Describing John Shade's last birthday, Kinbote (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions ancient Dr. Sutton, a snowy-headed, perfectly oval little gentleman, and his tall daughter, Mrs. Starr, a war widow (and president of Sybil Shade's book club):
From behind a drapery, from behind a box tree, through the golden veil of evening and through the black lacery of night, I kept watching that lawn, that drive, that fanlight, those jewel-bright windows. The sun had not yet set when, at a quarter past seven, I heard the first guest's car. Oh, I saw them all. I saw ancient Dr. Sutton, a snowy-headed, perfectly oval little gentleman arrive in a tottering Ford with his tall daughter, Mrs. Starr, a war widow. I saw a couple, later identified for me as Mr. Colt, a local lawyer, and his wife, whose blundering Cadillac half entered my driveway before retreating in a flurry of luminous nictitation. I saw a world-famous old writer, bent under the incubus of literary honors and his own prolific mediocrity, arrive in a taxi out of the dim times of yore when Shade and he had been joint editors of a little review. I saw Frank, the Shades' handyman, depart in the station wagon. I saw a retired professor of ornithology walk up from the highway where he had illegally parked his car. I saw, ensconced in their tiny Pulex, manned by her boy-handsome tousle-haired girl friend, the patroness of the arts who had sponsored Aunt Maud's last exhibition, I saw Frank return with the New Wye antiquarian, purblind Mr. Kaplun, and his wife, a dilapidated eagle. I saw a Korean graduate student in dinner jacket come on a bicycle, and the college president in baggy suit come on foot. I saw, in the performance of their ceremonial duties, in light and shadow, and from window to window, where like Martians the martinis and highballs cruised, the two white-coated youths from the hotel school, and realized that I knew well, quite well, the slighter of the two. And finally, at half past eight (when, I imagine, the lady of the house had begun to crack her finger joints as was her impatient wont) a long black limousine, officially glossy and rather funereal, glided into the aura of the drive, and while the fat Negro chauffeur hastened to open the car door, I saw, with pity, my poet emerge from his house, a white flower in his buttonhole and a grin of welcome on his liquor-flushed face. (note to Line 181)
In Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of the Three Garridebs (1924) Sherlock Holmes says that he used to have a correspondent—he is dead now—old Dr. Lysander Starr, who was mayor of Topeka (the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas) in 1890:
“Well, Watson,” said Holmes with a smile, “I said it was rather whimsical, did I not? I should have thought, sir, that your obvious way was to advertise in the agony columns of the papers.”
“I have done that, Mr. Holmes. No replies.”
“Dear me! Well, it is certainly a most curious little problem. I may take a glance at it in my leisure. By the way, it is curious that you should have come from Topeka. I used to have a correspondent—he is dead now—old Dr. Lysander Starr, who was mayor in 1890.”
“Good old Dr. Starr!” said our visitor. “His name is still honoured. Well, Mr. Holmes, I suppose all we can do is to report to you and let you know how we progress. I reckon you will hear within a day or two.” With this assurance our American bowed and departed.
A little later Holmes tells Watson that he never knew a Dr. Lysander Starr, of Topeka:
Holmes had lit his pipe, and he sat for some time with a curious smile upon his face.
“Well?” I asked at last.
“I am wondering, Watson—just wondering!”
“At what?”
Holmes took his pipe from his lips.
“I was wondering, Watson, what on earth could be the object of this man in telling us such a rigmarole of lies. I nearly asked him so—for there are times when a brutal frontal attack is the best policy—but I judged it better to let him think he had fooled us. Here is a man with an English coat frayed at the elbow and trousers bagged at the knee with a year's wear, and yet by this document and by his own account he is a provincial American lately landed in London. There have been no advertisements in the agony columns. You know that I miss nothing there. They are my favourite covert for putting up a bird, and I would never have overlooked such a cock pheasant as that. I never knew a Dr. Lysander Starr, of Topeka. Touch him where you would he was false. I think the fellow is really an American, but he has worn his accent smooth with years of London. What is his game, then, and what motive lies behind this preposterous search for Garridebs? It's worth our attention, for, granting that the man is a rascal, he is certainly a complex and ingenious one. We must now find out if our other correspondent is a fraud also. Just ring him up, Watson.”
I did so, and heard a thin, quavering voice at the other end of the line.
“Yes, yes, I am Mr. Nathan Garrideb. Is Mr. Holmes there? I should very much like to have a word with Mr. Holmes.”
My friend took the instrument and I heard the usual syncopated dialogue.
“Yes, he has been here. I understand that you don't know him. … How long? … Only two days! … Yes, yes, of course, it is a most captivating prospect. Will you be at home this evening? I suppose your namesake will not be there? … Very good, we will come then, for I would rather have a chat without him. … Dr. Watson will come with me. … I understand from your note that you did not go out often. … Well, we shall be round about six. You need not mention it to the American lawyer. … Very good. Good-bye!”
Just before John Shade's birthday party Kinbote telephones the Shades:
Now there is nothing a lonesome man relishes more than an impromptu birthday party, and thinking - nay, feeling certain - that my unattended telephone had been ringing all day, I blithely dialed the Shades' number, and of course it was Sybil who answered.
"Bon soir, Sybil."
"Oh, hullo, Charles. Had a nice trip?"
"Well, to tell the truth -"
"Look, I know you want John but he is resting right now, and I'm frightfully busy. He'll call you back later, okay?"
"Later when - tonight?"
"No, tomorrow, I guess: There goes that doorbell. Bye-bye."
Strange. Why should Sybil have to listen to doorbells when, besides the maid and the cook, two whitecoated hired boys were around? False pride prevented me from doing what I should have done - taken my royal gift under my arm and serenely marched over to that inhospitable house. Who knows - I might have been rewarded at the back door with a drop of kitchen sherry. I still hoped there had been a mistake, and Shade would telephone. It was a bitter wait, and the only effect that the bottle of champagne I drank all alone now at this window, now at that, had on me was a bad crapula (hangover). (note to Line 181)
On the morning after Shade's birthday party Kinbote visits Sybil Shade with his birthday present (an utterly gorgeous silk dressing gown, a veritable dragon skin of oriental chromas, fit for a samurai) and, before taking leave, tells her "I think my telephone is ringing:"
Next morning, as soon as I saw Sybil drive away to fetch Ruby the maid who did not sleep in the house, I crossed over with the prettily and reproachfully wrapped up carton. In front of their garage, on the ground, I noticed a buchmann, a little pillar of library books which Sybil had obviously forgotten there. I bent towards them under the incubus of curiosity: they were mostly by Mr. Faulkner; and the next moment Sybil wags back, her tires scrunching on the gravel right behind me. I added the books to my gift and placed the whole pile in her lap. That was nice of me - but what was that carton? Just a present for John. A present? Well, was it not his birthday yesterday? Yes, it was, but after all are not birthdays mere conventions? Conventions or not, but it was my birthday too - small difference of sixteen years, that's all. Oh my! Congratulations. And how did the party go? Well, you know what such parties are (here I reached in my pocket for another book - a book she did not expect). Yes, what are they? Oh, people whom you've known all your life and simply must invite once a year, men like Ben Kaplun and Dick Colt with whom we went to school, and that Washington cousin, and the fellow whose novels you and John think so phony. We did not ask you because we knew how tedious you find such affairs. This was my cue.
"Speaking of novels," I said, "you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described - by Cocteau, I think - as 'a mirage of suspended gardens,' and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but - and now let me finish sweetly - we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking 'human interest': it is there, it is there - maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenthcenturyish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing."
I am a very sly Zemblan. Just in case, I had brought with me in my pocket the third and last volume of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition, Paris, 1954, of Proust's work, wherein I had marked certain passages on pages 269-271. Mme. de Mortemart, having decided that Mme. de Valcourt would not be among the "elected" at her soirée, intended to send her a note on the next day saying "Dear Edith, I miss you, last night I did not expect you too much (Edith would wonder: how could she at all, since she did not invite me?) because I know you are not overfond of this sort of parties which, if anything, bore you."
So much for John Shade's last birthday. (note to Line 181)
Mayor of Tampeka invented by Holmes, Dr. Lysander Starr brings to mind Bob Wells, mayor of New Wye whom Shade mentions just before his death:
Through the back of John's thin cotton shirt one could distinguish patches of pink where it stuck to the skin above and around the outline of the funny little garment he wore under the shirt as all good Americans do. I see with such awful clarity one fat shoulder rolling, the other rising; his gray mop of hair, his creased nape; the red bandanna handkerchief limply hanging out of one hip pocket, the wallet bulge of the other; the broad deformed pelvis; the grass stains on the seat of his old khaki pants, the scuffed back seams of his loafers; and I hear his delightful growl as he looks back at me, without stopping, to say something like: "Be sure not to spill anything - this is not a paper chase," or, [wincing] "I'll have to write again to Bob Wells [the town mayor] about those damned Thursday night trucks." (note to Line 1000)
Sybil Shade arrives at the place of the assassination in Mrs. Starr's car:
"Come along, Jack, we'll put something on that head of yours," said a calm but purposeful cop stepping over the body, and then there was the awful moment when Dr. Sutton's daughter drove up with Sybil Shade. (ibid).
In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions Sherlock Holmes:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
In his commentary Kinbote writes:
A hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likable private detective, the main character in various stories by Conan Doyle. I have no means to ascertain at the present time which of these is referred to here but suspect that our poet simply made up this Case of the Reversed Footprints. (note to Line 27)
"This Case of the Reversed Footprints" and two charming identical twins mentioned by Kinbote in his Foreword to Shade's poem bring to mind Conan Doyle's story A Case of Identity (1891).