Miskatonic University PressThree stills from Pursuit to Algiers (1945), the twelfth in the series of Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson.
First, a menu from a Soho restaurant. Hors d’oeuvres include fillet of herring, sardines and anchovies, each for a shilling. There are three soups: “Clear Turtle” (three shillings; see other menus with this dish at the New York Public Libraries What’s On the Menu?), “Consomme Perles” (one shilling) and “Creme Dubarry” (one shilling; it’s a cream of cauliflower).
Watson and Holmes enter Fishbone Alley.
Watson says, “I don’t like it.”
And one from Dressed to Kill (1946), the last in the series.
This book, India’s Love Lyrics by Laurance Hope, is a real one. Laurance Hope was a pseudonym of Violet Nicolson, who lived a short but remarkable life from 1865 to 1904. India’s Love Lyrics is the American title of Garden of Kama (1901), though Dressed to Kill is set in London, so that’s the title we should have seen. It’s available at Project Gutenberg. One of the poems in it is “Kashmiri Song:”
Pale hands I love beside the Shalimar,
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?
Whom do you lead on Rapture’s roadway, far,
Before you agonise them in farewell?
Oh, pale dispensers of my Joys and Pains,
Holding the doors of Heaven and of Hell,
How the hot blood rushed wildly through the veins
Beneath your touch, until you waved farewell.
Pale hands, pink tipped, like Lotus buds that float
On those cool waters where we used to dwell,
I would have rather felt you round my throat,
Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!
This was adapted and set to music, and is the song Hugh Moreland and Nick Jenkins talk about at the beginning of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.