The Barker Street Regulars

a big grin and said shamelessly, “I’m not supposed to deliver this to you until tomorrow.”
    I grinned back. “Then why are you delivering it now?”
    “Because,” Billy replied with commendable honesty, “the man said you’d pay me for it, and I don’t want to wait until tomorrow. ”
    “And how much did the man say I’d give you?”
    “He said a dollar, but then I said it would be better to leave it up to you, and he said that was all right.” We settled on two dollars plus another two for the rush delivery. When Billy had departed, I examined the envelope. It was plain white. My name and address were written in legible, old-fashioned script. There was no return address. Inside was a single sheet of white typing paper. Hand-printed on the sheet was what I instantly recognized as a cryptic message. It inevitably reminded me of the one Sherlock Holmes receives from Porlock at the beginning of The Valley of Fear. I didn’t bother dashing out of the house and down the street to snag Billy and get a description of the man who’d arranged the delivery. The cipher message? Delivered by a child? And an Arab child no less, albeit one rather different from the urchins, the dirty and ragged little street Arabs, who formed the ranks of the famous Baker Street Irregulars. The man had to be Robert, who took an interest in vowels. Only a trained ear could have heard the Middle East in Billy’s fluent American English.
    To refresh my memory, I got out my copy of the Canon and looked up the story. Porlock’s message to Holmes, I remind you, begins:
     
    534 C2 13 127 36
     
    The Great Detective realizes that he has received what he calls a cipher message without a cipher. In other words, he needs to discover the particular cipher—presumably a book—that will let him break the code. He eventually concludes that the cipher is something called Whitaker’s Almanac, chosen because Porlock assumed that Holmes would have no difficulty in finding it. After a false start (Holmes first consults the new Almanac instead of the previous year’s), the Master decodes the message by going to page 534, column two, and reading the thirteenth word, the one hundred twenty-seventh word, and so on.
    My message also began with the number 534. Next, however, came the letters L and W, separated by a comma, and then a series of numbers.
     
    534 L,W 24,13 36,3 5,17 38,10 9,7 25,2 14,2,3,4
    5,1,2,3 25,2 43,11,12 7,4 43,15 44,1,2,3,4
    23,14,15 43,11 41,14 30,10 1,7 7,4 4,11 29,640,8 11,6
    1,12 4,5 15,16 4,5 37,6 3,5 45,12 13,12 29,6 14,1
    32,1,2 25,10 7,4 1,4 45,4 39,9 14,13 4,13 33,14 4,5 25,11
    35,18!
     
    In The Valley of Fear, Holmes reasons that C stands for column. Therefore the book he seeks is one with columns. It seemed to me that if the cipher I needed had columns, the C would appear at the start of my message. It didn’t. So I needed a work without columns. Not the Bible, for example. Instead of a C, my message had L, W —lines and words? So, the message began with the thirteenth word of the twenty-fourth line on page 534 of some book without columns. With a minimum of 534 pages, it was a long book. And as Porlock had done in sending his encoded message to Holmes, Hugh and Robert must have chosen a work that would be easy for me to find. An almanac? The men had commented that my house was right across the street from the Observatory Hill branch of the Cambridge Public Library. As I was about to sprint over there, I had a sudden inspiration.
    Of course! Hugh, Robert, or almost anyone else would correctly assume that I owned the latest edition of the American Kennel Club’s Complete Dog Book. Consulting it, I found that page 534 was devoted to the beginning of the write-up of the Tibetan spaniel. A photograph occupied about half the page. Consequently, there was no line twenty-four. Dead end. What other long book without columns would I be certain to own?
    The Merck Veterinary Manual! Flipping to page 534, hurriedly counting lines, I found that the twenty-fourth had only twelve words.
    Then, like Holmes, I suddenly realized my mistake. The correct cipher had to be The Complete Sherlock Holmes. It was long. It lacked columns. Furthermore, Hugh and Robert not only knew that I owned it, but had seen my one-volume Doubleday edition the day they’d trailed me home from the Gateway. Yes, of course! What story had we discussed? Which adventure had Hugh’s little Holmesian puzzler been about? Indeed, The Valley of Fear. Robert