MR: Reverend Thomas Brothers? Unpleasant fellow.
LRK: Well, maybe we could talk about your online experiences. You’re active on MySpace, and you have several thousand Twitter followers.
MR: Yes?
LRK: Not many women your—of your era, are quite so technologically savvy.
MR: It takes less mechanical acumen than changing the ink in a pen. And the demands of brevity are amusing—Holmes was fond of telegrams.
LRK: Where you had to pay by the word, yes.
MR: I? Or by “you” do you mean “one”?
LRK: I guess. And on your blog, you’re continuing the tale of how you came to give me the stor—the memoirs.
MR: Which you post on your own “Mutterings” blog. Clever, that.
LRK: Thank you. Is there anything else you’d like to tell us, about the book, or—
MR: All I choose to reveal lies within my memoirs. If you wish to know about Holmes, or Damian, or Robert Goodman, or Mycroft, I suggest you read the book.
LRK: The God of the Hive.
MR: Quite.
Three:
The Mystery
of the Memoirs
I could not imagine that this would end well. (Pirate King)
*
This was an age of the death of gods. (God of the Hive)
*
Self-criticism was my husband’s way of patting himself on the back. (The Game)
*
Holmes would have done the matter by telegram, I knew, but I always prefer the personal touch in my matters of mild blackmail. (Monstrous Regiment)
Laurie R. King, literary agent?
or
The Mystery of the Russell Memoirs
*
Being short tales of revelation,
deduction, and befuddlement
The all-important question is this: Are the Russell tales the memoirs of an elderly woman with an implausibly thrilling life, or novels by Laurie King? If they are in fact novels, all well and good—but if these books are actual autobiography, why is Ms King publishing them as if they were her own?
The history of the manuscripts
The problem arises in the very first volume of the memoirs, in the preface to The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, when Ms. King describes the delivery of a large cardboard box filled with a peculiar variety of things:
… as a collection, there was neither rhyme nor reason: some articles of clothing, including a beaded velvet evening cloak (with a slit near the hem), a drab and disreputable man’s bathrobe or dressing gown…. And, right at the bottom, a layer of what proved to be manuscripts, although only one was immediately recognizable as such, the others being either English-sized foolscap covered top to bottom with tiny, difficult writing or the same hand on an unwieldy pile of mismatched scrap paper. Each was bound with narrow purple ribbon and sealed with wax, stamped R.
Ms. King describes her reluctant decision to publish these manuscripts, under her own name, adding:
I have only tidied up her atrocious spelling and smoothed out a variety of odd personal shorthand notations. Personally, I don’t know what to make of it. I can only hope that with the publication of what the author called On the Segregation of the Queen (such a cumbersome title—she was obviously no novelist!) will come, not lawsuits, but a few answers. If anyone out there knows who Mary Russell was, could you let me know? My curiosity is killing me.
The puzzle is revisited in A Monstrous Regiment of Women:
As I said, I have no idea why this collection was sent to me. I believe, however, that the sender, if not the author herself, may still be alive. Among the letters generated by the publication of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice was an odd and much-travelled postcard, mailed in Utrecht. It was an old card, with a sepia photograph of a stone bridge over a river, a long flat boat with a man standing at one end holding a pole and a woman in Edwardian dress sitting at the other, and three swans. The back was printed with the caption, Folly Bridge, Oxford. Written on it, in handwriting similar to that of the manuscripts, was my name and address, and beside that the phrase, “More to follow.”
Then came A Letter of Mary, with a preface that adds to the mystery with the receipt—following the publication of the second book—of an anonymously mailed clipping from the Times of London:
Oxford Punt Found in London
A group of Japanese businessmen on a river cruise yesterday caught and towed to Hampton Court a punt which police have determined originated at Folly Bridge in Oxford. In it were found clothing and a pair of glasses. The Thames Authority has no suggestion as yet how a punt could manoeuvre the locks and deeper stretches of river.
Punts, the Cherwell
Ms King promptly set out to uncover more information. She was eventually told that the clothing was that of a tall, thin woman, and had been found neatly folded with the glasses on top. The police sent her their reports where, to her consternation, she discovered that:
…fingerprints taken from the sides of the punt match those on a filthy clay pipe that was in the trunk with the manuscripts.
And in addition:
… a key. The key, I have been told, is to a safety-deposit box. There is absolutely no way of knowing where that box is.
The curious Prefaces continue in The Moor, where King reiterates the receipt of the curious odds and ends of the box: clothing, a few rocks, a man’s pipe, emerald necklace, with the manuscripts at the bottom:
I thought that they had been sent to me because the author was dead, and for some unknown reason chose to send me the memorabilia of her past. However, since the publication of the first Mary Russell book, I have received a handful of communications as ill assorted as the original contents of the trunk, and I have begun to suspect that the author herself is behind them.
And finally, in Locked Rooms, we read:
This is the eighth chapter in the continuing memoirs of Mary Russell, based on a set of manuscripts I received in the early 1992. Some of the manuscripts were neatly collated and tied by ribbons; others, comprising as they did varied sizes and qualities of paper, required considerable work to decipher. Still other were mere fragments apparently unrelated to larger bodies of the work, and thus, for lack of a better approach, are best published as short stories.
And there matters appear to stand, until a decade and a half go by, and the assorted cards and hints begin to come together at last.
Later developments I: My Story
Beginning in 2009, the fifteenth anniversary of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, a series of posts on Mary Russell’s blog set out to unravel the story of how the manuscripts came to Ms. King—although perhaps “unravel” is not quite the right word, since the questions her posts introduced only added to the overall mystery.
In any event, Ms Russell’s story described the events of early 1992, when that good lady finally located a person suitable to be her literary agent: the granddaughter of a childhood friend, who was not only a writer (Laurie R. King’s first novel was at the time under contract, but not actually out—Ms Russell certainly has informants all over!) but also shared Russell’s own interest in theology.
However, before she could set the manuscripts on their way, Miss Russell was interrupted by what she describes as a “pack” of Sherlockians, who hounded the two elderly detectives from Sussex to Oxford, demanding some fleet-footed work and a touch of red herring before the pack was lost.
Those fifteen posts, collected as “My Story,” solve one portion of the King authorship question.
Later Developments II: A Case in Correspondence
The following year, King unveiled a collection of correspondences that had been sent her, which included vintage post cards, letters and carbon copies of letters, a telegram, and two newspaper clippings. Many of these pieces of correspondence appear to have been either placed in envelopes that were later lost (unlikely, given the otherwise complete nature of the collection) or else delivered by hand. The use of couriers may be understandable, when one considers the mo
mentous gravity of the matters at stake.
2010 was also the year King published The God of the Hive, a dark and convoluted story concerned in part with the British Intelligence services of the 1920s—not only the official branches of MI5 (domestic) and MI6 (foreign), but the private organization created by Sherlock Holmes’ elder brother, Mycroft.
Mycroft Holmes appears, in person or in name, in four of the Conan Doyle stories: “The Greek Interpreter”, “The Final Problem”, “The Empty House”, and “The Bruce-Partington Plans”. He is described as a large, physically lazy man with a mind quicker than that of his younger brother, who for employment ostensibly “audits the books in some of the government departments” and for pleasure retreats to the Diogenes Club, where members are forbidden to speak. In fact, Mycroft’s job is considerably more than that of a minor accountant. As Holmes tells Watson, “You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he IS the British government.”
Mycroft’s immense and covert authority underlies The God of the Hive, a story in which Russell comes face to face with the corrupting nature of power. Appropriately, “A Case in Correspondence” addresses the same issue. It should be noted here that the article from The Times given as Document Nineteen is not some Photoshopped wonder: it is an actual piece of news from May 7, 1992.
Which means that not only does this heretofore unseen collection of letters give us the background of the King/Russell memoirs, it opens up a chapter of British history, wherein Miss Russell and Mr. Holmes forced the hand of the prime minister, pushing an entire nation into a degree of openness.
If the British government had not made the mistake of annoying Mary Russell, it might never been forced to acknowledge the existence of MI6.
My Story
or
The Case of the Ravening Sherlockians
by Mary Russell
(This episodic tale began to unfurl in Miss Russell’s blog during the spring of 2009. It turned out to be merely the first part of the story, which continues in “A Case in Correspondence”. For the reader Illuminations of this tale, go to Six: The Russell Community.)
1.
Hard as it is to believe, fifteen years have passed since Laurie R. King published— under her name—the first volume of the Mary Russell memoirs. Ms King recounts (in her Editor’s Preface to that volume, which was given the title The Beekeeper’s Apprentice) her puzzlement as to what these manuscripts were and why she was the recipient of multiple volumes of hand-written (for the most part) manuscripts recounting the life of a perfect stranger—and moreover, a stranger who claims to have been married to one Sherlock Holmes.
The time has come to answer that puzzle.
* *
It began in the winter of 1989, when a bout with a troublesome although ultimately meaningless illness left me with an awareness that, in my ninetieth year, I was perhaps not to be granted immortality. It was time to gather my thoughts for posterity and make some arrangement for their preservation.
I might have done it long before, truth to tell, but for the identity of my husband. When one is married to a person of considerable fame, one tends to choose invisibility over all else. And since any memoirs I was to pass on would be of occasionally inflammatory nature, I needed to choose my literary agent with care.
2.
Any literary agent whom I put in charge of my memoirs needed to be, first of all, a woman. She needed to be strong-minded enough to resist the blandishments and threats unleashed upon her once the nature of these manuscripts came to light. And since I thought it best to begin with someone whose ties to Mary Russell would come before any affection for Sherlock Holmes, I cast my mind over my relatives: cousins of various stripe abounded, but search as I might, I could find no combination of literary interest and common sense.
Next, I sought out the descendents of my university friend, Veronica Beaconsfield, only to find that the current generation lacked the wit of their grandparents. So I went further back, to my childhood in San Francisco. There, in the early weeks of 1992, I found the person I sought. The granddaughter of a childhood friend, she was in the early stages of a literary career—her first novel had been accepted at a New York publisher—but she was also sensible enough to balance the demands of children, travel, a husband with his own career, and a complex household. And an untold benefit: She had a background in Old Testament theology!
Without delay, I began to assemble the manuscripts and prepared to send them off to Ms King in California. Before I could do so, catastrophe struck.
3.
I doubt it will come as a surprise to the reader when I say that my husband’s popularity in the world of letters approximates that of a lesser divinity. More than a century ago, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had an attack of pique and sent Holmes to his “death” over the Reichenbach Falls, readers protested with black arm-bands, cancellation of subscriptions to The Strand, and fury to Conan Doyle’s face. Were that story to be published now, I should expect flame wars, if not actual Molotov Cocktails.
This degree of renown brings, as you might expect, considerable problems. The cooperation of our neighbours is essential, and elaborate ploys are occasionally necessary to turn would-be visitors from our door in Sussex—although we have found that the most effective of these is encouraging the world to think of us as fictional characters. This weeds out all but the overly whimsical and the truly insane and, until one cool spring morning in April of 1992, permitted us to maintain our privacy.
I was in the downstairs sitting room finishing the task of assembling and sealing together the pages of my various memoirs, when my eye was attracted by motion at the window. I looked up, and saw to my horror that our rural home was being invaded, by none other than a ravening pack of Sherlockians.
4.
Seeing the press of eager faces at my window, I knew in an instant that I was in mortal danger—or if not our lives, then certainly our sanity was to be challenged. At least ten of them, Americans all, each wearing one or several lapel-decorations depicting a bee or a calabash pipe or the address 221B. They were unmistakable, and unstoppable.
I raised my voice in alarm, and scurried as fast as a woman of 92 can to check the locks on the doors. The cook came to see, and being a woman of wit as well as culinary ability, joined instantly in battening down our defences. While she went around the perimeter, closing the curtains, I picked up the telephone and summoned assistance: the stout, and stout-hearted, grandson of my old farm manager, both of the generations named Patrick.
In minutes, young Patrick was roaring over the paddocks in his Land Rover, dog and shotgun to hand. The Sherlockians made a hasty retreat, first to the road and then, when Patrick took up a position mid-drive with his shotgun over his arm, up the road in the direction of the village. I was tempted to telephone the inn and request that they deny these invaders entrance, or at least make certain their beer was overly warmed, but on second thought, an open declaration of war might only stir these Americans’ dander. Still, a declaration of war it had become.
5.
Holmes eventually came to a safe pausing place in his current laboratory experiment and toddled down the stairs to see what the uproar was. The cook set before us a pot of powerful tea and a plate of scones flavoured with outrage; Patrick leant his gun inside the door and joined us, trusting to his dogs to raise an alarm; we sat around the kitchen table for a council of war.
Holmes and I had long been prepared for this day when his past came to roost on our heads. In fact, given a mere thirty seconds’ warning, we were equipped to walk out with the essentials of life on our persons, and disappear permanently.
This, we thought, would not require such extreme measures. Instead, we planned how best to instigate our second defence, which we had come up with some years earlier when the local amateur Eastbourne Dramatic Society put on a production of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The gentleman playing the lead, a local solic
itor of barely forty, did a competent (if somewhat flambouyant) job of acting Holmes; later, we invited him to the house and arranged with him a smaller-scale dramatic rendition of the Great Detective. The thought of acting in place of the actual Holmes appealed to his droll, Sussex-born sense of humour, and he agreed to be available, if and when we called on him.
It was time to raise the curtain on our idiosyncratic one-man show.
6.
By good fortune, our solicitor-actor would be available for several days, to play the part of a genial if rather befuddled elderly farmer who, indeed, happened to bear a resemblance to one Sherlock Holmes. With him in place, the Americans could batter themselves against our doors until they were convinced that their information was faulty, at which time they might go back to the Plains or prairies whence they had come.
Behind our drawn curtains, Holmes returned to his experiment and I to my manuscripts. Before padlocking the trunk, however, I went through the house and collected an armful of treasured memorabilia that called to mind our cases and adventures over the years. They were, with certain exceptions, items of little commercial value—a friend’s trademark monocle, one of Holmes’ more disreputable pipes, some newspaper clippings—but were they to be spotted by any sharp-witted Sherlockian (if that be not an oxymoron) they could not only give lie to our ruse, they would be themselves vulnerable to the predations of the horde outside: Sherlockians are inveterate collectors.
I arranged them atop my memoirs, and padlocked the lid. When I had more leisure, I should write a letter of explanation to the recipient of the trunk, but today, I had much to do.
7.
With the trunk of manuscripts and memorabilia securely packed, I went upstairs and assembled a pair of valises for us, that we might at least keep dry and comfortable in exile during the American siege. I doubted that they had found my own house in Oxford— I would have heard, had there been strangers climbing over the walls and loitering out front—but Holmes and I have not made it to our respective ages by making easy assumptions.
The Mary Russell Companion Page 15
