They call me "the most Canonical man in the Canon," which I am to understand inspired those who advertise the Three X brewery company many years later. But you knew this!
It is I, Don Murillo, the Tiger of San Pedro! Hallo! The hero of "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge!"
Many of you readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories have been confused by Don Murillo in the past. This is not surprising! For I am the man who met Sherlock Holmes in 1892 . . . and caused him so much consternation that he did not resume his career in detection until 1894! Most assume it was that poor drunken card playing Moran that Mr. Sherlock Holmes avoided London for . . . have you ever seen the man? Without his professor, he was no match for even the likes of Aloysius Garcia, much less Sherlock Holmes!
For how did Sherlock Holmes describe his encounter with me?
"The most singular of them all."
Yes, roll that around in your little heads, my friends. "The most singular of them all." And he did not stop there!
"Strong, active . . . the step of a deer and the air of an emperor -- a fierce, masterful man, with a red-hot spirit!"
Oh, and pay heed to that particular statement from Mr. Sherlock Holmes: "I managed to see him on a plausible pretext, but I seemed to read in his dark, deep-set, brooding eyes that he was perfectly aware of my true business."
It was 1892! I had read "The Speckled Band" in The Strand Magazine, not a week before and the likenesses by the artist Paget were quite accurate.
Mr. Sherlock Holmes from the latest Strand
What a thrill it is to defeat assassins and then be visited by England's greatest defeater of assassins in the same week! Of course, we who defeat assassins are a private society, and must not acknowledge each other aloud, but I am sure Mr. Sherlock Holmes understood exactly what my knowing wink passed between us!
I spoke to my eldest daughter Isadora, then thirteen, that he might make a fine father for assassin-defeating children, but she was, at that time, so fond of golden syrup that she was determined to marry a sugar magnate before her fourteenth birthday. We Murillos have such power in our blood that we blossom early, and she was as strong-willed at thirteen as I at fifty.
But let us not talk of Isadora's misadventures, or those of her sister . . . oh, do not speak to me of that girl! . . . we are here to renew our acquaintance, as unnecessary as that surely seems. I am Don Murillo, after all, the most Canonical man in the Canon!
How many other men or women of my era were both a part of Sherlock Holmes's investigation in one year, and then had their papers . . . just their papers! . . . as the heart of a Sherlock Holmes investigation two years later?
Was it two? Was it three? No! just one, and his name is Don Murillo!
Seems to fit right in.
ReplyDeleteSorry Don Murillo, but Quinton McHale was the real tiger they still sing praises of... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlr-_D4RCPI
ReplyDeleteAh, Howard, don't your recognize a parody song when you hear it? That World War Two song was based on the much earilier national anthem of San Pedro:
Delete"Don Mur-rillo! Don Mur-rillo!"
"There never was a man so bold, who gathered all of the Aztec gold,
in battle, he's brought so many low . . . he's the Tiger of San Pedro!"
"Don Mur-rillooooow!"