Content area
Full text
A FAMILIAR YET UNDER-EXPLORED topic regarding the Baker Street scene is the V.R. bullet-pocks in the wall at 2218. How strange that Watson would point out this detail of Holmes's strange habits. In "The Musgrave Ritual," Watson famously opines
that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.
Watson further mentions Holmes's "occasional revolver practice within doors" in "The Dying Detective."
The idea of Holmes engaging in target practice in his lodgings raises questions: Which wall did he shoot at? Was it a solid masonry load-bearing wall covered with a plaster coat and wallpaper, or a lathe and plaster wall for dividing rooms?
If it was a load-bearing wall, the impact of the rounds would chip the plaster and tear the wallpaper to pieces. If the sitting room was between 15 and 20 feet wide, a 265-grain bullet would have such an impact as to destroy the wall and not leave nice bullet-pocks. This type of grain bullet was manufactured to produce such force as to knock a man to the ground. Indoors, bullets would hit the masonry surface and bullet fragments would ricochet around the room.
James Edward Holroyd points out that "American research comes cranking in with the information that had the Master indeed used such ammunition in such quantity he would have brought down half the walls of the apartment."!
If Holmes shot at lathe-and-plaster walls, it was either toward the wall between the bedrooms and sitting room of 221B or toward the wall that has the hallway...