During the first week of July my friend had been absent so often and so long from our lodgings that I knew he had something on hand. The fact that several rough-looking men called during that time and inquired for Captain Basil made me understand that Holmes was working somewhere under one of the numerous disguises and names with which he concealed his own formidable identity.
The Adventure of Black Peter, Arthur Conan Doyle, 1904.
You may imagine my surprise reading the above paragraph. I hadn’t read the Sherlock Holmes stories for decades, and certainly the last time I had done so, I had never heard of Captain Basil Hood, the librettist of Sullivan’s comic operas The Rose of Persia and The Emerald Isle.
Am I crazy or too Sullivan-addled to responsibly make this connection? If so, I am not the first! In a 1994 Oxford University Press edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes, the editors write:
Captain Basil: perhaps named after Captain Basil Hall (1788-1844), the British naval officer and traveller, whose books of travel included An Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea and the Great Loo-choo Island in the Japan Sea (1818) and Extracts from a Journal written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru and Mexico in the Years 1820-21-22 (1824). Or from Captain Basil Hood, the dramatist (Captain Basil Charles Willett Hood, 1864-1917), who wrote the words for Sir Arthur Sullivan’s The Emerald Isle (completed by Edward German), and for Edward German’s A Princess of Kensington (Savoy Theatre, 22 July 1903). The first of these includes a character named ‘Black Dan’.
Seems like a no-brainer, right? Hood was still alive and working in 1904. And Conan Doyle co-wrote the Savoy opera Jane Annie, or The Good Conduct Prize in 1893.
And that’s not all. In The Adventure of the Illustrious Client (1924), Sherlock says to Watson:
“Well, I can tell you a little more than that. He has rather a reputation for arranging delicate matters which are to be kept out of the papers. You may remember his negotiations with Sir George Lewis over the Hammerford Will case. He is a man of the world with a natural turn for diplomacy. I am bound, therefore, to hope that it is not a false scent and that he has some real need for our assistance.”
Sir George Lewis had been Sullivan’s lawyer. By 1924 Sir George had been dead for 13 years, and thus perhaps he was safe to memorialize.