The Notched Hairpin

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The Notched Hairpin

A Mycroft Holmes Mystery

H. F. Heard

Foreword by Christopher Pittard

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

TO
MICHAEL

CONTENTS

Foreword by Dr Christopher Pittard

The Notched Hairpin

The Red Brick Twins

The Inspector's “Who?”

Mr. Millum's “Why?”

Mr. Mycroft's “How?”

The Enchanted Garden

Preview:
A Taste for Honey

About the Author

FOREWORD

Writing the foreword to a work of detective fiction presents a certain problem: how much of the plot should be discussed? Is it possible to discuss the novel meaningfully while keeping its secrets largely hidden? In any case, is the appeal of any novel, detective fiction or otherwise, to be found solely in its capacity to surprise? (Evidently not, or what would become of rereading?)
The Notched Hairpin
complicates such matters even further; not only does the novel appear late in a series in which the main surprise—the identity of Mr Mycroft—was revealed at the end of the first novel (
A Taste for Honey
[1941]), but the question of whodunit is itself revealed on the contents page. Clearly, then, the novel's mysteries lie in questions deeper than that of the identity of a murderer, and in many ways such mysteries are often harder to avoid in a foreword such as this one. A murderer's name can easily be edited out; discussion of larger philosophical questions, less so. As a compromise, therefore, I would like to discuss
The Notched Hairpin
primarily through the lens of its brief opening sentence, “Don't touch” (3), on the basis that I can hardly be blamed for giving away secrets about the novel's first two words. Thematically, however, those opening words contain most, if not all, of the moral questions Heard discusses in the rest of his novel; as the narrator Sydney Silchester comments later, touch “tells for a great deal” (45).

The Notched Hairpin
therefore begins, rather unusually, with a prohibition. What are we to make of this? We might begin with the fact that writers of early to mid-twentieth century detective fiction had attempted to shape the genre through sets of similar commands and prohibitions. The British author Ronald Knox's ‘Decalogue' of rules for detective fiction (1928) had famously ruled out the use of multiple secret passages, identical twins, and Chinamen; in the US, S. S. Van Dine's “Twenty Rules for Writing a Detective Story” (1929) had set stricter generic boundaries, outlawing the incursion of romance or science fiction into the detective novel. But then again, these rules were never taken especially seriously (Knox's were never meant to be, although Van Dine seemed more earnest);
The Notched Hairpin
appeared in the same year as Agatha Christie's
Crooked House
and John Dickson Carr's
Below Suspicion
and (as Carter Dickson)
A Graveyard to Let
, works by authors who wilfully ignored Knox and Van Dine's rules. Heard is in good company here, as a writer who similarly defied generic convention and the limitations of genre. In his review of
The Notched Hairpin
, Anthony Boucher (a respected crime writer himself, best known for his locked room mystery
Nine Times Nine
[1940]) noted that Heard was “a writer as unclassifiable as he is entrancing.… he is the only man who ever won a $3,000 detective story prize with a pure science-fiction story” (35). But Boucher's positive review of
The Notched Hairpin
also includes an intriguing insight into the public reputation of Heard; Boucher comments on the rumour that Heard's novels are “transcribed by automatic writing; that his manuscripts are literally
manu scripta
, written by hand on odd bits and pieces of paper” (35). Such a story, whether true or not, stands in a strange relation to “Don't touch”; it simultaneously emphasises the tactile (the novels are written “by hand” on material scraps) while denying it (the novels apparently come to Heard through a spiritualistic mode of automatic writing). While Boucher ultimately dismisses such rumours (“the only magic here entailed is the necromancy of a perfect minor writer” [35]), he nonetheless admits that there is something fitting about such narratives where
The Notched Hairpin
is concerned, and I shall return to the language of entrancement and magic shortly.

But what of that initially cryptic opening sentence? Its immediate context is one of contamination; Silchester is rather brusquely advised not to touch the hairpin for fear of compromising its value as evidence. Therefore, the opening line signals a concern with material purity, a theme that continues with the maid Jane's obsessional return to questions of cleanliness: “Patty or putty, dirt is dirt; but of course masters can be dirty, if maids must (and like to be) clean” (22). Detectives, too, like to be clean, tidying things up, from crime scenes to mysteries. Sometimes the metaphor is literalised; Sherlock Holmes, for instance, uses a sponge as an agent of detection in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” to wash away a disguise. Likewise, the dirt found on objects provides the detective with clues; we recall Holmes in
The Sign of Four
, when challenged to interpret a watch presented by Watson: “The watch has been recently cleaned, which robs me of my most suggestive facts” (13). More recent detective fiction has explicitly dramatised the process of detection as one of reading material traces, dirt, matter out of place; the most obvious examples are the success of television series such as
Monk
(2002–9) and
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
(2000– ). In
The Notched Hairpin
Mycroft anticipates the entomologist detective Gil Grissom when he comments that, regarding the science of detection, “quite a lot might be done with insects” (99). But this is not merely metaphor; there is a sense in which dirt is itself defined by transgression, the breaking of a law. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, building on eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophy, famously argued that ‘dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder' (2). What is dirty or impure is that which is out of place, that which does not fit into a certain order: food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing (44–5). Systems, orders, and laws create their own dirt and impurities. Likewise, the literary theorist and critic David Trotter asks a pertinent question regarding the role of material disgust in detective fiction: ‘It seems to me … that moral and material horror are not so easily suppressed, and that we need to account for them, because they may be one of the reasons why people read detective fiction' (68). For Trotter, the body is not simply a mystery to be solved, something little more than a question mark, but represents a physical contamination: ‘In detective fiction, the corpse is always out of place.… Murder makes a mess in a clean place. Stories about murder are therefore stories as much about dealing with mess as about deciphering clues' (68, 70). We can, however, expand on Trotter's terms; the place in which murder makes a mess is not always clean to begin with.

As I have argued elsewhere (Pittard 2011), such concerns are characteristic (and even constitutive) of the late Victorian detective fiction that Heard so enthusiastically rewrites.
The Notched Hairpin
is continually looking over its shoulder at the culture of the 1890s (Silchester, of course, is too fixated on 1760 “as the acme of English Taste” (9) to penetrate to the mystery's historical roots), perhaps most obviously in its direct references to Arthur Conan Doyle. Mycroft's ability to identity different tobaccos by scent alone is surely a reference to Sherlock Holmes' monograph “Upon the distinction between the ashes of the Various Tobaccos,” as noted in
The Sign of Four
(10); Holmes' invocation of the “Indian
lunkah
” (11) mirrors Mycroft's detection of the Asian Latakia (70), a tobacco highly impregnated with opium (further shades of Holmes, most particularly in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”). Mycroft puts a new complexion on Sherlock's methods, reinventing them by changing the means of sensory perception; Sherlock identifies tobacco by sight, Mycroft by smell; Mycroft's “we hear, but don't really attend” (91), crucial to the plot of
The Notched Hairpin
, is clearly an echo of Sherlock's “You see, but you do not observe” in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (
Adventures
11–12). Appropriately enough, in that same story it is Sherlock who mishears; wished goodnight by the disguised Irene Adler, his response is to wonder where he has heard that voice before, a scene lent iconic authority by Sidney Paget's memorable illustration for the
Strand Magazine
. Paget captures Holmes in a moment of uncertainty, searching for his keys while on the steps at 221B Baker Street, caught between the public space of the street and the private space of the home; the confusion over the identity of Mycroft and Sherlock in Heard's fiction has often left readers in a similar position. It should be noted that the publishing history of
The Notched Hairpin
has done much to confuse the issue: the previous edition of the novel, that published by Vanguard in 1981, declared unequivocally on its cover that Mr Mycroft was “Sherlock Holmes' Brother” despite textual evidence to the contrary (the publishers were subsequently obliged to publish an unconvincing cover story to justify such a claim).