"Start her up, Watson"

The Holmes stories are linked forever with the Victorian age, but those written in the early 20th century sometimes surprise the reader with little details that snap you out of the eternally Victorian atmosphere with which we often come to them.

The most obvious of these is 'His Last Bow'. Published after the outbreak of The Great War, but set on its immediate eve, it's the detail of the motor cars that always make me jump. Motorcars! In a Holmes story!

There's already a "huge 100-hp Benz car" (Baron Von Herling's) blocking the lane to Von Bork's place. And here comes Watson and (a disguised) Sherlock Holmes trundling along... in " a little Ford". Where they have acquired this vehicle is not known, but its size is again emphasised when Von Bork sees "the lights of a small car come to a halt" - and later, after the success of their mission, when Von Bork's trussed-up bulk is "hoisted [..] into the spare seat of the little car."

Enough pointers, it may be thought, to identify which car they're in - can we deduce the exact model?

Could it be one of the Model Ts (of which there were various different types)? Probably not a Roadster, as a spare seat is indicated. Something like this perhaps, a 1913 Town model:









There are other such modernities to the later end of the canon - a telephone, a record player - and one wonders which other technological marvels might have peppered the stories had Conan Doyle lived longer - Mrs Hudson with a Hoover? Cinema films? Holmes himself was 'starring' in such films even within Doyle's lifetime. The question is to what extent Doyle would really have tried to push such modern details into the tales, where even the majority of the latter ones still comprise of cases from the Victorian heyday - by then a fast-vanishing epoch.

Perhaps better that he merely sprinkles a little of these into BOW and 'The Casebook', and that the "fairy kingdom of romance" of which Doyle writes in his Preface forever holds its nostalgic atmosphere, perhaps exemplified by the opening to BRUC:

"In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled down upon London..."

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