paget's frontispiece illustration in The Strand Magazine, December 1903

Hello and welcome to Episode 54. This time, we step into the world of international politics and diplomatic secrets in the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’ from December 1904.

Read the story here: ACD Encyclopaedia – The Adventure of the Second Stain.

Listen to an audiobook reading here: Magpie Audio – The Adventure of the Second Stain.

And check out the Sherlock Holmes Society of London’s Scrapbook on The Second Stain

You can listen to the episode below:

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Synopsis

On an Autumn morning, in an unspecified year, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson’s Baker Street rooms are graced by a visit from the Prime Minister, Lord Bellinger, and the Secretary for European Affairs, the Right Honourable Trelawney Hope. It transpires that a document of great moment – an intemperate letter written by an incautious foreign potentate – has gone missing from Hope’s dispatch box. It must be traced and returned if disastrous consequences are to be avoided. Holmes is rapidly on the scent and believes that one of only three conspiratorial agents – Eduardo Lucas, La Rothiere and Hugo Oberstein – could be involved. The investigative waters, however, are very soon muddied by an unexpected intervention from Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope and the brutal murder of Eduardo Lucas at his Westminster home – a case which falls on Inspector Lestrade, who calls Holmes’ attention to a curious discrepancy and a misplaced rug…

Writing and publication

‘The Second Stain’ was the unexpected thirteenth and final instalment of The Return of Sherlock Holmes. The origins of the story lie in a luncheon between US editor and publisher, S. S. McClure and Conan Doyle in November 1903. ACD offered to write a one-off story for McClure’s Magazine. His literary agent, A. P. Watt, advised that he should only do so once the Collier’s run of twelve stories had concluded.

In May 1904, Watt offered the story to McClure but it was turned down, probably because a one-off story was unlikely to boost subscriber numbers. And so, Watt offered it to Collier’s and the Strand who took it on as the final instalment of the Return. Meanwhile, ACD wrote to Strand editor, Herbert Greenhough-Smith, that he now felt able to leave Sherlock Holmes to rest in peace. Little did he know...

The manuscript of ‘The Second Stain’ has survived and was printed by the BSI Press in 2013. Six pages of the manuscript are in the handwriting of ACD’s second wife, Jean Leckie, which has led some to suggest it was a collaboration. Randall Stock, in the aforementioned edition, has convincingly argued Leckie was taking dictation. It’s interesting, though, as it gives a sense of close familiarity of ACD and Jean some two years prior to his first wife’s death.

‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’ first appeared in the Strand Magazine in the UK in December 1904, and in the USA in Collier’s Weekly in January 1905. It was included in the first UK edition of The Return which came out in March 1905.

A missing story explained

The story, or at least the title, had sat in the back of Conan Doyle’s mind for more than a decade before he put pen to paper on this case. In ‘The Adventure of the Yellow Face’ (1893), he alluded to “the affair of the second stain” as a rare example of one of Holmes’s failures. But later that same year, in ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’ (1893), it had become one of his greatest successes.

These earlier references do not match the story as told, although ‘The Naval Treaty’ version at least implies matters of diplomatic significance. One might theories that the case we see in ‘The Second Stain’ is just the first half of a longer case that saw Holmes visit the continent to round up the spies who had put Europe on the brink of war.

ACD had a knack of capturing the imagination with these missing stories, with alluring titles like ‘the politician, the lighthouse and the trained cormorant’ or ‘the giant rat of Sumatra’ being particularly rich examples. The idea for filling in the blanks of ‘The Second Stain’ may have been encouraged by the junior editor of The Bookman, Arthur Bartlett Maurice, who wrote an article to that effect in its June 1903 issue, shortly after meeting ACD.

Two political contexts

There are two political contexts at play in ‘The Second Stain’: that when the story was written, and when it is set.

Kaiser Wilhelm II

In 1904, European tensions were on the rise. Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale in April 1904 which settled longstanding colonial disputes, but put them increasingly at odds with the Triple Alliance, a pact between Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy in the 1880s. Meanwhile, Russian influence was on the wane, with the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) revealing the country’s weaknesses, and tensions were high in the Balkans where Serbia, Bulgaria and other states were asserting their independence from the declining Ottoman Empire.

The story, however, is set more than a decade earlier. The fact that it is referenced in ‘The Naval Treaty’, published in 1893, means it must be set before the Great Hiatus, when Holmes was presumed dead. The foreign potentate is most likely Kaiser Wilhelm II, who came to the throne in 1888, which gives us a three-year window in which the story could take place – 1888-1891.

The political tensions could easily be over Africa, which the European powers had been carving up for the best part of a decade. A likely flash point would be the opening of the gold mines in South Africa, over which Britain and Germany fought for concessions. Kaiser Wilhelm’s telegram to Paul Kruger in 1896, in which he congratulated the Boers for defeating the British-sponsored Jameson Raid, was likely an inspiration.

Other possibilities include the delicate peace of Zanzibar in 1890, when Germany recognised British control over the territory in return for Heligoland, an island in the North Sea, where they later established a naval base. A misstep at this time would have been very dangerous.

A more off-the-track suggestion for an intemperate ruler is William III of the Netherlands who was prone to offensive outburst and reputed to be insane. In the last three years of his reign, his wife, Queen Anne, acted as Regent. However, an intervention from the Netherlands, while important in the South African context, would be unlikely to plunge Europe into war.

Real identities

E. V. Lucas

The physical description of the Prime Minister is that of Gladstone, who Paget also took as the inspiration for the Strand illustrations. The dating would suggest the Marquis of Salisbury, although for much of this time, he also served as Foreign Secretary. His former Foreign Secretary, Sir Stafford Northcote (Lord Iddesleigh), died in No 10, in the antechamber of the Cabinet Office, shortly after he was replaced by Salisbury. One of Northcote’s sons, Amyas Stafford Northcote, wrote ghost stories in the manner of M. R. James.

Trelawnay Hope might be modelled on Lord Landsowne, who was Foreign Secretary when the story was written. Another candidate, based on description alone, might be Joseph Chamberlain, a rising star in the early 1900s.

Eduardo Lucas, the spy, appears to be a nod to Edward Verrall (E. V.) Lucas (1868-1938), a journalist and humourist who worked for Punch and later became Chairman of the Methuen publishing company. Conan Doyle and Lucas were acquainted as both were keen cricketers and played in J. M. Barrie’s team, the Allahakbarries. Lucas appeared to live something of a double life, being avuncular in polite society and cynical in private. The nod to Lucas may not have been entirely positive. In the manuscript, the name was originally Edward Lucas, and then corrected to Eduardo.

Spy literature and other influences

William Le Queux

Conan Doyle names three spies in ‘The Second Stain’: Lucas, La Rothiere and Oberstein. The latter has a more significant role to play in ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1908). Recently, ACD has been credited with establishing some of the tropes of spy fiction, notably by Andrew Glazzard in The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Another writer of the era who created these tropes was William Tufnell Le Queux (1864-1927). A great populariser, he was notable for his Invasion fiction, such as The Invasion of 1910 (1906). Le Queux was a shameless self-promoter and claimed to be a spy himself. He was also heavily influenced by Conan Doyle: Whose Findeth a Wife (1897) riffs off ‘The Naval Treaty’ while ‘How the Plans of Rosyth Were Stolen’ in Spies of the Kaiser (1909) is a straight lift of ‘The Bruce-{Partington Plans’. Le Queux’s work – and that of ACD and Erskine Childers - would be built on successfully by John Buchan, notably in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915).

Conan Doyle himself was not immune to borrowing ideas and this story owes much to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844). ACD had previously played with the basic idea in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891) and ‘The Naval Treaty.’

Another possible influence was Oscar Wilde’s play, An Ideal Husband (1895). Richard Lancelyn Green first spotted the similarities in the last acts. ‘The Second Stain’ could be seen as an inverting of the play as it concerns a leading politician who is blackmailed for an incriminating letter, written in his younger days. There is some of the comedy of manners in ‘The Second Stain’ too.

Criticisms

The story has been criticised for the lack of detection, with Holmes having luck on his side. That said, it seems Holmes was immediately suspicious of Lady Hilda, so much so that he carried around a photograph of her shortly after their first meeting.

The story reveals more of Holmes’s misogyny with his infamous comment that the motives of women might depend on “a hairpin or curling-tongs.”

Lady Hilda has come in for criticism from some Sherlockians. Pat Dalton, surveying women in the canon for the Sherlock Holmes Journal in 1971, described her as ‘an elegant and slightly dishonest nincompoop,’ while Felix Morley called her ‘a perfect boob.’ The negative view is uncharitable, given Lady Hilda is shown to be headstrong, cunning, and capable of dissembling – all qualities positively attributed to Irene Adler.

Adaptations

The story was very successfully adapted by John Hawkesworth for Granada’s The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1986. Patricia Hodge gives an especially good performance as a much more intelligent Lady Hilda.

The 1968 BBC series starring Peter Cushing and Nigel Stock opened with an adaptation of ‘The Second Stain’ which is less faithful than that of Granada, at least at the start. Missing from the BBC archives for decades, the audio track has recently been recovered by the Sherlock Holmes Society of London (Press Release). A clip from the episode can be heard near the end of the podcast.

Next time on Doings of Doyle…

We look at Conan Doyle’s druidical mystery, ‘The Blood-Stone Tragedy’, published in Cassell’s Saturday Journal in 1884, which was, for a long time, lost to modern readers. You can read the story here: ACD Encyclopaedia – The Blood-Stone Tragedy.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal.

Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.