The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part XI
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Thank goodness this incredible tin dispatch box has been accessed throughout the years by so many later Literary Agents to bring us all these other wonderful Holmes adventures. Many that have been revealed have been complete surprises, but sometimes we’ve discovered details about a special group of extra-Canonical adventures, those that fire the imagination to an even greater level: The Untold Cases.
Of course, they aren’t called that in The Canon. The earliest references to The Untold Cases that I’ve heard of so far (with thanks to Beth Gallegos) are by Anthony Boucher in 1955, and by William S. Baring-Gould in his amazing The Chronological Sherlock Holmes (1955). Additionally, Charles Campbell located a reference to “stories yet untold” by Vincent Starrett in “In Praise of Sherlock Holmes” (in Reedy’s Mirror, February 22, 1918). The Untold Cases are those intriguing references to Holmes’s other cases that - for various reasons - were not chosen for publication. There were a lot of them - by some counts over one-hundred-and-forty - and in the years since Watson’s passing in 1929, many of these narratives have been discovered and published.
For example, The Giant Rat of Sumatra...
Since the mid-1990’s, I’ve been chronologicizing both Canon and Pastiche, and as part of that, I note in my annotations when a particular narrative is an Untold Case. Glancing through my notes, I see that there are far too many narratives of The Untold Cases to list here. For example, just a quick glance through my own collection and Chronology reveals, in no particular order, these versions of perhaps the greatest and most intriguing Untold Case of them all, The Giant Rat of Sumatra:
The Giant Rat of Sumatra-Rick Boyer (1976) (Possibly the greatest pastiche of all time)
“Matilda Briggs and the Giant Rat of Sumatra”, The Elementary Cases of Sherlock Holmes-Ian Charnock (1999)
Mrs Hudson and the Spirit’s Curse-Martin Davies (2004)
Sherlock Holmes’ Lost Adventure: The True Story of the Giant Rats of Sumatra-Laurel Steinhauer (2004)
The Giant Rat of Sumatra-Paul D. Gilbert (2010)
“The Giant Rat of Sumatra”, The Lost Stories of Sherlock Holmes-Tony Reynolds (2010)
The Giant Rat of Sumatra-Jake and Luke Thoene (1995)
“The Adventure of the Giant Rat of Sumatra”, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine-John Lescroart, (December 1988)
“The Case of the Sumatran Rat”, The Secret Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes-June Thomson (1992)
“Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra”, More From the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD-Hugh Ashton (2012)
“The Case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra”, The Secret Notebooks of Sherlock Holmes-Liz Hedgecock (2016)
“The World is Now Prepared” - “slogging ruffian” (Fan Fiction) (Date unverified)
“The Giant Rat of Sumatra”, Sherlock Holmes: The Lost Cases-Alvin F. Rymsha (2006)
“The Giant Rat of Sumatra”, The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes-Ted Riccardi (2003)
Sherlock Holmes and the Limehouse Horror-Phillip Pullman (1992, 2001)
“No Rats Need Apply”, The Unexpected Adventures of Sherlock Holmes-Amanda Knight (2004)
The Shadow of the Rat-David Stuart Davies (1999)
The Giant Rat of Sumatra-Daniel Gracely (2001)
“The Giant Rat of Sumatra”, Resurrected Holmes-Paula Volsky (1996)
“The Mysterious Case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra”, The Mark of the Gunn-Brian Gibson (2000)
Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra-Alan Vanneman (2002)
“The Giant Rat of Sumatra” - Paul Boler (2000)
“The Case of the Missing Energy”, The Einstein Paradox-Colin Bruce (1994)
“All This and the Giant Rat of Sumatra”, Sherlock Holmes and The Baker Street Dozen-Val Andrews (1997)
In addition to these that are available, there’s also one that isn’t - possibly the earliest telling of “The Giant Rat”, the intriguing radio version by Edith Meiser, which was broadcast multiple times: With Richard Gordon as Holmes on April 20th (although some sources say June 9th), 1932, and again on July 18th, 1936; and then on March 1st, 1942 (with Basil Rathbone as Holmes). Sadly, these versions are apparently lost, although I’d dearly love to hear - and read - them!
Although Rathbone and Bruce performed Edith Meiser’s version of “The Giant Rat” in 1942, they weren’t limited to just that version. A completely different version, this time by Bruce Taylor (Leslie Charteris) and Denis Green, was broadcast on July 31st, 1944. Amazingly, Charteris’s scripts have been located by Ian Dickerson, who is in the process of publishing them for modern audiences who would otherwise have never had the chance to enjoy these lost cases. And even more amazing, Mr. Dickerson has allowed the 1944 version of “The Giant Rat” to premiere here in these concurrent Untold Cases volumes.
What makes this twice as much fun is that also appearing in these books is Nick Cardillo’s new 2018 version of “The Giant Rat”, showing that there can be more than one version of an Untold Case without any of them being the definitive version.
More than one version...
The list shown above is by no means a complete representation of all the Giant Rat narratives. These are simply the ones that I found when making a pass along the shelves of my Holmes Collection, and what jumped out during a quick search through my Chronology. The thing to remember is that in spite of every one of these stories being about a Giant Rat, none of them contradict one another or cancel each other out to become the only true Giant Rat adventure.
Something that I learned very early, far before I created my Chronology back in the mid-1990’s, is that there are lots of sequels to the original Canonical tales, and there are also lots of different versions of the Untold Tales. Some readers, of course, don’t like and will never accept any of them, since they didn’t cross the First Literary Agent’s desk. Others, however, only wish to seek out the sole and single account that satisfies them the most, therefore dismissing the others as “fiction” - a word that I find quite distasteful when directed toward Mr. Sherlock Holmes
My approach is that if the different versions of either sequels or Untold Cases are Canonical, and don’t violate any of the same rules that define what types of tales appear in these anthologies - no parodies, no anachronisms, no actual supernatural encounters, no murderous sociopathic Holmes portrayals - then they are legitimate.
Perhaps it seems too unlikely for some that there were so many Giant Rats in London during Holmes’s active years. Not at all. Each Giant Rat adventure mentioned above is very different, and in any case, Watson was a master at obfuscation. He changed names and dates to satisfy all sorts of needs. For instance, he often made it appear at times as if Holmes went for weeks in fits of settee-bound depression between cases, when in fact he was involved constantly in thousands upon thousands of cases, each intertwined like incredibly complex threads in The Great Holmes Tapestry.
Although not represented in this volume, there have been many stories about Holmes and Watson’s encounter with Huret, the Boulevard Assassin, in 1894. Contradictory? Not at all. Holmes simply rooted out an entire nest of Al Qaeda-like assassins during that deadly summer. There are a lot of tales out there relating the peculiar persecution of John Vincent Harden in 1895. No problem - there were simply a lot of tobacco millionaires in London during that time, all peculiarly persecuted - but in very different ways - and Watson lumped them in his notes under the catch-all name of John Vincent Harden. Later Literary Agents, not quite knowing how to conquer Watson’s personal codes and reverse-engineer who the real client was in these cases, simply left the name as written.
What Counts as an Untold Case?
As mentioned, there have been over one-hundred identified Untold Cases, although some arguments are made one way or another as to whether some should be included. Do Holmes’s various stops during The Great Hiatus
- such as Persia and Mecca and Khartoum - each count as an Untold Case? (To me they do.) What about certain entries in Holmes’s good old index, like “Viggo, the Hammersmith Wonder” or “Vittoria, the Circus Belle”? Possibly they were just clippings about odd people from the newspaper, but I - and many other later Literary Agents - prefer to think of these as Holmes’s past cases. Then there are the cases that involve someone else’s triumph - or do they? - like Lestrade’s “Molesley Mystery” (mentioned in “The Empty House”, where the most well-known Scotland Yard inspector competently handled an investigation during Holmes’s Hiatus absence), or “The Long Island Cave Mystery”, as solved by Leverton of the Pinkertons, and referenced in “The Red Circle”. (And as an aside, I have to castigate Owen Dudley Edwards, the editor of the Oxford annotated edition of The Canon [1993], who decided to change the Long Island Cave to Cove simply because “there are no caves in Long Island, N.Y.” (p. 206) - thus derailing a long-standing point of Canonical speculation. Pfui!)
And then there’s the matter of the Oxford Comma, sometimes known as the “Serial” or “Terminal” Comma. A quick search of the internet found this example of incorrect usage: This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God. Clearly this author either had some interesting parents, or more likely he or she needed to use a comma after Rand to differentiate that series of parents, Ayn, and Deity.
And that relates to Untold Cases in this way: There are two Untold Cases that might actually be four, depending on one’s use (or not) of the Oxford Comma. In “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez”, Watson tells of some of the cases that occurred in 1894. As he states:
As I turn over the pages I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow.
I have many adventures in my collection that present these as two cases: (1) The repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby the banker and (2) The Addleton tragedy and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. All are very satisfying. But I also have others that split them up into four cases: (1) The repulsive story of the red leech and (2) the terrible death of Crosby the banker and (3) the Addleton tragedy and (4) the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. For this collection, Nik Morton and Thomas Fortenberry have chosen to assume that the comma was intentionally omitted, and that there are two cases here, and not four, to be related.
More about the Oxford Comma...
As an amateur editor, I honor the Oxford Comma. I’ve been aware of it for years, ever since reading - somewhere - that editor extraordinaire Frederic Dannay (of Ellery Queen-fame and founder and the founding editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine from 1941-1982,) was a strong supporter of it. When writing this foreword, I couldn’t remember where I’d read that, so I asked his son, Richard Dannay, who replied:
I can say with certainty that my father believed in the serial, or Oxford, or terminal (pick your poison) comma. I have no doubt. But sitting here, I’m not sure where he said that in print. I’ll need to think about that. But I will send you a secondary source, absolutely unimpeachable in accuracy, where his preference is described.
And then he sent me a PDF excerpt from Eleanor Sullivan’s Whodunit: A Biblio-Bio-Anecdotal Memoir of Frederic Dannay (Targ Editions, NY, 1984, pp. 17-18). Ms. Sullivan was Dannay’s chief editorial assistant for EQMM for many years, and after he died, she became the EQMM editor as his successor for about ten years before her premature death. (As Richard pointed out, the current editor is Janet Hutchings, only the third EQMM editor in its now over seventy-five-year history.)
Ms. Sullivan wrote:
Fred’s style in editing EQMM could be considered eccentric, but I soon became used to it because there was his special logic behind everything he did. I didn’t know he was exasperated by my non-use of the terminal comma (that is, a comma between the second-to-last word in a series of words and the “and”) until one day when we were discussing some copy I’d sent him, he sighed dramatically and said, “I wish you could learn to use the terminal comma.” I’ve been scrupulous about using it ever since.
Recalling Frederic Dannay’s passion for the Oxford Comma, I try to notice and then to add one in every place that needs it in these books. Having hubristically stated that, I’m absolutely certain that sure you will find places where I’ve missed it, along with many other unfortunate typos. These books live and grow as a single ever-expanding Word document on my computer - I have no publishing software - until such time as I send the final version to amazing publisher Steve Emecz, and they aren’t seen by anyone else before their publication. There are no other proof-readers or editors who have a crack at them, and I’m flying without a net here. (My incredible wife of thirty-plus years has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism, and two Master’s Degrees in English Literature and Library Science, and her first job years ago was as a copy editor, but these books are neither her passion nor her problem, so I can’t ask her to proofread them.) I’ve had several offers from volunteers to proofread, but due to the fast turn-around involved in this new publishing paradigm, that simply isn’t possible. Thus, the errors that you find that throw you out of the story are on my head. Mortifying things sometimes slip through, and I apologize. But I do try to catch and fix every Oxford Comma situation that I can.
Other Untold Cases
While editing and assembling this particular set of books, I was concurrently working on Sherlock Holmes: Adventures Beyond the Canon (2018) for Belanger books, a three-volume set of twenty-nine new adventures that are sequels to The Canon. (It was amazing fun reading and editing all of these stories - over fifty of them between these five books - fresh from the Tin Dispatch Box, while keeping straight which went with which book.) Like the Untold Cases, these sequels don’t contradict any of the sequels that have come before. One can’t have too many traditional tales about the true Sherlock Holmes, and thankfully there are many more still out there. (I’m already receiving stories for next year’s Part XIII: 2019 Annual from MX, and sequels for the next Belanger collection.)
As mentioned, there are far too many Untold Cases to list or recommend. The first encounter that I recall with attempts to reveal the Untold Cases was in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954) by a son of the First Literary Agent, Adrian Conan Doyle, and famed locked-room author John Dickson Carr. At the end of each of those twelve stories, a quote from The Canon revealed which Untold Case that it was - since it wasn’t always clear from the story’s title - and how it was originally mentioned. I liked that, and have followed the same convention with this book.
Many later stories have related Untold Cases, such as some included in collections like The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (1997) and The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985). Others have appeared in the new Strand Magazine edited by Andrew Gulli, Bert Coules’ amazing The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, or on Jim French’s famed Imagination Theatre, broadcast on radio for decades across the U.S.
Interestingly, Untold Cases have been presented in Holmes radio shows since the 1930’s, but they are much more rare in television episodes and movies. Sadly, except for some Russian efforts and a few stand-alone films, there have been no Sherlock Holmes television shows whatsoever since the Jeremy Brett films from Granada in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Hopefully, a set of film scripts by Bert Coules featuring an age-appropriate Holmes and Watson, set in the early 1880’s, will find a home soon. I’ve been wanting to see (or read) these for years, and I’m curious as to whether any other Untold Cases feature in them - especially since Bert covered some of them so well in his radio scripts.
Some authors have specialized in finding the Untold Cases, like June Thomson, and more recently Hugh Ashton. For the record, I tried to recruit June twice to these books, and she wrote me some nice letters declining due to age. From the
beginning of this anthology series, Hugh has been extremely supportive, and I’m very glad that he’s a part of these books.
Philip K. Jones and the Untold Cases
I first became aware of Phil Jones back in the mid-when I ran across his amazing and massive online Pastiche Database. I’ve been collecting pastiches since I first found Holmes at age ten, in 1975, and have thousands of them on my shelves. I’ve scoured libraries and copied them from magazines and journals - a dime a page at old Xerox machines - and I’ve printed and archived them from the internet. I’ve bought Holmes books and asked for books - with traditional pastiches having first priority - as birthday and Christmas presents. I think that I’ve acquired one of the best pastiche collections ever. But finding Phil’s database made me realize that it was only a drop in the bucket - and it also gave me new directions in which to hunt.
Phil was born in Missouri in 1938 and raised in Michigan. He worked in Information Technology for many years, and upon retirement turned his attention to Sherlock Holmes Literature.