The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part X

by Marcum, David;

  In the Nero Wolfe book The Mother Hunt (1963), Wolfe’s client asks, “But you’re the best detective in the world, aren’t you?”

  “Probably not,” he replies. “The best detective in the world may be some rude tribesman with a limited vocabulary.”

  Pastiches are the same way - some of the best aren’t always to be found in a polished cleaned-up setting, like Wolfe in his Manhattan brownstone. Anyone who thinks so is limiting themselves and doesn’t even realize it.

  Thankfully, the opportunity to produce these volumes allows new adventures to be presented from all over the world, written by people who love the true Sherlock Holmes for people who love the true Sherlock Holmes. I’m incredibly thankful to be a part of it.

  Pastiches are worth reading, and they’re worth writing. Where do you and the Sherlockians with whom you’re acquainted stand in regards to pastiches? Do you support them? Do you write them? Consider the question by way of foundational Sherlockian Edgar W. Smith’s statement: As a Sherlockian, are you worth your salt?

  As always, I want to thank with all my heart my patient and wonderful wife Rebecca, and our son, Dan. I love you both, and you are everything to me! I met my wife in 1986, when I was already settled into my habit of wearing a deerstalker everywhere as my only hat. She ended up being my friend anyway. By 1987 she was my girlfriend, and then she married me in 1988. She’s put up with the deerstalker since then, and also my Holmes book collection, which has grown from a modest two or three linear feet when we met to around to around one-hundred-seventy linear feet, (based on the measurements I just made). She still goes places with me while I’m wearing the deerstalker, she keeps me company while I read and edit the stories for these books, and she’s very tolerant as the Holmes books slowly devour our house, with only an occasional frantic eye-roll as the books creep ever closer... My son was born into this - some kids enter a family of sports fanatics, but he joined a Holmesian Household. He’s simply the best, and it turns out that he’s amazing storyteller and writer. He watches and enjoys Holmes too, although with a bit less enthusiasm than his father.

  I can never express enough gratitude for all of the contributors who have donated their time and royalties to this ongoing project. I’m so glad to have gotten to know all of you through this process. It’s an undeniable fact that Sherlock Holmes authors are the best people!

  The royalties for this project go to support the Stepping Stones School for special needs children, located at Undershaw, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former homes. These books are making a real difference to the school, having currently raised over $25,000, and the participation of both contributors and purchasers is most appreciated.

  Next, I’d like to thank that impressive crew of people who offer support, encouragement, and friendship, sometimes patiently waiting on me to reply as my time is directed in many other directions. Many many thanks to (in alphabetical order): Bob Byrne, Mark Mower, Denis Smith, Tom Turley, Dan Victor, and Marcia Wilson.

  Additionally, I’d also like to thank:

  Nicholas Meyer - As mentioned above, you started this Golden Age of Holmes. As if that wasn’t enough, you also both saved Star Trek and nudged it in the right direction, allowing it to go - and keep going - correctly for many years to come. While it may seem as if I’m totally focused on Sherlock Holmes, I have many other interests, and one of them is Star Trek, which I first saw in approximately 1968, when I was three years old and a babysitter was watching an original series episode. The Wrath of Khan arrived in 1982, and I was blown away. I’ve seen it more than any other film in my life. What you brought to the Trek universe is reflected in every film, show, novel, and comic since then. I was thrilled to meet you at From Gillette to Brett III in 2011, and - even though there’s no reason for you to remember it - you were very gracious when autographing all three of your Holmes books for me and answering my questions about when I could expect a fourth. Thank you very much for contributing to these volumes. Your importance to the World of Sherlockian Pastiche cannot be overstated.

  Roger Johnson - Thank you once again for showing incredible support for all of these books, and also all of the other projects. You are a scholar and a gentleman, and I’m very glad to know you. I’m looking forward to seeing you and Jean again, whenever I can arrange Holmes Pilgrimage No. 4.

  Steve Emecz - Many thanks for all that you do that helps so many people, and for the constant support for my various ideas designed to promote Mr. Holmes. It’s amazing to see how far this has come in just a few years. (As of this writing, it was just about three years ago when I wrote to you about an idea that came to me in an early morning dream of editing a collection of Holmes stories. Wow.) It’s always a pleasure, and I can’t wait to see what we do next!

  Brian Belanger - Thanks once again for such wonderful work. I think these covers were the easiest we’ve assembled yet. I always enjoy when it’s time for me to pick more Grimshaw paintings - luckily he painted a lot of them! - and to see how you prepare them. Excellent work, as usual!

  Derrick Belanger - I’ve enjoyed being your friend from the first time we ever “met” in this modern electronic sense. First came great Sherlockian discussions, and then great support as we both found our way into all of these projects. I’ve enjoyed every one of them, and I know that what we already have planned for the future will be wonderful as well. Many thanks!

  Ian Dickerson - In his introduction to “The Adventure of the Doomed Sextette” by Leslie Charteris and Denis Green, included in Part IX (1879–1895), Ian explains how he came to be responsible for this and other long-lost scripts from the 1944 season of the Holmes radio show. Ian, I’m very grateful to you for allowing this one to appear in these volumes before it’s reprinted in one of your own upcoming volumes. When I first discovered Holmes, I quickly found a number of Rathbone and Bruce broadcasts on records at the public library, and that was where I first “heard” Holmes. I can’t express the thrill of getting to read these rediscovered lost treasures, having been tantalized by their titles for so long. Thank you so much!

  Larry Albert - From the enjoyment you’ve given me playing Watson the RIGHT way, to the time we started corresponding about my first Holmes book, and on to the incredibly helpful advice you gave as I started writing scripts, and then the efforts you’ve made to gather materials for use in these books: Cheers to you, sir!

  Melissa Grigsby - Thank you for the incredible work that you do at the Stepping Stones School at Undershaw in Hindhead, which I was thrilled to visit in 2016. You are doing amazing things, and it’s my honor, as well that of all the contributors to this project, to be able to help.

  Michael Rhoten - Although it’s likely that he’ll never know that he’s being thanked here, I want to express appreciation to Michael, one of my co-workers. He’s a true Renaissance man, and when one of the contributors of this book asked me about early twentieth century photography, I knew that Michael could help. I presented the question to him, and within minutes he provided a wealth of information, including illustrating his points by producing an actual physical camera from that era that the keeps in his office. I passed on his comments to the author with great success, and I appreciate his time and enthusiasm.

  Finally, last but certainly not least, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Author, doctor, adventurer, and the Founder of the Sherlockian Feast. Present in spirit, and honored by all of us here.

  As always, this collection has been a labor of love by both the participants and myself. As I’ve explained before, once again everyone did their sincerest best to produce an anthology that truly represents why Holmes and Watson have been so popular for so long. These are just more tiny threads woven into the ongoing Great Holmes Tapestry, continuing to grow and grow, for there can never be enough stories about the man whom Watson described as “the best and wisest... whom I have ever known.”

  David Marcum

  January 6t
h, 2018

  The 164th Birthday of Mr. Sherlock Holmes

  Questions, comments, and story submissions may be addressed to David Marcum at

  thepapersofsherlockholmes@gmail.com

  Foreword

  by Nicholas Meyer

  There’s a cartoon, known, I suspect, to all Sherlockians. It depicts a small boy in bed, staring with consternation and dismay at the last Sherlock Holmes story in the book he holds before him. What now? His expression seems to signify.

  I was - and am - certainly not alone in identifying with the expression on the boy’s face in the cartoon, as well as the feelings to be inferred behind it. When newcomers to the Holmes Canon reach the end of the sixtieth Doyle story, feelings of bereavement typically predominate. None of this is new. It is said that when Doyle killed off Holmes - (apparently!) - in “The Final Problem”, young men in London went to work wearing black mourning armbands.

  Just as surely, I am neither the first nor the last to have slid into the next phase of grief: Denial. The impulse to write my own Holmes story, to continue the adventures of that unique personage and of his Boswell. Fan fiction. Whether executed as straight-faced pastiche or broad parody, there are far more Holmes adventures penned by “divers hands” than the mere sixty penned by Arthur Conan Doyle, who remained oddly obtuse about the appeal of his creation and his own relations with The Great Detective.

  Yet the unconscious plays strange tricks. Doyle, who kept trying to kill off Holmes, nonetheless seems to have expressed a knowing kinship with him. Holmes tells Watson he is descended from the sister of the French artist, Vernet. Being fictional, he is descended from no one. It is Doyle himself whose ancestor was Vernet’s sister. One could thus term them cousins. Further, both Doyle and his alter ego bank at the same bank. Even more suggestively - as Holmes would observe - both are offered knighthoods in the same year. Doyle’s impulse was to turn his down - he felt it would identify him as an establishment patsy. He relented at the insistence of his mother, under whose thumb he spent much time. By revealing contrast, Holmes disdains his knighthood without a second thought. And we never hear a word about Holmes’s mother - only his skittish distrust of women in general.

  Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, when Doyle did kill off Holmes, in the memorable struggle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, at the picturesque Reichenbach Falls, he conveniently failed to produce the detective’s corpse, thus opening the floodgates for... the rest of us?

  All of which leaves much from for speculation, embroidery, and additional Holmesiana.

  In any event, even Doyle couldn’t kill off Holmes, who, as we all know, rose from the dead, not on the third day, it may be, but still, there was a resurrection that has been going on ever since - first at Doyle’s hands, but later, at ours.

  Although cynical folk have argued that these “ripoffs” of Holmes and Watson are conceived with mercenary motives, speaking for myself, I don’t think this is either fair or true. The small boy, despairing in his bed, doesn’t dream of adding to The Canon as a way of enlarging his purse. Certainly I didn’t. Writing my own Holmes story was simply an itch I had to scratch. Sixty stories are not enough! That my books went into profit surprised no one more than their author.

  I hazard the guess that the stories that follow were all written out of affection and enthusiasm, not with any thought of piggy-backing on the genius of Doyle for pecuniary gratification. I could be wrong. You be the judge.

  Nicholas Meyer

  December 2017

  We Can Make the World a Better Place

  by Roger Johnson

  Sherlock Holmes, as we all know, is the great English detective. Except that he was part French, his grandmother being “the sister of Vernet, the French artist”. (But which Vernet? There were four generations of notable painters in the family: Antoine, Joseph, Carle and Horace. The last, born in 1789, was probably Holmes’s great-uncle.)

  It’s little wonder, then, that the French have claimed the detective as their own, especially since his author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, freely admitted that an important influence on the creation of Sherlock Holmes was the great French amateur reasoner, the Chevalier C August Dupin - but Dupin was himself a fictional character, created by an American, Edgar Allan Poe. Holmes himself dismissed Dupin as “a very inferior fellow”, but Conan Doyle made his position clear in “To an Undiscerning Critic”:

  As the creator I’ve praised to satiety

  Poe’s Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,

  And have admitted that in my detective work,

  I owe to my model a deal of selective work.

  But is it not on the verge of inanity

  To put down to me my creation’s crude vanity?

  He, the created, the puppet of fiction,

  Would not brook rivals nor stand contradiction,

  He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,

  Where I, the Creator, would bow and revere.

  And what of Arthur Conan Doyle himself? He seems always to have thought of himself as an Englishman, for all that he was born in Edinburgh, of an Irish mother and an Anglo-Irish father. Arthur’s childhood was divided between his Scottish home town and his English boarding school, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. He went back to Edinburgh to study medicine at the University, and after graduating in 1882, he moved to the south-west of England. He never lived in Scotland again, but, as you can hear in the interview filmed in 1927, he retained a distinct Scottish accent throughout his life. (The film is easily accessible on YouTube. The statement that it was made in 1930 is erroneous.)

  Besides, he was happy to acknowledge another, even more important influence on Sherlock Holmes: Dr Joseph Bell, one-time President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and lecturer at the Medical School at Edinburgh University. In his memoirs, Conan Doyle wrote: “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer an exact science.”

  The Scots - and the Irish too - know that England has no exclusive ownership of the great detective, or of his creator.

  The Americans have also asserted their right: Elementary, with its updated Holmes living and working in New York, is evidence of that. In fact, what Robert Keith Leavitt felicitously dubbed “221b Worship” has from the start been stronger in the United States than almost anywhere else. The first authorised dramatisation was the work of an American, William Gillette - there had been numerous unofficial adaptations and spoofs before Gillette’s 1899 play Sherlock Holmes-and it was in America that the detective was first portrayed on film, on radio, and on television.

  In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, not then widely known to have accepted honorary membership in the Baker Street Irregulars, rather dubiously declared that the detective was actually American, and that “his attributes were primarily American, not English”.

  Mostly, however, admirers around the world have been content with the idea that Sherlock Holmes is as English as, well, as most Englishmen - which is to say, not entirely. Nicholas Utechin, my predecessor as co-editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, has proud Russian ancestry; I, like Holmes, am part French. In all probability, there’s no such thing as “pure English blood”.

  The authentic chronicles of Sherlock Holmes comprise sixty tales, long and short, nearly all narrated by the faithful Dr. John H. Watson. Only a few of those cases took the detective himself away from England, but in at least thirty-five of them, an essential part of the puzzle - not necessarily criminal - originated abroad. On occasion, Holmes acted as a spy or a counter-spy, as in the affair of “The Bruce-Partington Plans”, which he investigated at the urgent request of his brother Mycroft - who sometimes, as Watson was astonished to learn, was the British government. The man behind t
he theft of the top-secret plans was one Hugo Oberstein, identified by Holmes as “the leading international agent”.

  We may mourn the days when hand-written letters were the norm, but Holmes himself, remember, preferred the telegram, and in later years had a telephone installed at 221b. He would surely approve of the amazing technology that helps strengthen the ties between the widely scattered groups of his devotees and enables us to keep in touch around the world almost instantaneously.

  There are literally hundreds of such groups, large and small. Peter Blau, Secretary of the senior American society, The Baker Street Irregulars, maintains an invaluable list, accessible at www.sherlocktron.com, which shows that most of them are in the United States, though The Sherlock Holmes Society of London and the Japan Sherlock Holmes Club probably have the largest membership, with well over a thousand members each.

  It isn’t only clubs and societies. There are restaurants, bars, hotels, and shops throughout the world, all celebrating Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and their creator. Two of the finest screen adaptations of the stories are lavish television series made in Russia. The most important book on the Holmes phenomenon - certainly the most important of this century - is Från Holmes till Sherlock by the Swedish scholar Mattias Boström, published in the UK under the misleading title The Life and Death of Sherlock Holmes. (The American edition, printed from the same plates, is correctly entitled From Holmes to Sherlock.)

  In these divisive times, with nationalism, racism, and xenophobia prominent in the news, the devotees of Sherlock Holmes form that elusive ideal, a genuine international community, and our divisions are guided by taste and informed opinion.