"The Red Circle"

The Red Circle.

The case begins Tuesday, January 6, 1885.

Why?

THE STATE OF HOLMES’S BUSINESS:
"I really have other things to engage me."
"So spoke Sherlock Holmes and turned back to the great scrapbook in which he was arranging and indexing some of his recent material."

A PREVIOUS CASE:
"You arranged an affair for a lodger of mine last year," she said — "Mr. Fairdale Hobbs."

LUCCA’S ARRIVAL:
"You say that the man came ten days ago and paid you for a fortnight’s board and lodging?"
"He has been there for ten days, and neither Mr. Warren, nor I, nor the girl has once set eyes upon him."

HOLMES’S DAILY ROUTINE:
"He took down the great book in which, day by day, he filed the agony columns of the various London journals."

THE SCHEDULE OF PERSONAL ADS:
"That is two days after Mrs. Warren’s lodger arrived."
"Yes, here we are — three days later."
"Nothing for a week after that. Then comes something much more definite ..."
"That was in yesterday’s paper, and there is nothing in to-day’s."

MRS. WARREN’S TIME AT HER CURRENT RESIDENCE: 
"Well, we’ve lived there fifteen years and no such happenings ever came before."

STATEMENT OF THE SEASON:
". . . the gloom of a London winter evening had thickened into one gray curtain . . ."

THE LUCCAS’ AMERICAN PERIOD:
"We fled together, were married at Bari, and sold my jewels to gain the money which would take us to America. This was four years ago, and we have been in New York ever since."

THE STATEMENT OF THE NIGHT, BY COMPOSER:
"By the way, it is not eight o’clock, and a Wagner night at Covent Garden! If we hurry, we might be in time for the second act."

WHAT THE BARING-GOULD ANNOTATED SAYS:
September 24, 1902. 

WHAT ZEISLER, THE KING OF CHRONOLOGY, SAYS:
Winter 1895-1901.

THE BIRLSTONE RAILWAY TIMETABLE:
"Winter" is the only plain reference to the date Watson gives us in this tale, and a very weak reference it is. Holmes mentions "Wagner night at Convent Garden," but was he necessarily referring to Richard Wagner? For all we know he could have known a cellist named Violet Wagner whose part in the orchestra he especially liked to hear no matter what was being played. So we must once again turn to the subtler details to date this case.

Holmes claims he has "other things to engage me," but does he really mean other cases? Given the focused, driven aspect of Holmes’s personality, would he be pasting clippings into his scrapbook if he really had a case to occupy him? In fact, the very act of clipping agony columns to past in a scrapbook fairly sings of a younger Holmes, just starting out in his career, taking in all possible data which might be useful to him. For the later, busier Holmes of the 1890s, clipping agony columns surely didn’t balance benefits versus time spent enough to really be of profit to him.

Another sign of a younger Holmes is the way Sherlock is excited to meet the Pinkerton, Mr. Leverton, who seems to be the famous one in that exchange. Leverton doesn’t appear to have heard of Holmes at all, while Holmes is quite the fan. 

A third element that marks this as an earlier case is Inspector Gregson. Gregson doesn’t make any documentable appearances after Holmes’s hiatus that ended in 1894. He is the first detective in the Canon to summon Holmes. He is Scotland Yard’s smartest in Holmes’s opinion, and the two men get along wonderfully. Which leads one to wonder why Holmes was working with Lestrade alone at the time of "The Final Problem." We see Gregson investigating organized crime in REDC and suddenly he’s gone in FINA, a tale of Holmes’s biggest battle against organized crime. Might Gregson have been killed by Moriarty during the late 1880s? I think so. Past "Greek Interpreter" in 1888, Watson only mentions Gregson in "Wisteria Lodge" in 1892 — a case wherein Watson was hallucinating the presence of Holmes himself, another of Moriarty’s victims. I think the Gregson of 1892 might have even been a ghost from Watson’s distraught mind overlaid upon another Scotland Yarder.

Yet why is this younger Holmes so reluctant to look into Mrs. Warren’s case? In those days he was all for the commonplace matters and not being put off by anyone’s personal qualities. The best excuse I can find for young Holmes looking to spend a lazy day at Baker Street is that it’s his birthday, and with that, and the previous considerations in mind, I’m going to place this one on Tuesday, January 6, 1885.