The Retired Colourman
"The Retired Colourman" – RETI – seems to me a bit out of place. It was one of the last stories added to the Canon, and yet it possesses many qualities of the very first stories. It begins, for example, with the familiar scene at Baker Street: a supplicant calling on Holmes in person, Holmes dazzling Watson with his apparent clairvoyance, and Holmes berating Watson for failing to make brilliant observations. The story also includes one of the Canon's near-misses: although Holmes never speaks the "Elementary, my dear Watson" line made famous by Basil Rathbone, in this tale he does say, "Quite simple, my dear Watson," which is extremely close.
But to me the most interesting aspect of this story, viewed as part of the greater sixty-story saga, is the role played by various forms of communication. Most notably, RETI contains the first Canonical reference to the Baker Street flat having a telephone, that instrument we all now love, hate, and take for granted. Holmes seems indifferent to it, which seems only right for a gentleman with both feet planted firmly in the Victorian Age.
The story begins with communication being made in Holmes' favorite manner: the personal visit. The wretched Amberley comes in person to 221B Baker Street, and we must wonder if he was among the last to do so. Our modern experience suggests that later clients gave Holmes their tales of woe over the electrical waves courtesy of Alexander Graham Bell.
Note also the presence in the story of telegrams, the old reliable form of contact which serves Holmes so well through the Sixty Stories. And yet one wonders if Watson (our the Literary Agent) is not making a sort of commercial for the telephone – the first attempt in the story to send a telegram is foiled by the office being closed. Telegrams do, after all, required interaction with a human operator. But even at a tiny pub in a "primitive village" Watson is able to find a telephone – available, we must imagine, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Thus modern life encroaches upon what Vincent Starrett called "the age before the world went all awry."