The Mystery of the Missing Shirt
The "Mystery" of the Missing Shirt is an American Sherlock Holmes parody written by A. E. Swoyer published in The Sunday Oregonian on 18 august 1912.
Characters are Herlock Shomes & Fatson.
Editions
- in The Sunday Oregonian (18 august 1912 [US]) 1 ill. by A. Burr
The "Mystery" of the Missing Shirt
By A. E. Swoyer
(With abject apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Herlock Shomes, the great detective, sat, pipe in mouth, idly strumming a banjo. Times were dull in the sleuthing business, and our hero had not the price of his regular shot of hop; no mysterious murders nor clueless robberies sought his mighty brain for a solution. The truth must be told — the peerless Shomes was on his uppers!
"Great days, these, Fatson!" he said, carefully emptying the ashes from his pipe into a bit of paper, and dexterously rolling it into a cigarette. "Great days! No work for me; no annals for you to chronicle (at so much per chronic) for posterity! It seems as if the pleasures of a neat murder no longer appeal to the strong-arm man; we are becoming a race of mollycoddles!" A tear for a moment dimmed the eagle eye of Shomes, trickled gently down his classic nose and lost itself in the stubble of his two weeks' beard.
"Education has done it," replied his friend. "The real brainy criminal has learned that it is easier and more genteel to start a bank than to break into one; while the monetary results are the same. But, cheer up, Shomes, nothing can keep a good man down but a tombstone or a cash register!"
"You are right, Fatson! And even now I feel that in exactly five minutes, by yonder clock, a client, the victim of a dark and awful crime, will come—"
A ponderous knocking at the door interrupted him. Rising hastily he set the clock ahead five minutes. "Thus is the power of deduction vindicated! Right to the minute! Fatson, open the door. It is our client! (Or, perhaps, the landlord for last January's rent," he muttered, aside. "'Tis well I was not seen!")
Before the faithful Fatson could reach the door, it opened, and a tall man, with a huge and shaggy beard, entered and sank heavily into a chair; the latter, not built for heavy sinking, collapsed. The strange visitor continued until stopped by the floor.
"Aha!" said Shomes. "I see that you are the victim of a slight accident!
......
